Ironic Advent 2017 Meditation #3: The Feast of Christina (by Veronica Toth)

Ironic Advent 2107 Meditation #3: 

The Feast of Christina

*A Guest Meditation by Veronica Toth

Non-Apologetic Introductory Remarks: 

Dear Ironic Advent Friends, it takes a special kind of person to venture into the alternate universe known as Ben Camino's Ironic Advent (and sometimes Christmas) Meditations. The kind of person raised by wolves. And yet, and yet. For several years now, some of the very best meditations have come (originally from heaven no doubt but more locally) from readers who become guest writers. Ben Camino not only gets tired and sick, but sometimes he gets downright sick and tired of the sound of his own voice and the constructions of his own sentences (however witty they be). 

Last year featured some especially rich guest writing, including one of the most read pieces every to appear on the Benblog. Today, we welcome Veronica Toth and her reflection on her "personal saint" and one of Ben Camino's absolute favorite poets, Christina Rossetti. Although NOT raised by wolves (she says, however, that perhaps Malinda was), Veronica still has quite a pedigree as a writer. Her poetry has been published in Windhover and Rock and Sling, and she is a distinguished graduate of the distinguished English Department of Taylor University (which must, therefore, be distinguished too). She is presently a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Follow Veronica's blog, where she is co-posting this piece, at Tasting Twice.

I love this piece, as I love the love it reflects for the person about whom it is written. It is fitting that Christina Rossetti, who wrote her own book titled Feasts and Fasts should now, finally, have her own Feast Day. I hereby confer on Veronica the power to proclaim one. At least in the alternate universe known as Ben Camino's Ironic Advent Meditations. 

I know you will love it too. Stay tuned at the end for some music (the lyrics to which tiny Veronica loved to hate). 

Take it away, Veronica. 
..............................

Today is the 147th birthday of my personal saint, though she might not like me saying that (the saint part I mean). Too . . . papist she would say. She’s the kind of person who refused marriage proposals just because the guy was Catholic (she was a high-church Anglican). 

She might also be opposed to my mentioning her age – who knows, maybe Christina Rossetti is as sensitive about growing old as the rest of us – in which case, I’m sorry, Christina, but let’s face it, you’re no spring chicken. If, indeed, you are that sensitive, I guess I won’t tell you what Virginia Woolf had to say about you either.

When I was little, I had a volume of Christmas stories and poems that my mom kept on the top shelf of our built-in bookcase. I’d remember it every December and take it down and brush off the dust to read my favorites. Here’s the thing: I also took it down to read my least favorites. Because, in this collection of actual stories composed by real authors, the editors thought it would be cute to intersperse terrible writing from 8-year-olds who liked atrocious rhymes and trite phrasing. (What? No, no, I’ve never been elitist…) 

So, when I came upon the Christina Rossetti poem they included, I fully believed her to be some overly-pious, pigtailed girl from Newark who happened to wield meter and rhyme better than I could, and so I was mostly disdainful (but also secretly jealous that she had made the big-time). Every year this sappy last stanza would make tiny me almost lose my tiny mind with irritation:

"What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart."

You could say I was not yet a Christina Rossetti fan.

I met Christina for the second time in a Victorian Literature class taught by a smart and good human, the very same man who, in my final paper, told me that my ambitious thesis was both the paper’s greatest strength and greatest downfall. You should probably not listen to people who tell you this. They may be trying to mess with your mind. They may be idly exercising their rapier-sharp wit on your unsuspecting, overly-ambitious literary criticism. They may be trying to sell you a fortune cookie. But this professor happened to be, as I said before, smart and good and, most of all, right about the thesis, so I stuck with him. (Mostly. I did draw the line at Kipling. Can you blame me?)

Anyway(s), I liked “Goblin Market” well enough. If you haven’t read it, “Goblin Market” is a surprisingly sensual parable, “for children,” about not giving into temptation. But I especially loved her short autobiographical poems. Loved them. Like, check-out-all-the-Christina-Rossetti-biographies-the-library-has, loved. 

I guess you could say Christina snuck up on me when I was vulnerable, because the semester that I took Victorian Lit was not my best. I was fond of spending it in my room crying about what was wrong with me, or driving to Wal-Mart while crying about what was wrong with me, and sometimes I liked to mix things up by walking around campus while crying about what exactly was wrong with me.

Christina’s writing is, as one of her brothers puts it, “replete with the spirit of self-postponement.” In 21^st century vernacular, she says no a lot. No to potential lovers, no to her own fiery temper, no to normal human desires. 

In many ways, Christina also looks a lot like Victorian women are supposed to look: gaunt, pale, repressed. But don’t be fooled. She nestles down in these barren places, carved by her own hand, and distills them into verse and legend. She writes with power, with clarity and feeling, finding ways to make her compulsion to fast – her greatest personal weakness – into her greatest artistic strength. 

I, too, am a faster and not a feaster, uncomfortable with excess, compelled to renounce. To hear a voice from the numbered lines of an anthology that seemed to be echoing all the things I thought wrong with me was an exceptional discovery. Christina seemed to be my literary counterpart, except of course far better with meter and rhyme and definitely not, after all, from Newark. I felt known by this woman, even over the years and over an ocean.

Now, in graduate school, I’ve spent this semester in another Victorian literature class. We read novels, not poetry, and we look at everything with a postcolonial squint, so Christina Rossetti is always only in my peripheral vision. Luckily, I’ve found new hobbies that mostly don’t involve crying or wondering what is wrong with me. But I remember that semester when she kept me company when no one else knew how to. 

I remember that her words were the reason I decided, on my visit to a new campus for a shiny new degree, to try out the words “I study Victorian literature. I am a Victorianist.” They’ve stuck, though her time in the literary-criticism-sun has not. Her “aesthetic of renunciation” is passé.

And yet – and yet.

I like to imagine what Christina Rossetti does when I, on occasion, ask her to pray for me. Every week I affirm that I believe in the communion of saints, so I figure it’s worth a shot. If she puts her prayers for me in rhyme and meter, all the better. I know I’m getting her mixed up with her brother Dante Gabriel’s poems, because in my mind, she’s a blessed damozel leaning over the rails of heaven, watching with bated breath for the college students who crack open their fuchsia Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume E). 

I suppose she is up there today, perhaps still renouncing cake, along with the marriage proposals of Catholics and agnostics. But I hope that instead she is feasting on fullness, renouncing renunciation itself, learning the courage to say yes. That is what I ask her to pray for me.

You know what I think you should sing today? In between Mariah Carey and Pentatonix, of course? The poem Christina called simply “A Christmas Carol,” better known today as “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Do it for Christina. It’s her poem (the one I used to love to hate in my childhood Christmas book), now set to the music of Gustav Holst. 

If I’d slowed down to read the first few stanzas, all those years ago, I might have read between the lines. I might have heard the sadness of what she sang. I might have heard her battle with self, her tumultuous interiority, her hard-earned joy.

I hear it now.

Joe, Ben Camino’s friend and editor, just so happens to have recorded a version of the song and you can hear it if you click on this link yes this one right here.

Don’t say no. 



 











[This image of Saint Christina is actually from her brother's painting Ecce Ancilla Domini (also known as The Annunciation), featuring Christina as a rather angsty teenage Virgin Mary, apparently not THAT interested in the angel's announcement. Do yourself a favor and book a flight immediately to London to see the original painting in the Tate Gallery. Don't say no.]