PSEUDO St. Catherine of Siena: "What is it | you want to change? | Your hair, your face, your body? | Why? || For God is | in love with all those things | and He might weep | when they are gone."

YOUR HAIR, YOUR FACE

What is it

you want to change?

Your hair, your face, your body?

Why?

For God is

in love with all those things

and He might weep

when they are

gone.

     Daniel Ladinsky, Love poems from God:  Twelve sacred voices from the East and West (New York:  Penguin Compass, 2002), 203.  From the prefatory "Genesis of these poems" (xiii-xiv) a strong indication that this one, though attributed to St. Catherine of Siena, is inauthentic:

Penguin Random House

Any liberties I have taken with these poems was an act, I hope, void of self-interest and done with the sole intention of trying to help emancipate our wings. Several translators have been helpful to me with this work, though most of what is in this book could be said to be an avant-garde portrait of these remarkable historic figures. I have used and mixed whichever of their colors I felt were the most genuine, the most relative to the present, and were the most capable of bringing the reader into the extraordinary experience of these great souls. For their experience of God foretells our own.

What to say to academia about these poems? Well, I think scholars have made important contributions to unveiling God, yet millions of people continue to be persecuted by frightening untruths stemming from archaic concepts of Him that took root in many of us as children. I hope there is enough benevolence—and reality—in my interpretations of these poems to alleviate some of that suffering; truth frees and makes us laugh. We need to know that God is the source of all humor and that God is Infinite Intelligence, a Beloved that does not defy our deepest sensibilities and the innate, glorious compassion of the heart. . . .

"No one could ever paint a too wonderful picture of…God." But I feel He doesn’t mind that I tried. In studying the lives of these wonderful saints, I can’t imagine any of them saying "no" if they were asked if we could freely adapt their words to a few blue-grass tunes or whiskey-soaked jazz. I think they might shout, "Go for it, baby; set the world on fire if you can, kick ass for the Beloved with some great art."

     My suspicions have been confirmed in correspondence with two specialists in St. Catherine studies dated 6-7 October 2021, Dr. F. Thomas Luongo, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History, Tulane University ("it doesn’t sound like anything Catherine would say. She is not exactly the patron saint of body-positivity!"  "I don’t think it’s something that Catherine or any other fourteenth-century author could have written"), and Dr. Karen Scott, Associate Professor of Catholic Studies and History, DePaul University ("Ladinsky's text is in no way a real translation of authentic texts by Catherine of Siena").