Hi friends,
This email looks a little different and that’s because it’s coming from Substack instead of Mailchimp. Nothing changes for you; I imported all subscribers from Mailchimp and these emails will remain free. I just needed a platform that was more user-friendly and better suited to writing instead of marketing and e-commerce.
This email is also a little loose and rambling because I turned in my book this morning and my brain feels so light and empty in the wake of it. I’m very proud of the book and I’m very excited to work with my editor (the lovely Gwen Hawkes) to make it even better and I’m very excited to share it with you when it comes out next fall and also my mind has that wrung-out feeling it gets after too much creative output and not enough creative input. I like my writing to feel grounded and well-structured and a little weightier but I can’t seem to get to that place right now. I’m going to send this out to you and then spend a few weeks reading a stack of books I’ve been meaning to get to and not writing a single word.
The other day I read this little piece by Cynthia Bourgeault on the Fall Triduum. “Triduum” is a liturgical word which refers to three-day-long religious observances. It’s most often used to describe the days before Easter: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Bourgeault wrote about another triduum, the Fall Triduum or Little Triduum, consisting of Halloween, All Saints’, and All Souls’. It is during this little triduum that we remember the dead as we march into the dark winter. In the Christian tradition, Halloween is a day to taunt the death which we need not fear. We dress up as ghouls and mock the evil which holds no sway. We look darkness in the face and laugh because we are saved by the light. Halloween is the great vigil to All Saints’, the day on which we remember and recognize that the shadow of death is nothing and that, not only does the communion of saints exist, it is close enough to reach out and touch. The saints are real and we can talk to them. All Saints’ tumbles into All Souls’ as, newly reminded that the dead are intimately close, we pray for their souls. Obviously, I love this. I love it because it showcases what is, for me, one of the shining strengths of Christianity: its deep and abiding strangeness.
I recently returned to the Catholicism of my childhood. I’ve written about it a fair amount here, and I’ve had a number of conversations about it in real life. I had previously spent several years in the Episcopal Church, and, in my experience, people aren’t put off by Episcopalians. But (again, in my experience) Catholics are a different story. The Catholic Church is messier and more extreme and more corrupt. I get a lot of probing questions about abortion and women in the priesthood and gay marriage, trying to figure out whether or not I’ve somehow become politically conservative (I haven’t). I understand why that’s the first place folks go in conversation, and I’m always happy to talk about it. Being Catholic feels largely like an exercise in attempting to answer for Catholicism’s many, many sins. What I like best, though, is getting to the second place folks go in conversation, which is why. Folks don’t always want to go there, but I love it when they do, because then I get to talk about my favorite thing, and my favorite thing about Catholicism is stuff like the Little Triduum. My favorite thing is that it’s weird.
All I’ve ever wanted in my whole life is to live in a world that feels enchanted. I gobbled up fairytales as a kid. My earliest memories involve trying to communicate with both plants and animals. I left little offerings out for the fairies until an age which is surely older than you would guess. My husband has unnaturally blue eyes, the kind of eyes that strangers comment on, and I will never forget that the first unbidden thought I had when I met him was a little thrill of oh he looks like the sídhe. (This is why you don’t let your kids read too much Yeats.) I spent a long time away from Christianity in my twenties, during which time I fell into friendship with pagans and astrologers and tarot readers and the “spiritual but not religious.” I was jaded by organized religion but I still wanted magic, and these magical people were my people. They were looking for enchantment in other places, but at least they were still looking for it.
I spent years looking for that enchantment in all sorts of other places too, only to land right back in Catholicism because I didn’t find it anywhere else to quite the same degree. (Éliphas Lévi, the famous occultist, agreed, and I think about this quote almost every day.) There is nothing in this world more beautiful and uncanny than the Eucharist. That’s where God is. It’s not the only place, but it’s the place I feel it most keenly. For a lot of people, to hear someone say “I feel the presence of my Beloved in the Eucharist” is essentially the same as hearing someone say “I think it’s important to leave bread and milk under the oak tree for the fairies,” but I’ve reached a place where I’m pretty okay with that. I have felt both, after all, and I think both feelings come from the same pure and restless search for wonder.
I think and write often about the magic of Christianity, the mystical strangeness of it, the intersection of Christianity and folk religion. Stuff like the Little Triduum is exactly what I mean by that. I want to believe that death has no sting. I want to believe that the saints intercede for us. I want to believe that the dead are not so far away. And I do believe all of those things. What is more enchanted than God defeating death itself? I would love to see the Little Triduum more widely observed, because I think that Catholicism’s strangeness is one of its greatest assets. Someone dm-ed me on Instagram a few weeks ago, telling me that I should stop reading tarot because it’s precisely this kind of thing that makes people think Catholics practice magic or whatever. But it’s precisely that kind of thing that made me want to be Catholic again. I want my religion to be magical, or else what’s the point? I want to lean into the embarrassing earnestness of faith. I want to laugh at the devil. I want the saints to intercede for me. I want to pray for the dead and believe that it means something. Give me something, always, that pushes me to that little thrill of enchantment.
Brittany, I sense your thought resonating with that of G.K. Chesterton on the "mystical strangeness" and yes, even the "magic" of Catholicism. You are in very good company indeed! - Vernon
Oh this is the post I was waiting for! I discovered you thru your book first…naturally I wanted more…I’m not on social media, but was happy to discover your blog posts…I remember reading in your book about being a devout Catholic and when I started at the beginning of this blog I noticed you mentioned walking away from the Catholic Church; I patiently waited as I read thru the posts to see when you went back to Catholicism—this has been very fascinating for me as I am a cradle Catholic who stopped going to church in 2000, went deeply new age, but have found myself being called back to Catholicism for the past couple of years, but definitely strongly in the past few months. I remember growing up Catholic—I never thought it was weird…and in my teens it hit me how odd most non-Catholic’s find Catholicism…it still puzzles me. I thought everyone that went to church practiced like we did. I agree with you—it’s mystical and magical and there’s not a darned thing wrong with that! I love reading your posts; they resonate with me as a quite a mystical woo-woo tarot reader who is finding herself returning home to Catholicism. Thank you!