4/11/23

 Tuesday, April 11, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 4:30 or so, up at 4:40, awful thoughts of old age and incapacity.    56℉, wind WSW at 7 mph, gusts to 12 mph, high temperature of 72℉, mostly sunny, sunrise at 6:17, sunset 7:30, 13+13.

Home.  I'm well into the novel, realizing there's tension, a stress of disappointment underlying almost all of the scenes. Reverend Boughton is recognizing and forgiving failures in how he raised  Jack, what he should have done, what he shouldn't have done, always thankful for grace and forgiveness, God's great unearned gifts.  Jack is uncomfortable in his own skin; he doesn't like or love himself, and he's weary, exhausted of himself.  Glory too thinks of herself as a failure at life, her childhood home a refuge from a world that failed her and that she failed.  I am at the point in Marilynne Robinson's storytelling leading up to what will be a significant dinner with the Ameses.  

I am struck by the similarity between Jack leaving his family and me leaving my birth family when I set off for college out of state.  Though I didn't realize the significance of that move, it set me apart from my blue-collar, working-class roots.  Neither my mother nor my father had finished high school during the Depression (or afterward.)  My Irish grandfather and favorite uncle Jim were as far as I know hod carriers.  My Danish grandfather an inventory clerk at Western Electric.  My uncle Bim was a mailman, my uncle Bud a Chicago patronage worker of some sort.  My mother supported our family by working for tips as a waitress before landing an assembly line at a Kool-Aid factory, a step up from waitressing.  My Dad bounced from job to job for years before settling on a maintenance job at a Continental Can factory.  My college education, commissioned service in the Marine Corps, and marriage to Anne, another college graduate and very bright, set me apart and I'm sure I set myself apart in my own head.  Almost all the people I lived with, socialized with, and went to school with at Marquette "came from money," as my mother used to say.  Their parents were educated, some professionals, some executives, none of them blue-collar.  My parents and my sister were never all that comfortable around Anne nor she around them.  It put a strain on me to be around all of them together, a strain I did not handle well.  It didn't help that my Dad and I were so 'un-close' and that he was so unsocial.  In any event, the effect of the distance between me and my family wasn't all that clear to me until my mother died, leaving me guilty and ashamed of how I had distanced myself from my birth family, especially from her and, as I later realized, from Kitty.  The fault was entirely mine, not Anne's, not my parents' or sister's.   "Things said or done long years ago, or things I did not do or say, weigh me down. and not a day but something is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled."

I'm wondering how it was that Marilynne Robinson came to the decision to focus so much on a Prodigal Son, the character who is so central to Home but also to Gilead and I suspect to Lila and of course Jack.  I'll probably look for some YouTube interviews of her.  I read in Wikipedia that she was raised Presbyterian (like the Boughtons) and switched to Congregationalist (like the Ameses). . . . I started watching on YouTube an interview of Ms. Robinson by Paul Elie, whose book about American Catholic authors I read several years ago.  Elie explores the idea of "blessing" and "blessings" with Robinson and she says that the book-length letter that is the corpus of Gilead is intended as a blessing on and for his son.  Elie asks her if in writing Gilead, she was exploring as a writer what blessing is and she responds "I think I'm finding out for myself as a Christian what blessing is.  You know, I am who I am and then I write to explore what that means."  I suppose the same is true of my 300 page memoir to my children, which, alas, I'm not sure either of them has read.  I suppose it was also intended as a blessing on my father, or at least a blessing insofar as it might cause his grandchildren to have a kinder assessment of him, soemthing other than 'a crabby old man.'  On reflection, I suppose it was mostly a blessing on myself, inasmuch as it helped me to understand this human being who was so distant, so seemingly indifferent to me and my sister and my mother when I was a child growing up.  I gave a copy to Kitty also years ago and I can't be sure of how much of it she read.  She was very taciturn about it but it led her at some point to confide in me that our Irish grandfather had molested her when she was a little girl, a fact she never shared with our mother or perhaps anyone other than me with the exception of her husband.  In any event, I've long since learned not to expect any comment on any of the drivel I write, an indication I suppose of my inabiltiy to engagge a reader with my loquacity.  This mult-month daily journal will surely meet the same reception as the memoir.  So now as then I write for myself, in an attempt to understand my own thinking, my own biases, my own values, my own failings.

Cardinal Stritch University closing at the end of this semester.  This is heartbreaking news for many students and alumni and maybe terrifying news for faculty, administrators, and other employees.  Cardinal Stritch, named after the head of the Archdiocese of Chicago when I was young and formerly archbishop of Milwaukee, is a project of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi.  It embraces Franciscan values, including compassion, peace-making, reverence toward all Creation, the precedence of spiritual values over material values, etc.  One-quarter of the students are Black or Hispanic, and one-third qualify for Pell Grants, indicating substantial financial need.  My friend and colleague at the House of Peace, Gerri Sheets Howard, worked on and I think attained her theology or ministry degree there.  The school has been a haven for minority students who were unable or for some reason unwilling to seek their higher education elsewhere.  This is a big loss for many in Milwaukee.  The reason for the closure is money, not enough to support operations.  It has a student body of only 1,400, down from 2,400 a few years ago, pre-pandemic.  I wonder how it managed to exist as long as it did.   The closure raises broader questions to me about the role of religious universities in general, especially with respect to graduate and professional programs.  I'm reminded of the effort years ago to create a law school at UWM and Marquette's efforts, including mine to my shame, to defeat the effort.