{"id":1715,"date":"2016-04-19T13:21:31","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T17:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/?p=1715"},"modified":"2016-04-19T13:21:31","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T17:21:31","slug":"good-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/good-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Charles of the Desert<\/h1>\n
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By Rebecca A. Spears<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\"charles-of-the-desert-a-life-in-verse-5\"<\/a>One early June, traveling to a wedding in San Diego, I\u2019d taken the long way from Dallas by train. I wanted to see the Southwestern deserts. Two days later Amtrak\u2019sSunset Limited <\/em>broke down in the Mojave Desert.<\/p>\n

Pretty quickly it became clear: We are not so great. Nature is. God is.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is one reason why Charles de Foucauld went to live in the Sahara: not only to offer the people there hospitality and love as Jesus had, but also as a way to empty himself of the temptations of civilized life, allowing himself to be humbled by the vast universe.<\/p>\n

The Christian hermit and martyr Charles of the Desert (1858-1916) is a complex, puzzling character. William Kelley Woolfitt\u2019s new book of poems Charles of the Desert<\/em><\/a> develops a full portrait of this mystifying cleric from childhood in 1863 to his last day in Algeria\u2019s Hoggar Mountains. The poems, written in first person, proceed on a timeline, zigzagging geographically from France to the Holy Land to Algeria.<\/p>\n

For over a decade, P\u00e8re Charles lived a stringent life in the Sahara, a life that would kill most of us. He lived and worked among the Tuaregs, who saw him at best as an eccentric, at worst as an enemy. In 1916, he was assassinated by rebels attempting to rob and kidnap him. He left to the world a four-volume dictionary of the Tuareg language, a new order\u2014the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus\u2014and a public fascination for his austere life among the Muslims, whom he hadn\u2019t been able to convert.<\/p>\n

How hard his life must have been. Yet by some firsthand accounts, he was \u201cluminous,\u201d \u201cpeaceful,\u201d and \u201cpure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles\u2019s young life, marked by the early loss of his parents, makes me wonder if his initial impulses toward the holy life were to satisfy not only a need to glorify God and do God\u2019s work, but also to seek parents in the Mother Superior and the Abbot.<\/p>\n

In Woolfitt\u2019s poems I find a child who couldn\u2019t know or understand his father. That man is described as \u201cwhip-like\u201d and \u201chalf-lizard,\u201d someone whose \u201cwhims enslave him.\u201d He appears more like a \u201cWeather Formation\u201d in the young boy\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Charles\u2019s mother seems to have languished and died, after a miscarriage and postpartum depression. Charles sees her as \u201cHarp Seal, as Sacristan.\u201d With his mother, Charles has an early memory of compassion for Jesus, \u201cthe man who hung on the church wall,\u201d \u201cthe pale, poor eggshell man.\u201d The child wishes to bring a blanket for him, but forgets to carry out this kindness.<\/p>\n

Woolfitt\u2019s formal poems are intriguing for the ways they develop Charles and those around him. Besides the innocent child, we also see the mischievous Charles asking a fictionalized sister Beatrix to \u201csteal for me,\u201d not just any small thing but \u201cthe gilded china baby\u201d at grandfather\u2019s house. For this, the boy is sent into the yard, shivering as he waits for his grandfather\u2019s \u201clashes to mark me, while [grandfather] quakes \/\/ like a man waiting for grief to pass.\u201d The older man\u2019s grief at having lost his daughter, Charles\u2019s mother, doesn\u2019t extend to compassion for Charles and his sister.<\/p>\n

Woolfitt adeptly draws the children\u2019s hard life with their grandfather, so that when Charles declares, \u201cWe are not safe, sister,\u201d in \u201cThe House of Bones,\u201d I believe him. Charles grows to despise the old man.<\/p>\n

The poems show us Charles\u2019s lifelong allies, his sister and an older cousin, Marthe (also fictionalized)\u2014beautiful and devoted to her faith. In her presence, Charles\u2019s faith \u201crose like a tongue of flame,\u201d but he \u201chad nothing to feed it.\u201d \u201cSummer in Giverny,\u201d a prose poem, defines an important moment in the boy\u2019s development. This is the second time we see Charles\u2019s wonder of God and adoration of Christ.<\/p>\n

Yet his conversion is drawn out. After grueling trials at a Jesuit boarding school, Charles is sent on to military training and soldiering. On his own time, Charles becomes a \u201cGold Eater\u201d who takes and takes\u2014keeping a prostitute, eating and drinking to excess, and gambling.<\/p>\n

Three years later, after he\u2019s published a travelogue and \u201crooster-struts\u201d the streets of Paris, Charles feels trapped by the excesses of his life. So that in \u201cThe Pangs of Wanting,\u201d he longs to have faith. This poem marks the beginning of Charles\u2019s conversion. At communion, Charles declares, \u201cI almost vomit; I almost sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Woolfitt\u2019s poems are marked by a physicality of diction, the blunt words juddering next to the softer expressions. The poems also connect strong metaphors to intense moments in Charles\u2019s life.\u00a0 He makes a trek to Jerusalem \u201cAt the Ruins of Pilate\u2019s Palace,\u201d and seeing where Pilate \u201cgave Christ to the throngs,\u201d Charles presses his hand down \u201cand, groove[s] \/ my skin with the grains of the paving stones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in France, living as a monk, he studies the breviary and learns to love the natural world; yet he cannot love himself, acutely declaring \u201cI am foul matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poems also unveil the many iterations of Charles, as he searches for an authentic identity: Charles the profligate, the soldier, the injured child, the peasant. We also encounter Charles the escapee, the refugee, and the wanderer, before he finally becomes the devoted priest.<\/p>\n

In a startling late moment, Charles cleanses himself with sand (\u201cDesert Bath at Sunset\u201d) and resolves not to despise what God has given him: \u201cYour bruise-red sun \/ embers the tamarind tree.\u201d He considers Teresa of Avila\u2019s metaphors for the soul and finds them wanting. In his desert ministry, he finds the earth is \u201ca malicious father.\u201d<\/p>\n

Late in life, Charles becomes despondent: \u201cThe ground is iron that I cannot sow,\u201d while the Tuareg\u2019s language continues to evade him. He can still admire God\u2019s world, however, in \u201cPied Crow,\u201d the crow\u2019s \u201cglossy black wings\u201d and \u201csnowy vestments,\u201d even in \u201cthe goodness of this hand \/ rubbing my weary neck.\u201d He declares, \u201cAll things made for our use, our conversion, \/ our wonderment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Woolfitt\u2019s collection evokes our holy connection to the astonishing and sometimes terrifying forces around us and beyond us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From Image<\/em>.\u00a0The Image<\/i> archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.<\/p>\n

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Charles of the Desert By Rebecca A. Spears One early June, traveling to a wedding in San Diego, I\u2019d taken the long way from Dallas by train. I wanted to see the Southwestern deserts. Two days later Amtrak\u2019sSunset Limited broke … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paraclete-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}