Editorials
CONTENTS Volume CXX, Number 22 Correspondence: 2 Editorials: 3 Notebook: Robert G. Hoyt 4 Be of few words: Deborah Smith Douglas 4 Memory can play tricks: Sidney Callahan 6 What is God...
...Or, in full, "Sarah Boyle Hoyt," a name first put to formal use at the heading of a Fed X message accepting another new arrival, one Andrew Michael Boyle, into her cousinship...
...It was correct that she arrived in time for Thanksgiving...
...This Christmas we would do well to reflect on Jesus' realism...
...Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome but must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...NOTEBOOK HOME FOR CHRISTMAS THE BIRTH OF A FAMILY t's my turn to write a "Notebook...
...The nature of God's supreme care for us is precisely that he has become our fellow sufferer: Jesus, the child shivering in a manger...
...This was a way of leading into an improbable announcement: Mig and I were (gulp...
...God indeed has come to share our sufferings...
...Thanks for coming...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 15 Dutch St...
...Even more appropriately, she'll be on hand for Christmas, when all babies are seen anew, and rightly, as blessings, gifts, miracles...
...No magic bullets...
...doing well...
...For the very same reasons, I do want to write the column...
...The first of our two messages was a memorandum addressed to the "Liturgy and Liquefaction Coalition," my nickname for a group that has been gathering in its members' homes once a month or so for 1o, these several decades, to worship, talk, dine, and hoist a few...
...One vexing issue was resolved when the adoption agency told us (at the last possible moment) that we couldn't walk away with our daughter--she might not even be our daughter--unless and until we gave her a name...
...Sarah's siblings have cause to worry about her...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...8:6...
...Telephone: (212) 732-0800...
...I've just interrupted this writing to go and hold Sarah...
...And, "I believe God has a twisted sense of humor, and he uses me for his amusement...
...I don't want to...
...About the baby' s future, we predicted that, having already worked a couple of miracles (on us, in absentia), she will be "the first pope to be canonized in her own lifetime, along with her husband...
...and monthly July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...What is most striking about the set is the figure of Christ--he simultaneously beckons to Thomas to touch his wounded side and blesses the recalcitrant Apostle...
...he entered history the day after Sarah had enjoyed a baby shower in her honor attended by numerous Boyles and Hoyts...
...The way out of this impasse, I hope, is to borrow from two light-hearted communications distributed by my wife, Mig Boyle, and me, having to do with the Big Happenings, and then to touch ever so lightly on matters of moment, depth, and meaning...
...But there are countervailing factors as well...
...they are "ruined and good for nothing...
...from Scotland, when the hand-written notice caught my eye...
...Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited Andrea del Verrocchio' s 500-year-old heroic bronze sculpture, Christ and Saint Thomas...
...Completed in 1483, the piece's two eight-foot-tall statues were exposed for centuries in an outdoor niche in Florence...
...They deserve a response...
...Substantially reduced postal rates would be available for the holidays, the Royal Mail announced, for unsealed greeting cards containing no more than five words in addition to the printed rues4:17 December 1993 Commonweal...
...She doesn't yet know she has cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and--most significantly (to me)--a set of siblings: my six children by a previous marriage, some of whom have offspring of their own who are, astonishingly, Sarah's nephews and nieces...
...When the baby was placed in Mig's arms we looked at her, wept a bit, then at each other and agreed that she wasn't Elizabeth or Maureen or Ermegilda...
...The problem remains, of course, that while God has indeed come among us, he allows historical events to take their human course...
...Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...but she warmed me more than I warmed her...
...No end to death, perfidy, or injustice...
...These commanding words of Isaiah (40:1) are not consoling...
...Not through some surrogate, but as very God...
...He not only understood scandal, he foretold it: "Such occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to those through whom they come" (Matt...
...on first meeting Sarah he said, "She's my aunt...
...adopting a baby girl...
...For the most part, you the reader will have to read between the lines to penetrate the persiflage...
...Display advertising correspondence should be sent to Ruth E. Taylor, 11 Graffam Rd., So...
...With the benefit of this experience, and with the help of several amanuenses, Sarah was able to inform Andrew of things to come: "I've had occasion to observe at VERY close range that you have a wonderful wide family who will google and coo at you and hand you around from lap to lap and tickle your toes and pat your head and feed your face and wipe your bottom and make funny faces till you'll wish you were back in the womb...
...By becoming a man, God "takes upon himself responsibility for all the world's ills...
...She hasn't even seen a dog yet...
...The revelations in Santa Barbara add to the juggernaut of accusations and disclosures about the sexual misconduct of Catholic religious and clergy...
...This Christmas, as every Christmas, we need such art, such realism, such recognition...
...In Jesus, God subjects himself to all the cruelty and horror of evil and human suffering...
...Staff: Harriette Balsky, Carmen P. Alava, Sandra Smith Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly except Christmas/New Year's...
...Like Jeremiah, Jesus was a realist...
...These are calls for relief in affliction...
...5.03 pounds...
...Both were sexually abused by faculty members: "How could God have allowed this to happen if he truly cares...
...For the nonce, at least, we have incredibly deft and gentle live-in help...
...CONTENTS Volume CXX, Number 22 Correspondence: 2 Editorials: 3 Notebook: Robert G. Hoyt 4 Be of few words: Deborah Smith Douglas 4 Memory can play tricks: Sidney Callahan 6 What is God like?: John Garvey 8 Go away!: John Whitman 9 Poetry: Anne Porter 10 Lawless roads still: Alberto Huerta 12 Screen: Richard Alleva 14 BOOKS The Debate on the Constitution: Wilson Carey McWilliams 12 The Hidden Law: Daria Donnelly 18 Looking Backward: William M. Sullivan 19 The Land Where the Blues Began: Jason Berry 20 Index to Vol...
...By so doing, he reveals, as he could in no other way, the reality and depth and costly nature of his forgiving love...
...CXX 22 Sisters of caramel: Tyron Baldwin 30 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Business Manager: Richard Haas Design: Emil Antonucci Screen: Richard Alleva Stage: Gerald Weales Poetry: Rosemary Deen Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy, David R. Carlin, Jr., Sidney Callahan, Liz Leibold McCloskey, Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr...
...10038...
...And while we will no doubt continue to mock God's powerlessness, he will know our jaundiced humor from the human side...
...As in the parable of Jeremiah's loincloth (13: 1-11), those bound closest to God have profaned others...
...too much is happening in my life and what's happening is too utterly primal, many-sided, unplumbable...
...Pause for exultation...
...On the record, I am not now and have never been a model father...
...Think about it, as did my youngest grandchild, Timmy, four years old...
...God's salvation is manifest in precisely that suffering...
...despair at the state of a world in need of redemption...
...I'm seventy-one-goingonseventy-two...
...Like many words from Scripture they are a demanding, realistic call to action...
...I was able, with effort, to outstare her...
...They are also damning phrases, as searing in their way as Jesus' condemnation: "Better for those who cause the downfall of such children to have millstones hung around their necks and be drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matt...
...But woe to us who cause others to stumble...
...the man Jesus falsely accused and hung on a cross...
...Portland, Me...
...At that point we hadn't even seen our soon-to-be daughter, but we could give some standard data: Born four-and-a-half weeks early...
...his parents pursued by a ruthless government...
...Again, cute...
...There is ample reason for some angst...
...It was perfectly obvious that she was "Sarah...
...04106 (207) 7994387, classified advertising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
...Without that pressure, she might have reached college age sort of anonymously...
...In a Christological reflection that drives to the heart of the matter, British theologian Brian Hebblethwaite (The Incarnation, Cambridge, 1987), explained why it was necessary for God to become human in order to redeem us...
...So much for cuteness and kitsch...
...ROBERT G. HOYT A CHRISTMAS NOTE FROM SCOTLAND BE OF FEW WORDS HER MAJESTY'S WAR ON VERBOSITY here I was, standing in line at the post office again, my arms full of letters to send home to the U.S...
...And Sarah is beautiful...
...With us, for us, and from us, he will suffer until the end of time...
...The memo asked the other members to accept a new body into the group--even though "she has not yet been shriven" and "does not yet have a full name...
...New York, N.Y...
...So much for origins...
...Christ's powerful right hand nearly dances above Thomas's head...
...COMMONWEAL . . . . . . . "))--m == jlmm ||~'VA'V, AV~I Jesus, the realist omfort ye my people...
...Welcome, Sarah...
...It is the only thing likely to deliver us from despair: despair at our own failures and the desecration of our ideals...
...Mig and I have some interactive neuroses that may be interesting to counselors but won't be to Sarah...
...But most remarkable is that the whole figure of Christ seems to be recoiling from the piercing pain about to be inflicted by Thomas' s touch...
...18 3/4 inches...
...18:7...
...Consider the testimony of two former students at Saint Anthony's, until 1987 a Franciscan high-school seminary in Santa Barbara, California...
...Here is power and vulnerability perfectly wed: Christian theology in its highest and most graphic expression...
...Birth mother twentytwo, Irish-Catholic background, already a mother but unable to provide for a second child...
...Andrew is the newly minted son of Susan and Michael Boyle...
...10038...
...Brought to New York after a painstaking restoration (in which much, Commonweal 17 December 1993:3but not all, of the work's original luster, was restored), the work is a triumph...
...Sarah enters not one but two wide and wonderful families and a circle of friends beyond compare...
...Mig said we had to see her first...
...It doesn't adequately clarify the subtext...
...She was placid and solemn...
Vol. 120 • December 1993 • No. 22
