Selfish Solitude

The label “heretic” has such an interesting draw to it doesn't it. It holds a special charm for a variety of reasons I think: it’s generally anti-conformist, anti-populist, and anti-status-quo. That makes it unique, and unique can be quite attractive. Since everybody wants to be unique – especially in a culture of conformity – what’s not to like about heresy. Plus, it’s not all bad either. T. S Eliot spoke of it more than once and in some cases of it as a good. Anyway, all that to say that a label of something being potentially heretical makes it ... could I use the word “hot”?

So when I heard that one of the popular Inklings other than Lewis and Tolkien had it suggested of him that it would be understandable to have him burned at the stake, I was quite taken. “Cool,” I thought to myself. But then, because I was young I had a difficult time in reading Charles Williams. However, some years ago I came back to him and was most heartily surprised. And sure enough, the heresy claim isn't too far off. So of course I read him all the more. Now it’s not all that un-orthodox, but there are some interesting thoughts he brings up.

Just recently I was re-reading his second last novel, Descent into Hell, and found something interesting concerning his thoughts on Sodom and Gomorrah. Nope, it’s probably not what many others might be thinking (we here at Relief are a clever bunch). These two cities are connected for Williams with un-neighbourliness (which for Williams was a form of sterility in that it doesn't contribute to generating life) and solitude, and their direct association with hell.

Now, since I have tendencies towards introversion, I was not just a little annoyed at the strong connection with solitude and damnation. Plus, have you ever read what early psychological theory – Jung was a little kinder – said about those who were essentially introverted? It was basically pathological narcissism. However, as I continued to read Williams I was quite taken with his ideas and began to have self-to-self conversation/conversion. (Ever have a conversation with yourself and afterwards noticed that your view changed – it’s cool right? It might be difficult, but I think we actually can change our own bias.) I was persuaded that Williams had made a great point about solitude being the pathway to damnation when it is mixed with selfishness. Thomas Merton, who spoke a great deal of the importance of solitude, went to great lengths to clarify that while solitude is exceedingly important, it cannot be practiced for the sake of the self. If self is the primary concern, then this solitude is actually wicked. And the reader is lead to seeing selfish solitude as the ultimate undoing for anybody when practiced fully as William’s work depicts. I won't spoil the ending of Decent into Hell, but I think the suspense factor would have Stephen King green with envy.

Back to solitude as selfishness though. I once remember hearing a respected minister say something to a largish crowd that s/he just didn't have much time to spend chatting with friends and others when invited out because the time would be better spent with God. You know how Jesus was known to be meek? Yah, I wasn't at that moment. I didn't know how to voice it, but it felt, well, selfish. I mean I get separating yourself from the hordes from time to time – Jesus did that too, after all – but Jesus also spent lots of time with people. I think there should be a balance. Holiness that excludes itself from public life – from being human – might not be as holy as it thinks.  We were made to live in communion with each other: which means both, sharing and imparting life with each other. So, of course we need alone time – I demand it regularly – but I was gently warned by Williams cautionary tale that solitude can't be mixed with selfishness. Because that is real heresy – and it’s not cool.

Tangents on the Orbit of Planet Squirrel

Once our boys left home Bev and I were thrust into quick adjustments akin to riders just off the tilt-a whirl. Our stable orbits missed the gravity of their presence. The momentum of parenting doesn't go away once you've spun your progeny off and into the world. So we rotated and balanced the tires, refurnished repainted rooms, re-sized the recipes and learned new steps.

Even the cat made her adjustments, her periods of meditation at the window on the lawn growing longer. At some point we decided to enhance Annie's interest in the squirrels. Peanuts. First the salted ones I was eating, then raw, once the idea of hypertensive squirrels crossed our minds, except that Bev read about tripsin inhibitors and finally unsalted, roasted. It's the word on squirrels. She loves it. Begs for it when we forget.

Morning rituals now include balancing some nuts on the outside window mullions. At another point I remembered my own dad's story of the dead squirrel bagged in his freezer. It was waiting there for the next garbage day, but was discovered a prior evening by a shrieking party guest.

My dad pelts squirrels with BBs in favor the the many birds he feeds. My own eye is on the neighborhood tomcats. One of our frequenting squirrels who is partially blind and deaf re-appeared recently after what we suppose now was a restorative absence in the woods. A tomcat gashed his hindquarters. He escaped up the column at our front door leaving it impressively bloodied. We worried he'd contract an infection and die and thought that was the case after weeks of missing him. But he's back with the Spring and looks through the window for peanuts.

The momentum of our lives is driven by desires existing in and outside us, both proximate and ultimate, that conspire in an impossible dynamic, both inwardly, compelling us to deeper relationships and outwardly, propelling us toward greater freedoms. And instead of being sheared apart we join a spiraling dance, which is itself part of some larger dance, and so on. Some greater gravity drawing us near, hurtling us forward.

I can't parse whether we dance with the squirrels or they with us. I cannot see far into the space that expands for lifetimes in front of us. If my dad and I strike some kind of cosmic balance, I am unable to factor it. But with the squirrels I trust the light that fills the void will manifest new sight and new prospects. I miss my boys, even as I feel profound joy watching them learn to dance with the world. I still feel the tug of their earlier places as we circle them from time to time, by a memory that grows further away and yet somehow deeper.

Good News

Pulse's motto used to be “Bringing you good news.” You would enter in your favorite news sources and topics of interest, and it would scour the internet and put relevant information on your homepage. It would then take the top headlines from every major publication and put them under the typical headings: Breaking News, Global, Local, Politics, Entertainment, Environmental, Sports, and so on. It became something of a ritual, every morning, I would sit down with a cup of coffee, open the app, and see those four words, “Bringing you good news.” The news was rarely good, but Pulse seemed to at least try, and occasionally, in between the frustrations and setbacks,  there was a feel-good story: a cat that rescued a toddler, an inner city barber offering free haircuts to kids who came in with perfect report cards, a wealthy man using his powers for good, little stories like that, but mostly the news was what news tends to be, bad.

I read the news so I can know what is going on and so I can make informed judgments and decisions. Those who don’t know their history and present, are not only doomed to repeat it, but they are probably going to make things a lot harder for a lot of people in the process. As a dance teacher, my influence is small, but I am determined not to be one of those people, and so I read the news. The headlines I see usually read something  along the lines of:  A white man with an audience said something stupid, offensive, and/or racist. I know I should care. I know I should be enraged. I know I should take to the streets, or at least to Facebook, and quote Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis,  Sonia Sanchez, or whole cornucopia of freedom fighters that came before and fought the same battles, but, more often not my first thought is, “And in related news, ice is cold.” I cannot find the energy to be angry. Here is a lesson I have learned: if you intend to be angry every time someone, either intentionally or unintentionally, says something he should have kept locked away in the deepest corners of his mind, you will be angry every day of your entire life. Being angry is exhausting.

It isn’t apathy that I am struggling from. It is burnout. I am tired. Speaking loud enough to be heard weighs on the vocal cords, walk outs, and picket lines are hard on the soles, and holding up signs causes damage do the shoulders. Every sociopolitical step forward demands two steps backward, and it is not, as the meme suggests, a cha cha. It is an incredibly inefficient way to go about making the world a better place. No one ever moved forward, by traveling backwards.

There is a speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave in 1967 called “Dr. King’s Entrance into the Civil Rights Movement.” He talks about getting home one day and receiving a phone call that threatened him, wife, and his newborn daughter. He says that this particular phone call bothered him more than the others. He says, “Then I went to the kitchen and started warming some coffee thinking that coffee will bring me a little relief.” I’ve always loved the speech for that moment. I know that moment. I know what coffee tastes like when you are less than a second away from giving up. “I think I'm right,” he whispered into the night. I imagine the steam rising up to caress a face too discouraged to hold even onto defeat. “I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage.”

It is easy to see leaders in social change as strong and steadfast. It is inspiring to see them as smooth-skinned and stone-faced. It is harder to imagine them in a moment when they chose to make coffee because they could make coffee and succeed. It is even harder to acknowledge the whisper that the road to justice will probably never end. Dr. King stood behind a podium in 1965, asked, “How long?” and answered, “Not long.” That was fifty years ago, and we are still walking.

These days I get my news from a service that delivers top headlines to my email inbox every morning by 5 AM. Their motto seems to be that if you must bring bad news, be funny about it. It’s not incredibly intelligent or through-provoking, but it informs without depressing. The other day I entered Pulse’s address into my internet browser, searching for the comfort of an old ritual. “Error,” said the screen that should have read “Bringing you good news.” “Not found.” I pushed the computer away, leaned over my fresh cup of coffee, sat quietly, let the steam rise.

Honeycomb and Cream

“I held on to Ginnie Hempstock. She smelled like a farm and like a kitchen, like animals and like food. She smelled very real, and the realness was what I needed at that moment.” –Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The novel, like many fantasy novels, is about good and evil. But masterfully—pointedly?—Neil Gaiman casts the large-scale drama of frightening, abusive forces against the forces of kindness and sacrifice in the little theatre of domestic life. It’s all on one lane, this drama, set in a family house, a farmhouse, and the little patch of land in between. It’s a seven-year-old boy who participates in the fantastical adventure, too: there’s a kind of little theatre there, in a narrator who still needs looking after.

As I read the book and just after, that’s what impressed me most—the scale. It was the drama of fantasy-novel proportions set in a family story. The wily, scary tactics of the antagonist are aimed at breaking up a family. And the savior who saves this boy and his family? It’s three generations of Hempstock females living on an old-fashioned farm: an ancient granny, a strong middle-aged woman, and a young girl. And it’s not only their mystical powers and heroic care that saves the boy. Their home is a place of sanctuary and salvation.

And that’s what, after I returned the book to its place on the bookshelf, emerged as most precious about the story. All the scenes in the Hempstock farmhouse had warm, rich hues in my mind, even brighter and more memorable than the bizarre, fascinating elements. It was the farmhouse with its whitewashed walls, jug of daffodils, flagstone floors, and warm hearth that I took away from the book and held close. Like the young boy observes, as he finds refuge in the house after a horrible escape, “I felt safe. It was as if the essence of grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time.”

Maybe I remember the farmhouse scenes because of the meals served there. I don’t think this is accidental (or because I happen to love food). Gaiman crafts the description of food that these ladies serve with extra, superb detail; it’s as if the camera slows so that we can take in every loving dish that the Hempstock ladies made. The boy’s first meal is paper-thin pancakes, rolled up with lemon juice and plum jam. Before he leaves, granny Hempstock slips him what must be one of the most comforting treats imaginable, a little saucer of honeycomb and cream. Another time the young boy—arriving to the house freezing wet—drinks hot, rich broth in a warm bath. How comforting does that sound, liquid warmth within and without? Another meal is roast beef and potatoes, buttered nettles, “blackened and sweet” carrots, and a gorgeous, homey apple pie with thick yellow custard. After a breakfast of toast and homemade blackberry jam, thick porridge with cream, and rich black tea, the young boy feels like he could purr, as the kitten beside him does—the feeling of utter contentment.

Why would Gaiman spend such care describing the homey details of hospitality? I think it’s because, when epic fantasy unfolds in the reality of a domestic drama, hospitality—genuine, caring, expressive hospitality—emerges as a primary force of goodness that does defeat evil. Making a safe, cozy, cheerful space in the dark, cold, abusive world is not a small thing. It’s kindness at its most practical and welcoming. It’s refuge for those—and that’s all of us—who need a touch of looking after. Like the boy realizes, as evil forces whip and howl around him, as he’d held close by the middle-aged Ginnie Hempstock, her kitchen and the food made there, are real things. That’s sometimes exactly what we need to provide, and what we need to receive. In the big drama of evil and good, a place at the table is, truly, sanctuary.

I pass by the novel on my bookshelf, and it reminds me of all this. May the “essence of grandmotherliness” thrive in my Los Angeles apartment.

Hopeful Mysteries

“Mrs. Feyen, do you like professional football teams?” This comes from George, one of my 8^th grade students. He’s asking me about football because I’m wearing a Notre Dame t-shirt today. I probably shouldn’t be wearing it; it’s not very professional, but every so often I get dreadfully homesick for the Midwest and this morning as I got dressed I decided to pull Notre Dame over my head and feel a little of South Bend on me as I walked through the day.

I wore a cardigan and a scarf with it and figured nobody would notice I was wearing a t-shirt. George notices, and now he’s asking me about the NFL. While I like everything that has to do with football: tailgating, the stadiums, fall, old, grey depressed towns that transform into vibrant, storybook places for 48 hours, I know nothing about the sport, professional or college.

“Let me guess,” George says, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder. “The Chicago Bears.”

I smile. I never hear them referred to as “The Chicago Bears.” Just, “the Bears,” and the “s” is drawn out a bit. George reminds me where I am – in Maryland, in Redskin territory, in a classroom of 21 of the rowdiest, craziest, 8^th graders I’ve ever come into contact with. Trying to teach them is like trying to keep the lids on 21 pots of boiling water. On better days, I call them hippogriffs. On the days they bring me to my knees, they are grizzly bears.

I shouldn’t take any of this personally: the eye rolls, the snickers, the talking while I’m talking. Most days, standing in front of them feels like I have my fly unzipped or toilet paper hanging from my butt. That’s how they look at me, if they look at me. Most of the time they are either looking at each other, falling asleep, or so zoned out I think I am teaching the dead. I usually drive home from school crying, trying to figure out where I went wrong.

They are my grizzly bears, though. As ruthless, conniving, and ridiculous as they are, I adore them. They make me laugh, they are dead silent when I read out loud to them, and when I can get them to trust me and themselves, they are poets. We take walks in a patch of woods behind the school and they write in the second person using all five senses. They can write a sonnet about baseball or their little brothers, all in iambic pentameter. Their writing is vulnerable and gritty. They can be lyrical and they can be stark. You’d never see it in class, though. It only comes out on paper, when they are writing with the lights off. Their preference. They are most comfortable in the dark.

“George,” I say as I erase the whiteboard. “I don’t think I can say I like the Bears, but I do root for them.” I turn towards him and say, “they break a lot of peoples’ hearts on Sundays in the fall.”

George laughs. “Yeah.” He leaves the classroom and I am by myself, looking around. Candy wrappers are everywhere. Assignments I took hours grading are balled up and lying next to the garbage can. There’s writing on the whiteboard, something about peaches. I think it’s a dirty, menacing joke aimed at a student in the class, but I’m not certain. I’m also not sure which student this is aimed at, nor am I sure how this got here in the first place. How did I not see a kid writing on the whiteboard?

As much as these students break my heart, I am addicted to the contrast they bring. I believe my faith lives in that contrast.

We are studying Romeo and Juliet right now, and day they meet Sampson and Gregory, they gasp in what I’m certain is delight when they hear Sampson talking about thrusting women against walls. When we get to the part where Gregory and Sampson contemplate the size and beauty of their reproductive organs, I feel like I’m conducting class in a frat house.

“I had NO IDEA how dirty this play is,” one kids says, delightedly.

When Romeo describes his love of Rosaline, “feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,” we discuss why the opposites contribute to the definition of Romeo’s love. “You can feel it more,” one of them says.

We try to do the same thing to describe the word, “crush:” perfect confusion, sorrowful happiness, paralyzing giddiness. They all smile, and I smile, too. I remember so well those days.

“Romeo kind of likes this mood, doesn’t he?” I suggest.

“Yeah,” they all say, knowingly.

“Now you try,” I tell them, handing them a piece of paper.

Loud secret is used for "mysterious," blurry focus for "art," and my favorite, hopeful mystery for the word "bless."

I tell them I’m going to cry for how good they are. “Read mine! Read mine!” they say, reaching their papers towards me. I take their work, and they put their heads on the table, shy now. I always tell them good job. I always tell them I love what they write. It’s as close as I can get to saying I love them.

When Mercutio and Tybalt die, I have them make webs around their names and we write down all the things they were: inappropriate, angry, possessive, rude.

“Is that all they were?”

No, they say. Mercutio was hilarious and he was a good friend. Tybalt was fiercely protective of Juliet.

I tell them Mercutio and Tybalt were nasty and awful, but that’s not all they were. “If we believe they were made in the image of God, then nothing they do – nothing anything any of us do – can separate us from His love.” I stagger when I say this. I’m always stuttering and tripping over my feet when I talk to my 8^th graders.

This class might give me nightmares. They might make me second guess everything I do, but they show me how to live in the contrast. I think it’s where the smiles are bigger, the laughter is heartier, and grace is at its most palpable.

We are cleaning up the classroom during the last five minutes of class. I’m trying to pass back papers, and kids are shooting baskets across the room with them. I get hit several times and realize they’re probably aiming at me. One girl has hip pinned another girl to the wall. Another kid is doing some sort of rendition of “Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk.”

George is sitting at his desk, whistling. He has perfect pitch, and I can hear him above all the ruckus. He is whistling the Doxology. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

George reminds me where I am. George reminds me of my blessings. George, and all his classmates, help me believe in the hopeful mystery.

Simply Enough

When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop.    —Leviticus 19:9

At first, it’s frightening to say “Enough is enough,” but after a while it gets easier. These are words that we say mainly when we are frustrated or angry; they sound like a threat. But really, when I stop to think about everything I have—what I need, what I want—I’ve discovered that I have enough—food, clothing, furniture, a satisfying job, nights out, and hair products. At first, it may feel like denial, and who wants to deny themselves?

Saying enough, lets me look at what I do have. I have a son and two daughters, I have two grandchildren. That makes me happy. I love them. I like to write, and I get plenty of opportunities to do that. For a long time after my divorce, I flirted, I dated, I considered another long-term relationship. Now for over a year, I have been decidedly single. This state of being has felt like a blip in my life at times, and like desolation at other times. But then I have simply enough of everything else in my life—and that makes me feel pretty content with my lot in life. At first saying enough, I have enough, sounded like I was settling for less, which is not part of the modern dream I’d been chasing for many years.

During this Lenten season, I’ve decided not to accumulate any more stuff, except for the things I need to live in my ordinary world. Enough. I intend to live out the season with awareness of all that I do have. I’ve been spending more time working on my relationships, checking in on people I haven’t been in touch with. I’ve been devoting more time to writing—which is my way of meditating and reflecting. I won’t buy that new loveseat I was thinking about buying. I’ll put off that purchase a little longer. Actually, I do need, really need, new walking shoes. I have a pair that is wearing down fast. But you know what? I can wait another month to get those shoes.  

A couple of years ago, I started trying to do simply enough after I had a conversation with a dear friend. We were both feeling overworked and overburdened. My friend is no ordinary friend; I’ve known her since before first grade, so she’s like family to me. She heads a Social Work program in child welfare at a university, and I teach English and writing to high-schoolers, and occasionally to college students. We work too hard, we concluded, after going over all that was weighing us down work-wise. What could we do about our careers, which were overwhelming every other aspect of our lives? Enough. We would start practicing doing enough. What were the essential functions of our jobs? We each made a list of tasks that needed to be high-quality; then we made of list of tasks that needed to be good enough, and not more; finally, a list of tasks we could probably delegate. Could we do this? Could we each let go of the need to do more than enough at work?

It’s been a long process, but yes, we could. Sometimes we still check in on the phone or talk in person when work starts to occupy a bigger place in our lives than we want it to. That’s when the questions start: What is essential? What has to be done and done well? What can you let go of, if not forever, then for a while? Having a friend to touch base with has certainly helped me to learn what is significant and what’s minor. This process, the practice of doing, producing, and having simply enough on the job has worked its way into other areas of my life. I think you have to say enough to find contentment. The practice of simply enough leads to a state of gratitude. Don’t take more than your share. Leave some things for others, yes. It’s a generous gesture.

The Reader’s High

I am a trail runner. But when I tell you that, you will get the wrong idea about me. You will picture someone with gleaming calf muscles and a wardrobe stuffed with Lulu Lemon gear.

That’s not me. I am the type of runner people roll down their windows to cheer on because I look like I might keel over. I am short-legged and hippy and I take frequent walk-breaks.

And no, I’m not downplaying my athletic prowess for modesty’s sake. Want proof? A man once stopped me on the trail just to remark, “Wow, I’ve never seen anyone running this far up. How do you do it? Is the trick to just go super slow like that the whole way?”

Yup. It is.

Despite all the huffing and puffing and the occasional backhanded compliment, I can’t quit trail running. I’m hopelessly in love with the runner’s high.

It’s usually somewhere around mile three. My body throws an endorphin party and every organ’s invited. It’s usually around the same time I’ve reached the curve in the trail that shows the whole valley spread out before me. And it’s always enough to keep me coming back for more, to keep me hitting the trail even when I’m achy and slow.

I’ve never joined a running group or trained in any official sense. One day I just decided to see how far I could go without stopping. The process felt natural to me, and for inspiration, I found myself drawing on an unlikely (and very nerdy) source—reading. Specifically, reading the classics.

I’ve always had a fascination with books that look daunting. They feel like a steep hill waiting to be climbed. They require the same sort of grit, and they provide a similar reward. At the moment, I’m halfway through Middlemarch by George Elliot. And as much as I’d like to tell you I’ve been riveted by every line, that would be a lie. Some moments have felt like a very slow trudge.

But then, last week, I came upon the most beautiful passage. I’ll try to describe it, but I think part of its impact may have come from the way it burst forth after pages of rather dreary narration.

Dorothea, who has wound up in a rough marriage partially because of her overly pious, prideful nature, tells her husband’s cousin Will that she is now learning to live “by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

Will understands, and listens, and Dorothea feels heard and valued for the first time. Will is in love with Dorothea, but she doesn’t know it. There’s just a charge and power to the whole scene.  Eliot finishes with the charmingly apt description:

“They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds”

When I came upon this scene, something similar to a trail runner’s high flowed over me. Sandra Scofield, in The Scene Book, describes scenes like this as focal points. They are “where the essence lies, the point at which everything changes.”

And isn’t life like that, too? Think back over your week—there are probably whole hours that got swallowed up in the ordinary. Hopefully, though, you can also conjure up in memory at least one swift rush of joy.

As a teacher, February and March can be dreary months. Days can tend to drag on, weighted down by the mundane. When I find beauty on the trail and in literature, when I experience these micro-rushes—a beautiful run, a perfect scene—I’m reminded to seek this out in my daily life, too.

A Displaced Person

(Wikipedia image)

Flannery O’Connor changed my life. Her work located me. Sought me out from the top corner of a near empty shelf of a quickly-going-bankrupt mass-market bookstore. I read one story and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in any and all words and places and ideas I could generate. I have never regretted it, even if the writing life has brought unsubtle revelations about who I really am and how far away I may be always from the person I see myself as.

My attention was drawn back to O’Connor after David Griffith’s article in The Paris Review about her “least anthologized” short story “The Displaced Person”. I urge you to read the piece, regardless of your political leanings. Then read the short story. Or vice versa. On display is the inherent power of fiction; how it can carry a “dark moral force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality.”

The idea of displacement Griffith talks about in O’Connor’s story was reinforced just last week. Again from that high-on-a-shelf kind of unexpected angle: a trilogy of graphic novellas we picked up for the kids at the library. It’s called “Lost & Found” by Shaun Tan. These three short illustrated stories are immaculately drawn, layered with rewarding and minute details. There is an astounding force at work inside each frame.

The middle story in the collection, “The Lost Thing”, strikes at the heart of why I continue to feel displacement in my own life. How it continues to be a “question about belonging in the absence of any direct language”. The story illustrates the journey of a lost, voiceless creature and the narrator who tries to find a home for it somewhere in the city. After some missteps, a unique and unexpected home for the creature is uncovered. This placement of the creature, finally, reveals a startling idea: where a displaced thing ends up may in fact not be the place it actually belongs.

Exactly a year ago now my family and I intentionally displaced ourselves in hopes of finding a community to which we could belong. We had outgrown our home in a number of real ways and we couldn’t stay. We moved deeper into the midwest. A small town, still in Ohio. We have no business being here, outside of work. And yet here is where we are. Like the odd, eschewed characters of Tan’s story, we “are happy enough.” But still the irk of not belonging is persistent and indirect. It sweeps over us in quiet strokes on Sunday mornings, in silent nights on our unlit street.

Griffith points out that many of O’Connor’s stories deal with displaced persons. And how they are always subject to violence whether as the perpetrator—or, as “The Displaced Person” shows despite the faultless and hard-working Mr. Guizac—as the victim.

I know where I am. And here life is comfortable and cozy. I am happy enough, too. I do not openly wish for a change. After all, like O’Connor’s Astor says, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” But I know how a simple glint caught by the corner of the eye can violently change my life. So I merely hope I don’t become “too busy doing other things” to fail to notice. Because I am—and may always be—a lost thing.

Food for Thought

“It tastes healthy,” my friend benignly replied to my increasingly inquisitive gestures in the church potluck dining hall. The substance before us had the color of chocolate mousse; it had the consistency of chocolate mousse; it certainly felt like chocolate mousse on the tongue, but upon taking a mouthful, it immediately introduced itself with that telltale vegan, no sugar added, and nutrients aplenty sensation. It wagged its tongue at the sweet sultry flavor that chocolate offers—no sir, this stuff boasted dates, avocados, and coconut milk!

Now, I actually have a pretty strong affinity for quirky health-filled kitchen concoctions. Pinto bean brownies, dessert hummus, beet breakfast bars with chilli peppers and cardamom, gingered lentil goji berry cereal: these are things that find their way into my edible creations. Someone might call my concoctions bizarre, but most nutritionally minded people I know would call them wholesome, or guilt free, or maybe even innocent: and they would mean it as a compliment. Still, though, there is no denying it, sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free food generally has that healthy taste about it. And to be honest, as a metaphorical concept, the whole healthy food versus yummy food dichotomy deeply troubles me. I struggle against the thought because as someone who aspires to a spiritually enriched life, I feel that the polarization relegates my pursuits to the healthy tasting section of the potluck table: the brownish, runny bland dish in a homely, well-used crockpot that people look at probingly before quickly darting to the next dish.

Several years ago I found it quite convenient to partake in an exclusively strict superfood laden regimen. I had some spare time on my hands so I figured taking the effort to prepare really healthy stuff would be a good experiment in how it made me feel.  For months I ate sprouts, beans, kale, spinach and tofu—it was a banquet of nutrition packed awesomeness. And then a friend of mine, who happens to be an excellent cook, came to stay with me.

During the week together we feasted on homemade buttery shrimp bisque, Greek pasta salads that luxuriated in feta cheese and oil, crème brulee and cake so delightful that I could have written romantic odes to it. Meal after meal I quietly moaned to my friend, “I didn’t know food could taste this good.” Every meal was like a Dionysian festival betwixt my lips.

When my friend left and the culinary expedition ended, I felt as though I had two stark choices for restocking my refrigerator: sprouts or stroganoff.  I approached my food choices as I sometimes subconsciously approach life: I could make the healthy and responsible choice or the delicious and enjoyable one. My mouth, accustomed to the sweet joys of butter, sugar and cream howled for satisfaction, my body, slightly sluggish but staunch, quietly demanded some veggies. I had to make a choice, there was only room for one.

What I am seeing more of is that, as a general concept, enjoyment and responsibility are not necessarily as dichotomous as I sometimes have been led to believe though. Surprising as it is to me, my pursuits can’t quite be compacted down to the category of a vegetable or a cake. This is particularly applicable to a nuanced spiritual perspective. In an excerpt of Miroslav Volf’s book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, posted in Christian Century, he says:

In choosing between meaning and pleasure we always make the wrong choice. Pleasure without meaning is vapid; meaning without pleasure is crushing. In its own way, each is nihilistic without the other. But we don’t need to choose. The unity of meaning and pleasure, which we experience as joy, is given with the God who is Love.

This is truly magnificent news, for it tells me my dichotomy is off. Love personified has constructed a world in which, when approached from a spiritual lens, proffers things both beneficial and satisfying. Our spiritual awareness, far from making us and our world the unappealing undercooked onion puree in the potluck of life, enhances flavor.        

On Flashlights and Wanting to Believe

As I write this piece, in part, out of fondness for my pre-Internet childhood and an old love affair with a boxy and rabbit-eared television, I can see us. We are sitting rapt – my two little sisters cross-legged beside me, our faces iridescently lit by the FBI flashlights that spear the dark glaze of an eerie and abandoned field. I can see Mulder and Scully pushing the light forward, toward us as we lean into it, intersecting one another like the glowing crossbeams of their flashlights.

I have forgotten many things about being a child, but piercingly clear is the part of my childhood and adolescence spent watching The X-Files. I remember the metallic smell of the antenna in my hands as I worked toward the delicate arrangement that would render a clear screen. I remember the big bowl of popcorn and pushing through angst and fear to deliciously tremble week after week as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully dodged monsters and aliens, their faces tense with the work of believing and proving what no one else could.

And it was worth it – the increased fear of a dark room, the occasional nightmare about spaceships or shape-shifters. It was worth it because as Mulder famously told us and as the opening credits stated week after anticipated week, “the truth is out there.”

Having grown up in the world of faith, in belief in the humanly impossible—in arks and Ascension and water into wine—I didn’t find Mulder’s words hard to accept. My whole world was informed by the supernatural, by the persistent grip of redemption and grace and by what I couldn’t always see and couldn’t always touch. I cheered for Mulder’s tenacious desire to uncover truth, for his skeptic partner Dana Scully’s increasing ability to begin to believe with him, too. And as they struggled with the paranormal, I sensed how faith in what couldn’t be seen or touched could become the foundation against which all the experiences of my life, even the frightening and unexplainable ones, were contextualized and illuminated. I even saved money to buy an expensive flashlight that I told myself was for reading beneath my bed covers. Really, I think I wanted it to illuminate my dark room the way Mulder and Scully’s search illuminated the space between me and the television on nights The X-Files came on.

One day, The X-Files went off the air. Soon after, I went to college. And I only kept a flashlight inside the glove-box of my car on the chance I had a flat tire and not because I anticipated a situation that involved the goose-bump pull of a dark field. Somewhere, in my movement through the long corridor of my twenties and early thirties, the unexplainable became too easy to explain with despair and disillusionment. Time has a way of relieving us of our wonder and expectation, of dimming our flashlights and making darkness seem more commonplace than even the simplest light. After the usual bouts with time that produced deaths and divorces and friends moving across the world, it was the joy that baffled me, the surprise that someone I loved did not die or divorce or move far away.

A few months ago, it was announced that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were going to revive my old friends, Mulder and Scully, for six new episodes. In honor of the show’s new season, I began re-watching the old episodes. And I was surprised at how completely I had forgotten about the unbelief. And I’m not talking about Dana Scully, the skeptic to Fox Mulder’s persistent enthusiasm. I’m talking about Mulder, whose energy of faith was its own kind of light in the dreariest and most hopeless of circumstances:  “It’s hard, Scully,” he said. “Distrusting everyone and everything—it wears you down. You even begin to doubt what you know is the truth.” Stunned, I thought about how his words articulated a disillusionment buried in my own movement away from wonder. I understood what Mulder meant: the work of belief can be exhausting.

The revival of one of my favorite series has reminded me of the longing, of the unquenchable desire that is the human struggle to believe. Tonight, another episode will air. The flashlights will glimmer into focus. Mulder and Scully will reappear across my living room. And if they, years later and in middle age, can still be pulled into the fray of search and hope, if they can still be compelled to ready their flashlights and hit the dark and eerie fields, I can, too. Maybe I will call my sisters, remind them to turn on their TVs, and pop a bowl of popcorn. Perhaps, at the first sound of the theme-song’s whistle, I will become 14 again—a total nerd, a total dreamer, a total fan of the insatiable human capacity for belief that relies both on the resilience of imagination and the mystery of faith and that resurrects itself into the most unsuspecting life when she has forgotten to believe resurrection can happen.

Living Water

I always try to pick just the right moment to tell people. That moment is sometime between realizing that they are one of those who will need to know, and the point when they figure it out on their own. Although I frequently share intimate details of my life, in writing, and with my bank teller, or a new acquaintance, there is one thing that I hold back until the last minute.

I have hyperhidrosis, which is believed to be a disorder of the parasympathetic nervous system. What this means is that I sweat excessively, mostly from my hands and feet, although everyone who has this condition is affected a little differently.

The paragraph above is usually what I tell people who are about to give me a professional massage or a pedicure. I’m still nervous every time I say it, but I’ve learned that these are the conversations most likely to go according to plan. These people are professionals.

Whenever I start dating someone new, I begin thinking about when I should tell them. My goal is always to do it before we hold hands for the first time, to minimize the shock, and the revulsion. Although no one has ever reacted badly at first (one boyfriend told me he liked knowing when my anxiety was heightened, so that he could attempt to soothe me), I cannot count the number of times that my beau of the moment has removed his hand from mine, wiping his palm on his pant leg. My sweat stands between me and the intimacy I crave, sometimes.

I was in single digits when I started to notice this phenomenon. My reading confirms that this is fairly standard for those who suffer without another underlying condition to explain the symptoms away. As a nine-year-old, I knew that a pencil was likely to slip through my fingers if I wasn’t paying attention, I couldn’t wear sandals, and that hardback books were my best bet at the library (I was once charged for water damage).

In my teens, I went the way of drugs. At the time, my only option was to put a highly concentrated antiperspirant on my hands and feet, wrap them in saran wrap, and cover them with socks and gloves overnight. The antiperspirant burned and dried out my skin, but the sweat got through. After too long, I stopped.

I used to plead with God to take away this condition, frustration twisting deep in my stomach. It seemed like such a small thing for God to do. But it hasn’t changed.

I have learned to live with my extra sweat. I shy away from synthetic fabrics and an abundance of cinnamon. I bought a mat made for hot yoga so I don’t slip. I wipe my hands discreetly before meeting someone new in a handshake. I am patient when I explain the water damage on my phone to the guy at the Apple Store.

Sometimes, my senses overpower me and I squirm. In those moments, I want nothing more than to run my hands under ice cold water while wearing a pair of absorbent socks. My boyfriends are not always the ones who pulled away, sometimes I was the one who couldn’t stand the humidity anymore.

I know that my sweating is outside of my control, something that came to me unbidden. Still, I can’t help but wrestle with shame when holding it up to the light. My sweaty hands are connected to me, a part of me, just like my heart and my lungs.

I have learned that when something doesn’t make sense to me, my best bet is to sit with it, even pour it a cup of tea. In these interactions, I have to force myself to be civil. I cannot say: “why are you here?” so instead I say: “tell me about yourself.” I ask: “could you possibly be living water?”

I believe that our bodies are intentional, that they are the best lens for us to experience the world. I believe that it matters that I am five foot two and a half, that my knees contain tendons that like to hang loose, and that my hands and feet sweat more than most.

My sweaty hands and feet have taught me to be patient with myself, and with others. They have taught me to take myself less seriously. There might be more, I need to schedule another time for tea. Along the way I have also learned that healing doesn’t always take the form I hope for. Some days it looks like sidling up to Jesus and slipping my hand in His, not worried about rejection. He already knows all my stories.

Breathe Lightning

“Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.”     ― Joseph Brodsky

On days when the sun is shining across the oak outside my door, and colors I didn’t know it possessed bloom in the bark’s inscribed lines – gold, green, sage – I like to think about the concept of limits. The Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky, spent 18 months in a labor camp in subzero temperatures along the Arctic Circle. Some have said of this time that “Brodsky’s exile was the best year of his life...because it gave him time to read and write.” Brodsky agrees, “Even sitting there between those walls, locked up, then being moved from place to place, I was writing poems.” Brodsky’s writing flourished in confinement.

This paradox has a parallel in the art world. Post-expressionism was a revolt against Expressionism; an attempt to put the rampaging genie back in the bottle. It countered Expressionism’s fluid and mainly angst-ridden style with one placed inside limits. As Carlo Carrà suggested, it put things “in the space allotted to them.” Consider Edvard Munch’s The Scream (Expressionism) and Anton Räderscheidt’s House Nr. 9 (Post-expressionism) side by side.

The Scream seems to overflow the canvas in its intensity, while House Nr. 9  is rendered in parallels, angles, and is fixed within its borders. The painting’s strength comes from creating its essence within its limits. The overflow of emotion in The Scream plays on our senses, but so do the constraints of House Nr. 9. Its lines and muted colors present a stable backdrop for the mysterious couple. Who are they and what is their relationship to each other? Is one a door-to-door salesperson; are they lovers; is one an angel in human form? The window’s acute angles form a cross on a hill. Räderscheidt creates mood and room for imaginative interpretations within the stylistic constraints.

Don’t immovable lines seem counterproductive, and limitations seem to keep us from accomplishing our good work? Even in what might be considered an unfettered life, Emily Brontë’s prison imagery would have made the exiled Brodsky feel at home. Anne Carson’s poem, The Glass Essay, speaks about the poet and novelist:

Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

Outwardly, Emily Brontë didn’t seem to have lines hemming her in; she was free to write and roam the moors. Whatever the constraining forces were that shaped her writing, Emily yielded to them. Carson’s poem continues from Charlotte Brontë’s perspective:

Charlotte talks firmly and calmly about…

         Emily’s total subjection to a creative project she could neither understand nor control, and for which she deserves no more praise nor blame than if she had opened her mouth

“to breathe lightning.”

What is God creating in the midst of your parallel lines, your locked windows and aching walls? Do you dare? Breathe lightning.

View to a New Mythology

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”      —Marshall McLuhan

Our views on the world are framed for us by myth. This is how it should be. Mythologies imagine the ancestry of humankind and give us frames of reference for origins, values, relationships and more. They're our points of departure for everything we are. But mythologies in a world of science and certainty are hard to come by or keep. But we need them, so modern myth-makers, from gadget companies to masters of cuisine to politicos to religions, fill in the blanks for us. Their modern mythologies suggest that we are the royals of our own realms. That we can live our ideal. That life can be stable, comfortable and happily unconsidered. And even though our world is a big round ball, the arcing horizon is a safe, convenient limit. So we can exist in circles of norms, majority's rule, the way we do. How we roll. We may play, learn and work in a consistency of comfort while the rest of the world, the suffering world, is disclosed only at our pleasure. And how we see the difference, say, between Somalia and Sonoma, or Damascus and Notre Dame, or Nepal and Manhattan, is through the soaring windows of our mythological frameworks.     

Roland Barthes was a semiologist and philosopher and wrote an important book in the 1950's, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. One of the essays in that book, “The Eiffel Tower.” articulated a modern intellectualist view of the world. And though it was written sixty years ago, it sounds startlingly familiar. Here is an excerpt:

The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it is an object either very old (analogous, for instance, to the ancient Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there; as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world.

The tower's metaphor translates to many others: the Tower of Babel and the World Trade Center come to mind of course. But how about soaring personalities: celebrities and politicians, authors, directors and artists we look up to? Don't we enjoy seeing ourselves in their light? And if it's true, that these mythologies make us, then how can we parse the popular Christian paraphrase, in but not of?

The remedy is to come down from our high places, submit to a kind of disembodiment, or dislocate from our self-enlightened sources, and re-imagine life in relationships, in difficulty, in the pain and grief, and every now and then, in fulfillment. Jesus' first sermon tells us to attend everything in a mythology of his humiliation: the divine come to earth; the crown laid aside; the architect become servant.   

In a story told in all four gospels, Peter, James and John wanted to live on the mountain where Jesus was transfigured. They wanted to build booths, or small houses, to contain and persist in the bright sensations of their mountaintop experiences. On the way there they had argued who would sit closest to Jesus. And afterward, at the bottom of the hill, they found the other disciples unable to heal a boy. So Jesus drove them to their knees saying, These spirits come out only by prayer. And seeing it, knowing he's talking about me, I want to say with the father of the boy, Lord I believe; help my unbelief.

And here we see at ground level, the Eiffel Tower is a gateway.

So, Lent is here. Let's do something crazy. Let's fast the frames: the television, the computer, the phone. Let's pick up a pen and write a letter on the back of a service agreement. Let's live on a buck twenty-five for a week of days. Let's wander with a wanderer and wash her feet with expensive perfume. Let's embrace a modern-day leper. Offer a cup of cool water. Read this poem* to a stranger. Walk down the bright mountain in silence together, lie prostrate on the grass, empty our insides until something leaves and our enemies are welcome inside. And let this be the ground of our mythology. From its low-ness, from our own low beginnings, may it transform our towers into doors.

^{* "You've Got To Start Somewhere" by Deborah Landau} 

Dark Night: The Illness Narrative

“Pale horse, pale rider done taken my lover away,” a line from an old spiritual hymn, is the inspiration for the title of Katherine Anne Porter’s novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. I taught this text, a rare narrative of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, to my students last semester because it provides an accessible introduction to stream-of-consciousness writing. More importantly, Porter’s story is autobiographical, as the author herself nearly succumbed to the flu. Through stream-of-consciousness, she shows the effect of a collective trauma on the individual psyche, a dark night of the soul.

The novella is set during World War I and opens with Miranda, a young newspaper reporter in Denver, sunk deep into nightmare. On her horse Graylie, she tries to outrace a “lank, greenish stranger” riding a pale horse. It soon becomes clear that this rider resembles one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, referenced in Revelations. In this dream, she does outrace Death; it isn’t her time to die just yet. Fragmented memories and images of death pervade the story—with “this funny new disease,” the Spanish flu bringing on a pandemic, even as young soldiers prepare to go overseas to fight and perhaps die. We’re with Miranda as she falls in love with a soldier, Adam, and as she becomes increasingly ill, struggling through semi-consciousness and delirium. The “pale horse, pale rider” spiritual, which Miranda and Adam sing, turns out to be horribly ironic because in the hymn, the pale rider eventually takes everyone but the storyteller.

Stories of illness serve several purposes, and one is to develop empathy in the reader for both the sufferer and those who care for ill loved ones. These narratives can show how the psyche experiences pain and how the soul aches when threatened with loss. When Miranda finally does recover from the flu, she discovers that Adam has succumbed to it while she herself was too ill to be aware of events around her. The novella then can be seen as a memorial to this Adam, and to Porter’s Adam who was also lost to the flu.

At the same time I taught Pale Horse, Pale Rider, I read a new book of prose poems, Stay, by Kathleen McGookey. By coincidence, a strong through-line in the poems is the illness and death of the poet’s mother and father. The father declines progressively from a “brain disease,” while the mother’s demise is sudden, from a deadly cancer. In Stay, the speaker’s shock and grief is laced with exhaustion, anger, and even brief moments of happiness and contentment. The poems give us a more intimate look at how wide-reaching the effects of illness are on an individual and her family.

In “Disease, in the Particular,” the speaker admits that her father’s brain disease “is real, stark, and incurable, so slow, so nearly imperceptible its progression, so—can I say this?—gentle, and so gentle his decline, how can I not cry?” And in this poem, the speaker knows she must accept what is terribly unacceptable: “I cannot hope to lift him out of his stiffening limbs and set him down shiny and baptized into the rest of his life.”  The poem works against any romantic notions of the father’s decline, showing the reader in particular that at some point our loved ones will move inexorably toward death.

“Sometimes the Ache Sleeps” delves deeper into the father’s illness and the mother’s sudden bout with cancer, while the speaker herself mothers an infant son:

When my dad reached unsteadily from his wheelchair to put my baby’s sock on, the baby clapped and waved. When I helped my mom to the bathroom, she whispered, My little girl. By then the ache was all around us.

In these few lines, we’re aware of the metaphor of pain, the symbol of life inherent in the baby, and the psychic turmoil in the speaker, who cannot fully experience the joy of the new child in the midst of the illnesses that will soon claim both her parents.

For the poet of Stay and the storyteller of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the painful reality they impart to us is that a loved one’s illness and death bring on conflicting emotions in the sufferers and survivors—love and grief, ache and anger, to name a few—and that recovering from such loss is not straightforward. Their stories remind us that not all illnesses can be cured, no matter our prayers, because to have a life here and now is to have a gift that we will someday have to relinquish.

Bookmarkings

At a writing workshop, I’m asked a question I’ve often been dishonest in answering: “What writer(s) have influenced/influence you the most?” On such questionnaires, I carefully write the canon worthy names. Sometimes T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson make the cut. Or Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare, Marilynne Robinson, and W.S. Merwin. But I know my list is lying. I know that no matter how many modern and classic and award winning names I identify and no matter how much each of those writers have and do influence me on a near daily basis, I’m never really telling all the truth unless I include her.

Unless I talk about L.M. Montgomery.

If I’m being the kind of honest that disdains pretention and doesn’t care what the list “should” say, I would talk about being 12 years old and saving to own every single book Montgomery ever wrote, even the out of print ones. I would tell how at recess or hiding in the quiet of my closet, I filled notebook after notebook with stories and poems in attempts to emulate her style, to make the kind of stories I wished she were still alive to write. If I’m really telling the whole truth, I would talk about just how much I longed to be part of the stories she told because her work was a creation so splendidly rendered that I wanted to touch it all with my own hands or at the very least, use those hands to reach out toward it all with my own words and stories.

Most famous for her writing the Anne of Anne of Green Gables, the endearingly stubborn red-haired orphan with an unrivaled imagination and penchant for seeing beyond the bleakness of her circumstances, Montgomery saw over twenty novels into publication during the turn of the 20th century, an era not well-known for “taking seriously” its few successful female writers. And while I find, particularly as a woman, her publication record deeply impressive, I fell in love with Montgomery’s voice long before I quite realized there was anything incredibly meaningful about her lonely position as a successful woman author in the early 1900s.

It was Rachel Lynde and the brook that babbled into submission as it passed her home that did it:

It was reputed to be a headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade. But by the time it reach Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door….

And the first taste of November concentrated into words:

It was November--the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.

Of course, there were so many discoveries. So many perfectly chosen words and in those words, so much knowing and feeling known. Most of all, L.M. Montgomery’s books worked like a place that after years of visiting, begins to feel, to become, something like a home.

About ten years ago, I lost my childhood home. It still exists, but for hard as well as necessary reasons, my family packed up and left it behind. They said goodbye to the rye grass pastures and the wrap around porch my grandfather built; they left it all the way you leave someone you will always love and always regret leaving. They moved on to a new town and began all over again. And when, states away, I traveled home for holidays and visits, I felt I never really came “home.”

A few weeks ago, on a work errand that sent me hours south of my own home, I found myself on the road that bent past the old house and land. And so hungry for home, I nearly stopped on the side of the road to scoop up a fistful of dirt I was considering placing in my empty Sonic cup until I could get back and rehome the soil in a mason jar I would tell no one about.

I didn’t stop, though. I drove on, and before bed that night, I rifled through my shelves looking for something to help the ache. And I found Montgomery and Anne and her journey towards home, ironically, comforting me in the loss of mine.

It’s important to pay homage to the often unsung writers who grabbed hold of us in the really formative years, the years where the concrete of  bones and brains were just beginning to set, and one good sentence pressed in the soft plaster would leave its mark forever. There is something comforting about how a book, or a perfectly loved authorial voice, can work like a placeholder in our lives and offer us the stability necessary to venture into the darker and complex stories, the new towns and jobs, even the tragedies and gray endings that spill forth from the great literary canons and life experiences we learn to embrace or tolerate later on. Those first guides don’t cease to be important as we move into more complicated stories and lives. If anything, the first books become even more essential.

There are books that can take us home; there are places inside the lines that somehow make a home for us to come back to. Montgomery’s works, so important to the child I was, are also just as meaningful to the adult I am, bookmarking a sense of home for me and cutting a path toward the other writers and the other homes I would and will know.

Guest: Limited Access

I have a friend who was once viewing an article on Mother Theresa. Somehow, the advertisements on the webpage were not set to “Catholic approved,” since, alongside the picture of the now saint, was an ostentatious full screen ad for Plan B. Seriously. It was a perfect example of “what’s wrong with this picture.”  Recently, as I was merrily skipping/clicking links that looked interesting, I came to a well-known religious leadership publication. Maybe it was the devil, because he knew it would assuredly annoy me, but the thing my eye caught under the name of the journal was the two words placed next to each other. It looked like this:

GUEST|LIMITED ACCESS

Now, I know this sounds prideful, but as someone who has a handy prime college access, one thing I rarely see when spending time in online journals is “limited access.” Mine isn't limited, it’s full—at least in academic journals. And yet here I was being called a guest, with “limited access.” I was instantly offended. Then I felt guilty about being offended. Here is the thing though, nobody wants to be knowingly excluded to the outer regions of power. This got me to thinking.

I have for a while wondered over the seeming insatiable lust which seems to be incited over positions of leadership. Maybe “lust” is too strong a word; perhaps positions of leadership are more of a thing “craved” than lusted over ... but that would be a hard call. It doesn't matter what setting these leadership positions are in either: be they at a university, church, community, in politics or whatever, the desire to be in a location of leadership seems to be fairly intense. As if to confirm this, more than ever before, I am seeing leadership courses being taught at public libraries, colleges, universities, and even churches. They are popping up everywhere. You can take them in-class, online, or over Skype—whatever method is best for your busy schedule.  And such courses fetch good money, too. If you’re worried about your job, don't; you can even get a Masters in Leadership while working full time!

Now, I am not dissing people in positions of authority at all: we need profs and pastors and presidents and prime ministers. Neither am I picking on leadership courses, from what I hear, they bring in much needed funding for places of education. However, I am curious: why the upsurge in interest over leadership? I wonder if the interest is driven by advertisers—like the craze over teeth whitening products. Or is it driven by average Janes or Joes who are suddenly realizing that they would like a title or a position of respect?

Here is the question churning inside my head though: are people becoming more curious about getting into leadership because they feel that it is the primary way they will actually be heard? I.e. that the only way to be listened to, in whatever place they happen to be in, is to be a leader? I realize that there are a few more possibilities than that, but I do wonder if being heard is one of the main reasons.

And if that’s the case, isn't it saying something about our culture? Like, maybe we haven't been willing to pay attention—literally!—to people around us because we assume they don’t have something of worth to say? And if we all think that, then one seemingly reasonable way to get other people to listen to us is not to be an everybody, but a somebody—specifically a leader. After all—leaders have to/must be listened to, right? Again, I am not implying that those in leadership don't have worthy things to say, I just wonder how many times I have contributed to another person not feeling listened to, and thus unwittingly encouraged him or her to seek more formal routes to not only speak, but ensure being heard.

Believing in Poetry in Haiti - Part 2 of 2

 (Read Part 1)

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” —Edwidge Danticat

A group of Haitian men and women sit around tables in a classroom with small windows. Fans are whirring, cutting some thickness from the warm morning air. The instructor, Lunise, is teaching Chapter 4 of a literacy program in a language I do not know. She translates for me when she can, but her main focus is, as it should be, on her class. Despite the distance of my foreigner’s ear, I am grateful to be among these attentive literacy students for an hour. I make a note to try and use “we” and “our” when I write about this later.

We are learning in Creole. I have been told this is not the educational language of choice for most Haitians. Most of them would prefer to learn in French, since it is considered the language of the elite. But French would be an extra step for learners who already know word meanings and organize their thoughts in Creole. The incorporation of poetry helps make the familiar fresh. “Poetry makes Creole attractive and new for them again,” Lunise told me. I like that, a familiar language reborn through a literary form.

We learn new words to build our vocabulary, copying them out while watching the clock to time the exercise. We work through a fictional set of letters between two characters who are talking about what they have learned—how each unit of rhythm is called a "foot" of poetry and how poetry is an expression of feelings. We copy out Psalm 23 and then paraphrase it. Some students share their phrases—and while the words have necessarily shifted, the sentiments hold. “I will fear no evil, for you are with me,” for example, becomes “I won’t be afraid, you won’t leave me behind.”

The language barrier makes it difficult for me to keep up at times. The student to my left gently taps his packet of worksheets with his finger to guide me to the right page. I smile and nod in thanks as I turn to where I am supposed to be.

The Psalm 23 phrase “dark valleys” fits with the topics of a writing exercise given as homework. Students are to write three sentences analyzing the cause and effect in these topics, which Lunise translates for me. Twop moun nan prizon—overcrowding in prisons. Lapenn—sorrow or grief. Goudougoudou—a nickname for the December 2010 earthquake that is onomatopoeic, since it mimics the sounds buildings made as the ground shook.

I do not have the chance to interview these students one on one; I’m scheduled to travel out to another area to meet with students in a beginner’s class. I would love to go home with samples of poetry they have written, but they are not at that stage in their literacy journey, not yet. I have faith in the work to come, though. Poetry is taking root.

***

As I travel through the tight, packed city streets to the next literary class site, I spot a man in a baseball cap and grey t-shirt. I read the yellow text over his chest, a phrase in English: "I am not perfect, just forgive".

Or does it say just forgiven?  Our car is beyond him before I can confirm. So even if I read his shirt in error, I will now remember the ending as a kind of plea or command: just forgive.

***

I am home and working on a web story about Haiti. I email Lunise to ask her about some of her favorite Haitian poets. It is still quite rare to find Haitian Creole poems translated into English, but I would love a taste of a work, however small. She sends me the poem “Testamen” (Testament) by Félix Morisseau-Leroy. It is a version that can be read online here, as posted by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat.

I read the poem once and immediately over again, more slowly. Then I sit awhile with the short, lively work. 

A quick Google search reveals that Morisseau-Leroy was one of the first prominent writers of poetry and plays in Creole. He wrote during Papa Doc Duvalier’s autocratic regime, which was set on stopping free expression. He was nearly killed and eventually exiled. Literacy is particularly risky in tyranny.

The image of the man in the forgive t-shirt comes back to me. Forgiveness is risky, too. A forgiven person may fail us again. Reading and writing can follow this same tenuous track of comprehension found and lost.

As I remember the beginner students, Josette and Mirlaine (who I eventually wrote a story about), the phrase “nervous yet excited” comes to mind. These women fidgeted and grinned as they talked about using their new skills to find jobs that enable them to provide well for their families. Both spoke of one day reading scripture aloud in church. They are unsure yet trusting, learning lesson by lesson, and taking steps to build a healthier, more secure life.

Perhaps they, and the other Haitian students I encountered, will go on to write and even publish poetry of their own one day. Perhaps they will not. Regardless, I am heartened to know that people in their country celebrate this form's mysterious, muscular voice. Morisseau-Leroy’s poem and countless other literary works will be there for them to discover, along with the written language of the everyday.

I believe acts of forgiving have a witness which abides long after forgiveness has been given or received. Isn’t this similar to literacy, too? By writing and reading texts, we give them power and place beyond the time we know. Consider Edwidge Danticat's observations about a someday, somewhere, someone reader. There is legacy in the work of words, and these Haitian students are now a part of it.

Our literacy always outlives us. Books may puzzle us and imperfect creations may fall short of what we mean to say. Of course they do. But we are daring to read and create dangerously, anyway—making small testaments that speak to what is greater than ourselves.

Living with Armadillos

It had to be 98 degrees as I walked the perimeter of my cabin last summer, surveying the damage caused by armadillos. Wow, they had plowed up the entire hill where my cabin sat! They’d sent nearly all the topsoil down to the creek, exposing the underlayers to the heat and drought. No wonder a large crack had developed along the steepest side of the hill.

A year ago, I’d spent a lot of money for an engineer and an earthworks company to create a stable, level soil foundation for my cabin. In the months after, I’d spread topsoil, then planted grass and liriope on my hill, in an effort to create a natural barrier against soil erosion, crucial to the health of the house’s foundation.

I don’t live at the cabin full-time; I live in a city and commute to my place in the woods about six times a year. So it’s easy for a few armadillos to come in and wreak havoc without humans around full-time. The damage they can do in one night is astounding. Over a few weeks, their work can be monumental. I wanted to scream about the destruction, in fact, and strangle a few armadillos. The only reason I didn’t—I might be fined for throttling an armadillo, because this creature is honored as one of the “state” mammals in Texas.  

It’s amazing that I was once fond of armadillos, that just the sight of these “little, armored ones” was amusing, pleasing. Yes, they’re mostly gentle animals, foraging for insects near creeks and ponds.  And in this century, they’re a threatened species. What’s the harm in an armadillo? I never thought to ask such a question.

In the middle of my armadillo troubles, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo” inserted itself into my thinking. Truly, I’m a Bishop fan, and I like to revisit her work every so often. When I reread this poem, I didn’t consciously think it could help, but engaging with poetry is a source of meditation for me.

“The Armadillo” isn’t just about an armadillo, but about “the frail, illegal fire balloons” released during Brazilian celebrations of saints’ days. When the fire balloons “flare and falter, wobble and toss,” they suddenly become dangerous to wildlife, and this is just what Bishop wants us to see when  

                another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down.

Unfortunately, a pair of “ancient owls,” whose nest “must have burned,” fly “up / and up,” their undersides “stained bright pink” by the fire just below them. The armadillo of the poem “glistens” and is “rose-flecked by the fire,” leaving with its “head down, tail down”; its armor can’t protect it from the fire’s danger. The poet then shows us a small rabbit, “so soft!” but its softness turns grotesque “like a handful of intangible ash.” Here are the vulnerable animals whose lives will be cut short by humans sending up fire balloons meant to celebrate a holy day.  

While Bishop’s poem is ostensibly about the specific incident described, the dedication to her friend, the poet Robert Lowell indicates a larger purpose. Lowell, a conscientious objector during World War II, protested US firebombings of cities. In Bishop’s poem, the balloons that bring fire to the wildlife echo on a small scale what it might’ve been like to live in a firebombed city:

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!

The “weak mailed fist” suggests the soldier, who even though well armored like the armadillo, cannot win in a conflagration.

For readers today, getting at Bishop’s intention requires some digging. Yet her poem resonates for me in the way we humans have encroached into the natural world. In situating my own cabin, I know I’ve disturbed the wildlife, from fire ants to armadillos to coyotes. No, I didn’t wish to destroy the natural scenery, or animal habitats; and I do understand how much of the natural world we’ve already gobbled up. I’m aware that the East Texas woods now receive a lot less rain than they did in decades past. Just two years ago, wildfires threatened the areas close to my new habitat. There, and in “The Armadillo,” I’m reminded that we share the God-given world.

When I felt the urge to destroy armadillos after they destroyed my hillside, I scared myself. After all, these guys only did what armadillos naturally do. I don’t think I can return to my old fondness for armadillos, but I want to find a way to handle them without animosity—a fence maybe.

From Ache to Amen

A few Decembers ago, I saw Handel’s acclaimed Messiah oratorio in concert for the first time. From our side balcony seats at the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, my friends and I had an overhead view of the choir as well as the orchestra stage. We could only see the backs of the interchanging soloists, which worried me a little. Would the experience be lessened by this limited view? A few minutes into the show, however, I realized that we could see something that the coveted, pricier center section below could not: the face of the conductor.

This conductor was, in a word, animated. He waved his arms and wielded his baton with a wizard-like flourish to guide the skilled group of musicians. His face is what caught me, though. His features echoed the emotional tone of each movement—tight and serious in moments of lament, open and bright in moments of delight. He smiled during that famous chorus.

Anecdote has it that Handel’s own face was wet with tears after he wrote the Hallelujah chorus. His assistant came upon him crying at his desk and asked him: “What’s wrong?” To which Handel replied. “I thought I saw the face of God.”

After such a splendorous vision and satisfying creation, it is a wonder that Handel went on to write another act at all. Yet he did.

In Philip Yancey’s reflection on Messiah’s “bright and glistening theology," he recalls the various theories behind King George II standing during the Hallelujah Chorus at the oratorio’s London premiere. Some believe did so because he was emotionally moved. As Yancey points out, however, there are also those who suggest that the king in fact rose to his feet because he mistakenly believed the show was over. Apparently novices in the audience have been known to make the same error today.

“Who can blame them?” says Yancey. “After two hours of performance, the music seems to culminate in the rousing chorus. What more is needed?”

Handel had an entire act of “more” to add. A heavy act. This brilliant composer, this creative man of God, recognized that as heavenly as his chorus sounded, it was still a chorus of earth--a place where so much is wrong and so much is needed.

In what Yancey heralds as “a brilliant stroke,” the final act begins with words from a stricken Job. It seems a steep fall from ebullient Hallelujah to a story of such tragedy. But there is a brave hope in Job's persistence of belief. The Christ that Handel then dwells on is the Christ of Revelation 4-5—the slaughtered Lamb, the humble sufferer whose victory comes through surrender.

“The great God who became a baby, who became a lamb, who became a sacrifice—this God, who bore our stripes and died our death, this one alone is worthy,” says Yancey. “That is where Handel leaves us, with the chorus "Worthy Is the Lamb," followed by exultant amens.”

Messiah’s expansive view is shown in its refusal to skip over wounds and tears to get to exultations. There is anxiety. There is uncertainty. There is blood. Handel acknowledges that here, in this sin-wrung world, our cries to the Lamb do not always sound like Hallelujahs. Sometimes they sound like weeping, or groaning. Like…ache.

As Handel’s “bright and glistening theology” swirled around me live that first time, my enjoyment of the piece was rimmed with specific aches. Ache for Opa (grandfather), who passed away a few years earlier and used to see Messiah in concert with my Oma, year after year. Ache for a coworker who was, at that very moment, stricken with the pain, exhaustion, and delirium of leukemia. In years prior I heard him loudly singing along to Messiah in his office. That was to be his last Christmas; a month later he would pass away. I ached, too, with awareness of the painful arcs in so many people's lives—persecution, loneliness, war, depression, disaster. The list goes on. As does the ache in our world.

Handel’s Messiah is as honest in its agony as it is in its joy. Its chords anticipate a world restored without diminishing the woundedness of living in the not yet. This is its gift: a true vision of Emmanuel, a Lord who is not just visible to us, his children, but present with us. He rejoices with us and carries our sorrows. May we look closely, sing boldly, and listen well as we seek His face.

Blessing, and honour, glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. Amen.

Christmas Gifts

You have probably heard the over-used saw, “tis better to give than to receive.” Now aside from the advertisers who glibly employ it for entirely selfish reasons (may they be sent for a week to the 8th circle of Dante’s hell) here is my annoyance: a gift with a motive is no gift at all, unless it’s to make the receiver thrilled to their booties. Romantic friends with pure intentions know that warming glow felt deep in their hearts as the beloved opens up some carefully chosen little treasure. Parents also know a similar feeling – or so I am told, not yet partaking in parenthood – of watching a twinkly eyed tot ogling over their gifts. I rather doubt that the parents were secretly plotting in the corners of toy department how best to psychologically manipulate their children into being better behaved, or quicker memorise their classical education. If they did, the gift would cease being a gift.

And so, I find myself troubled when one of the greatest Deific gifts offered is seemingly proffered with a large string. Maybe it’s just me, but so often during the holidays I hear, often performed with beautiful voices in song and hymn, that the Christ child has been given to the world as God’s heavenly priceless gift. I feel the tingles now just thinking of it. In the second breath coming from the preacher though, we are told that we owe this divine sovereign something in return. I am bothered.

Sure. I suppose that is the truth. I guess the tot who has just received the gift from pleased parents should feel indebted to her or his familial guardian. (Though, isn't it funny how often the parents look happier than the child!)  And yet despite that being the case – maybe – I think if we were to ask the gifting parent whether their child should primarily feel obligation, that parent would suggest that we had never been a parent, or at any rate a true parent. They might even give us a rude look from over a shoulder as they left us standing by the punch bowl.

And so back to the well-meaning religious types who proudly proclaim God’s best gift to humanity ever, ever in one breath, but then in the next espouse how unrighteous we are if we don't hold up to our end of the gift.

Did you see that? The last word shouldn’t have been “gift,” it should have been “deal.” But is that what we humans were given at Christmas, a deal?

G.K Chesterton speaks very fondly of Christmas and of gift giving and goodwill, but also of the nature of the grandest giver of them all. He cleverly uses the name Santa, but all the adults will know exactly of whom he is talking. During the holidays, he says,

[As a child]  I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them.... I had not even been good— far from it. And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus ... was [a] benevolent agency... [that gave us] toys for nothing. Of course, most people who talk about these things get into a state of some mental confusion by attaching tremendous importance to the name of the entity. We called him Santa Claus, ... but the name of a god is a mere human label. ... [As a child] I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet ... Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it.

So why did “Santa” give him the gift of existence? “It was,” says Chesterton, given in “a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.” No strings attached. Except maybe thankfulness.