Autumn for Lent

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Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff, pictured with flower

Brad Fruhauff

Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff observes a paradox of the Lenten season–at least for his family.

This Lent I determined to finally take on the one sacrifice I knew would be nearest and dearest to my heart: caffeine. I’ve been drinking coffee since middle school (when doubtful adults cautioned my friends and I it would stunt our growth; I’m currently nearly 6′ tall and my friend was 6′ 4″ already in middle school, so eat that, doubtful adults).

As a college teacher, my brain is my livelihood, so I went into this period of fasting with a strategy that involved slowly weaning myself off the java juice while also trying to get more sleep. You can perhaps see the apparent contradiction, here, as the reason we usually drink so much caffeine is that we don’t have time to get everything done and still sleep.

But then, one of the “mysteries” of Lent is that you discover how little you need the things you’re sure you need. It turns out I can manage my time better if I try, can sacrifice some things as low priorities, and can function pretty well on peanuts, bananas, and oranges for energy (the Zoo Diet?).

The etymology of Lent is simply the Old English for spring, or, more properly, long day. There’s nothing particularly spiritual about that, but the whole symbolism of Easter has to do with the return of light, the emergence of life from (seeming) death, newness and rebirth in general, so it’s not a far leap to see the insight learned from fasting as participating in this general trend of freshness, emergence, even freedom.

Still, life’s been throwing us curve balls. Or something like IEDs disguised as curve balls but that blow up in your face. This feels more like an autumnal season, a season of losses, than spring. Without unloading too much on you, I’ll just say that the excitement over my new job has been alloyed with the realization that our student loan debts are about to become so burdensome that we may not be able to move to a much larger or nicer place than we’re at. Our cars have been acting up and needing expensive repairs. We’ve been needing new glasses and contacts and other expensive health care items. Our son is growing and so costing us more in groceries every month, and now we find we owe on our taxes. On top of that, our grandmothers all seem to be falling down and feeling generally rotten. Oh, and I have the hiccups. Coming all at once like this has made March a rough month.

I know we sometimes get confused between the “promise” of America and the promise of God. The dream of prosperity is not the same as the dream of kingdom life–except that no one owes us either. The purpose of fasting during Lent is not to learn self-sufficiency but to clarify one’s priorities and to give one’s sacrifice to the one who made Himself a sacrifice. Thus part of the discipline is to hold to it even when it doesn’t seem to be “working.”

I searched for Autumn poems on Poets.org and ran across Keats’s ode “To Autumn.” There Keats imagines the autumn as the “close bosom-friend” of the sun,

Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core

I think it’s interesting that Keats doesn’t waste a breath getting to the positives of autumn. Loss and dying becomes only the preparations for the life to come–and abundant life in which it seems “warm days will never cease.”

The rest of the poem, however, turns to autumn for its own sake, and it ends by insisting that autumn “hast thy music” as well as spring, a music spare and soft as befits it:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It is easier to appreciate the beauties of a season than of a spiritual state, but much of the Bible contains the poetry of hard times or lament, a reminder that our sufferings do not remove us from the beauty of God or of grace. This Lent, for me, has become one of learning to seek this beauty through and despite emotional and moral exhaustion.

I try to fight a pastoral urge within me to always end with a moral, so let me only suggest what isn’t original or surprising but is worth repeating, that real beauty is hard to come by these days, but it’s worth looking for.

Brad Fruhauff is Poetry Editor for Relief and teaches college English in the Chicagoland area. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in catapult, Burnside Writers’ Collective, The Ankeny Briefcase, and Salt. He lives with his wife and son in Evanston, IL. He also hopes you’ll take a moment to donate $15 or $25 to the #LoveRelief campaign.

Violence and Grace

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Stephanie Smith

In my favorite novels, it seems that the characters come to the moment of illumination only after being confronted with great violence.  When Jane Eyre finds her former home and master have suffered a fire in her absence, the agony of separation inspires her to the realization that she loves Mr. Rochester.  In The Lord of the Flies, it takes the death of a comrade for Ralph to understand that the boys on the island have lost their childhood innocence.  And it is not until author Annie Dillard wrestles with the life-altering plane accident of a small girl (in Holy the Firm) that she sees God’s goodness in a crazy world.

It seems to be human nature to have thick heads that only extreme circumstances can penetrate.  In a state of comfort, we are sometimes too relaxed, too unmindful to learn what our lives actually depend on.  But if our child unexpectedly gets sick, our husband is laid off, or our friend is going through a messy divorce, suddenly our senses are awakened and sharpened in a way that lets us experience life a little clearer.

In the face of violence or tragedy, our daily concerns rearrange themselves according to an eternal reality.  When something goes suddenly wrong, the urgency of the situation mercifully clears away any petty anxieties that once occupied us.  And that is some small grace.  I remember last year driving home from a funeral of a friend I’d known from elementary school, and finding myself suddenly careless about the work I needed to catch up on and the wedding planning I had been stressing over. Instead I wondered whether or not I spent enough time with the people I loved, and then hurried home so I would make it in time for family dinner.

Shauna Niequist, in Cold Tangerines, writes, “You pray for honest, gritty, and tender stories, and then you pray to live through them.” The price of epiphany is often violence, and any prayer beginning with, “God, change me…” is a dangerous one.  Anyone who has ever prayed to know our Father better knows.  But with the violence we are ushered into grace, just as there is grace in the story of the Light of the World who had to suffer death and darkness before mankind could see.

Stephanie S. Smith graduated from Moody Bible Institute with a degree in Communications and Women’s Ministry, which she now puts to work freelancing as a book publicist and writer through her business, (In)dialogue Communications, at www.stephaniessmith.com. After living in Chicago for four years, traveling to Amsterdam for a spell, and then moving back home to Baltimore to plan a wedding, she now lives with her husband in Upstate New York where they make novice attempts at home renovation in their 1930s bungalow. She writes for www.startmarriageright.com and manages Moody Publishers’ blog, www.insidepages.net.

Those in Hell Can Come to Heaven

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Bonnie Ponce

Bonnie ponders C. S. Lewis’ question of what would happen if people sent to hell could visit heaven. C.S. Lewis’ controversial novella, The Great Divorce, offers a unique view of heaven and hell. In the opening of the story the narrator is standing in line for a bus in Gray Town. It is a dreary place that is perpetually twilight and raining. When the bus comes, it takes them to heaven, a bright and colorful place, totally opposite of Gray Town. The premise is that anyone who wants to stay in heaven can, but they have to speak to a person from their past that they knew on earth.

Three interactions between visitors from Gray Town and residents from heaven are examples Lewis’ social commentary of our culture.

The Apostate and the Spirit
After they great each other, they begin to discuss their friendship on earth and their current locations. The Apostate asks, “Do you really think that people are penalized for their honest opinions? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken.” The Spirit asserts that they followed the academic fads of the times, stating that, “we were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes… Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, un-praying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires we reached a point where we no longer believed in the Faith…The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. If that’s what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.” They continue to talk and the Spirit asks his friend to repent and believe in God, the eternal fact. The Apostate returns to Gray Town unable to repent.

The Man in Sexual Sin
There is a man, like a ghost but dark and oily stumbling through Heaven. He carries on his shoulder a red lizard that whispers in his ear. An Angel approaches him and asks him if he would like him to quiet the lizard and the ghost replies that he would. The Angel states that to silence the lizard, he will have to kill him. The lizard’s voice becomes louder as the Angel continues to offer to kill it. He says, “I know there are no real pleasure now, only dreams. But aren’t they better than nothing? And I’ll be so good. I admit I’ve sometimes gone too far in the past but I promise I won’t do it again. I’ll give you nothing but really nice dreams-all sweet and fresh and almost innocent. You might say, quite innocent…” The man agrees to let the Angel kill the lizard and out of it comes a beautiful man restored to his sexuality embodied in the form of a great stallion. He stays in heaven to live as a resident of heaven.

Sarah Smith and the Tragedian
A woman from Heaven, whose name was Sarah Smith, comes to meet her husband, whose self pity has split his soul in two. The man is now a dwarf, leading a tragedian, which is the embodiment of his self-pity. Even as his wife meets him, his is upset that she didn’t miss him since their death and separation. His wife asks for his forgiveness for all that happened when they were on earth and asks him to let go of the chain connecting him to his self-pity. Unable to let go, eventually his soul disappears and ceases to exist at all.

These three encounters lead us to ponder some interesting questions about our culture today. In the first one, the Apostate is in Hell because though he had sincere beliefs and opinions they were wrong and he was sent to Hell. Would a loving God send us to Hell just because our opinions are wrong?

In the second case, a man who struggles with sexual sin – be it homosexuality, adultery, pornography etc. be redeemed and stay in heaven?

In the third case the man’s self-pity consumes his soul so that he ceases to exist. Does self pity keep us from living?

Bonnie Ponce is the Director of Support Raising for Relief and lives in Huntsville, Texas with her husband and betta fish. She has a BA in English from Sam Houston State University. After work she enjoys relaxing with a good book or working on her novel.

In Defense of Porn

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Travis Griffith

Sometimes uncomfortable topics need thorough discussion. Take pornography, for instance.

Yeah, the topic makes people wince, but porn lurks around every corner, in both cities and online. While there is more porn available now than ever in our history, the “artform” has been an expression of human sexuality, in one form or another, since the day God blessed humans with sexual pleasure.

While porn is (secretly) enjoyed by millions, it’s seriously discussed by very few. When it is talked about, it’s usually portrayed as a scapegoat for society’s ills.

I’m not going to sit here and say that I think porn is as great as beer and Skittles, but I also don’t believe it’s a sinful indulgence that’ll send people straight to hell (you know, assuming hell was real).

So why are we discussing porn today? Because it’s making news, it’s a part of life and it’s a topic that fills many Christians, one way or another, with fiery and passionate emotion.

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There’s No Crying in Starbucks!

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Michael Dean Clark

This is the fifth in a series of thoughts on how place shapes and is shaped by the stories we tell. The first four can be found here, here, here, and here.

This is a love song about the place where I write, not the places I’m writing about.

I have a bad habit, but it’s a habit nonetheless. I write at Starbucks.

Really, most of my friends think I write there so I’ll “have” to buy some coffee. And while I admit that I may have a (borderline) issue with my love for the Seattle bean, that’s not the main reason I work in the House of the Mermaid. It may, however, be the main reason I have a job that provides a paycheck that allows for said coffee ingestion.

But I actually started writing in the Green Room because I discovered that I compose better when there are people around me and natural ambient noise (that I, of course, drown out by putting my headphones on).

But I tried the monastic-writer-thing. The computer-in-the-closet-thing (hat tip to R. Kelly for teaching us all why it’s bad to end up trapped in a closet). The typewriter-instead-of-computer-thing so I could “feel” the story as an extension of my keystrokes.  I even tried the low-rent-Hemingway-stand-and-deliver-thing, but my knee sucks too much to let me grow that manly a beard.

As a side note, I draw the line at the handwriting-in-the-Moleskine-thing. No yuppie journals for this guy (if for no other reason than my handwriting is so awful – thank you journalism years – that the cost-to-benefit analysis just won’t let me be that much of an affluent nerdy hipster).

Nope, for me, the place to write is Starbucks, with their endless supply of Pike’s Roast, horrible cover versions of songs I used to like, and meetings between wedding photographers and their clients. I have, to date, written two complete novel length manuscripts and am a few hundred pages into the first version of a third, and I would conservatively estimate that in the more than 1200 pages of text in those three projects alone, at least 1,000 were written in this, my other office.

Which brings me to yesterday when I was working on changing a scene in one of my books…it’s an important scene. I killed a kid (in the book, not in the store). It’s a child I worked on creating for more than a few years. And I killed her.

Now, I’m not an overtly emotional guy. But I was a little moved when the final words began migrating from my fingers to the screen. Maybe even a little teary-eyed (though I blame that on the eerie confluence of that scene syncing up with my friend’s cover version of Muse’s “Unintended” – thanks for being such a sweet-voiced beast J. Lynn).

 This is the first time I’ve ever wondered if writing in public, in Starbucks of all places, is a good idea. I mean, I never know when a scene like that is going to present itself and I sure don’t want to get the whole Coffeehouse Weeper rep. That’s just not the guy I want my kids to have to deny is their father. I give them plenty of other reasons for said denials.

On the other hand, what better market research is there for a writer than resting secure in the knowledge that a scene they created brought them to tears in a coffee shop full of strangers? Unless that author is Glenn Beck, it seems like that says pretty good things about the emotional resonance of the moment.  

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief, as well as an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and three children.