Undaunted Joy #93 Guest Katy Carl

The Joy of Flexibility : On not always having to perform the same role

(Tapestry from Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, Los Angeles)

Every once in a while, I like to feature a guest post. It is good to look at joy from a different view than just mine.

This week Undaunted Joy features writer, Katy Carl. I met Katy at Catholic Imagination Conference in Chicago a few years back. She continually inspires me with her faith and her talent. Last year she released Fragile Objects, a BRILLIANT short story collection which was on my list of favorite books of the year. I have had the honor of being edited by her once for Dapple Things, for which she is the editor in chief. This essay on learning new aspects of our identity has stuck with me.

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Are we who we are because of ourselves, or because of who is around us and how we respond to them—their realities, their needs, their expectations? The simplistic answer to both is, evidently, “yes.” But just how this plays out in practice is far from simple, and we continue to ask what the mystery of self-in-community means.

At best, the human person is a gift. We are gifts from God to ourselves, from ourselves to God,from ourselves to each other—and, in many ways, also from each other to ourselves. It’s the recognition, the affirmation, of our goodness, gifts, and strengths that brings us awake to these things in ourselves. A talent I perceive as truly extraordinary—my colleague’s pure facility with poetic meter and structure, my teacher’s keen insight into the meaning behind a student’s confused speech, my husband’s apparent ability to keep open tabs in a hundred conversations at once without losing the current state or subtle shades of any one thread—feels normal to the person who possesses it.

This is part of why, as St. Augustine noticed, we’re so thirsty for others’ praise. Why we want to hear them say, well done, well done. It isn’t mere egotism. In a real way it lets us know who we are. And wanting to know who you are is not narcissistic. Narcissism is holding a void at the center of yourself and expecting others to fill it with their substance. Identity is guarding your worth near, but not at, the center of yourself, which ideally is fixed around something good that is bigger than you. Identity is sharing your goodness with others, allowing them to appreciate what you have to give, as you mutually share and appreciate in their gifts.

This is part of why I so love the Catholic teaching on the communion of Saints. This is, exactly, a community stretched out over space and time in which we share with each other what we have and give to each other all we can afford, which is all God affords to us. It’s a matrix for mutuality, a grouping that can unify all diversity: that makes room for misfit souls as for well-adjusted ones, for all colors and ages and shapes and sizes, for the bold and the gentle, the smooth and the gritty, the wild and the tidy, the orderly and the scattered, the tough and the tender.

Dwelling in peace among our brothers and sisters, we gradually lose the shallow idea that polarities of character need to be opposites or necessarily even absolutes. The same person may be different things on different days and remain one, unified, core self, consistent over time. We come to drop the fixed and crucifying categorizations, the needless limits, we’ve placed on ourselves and each other. We learn to watch each other practice self-transcendence. We get a fresh chance at transcending ourselves.

A recent parish festival at my children’s school bore this out for me. Pitching in to the needed hands-on work gave me the opportunity to shed my superficial assumptions about what I am capable of, what I am good for, what can be expected of me. Because if you’ve made it this far with me, you can tell I am someone who dwells quite a bit inside my own head. But when I am “called to the things of this world”—a state poet Richard Wilbur urges us to accept—this forces me to take my abstract thoughts and pin them down to the process of what helps others, what helps my community, right now.

So I taped down signs and brought over supplies and set up tables. I hung up t-shirts and spread out tablecloths and filled food orders. I forgot for a while about the watchful, evaluative mind that tries to see the whole picture and slipped into the relief of flexibly doing one’s own small part, however small that may be. Watching others handle with ease those tasks that are truly beyond my capacity—setting up lights and wiring; running account books; managing the grilling of delicious food for thousands of people—gave me the chance to marvel at how “different gifts, but the same Spirit” (1 Cor 12:4) need not be used as it sometimes has been: a shrugging write off of those who seem unlike us. On the contrary, it’s an invitation to wonder. It’s a motive for gratitude. And it’s a chance to affirm those without whom our lives and our roles, large or small or somewhere in between, could never quite gain the same richness or meaning.

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Katy Carl is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine, a project of the Ars Vivendi Initiative of the Collegium Institute at Penn, and author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood, 2021), Fragile Objects, short stories (Wiseblood, 2023), and Praying the Great O Antiphons, meditations (Catholic Truth Society, 2021). Her essays have appeared in many outlets including Church Life Journal, Ekstasis, Fare Forward, Genealogies of Modernity, Mere Orthodoxy, Psaltery & Lyre, Public Discourse, and Sostenuto, among others. She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, and she lives in the Houston area with her husband and their family. Find her on Substack at Depth Perception: katycarl.substack.com

If you would like to write a guest post, send me your submission. Perhaps we can find a home for it! With 1200 subscribers, I’d love to use this Substack to share other joyful voices.

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