In Fall 2023, I joined several American writers on a “Truth and Sacrifice” pilgrimage to England. Our journey’s title was not about us, but the British Catholic recusants, martyrs, converts, and writers who paid a price for their faith. Having crammed a summer’s worth of Thomas More, Edmund Campion, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and J.R.R. Tolkien, we spent a week in a whirlwind of walking tours, visits and lectures on the Tyburn tree, Newman’s all-night confession, Hopkins’ dark brightness, Tolkien’s inspirations from the Oxford Blackfriars chapel, and gallery tours at the V&A and the National Gallery. The trip was glorious and convicting, and yet…

And yet, at the end of our trip, what could we take home from it all? Exactly what does it mean today to be a Defender of the Faith, like More? Or to be hunted down, like Campion? How could we possibly imitate their sacrifices, we pilgrims who had done more feasting than fasting?

Pilgrimages, like retreats, promise to stir the unfaithful and fortify the faithful. How could we sustain our “Truth and Sacrifice” high? Our shared photos helped. So did a Newman prayerbook and rosary from Littlemore. But I still thought I needed something—a thing—that might stir my courage to bring truth back to my suburban home and parish.

Before leaving London, I bought Eamon Duffy’s history of the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, to keep the “recusant’s spirit” alive in me. Back home, however, my bid to keep my “Truth and Sacrifice” high quickly moved from a £17 paperback to a £1,500 painting. There it was, online at a Cotswold auction house: Pierre-Antoine Labouchère’s oil on wood panel, “Erasmus Reading His Poems at the House of Thomas More.” Here was the souvenir I needed: England’s most famous martyr on my wall, in living color.

I viewed it virtually via the online catalog titled, “British & European Paintings, Old Master & Modern Works on Paper, Pictures from Beeleigh Abbey.” This More hardly resembled the man brought to life by our spiritual guide, an Oxford Dominican, as he recited More’s “Psalm on Detachment” in his drafty Tower of London cell: “Give me thy grace, good Lord: To set the world at nought…” Labouchère revealed a different More and family, pre-Oath of Supremacy. Here was a relaxed Sir Thomas, with cherished daughter Margaret Roper, tenderly leaning on her father’s shoulder while he gives full attention to his Dutch friend and houseguest, the irascible monk, Desiderius Erasmus.

Unlike Hans Holbein’s masterpiece, Labouchère’s painting shows no photorealist stubble, distant stare, or sumptuous velvet, but a youthful and debonair More. On the wall above hangs a shadowy portrait of his liege, friend, and employer, King Henry VIII, looming over his chancellor. More’s stolid, weighty pose, juxtaposed with his red-stockinged ankle and velvet-buckled shoe, foot slightly turned up, reveals the pleasure he takes in his friend’s companionship and further endeared me to this painting.

Where had this French painting been since 1855? Auction junkies will tell you that hunting a work’s provenance can be as rewarding as the gavel striking your winning bid. Its recent home in Essex, Beeleigh Abbey, has its own storied history. It was originally established as a monastery in 1180.

After the Reformation, it fell into private hands and eventually into disrepair. In 1943, it was acquired and restored by famed bookseller William Foyle; his grandson and recent owner Christopher Foyle was featured in Country Life magazine, with the headline: “Beeleigh Abbey: An incredible medieval house that’s barely altered since Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the monasteries.”

How fitting. This nineteenth-century tableau of St. Thomas More had for decades hung in one of the only monasteries to survive a sixteenth-century iconoclastic movement hellbent on wiping out the practice of Catholicism and all art related to it!

Erasmus and More frequently exchanged letters of praise and affection, along with reports on their scholarship and literary hijinks. Once asked to pen a “picture of More at full length,” Erasmus responded in a now-famous letter that heaped the highest praise on More. “He seems to be born and made for friendship,” he wrote, “of which he is the sincerest and most persistent devotee.” Labouchère’s painting is a portrait of friendship in the calm before the storm of the English Reformation.

So, did I get the painting? Not exactly. The potential shipping costs and reservations about the painting’s condition led me to pass. But when I checked the day after the auction for the sold price, the painting was unsold. Oh dear. Perhaps I might secure a post-auction bargain. That same day I was having lunch with a friend who had once been a serious art collector. I showed her the painting and told her all about the Foyles. Maybe, I mused, I should put in a post-sale offer. “I’ll buy it!” she said immediately. And so she did.

Back to my pilgrimage. At my journey’s outset, I knew only one of the fifteen fellow travelers. Upon landing in Detroit, my phone buzzed with a notification that the flight to London was delayed. I panicked that I would miss the bus north to Stonyhurst College, the beginning of the pilgrimage. Then came a text from the only other pilgrim on that flight: “I’m at the Chinese joint across from the gate reading a book about Thomas More.” I like this person already, I thought. Good thing—we spent the next 30 hours together, grazing all day at airport lounges, before belatedly joining our fellow pilgrims at Oxford. To start the trip with a new friend was a nice silver lining to an otherwise maddening delay.

At week’s end, we celebrated new and old friendships at a grand London pub. Our spirits soared. In that same letter referenced above, Erasmus wrote of his dearest More, “He talks with his friends about a future life in such a way as to make you feel that he believes what he says, and does not speak without the best hope.” That was what we pilgrims shared as we went around the table that magical London night—“the best hope.” Is that what we would be bringing back?

Pilgrimages, like art collecting and traveling, can be ruined by an acquisitive spirit. We can be so determined to “get something out of it”—to make a million spiritual goals, or jam something from the gift shop into our suitcase—that we miss the graces of the thing. The painting brought me to my senses. It was time to jettison the need to own or to “cram” everything into my head or my baggage or prayer life. It was time to read “Psalm on Detachment.” I didn’t need the painting, after all, and now I have visiting privileges. It’s not about having a piece of art on my wall. It’s about fidelity and friendship: More’s to his family, his friends Erasmus and fellow martyr John Fisher, his God, and, yes, even to his king. And mine to my fellow pilgrims and our guides. Mine to my dear friend, a Protestant, who bought it to delight me and have friends around her table to talk about the friendship of two sixteenth-century Christians. Now there are souvenirs worth treasuring.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Catholic Herald.

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“And death shall have no dominion.”— Dylan Thomas

Ben Sasse has a death sentence. And he wants you to know you do, too. His was handed down last December by his oncologist, who discovered his body was full of tumors; he shared the grim news via X, stating he had 90 days to live. So far, he has cheated the odds, thanks to a grueling drug regimen that includes the pancreatic cancer “miracle drug” daraxonrasib. He’s using the extra time to repeatedly remind you that, like him, your days are numbered.

Since flying past his projected death date, Sasse has appeared periodically in interviews and on podcasts (including his own, “Not Dead Yet”), offering fresh bon mots on a panoply of subjects: technology (“We’ve decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time”); regrets (“I wish we’d had more babies”), optimism about cancer breakthroughs (“We are very likely at a place where we end cancer deaths within 30 years”); and lingering dreams of coaching Nebraska football, like his dad.

He bounces around wearing various hats—Yale Ph.D. historian, educator, statesman, family man, and cheery, humble, armchair theologian—often repeating St. Paul’s phrase, “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” He is clinging, in these lagniappe days, to his faith.

MAID and the Frictionless Exit

If his face has at times appeared on fire—literally—from medication that prevents skin growth—so has his determination to stay true to “live well.” His witness through pain, disfigurement, nausea, and sorrow stands in stark contrast to the “frictionless” option—MAID—“medical assistance in dying.”

With Canada expanding access to MAID and advocates in the United States and the United Kingdom pushing not only to legalize the practice (13 states currently allow it), but to normalize it, Sasse is the poster child for why MAID is a terrible idea. Had he planned his own exit, the grit, humility, self-deprecating humor, and wisdom he has shared since December would have been lost to us—the very balm the world needs to accept the terrifying, yet often beautiful, process of dying and death.

He’s genuinely puzzled by the attention, insisting that he has nothing really profound to say, except to remind people that they are going to die. In the medieval world, those reminders of death—“memento mori”—were everywhere—not just the skulls and skeletons in religious art and imagery—but the funeral processions, deaths at home, and the burial plots next to the town church. Images of death were inescapable. What happened?

Lydia Dugdale's Ars Moriendi for the Modern Age

That’s exactly what Columbia University physician and medical ethicist Lydia Dugdale spent years trying to find out. I first encountered Dugdale years ago on a panel about death and dying—she had studied the subject after being repeatedly asked to resuscitate a 92-year-old man with terminal cancer, and after consistently encountering patients and their families unable to accept mortality. Had physicians always encountered this resistance?

Her quest led to the discovery that this denial was fairly modern. She then found the ars moriendi—“the art of dying”—compiled by a fifteenth-century Dominican friar in response to the bubonic plague. The manual contained meditations to dispel despair and fear, as well as woodcuts depicting demons tempting and angels consoling the dying and their loved ones. Art, it turns out, proved especially useful in those highly illiterate medieval times.

Dugdale became convinced we needed an updated ars moriendi, so she wrote one: The Lost Art of Dying. “If the whole project sounds morbid to you,” she tells her readers, “rest assured that it’s not. The art of dying well starts with the art of living well.” At the heart of it all, she writes, we need a “sense of finitude, and the embrace of community.” This, too, is Ben Sasse’s clarion call; face mortality, and form “little platoons” not just of family, but of local community.

When I saw Dugdale on another panel about death and dying in mid-April, I asked her if she had spoken with Sasse, and she said no, but nearly two dozen people had asked her the same question. No wonder: he is a walking, talking advertisement for her modern ars moriendi. Since then, we’ve corresponded on why she thinks Sasse’s interviews have gone viral.

She wrote to me: “Especially in the West today, we’ve created the illusion of wellness and youth and ease. But no matter how much we alter ourselves, the reality is that 100 percent of us will die, and nearly all of us will experience breakdown of our bodies before we die. But we have not trained ourselves to sit with discomfort, decay, and death. We have habituated to running from it, to mitigating it. But this is a distinctly modern move.”

The Isenheim Altarpiece and the Grammar of Suffering

Dugdale frames a portion of her book around Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, France; I recently spent part of a day there viewing the stunning multipaneled work of art. It was created as an empathic gesture for patients suffering from St. Anthony’s Fire—a horrific condition caused by eating rye grain infected with ergot fungus. One of the most famous images from the altarpiece is a man covered in lesions and sores; I couldn’t help thinking of Sasse’s ravaged face from his drug treatment (which has since improved).

I posed two questions to Dugdale to help connect Sasse—and the image of his bleeding face—to the altarpiece, prompted by her piece, “Your Prescription: Look at Art.” In it she asks the reader, “Do we let art transform us? Do we allow art to remind us of our finitude and comfort us in our brokenness?”

In light of that, I asked, “Sasse is a living artwork in one sense—in that he is reminding us of our finitude. Can you connect this piece with the images of Sasse in Ross Douthat’s New York Times interview?”

“For most of human history, people have anticipated and prepared for death, and one of the ways they did so was through art. The sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece was commissioned for the Order of St. Anthony, a religious group whose mission was to care for those suffering from plague and other disease.

Not only did the Antonites house and care for the sick, they also “prescribed” meditation on the altarpiece as a way of being reminded of and comforted by the co-suffering of Christ. The altarpiece shows Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection—and this reminded those on death’s door that they too would experience bodily resurrection. In this way, the art of the Isenheim Altarpiece transformed the viewer from one who despairs to one who hopes.”

And the follow-up: “How do you see Sasse’s insistence on not staying hidden as a modern-day example of ars moriendi?”

“In his illness, Ben Sasse has given an incredible gift to humanity. He has not hidden the ugliness. He has not presented a veneer of wellness. He has literally and figuratively shown up in the totality of his rawness, reminding us that our days, also, are limited. By serving as a walking reminder of our own finitude, Ben shares his wisdom with us. As the Psalmist wrote, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

Sasse’s extraordinary use of extended time is an art form and can give courage to those facing a dire diagnosis—or anyone reckoning with mortality. He and Dugdale paint the same message: Practice the ars moriendi—forgive, ask forgiveness, be thankful, and love well. Let art lift you and move you, as Dugdale says to the Isenheim viewer, “from one who despairs to one who hopes.” A final Sasse-ism on death and heaven: “We should call it a wicked thief. And yet, it’s pretty good that you pass through the vale of tears one time, and then there will be no more tears, there will be no more cancer.”

God willing, that day will come.

Betsy Fentress is a co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show “Conversations with Consequences” and a Fellow of The Catholic Association. She lives in St. Louis with her family.

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In this month of May, we invited Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, founder of the Scala Foundation, and a research fellow in theology and the arts at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University, to join us on Conversations with Consequences and discuss her new book: When Mary Calls, Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God. In it, she explores the contemporary and often miraculous influence of the Virgin Mary, through a series of seven spiritual memoirs and interviews.

Here are some highlights of our illuminating conversation. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Betsy Fentress: To what do you attribute both Protestants and Catholics praising this book?

Margarita Mooney Clayton: Well, to put it simply, Mary is alive and she’s moving in the world right now in unexpected ways, which historian Peter Brown can recognize and call an ancient healing well reaching out to a desiccated culture, or which a former Orthodox turned Protestant, Eric Metaxas, can realize that skeptics have long questioned the place of Mary in Christianity, but she has been a presence with the saints and with the faithful. Mary has been close to the people of God since not just the birth of Christ and his crucifixion, but right there in Acts of the Apostles, generating hope in times of fear for the church and really binding the apostles and the followers of Christ together into a family.

Ashley McGuire: So, I’m a Protestant who became Catholic and like so many Protestants got tripped up on some of the Mariology. I never really was against it and never really understood it. I went on a trip to Rwanda with a Protestant group and joined a dinner with a Catholic pilgrimage group led by Immaculée Ilibagiza. She started telling me about Our Lady of Kibeho, and that people were actively having visions of her. How have you highlighted some of these things mystical encounters with Mary right now?

Margarita: There have been powerful apparitions of Mary, Kibeho in Rwanda, Our Lady of Zeitoun in Egypt, not to mention Fatima and Lourdes. For Protestants, the hesitation when you talk about those apparitions is well, can’t people be fooled? Can’t there be demonic influences or false apparitions? And if you look at the history of the Catholic Church, it’s always been recognized that a personal revelation from Mary doesn’t make it authentic or authoritative. But we don’t want to fall into the error of rejecting the possibility that Mary does have a personal message for individual people and for our culture.

Two of the people I spoke to [for my book] were Protestant and had a miraculous healing through Mary. And this was as much a shock to them as it is to listeners, because they weren’t actually looking for it.

But they recognized that there was a maternal embrace reaching them, in one case, spiritual healing, and the other a physical healing. And they didn’t know what to make of it. And they came to me as a Catholic to ask, how is it that I, a faithful Protestant, can’t tell you anything about Mary? And why doesn’t my church ever mention this?

This is part of what the book is trying to do, to show that these miraculous healings which these young Protestants experienced through Mary bound them even tighter to the Church and to Scripture, but in ways which they as Protestants had never seen because of a skepticism about Mary or frankly, a rationalism that says let’s not talk about the miraculous because we can be deceived by it.

The miraculous, as in Mary’s life, has to give way to the ordinary, but we don’t want to neglect Mary’s extraordinary power.

Betsy: You were born and raised Catholic, but admit that Mary hadn't played a large role in your life until you went to Cuba on a clandestine mission with your mother. Talk about going there and seeing the destruction of the Church and what was going on beneath the rubble.

Margarita: As a very young girl, I went to Catholic school and Marian devotion was part of our catechism, it was part of our Sunday liturgy, so I always had Mary. But when I went away to college at Yale, you start to think that in order to be a Christian in the academy, you have to be able to know how to defend every doctrine and have big intellectual ideas and that sort of childlike trust in Mary is for people who don’t have the chance to study or something like that.

I began to appeal to Mary for protection rather instinctively while carrying a suitcase into Cuba—where my mother is from—that was stuffed full of rosaries and DVDs for catechism, Bibles, all kinds of prohibited things.

I first went in ‘94, but this trip I write about in the book, when I almost got caught, was in 2005. And I had seen in those 10 years and seven trips later a society built on atheist communism. In my mother’s school of the Sacred Heart in Havana, they ripped out the Sacred Heart of Mary and Jesus and put in its place two angry men wearing camouflage—Fidel Castro and Che Guevara—and replaced “To Jesus through Mary” with “Fatherland or Death.”

What shocked me, having seen that desecration in my mother’s village, was that not only had they saved images of the people who they were told to forget, like my mother, but someone had saved two stained glass windows of Jesus and Mary in his backyard, hoping and praying that someday those windows would be restored into the church and the church would open again. And the heroic courage and hope to do that really struck me.

But there I was, the Yale and Princeton educated person thinking, I’m going to go into Cuba and bring in money and restart the economy, or something like that. Whereas my mother, one of 14 children, mother of four children, spiritual mother to countless people, what she had was compassion. And she went door to door, listening to people’s stories, embracing people, hearing stories of despair. And I saw in that motherly love that she had an image of Our Lady who can hold all of the pain in the world and say, “Well, I’m here. And if you ever want to come to church again, I’ll walk with you there.”

So that desire for Christ and reverence for his Mother were knit together in people’s hearts. And I realized, who am I to say the faith is not essential? The people in Cuba didn’t want Christ without the Church or Christ without the Mother. And it just dawned on me, well, if you look at the Scriptures, there is no Christ, there is no Incarnation, there is no hypostatic union of a divine nature with a human nature without Mary’s human nature.

Ashley: Beauty and art and how some people encountered Mary through them is a theme in your book. We try to take our kids to a lot of museums. And the other day at an exhibit I said to them, “What do your eyes tell you? How could there be this much beautiful art depicting Mary if she was not an essential part of not just Christianity, but of culture?” What is the role of beauty and art in an encounter with Mary?

Margarita: One of the personal stories that I share is that in part, I had drifted into a very intellectual faith and I was a single, unmarried woman until the age of 48 when I thought during those years, Well, if God hasn’t blessed me with a husband and children like I desired, maybe this whole motherhood thing— it’s not for me. But I ended up a wife, and a stepmother, at the age of 48.

I married a wonderful man, David Clayton, who studied physics at Oxford and then became an iconographer. I was starving inside for the things that I loved as a little girl—music, art—but I’d never been taught how to integrate the experience of art and music with my intellect and my faith. I was raised Catholic, so of course it was there. But when I met my husband who had studied iconography and we began to talk about the liturgy and worship—we talked about the basic fact that Catholic worship is fully embodied and goes through all the senses.

But what I realized from iconographers like David and Aidan Hart is that—that’s why we depict Jesus—because he was a person. He was a human being, he had a face. In the Church we need to depict Christ and his Mother so we remember that they’re persons who are still alive in a transfigured state, which is why traditional iconography doesn’t look like a portrait. It’s not that they don’t know how to draw, but they’re drawing a person in their likeness, but with the mystery of that transfigured person because they’re now in another realm.

I’ve taken students to an Eastern Rite Catholic Church, St. Mary’s Byzantine Catholic Church in Hillsborough, New Jersey. And some of them have never been in a church with images. But several of them have such a direct encounter with Christ and Mary in the images that they are absolutely taken into this kind of window to heaven. And I saw for people who have no exposure to art in church, the direct encounter with Christ and his Mother that can come through these powerful images.

I have prayed the Rosary with Anglicans in England. The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham has reformed Catholic and Orthodox going. There’s actually a revival in certain places of Europe with Mary as an image of the patroness of the nation in places where these pilgrimages and superstitions and all of that were actually squashed out by legal decree. We have people going back to some of these older European sites of Marian devotion and recovering the place of Mary.

She is the visible enculturation of the faith across culture and across nations. And this is why she’s depicted in Chinese sacred art, Japanese sacred art, because we are the body of Christ, we are the family of Christ, and we have different faces. So Mary helps, again, embody this incredible truth that we have unity in diversity.

Ashley: One of the most powerful stories in your book is about Tammy Peterson, who many people have come to know through her husband Jordan. She had an incredible conversion. Can you talk about that, and what was it like to interview her?

Margarita: I became friends with Tammy because of her newfound interest in Catholicism, which came really through Mary. I first met her just a couple of months after she received confirmation in the Catholic Church. And what really struck me when I interviewed her was she has this maternal, warm presence.

But what got me about her story is that she really resisted. She had a miraculous healing in the hospital from cancer. She learned to pray the rosary. She was reading Scripture, but she didn’t want to join a church initially because she struggled with the whole concept of authority. But at some point, she realized, as she describes to me, that in order to keep alive that exuberant faith and hope that she encountered in her miraculous cure from cancer, she needed to commit to daily practices.

And then she realized that to keep up those daily practices, she needed community. And then she realized that community has hierarchy, and it has authority, and that she couldn’t just stay on the margins of church and community authority because it didn’t suit her personality. So she gave herself the task of meeting a Catholic priest who guided her section by section through the Catechism. And she found, actually, that every single line of the Creed was something that she could understand and affirm. And so she says that Mary led her to Christ, and that that desire to know Christ led her to the Church and led her to the Catholic Church with its creeds and with its sacraments.

Betsy: Tammy Peterson has featured you on her podcast. In one episode, as a little girl, she recalls thinking, "Where is Mary?"

Margarita: Yes, and that she needed Mary because she needed Mary’s maternal presence to understand that as a woman and a mother that her sacrifices were really meaningful to God. That blew her mind. She practiced New Age, kind of Buddhist-inspired meditation, but there’s frankly no dignity of motherhood or the body. It’s about escaping the body, and so Mary’s maternal embodiment resonated so much more with the bodily sacrifices that mothers make of giving birth, but also of giving up sleep and of nursing a sick child, giving up a career, giving up the capacity to earn money. And here’s Christianity telling her that all of those sacrifices are a sign of love and that is exactly what God has called her to do.

And she never felt worthy for having made those sacrifices. And she says it’s because she had imbibed New Age spirituality with feminist politics that [said] if you don’t have a public influence, you’re nothing. She really struggled with that. And her mission is now to reach women who maybe got pulled in through one or another understanding that to be a real woman is to have kind of public power, and to realize that that’s great if you that’s what God’s calling you to, but the power of motherhood and the private, simple acts of everyday love and obedience, Scriptures tell us, is more powerful than the public power.

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After the Roe v. Wade decision, my mother spent much of the mid-1970s giving pro-life talks in high schools across Iowa. One of her favorite “gotcha” hooks was a Jeopardy!-style question, the imaginary category being Famous People Who Weren’t Aborted. The “answer”—still circulating decades later online—went like this:

“The father of the family had syphilis and the mother tuberculosis. They already had four children. The first child is blind, the second died, the third is deaf and dumb, and the fourth has tuberculosis. Now the mother is pregnant with her fifth child. What would you do?”

The setup relied on someone answering “get an abortion,” which teed up my mother’s response: “You would have killed Beethoven.” As a teen, I found this story, naturally, very compelling.

But the entire story is false, except for the fact that Beethoven’s mother later contracted tuberculosis, long after his birth. The anecdote was meant to shock and, unfortunately, to shame the poor student who answered. How dare you kill one of history’s most famous classical composers!

It was 1970s-style clickbait (and there were others), meant to drive home the point: you just never know who you might abort.

Baylor professor Francis Beckwith explains the potential harm such stories can do to the pro-life cause. To illustrate, he alters the scenario:

“Imagine, however, all the facts about Beethoven’s parents, siblings, and family life were also true of Adolf Hitler’s. Could not a pro-choice advocate then end the dialogue this way: ‘As the attending physician, what would you have done?’ ‘I would have terminated the pregnancy.’ ‘Congratulations, you just saved the lives of six million Jews.’”

He continues:

“For those who defend the sanctity of life, the wrongness of intentionally killing an innocent human person does not depend on whether or not he or she will become a world-class composer or a moral monster. Fetus-Ludwig and Fetus-Adolf are equally human and equally innocent, just as an anonymous homeless person, an asylum-seeking immigrant, and Jeff Bezos each possess the same inviolable right to life.”

I thought of the “Beethoven fallacy” recently when a clip from The Oprah Winfrey Podcast came across my social media feed. Though recorded last February, it remains evergreen. Joined by her co-author, psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry, she discusses their book What Happened to You? Several readers touched by the book join the discussion via video call, including a fragile caller named Annie, who asks, “How do I forgive my parents for not showing up the way I needed them to show up for me?”

Oprah confesses—her voice quivering like Annie’s as she becomes increasingly emotional—that the question triggered a painful memory involving her complicated mother, Vernita Lee. Invited to speak at her mother’s church, Oprah panics as other adult children recount tender moments—lovingly made school lunches, galoshes sweetly placed by the front door on a rainy day—and realizes she has none of her own to share.

“And I couldn’t think of one thing,” Oprah says. “When it came time for me to speak, I thought, what do I actually have to be grateful for? She didn’t abort me. She did the best she knew.”

She dodged being aborted, but not severe childhood trauma. For years, Oprah openly detailed and grieved the ups and downs of their relationship—from her mother’s absence in early childhood (she was raised by her whip-yielding grandmother until she was six), to sexual abuse under her mother’s unwatchful eye, resulting in the stillborn birth of her only child, Canaan, when she was fourteen, to learning in 2010 that she had a secret half-sister , Patricia, whom her mother had placed for adoption. And that’s the short version. There are countless tearful clips, confessions, and reunions of her family’s web of relationships from every stage of Oprah’s storied career. It’s a lot.

Shortly after her mother died in 2018, Oprah described a final deathbed conversation in a People magazine interview. She had one final chance to say what she wanted to say—and she did:

“Thank you. As a young girl, having a baby in Mississippi—no education, no training, no skills—at seventeen, you get pregnant. Lots of people would have told you to give that baby away. Lots of people would have told you to abort that baby. And you didn’t do that. I know that was hard, and I want you to know that no matter what, I know you always did the best you knew how to do. And look how it turned out. … You should go. You should go in peace.”

Her sister, who had been placed for adoption, was also present. Oprah recalled her sister’s parting words:

“My sister said, ‘Please forgive yourself, because I’ve forgiven you for giving me away. It was really sacred and beautiful.’”

“I feel like it was as sacred and blessed as a passing can be,” Oprah added.

There it is again—she didn’t abort me.

What transpired in Oprah’s life—and the forgiveness and grace that closed the story—is far wilder—and more compelling—than the fabricated Beethoven one I heard at thirteen. And far more pro-life.

* * *

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs recounts his desire to find his birth mother. Jobs initially hit a dead end when the doctor listed on his birth certificate claimed the records had been destroyed in a fire. Isaacson writes:

“That was not true. In fact, right after Jobs called, the doctor wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote on it, ‘To be delivered to Steve Jobs on my death.’ When he died a short time later, his widow sent the letter to Jobs.”

The letter revealed that Jobs’ mother had been an unmarried graduate student from Wisconsin named Joanne Schieble. Working with a detective, Jobs later found her—now Joanne Simpson—in Los Angeles. Isaacson explains that Jobs wanted to contact her to “reassure Joanne that what she had done was all right.” Jobs later said:

“I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her, because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three, and she went through a lot to have me.”

Further parallels continue. Jobs’ story, like Oprah’s, includes an out-of-wedlock child. At 23, his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan became pregnant, and Jobs made it clear he neither wanted to marry her nor objected to her having an abortion. She kept the child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and his less-than-exemplary fatherhood, as well as their fraught relationship, was later chronicled in a memoir published after Jobs’ death. Like Oprah, she declares her public forgiveness.

Jobs’ gratitude drove his quest to find his mother and thank her for giving him life. Known for lacking empathy, he nonetheless must have held a quiet conviction about the gift of life. For both cultural icons, the conclusion they came to is unavoidable: their value was there from the beginning. Why else would they explicitly make a point of thanking their mothers for not aborting them?

Beckwith again:

“The dignity of each member of the human family is not affected by what we may think he or she is capable of contributing, whether to the country’s gross domestic product or to the world’s cultural riches.”

He’s right. Arguments rooted in potential future achievement ultimately undercut the very claim they are meant to defend—a child’s worthiness to be born. Jobs’ technological revolution and Winfrey’s media empire loom large, but that is not why their rags-to-riches birth stories matter.

Their most compelling legacy is their public witness of gratitude—for life itself and for the mothers who carried them to term—despite, and in tension with, their equally public support for abortion. Four babies—Oprah Winfrey, Baby Canaan Winfrey, Steve Jobs, and Lisa Brennan-Jobs—all conceived in hard circumstances, nevertheless came into the world. Four very different real—unlike Beethoven’s—stories, with vastly different outcomes and life spans. Their tales testify to a truth deeper than genius or success: that life is a gift before it ever becomes an accomplishment.

If that truth—the inherent dignity their mothers grasped despite poverty, fear, and isolation—could be broadcast through the devices Jobs invented and the media outlets Oprah created, we might hear fewer arguments about who deserves to be born, and more stories that simply end with: and look how it turned out.

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb… so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” (Ecclesiastes 11:5)

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Steve Jobs photo credit: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0; Oprah Winfrey photo credit: Greg Hernandez from California, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Some people are planners. You know the type: their eating, sleeping, and exercising schedules are fixed; their vacations booked and paid for months in advance; their Christmas gifts purchased and wrapped well before the 25^th. They seem to have it all “perfectly” under control.

But other people…need help, hoping for that “one neat trick,” as the digital world offers. There’s no shortage of booklets, meditations, and apps to guide us through the darkness of December into the light of Christmas. In this “bleak midwinter”—as the carol goes—my own Advent plan comes from the Church’s newest doctor, St. John Henry Newman. His counsel feels like a “prescription” for both body and soul—a steadying antidote to the exhaustion and distraction that creep in during the season.

[The doctor’s output was prodigious—his collected letters alone comprise 32 volumes—and the National Institute for Newman Studies has digitized over “1,000,000 images featuring letters, published works, library records, photographs, maps, manuscripts, music scores.” Though Newman’s lofty work—Apologia Pro Via Sua, The Idea of a University, and the Grammar of Ascent— is referenced from scholars to saints, his devotional writing is every bit as important as his scholarly ones.]

I’m focusing on just two pages out of the 723 of Newman’s Prayers, Verses and Devotions (published by Ignatius Press)—a brief essay called “A Short Road to Perfection.”

Newman’s tone throughout is fatherly and encouraging. He begins by assuring the reader—his “patient”— that what follows is truly achievable: “I think this is an instruction which may be of great practical use to persons like ourselves.”

Writing on September 7, 1856, he continues:

“It is the saying of holy men that, if we wish to be perfect, we have nothing more to do than to perform the ordinary duties of the day well. A short road to perfection—short, not because easy, but because pertinent and intelligible. There are no short ways to perfection, but there are sure ones.”

The word perfection is a two-sided coin; there’s the positive side (“nobody’s perfect, “she’s a perfectionist”) as well as the negative one(“he did a perfect job,” “the wedding was perfection.”) Christian perfection stands in stark contrast to secular perfection; it’s not a quest for the impossible, but a call for holiness. For Newman, I ima

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gine the word looks back to Christ’s call to “be perfect like your heavenly Father is perfect” and Newman stands in a long tradition of spiritual writers who have taken up this command. Two classics in my library are St. Teresa of Avila’s Way of Perfection and Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence.

Like the saints before him, this good doctor puts his reader at ease. “He then, is perfect who does the work of the day perfectly, and we need not go beyond this to seek our perfection.” In other words, don’t overcomplicate it.

Then comes his succinct prescription:

“If you ask me what you are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first—Do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly, eat and drink to God’s glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time, and you are already perfect.”

The pope just recently told reporters that the book he turns to almost every day is Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God. Newman’s daily list, too, is a way of practicing God’s presence. I’ve made a copy of these simple steps for my bedside and desk as a daily guide for Advent; there’s a lot to do in that small paragraph, but with God’s grace, I’ll manage. We often make our spiritual goals so daunting that we lose heart. There might not be “one neat trick” to stay on the road to perfection, but I trust Newman’s assurance that “ordinary” faithfulness—done well—is a sure path toward a joy-filled Christmas.

Betsy Fentress

J. S. Bach: Sheep May Safely Graze - BWV 208by Kevin MacLeod

It’s late August, high vacation season, but it also marks a lull in the wedding season before an uptick in October, the most popular month for getting hitched. Yet despite the laments here and here claiming marriage is in the tank, I’ve been to two weddings this summer—and there’s another on the September calendar. Both were a reminder that weddings are not just for the couple, they’re for all of us. They’re a gift, even if bittersweet for some: a chance to take stock of our own lives and, in the most incarnate of ways, stand witness to the hope and joy of the betrothed. They’re an affirmation that rings out above the cacophony of dismal daily news.

Weddings return us to the sacred calling and surrender that is marriage. As Joseph Pieper says in his marvelous work on his theory of festivity: ‘“Underlying all festive joy kindled by a specific circumstance there has to be an absolutely universal affirmation extending to the world as a whole.” That festive joy is at the heart of weddings and an affirmation that life—and marriage—are worth risking the unknown.

At the first wedding I attended in June, sitting in a Catholic church pew and watching a parade of peacocks preening down the aisle—bridesmaids glowing in matching dresses and updos, groomsmen marching confidently in tuxes, the beaming bride carefully timing her stride to Bach—I thought of how marvelous weddings are. They can seem eerily the same—flashy party bus idling outside, corny signature cocktails and monogrammed M&Ms, the perennial playlist of “Celebrate” and “We Are Family” that make you feel like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” when he hears “I’ve Got You Babe” again.

Also the same: the nervous flower girl who runs a bit too fast; the silked and sequined mothers fighting tears and high heels; fathers strolling down the aisle, having that “just show up and beam” look-- oblivious to the months of planning (until the reception bill arrives); the quietly weeping women, daubing their eyes as the bride makes her grand entrance.

But of course, they are never the same. They’re a Heraclitean river: two unique people leaping into an unrepeatable day. You can’t recreate the weather, the guest list, the wardrobe malfunctions. It’s one and done-- always the promise of newness, uncharted territory, unbounded hope. You can’t step into the same moment twice; life’s current moves swiftly.

What stays fresh, if we allow it: dressing up for the day, hearing Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, fathers delivering heartfelt toasts, and the perfume of glorious flowers. But there’s more to cherish: the recitation of vows, the chance to take inventory of your marriage, to fan glowing embers after decades together, the flood of memories from weddings past, and the hope of ones still to come. For the unattached, or semi-attached, it’s a chance to dream of their future day, as they scan the crowd for prospects. It can be a matchmaker’s dream.

The second wedding—a hot July Southern nuptial in an event barn—had me fooled. I thought the minister was the real deal, only to learn later he was a friend of the groom who had purchased his bona fides online. Yet he clearly knew his Scripture, and I liked that he asked the couple to conclude their vows with, “This is my solemn vow.” (Catholics don’t say that; I wonder why?) His understanding of the Church as Christ’s bride, and the sacrificial nature of marriage—explained to the guests in detail—was better articulated than many ordained clergy I’ve heard.

* * * *

Weddings require courage; they can reopen old wounds. Sometimes they remind us of who is absent from the feast—or who isn’t welcome. Years ago, a friend of mine was asked by her soon-to-be daughter-in-law to read a passage from the Song of Songs at the wedding. She wasn’t thrilled, partly because she couldn’t get the hang of saying “Hark!”—the more she practiced it, the funnier it got, each attempt in a different tone. But her comedy act thinly masked the festering wound of infidelity, the salty words poured on her loss, but for her son and his bride, they offered a foretaste of eros and marital bliss. “Hark! my lover—here he comes, springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills.” Her own “Mr. Spring-across-the-Mountain” had long since made off with another gazelle. Weddings are a painful reminder of the squandering of the solemn vow once so joyfully recited. Still, the broken and crushed show up—a witness to the day, and a reminder of the fragility of the undertaking at hand.

Poet Richard Wilbur gave his son and “new daughter” a lasting gift on their wedding day, words crafted just for the occasion. In “Wedding Toast,” he invokes St. John’s story of the wedding feast at Cana, explaining that the miracle of water into wine

To give up autonomy—dinner schedule, travel plans, heck, the bathroom counter space—for the hard, daily grind of becoming one, as Wilbur says, can sometimes make no earthly sense. Why would you want to meld yourself into “one”? Sounds painful because it can be! Wilbur explains: what could be sweeter, and more abundant, than the love that overflows in a marriage “without depletion”? Like the loaves and fishes, in marriage, love multiplies exponentially in ways you could never imagine. Children, grandchildren in-laws—they’re all an ineffable abundance.

Just two days after the barn wedding in Mississippi, my husband and I stood in a funeral home parlor watching the slideshow of his godfather Jim’s life. Bride and groom pictures appeared on repeat—photographs of Jim and his bride Helen on their wedding day, as well as his parents’ and children’s weddings. While the dressings looked the same in tuxes and tulle, the photos captured the most important and unrepeatable festivity of their lives—the cake cutting, the posing before the altar, the ducking under a cascade of rice happened to them, on that day.

I dismissed the social scientists' warnings about the dearth of weddings because it’s been a summer for weddings, but the truth is, I worry about young people forgoing marriage. You can’t have a slideshow of what didn’t happen. Weddings are the virgin soil in which you plant the seeds for the photos to come, so that someday, you’ll have something to look back on. Life’s current, let me remind you again, dear reader, moves swiftly. Weddings, baptisms, wakes and funerals matter not just as rituals, but because marking life’s events helps us stay present. Weddings are a kairos moment—a still point in the turning world, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s image.

“Where love rejoices, there is festivity,” Pieper writes. His whole book, investigating festivity, reminds us of the importance of marking life’s grand events. “To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.” The bride and groom, and all who witness their vows before God, give us a chance to reaffirm the goodness of the world. Wilbur’s parting wish for his daughter and her spouse? The poem ends with “May you not lack for water/And may that water smack of Cana’s wine.”

We keep showing up, because we believe that the newly minted couple can find the world’s fullness. Here’s a toast to the promise of marriage, and wishing all couples a life full of Canaan miracles, wine-smacked, and otherwise.

P.S. Yesterday this was posted, the same day that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got engaged. Whatever issues there have been with them, and their romance—let’s hope that young people become emboldened to make the commitment of marriage as a sacramental, life-long commitment!

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A recent New York Times piece about Paula, a 52-year-old non-terminally-ill Canadian woman who qualified for Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program (MAiD) and orchestrated her death (with assistance) reminded me of two stories—purely anecdotal, mind you—about two elderly people who, in the hands of the wrong family members, doctors, and “compassionate” friends might have left this good Earth before their time.

Several years ago, a close friend’s father, Mr. Murphy, in his late 80s, was having a hard time making it through another Midwest winter. For almost 40 years, usually starting in October, he and Mrs. Murphy escaped the cold for balmy Naples, Florida. That year, they had come home for the holidays and, his health failing, had remained that frigid January in their senior living apartment. He was hospitalized and inching toward death; with no acute diagnosis he was, in a phrase, “failing to thrive.”

My friend, whose gift for hospitality knows no bounds, had an empty guest room and, in concert with her husband, welcomed her dad into their home for roughly six weeks. Nothing extraordinary, just homemade meals, soft music, and lots of TLC. Mr. Murphy’s wife of 60 years, a character in her own right who had five children in five years and was fond of impromptu handstands, walking her lithe body upside-down across the living room floor, was also in her 80s and could not provide that kind of nurturing care, so she remained at their apartment while he recuperated.

Once back on his feet, they were reunited. He resumed his daily breakfast klatch in the communal dining room of the senior center and proceeded to live for another six years. With the proper care, “failure to thrive” became a “will to live.”

My second story came unexpectedly at the funeral of my mother’s estate lawyer, Mr. Moloney, a devout Catholic whose office was practically a shrine to the Blessed Mother. To illustrate the family’s spirited household, his son’s eulogy set forth the story of Mr. Moloney’s hospitalized retired secretary. According to the medical “experts,” she would die within a few days. Since she had no next of kin, the staff recommended she be taken into the Moloney’s home. It might be nice, they suggested, for her to not die alone. And so she entered the cacophony of a home with seven rambunctious children—six sons and one daughter.

“There was so much love and laughter there,” Mr. Moloney’s son recounted, voice cracking as he paused to gather himself, “she lived for (his voice raising) “SEVEN. MORE. YEARS.” But for that phone call to Mr. Moloney, his secretary would have succumbed to the same failure to thrive that had threated Mr. Murphy’s life.

If you have been following events in the United Kingdom, and New York and Canada on assisted-suicide legislation, it really comes down to just this: anecdotes, highly personal stories of pain and suffering, loss of function, faculties, resources, and most especially, hope. Stories and statistics are shaping our laws. If there is no common ground on what constitutes “life,” dignity, and its meaning and purpose, if there can be no redemptive value to suffering or a lengthy illness, if it is only meaningless and cruel and we should be able to fashion our own exit, then we are headed down a frictionless ski slope with no way to control the gathering speed of death-by-choice.

Statistics are nothing more than a stack of curated mini-stories, often intended to sway or frighten. From the story about Paula, we learn that in 2023, “15,343 Canadians — one out of 20 who died — received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of assisted dying in the world, when measured in total figures.” Like AI, the statistics can provide a barrage of facts, piled on top of each other, but they cannot share the deep stirrings of the human heart, or why breakfast in bed and soft jazz can bring people back to life.

“We tell stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion, and that is why I am telling you about the Moloneys and the Murphys. Their stories are important and an antidote to the bleak, colorless stats and misplaced compassion surrounding “death with dignity.” And those assisted-suicide stories, those “I did it my way” stories? Are we telling them in order to live, or in order to die?

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