Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Dappled Things has released their Lent and Easter online edition. Here are some of their authors’ contributions:

In Katy Carl’s “Tenebrae,” a young man must make one of the most difficult choices of his life:

He could push back his kneeler, too. He could go after her, walk her outside under the dark blue night and the cherry blossoms and the rain. He could tell her he’d decided to stay. He could fall back on the half-truth that the hardest path wasn’t always the best—he could hold back the other half, the personal half, the half that mattered: But it’s the right path for me. He could stroll her up the dew-glimmering sidewalk; he could kiss her under the trees; they could drive down streets of antique red-brick mansions and pick out the ones they wished they could live in someday. Victor had curled his hands in a semicircle, like the brim of a baseball cap, around his forehead. Now he slipped his fingers apart. Her dark gaze glanced off his forehead; he stared between his fingers, straight at the tabernacle lamp as its light flickered on an angel-wing carved in relief on the doors.

Maria D. Byars listens for Heaven in “Then We Shall Know Fully”:

On a January night I saw
stars, roaring lanterns, thunder
in the massive silence
of an echo-holding sky
above a fragile world, half woven of
frosted roots and grasses;
and the cold field swayed, glittered vaguely,
oblivious to the universe’s
swelling scale of sounds,
never apprehending the unheard noise
surging over the mute and thousand throngs.

You can imagine what happens next in Brother Bruno Shaw, O.P.’s essay “Sanctification: A Comedy of Error” :

During the first days at the seminary, the Master of Students gathers the newly arrived to discover what practical talents are available for the community’s benefit. (We blithely refer to the house’s chores as “privileges.”) Each of our sixty men has some share in the work of home-maintenance—this brother is handy with electrical equipment, that brother has a background in carpentry, this brother is literate in computers, et cetera. Well, this brother claimed that he could cut hair. And for an order that vows evangelical poverty, getting haircuts for free is what philosophers call a “useful good.”

When I testified to having the skill to cut hair, I was relying on memories of buzzing roommates’ heads in college—memories that are not especially clear and coherent to begin with. That I had any of the barber’s prowess was, you might allow, a “shear” delusion.

Brother Kevin—as heavenly aloof as he is worldly languorous—was my first customer. He was simple enough to make a single request: “Anything but a buzz.”

J.B. Toner girds himself for battle in his sonnet “The Kingdom of Heaven”:

To be as little children, we must fight,
Leave childhood far behind us and be men—
Seek Heaven’s dawn through Purgatory’s night,
Engird the earth and find our homes again.
For God has placed in us an awful trust:
Not soldier-angels but ourselves He sends
To battle Satan’s pride and hate and lust
Until the broken world our Savior mends.

Eleanor Donlon’s hero from “The Priest Hole” wages a very different kind of battle during the English Reformation:

He sat for hours on the small shelf that served as his bed. If he held his breath he could sometimes hear the breeze along the walls of the old manor. Occasionally he moved to stretch his aching, atrophying muscles, and was thankful for the little ease available to him. There were worse cells than this, more suffocating and devoid of hope.

This hole, too tight for real movement, too small to be a makeshift chapel to house his hungry little flock when they gathered in the early morning for subversive sacraments, had been his prison for days. It had been a fortnight since the priest-catchers had come, and ransacked, and questioned, and listened, and tortured. And missed him. No respite had been granted, not since the anxious hours when government agents searched the house.

Rosary beads passed through his fingers until he lost count of the decades. He dared not whisper the words, yet his lips still moved in the silent repetition of prayers.

Sic et ego habui menses vacuos et noctes laboriosas enumeravi mihi

So I also have had empty months, and have numbered to myself wearisome nights

Also of interest is there will soon be a print edition of Dappled Things. They are now taking subscriptions.

For budding authors out there, if you are interested in making a submission: the deadline for submissions for the first printed edition is April 16, 2007.