THE JESUIT: FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

The Jesuit: Finding God in All Things (Commemorating the Quadricentennial Canonization of St. Ignatius of Loyola & St. Francis Xavier) Published by Squircle Line Press https://www.squirclelinepress.org Email: squircleline@gmail.com Preface and this collection © Desmond Kon, Eric Tinsay Valles & Squircle Line Press, 2022 Individual Poems © retained by the authors All rights reserved.

Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

Book design by Squircle Line Press ISBN 978-981-18-4063-0 Published in Singapore

THE JESUIT Finding God In All Things

K edited by

desmond francis xavier kon & eric francis tinsay valles

an especial anthology to commemorate the quadricentennial canonization of st. francis xavier & st. ignatius of loyola

St. Ignatius of Loyola & St. francis xavier, intaglio art print

CONTENTS PREFACE

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SOFIA M. STARNES

26

Ignatius Sakoku DANIEL REARDON

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Ignatius Loyola September 27, 1540 Loyola Looks Down from Heaven 1573 AMDG Rome, April 23, 1573 Campion and His Fellow Missionaries Loyola and Campion Celebrate in Heaven October 25, 1970 PAUL MARIANI All That Will Be New in the World

41

MARYANNE HANNAN

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Seek and You Shall Find Courage: A Study of Context Sprung Self ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

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Jesuits November 16, 1989, El Salvador Return of the Saints November 19, The Rose Garden, University of Central America El Salvador St. Lazarus On Seeing Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun on the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi St. Francis and His Kin GERARD GARRIGAN, OSB All That Is Good Good Friday Resurrection The Sacred And Profane

62

Grace MARTIN M. MACASAET, SDB

70

Night, Morning, Daytime, Evening (A Quartet) Christ in the City of Rome ERIC TINSAY VALLES

81

A Chinese Priest at Mass in Melbourne A Rebirth El Padre KIMBERLY K. WILLIAMS

92

At the University of Alcalá Prayer to St. Francis (after the Prayer of St. Francis) DANIEL TOBIN Processions His Stone SWALLOWTAIL, VARIATION

95

DESMOND FRANCIS XAVIER KON

108

Episodic Memory, What Memorabilia-Made-Explicit SALLY READ

130

Annunciation to a Poet Mother JEFFREY ESSMANN

137

Psalm 19 The Poet The Fulsome Swell Francis Xavier at the Tomb of Thomas the Apostle THOMAS HOLAHAN, CSP Gallienus and Hyacinth Roberto Preemie Less Than Simple

146

MERLIE M. ALUNAN

156

In a Century of Floods, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Wars and Pandemics, the first order of business is JOHANNA CATON, OSB

162

A Momentary Sound of Hail Finding God in the Dis Words Ignatius Finds the Right Story LOIS ROMA-DEELEY

172

At the San Xavier Mission How to Forgive JASON DY, SJ

178

Real Flowers Bloom Real Flower Wilts DAVID CRAIG Easter Lilies Easter Prayer (for Freud)—retreat’s end The Only Way—Retreat House

181

Better the Patch Job —down a retreat wood-path Jesus Retreat Woods Two Brothers, Widening my Retreat —I can’t eat the potatoes for dinner and so take a drive to my one brother’s house; the other is, surprisingly, there as well.

The Basement Rain—last morning of retreat Chopin’s nocturne op. 9 no. 2 LOUIE JON A. SÁNCHEZ

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IN THE PRESENCE OF THE IMAGE OF SAINT IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA MARJORIE MADDOX Pandemic Spiritual Exercises The Altarpieces at St. Charles Borromeo Church The Two P’s Ode to Meditation Ode to Everything

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BIOGRAPHIES

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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“Truth is a relationship.

As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.” + “In this quest to seek and find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be.

If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.” + “The Jesuits have a vow to obey the pope, but if the pope is a Jesuit, maybe he should have a vow to obey the superior general... I feel like I’m still a Jesuit in terms of my spirituality, what I have in my heart.” + “Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others, and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others.”

Pope Francis Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

PREFACE Finding God in the Lyric: A Manifesto By Eric Francis Tinsay Valles Desmond Francis Xavier Kon We give thanks and praise to God as we recall that on 12 March four hundred years ago, five great souls were raised to the altars: Saints Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Jesus, Philip Neri and Isidore the Laborer. They were also leading figures in the Catholic reformation.

Foremost among them, St. Ignatius, the founder of the Society of Jesus, recommended something that we sorely need these days, discernment, seeking the greater good for its own sake. This calls for the believer—mind, heart and soul—to experience union with the triune God in creation. It necessarily sees God’s loving hand at work in whatever happens to us. Discernment informs Jesuit education, with which the editors have been blessed. It follows a striving for arete or excellence and for social justice. It is also conforming our will to God’s in the little things of daily life.

Discernment sees God neither as a distant watchmaker in the deist sense nor as an abstract concept in theology. God is present in all things, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Theologiae, “by essence, presence and power.” God dwells among us and offers Himself to us in the sacraments. He is, above all, the source and fullness of beauty with whom poets and artists can form an

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

abiding friendship. He speaks to us lovingly in these pages.

St. Francis Xavier, St. Ignatius’s close collaborator, discerned as his mission preaching the gospel to the ends of the then known world. That brought him to India, Malacca, Japan, China and Singapore. It was apparently in Singapore that he read St. Ignatius’s letter that appointed him as the provincial of the “Indies and the countries beyond.” St. Francis Xavier devoted nights to prayer and embraced sacrifices. In the end, he became, as the one he preached about, obedient unto death in a foreign land.

The two Jesuit pioneers and the three other saints whose canonization we celebrate were kindred spirits in at least two respects. First, they contemplated the God Made Man at prayer.

This involved a close identification between the lover and the beloved so that their wills became one. They also imitated Him by accepting what they had no control over in order to draw a greater good. Think of St. Francis Xavier dying of a fever in Guangdong so close to his goal of evangelizing throughout mainland China.

Second, these figures of the Catholic revival responded to grace with self-giving and a powerful imagination. St. Teresa of Jesus reformed the Carmelite order and wrote verses that revealed her exchanges of love with Christ. St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorians, filled halls with hymns and preaching. St. Isidore the Laborer worked miracles while tilling the soil.

A rich imagination is needed to immerse oneself in St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, a retreat built around the examination of conscience and discernment. Former Boston College dean Fr. J. Robert Barth, SJ, describes the exercises as “[bringing] together in a single view the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human, the universal and the deeply particular realities of

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PREFACE

the world” (“Mortal Beauty” 71). The exercises encourage role playing in gospel scenes with the end of a greater commitment to follow in Christ’s footsteps.

We suggest that discernment can be also a fruitful vehicle to generate art, even poetry, and to contribute to human flourishing. Both religion and art, after all, are rooted in the human imagination. Believers and poets alike experience and communicate the divine in the created world. Fr. Jason Dy, SJ, celebrates this with his sketches and meditative verses on red flowers in this anthology. Poets from all over respond to the gift of writing sometimes with heroic sacrifice. Believing poets listen to the rhythm of God at work and in all things. American Marjorie Maddox, for instance, witnesses “grandeur/ trailing from worm and woodchuck,/ branch puzzles of woods, open boat of breeze—/ all brimming with Hey!/and Hallelujah!”

They find resonances of their work in sacred scripture with its imagery and cadences. They also sing with the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s/ self and beauty’s giver” (“The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”). Reflecting on our uncertain times, Filipina Merlie Alunan chimes in with her “faint song lilting to the stars, haunting, haunting,/ pleading, asking, asking, asking, begging to return….”

Above all, we hope that the collected lyrics on these pages could inspire love of God, a soul’s response to divine love. This love may be expressed in the repetition of the same acts, say being open to divine inspiration. When one strives to grow in love, one inevitably draws closer to the divine. As a result, one enjoys peace and joy that the world cannot give. That is our fervent wish for the reader.

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Jesuit Church ON THE REUSS, Switzerland

SOFIA M. STARNES

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SOFIA M. STARNES

Ignatius Manresa, 1522

He fought April and August battles over a king’s castle, his wet brow, half-salty, half sweet.

What do we know about discovering God in a bone’s fracture?

From faulty stabs at prayer to a beggar’s fealty in the hollows of Manresa.

Cedars as sentinels, the cave ledges as altars, solid beneath the silences he bore nightly.

Yet to fight. Yet peeling off scars.

O Lord, what war to wage with this armor….

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St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Peter’s Basilica

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Sakoku St. Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit to go to Japan as a missionary, arrived there in 1549. Yet, the history of Christianity in Japan would be a tortuous one. Under Sakoku, Japan was isolated from the west for 214 years, from 1603 to 1868.

They bent as willows over a relic stone, where once a foreign man measured some grain and told them of a Body like their own being pulled up, inward—where summer gain wintered as sacrifice. The wheat stain on the stone waned, but they, they heard him still: do this in memory… from cross to syllable.

Their memories would portion out the rest.

He’d said something about a cup. To spill?

To drink? They looked to sea, hammered their breast.

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DANIEL REARDON

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Ignatius Loyola September 27, 1540 That same year in Rome, a man with a limp Cloaked in black, approached the Farnese Pope Seeking his permission to establish An Order, the Society of Jesus, Dedicated to teaching and preaching The Gospels, to serve Our Saviour, spreading The message of Jesus throughout the world.

The arguments were powerful, well made.

He brought his band of exemplary men, Each one with singular skills, unique talents.

Pope Paul approved and blessed the New Order, With Ignatius Loyola their Leader.

Great jubilation, they vowed to soldier on Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.

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DANIEL REARDON

Loyola Looks Down from Heaven 1573 I delight in observing the workings Of the Society. We are now marking Thirty-three years, as did Jesus on the Cross.

The amount of Jesuit houses looks Wondrously global. Gracias a Dios.

We never imagined success like this.

In Rome we must elect a new General.

My compadre Polanco, my loyal Secretary expected to be chosen.

Instead it was Everard Mercurian, A Belgian. He approved Edmund Campion As a Jesuit Novice. This Englishman, Aged thirty-three, like Jesus and the Society, Will rejoice with me in Eternity.

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Church of the Gesù, Rome

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

AMDG Rome April 23, 1573 I am no more my own man. I was told

By Father General I’d been approved As a Novice in the Society Of Jesus. My prayers answered joyously.

He had put to me a list of questions, Choosing to focus on my intentions, My willingness to embrace the Ignatian Way of life. He avoided discussion Of my years at Oxford and Douai, he knew.

I felt the power of this man, yet how Gentle and knowing. It’s with men like this I long to live, to work and break bread with, Die with if God wills it. We sat in silence, Communing with the Spirit of Ignatius.

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DANIEL REARDON

Campion and His Fellow Missionaries Let us pray. We are Loyola’s soldiers.

Our breviaries our swords, our banners Unfurl the Image of the Risen Christ, Ours the armour of the Holy Spirit.

We are the vanguard of Our Lord’s Army, Charging into battle with the enemy To rescue and restore our persecuted Faithful and rejoice in the Name of the Lord.

I never said this. I could not say this.

I am wracked with a crippling cowardice.

Doubts and fears assail my waking hours, Swooping like harpies to haunt my nightmares.

Bless me Ignatius with your bravery, Run the steel of your courage right through me.

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St Patrick’s Catholic Church, Belfast

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Loyola and Campion Celebrate in Heaven October 25, 1970 “Felicidades Frater Campion.

We celebrate your canonization.

Took a while, just under four hundred years.

Mine, just over a hundred. What matters Is we were here, time is irrelevant.

I see you in dialogue with ancient Favourite philosophers and writers One of Heaven’s wonders.”

“Yes, Good Father, But for me the particular treasure Is talking with you. It was always your Vision, your mission that inspired me.”

“Muy bien, we will talk throughout eternity.

Now let us join our Jesuit brethren, Give thanks and rejoice with Jesus in Heaven.”

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PAUL MARIANI

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

All That Will Be New in the World will be anti-Puritan, Williams insisted, in one of his best prose pieces, his admiration for Père Sebastian Rasles spilling out as if confessing.

Larbaud the Frenchman began reading from a copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana on the Mosaic-like manifest destiny of New England.

But Williams wouldn’t have it. No, they were not the ones to lead, those strong-willed Puritans who saw only dark savages around them.

Better to learn from that Jesuit priest come down from Quebec to live with his Abenakis, to eat their dried seal and boiled wood if it came to that, and who in the end would die with them. No, not Mather, with his map in hand, but the man who stayed in constant contact with his “cher troupeau.”

How Williams got it so right still moves me all these years on. Unlike those who raged against the natives, Rasles saw that “the head of logic” must be relegated to its proper place, which was in heaven, residing with the mystery of the Logos.

There was someone who could confirm what a Jersey doctor, half Brit himself, and half Puerto Rican, someone who saw each day all of life and death with its attendant sufferings. Someone who came to see in all its scintillant beauty a new world naked.

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PAUL MARIANI

Rasles too saw what the poet too must come to see.

That “every tree, every vein in every leaf ” was part of “God’s mysterious flower.” That somehow it was the “worldly flower of Rome whose perfume might still draw all bees,” even here in the mud of the Passaic.

How Williams came to despise the dry and splitting logic that cut each flower from the glazed rain water we all need to survive and flourish.

Both legs fractured as a youth, Rasles knew what suffering was as he hobbled on with his people, marveling the more as he learned their incandescent words and ways. What warriors they were, with those brilliant guerilla tactics they used against those bent on robbing them of what was theirs with rum or a strand of pretty red ribbon, or logic’s words... or nothing.

Rasles knew in time the Englishmen would find and kill him. Still, not even death would keep him from his flock.

Back in Boston, his bloody scalp garnered his killers a hundred pounds. But you too know the places, don’t you?

You who’ve lived here now for fifty years? Deerfield, Hatfield, Hadley, the Abenaki and Pocumtuck names long gone. Still, something lingers in the spray that tumbles to this day at Turners Falls, named for the one who killed the Peskeompskut while they fished for salmon there, then died himself, that sad history that lingers in the river’s mist.

* This poem appeared in A Given Grace: An Anthology of Christian Poems (Squircle Line Press, 2021).

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MARYANNE HANNAN

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MARYANNE HANNAN

Seek and You Shall Find Tell me not, my child, it’s enlightenment you seek.

Wouldn’t you rather a party dress, a pretty face, to dance on far-off mountain peaks?

For enlightenment, my sweet, is very dark indeed, full of snares, alive with death, a place not known, not seen at all, until you clear its depths.

* This poem first appeared in Review for Religious.

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St. David’s Cathedral, United Kingdom

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Courage: A Study of Context First to mind, a field of flames— The figure rushes in to save, Or else, away from his brave deed.

Next, a wall of sea, the frightening crest Or, the big air of a sky-bound skier— All acts, the body, of bravery Nowhere in the word. Courage, A matter of heart, its history says Cor, le cœur, el corazón: How to quell the mind’s raging reign.

Act out, instead, a habit of heart.

The saint knew the struggle.

Be still, he wrote. Be brave.

Look inside, until the discerning heart Exhausted, no end to peccadilloes in sight, Falls finally in a silent embrace.

Does the heart have words?

If so, I haven’t found them yet.

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MARYANNE HANNAN

Sprung Self Self speaks to self in figures rodomontade, sumptuous dance in glacial terrains, or it wails with a whisper, ulalume-like shrieks, moues of dissemble elongated in drift; self speaks to Self of necessity’s fit, priorities ordered, calculable risk, reason pre-measured, goals worth achieving, in lists made for closure.

Himself heard the call: he plods his work unerringly, a treatise on Welsh cynghanedd.

But tossèd pillows taunt, forbid and dreary days, recalcitrance; pupils, papers, letters, sermons cancel out in languishment.

Five wasted years; no work that lives; self unmembered, seared with toil; what Self remembered, confined, out-kept.

Grief ’s gasp held fast, intention smeared, lost in a welter of wait. Father Hopkins, bending to task, never knew with him that round-himroaming wreckless one had come to stay at last.

* This meditation on the life and work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ first appeared in The Windhover.

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Mission São Miguel das Missões, Brazil

ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

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ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

Jesuits November 16, 1989 El Salvador The pandy bat, the swift soutane, the fierce eyes that tempt the boy to pride.

Ordinal in their ranks and rows, the God-squad, heaven’s Special Forces.

Trampling Christ’s face before the smiling Inoue in sacrifice of soul for tortured peasants.

So brave, so fired by God’s love, the Iroquois ate Brebeuf ’s martyred heart.

A mighty story, terrible and true beginning with Ignatius’ shattered bones, grace exploding from a French canon, unfolding with the cold steel of dawn against the necks of five prostrate priests, the bodies of an old schoolmaster, a housekeeper and her terrified child.

Ignatius imprisoned in the picture, the caves of Manresa behind his eyes, forever doomed to write his holy book, right hand brandishing the endless pen, his sword long left behind at Monserrat. * This poem was published in AMERICA, November 15, 2004.

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ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

Return of the Saints

November 19 The Rose Garden, University of Central America El Salvador This morning the grass is bloodless.

How surprised you must be to find beauty where your bodies once lay, your new wounds blooming red as roses.

The man who planted them is gone.

For years he tended every stem, hands sure as a father’s soothing his dying child.

Only the murdered ones return, a gift you receive in exchange for death in the pre-dawn dark roused from your lonely beds.

Your crimes (un)common as love: aiming truth at the face of falsehood, claiming justice for the disappeared, shaming the proud and the fortunate few.

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

No one calls you saints, even now.

You loiter on the well-trimmed lawn, toe stones along the brickwork paths, search for your selves in empty rooms, then retreat as you once refused to retreat, before the coming sun, those roses blooming red at the heart of the martyrs’ garden.

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ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

St. Lazarus He knit him self up, a cable-stitch of skin.

Pushed his left eye in its socket, then his right.

Cracked the knuckles in his fingers (now so thin!).

Raised him self from the dirt and stood up right.

Lazarus, Lazarus, don’t get dizzy.

Lazarus, Lazarus, now get busy.

Mary’s weeping, Martha’s made a cake, Jesus is calling at the graveyard gate.

Your closest cousin, happy you are dead, Eyes Martha’s sheep and Mary’s empty bed.

The chorus of voices sings him awake.

Once a body’s broken, it cannot break.

He licks his lips and wags his muscled tongue.

Flexes each foot till the warm blood comes.

Turns from the darkness and moves toward the sun.

A step. A shamble. A dead-out run.

* This poem was first published in Christian Century, November 26, 2007.

It also appears in Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (Word Press, 2011).

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ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

On Seeing Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun on the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi Vincent’s sower bows his brown head.

His heavy hand scatters small seed against a setting sun so thick with cream and ochre, I believe I can grasp it, place and taste it on my tongue.

Francis named Him Brother in the hymn he sang daily once he lost his sight, as if darkness made the Sun more dear, as if song could replicate His light.

Though the wide sky grins unearthly green, and clouds peek pink as a conch’s ear, I believe in the coming of evening, in the heavy hand blessing the good ground, in the sower sainted by the sun’s round.

* This poem was published in Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (Word Press, 2011).

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ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

St. Francis and His Kin Francis claimed Umbria, her earth and sky.

Instead of bread, he tasted daily blue.

He’d bless the cypress, greet the olive branch, kiss the wind that stirred his naked thigh.

Francis stalked the hills steep with love.

He traced God’s name on Assisi’s wall, asked Brother Fire to open his eyes, thumbed ash on the head of a morning dove.

Francis went blind and sang to Brother Sun a hymn to light his heart could darkly see.

Noon breathed hot upon his outstretched hands, bathed the tired body he used to be.

Brother Ass remained, faithful as the birds, while Francis preached a gospel without words.

* This poem was published in Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (Word Press, 2011).

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GERARD GARRIGAN, OSB

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GERARD GARRIGAN, OSB

All That Is Good All that is good You give us For awhile All that is best Forever And a lifetime In which To learn the difference

* This poem was previously published in The Sacred, the Profane, the Hodiamont (Saint Louis Abbey, 2014).

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Good Friday Let us probe his gentleness With nail and thorn and lance Dissect the flesh of godliness With all our dark devices And when the curtain’s torn in two Hide our wretched dead-set faces In wicked pitch of night

* This poem was previously published in The Sacred, the Profane, the Hodiamont (Saint Louis Abbey, 2014).

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GERARD GARRIGAN, OSB

Resurrection my tears in the dust covered one for one by your drops of blood and resurrected raised to glory to that place alone where there are only tears of joy

* This poem was previously published in The Sacred, the Profane, the Hodiamont (Saint Louis Abbey, 2014).

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

The Sacred And Profane Moving back and forth between The sacred and profane I finally heard that voice, no sound It whispered from a burning bush: “Of course, they are the same.

I am. I am. I am.”

* This poem was previously published in The Sacred, the Profane, the Hodiamont (Saint Louis Abbey, 2014).

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GERARD GARRIGAN, OSB

Grace Like reaching dreams Suddenly come to life The canopy of trees Lining the still straight drive I’d strolled a thousand times before Now woke me from my life-long sleep Exclaiming yes proclaiming GRACE! GRACE! GRACE!

* This poem was previously published in St. Louis, Grace and Other Poems (Saint Louis Abbey, 2015).

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MARTIN M. MACASAET, SDB

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MARTIN M. MACASAET, SDB

Night, Morning, Daytime, Evening (A Quartet) I. Night Prayer “Watchman, how much longer the night?”

—Isaiah 21: 11 (Good News Bible)

Watchman, how much longer the night?

I rehearse death every time, Until I’m no longer afraid of it.

So again, how much longer the night?

I’m a night person anyway, Needing less and less hours of sleep.

But definitely: let me not fall asleep At that most crucial time Of the world’s (and Thine own) agony.

Even with my rituals all done, I go to bed, not just yet.

I carry on dreaming and struggling.

All the same, I’ll say good night To Thee. In a lonely bed I lie.

Set me to rest and to dream with Thee.

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

II. Morning Lauds How we’ve been so fixated With sunsets. If we only knew What we also miss. That sunrise Is good for the skin too, for one.

And so through it all, We laud God most glorious!

The Sun of Justice is about To do justice to solar energy.

Hurry, before it rains again soon.

No farmer’s almanac ever works now.

Topsy-turvy weather patterns.

Or crazy weather, as they call it.

It’s all our fault. Grand mea culpa.

May it not go haywire further.

We make amends for our faults.

We make do with what’s left.

We praise Him through it all.

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MARTIN M. MACASAET, SDB

III. Daytime Dirge Inspired by The Parable of the Vineyard Workers (Matthew 20:1-16)

We’re the ones who toil In the heat of the sun, Hired at the earlier hours.

Enough reason to complain later.

And yet in this daytime, We even offer still more praise To the One who recruited us.

He’ll give us our salary—we’ll just wait.

In other words He’ll Sustain us. Call us, and give us A question to answer.

A graded recitation.

But, enough of these work-related thoughts.

Even our job becomes a prayer.

We just ask Him to sustain us through the day.

Till we’ll line up and receive the real wage.

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

IV. Evening Intercession On a frantic evening like this, I muster my leftover energy Or more like recycle it, actually.

Eager to go finally home, Traffic still to contend with.

Pluck some beads with which to pray Somehow, some way.

For if the traffic will teach us anything, There are two things: pray, or curse.

For sure you’ll help me, Lord of the evening, God of sunsets, To choose the better part.

In fact, I’ll sing you a hymn With the blaring of the car radio: No praise songs nor worship hymns.

Only my own anguish instead.

That’s indeed what I’ll lift unto You. And my intercession as well For those still traveling the Traffic-ridden roads of life.

* Taken together, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier exemplify for me a well-grounded prayer-and-action tandem. As both saints have shown in their colorful lives, everyday concerns and mundane matters can very well be the stuff of prayer—as well as dramatic, life-changing episodes of course. These four prayer-poems articulate the struggles we often go through in our prayer life— particularly that of finding God even in the mundane.

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MARTIN M. MACASAET, SDB

Christ in the City of Rome After a study-conference on the topic (Rome, November 2015).

In honor of the Filipino Catholic OFWs there. . . . [T]he Lord said to Paul, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you. No one will attack and harm you, for I have many people in this city.”

—Acts 18: 9-10

Ambulance sirens a-wailing (or are they of the carabinieri?1), Subway station frenzy, dishing out leaflets, Ethnic groups competing, each with its own niche, Babel of vernacular voices, ugly graffiti assaulting the eyes, And so with ads. Useless attempts to dodge them.

Intercultural pentecost, bumping finally into a kababayan.2 Besieged by loneliness and homesickness, and yet ever-smiling, Streetwise and ma-diskarte,3 holding on to the Faith, Notwithstanding trials, and in spite of the irony Of taking care of kids, while missing their own back home.

The opposite of pickpockets: they’ll drop and donate something.

Notwithstanding intrigues and all, involved in communities.

The sharp, biting chills in an anticipated winter Gets you sick and ill and depressed.

The dizzying, frenetic pace of the city and its towers Makes you pine for peace and quiet and calm.

But no cold will make you cold and indifferent.

But no rush will make you rush and be uncaring.

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Cervara di Roma, Italy

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

And so in the midst of all this: the proclamation of Christ.

Initial, or secondary? Pre-evangelization, or without the prefix?

But is there a need for it at all? Isn’t He already there ahead?

Perfectly at home: walking about, healing and preaching.

For all you know, you’ll meet him here, there, and everywhere.

Maybe even together with Paul—both strategically located.

So, where are the voices and the choices?

A genuine beggar, or a masquerading con-artist?

Refugees from and beyond the borders, pushed to the limits.

But we too ought to be pushed (strongly, at that) To visit them in their apartments, to meet them in the piazza,4 (In other words) to come out of our churches, to go to the edges.

* I composed this poem some time ago in Rome, after attending a conference on the theme. This poem has a missionary aspect to it, fruit of my ministry years ago. I reconnected with the realities of my fellow Filipinos who have migrated there mostly for work. To them I dedicate it as well.

1: Italian police 2: a fellow Filipino 3: crafty, clever 4: city square

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FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

A Chinese Priest at Mass in Melbourne A column of three men pacing solemnly signaled the start of the ceremony at St. Patrick’s in Melbourne.

The congregation in coats and smocks with half-opened eyes, grave faces wondered at the miracle of transubstantiation at mass.

When the procession crawled into the sanctuary, the sun preached the multiplication of bread through ornate stained glass to Missionaries of Charity in sari veils white like communion wafers; old white couples; a Chinese family disgorged from an off-white van; and me reciting “Gates, lift up your heads!...”

“The Lord be with you,” the celebrant thundered with a Cantonese glaze.

The almost jasmine-white congregation replied, “And also with you.” No one smirked at the Chinese administering the sacrament in that solid, century-old cathedral just as no one sneers at a white man breaking bread in Mandarin in Hualien.

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The Chinese family’s eyes flicked upward, not with pride for our own incarnating the Word at the altar but reverence for consecrated bread served up by the engines of globalization in a universal church under whose spires all partake of a meal of God flesh, all colors dissolve with a resounding “Amen.”

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A Rebirth A young man stole into the city with a stooped Mary riding a donkey across slush to huddle with friends from afar; Cows fed on stored hay, the path strewn with fresh prints of sandals on the run; Shepherds tending flock fought back tears at the shattered peace after a king’s death.

In that nippy morning, dashing to the upper room past caked mud, crumbling leaves, A throng speaking various tongues gathered in Jerusalem and was thrown into confusion As each was greeted in his language in a spectacle of light and felt warm in an instant.

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A howling whirlwind * showered flames on the young man, his crucified savior’s mother and all faithful; millennial, ever praising the fruit of the vine and the arrival of spring, It lit up mortar walls, circled the yard for a minute before igniting sorrel sunbursts, setting off supernovas in windowless voids, reaching out across time to warm a scribe’s hands, the quiet Spirit burned the page.

* The Holy Spirit that descended on Mary and the apostles after Jesus’ ascension.

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St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

El Padre A marble-white face, eyes half-open, glass-framed: Josemaria, a mute guardian on a card as I prayed.

One sunny autumn morn— like today at St Peter’s square, leaves ignited with strange fires, God’s Spirit stirred his heart.

The 26-year-old chanted, “That I may see....”

“A good spot at St. Peter’s,” I whispered to the same Spirit.

Blurry vision, human frailty lingered but overcome with grace in multitudes of souls.

I looked on his other children.

No glint of silver but calumny and pain ushered their birth, yet they found God in all.

A mere sapling, the Work was trampled by threshers but sprang up, healed by Our Lady’s touch.

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My soul Father whose winnow-weary sinews endured blows and stripes can now take his rest.

“Mangy donkey,” as he called himself, labored at the water wheel ’til all the sod was fallow.

While he slept, the Spirit tilled the clod; hardy riceshoots sprang and covered the earth from Compostella to Cagayan de Oro, sown in praise of the Maker by the Castillan saint.

Behold the field of St. Peter’s is emerald-gold as the morning sun bathes his visage on a tapestry as he joins the rolls of saints.

Pangs of flesh tear me up, but his quiet smile assures, makes my heart burn.

“Go on, pilgrim, grace and violence divine out of brittle rock clear, honeyed streams.”

Warm hands clasped in mine; his gaze sweeps the depths of my soul, Padre, your spirit in this my family renews my flesh and bones.

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KIMBERLY K. WILLIAMS

At the University of Alcalá That moment conspired against the tour guide, whose choppy English succumbed to the cacophony: the jet gunning overhead, the sparrows bickering, the doves cooing in pyrrhics, and the crows flinging spondees attempting to cry alone. Lunch bags crinkled, complaining of the weight of the ham, bread, and juice inside them. We were here for a grand tour of history: to see where the holy seed of San Ignacio de Loyola was planted, to marvel in the courtyard at his Latin phrases that hovered like airplane advertisements overhead. But I could only memorize the sounds shaking like leaves in all directions, the gestures of the lost guide who spoke on mute while the saint’s words flew like a lark off the wall, bound for elsewhere, leaving only the storks nesting on the rooftops and the memory of it all, flowered and whole, in the distance.

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Prayer to St. Francis

(after the Prayer of St. Francis) Where where

make

where

as

where

to

where

love

where

soul

where

there

make

there there there

make

there there there

me

a

is

me

is

to

is

with O, me

injury, console

understand

as

is all

is is

peace;

instrument pardon;

doubt,

as

faith;

despair,

to

hope;

my

light;

darkness

master

is(soul)

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channel

hatred,

an

sadness,

whole

grant whole

joy; love.

DANIEL TOBIN

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St. francis xavier, french ANTIQUE lace HOLY CARD

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Processions Nascent silence. Above the sea, a full moon ripples its light into folds of waves, the same light falling like powdered silver on the village where women, candles in their hands, voices lifting the ancient hymns, move in procession to the shore to bless the boats. No céu desponta nova luz—in the sky dawns new light? Something sadder, Simone believes, heart-rending, for the village is “wretched,” and what is borne in upon her confirms what she has known: the red-hot iron, the mark of the slave, given to the afflicted, with the religion of slaves.

On her first day in her first factory in her year of factory work, she had arrived in a white blouse; the workers saw her hands, soft, as yet unscarred—a student who had failed her exams?

Not this professor with her “inborn awkwardness” offering herself to the machines, like a copper bobbin to the furnace, flames licking fingers, arms, her unable to close the shutter: unable, at one shop then another to meet the need for speed, to work without thought, like the cutter slicing her thumb, the mill that drives the metal shaving in her palm—slavery

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“not in the circumstances, but carried by the work itself ”— her upset at seeing the conveyor belt, its frantic procession under the pendulum, the human cognates at their given task...

All most unlike this living circle of women walking, singing around their husband’s boats, again, now, for centuries, full moon, the sea below rippling light. This nascent silence.

* This poem was published in This Broken Symmetry.

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His Stone Again, this dawn-lit incandescence through the yew trees, and down the slope, the river scrolling the length of itself in every purl and ripple. When, years ago, they set me to attest his life among the growing human increase under grass, I had long been lifted from the groundmass, soft-grained, sun-blanched, vaguely crystalline, his name cut into me plainly with his beginning and his end, and the frozen earth unwilling to lay him to his rest for this man to sleep the sleep of trust, the sleep of seed in the winter field. “It is a terrifying thing to be born, to find oneself, without having willed it, swept along on a torrent of fearful energy,” still I hear him say.

Or maybe I only think I hear him, as if I were his “god of iron,” a childhood’s distant dream, infinitely durable, not my weathering granite shield against effacement.

What comes at the very end, he said, is the Adorable.

To this pad-locked field behind the shuttered church I watch them swing the gate to scan the identical rows

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along the tarred path pillowed by decades of moss until they find me, each one leaving their gift of stone on my crest. And sometimes it is, in that stillness, as if I am the river moving along with the layers, light pouring over me, pouring through me, light speeding from so far away it has no past or future.

* This poem was published in At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin.

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SWALLOWTAIL, VARIATION Turning from my book, I find this next life newly freed of its ornament hanging from the sheerest veil of fennel, obsidian wings like hands in prayer, bright vestures of yellow-green, a slick wash on wood where the novice flesh must have tumbled, already the dear predators circling with their honed

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fascination.

What to do but lift it from its vessel, like a host in my palm, to let it go?

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DESMOND FRANCIS XAVIER KON

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DESMOND FRANCIS XAVIER KON

Episodic Memory, What Memorabilia-Made-Explicit 1.1 This is a list poem, or at least desires to begin as one.

An inception, like a small gifting.

Of a blessed waking up into conscious things, what needs to be said this early morning.

I think of first thoughts and odes and living saints and the day I decided to be a pilgrim (although no one really decides these important things).

2.4 That wandering into Malacca. Over a decade ago. Sarong for a bag, big knot over my shoulder. I only ever wore black—crew neck tee and fisherman pants—to be non-descript, and disappear like every other dull, humdrum thing.

2.7 The look of poverty gets you spat upon (but divinity school made me brood, think up ways of ascetic living). A group of students talked about beating me up.

An old man at a kopitiam told me I wasn’t welcome.

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We’re a small town, he said, we don’t want trouble.

The town here isn’t the town there. There are so many towns, all of them different in peculiar ways. You can’t tell a town from a day’s stay, or even after a month or year.

4.1 Self-denial, like this Lenten season of greater intention.

More fasting, more prayer, more alms-giving.

There’s a rush to the couplet, like something of the hastened heroic

—no need for delineation and breakage;

what defined lines and stanzas?

3.5 Who is he, where is he from?

Will we find him dead in the morning?

Check his bag. Check his hotel room upon check-out.

(Did I look that desolate, was everything so morose,

as much as everyone in the small town

depicted things to be?)

How did he die the first time? Did he kill himself in the attic?

(Does the memory look that dismal, so tragic?)

39.40 There is the ideal reader.

There is the inscribed or implied reader,

how implicit meaning becomes.

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There is the thoughtful reader, who reads the way writers read and write.

There is the empirical reader,

and everyone else’s tall walls,

all their unvoiced limits of interpretation.

What of intentio operis? ….….

….….

….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

What of intentio lectoris?

8.2 In South Bend, Indiana, a kind man walked up to me at the grotto, and told me life wasn’t that bad. That must have been 2008 or 2009, when I wanted to visit the lake, but steer clear of deep water. I wished he’d given me a religious tract, something to keep in my wallet, some pamphlet on grief and salvation.

(Now, I collect holy cards, and give them to anyone who wants them.)

Stay close to piety, I told myself, hang on to any handrail.

Sacred, grace-filled places and things.

Offer up your suffering to God with complete love and abandon.

Offer up your suffering to God for the salvation of souls,

especially your own.

In some cities, they call you a dog, talk about stripping you bare, leave you naked—so you’ll beg like a dog for your clothes back.

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Here, they make plans to steal your money after, say the world would be better off without people like that.

There’s a casualness to confession, you’ve been taught

—crispness, the starkness

of one’s own cognition and acceptance.

3.7 ….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

(Do these look like coded ciphers, or erasure, a kind of white-out redaction vis-à-vis double-barrelled ellipses?)

2.9 The pink rosary someone left behind on a pew.

They didn’t forget to take it.

It’s left behind on purpose, as a blessing.

It’s left behind for someone else.

(Which town is this now?

This town isn’t the same town, or is it?

Who can read the signs, especially the ones that point to somewhere beyond a hill?

And you already know there are so many towns.

Where has the bus-to-nowhere taken me cross-state?)

5.8 Christ Church Malacca is pink too, like a robust roseate or orange dahlia. The Dutch started building it in 1741, took twelve years before it was finished. It was actually all white, until 1911.

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By then, it was an Anglican church.

Facades change, even whole identities and constitutions.

Some historical things don’t change though, like Christ Church, and how it’s still the oldest working Protestant church in the country.

It’s nice to have warm pews.

Wood doesn’t turn cold, like leatherette or wrought iron.

It’s nice to have churches filled with people and song.

7.4 ….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

This is a series of elliptical phrases, saying things halfway.

(Is the adjective elliptical here used to connote a shaping of thought and feeling as curvature?

Or is it talking of a concision through omission?

Or as a counterpoint,

like a protracted dramatic monologue

rambling in a periphrastic sprawl, into tedium?)

11.9 I still have memorabilia from that trip

—pink rosary in a coin purse, made of barn straw, its big and bold stripes of pink, green and white, like a Newfoundland flag.

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11.12 This is a list poem, I remember.

Its tricolour re-authoring

and recollection.

I’d like to visit this island expanse, as if to step into a world hitherto unknown, untouched.

I’d like to visit St. Pius X Church, the modesty of its red brick.

Look at its vast parking lot, ideal for our open-air soup kitchen.

I’d like to go to Montreal too,

visit the Archive of the Jesuits in Canada.

How small and distant, how alien and quaint we must seem here.

11.38 The provincial capital is St. John’s, that’s what they named it.

That’s what they decided on; every act of naming is a conscientious, conscious choice,

we’d like to think, a decision-in-the-making.

As deliberate as today’s studied, thoughtful care.

As deliberate as tomorrow’s confession.

People in love with language inevitably like the sound of names,

and the reason for words and their being

how they come into their signifying.

St. John’s is seated somewhere on the southeastern coast;

what sense of direction does direction afford?

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What of life’s soft nudge and bump?

These are not questions for a confession.

12.4 Christ Church felt like a homecoming after the years of absence.

So was St. Paul’s Church—there, you walked straight into sanctity.

“I have heard thousands of confessions, but never one of covetousness.”

That’s what St. Francis Xavier said about what people have to say.

How could that have been,

you think to yourself,

how could no one have coveted?

How can anyone today look beyond what we desire,

that excess and greed?

5.18 So was St. Paul’s Church, I confessed.

On a hill so slight, you look up and think you’re walking home.

I like to tell people the body of St. Francis Xavier was temporarily buried here in 1553. He’d died in Shangchuan Island, China.

I went to Malacca to see the open grave

of my patron saint

before he became my patron saint.

His body was eventually shipped to Goa, which also felt a bit and a lot like home.

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St. Francis Xavier, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Malaysia

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

24.13 Which year was it when I received the relic of St. Francis Xavier?

It was sometime between 2006 and 2008. My bedroom had rosaries decorating its walls, hung from small nails. They were made of beads of every kind—glass, plastic, crystal, pearl, olive wood, moonstone, sterling, steel, seed, coral, carnelian.

They draped across the wall, beaded curtain.

Last year, I received two more rosaries, one limestone and the other Job’s tears from wild adlay. I wanted to give some rosaries away, but they remain too precious. Before I die, I will donate the relic to church, along with every other precious Catholic thing now in my keep.

The Litany of St. Ignatius of Loyola called him— encouragement to all our scholastics

model of interior peace

living always in God’s presence

—within a long list of attributes.

What do names and relics do for the saint, and for the adherent?

0.31 Have you enjoyed your swim today?

I can’t remember, Daddy says.

I can’t remember, the second declaration

like desperation, its gasp.

Daddy drops his head back into the deep of the pillow.

On good days, he remembers to recite the psalms.

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Here are three aphorisms from Pope Francis, pontiff of many firsts, first-ever from the Jesuit order: “The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy

motivates us to do better.”

“The Lord never tires of forgiving.

It is we who tire of asking for forgiveness.”

“Let us all remember this:

one cannot proclaim the Gospel of Jesus

without the tangible witness of one’s life.”

Mother’s skin looks like pastry, flaking, red spots where she breaks skin, as if to draw blood from a life of pride and fierce individual freedom. The givenness of autonomy; yet, no one gets to choose the consequence of free will.

Who are men and women of goodwill; more importantly, who discerns— who are the men and women of good faith?

24.14 What do words and objects do, when they serve their most rarefied function?

The Litany of St. Francis Xavier called him—

prophet mighty in word and works

wonderful worker of miracles

preacher of the truth and doctor of the nations

—amidst a long list of enumerated names.

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St. Ignatius of Loyola & St. francis xavier, ANTIQUE RELIGIOUS MEDAL

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Look at the bronze medal. The front depicts St. Ignatius of Loyola, and the reverse St. Francis Xavier. The medal was made in a Roman foundry in the 1700s. It was made for the Society Of Jesus. The metal, strike, and image are all correct for that period.

JHS or IHS is a Christogram, Latin in short for Jesus Hominum Salvator, or Jesus Saviour of Mankind. This is a distinctive Christogram. The reversed S—Ƨ—is another version of the letter within the Latin alphabet. Ƨ substitutes for S, it’s said, to reflect a child’s longhand, that first attempt at a different kind of signifying practice.

That initial shift between textualities,

from text as speech to text as writing.

9.1 Perhaps you can tell more about someone (and anyone) from how one has lived one’s life

than what one actually says.

Nothing is an availed destiny— what might someone think of this?

Then again, there is the spiritual certitude.

(I try to pray novenas right through the year, an endless suite of Spenserian stanzas, always closing with the alexandrine line.)

(How does one give up prayer that draws out this tabled list of miracles,

arm-long like this knotted cord?)

There is spiritual discipline with spiritual certitude.

And always a humbling of the spirit, there’s that too.

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(No pony beads loosed—how joyless to neglect the rosary.

Ready crown of signifiers, offered up, unfurled proclamation after proclamation?

Each spina christi seed

another garlanded Jerusalem thorn.)

How daily devotions at once bear and arrive,

how they come into view.

Nothing is known, until one comes into the eventual, certain knowing.

Of destination, good or pained, endless and enduring, either way.

But, there’s still the prayer for the dead, the souls of our dear and faithful departed.

There’s still that, and what we make of confession and reconciliation. ….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

And always, the Blessed Sacrament tomorrow,

you already know for yourself. ….…. ….…. ….….

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….…. ….…. ….….

….…. ….…. ….….

Basilica of Bom Jesus, GOA, INDIA

SALLY READ

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SALLY READ

Annunciation to a Poet A hunter’s gunshot in the dawn, muffled and deep in stiff October air, as if it pierced the thick hide of the sleeping world.

Awake, I’m counting unheard words, the wasted days.

Outside: wet grass, dead leaves; hush like a bow drawn a long way back, yet to be released— Will you?

Your knowledge of me is fleet as x-ray or the sifting of a blind-man who knows each coin by expert, grasping touch.

And yet, like every fallen child since Eve, I am unknown.

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I tell you I only scatter words like breadcrumbs on a path as if one day they’ll lead me home.

There is no answer but, as I walk the olive grove that night, I see an ancient tree that looks about to fall apart— dark breaks at all its joints, and yet the cracks so deep and dry, the branches strong, I think it’s held like this for years. As I walk on, the wind gets up, sings loud through its long breaks— the kind of storm-song we hear about in tales, as if the rough wood had vocal chords and mouth.

Then, I’m given over to this voice: the meeting of crippled wood and air, the invisible scale-runs of the wind vested in slow sound.

I will stretch out my arms, I say, as if I know, as if I can be sure, like him.

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SALLY READ

Mother Nine months gone, I was alone.

It was on a walk where earth heaved white mist that I slowed and, as others ran on, I saw bright drops of rain clinging to a lone oak’s bough. Some skein around the water’s shape held the drops in place so they could push against their lines, slide unbreakably in weight and light, and tremble.

Alone, I couldn’t catch up nor shout.

It was as if I nursed a fragile town, and any minute would fall down, curl around those soft lamps coming on in me and sing.

The child knew. She was stockstill—listening like someone in an empty room— as multitudes of flocks of shadows of the days to come fell on us.

In that moment,

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it was as if I’d been startled into form—no way back nor forward— arrested by new flesh and the kind of holy fear we see in dawn light when we wake and know before we know our thoughts that we are not enough.

I think of you alone, the muscular presence of wings; you, tottering, but freighted by the story within. And—though I couldn’t know it yet— as I stood, helpless, before the years as before a white and silent altar, I must have felt a breath of that same weather, that cloudless overshadowing.

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JEFFREY ESSMANN

K

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

Psalm 19 As Saturn with its icy rings A bright celestial whimsy brings To matter elsewise dark and deep And all the orbs their orbits keep, There seems within the nighttime sky A subtle force sublimely sly And wonderful at work, a hand Divine, industrious, and grand.

The sun each morning not by choice But acquiescing to a voice That strangely speaking’s strangely heard (Unlike the way one hears a word), In gold and pink begins the day, The clouds all cleared with blue away.

And shooing off the morning chill the silent voice is louder still.

And deep within the human heart (Where oft the chill is loath to part) The echo of the voice sublime Inspirits space and tickles time And draws the soul within the sphere Of trembling grace and holy fear To ponder thoughtless on the might That shines behind both day and night.

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JEFFREY ESSMANN

The Poet The One who fixed the meter of the tides; Whose rhymes the whole of nature do inform And cadences the seasons commandeer; Who punctuates with stars the nightly skies And set the stanzas of a summer storm (Yet freely versed the subatomic sphere), Within each human heart a sonnet’s writ (Though I’ve a friend I swear’s a villanelle) And bid us honor one another’s lines: To trust the Poet’s keen creative wit And never dare to treat as doggerel The part in us that’s poetry divine.

* “Psalm 19” and “The Poet” originally appeared in Agape Review.

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Benedictine Abbey of Tyniec, Poland

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

The Fulsome Swell The fulsome swell of waves so deep And raw no human soul could keep Its compass toward the distant shore— He’d never known their strength before.

The missionary couldn’t sleep.

His focus keen yet all aheap, He prayed for graces rich and cheap That of God’s love he’d know once more The fulsome swell.

A year and more did slowly creep Until the coast rose green and steep And though he had so much forbore Now nothing in him could outsoar Or ever blithely overleap The fulsome swell.

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JEFFREY ESSMANN

Francis Xavier at the Tomb of Thomas the Apostle They say at Mylapore he prayed each day Before the sacred relics of the tomb (The finger that had touched the Hallowed Wound) Before he farther eastward made his way.

With thousands baptized solely by his sway And endless time by voyages consumed, His life the soul of water had assumed, And out it poured on the Apostle’s clay.

We cannot know what Francis prayed about: Perhaps that all the graces of Montmartre Might shed their light on missions yet to chart; Or there to bare the heart of human doubt And with the Saint of Doubt perhaps to laud The shaking grace that prompts “My Lord! My God!”

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THOMAS HOLAHAN, CSP

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THOMAS HOLAHAN, CSP

Gallienus and Hyacinth Charred bones—a small pile really testify to Hyacinth who once refused to believe Gallienus to be a Greek god.

Emperors do such things, Eleutherian mysteries shoring up all that had been lost

by Rome by 258.

Much is not known about Hyacinth except that his ashes were found by accident when digging out a catacomb thought empty of its saints already.

Those pitiful remains burnt by a violent fire so long ago… he put up such resistance.

The ashes, delicate and dark, now turn eloquent refusing to emit a spark but sit heavy, alien, like some meteor.

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Roberto He died in the midst of his struggle to live.

Dialysis appointments, share-a-rides, shopping.

What he had been, a go-to hairdresser, was past.

What he was, AIDS survivor, Puerto Rican. son and brother, continued.

He had trouble convincing his family he was dying.

They arrived just weeks before the end.

He gave me a painting he made: Aqua sky, two tall palms, bright yellow church.

Just how he wished it would be.

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THOMAS HOLAHAN, CSP

Preemie They come, a robed choir to see her dressed in LED rubies and swathed bandages, exquisite toe to miniature brow, and yes, in a crystal casket but not deep asleep, still jerkily dreaming of a prince or of a past impossible to know.

We pray. It is what is done when faced with life transfixed, made holy, by tubes and fluorescent numbers—foiled in their mission to pacify a heartbeat, to purge a lung.

The choir, arranged so all can see, is silent and absorbed in the struggle—only hinted at by thrust of delicate fingers, by strut of limbs, eternally prone.

They gaze, placid as a Raphael, at their child, holding close their hopes as if too much for it to bear.

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chAPEL of St. FRANCIS XAVIER, MACAU

FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS

They choose gratitude, just for that moment, for a life that will not unfurl that will return to the place all mysteries go.

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THOMAS HOLAHAN, CSP

Less Than Simple A poet once built a life on one decision.

There was no fallacy of rock foundation, no need for the complex, nor the clever.

She possessed the resolve of a walker in the dark, hastening carefully over moist and trembling earth, impelled to go not from fear but from a craving to be near the one dim diamond of light kept so long apart, refused because she could but which continued shining shining, beckoning.

It could not be stopped.

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church of holy spirit, poland

MERLIE M. ALUNAN

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MERLIE M. ALUNAN

In a Century of Floods, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Wars and Pandemics, the first order of business is to survive.

Engulfed in the navel of the deep, to come out alive, soul knit to body, the mind in one piece. Only then should concessions be allowed—silence, for instance, and its awful dignity—so that, we could say about him moving in our midst, “There goes he who’d been to the edge, but refuses to tell.” Or be like that old glassyeyed salt staring down the bridegroom at his own wedding feast, filling his ears with tales of an invisible bird dangling around his neck, while all this time, the unkissed bride fidgets by his side, the wine in the cups going sour, fat congeals on the dishes the guests would not touch, repelled by the strange sudden cold cutting into their gut, in their mouth the taste of ashes and dust.

Details the world knows well—the Roman who fiddled while Rome, the city of his affection, burned. A French queen prescribing cake for the hungry multitude (legend tells, her finicky cat would have only the cream, her poodle refused tripe, wanting for itself the best of the side). Grim stories rife of earlier times, till we chalked up tales longer and grimmer: Hiroshima, Vietnam, Hitler’s gas ovens, Tiananmen, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Somalia, Rohingya adrift on the oceans, no land on this earth to call their own. Butcheries, pocket wars, waged for

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tribe or nation, for simple greed, even for God, one reason or cause just as good as another.

The sun each morning rises for the orphaned in our midst, the bastards of Saigon and the Philippines. Somewhere in a ghetto, London or San Francisco, fourth-fifth-generation descendants of slaves wake in the night, still shaken by recurrent dreams. Palms of memory retracing on their backs fully branched vines secretly growing, invisible whipscars, the slave’s legacy.

Where commerce wages war for profit against the earth, wells may go dry, leaving no space for humble tillage. Still, survival first is the order of business. In every corner of any neighborhood, always, there lives one, two, or any number who’ve been to the edge, who, by some invention or miracle, had managed somehow to return. Refugees of one or another frontier, children of the last revolution, remnant of a crossfire, what a flood or an earthquake had spared, the ones who had fled when a volcano, or war, had exploded.

We live as ever amongst the broken and the maimed— and how is it that they could walk upright, love their wives, their men, wanting to have children, looking up as we do to the same stars, able to laugh, to sing, yes, to sing, as though there haven’t been these grim facts they’d been through? We never see where they’d stitched themselves together to seem whole. How they healed. Or why, we marvel all the time, we never seem to hear them cry, or beg for anything, or scream, or whine. Truly, if survival be the final enterprise, no other scheme or heroics required, am I not eminently qualified?

To keep a human face, whatever that be like, in these unholy times is danger enough, for anyone alive. I’d pay no fee for better virtues. I wouldn’t bear with chaos, exile, hunger for

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any reasons or cause. Only by sheer coincidence (though heaven only knows what that might be) might I go out on a limb for a glimpse of the impossible height, or depth boiling bottomless under my feet. Never would I, for my cowardice, tempt the Fates with such a folly. I have earned no merit for silence, nor have I the old salt’s license to repeat his tedious tales over and over till his confounded boat runs aground.

In this century of floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, wars, pandemics and climate change, the human race might at last succeed in wiping itself off from the slate of life. But perhaps after millennia, a voice may lift from the bleak terran landscape, from the bleached bones littering the plains and the nightmare trees—a faint song lilting to the stars, haunting, haunting, pleading, asking, asking, asking, begging to return—

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JOHANNA CATON, OSB

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JOHANNA CATON, OSB

A Momentary Sound of Hail “The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman along to Jesus who had been caught committing adultery.”

—Jn. 8:3

pharisees deposit me filth to them with some rabbi for judgement I shake cradle one arm grip it try to stop shaking study his feet long toes high arch scribes pace so beasts prowl. We caught—a fact! we caught this woman in the very act!

Sir? a sneer.

He waits. feet flex and heels lift, kneels He writes in the dust bodies stink the question festers I hear the spider spin its web the worm turn in boring.

He stands his feet apart and firm He makes one remark: Let him be first to stone that has no sin.

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no man moves again He kneels writes through roaring in my brain, hear: stones slowly drop, first one, then one, and one and one and one and then a momentary sound of hail, then done.

They go.

Feet, deathly, walk to me with quiet care I hear His breathing.

Is this life? Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned?

No one, Sir. Nor do I. Go, and sin no more.

I drag my eye from Feet, slowly walk. So still the hanging air, He hasn’t disarranged a thing. Except: very bone is changed.

* “A Momentary Sound of Hail” was first published on the “Catholic Poetry Room” webpage of the website Integrated Catholic Life at integratedcatholiclife.

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Finding God in the Dis Words Admit it: some words are hard to find God in— like disrepute. Take the woman caught in the act of adultery. Pharisees tried to put God in this word, but Jesus turned it: ‘Isn’t this word really about you?’ he asked.

Or dysfunctional. Dysfunctional family—words that come with their own groan conveniently attached— at no extra cost. Where is God in this? In the groan?

Disquiet is another one: nervous, close to dread.

Is God in disquiet? Or Displacement. Displaced families. Exiles, people fleeing from horror through horror into more horror.

Is God in displacement?

I could go on: disintegrate, disable, disempower, disarray, distrust, dismember, dishonour, disgrace— not one of these words shines with the joy of God. But let us turn to another dis word.

What about discernment? Is God there?

Yes? Then, shall we ask if God is obliged to shine with joy, a child giving a first ballet recital?

What about distil? If God is the root of the root will not God reach down through the rubble of disaster into the soil of the sordid and the decay

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of death to draw up nutrients and distil them for us— if only we will discern that this is true food?

What about dispel? What about disparity? If God is truth, will not God dispel the disparity between disintegration and integration, disgrace and grace?

And what about discover?

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Ignatius Finds the Right Story Sacred Word: a single line opens on joy, merest mote’s a seed growing. But also a cooling breeze, also sparks— The Christ-story!—nothing tame! a song of larks’ notes, spring rain, dawn, dew, stars, all birthing, all open, new— but the itch of those chivalry-tales, all vain imagery, pride, once bewitching, now in after-lick I’m soured, bereft. No song, only gimmick, pitch falling flatter with each measure.

Go back, my mind! Start all over again to be your own, weigh in on scales of God’s word. And his word is: Run. Run, man, to the tomb of the Risen One, kneel in the dark.

His death’s for you: your story starts at his tomb—stay with Magdalene, Peter, young John. Ask them. Say: Now take me into your story, let me join your thirsting, ecstatic, holy quest. Run soul! Run to his tomb; enter the word, find endless meaning, know the Eternal One, the warrior, sword, rabbi, master, saviour, only Lord.

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church of St. Ignatius of Loyola CEILING, Campus Martius

LOIS ROMA-DEELEY

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LOIS ROMA-DEELEY

At the San Xavier Mission You worry too much, I say.

It’s my job, you say.

As we begin to make our way up the dirt trail toward Grotto Hill, we see, in the distance, stone lions waiting at the gate, jaws open in perpetual roar.

I’m not dead yet, I say. Good, you say, now hold onto my arm, steady yourself.

We’re half-way up the mountain having just left the old mission church known as “the place where water appears.”

And I want to tell you that I still believe in divination, the way a dowser grasps the Y-shaped branch with the palm of each hand, and walks slowly over the ground until the rod dips, then dives deep into the earth and there, leaping from the dusty, barren sand water overflows and the desert is made green once again.

But then we make our turn, and there, in the middle of this desert, is the grotto

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where, on a makeshift table of slab rock, two dozen candles flicker, and tucked under each candle, cards, letters, tattered photographs— prayers for those we two will never know.

I scribble on a slip of paper, fold the note in half, then halve it again, the corners forming a small envelope in which I leave just one name. You hold your breath, tight inside your chest, afraid of what will happen when you have to let it go.

* This poem was first published in Constellations.

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How to Forgive If there were a chart or grid arranged in horizontal rows according to the ways and means of how we should forgive, would I close my eyes and point to any square like it’s a game of pin-the-tail on and of deep wounds, mine or yours?

Would I then open my eyes and say here is mercy, there is forbearance, and on this spot, tucked all the way at the corner of the page, the one framed by blame and spite— is absolution.

But isn’t forgiveness a way of letting go?

The release of hurt into the still night air like a body giving up the ghost rises from its bones and, atom by atom, fuses star dust and soul.

* This poem was first published in Here.

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JASON DY, SJ

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Easter Lilies —a sunny verb—where every heavenly fountain speaks. We know the languages which flower, become new shoes. Each day splashes wider, in turn.

That’s why I hurry outside, to shop for a Cavs hoodie today—a cold retreat house basement.

I try to contain myself in Walmart, this nice day, bless the cashier, though we don’t talk much. I hum Your name in the parking lot, get back to my quiet.

Our lives are so small sometimes, almost silly— that Old English word meaning “blessed”; a behavior so odd that it’s lost that meaning. Catherine Doherty engraved Francis on her cabin in the Canadian woods: “The Lord has asked me to be a fool the likes of which the world has never seen.” Urodivoi—not such a jump for most of us. A sepulcher designed to wake you up, dead.

You’re the morning leaves again today, a call to wait for the One who owns us, a bough-wagging breeze.

At that point, we’re everything nobody gets to see.

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Easter Prayer (for Freud) —retreat’s end Roses have smooth shoulders, not hips: Freud!

He’s been on the outs for so long now, cigars don’t help.

Like all of us he’s had his issues: a dad who hated his grin, a mom swamped by coupons. His little brother really did enjoy a fire. That’s why our man got into dreams, holy conflagrations. There had to be answers— Descartes’ argument for God! That’s why Easter is buoyant.

It keeps showing up in our efforts. The last thing you get in this season is sustained peace. Think of our rose, how it grows, perplexing itself at every turn.

Its colors astound the poor creature. Its reach redefines its grasp. Despite this, it knows its every attribute is a prayer that answers prayer: a voice that reveals what we can know of the Risen King. We can sit next to one, bob with the breeze, the fire-thorn stems.

And when we get up and leave—that good is gone: a part of the earth, our future friends. The wet road continues, takes us, what we have to give.

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The Only Way —Retreat House Trees down in the forest, branches blocking the path; the good days come so naturally after rain.

Not that any of it matters. Your feet crunch the pebbles— a barn door still opens somewhere. New life begins to stir. This is called Easter. It’s much larger than you. It’s like you’re walking inside a great ear out of doors—most leaves high up waft like a distant sea in these trees, seahorses. I open order’s mouth when I open mine. Answers come because they have never left us. May we be part of that, the small-town residue which makes up for so much that’s missing: the touch of Jesus, Our Lady as she fishes, barefoot, off a pier. It comes down to us—as it always has: the wind-saving grasses. The cross happens again. It comes with the joy: the world’s caress.

It comes when the young buck on the back path won’t let you pass. You turn, go back another way.

Each direction is the same. Heaven is in the grass.

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Better the Patch Job —down a retreat wood-path Will I live to see the better man, the unselfish one, the one who forgets his imagined due?

The world would be utterly changed—or almost. It would be a place my body could more completely recognize.

The shops would be small, the coins, all new. Lots of other people would speak out loud to themselves, walking down Mister Rodgers Avenue. There would be a small-ish statue, a tribute! I will know each of my neighbors, all the way down the street. Birds will invent new tunes. I will learn to skeet shoot. (So you can see the problem that would arise: our imaginations, no matter how good, would pale. Violence would follow.) Besides, who has time to wait for that guy who would only annoy you?

Better the patch job. Here quandary can console. In a way, we’re already men for others, somewhere, offering ourselves in our limited way for the greater good.

The trick is to notice what matters: a coolness in the air, the familiar tree-path on a sunless jacket of a day.

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Mary & Jesus, Notre Dame de la Garde Basilica

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Jesuit Retreat Woods Easter stretches, like the back of our necks when our work moves past our efforts. Our joy doesn’t last. Or what we remember of it—that yesterday late morning place where leaves shone sun-bright on the younger and farther, much taller trees: different greens at different depths— holy hands, moving behind each other in the breezes.

God’s canvas, a place to remember friends, alive or not. And Jesus, heaven, a dispensation.

Our Lady may leave you flowers. A few saints line up.

Joy reoccurs, what it feels like here when the sun bears a bright blue shield, mottling the foliage inside you. It doesn’t matter how many trees crashed last night in the rain. Or that a buck, young, stands in the same trace of path near the back fence at both ten and two o’clock; several does, at the earlier hour, on the other side. (On a retreat every symbol matters!) Perhaps it’s who we are, in one need or another. This will always be our plight.

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Two Brothers, Widening my Retreat —I can’t eat the potatoes for dinner and so take a drive to my one brother’s house; the other is, surprisingly, there as well.

It’s easy to forget who we are, maybe because we drift so far from home, rewriting star charts, petting new dogs. We want more. Let me offer sandy amends: an evening tambourine, beating it slowly against my palm on a desert plateau.

Let me frame the proceedings. Or better, let my brothers.

I met them—surprisingly—today, away from here, both part, my Director says, of a widened retreat: one, a maverick, the other, perhaps, too giving, both twisted up—I see just now—how each lives the only life their baggage could allow; each considered excess, a precise way to rise above, to give salvific assent to our father, that marvelous and brutalizing stamp which made us. They offer imitation, compensation. They’re like the evening primrose in the desert, covering it in paper. They hold life together— which is their glory. They are him, made whole; completing our family, those postwar projects, those neighbor-less hoods.

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The Basement Rain —last morning of retreat Jesus, what’s here? Pan pipes, a sunny afternoon?

The cool promise of heaven? The humus of my life?

It’s lonely and cold, where the portions get smaller—if we’re blessed.

No one of any importance will meet us on the roads out of here. We won’t care! The wet asphalt will recommend itself. It’s Jesus, the dark, which will give it meaning.

We’re like the fingers on Your left hand, Lord, a rise in birds and later temperature; so many changes, kind of like how heaven will be when it comes. Jesus, Easter is the call that invents us, the towering city.

Who could move and not find succor? Today will be another canvas, Your absent vote. Like the e-mail I just got from my wife! She and our two adult kids, both other-abled, picking strawberries in my absence.

I can picture them, counties away, struggling to lift that twist-tied net! It would be nice to be there, share jokes, staining my fingers with my life, my home place in the dirt. Their failures will be like money to me.

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Chopin’s nocturne op. 9 no. 2 The good doesn’t overwhelm; we have our lives to live.

Days happen slowly, we wait for their meanings to unfold.

Water lilies come to mind, Monet’s, at night, when the art museum’s lights are low. Just me or you in there, making our unguided rounds.

We can stay for as long as we’d like. And today, on retreat, it rains all day, softly. My books are gathered on the desk. I’m scheduled to see my Director soon.

Everything happens for reasons beyond us, even rain!

Chopin’s music could be about that, beaded on the grass, windows. It could be about the dance one has to make alone. There’s no hurrying as we wait for the next thing. Empty days do not remain so: the promises you’ve made, the company you’ve lost or botched.

The sky’s unbroken even when it’s not. Jesus falls with the rain. Our acts still define us; God’s will, this moment: this chair, desk. They might be the rest of our score, waiting for bigger music to define it.

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LOUIE JON A. SÁNCHEZ

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE IMAGE OF SAINT IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA Standing still, you hold the book Open, as if allowing the faithful to divine The paradox of existence: that man and time Are always in discord; one must learn The hidden truth of rumination And discernment. In hurried times, One must pause, emulating your bearing While knees are bent. What does your image Shape, intimate? Was Crucifixion Envisaged, and the probable pathos While witnessing flesh painfully, slowly Dying? But we must promptly leave This chapel—the door of drudgeries Await, with disquiet pummeling For all that we must face. Moments after, The altar enthralls and once again we Encounter that which you constantly contemplate, The bloodied Christ, which for us amidst commotion And respite is merely an icon, almost bereft Of meaning possessed. In your presence today, It is grace to sense the pulse of the moment Of dwelling on you in the corner of your shrine, To again encounter at the feet of an unfathomable Eminence the exercise of lingering tranquility.

* This poem was translated from Filipino by the author.

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St. Ignatius of Loyola, Boston College, USA

MARJORIE MADDOX

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MARJORIE MADDOX

Pandemic Spiritual Exercises —after Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 2022 Week/Year One We guess it will be a week, maybe two, the light of mid-March frail in the fog of what we don’t know, the brisk winter air brittle with disease.

By Easter, we’ll frame faith with stained-glass, not shattered exactly, but cordoned off with Caution tape, crisscrossed with graveside shadow.

But still the Light shines through.

Week/Year Two Births, baptisms, Blessed are the’s recast as promises postponed, healing and teaching broadcast daily via radio and Zoom. Everyone becomes our neighbor. And here, too, the rising of the dead alongside

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the too-many buried, the too-many unable to be buried, ground too frozen, air too full of fear.

With us, Jesus weeps.

Week/Year Three With each new variant, we vary our distance, mode of expression, number of lines on faces hidden by cloth and doubt.

We eat alone or with only the ones we hope are safe, though we cannot see inside the soul, or heart, or lungs.

Is this our last supper together? This our last embrace in a world wild with spiked weeds overrunning the garden?

Take, this is my body...

Week/Year Four A time to kill and a time to heal, and the days become weeks, become months, become years, begats as numerous as Genesis’ predictions of second births,

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second Adams—with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day— which eventually lead, we’re reminded, to the fourth after-resurrection appearance and the long, dusty road to Emmaus, our weary vision blurred but primed for enlightenment.

And then our eyes will open and we will recognize Him...

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Church of the Jesuits, Solothurn

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The Altarpieces at St. Charles Borromeo Church I. Rubens: The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola See how they flee, the demons— dragon, horned beasts— circling up and away from the altar where St. Ignatius stands after Mass— dragon, horned beasts exorcised. A woman rips her bodice when, after Mass, St. Ignatius turns toward her.

Eyes rolled back, she tears at her hair.

Exorcised, the woman rips her bodice.

Nearby a half-naked man writhes.

His eyes rolled back, will he tear at his hair?

He breaks the cords that bind him.

In agony, the half-naked man writhes while another consoles him. St. Ignatius breaks the cords that bind them.

Madness, not demons, today’s experts say while others claim convulsions. St. Ignatius, haloed priest with arm raised, calls the Devil by name.

Madness, not demons, today’s experts say.

Meanwhile, putti mock Satan. Calm mothers listen.

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Arm raised, the haloed priest calls the Devil by name, commands, “Retreat!” Reciting prayers, the Creed, he calms listening mothers. Meanwhile, putti mock demons.

Black-cloaked Jesuits stand by St. Ignatius.

“Retreat!” commands the priest, reciting prayers, the Creed.

Dragon, horned beasts circle up, away from the altar.

Black-cloaked Jesuits stand by St. Ignatius.

See how they flee, the demons.

II. Rubens: The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier Altarpiece in Antwerp, commissioned defense for beatification, bright light bathes you, bathed him who painted the saint who bathed Asia in His light.

And where are we below that high altar?

The deathly pale, limbs limp but twitching, by miracle beginning to rise in His resurrection?

Or, pointed out by the saint’s right hand, merely stone, backdrop of chiseled idols toppling toward destruction?

Later, looking up at canvas sky at the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna,

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may we become even a speck of the divine paint on the nail on the index finger on the left hand of St. Francis Xavier as he gestures toward heaven and Fide, personification of faith, and the hope of the blind seeking light, seeking in Francis’ teaching and Ruebens’ vision, the merciful miracle of sight.

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The Two P’s “It is impossible to find a saint who did not take the ‘two P’s’ seriously— Prayer and Penance.”

—St. Francis Xavier

Prayer “a flight of the heart towards the throne of God.” —St. Joseph Cafasso

How the air of prayer breathes and buoys— not words, not even the slight lift of almost-thought, but less/ more; who can tell the teaspoon of light beneath wings that tilt, just so, toward eternity?

It is the breeze of eyelids closing, 211

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the wind of knees bending, the mind without knowing soaring beyond what we know of beyond.

Penance Same lazy list of nothing bold.

No sins killed: impatience, lies, anger still kicking, still karatechopping seconds, milliseconds even; unflashy, bland sins defiant, standing up to leave but never leaving entirely, stomach-punched by the priest, then blood-flushed from God’s eye but still in mine, those splintered irritants, such strong tiny crosses right in the retina.

* “Prayer” was previously published in Anglican Theological Review and in True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series, Cascade Books). “Penance” was previously published in Seminary Ridge Review and in True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series, Cascade Books) under a different title.

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Ode to Meditation —after St. Ignatius of Loyola When all else goes, I welcome you in, pull you close; skin to skin.

I welcome you in.

Ban the banter.

Skin to skin, the poem my cantor.

Banned: the banter that silences hymns.

The poem my cantor to listen within the silence of Him when all else goes.

To listen within, I pull Him close.

* This poem was previously published in St. Katherine Review and is forthcoming in Begin with a Question (Paraclete, 2022).

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Ode to Everything Enough of the lamentations.

Open the window and sing!

The world is awash with world: color-dripping globe always tilting into some Ah! or another, clouds stretching wide plump happiness, even in the noisy stage-show of showers, such sunny ovations.

And the birds— overpopulating every poem— swoop here for free— swallow, hawk, robin, gull, eagle—what else can be written but wings that wave horizon to horizon?

And enough of windows.

Praise doors! Step out with arms open, and eyes gathering vim and vision: grandeur trailing from worm and woodchuck, branch puzzles of woods, open boat of breeze— all brimming with Hey! and Hallelujah! and Celebrate! such green giving of thanks, such miraculous mercy of earth: calm valley and even this rugged, rocky chain

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we climb now as family, claiming praise as respite, holding close each breaking day, dangerous yet divine in all its gorgeous glory.

* This poem was previously published in Plough.

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BIOGRAPHIES Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, and writer at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and seven collections of poems, most recently, Andalusian Hours (2020), a collection of 101 poems that channel the voice of Flannery O’Connor, and Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage (2021). In addition, O’Donnell has published a prize-winning memoir, Mortal Blessings (2014) and a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy (2012). Her biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (2015) was awarded first prize for excellence in publishing from The Association of Catholic Publishers. Her new critical book on Flannery O’Connor, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. O’Donnell’s most recent manuscript, Holy Land, won the Paraclete Poetry Prize 2021 and will be published in 2022.

Daniel Reardon is an actor, playwright and poet based in Dublin, Ireland. His film and television appearances include My Left Foot, Night Train, The Man Within, The Tudors, Fair City, and The Clinic. On stage, his favourite Shakespearean roles include Prospero, Puck, Feste, and The Fool in King Lear. In his 50-year career he has appeared in the major plays from Ireland, England, America, Russia, as well as the Greek and Roman Classics. He tours with Irish theatre companies to festivals around the world. He was a leading member of the RTE Players, the acting company of Radio Eireann. As playwright, his award-winning plays include Spenser’s Laye, The O.K. Thing To Do, All Around My Head, Fun With Bamboo (winner Bewley’s Café Theatre Award) and Bleeding Poets (nominated Best New Play Irish Times Theatre Awards). He has written many plays for radio, including the Daily Serial riverrun. He has two volumes of poems published, In the Lion House (Gallery Press) and Fond Pageant (Somerville Press). His poetry appears regularly in magazines, journals and newspapers in Ireland, the United Kingdom and America. He performed his stage adaptation of Fond Pageant in Dublin, Cork and Galway late 2019 to early 2020, and in November 2021, his first stage performance in nearly two years was in Chekhov’s First Play by the Irish Theatre Company Dead Centre at the Sarajevo National Theatre.

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Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2011), The Net (2014), From Nothing (2016), and Blood Labors (2018). The New York Times named Blood Labors one of the Best Poetry Books of the year for 2018. He is also the author of the critical studies Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America and On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence, a collection of essays. He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, The Selected Poems and Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the poetry of Paul Celan, appeared from Salmon Poetry (Ireland). Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, and creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

David Craig was fortunate enough to attend a Jesuit High School in Cleveland, Ohio. And despite his spotty academic record there, that formation has served him well over the years. He is retiring this May from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he has taught literature and creative writing for 33 years. To date he has published 31 books, mostly poetry. Jesus, of course, has made all this happen, usually through the love and patience of his wonderful wife Linda and his three children: David, Jude, and Bridget. As far as spiritual formation goes, besides the Jesuits, he would like to thank the Servant-of-God Catherine Doherty and her lovely Madonna House Apostolate for often allowing him the opportunity to live, work, and pray with them on their farm in Combermere, Ontario. Their Fr. Robert Pelton was a generous, gifted, brilliant spiritual director of his for more than 30 years. He will not be able to repay what these people have done for him.

Desmond Francis Xavier Kon (Zhicheng-Mingdé) is the author of an epistolary novel, a quasi-memoir, two lyric essay monographs, four hybrid works, nine poetry collections, and a guided creative journal.

The former journalist has edited over twenty-five titles. Trained in publishing at Stanford University, Desmond studied sociology and mass communication at the National University of Singapore, and later received his theology masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame. Recipient of grants from the National Arts Council and Singapore International Foundation, he

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hurch, New Orleans, Louisiana

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has enjoyed literary appointments at the Notre Dame Poetry Fellowship, NAC Gardens by the Bay Writing Residency, and NTU-NAC Creative Writing Residency. Among other accolades, Desmond is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, Illumination Christian Book Award, National Indie Excellence Book Award, Poetry World Cup, Singapore Literature Prize, and three Living Now Book Awards. He helms Squircle Line Press, and has taught creative writing and publishing for over two decades. He can be found at: desmondkon.com.

Eric F. Tinsay Valles draws inspiration from all the places that he has called home. He has authored the poetry collections A World in Transit and After the Fall: dirges among ruins. A former journalist, he has coedited A Given Grace: An Anthology of Christian Poems, Get Lucky: An Anthology of Singapore and Philippine Writings, Sg Poems 2015-2016, Atelier of Healing, Anima Methodi, and The Nature of Poetry. Recipient of the Illumination Christian Book Award, Goh Sin Tub Creative Writing prize and British Council Writing the City prize, Eric has been awarded the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Centrum Artist Residency, and Wellspring House Residency. He has been invited to read poetry or commentaries at Baylor, Melbourne and Oxford Universities as well as the Kistrech Poetry Festival. His poetry has been featured in Southeast Asian Review of English, Routledge’s New Writing, and other journals.

With a BS in Business Management from Ateneo de Manila University and an MA in English from the University of the Philippines, Eric received his PhD in English, with a specialisation in Creative Writing, from Nanyang Technological University. His dissertation focussed on mediating trauma through short and long poetic forms. Eric is a director of Poetry Festival (Singapore).

Gerard Garrigan, OSB, is a monk of Saint Louis Abbey. His approach to poetry and to spirituality is given in the preface of his first book, The Sacred The Profane The Hodiamont: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” The words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins make the point that the things of this world, the profane, are actually sacred because all Creation bears the imprint of their Creator. God’s presence, his glory and wonder can be found not only in the Eucharist but also in the profane, in a jazz piece by Miles Davis, in the game of basketball, on a lonely road in Ireland, in flawed and improbable creatures as ourselves. St. Benedict realized that the author of Creation was present in the things of this world and so he insisted in his Rule that even the tools of the monastery should be treated with as great care and respect as one would treat the sacred vessels of the altar. These poems manifest the hand of God not only in what we would deem sacred but also in the

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profane, the mundane, for, as novelist Georges Bernanos noted, indeed, “Grace is everywhere.” Email him for more free poetry: frgerard@ priory.org.

Jason Dy, SJ, is a Jesuit priest and artist who lectures at the Fine Arts Department, ADMU, Quezon City. In 2009, he founded the Alternative Contemporary Art Studio (ACAS) at the garage of Sacred Heart Parish, Cebu City in order to promote contemporary art. In 2013, after being a parochial vicar at Sacred Heart Parish, Cebu City and holding his solo exhibition Testimony of What Remains at the Fernando Amorsolo Gallery, Cultural Center of the Philippines, he pursued his graduate studies in the arts, namely, MA by Creative Practice and MA in Art History and Curating at Liverpool Hope University, UK. His creative practice investigates into “the community and studio-based responses to changing religious and cultural circumstances, locations and events” (LHU). One notable project was Procesion de los Camareros, commissioned for first Manila Biennale Open City with the participation of the fifteen pedicab drivers from Barangay 655, Intramuros, Manila (2018). Another one was Not One Less project in Kecamatan Imogiri (2017, Bantul, Yogyakarta) and Project Space Pilipinas (2017, Lucban, Quezon) that responded to EJK violence through happenings and rituals. Currently, since the lockdown in March 2020 because of the pandemic, Dy has been arranging flowers as part of the ongoing art project Arrange/Enliven. This floral arrangement had been part of his recent show Nature is Never Spent at the UP Diliman Vargas in August 2021.

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, St. Austin Review, Agape Review, America Magazine, U.S. Catholic, Grand Little Things, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.

Johanna Caton, OSB, is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent, England. She was born in the United States and lived there until adulthood when her monastic vocation took her to Britain. Originally a ballet dancer, Sister Johanna felt a deep call to monastic life during a retreat at a Benedictine monastery. After a period of discernment, she left her career in dance and joyfully answered the Lord’s invitation.

Sister Johanna finds that writing poetry offers a unique perspective on the hidden God, paradoxically present in all things, at all times, in every event and person. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming

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in various online and print publications, including the Catholic Poetry Room page of the website Integrated Catholic Life, Christian Century, St. Austin Review, Ekphrastic Review, St. Katherine Review, The Windhover and Amethyst Review.

Kimberly K. Williams is the author of two books of poetry, Sometimes a Woman (Recent Work Press) and Finally, the Moon (Stephen F Austin UP). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas El Paso. Kimberly was shortlisted for the University of Canberra’s ViceChancellor’s Poetry Prize in 2019, and serves as the director of the University of Canberra’s Poetry on the Move Festival. She is originally from Detroit, Michigan.

Lois Roma-Deeley’s most recent poetry collection is Like Water in the Palm of My Hand (2022). Her previous books include The Short List of Certainties, winner of the Jacopone da Todi Book Prize (2017); High Notes (2010), a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist; northSight (2006); and Rules of Hunger (2004). Her poems have been published nationally and internationally in numerous anthologies and journals, including Without a Doubt; New Millennium Writing Anthology; Illness as a Form of Existence; Feminine Rising: Odes and Elegies; Voices of Power & Invisibility; The American Voice in Poetry: The Legacy of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg; Villanelles anthology (Everyman Library Pocket Poetry Series, Random House); Orbis International Literary Journal; New York Quarterly; Rock & Sling; Windhover; Slipstream; Post Road; Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program; Columbia Poetry Review; Bosque; Zone 3; Spillway, Water~Stone; Artemis; Juked (online); Wallace Stevens Journal; The Transnational; The Bellingham Review, and many more. Currently, she is Associate Editor of the international poetry journal Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry.

Roma-Deeley was named U.S. Professor of the Year, Community College, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE, 2012-2013. She is Poet Laureate, Scottsdale, Arizona (20212024). www.loisroma-deeley.com Louie Jon A. Sánchez is an Associate Professor of Broadcast Communication at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman. A prize-winning poet writing in Filipino, he is the author of three collections of poetry in Filipino—At Sa Tahanan ng Alabok (Where the Dust Dwells, 2010), Kung Saan sa Katawan (Whence in the Body, 2013), and Siwang sa Pinto ng Tabernakulo (The Tabernacle Door Agape, 2020). He is also a translator from both English and Filipino. He has been a habitué of Singapore for the past few years, doting on the children of his youngest brother who lives there.

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Winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises and A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry, Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems, I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book)—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (assistant editor); and over 650 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. She is the great grandniece of Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball. The recipient of numerous awards, she gives readings and workshops around the country. Forthcoming in 2022 are her books Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press), as well as her ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias, Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts). Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com.

Born in Manila, Martin M. Macasaet, SDB, is a Filipino Catholic priest.

He also belongs to the religious congregation known as the Salesians of Don Bosco, for more than forty years now. At the same time, he is also a youth minister, as well as a youth culture observer and commentator.

With a doctorate degree in Theology (from the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome), he reads, writes, speaks, and lectures on various youth ministry subjects, topics, and concerns. But the poetry bug caught him, and he has been crafting verses for these past seven years or so.

Even without formal training in poetry writing, his being a bookworm ever since childhood has provided him with enough know-how and skills. He strives to spread the Good News of God’s saving love also now through poetry.

Maryanne Hannan has published poetry in numerous publications including Spillway, Rabbit: A Journal of Non-Fiction Poetry, Rattle, Poet Lore, Minnesota Review, Magma, Oxford Poetry, Ruminate, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Windhover, Christianity and Literature, The Christian Century, Ruminate and Gargoyle, and in several anthologies, including The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. She is the author of Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Responsorial Psalms (Resource Publications, 2019). A former Latin teacher, she lives in upstate New York, USA. Her website is: www.mhannan.com.

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Merlie M. Alunan writes fiction and poetry in both English and Cebuano. Her poetry is collected in five volumes, namely Hearthstone, Sacred Tree (Anvil, 1993), Amina Among the Angels (UP Press, 1997), Selected Poems (UP Press, 2004), Tales of the Spider Woman (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2010), Pagdakop sa Bulalakaw ug uban pang mga Balak (Ateneo Press, 2013), and Running with Ghosts and Other Poems (Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2017), which won the 37th National Book Award for poetry in 2017. The University of the Philippines named her Professor Emeritus upon her retirement in 2008.

She currently lives in Tacloban City and continues to write.

Paul Mariani is the University Professor Emeritus at Boston College, specializing in modern American and British poetry, religion and literature, and creative writing. He has published over 250 essays, as well authored 21 books. These include biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. His biography of Williams was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently Ordinary Time: Poems (Slant Books), and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism (Paraclete Press) as well as commentaries on Hopkins, Williams, and many others.

He is also the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius. For over two decades he taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Glen Workshops in Colorado and Santa Fe. He earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 2009, he received the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, he was presented with the inaugural Flannery O’Connor Lifetime Achievement Award at the Catholic Imagination Conference. Poetry editor for America Magazine between 1999 and 2006, he has received honorary doctoral degrees in Humane Letters from The Elms College and his alma mater, Manhattan College.

Sally Read’s most recent book of poems is Dawn of this Hunger (Angelico Press and Second Spring). She has also published three books of poetry with Bloodaxe Books: The Day Hospital, 2012; Broken Sleep, 2008; and The Point of Splitting, 2005, which was shortlisted for the JerwoodAldeburgh prize for best first collection. In 2001 Read was awarded an Eric Gregory, a prize for the most promising poets in the UK under thirty, and her poems have been recorded for the UK’s Poetry Archive.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies including, The Independent on Sunday, The Manhattan Review, The Catholic Herald, The Picador Book of Love Poems, Poems of the Decade, and Identity Parade. In 2010 she became attached to the Hermitage of

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the Three Holy Hierarchs as ‘poet in residence’. Sally Read’s other books include the best-selling Night’s Bright Darkness (Ignatius Press, 2016), a memoir described as “the best and liveliest account of a conversion for a generation” (Paul Murray OP), and Annunciation, a Call to Faith in a Broken World (Ignatius Press, 2019). Sally’s work has been translated into five languages, and she has also written for The Tablet, Magnificat and the Times Literary Supplement, and presented Poetry for the Season for Radio Maria England. She lives with her family by the sea near Rome. Her website is: www.sallyread.net.

Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate, 2012-2014, is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Consequence of Moonlight (Paraclete Press, 2018). She is the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, among other commendations, including the Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Prize, the Ellen Anderson Prize (Poetry Society of Virginia), a Superior Achievement Award (Virginia Writers Club), the Aldrich Poetry Prize, the Transcontinental Poetry Book Award (Editor’s Choice), the Marlboro Review Poetry Prize, the Whitebird Poetry Series Prize, five Pushcart Prize nominations, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Union College, Kentucky.

In 2012, she was selected as Galing Pinoy (Outstanding FilipinoAmerican) by the Los Angeles Asian Journal. Sofia’s poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, First Things, The Bellevue Literary Review, Notre Dame Review, Laurel Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, and Modern Age, as well as various anthologies, including the Best of the Decade Edition of the Hawai’i Pacific Review. Her translations of essays on the Philippine-Spanish artist Fernando Zóbel have been issued by Galería Cayón in Spain and the Ayala Foundation in the Philippines. Sofia lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with her husband, Bill, Gottwald Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, and jazz pianist.

Thomas Holahan, CSP, is a Paulist priest living in New York City. He was a poetry writer from childhood. He received his undergraduate degree from Manhattan College and studied film production at New York University. After ordination, he worked as a creative consultant for Paulist Productions in Los Angeles and then studied at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, receiving a master’s degree in Communications Management. He has worked as a campus minister at the University of California, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

He has also served as communications director for the dioceses of Austin, Texas and Columbus, Ohio. For five years, he was vice rector of San Patrizio, the American Church, in Rome, Italy. While living in Columbus, he produced and hosted a radio talk program, “Time Out

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for Leisure”, that explored ways to create and use our unstructured time.

He finds inspiration in both the everyday and the exotic. A firm believer in the journey being the destination, he once took a bus trip from London to Kathmandu, ultimately having to ford a fast-moving river to complete the trip. He has conducted poetry workshops in Boulder, Colorado and Berkeley, California. While in Berkeley he made a request over the radio to join him at a local bar to read James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake each Friday night. The group faithfully read the entire work aloud, completing it after three years. In New York City, he leads the poetry collective Poets@StPauls and a virtual group, SharingPoets. His work has most recently appeared in Listening Journal, and Ekphrastic Review.

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Lucerne Jesuit Church, Switzerland

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We extend our heartfelt thanks to: Above all, God, for all His provisions. Thank you for guiding us so lovingly and steadily through this project.

St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, for their amazing lives and legacy. We hope you are pleased with our modest gift of a tribute.

Catholic200SG Festival, for which the web anthology, A Given Grace: An Anthology of Christian Poems, was featured in the Luminary Lit Exhibition. Editors Desmond F. X. Kon and Eric Tinsay Valles were so inspired by the incredibly favourable and acclamatory reception that they decided to embark on this project, yet another delightful collaboration.

All of the artists whose images grace these pages. To all of you, our boundless appreciation and admiration.

All the stellar writers who gave of their time and imagination to engage with the anthology concept, contributing their important voices, without which this anthology would not have been possible. Most of the poems published here retain their little quirks and imperfections, all of which we cherish. To each of you, it is impossible to adequately express our deep honour and gratitude. You have been wonderfully generous in allowing us to share your poetry with the world.

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In the wise words of St. Francis Xavier: “It is not the actual physical exertion that counts towards one’s progress, nor the nature of the task, but by the spirit of faith with which it is undertaken.”

Then, there’s St. Ignatius of Loyola, who said: “For those who love, nothing is too difficult, especially when it is done for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

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PHILANTHROPY The Joy of Giving We hope you have enjoyed reading the writing within these pages.

This e-anthology is our love gift. The editorial team and featured authors happily volunteered our time and talent for this worthwhile cause, receiving no remuneration for our contributions.

This project does not receive donations of any kind.

In the spirit of charity, we do encourage you to offer your gift giving to a charity of your choice. Gift giving is a blessing, whether it is an offering up of money, time, service, prayer.

In Acts 20:35, we encounter these words: “In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ” There is also Proverbs 19:17, which tells us: “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his deed.”

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Ways to Give In Singapore, Giving.sg provides a one-stop national giving platform to donate, volunteer and fundraise for any of the over 600 registered non-profits in the country.

If you are keen on giving to Catholic non-profit organizations, here are some listed on Giving.sg: Catholic Welfare Services Singapore Caritas Singapore Community Council Caritas Humanitarian Aid & Relief Initiatives Singapore To make a gift to the Catholic Archdiocese of Singapore, visit Catholic Foundation.

May God look kindly on your good soul, and bless you abundantly.

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