Immersed in shallow waters of Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, of Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, of Cormac McCarthy and Ron Hansen, of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O’Connor I’ve found myself knee deep in Catholic American culture, ideology and aesthetics.

Have Your Voice Heard: Become an Odyssey Creator

For these folk, religion, specifically Catholicism, has been a major influence in elements of their artistic creation. They’ve either practiced their faith or had chosen not to – falling somewhere in between the false dichotomy of believer or non-believer. Religion has influenced they way they see and engage and create in the world.

I find myself asking: what has motivated the way in which I “see” and “read” and “inhabit” the world as a creative and critical being?

If you think about it, us Catholics are weird. We believe in the supernatural and natural order – that ephemeral stuff, that formless Holy Spirit floating above, beyond, and around the body bearing gifts upon our very humble and prayerful supplication. We like physical “stuff” too. As Angela Alaimo O’Donnell refers to in her essay titled “Seeing Catholicly,” Catholics “invest particular material entities with supernatural significance, to see in ordinary objects a bodying forth of Divine, which pervades all.” We see life beyond death. We believe that suffering is productive. We subjugate our will, our selfish desires, to that of a deity beyond our comprehension, all out of love. Bread and wine à flesh and blood.

O’Donnell says that, “Anyone who has been brought up in a Catholic household, undergone the process of formation in preparation to receive sacraments, or been educated in Catholic schools has been initiated into the unique configuration of reality afforded by Christian theology as communicated through scripture and church tradition.” Writers like O’Donnell suggest that Catholics see the world differently, and as a result, they write the world differently, they perform and live differently. So this “unique configuration of reality” can consciously influence our ways of seeing and being in the world. But even better, it can and does unconsciously influence how we see and read and inhabit the world.

How does this configuration take shape, take flesh?

One place to start is by looking at who and what we read. Paul Giles, in his gross compendium titled American Catholic Arts and Fictions would suggest that these religiously motivated ways of seeing the world have cultural manifestations in literature. This issue becomes particularly interesting when asking the question: What is the American novel? Who are the great American novelists? Giles is cautious yet curt in suggesting that the tradition of idolizing Poe, Dickinson, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, follows a “Protestant romanticism” founded upon the “premises of the Emersonian tradition” (25). Giles does not strive to subvert or deface these American authors; rather, he stages the question: why have Catholic writers, artists, in American received “less than their critical due”?

O'Donnell frames this tension by quoting sociologist Andrew Greeley who discusses differences between a Catholic "analogical" imagination and a Protestant "dialectical" imagination:

"The Catholic writers stress the nearness of God to His creation, the Protestant writers the distance between God and His creation; the Protestants emphasize the risk of superstition and idolatry, the Catholics the dangers of a creation in which God is only marginally present. Or to put the matter in different terms, Catholics tend to accentuate the immanence of God, Protestants the transcendence of God."

These distinctions are sweeping generalizations incapable of describing every religiously influenced text. But this generalization provides a launching point to think about ways in which religion influences literature and the way in which religion influences ways of seeing and being in the world. Yes, religion percolates beyond the church doors. And yes, different religions nuance different ways of being and seeing. The difference in the way we see the world, the way we write the world, inherently influences the ways in which we inhabit the world.

What comes in affects what comes out. But sometimes I don’t think we really know what were looking at unless unless we clarify what we’re looking for or looking at – for example, finding some mystical and sacred imagery in Madonna. You don’t have to look too far… sing us out, sister...

“Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, I hear you call my name, and it feels like home…"