I am realizing that it has been far too long since I added anything to this blog. Well, here is some more shameless self promotion. I have so much to talk about rather than bragging. But I guess that is not a bad place to start. Here is another review of a play that I wrote that was published in Curator, my favorite magazine. World Youth Alliance did several nights of the show (which played off Broadway) and in which I went up and was able to talk about the organization. I will be writing more about that in future posts. Anyway, in the meantime, here is my article. I hope you all enjoy it and I promise to be more in touch soon.
The Curator | Lost in the Cosmos
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Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Shamless self-promotion
At the risk of tooting my own horn, a article of mine was just published in The Curator, which is a wonderful arts magazine here in the city. Follow the link below to see what I said.
http://www.curatormagazine.com/caseydowning/irenas-vow/
Enjoy
http://www.curatormagazine.com/caseydowning/irenas-vow/
Enjoy
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Art and Dignity
This past weekend, World Youth Alliance partnered with an organization with whom we are good friends, International Arts Movement, so that we could have a table at their event. The folks at IAM and I have discussed over various cups of coffee and breakfast rolls the importance of uplifting art, and of the need for artists to engage culture through their work. There was also an element of social justice discussed at the event, and the work of World Youth Alliance, promoting human rights through human dignity, and how vital art is to this process, and how vital this process is to building good cultures.
I met many artists, writers, actors, dancers, musicians at the weekend. It was a little difficult to wade back into that world again, to disentangle my mind from politics, economics and policy, and to engage with the world of the aesthetic, of expression and movement and grace. But it did not take me too very long.
I also had the chance to listen to one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, the poet laureate of the United States. His poetry is an absolute revelation. It is stark, sharp, and hilariously funny. But then there are moments, when his understanding of the world, his subtlety and humor are like a sword, cutting deep, to a place we did not know was vulnerable. Such, I guess is the place of good art. It brings us bare and raw to places we did not know were there. It makes us stand before something larger, truer. Here is one of his poems that has stuck with me since he read it.
Sweet Talk
You are not the Mona Lisa
with that relentless look.
Or Venus borne over the froth
of waves on a pink half shell.
Or an odalisque by Delacroix,
veils lapping at your nakedness.
You are more like the sunlight
of Edward Hopper,
especially when it slants
against the eastern side
of a white clapboard house
in the early hours of the morning,
with no figure standing
at a window in a violet bathrobe,
just the sunlight,
the columns of the front porch,
and the long shadows
they throw down
upon the dark green lawn, baby.
with that relentless look.
Or Venus borne over the froth
of waves on a pink half shell.
Or an odalisque by Delacroix,
veils lapping at your nakedness.
You are more like the sunlight
of Edward Hopper,
especially when it slants
against the eastern side
of a white clapboard house
in the early hours of the morning,
with no figure standing
at a window in a violet bathrobe,
just the sunlight,
the columns of the front porch,
and the long shadows
they throw down
upon the dark green lawn, baby.
A little bit of humor, mixed with beauty and awe. I suppose love is a lot like that.
I am still so very young.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Life Deserved
Sitting in a cafe up at Yale University. It is raining outside, and there is a puddle just outside my window. As the drops hit the water, they create the rippling of small circles that spread and fade. Some of the drops hit and create dome shaped bubbles, that float across the water like little ships, or the heads of tiny swimmers sticking above the surface.
I am stuck on the idea of choice, specifically the choice of who will take part in our societies, and who will not. "Falling before the emptiness of choice," Esolen said in the article I just referenced. I am reading about bioethics, and thinking of the presentation that Shannon Joseph, our UN Advocacy Specialist gave at Columbia last week. She explained to the students the gravity of choosing which embryos should be allowed to live and which to die based on genetic screening. Those who are deemed less than ideal, those with imperfections, those who have potential to be strange or outsiders - many if not most of them are terminated before they are born. Ninety percent of children who are deemed to have down syndrome are terminated before birth. They are not terminated because the pregnancy is too dangerous for the mother, nor because of rape or incest. They are terminated because of a condition that they have already, and based on the projection of the person they would become - not because they are not human beings, but precisely because they are human beings. Human beings who are somehow deficient, unworthy. This is important to remember.
When I was in high school, I knew a young man with severe autism named Chris Matthews. He acted as manager for our football team. Chris liked to give the players high fives, he liked to carry the ball to us or the water bottle. "Who's that?" he would ask when a new player would show up, and he would greet them and smile once we explained who it was. Chris would not always look us in the eyes, he sometimes didn't understand that our words were for him. The team adored him. We gave him a jersey, and his family would come to the games, and stand under the lights and hold up signs with his number. He was friends with all the cheerleaders.
What was it about Chris that was so dear to us? He was not the most handsome nor the most athletic. He had no concept of the game. He was dear to us by his virtue, and his friendliness, and maybe for his fragility too. He was dear to us because he was Chris, and that was enough. It was wonderful, in fact.
Chris passed away several years ago, and my mother called me in Argentina while I lived there to tell me. My whole community mourned him. His parents still place memorials in the paper. Their daughter went on to Harvard medical school and carried the Matthews lineage to prestigious jobs and hospitals abroad. But Chris was their light.
And now we mold our society such that men like Chris might never be among us. That we can all be tall and blonde and muscular. Seventy percent of sperm and egg donations come from Scandinavia, and the ivy league students here in the US are heavily courted for their sperm and eggs. We want our future generations to be doctors and lawyers, each and all of them. We want them tall and healthy, without flaw or weakness.
Of course there are counter arguments here. What about the parents? The difficulty of life that the child will have? Having a disabled child is difficult, it is work. It strains finances and marriages. It is, no doubt, the source of countless tears, tears of genuine love too - I do not question that.
We must acknowledge the costs of having a child, especially a child who will have a difficult life. Such a thing must not be dismissed lightly, and I understand that sorrow and pain are serious consequences of bringing a person of disability into this world.
But I also wonder - when life is finished with us, which of us are not scarred? Who among us is not vulnerable and weak?
There is an organization called L'Arche, in which disabled people from all backgrounds come together to form community. They hold each other up in weakness, they depend on one another, and they form their lives according to the needs of each other. Jean Vanier, who started L'Arche notes that "it is the most vulnerable and disadvantaged who are the very cornerstone of humanity. They are the ones who teach us compassion and change our hearts." We understand that there is pain in these lives, that there is weakness. Such is the way of all life - what if we embrace it anyway?
What if we were a society that took the poet seriously when he said, "Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds?" What if we understood love in the context of something larger, in some work of bettering ourselves, of growing through pain, shedding our selfishness and vice as a fighter in training sheds layers of fat? What if we let love shape us, and life's troubles teach us, instead of assuming life owed us something, some obscure happiness that we have seen on sitcoms and cereal boxes? What if we were a people who looked in our children's eyes to see their hearts, and not simply our own reflections? And we remembered that we live more truly when we love something more than ourselves, when our dreams shape themselves into something larger, and we face difficulties with one another, allowing untold joy to come from unexpected places.
What a remarkable thing that would be.
I am stuck on the idea of choice, specifically the choice of who will take part in our societies, and who will not. "Falling before the emptiness of choice," Esolen said in the article I just referenced. I am reading about bioethics, and thinking of the presentation that Shannon Joseph, our UN Advocacy Specialist gave at Columbia last week. She explained to the students the gravity of choosing which embryos should be allowed to live and which to die based on genetic screening. Those who are deemed less than ideal, those with imperfections, those who have potential to be strange or outsiders - many if not most of them are terminated before they are born. Ninety percent of children who are deemed to have down syndrome are terminated before birth. They are not terminated because the pregnancy is too dangerous for the mother, nor because of rape or incest. They are terminated because of a condition that they have already, and based on the projection of the person they would become - not because they are not human beings, but precisely because they are human beings. Human beings who are somehow deficient, unworthy. This is important to remember.
When I was in high school, I knew a young man with severe autism named Chris Matthews. He acted as manager for our football team. Chris liked to give the players high fives, he liked to carry the ball to us or the water bottle. "Who's that?" he would ask when a new player would show up, and he would greet them and smile once we explained who it was. Chris would not always look us in the eyes, he sometimes didn't understand that our words were for him. The team adored him. We gave him a jersey, and his family would come to the games, and stand under the lights and hold up signs with his number. He was friends with all the cheerleaders.
What was it about Chris that was so dear to us? He was not the most handsome nor the most athletic. He had no concept of the game. He was dear to us by his virtue, and his friendliness, and maybe for his fragility too. He was dear to us because he was Chris, and that was enough. It was wonderful, in fact.
Chris passed away several years ago, and my mother called me in Argentina while I lived there to tell me. My whole community mourned him. His parents still place memorials in the paper. Their daughter went on to Harvard medical school and carried the Matthews lineage to prestigious jobs and hospitals abroad. But Chris was their light.
And now we mold our society such that men like Chris might never be among us. That we can all be tall and blonde and muscular. Seventy percent of sperm and egg donations come from Scandinavia, and the ivy league students here in the US are heavily courted for their sperm and eggs. We want our future generations to be doctors and lawyers, each and all of them. We want them tall and healthy, without flaw or weakness.
Of course there are counter arguments here. What about the parents? The difficulty of life that the child will have? Having a disabled child is difficult, it is work. It strains finances and marriages. It is, no doubt, the source of countless tears, tears of genuine love too - I do not question that.
We must acknowledge the costs of having a child, especially a child who will have a difficult life. Such a thing must not be dismissed lightly, and I understand that sorrow and pain are serious consequences of bringing a person of disability into this world.
But I also wonder - when life is finished with us, which of us are not scarred? Who among us is not vulnerable and weak?
There is an organization called L'Arche, in which disabled people from all backgrounds come together to form community. They hold each other up in weakness, they depend on one another, and they form their lives according to the needs of each other. Jean Vanier, who started L'Arche notes that "it is the most vulnerable and disadvantaged who are the very cornerstone of humanity. They are the ones who teach us compassion and change our hearts." We understand that there is pain in these lives, that there is weakness. Such is the way of all life - what if we embrace it anyway?
What if we were a society that took the poet seriously when he said, "Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds?" What if we understood love in the context of something larger, in some work of bettering ourselves, of growing through pain, shedding our selfishness and vice as a fighter in training sheds layers of fat? What if we let love shape us, and life's troubles teach us, instead of assuming life owed us something, some obscure happiness that we have seen on sitcoms and cereal boxes? What if we were a people who looked in our children's eyes to see their hearts, and not simply our own reflections? And we remembered that we live more truly when we love something more than ourselves, when our dreams shape themselves into something larger, and we face difficulties with one another, allowing untold joy to come from unexpected places.
What a remarkable thing that would be.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
A child of grace
Several days ago Mary, the President of World Youth Alliance, told me about a conversation she was having with two doctor friends of hers. They were both obstetricians, meaning they worked mostly with women who were pregnant. Over the course of their conversation, they began to speak about children with disabilities, specifically down-syndrome and autism. Both doctors agreed that when they had patients whose babies were shown to have either of these conditions in the womb, they advised the mothers to terminate the pregnancy and try again to have a normal child.
They went on to say that they had seen the difficult lives that such children lead, their unhappiness or the strain they put on the family. It is better not to have them, both men concluded.
When Mary told me of the conversation, it reminded me of an article I had recently read by a personal hero of mine, a writer and scholar named Tony Esolen (who will be giving the keynote address at WYA's DDD Conference in September). The article from Touchstone Magazine was so powerful and compassionate, about his son who is autistic. To think that many such children are not given the chance to live at all because of our so called compassion.
Mary told me both doctors were good men, well educated, well meaning. But what does it say about we normal people that we think those not like us would rather die than be different? That we have nothing to learn, and they nothing to give. I hope this article will make us think twice about such things. Here it is:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-01-018-v
-Casey
They went on to say that they had seen the difficult lives that such children lead, their unhappiness or the strain they put on the family. It is better not to have them, both men concluded.
When Mary told me of the conversation, it reminded me of an article I had recently read by a personal hero of mine, a writer and scholar named Tony Esolen (who will be giving the keynote address at WYA's DDD Conference in September). The article from Touchstone Magazine was so powerful and compassionate, about his son who is autistic. To think that many such children are not given the chance to live at all because of our so called compassion.
Mary told me both doctors were good men, well educated, well meaning. But what does it say about we normal people that we think those not like us would rather die than be different? That we have nothing to learn, and they nothing to give. I hope this article will make us think twice about such things. Here it is:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-01-018-v
-Casey
Friday, February 13, 2009
New York Winter
So now I am blogging for World Youth Alliance. It has been almost a year since I was blogging regularly, so you will all have to forgive me for being rusty.
The sun is just starting to show itself in New York again, and the windy coming down the avenues doesn't bite the way it did several weeks ago. It seems that all of the interns and staff here are lifted by the nicer weather, given an extra kick. I think we are also all encouraged by the way things have been going at the UN. Last week and this we were at the Commission on Social Development at the United Nations. The interns were remarkable, canvassing the place, handing out language proposals and speaking with Delegations. When you have an idea as important as human dignity, it is not hard to find people to get excited about it.
I also went up to Fairfield University earlier this week for a presentation by two Broadway actors about their play, Irena's Vow. They talked about the decisions of Irena, a young Polish woman, who hid 12 Jews in her house from the Nazis during the war. Her heroism lay in doing what she could, though it might mean death. She did not bring down the Nazis, or win the war, but she saved lives and changed the turn of history, in her own small way.
I think of the multitudes out there, and the current situation in Gaza, in Darfur, in Congo and Sri Lanka- and it breaks my heart. I would like to fly over there and embrace those who are suffering, to shelter them from the bombs with these with this nimble frame, these frail arms and ribs. To brace myself against the falling ceiling and sky.
But I will think of Irena, who did what she could and no more, and her actions changed the world. I will serve this city, where I have been placed at the moment, where there is need enough. Dignity stretches from every corner of this earth, and is a message that needs to be heard by all. Each person's value is complete, inherent, sacred. We start by protecting one and at time, we put our hands to the simple tasks that are given us.
Time to get to work.
The sun is just starting to show itself in New York again, and the windy coming down the avenues doesn't bite the way it did several weeks ago. It seems that all of the interns and staff here are lifted by the nicer weather, given an extra kick. I think we are also all encouraged by the way things have been going at the UN. Last week and this we were at the Commission on Social Development at the United Nations. The interns were remarkable, canvassing the place, handing out language proposals and speaking with Delegations. When you have an idea as important as human dignity, it is not hard to find people to get excited about it.
I also went up to Fairfield University earlier this week for a presentation by two Broadway actors about their play, Irena's Vow. They talked about the decisions of Irena, a young Polish woman, who hid 12 Jews in her house from the Nazis during the war. Her heroism lay in doing what she could, though it might mean death. She did not bring down the Nazis, or win the war, but she saved lives and changed the turn of history, in her own small way.
I think of the multitudes out there, and the current situation in Gaza, in Darfur, in Congo and Sri Lanka- and it breaks my heart. I would like to fly over there and embrace those who are suffering, to shelter them from the bombs with these with this nimble frame, these frail arms and ribs. To brace myself against the falling ceiling and sky.
But I will think of Irena, who did what she could and no more, and her actions changed the world. I will serve this city, where I have been placed at the moment, where there is need enough. Dignity stretches from every corner of this earth, and is a message that needs to be heard by all. Each person's value is complete, inherent, sacred. We start by protecting one and at time, we put our hands to the simple tasks that are given us.
Time to get to work.
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