Hi friends,
August was a busy, busy month here. My kids started school, we spent a few weeks dog-sitting for a family member, I’ve been feeling very nesty in late pregnancy and have been cleaning and organizing the house, and prep for the book release has been happening on top of it all. But! It’s all good things!
Speaking of the book release, The Contemplative Tarot comes out in less than two weeks, on September 13th. Many, many thanks to all of you who preordered; I’m very excited for you to read it. I’ve recorded some fun podcast episodes with different shows that should be released soon, and I’ll plug those on my socials as they come out. (I like guesting on podcasts because it feels easier for me to be more vulnerable and open in that medium than it is on social media, and that feels refreshing.) I’ve also put together a little hour-long virtual workshop which is graciously being hosted by my old church in New York, Church of the Heavenly Rest. That will be happening via Zoom on September 17th at 9 am CT (and there will be a recording if you can’t watch it live!) and if you’re interested, you can register here.
“How many open doors to serve Our Lord! Ask Him to send workers into His vineyard.” — Saint Vincent de Paul
The other day I was having a conversation with a friend about the current popularity of Catholic aesthetics, and how we feel about it. The conversation was helpful for me, because I had sort of noticed the phenomenon but hadn’t really named it yet. But it is a thing! The vaguely goth aesthetics of Catholicism are popular right now! I was in a New Age store in Marfa, Texas earlier in the summer, and they were selling crucifixes and statues of Mary along with their tarot cards and Buddha heads. You can buy saint medals at Catholic Supply, but now you can buy them at Ritual Cravt too. Kourtney Kardashian married Travis Barker a few months ago, and their wedding theme was basically “Italian Catholic.” To be very clear, I don’t think the popularity of Catholic aesthetics is necessarily a bad thing. I myself was largely drawn back into Catholicism by way of the Met’s 2018 Heavenly Bodies exhibit, which was nothing if not a celebration of the Catholic aesthetic. But I really want to think more about this, because I think there’s something about the beauty of Catholicism that draws people to its aesthetics. And I really want to write more about this, because I think there’s something about the beauty that points to a truth people want to grasp and yet can’t or won’t quite commit to, but I haven’t untangled my thoughts on it yet. I have noticed, though, the way the popularity of Catholic aesthetics has affected my own online life.
I can’t help but notice it – metrics are a thing, and I pay attention to what content of mine does well and what falls flat. Instagram posts about Mary Magdalene or Marian feast days? They do great (or, as great as any of my posts do on an increasingly reel-pushing platform). Instagram posts about philosopher saints like Bonaventure or less well-known saints like Philip Neri? They usually flop. A Substack essay about Joan of Arc and patron saints will get high engagement. A Substack essay about Saint Benedict and cultivating virtue will get almost none. I can see what people like and what people are uninterested in, and I do think it’s connected to the popularity of Catholic aesthetics. People love the mystics and the women saints, but they tend to be much less interested in any Catholic content that doesn’t fit the romanticized image of Catholicism.
There is a certain kind of person who will follow me on Instagram, seeing my feed full of mostly tarot cards and paintings of saints, and then will be shocked to find out that I am not just play-acting the aesthetics of Catholicism, that I am actually a mass-attending, confession-going, catechism-believing Catholic. This doesn’t happen constantly, but it’s happened often enough that I’ve noticed it. I am a real Catholic, though! The things I share online are not a performance, and I never want them to be. As a writer, my online platforms are important; they’re how I get readers. From that perspective, it’s always tempting to share only things I know will be well-received. As a Catholic, though, I want to share the kinds of things that are relevant to my real-life faith. Sometimes those things are interesting to the internet and sometimes they’re not, and it feels important to share them anyway.
Each month, I try to write a little essay about a liturgically-appropriate topic. For September, I was going to write about Our Lady of Sorrows, to whom this month is dedicated. I knew people would love it, because Our Lady of Sorrows fits perfectly into the Catholic aesthetic that’s so popular right now: emotional, gothic, feminine, capital-R Romantic. But part of how I keep myself honest about my internet presence is to stay authentic to what my real-life faith is actually like at any given time, and to make sure that my internet presence reflects that. And so I don’t want to tell you about Our Lady of Sorrows this month. Instead, I want to tell you about Saint Vincent de Paul.
Vincent de Paul was born in France in the late 16th century to peasant parents. He grew up in the little village of Pouy, and his parents sold the family oxen to send him to seminary at the age of fifteen, where he studied for four years and became a priest at nineteen (!). While there’s some doubt to the veracity of this story, it’s commonly believed that Vincent was captured and enslaved for two years in 1605. The story goes that he was sailing home from Castres when he was captured by Barbary pirates, who took him Tunis and auctioned him off as a slave. Two years later, he managed to escape and returned to France. He ultimately continued his studies in Rome and became a chaplain to the Count of Goigny, who placed him in charge of distributing money to the poor. It was from this point on that he dedicated his life to serving the poor, establishing hospitals and ministering to convicts. Because the demands of this ministry were so beyond his ability as one man, he founded the Ladies of Charity, a lay institute of women, to help him. He also helped to reform the clergy during a time when there were few priests in France and the priests France had were, frankly, not very good. He is sometimes referred to as “The Apostle of Charity” and “The Father of the Poor,” and he’s the patron saint of charitable societies.
When I think of Saint Vincent de Paul, I think of tarot’s King of Cups. Each of the four suits of the tarot includes four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King. It’s easy to turn the court cards into a hierarchy with the Pages at the bottom and the Kings at the top, but I dislike that interpretation and I’m always trying to find ways to level the playing field. For me, the Kings are not more powerful than the other court cards, but they are more mature and practical. They’re not necessarily ruling over people, but they are more outward-focused in their ideas and desires. The King of Cups shows us these traits as they specifically relate to the love of Christ and how it shows up in our lives. Saint Vincent de Paul is an example of how that personality can look in the world: going out into the world to love others in the most practical ways, and being the healing presence of Christ for the people who need it the most. Vincent was renowned for his compassion and humility and generosity, and those personality traits manifested in a very outward way.
Saint Vincent de Paul is not a saint who fits the current popular Catholic aesthetic. He wasn’t a mystic who had ecstatic visions of Christ. He wasn’t a young and beautiful martyr. Other than the story of his enslavement, which may or may not be true, his life wasn’t particularly captivating in a storybook kind of way. All the same, he’s still the kind of saint who helps me in my day-to-day life. I am naturally drawn to a more interior, contemplative spirituality, and I need constant reminders that I am to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world. My personality doesn’t absolve me from that particular Christian duty. It is my task – it is the task of every Christian – to love people in practical ways, feeding the hungry and tending the sick and clothing the naked. That’s not always comfortable and it’s not always aesthetically pleasing, but it’s faith all the same.
When visiting Catholic Churches I'm always struck by their emphasis on beauty - the incredible light in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, or the mosaics in Rochdale - and beauty can be so nourishing. In fact I first found out about the mosaics in Rochdale through social media and would probably never have ventured 10 miles down the road to see them if not for that chance encounter online (they're online here for anyone who wants a look: https://modernmooch.com/2020/10/31/st-john-the-baptist-rc-rochdale/).
The double-edged sword of social media aesthetics is something I have been mulling over for a while. I don't mean this in a grumpy "kids these days" kind of way but it often seems to lead to a shallowness of engagement - the hunger for connection is real, but everything discourages us (or distracts us) from believing in and reaching for the real depth that lies beyond it. So we make do with the image of what we hunger for, instead of the nourishment that waits for us.
The kind of Catholicism you write about (which I find very enriching!) asks something of us, however gently, and that might be one of the first barriers that people find in moving from image to nourishment, or from shallowness to depth. My own faith journey has asked me to come to terms with my feelings of unworthiness, to embrace sincerity (social media always tempts me to express an ironic distance from the things I truly care about), and to find new understandings of and value in things I thought I had understood and rejected years ago. It's been humbling and uncomfortable, and there is no way to express the value of it that translates easily into social media aesthetics, but I for one am very glad you write about these things.
Hello! I have been wanting to learn more about Tarot, but wanted to find the right source. I just discovered your page and found it very interesting. I'll have to check out your book. I guess I would also consider myself a Catholic mystic astrologer. - Clara