A New Year's Letter from Virginia
Goals (ordinary and existential) for 2025, as well as art that I'm enjoying at present.
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Dear friends,
I’m writing to you from a little coffee shop in western Virginia. This week, in no particular order and very much still in the spirit of the unweek, I have made impromptu airport book purchases (a new Robin Wall Kimmerer volume!!), visited many local coffee shops in pursuit of the perfect chai latte, gotten my nails done, had a completely delicious mug of mulled wine from a local coffee bar, celebrated New Year’s Day and the Solemnity of Mary, and ice-skated with some friends. I’ve returned no more than four emails. And it has been completely wonderful.
Last week, I shared several of my reflection questions for the new year. This week, as I’ve been out of town, enjoying days that have been physically, emotionally, and spiritually restorative, a few key themes have surfaced— distinct markers of what brought life, what fell short, and what I hope to cultivate more intentionally in the months ahead. Below, I’ve shared more about three from each category.
What Worked This Year
1. Morning & evening walks
Admittedly, this isn’t a new practice for me. However, it remained a really important rhythm in my days, and I’m pleased to say that my phone’s health app tells me that I was clocking in an average of just around 8 miles a day from January-December. I strongly believe that regular walks can help to enrich our creativity and develop our moral character. I love the story of Charles Darwin, known for walking along a gravel track near his home in Kent nicknamed "the Sandwalk.” His son later wrote that these walks were not just for “hard thinking”; rather, he allowed his mind to wander and aimlessly run over data much of the time. ("I hate a barnacle," he once wrote, "as no man ever did before.") Anyway, there’s nothing much to say on this other than that long walks have the tendency to remind me that my mental crises are often metabolic ones, and I’m able to better pay attention to everything when my focus is redirected in this way.
2. Spiritual direction
I started meeting with my spiritual director, the wonderful Jen Goodyer, regularly in November 2023, and I cannot speak highly enough about it. I had originally met Jen through Instagram and resonated with her deep roots in the contemplative and mystical streams of Christianity. There’s no one good reason to explore spiritual direction; I first started during a time of faith transition, and at this point in time, I feel that I most want to deepen my relationship with God. I read this a couple years ago when deciding whether to pursue spiritual direction, and it has stuck with me since: “It can be viewed as a time of honest prayer as it is often a holy conversation that God is present in.” Spiritual direction helps me to ask deeper questions of myself, God, and others, and I tremendously recommend it.
3. Risking delight
There’s a piercing little poem by Jack Gilbert that I’ve loved for years and discovered through Christian Wiman’s Joy: “A Brief for the Defense”. In it, he writes: “We must risk delight…We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”1 Historically, I’ve found it difficult to strike the balance between knowing what’s going on in the world and being informed to the point that I’m completely drenched in despair. But for some time now, the news hasn’t just been something that we read in the morning paper; it’s all over the Internet, social media, and our email inboxes. We’re given access to everything that’s going on everywhere, and it’s not foolish, naive, or privileged to want something more than, as Joy Clarkson has cleverly remarked, binge-watching the world burn.2 We must know goodness if we are to defend it. Risking delight, I’ve found, is the only way to actually tend to our souls and be able to take on any part of the world’s grief. I read a limited amount of news this year, and that was deeply radical for me.
What Didn’t Work This Year
1. Excessive scrolling
This one is very self-explanatory. For the majority of January-May, I deactivated my Instagram account as a sort of long-reaching Lent, and my favorite thing about this was not knowing what was happening in everyone’s lives. However, despite the fact that I do think that social media is bad for our culture at large, I don’t think that all elements of social media are black-and-white, and there’s a lot of good that I’ve found through the couple of sites that I’ve used over the years. I do enjoy Instagram because I’ve stealthily guided the algorithm into remembering that I most enjoy spiritual writing, corgis, Coptic icons, and recipes for scones, but that doesn’t mean that every time I’m on socials I’m walking away thinking, “I’m glad I spent my time in that way.” Anyway, this year, I want to read less on Instagram and focus more of my attention elsewhere.
2. Not enough fiction
My academic research focuses on theology, medieval history, and art (visual, literary, musical), which means that I both read a lot and talk about what I’m reading a lot. With my master’s work this past year has come a great deal of hefty theological and philosophical writing, and I’ve found myself feeling as though I haven’t visited quite enough of my beloved fictional worlds. I’m finishing my other master’s in library science this December, and will soon be having to hunt for a job that’s in my ideal realm of children’s and youth services, so I want to be returning to more of the books that are my reason for doing any of my theological work in the first place: my belief that stories, more than anything else, form our sense of identity, strengthen our sense of wonder, and equip us with courage.
3. Too much busywork, so to speak
For some reason, I don’t seem to admit to myself that my life is rather demanding. I do think that this is, fundamentally, a privilege: my interests are varied and expansive, my relationships are rich and meaningful, my work is exciting and enriching. However, I want to be better about prioritizing and distinguishing tasks that are genuinely either 1) life-giving or 2) necessary in this new year. This year, I’m going to be working on a really important investigation with FemCatholic, traveling to Europe for a month in the summer for an independent research trip, and doing PhD applications later in the fall, so I want to be able to attend to my time and energy carefully and push aside the busywork that I tend to think is necessary for the rhythms of my life to commence but really, really isn’t.
What I Want More of This Year
1. Consistent writing practices
There has been one idea that’s been instrumental to me in learning how to write more consistently, both on here and with various freelance projects: dismissing the idea of “writer’s block.” At least, not in terms of this fundamentally negative thing that we pathologize. Writing is, for all intents and purpose, the harvest that we yield, but isn’t only done during the specific time we carve out to sit and type- it’s done while in church, walking with a friend, on the train, etc. Removing the pressure that I put on myself to sit down and write thoughtfully helps me to just sit down and harvest what it is that I actually have to say on any given day. It’s more organic, and less stressful. I thank Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (enjoyed in parts, not yet in its entirety) for much of this shift in my thinking.3
2. Send more letters
Most of the time, I’m awful at responding to text messages. Calling instead of texting, regularly turning on Do Not Disturb, and choosing to respond to all of my emails twice a week (ensuring that I am not habitually opening my inbox throughout the day and then, overwhelmed, neglecting to respond to anything) have all helped with this.4 If I really think about what I want out of messaging people, I want my habits to be 1) reliable and 2) efficient, without my phone becoming sort of a stand-in “third space” in a time when third spaces are harder to come by.5 What matters to me is being fully present for the people I love, which is why I’m choosing to write more letters/send more snail mail in 2025.
3. Discerning religious life more intentionally
Bethany Doyle’s excellent article “Everyone Should Discern Religious Life” has been on my mind quite a bit throughout the past six months. She writes about the importance of not assuming that you are called to marriage, even if you ultimately discern out of religious life.6 I think that for me, as an idealistic introvert who has spent a fair amount of time chatting with religious sisters and visiting monasteries, I have always been a little cautious that any exploration of religious life that I would choose to discern isn’t rooted in dashed romantic hopes. However, I’ve reached a place where I feel that I can discern with my head on straight, so I’m choosing to devote time this year to discerning religious life- apostolic, not contemplative- with more dedicated focus and attention.
Wisdom & Whimsy: Art I’m Enjoying
The film A Complete Unknown
I watched this last weekend and really enjoyed it. A Complete Unknown tells the story of Bob Dylan’s early career, beginning with his arrival in New York City in 1961 and concluding with his controversial performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It’s largely centered around his significant relationships during this period of time: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Sylvie Russo (i.e. Suze Rotolo, the woman walking next to Dylan on the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), etc.7 Before watching, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Chalamet in this role, but his performance was excellent, and I forgot I was watching a biopic.
I appreciate what Stephanie Zacharek writes about the movie in TIME: “There’s something about ‘A Complete Unknown’ that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.”8 It’s made apparent that Dylan didn’t care what people thought, making him both an artistic visionary and… well, a curmudgeon, to say the least. With that said, it’s interesting to me to see such a layered portrayal of an artist that so many- myself included- deeply enjoy.
“Eleven Addresses to the Lord” by John Berryman
John Berryman is considered a major figure in the confessional school of poetry, a style that emerged during the late 1950’s and focused on the realities of the individual experience, often linked to overarching social themes. I return often to the poem of his that Robert Lowell believed to be one of the best poems of Berryman’s age: “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”, and especially this stanza:
“I fell back in love with you, Father, for two reasons:
You were good to me, & a delicious author,
rational & passionate. Come on me again,
as twice you came to Azarias & Misael.”9
Berryman is a deeply tumultuous, controversial figure. By most accounts, he didn’t live a life of integrity, and certainly not a life visibly aligned with the Catholic faith that he, at different points of time, claimed to assent to. I think that it’s appropriate to admit this while also recognizing that evaluating poetry based on the poet's moral and religious condition is an unreliable approach. I like this paragraph from a theologico-poetic analysis of the poem by Bruno M. Shah, and find it really helpful in the “should we separate the artist from the art?” debate:
“For, if confessional poetry requires that its critical readers make judgments--not only about the poetry but also about the poet as a person--what standard of judgment is there to use? Regardless of any poet's successful versification of his or her experience, one can never "read back" into that experience in order to extract it as a bald datum. Nor is it prudent to use accounts of a poet's moral and religious state in order to render his poetry blame- or praiseworthy--as both Kirsch and Mariani tend to do... The interior life of a soul remains irreducibly incommunicable to all but God. It is for this reason that good confessional art can be so magical: it illumines the opacity of others and creates a communion of sympathy. At least that is its artful conceit.”10
The Hillbilly Thomists
The Hillbilly Thomists are a band of Dominican friars who write and perform songs in the style of bluegrass and folk. Their name is inspired by Flannery O’Connor, the Catholic novelist with a deep affection for Summa theologiae, who once wrote: “people think I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas I’m a hillbilly Thomist.”11 Katie Marquette had a wonderful interview with the friars on her podcast, where Fr. Justin Bolger refers to their songs as “front porch music.”12
Their latest album, Marigold, was released in summer of last year. I particularly like these lines from the song “Justify You”:
“Sitting in the corner is old Jude Jones
Been there so long he's just skin and bones
I said, ‘St. Jude what's the secret to life?’
He said, ‘I live with the angels, but I sleep with a knife.’Lovely Rita with the dark brown eyes
I said, ‘St. Rita what's the meaning of life?’
She said, ‘Oh now honey, what can I say? You got to, save your money and learn how to pray.’”
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
In this incisive little volume first published in 1961, Lewis described the greatest gift that story can offer us as the “enlargement of being.” He writes:
“In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”13
I really like the idea that appears at the heart of Lewis’ refrain in this essay: the idea that to properly read literature, you must surrender to it. In other words, we should be keener on getting ourselves “out of the way” and remain open to the possibility of what remains to be found in any piece of writing. Quick, clever analysis of a title is cheap, Lewis seems to be saying here. Books should be judged on how they are read, so things like the desire to reread a book, or the internal transformation incited by a given title, are what truly distinguish great literature.
Well, that’s it, friends. I’m in need of a ridiculously decadent latte. This weekend, I’ll be catching a flight back to California and the ordinary rhythms of work, writing, and churchgoing will commence. Let me know what worked, didn’t work, or what you want more of for yourself in the comments!
Warmly,
Julia
Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense,” in Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
I have this Tweet of Joy’s saved and think about it a lot: https://x.com/joynessthebrave/status/1237100210121322496?s=51
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path Toward Higher Creativity (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002.)
After Babel by Jonathan Haidt has a really thought-provoking piece on the consequences of constant digital availability, which you can read here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/no-im-not-always-available?utm_source=publication-search.
I enjoyed this piece on third spaces and what community entails here: https://midwesthetic.substack.com/p/third-space-you-cant-handle-a-third?r=ggr6m&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
https://bethanyd.substack.com/p/everyone-should-discern-religious
I’m thinking here of Rotolo’s A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. This line stands out: "… the sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it. The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell."
https://time.com/7202876/a-complete-unknown-review-bob-dylan/
John Berryman, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”, in Love and Fame (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971).
Bruno M. Shah, “The end of John Berryman's hope: a theological consideration of hope in ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’”, in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, January 1, 2009. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+end+of+John+Berryman's+hope%3A+a+theological+consideration+of+hope...-a0198849442
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.)
https://bornofwonder.substack.com/p/not-a-hillbilly-nihilist-a-hillbilly?utm_source=publication-search
C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 89.
I hope to read more fiction this year too
I just discovered your substack recently and am so glad I did because I am reveling in all we have in common! Mrs. Rumphius! I haven't thought about that beloved childhood book in years. I just finished reading The Serviceberry (I'm guessing that's the RWK book you picked up). This Spiritual Director is so glad that you are reccomending it to the rest of the world - especially in the midst of study and discernment, it can be so powerful. And as a huge Dylan fan, I am so eager to see the movie (but alas, 2 kids and 2 jobs, and I haven't found the time just yet....)