Dog Food, Sauerkraut, the Interior Castle

A Prologue to Chapter 12: The Flight to the Ford

Oh Elbereth! Gilthoniel!

There’s a threshold crossed between the end of Chapter 11 and the beginning of Chapter 12, like a before and after. Before the Witch King drives the Morgul blade into Frodo’s left shoulder and after, when he comes back to himself to find he’s lying on the ground “still desperately clutching the Ring” surrounded by his friends and the warmth of a fire. Between these two markers, an interstitial partition. A plea for intercession: Oh Elbereth! Gilthoniel!

This prologue to Chapter 12 is an interstitial prayer, too, but offered more as proclamation than petition. It starts with one more Traumatic Catholic Upbringing story before the tone shifts. This time I’m thirteen, in 9th grade. My Marianist middle school in Chatsworth had a high school campus in Woodland Hills where Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Jessica Biel¹ went and students did blow in their SUVS and pleated skirts before morning prayer; I enrolled, instead, in a pretty radical magnet program at Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda. After the whole pleading fetal orb incident, I wasn’t interested in being confirmed Catholic, but it wasn’t up to me, so I had to take CCD in the Saint Euphrasia² rec room after school instead of getting it over with in Religion class. One day, to teach us how disgusting it is to give your boyfriend a blowjob or something, the teacher passed around strips of a navy blue bed sheet to serve as blindfolds, and then a commissary-sized stainless mixing bowl filled with wet dog food and sauerkraut, and told us to stick our hands in it.

God’s been trying to get my attention in a very Catholic-sounding language for a long time now; I’ve resisted speaking it back. That started shifting with the season and then last week, caught up in a wave one might call a rapture, I came to some clarity that's ready to be consecrated. It started with a yammering in my right ear that said Girl, listen! Your ambitions are growing and every breath brings you closer to your death. Use Resources Wisely. Thinking back to the Sin Bowl, I’m disgusted by the smell, but also by the waste. In our refrigerator you’ll find nubbins of cheese and a 1/8th of an onion in thrice used bits of aluminum foil. I’ll cut the flat edge off the tube of toothpaste to scrape out five more days of use, and add sugar and rice wine vinegar to the squeeze bottle of mayonnaise to shake out one last creamy salad dressing. I hate waste. I love resourcefulness, like the way my own ancestors found their Tonāntzin³ contained in the body of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and how Grandpa made face sculptures out of leftover concrete.

My grandfather José Barbosa laid sewer pipe all over the City of Los Angeles and made art out of everything—drawings in charcoal left in the fire pit after he’d roasted a goat, powdered sugar like snowfall on hot lemon donuts, concrete faces after the slab had been poured. Thanks for sending, Mama!

Precious Grandpa

The clarity I came to is that responding to God’s call in Catholic is resourceful. It makes use of an ancient, expansive linguistic and liturgical toolbox that housed beautiful, misunderstood freaks like Hildegard von Bingen with her Cosmic Egg and Teresa de Avila, whose Interior Castle I’ve just started sitting with. It invites me to work within a lineage that’s mine, whether I like it or not. It moves a little power out from the rotting hoards of overlords and into the open palms of those with their heads to the earth in prayer.

It beatifies the bright-eyed seventh-grade version of myself who loved God so simply. It takes the hand of the hardening ninth-grader, learning to sniff out the sin in systems built to shame and punish; it says, yes, babe—I see what you see.

I learned this week that human bones are made of finger-shaped crystals that organize in concentric circles and twist as they grow, self-similar spiral staircases connected by walkways like chemin de ronde. Fractal castles that make us vertebrate. Maybe with these old Catholic bones, I’ll build a castle big enough to sleep all those restless, longing women I’ve been. Big enough for everything.

This one particular Parrot Tulip kept me good company this week.

Lately to myself I’ve been calling this project A Lectio Divina of The Lord of the Rings instead of Talking with Tolkien on the Hungry River, and that shift has been fruitful. Tolkien might have thought it profane in 1965 but I bet if he were my contemporary he’d be into the idea. At any rate, we don’t get the final say over how people interact with our work, and “Lectio Divina” makes sense to me. The timing’s great on the language reclamation, because Chapter 12: The Flight to the Ford opens all the way up when I let it speak Catholic like it wants to.

I’ll pause here to give the lessons from my younger selves some breathing room, and because the girls and I have an 11-hour drive ahead of us today to see a Very Special Baby belonging to the sweet-faced, red-robed brother boy in the photo down below. Next week we’ll turn focus toward the brass tacks of this juicy stretch of text, to witness Strider in his role as Earth Healer and herbalist, the power of friendship and telling stories of our Well Ancestors, to contemplate the nature of Frodo’s temptation and his wound, and to find out just who/what/where is Elbereth, Gilthoniel!

One River At a Time,

Brace-faced 8th-grade me & my brother Timmy—new Dad to Maeve!—about to ring some bells real hard.

This Red Oak Catkin came from a tree the hurricane brought down last September. Alex chainsawed it into pieces, and we stacked the remains into an embankment. Still, flowers bloomed from its disarticulated skeleton.

Me last Sunday, April 5th, picking up Elfstones. Did you know that a Rainbow is actually a circle?

1. Peak Seventh Heaven, which I never watched but went instead for The Craft, Cruel Intentions, & Buffy the Vampire Slayer. God Blessed 1996-1999.

2. Saint Euphrasia of Constantinople’s big work was moving big rocks from one pile to another in penance til the Devil conceded.

3. Tonāntzin meaning Sacred Mother in Nahuatl, worshiped on the hill of Tepeyac before the Spanish forced conversion on Indigenous Mexicans. Sacred Mother came to an Indigenous man named Juan Diego at the site where her temple had been destroyed, now cloaked in robes, to say: Don’t be scared. They can’t kill us. I’m still here.