February 9: Catholics, Sarah Vap, "Faulkner's Rosary," New Cartoon

I said I'd enjoyed talking to them a lot, too.  I meant it, too.  I'd have enjoyed it even more though, I think, if I hadn't been sort of afraid, the whole time I was talking to them, that they'd all of a sudden try to find out if I was a Catholic.  Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic.  It happens to me a lot, I know, partly because my last name is Irish, and most people of Irish descent are Catholics.  As a matter of fact, my father was a Catholic once.  He quit, though, when he married my mother.  But Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic even if they don't know your last name...

Of course, Holden has an opinion about Catholics.  Holden has opinions about everyone.  He reserves his most negative criticisms for people he considers to be "phony"--pretentious teens and adults who try to pass themselves off as smarter or more important than they actually are.  Holden prizes humility and truth.  That's why kids like his sister Phoebe and brother Allie are so central to him.  They are unspoiled by life.  In the passage above, Holden is talking to a pair of nuns he's met at a diner, and he likes them a great deal.  Holden claims to be an atheist, but he admires people with strong convictions and beliefs, because, at the moment, Holden is not sure what to believe or who to trust.

I've been lucky.  For the most part, I've had a strong spiritual life.  I was raised Catholic, and, aside from the usual teenage diversions, I've maintained my beliefs.  My faith informs most of what I do--working, teaching, husbanding, parenting, and writing.  I may get mad with God.  I may question God,  I may even wrestle with God from time-to-time.  That's normal.  Even healthy.  It's my faith, however, that is the thread that holds the elements of my life together.

Sarah Vap's collection of poems, Faulkner's Rosary, follows this thread, from pregnancy to birth to new motherhood.  Each poem is a bead, a cell, a prayer in the fabric of life.  Vap uses the concept of the Catholic rosary, with its concentration on meditation and mystery, happiness and sorrow, love and death, to create a circular poetic portrait of life.  Each line vibrates with a peculiar energy and light:

Fallopian

I don't know what it was like for you,
before me.          Wrapped-up, did your night

walk with you?  And practice speaking

like the black rock
slipped secretly, hand to hand, by a new love

to a new love?  Then, is forever looked-after?
Welcoming,

and not very happy, the black cat
turns into a white one

as it crosses the stone wall of the Street of the Holy Spirit.
Something untouchable, we know,

is still voluble.

I would be lying if I said I understood all of Vap's poems.  They resist understanding at times.  Like reading a Faulkner novel, Faulkner's Rosary is a journey through time, from the inner space of the womb to the outer space of the Street of the Holy Spirit.  Vap sees the miraculous even in the frayed string that holds her rosary together:

A cradle of warmed oats for the chickens on the Epiphany

Last week you formed the chambers of your own heart; this week
the lobes of your brain.  I wake up thinking overcelebrate.

I wake with the phrase as I am wont.

Chronology doesn't enter--my birth and yours,

my mother's pregnancy
and mine, they are the same:          blessed,

and tendered thanks for the infinite detail--windowsills,

before or after Advent, where the worm lived

by your vanished sister.  You must dream

of animals, afraid,
pitching themselves

into hollowed-out buildings, built

several stories down into the earth.

Sarah Vap's work frustrates me at times.  It leaves me puzzled, wondering.  Yet, I keep returning to it, the way my mother returns to her prayer books every morning or my father to his black-beaded rosary.  The poems in this book make me say a holy "yes" to life in all its vicissitudes, from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Saint Marty is in love with Faulkner's Rosary.

Confessions of Saint Marty