L'Abri Fellowship: A Vulnerable but Secure Shelter

Perhaps more than anything, L’Abri Fellowship provides a space that invites, encourages, even fosters vulnerability. It is almost impossible to explain what L’Abri is in one word—or even one succinct phrase. Its name means “shelter” in French—and the word has a rich, multilayered meaning. Francis and Edith Schaeffer began the work of L’Abri in 1955 in Huémoz, Switzerland as their home became an open space for dialogue and honest questions for the locals and friends of their children. Word spread quickly, and L’Abri was born as a communal study center, a home open to any who want to come and seek answers to life’s big questions.

There are now eight residential L’Abri Fellowship communities around the world, and I am here as “Writer in Residence” at English L’Abri for a summer term. I have walked through the heavy wooden front door of this manor house many times before, each time both exciting and frightening; although the days at L’Abri are very structured, almost everything else, except for the warm welcome, is unpredictable, fragile, vulnerable.

According to English L’Abri director Andrew Fellows, the founders of L’Abri, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, created an organization that was “intentionally flimsy.” After asking themselves whether their lives would be different if every reference to prayer and the Holy Spirit evaporated, they honestly answered “no,” and decided that the work of L’Abri must be based not on strategic planning, recruiting, and well planned financial security, but on a visible, vulnerable dependence on God. Because of this, L’Abri was founded on four “intentionally flimsy” principles: 1) not advertising for students 2) not advertising for workers 3) not fund raising, and 4) not having a plan. Although the Schaeffers (and current L’Abri workers) do not speak against advertising, fund raising, etc.—and even verbally support some Christian ministries that do this—they feel/felt a specific calling to demonstrate the reality of God’s provision and presence through intentional vulnerability.

The L’Abri philosophy and practice is very much evident in the lunch discussions that occur five days out of the week in workers’ homes or the manor dining room or kitchen. A L’Abri worker heads the table, and ten or so students assemble at each lunch table. After we have all been served (lush, homemade) food, the table is open for any of the students to ask a question that will be discussed for the next hour and a half. Any question is a good question as long as, as the workers put it, it is an “honest question.” In a sense, the lunch discussion is a representation of the heart of L’Abri, a belief that, in the context of a life of faith, everything should be open to questions. It is also a testament to a deep acknowledgement of the importance of listening to one another, to truly believing that there are, as Schaeffer says, “no little people,” but a collection of glorious, broken individuals all made in God’s image, all longing for wholeness and community.

Fellows claims that “the heart of community is interpersonal dialogue,” a space where each individual can both hear and be heard in an ongoing reflexive relationship. He also emphasizes that L’Abri has, since the beginning, “championed the question;” this act of gathering to ask a question and grapple together towards an answer—or sometimes just a larger set of questions—is perhaps even countercultural in an age where many have, according to Fellows, “lost their questions.” Asking questions takes both humility and faith as we acknowledge our lack of understanding and hope for an actual answer. It also reminds us to be curious, to regain a sense of “childlike wonder” that, as Wordsworth reminds us, is so often lost in the ongoing distractions of adult life.

When Christ says in Matthew 18:13 "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” perhaps he is calling us to be vulnerable. And in doing this, to become more and more curious, to learn to ask questions, to turn away from apathy (not caring enough to ask questions) or arrogance (thinking that we know all the answers or can find them fully ourselves). To ask an honest question and seek an answer is a bold, brave, vulnerable move—and it implies a deep trust in the idea that an answer can be found, as well as a trust in those being asked (both God and those discussing the question).

L’Abri’s focus on prayer is clearly a demonstration of vulnerability before God, of curiosity and wonder in front of the mystery of our lives in His image. Because of the safety of God’s provision in the midst of this particular community that acknowledges both human frailty and beauty, L’Abri has created a shelter where students can ask questions of the workers, of one another, of themselves, of God. With this honest, and sometimes painful, vulnerability, we become like little children seeking a home where arms are open and answers can be found.

(Photo by Mägi May)

Go and do likewise

In rereading Victor Hugo's collected works , I was struck by the ire the author held against the church. Victor Hugo had no issue with the divine but rather with the bureaucrats with “large mitres” who built institutions to “administrate” the sacred. Today, we are made to feel small in the modern church . If we haven’t brought in new “pelts” to the pews, we haven’t lived up to Jesus’ great commission.

I recently had the privilege of spending time with Knox Thames, Director of Policy and Research at the United States Commission at the U.S. Department of State. Yes, he is Christian who works under Obama. Knox revealed to me the harrowing levels of persecution that is going on in the rest of the world to Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists – and of course, in most cases, these are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists doing violence to one another. I am not a Universalist. I am a Christian. I believe that Jesus is the Way. But in the face of the violence that is happening, it seems that the first order of business is to aspire to charity and kindness toward the other religions.

As Knox Thames, so eloquently put it, we need to look at Jesus’ example of loving. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite passed the half dying man who had been beaten and robbed on the road. It was the Samaritan, the lowest of the low in that society, who stopped. The Samaritan ministered to the fellow in the road, and carried him into town. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus instructed his followers. Perhaps we should be more focused on loving our neighbor before we start judging or converting them.

As Victor Hugo said, “What a grander thing still, to love!”

(Painting by Vincent Van Gogh)

Gods and Janitors

Of the gods, my favorite is Janus. He was the god of beginnings, transitions and portals. The month of January is named after him. His name heads the oldest lists of Roman gods. His temples were oddly small and made of wood, yet, he was sometimes referred to as divom deus, or god of gods. He was said to be present at the beginning of time and guards the gates of heaven. He was invoked at the celebration of every other god and he alone was worshiped at the first of each month. He is usually depicted with two faces, one bearded and one smooth-shaven, one looking aft, and one fore.

Among these disparate traits, though, my favorite thing about Janus is his place in the derivation of the word “janitor.” It's wonderfully counter-intuitive and paradoxical, but in an ideal way it makes sense. If you're like me, your first encounters with janitors were in elementary school. Common but revered, they were ever-present, uniformed and kept a cart with special equipment. They had exclusive and intimate knowledge of attics and basements and a ring of keys to unlock every door. They had a pink powder that transformed every spill into a sweepable material and bravely neutralized even the most disgusting post-lunch mishaps. But we don't idealize janitors that way anymore, do we?

Perhaps we should. Maybe we should even identify with them. Jim Carey was once a janitor. Ben Affleck's dad was a janitor at Harvard. (Aha! Good Will Hunting!) Janitors have made for many memorable television and movie roles. They show us something about ourselves. Some are sage like Fortune, the janitor from “Rudy”, while others seem foolish like Carl the Janitor from “The Breakfast Club.” There are portrayals of idiocy like Joe Dirt and necessity like Dr. Richard Kimble. They walk among us but as from another world like the un-named “Janitor” from “Scrubs.” There is something true and essential about them no matter how they are portrayed. Something wise in their futility, something constructive in their duality. Something of the god in their humanity. Custodians of time and space with history and possibility in view.

Relief Issue 7.2 Thinks You're Pretty Smart

As we get ready to print 7.2 (debuting at the Festival of Faith and Writing next week), I've been noticing how many of the pieces ask so much from the reader. If art is, or can be, a difficult pleasure, then I think you'll enjoy issue 7.2, but in that Relief-y way that isn't satisfied with pat answers or disingenuous questions.

Of course, this means that the issue as a whole, which is to say our authors, think that you as readers are pretty smart and can handle some uncertainty, some openness, and some unrestrained wonder—if you're into that kind of thing. The teacher in me wants to make sure you're not among those who sell themselves short. Most people are better readers than they think; as often as my students say they're "not smart enough" for the poems or short stories we read, but when I ask them for their responses, their questions and gut reactions are often right in line with what the piece invites and evokes.

I'll highlight just our Editors' Choice recipients to give you an idea of what to look forward to. In fiction, Amy Krohn's "Master of Light" reads like memoir, it's so full of those inarguable facts that are so indifferent to its heroine's fantasy. Not only that, but Krohn manages to pull off an entire story in second-person narration without it feeling in the least like a cute gimmick. Her story asks "you" to think about what it would mean if your farmer husband suddenly turned missionary and left you behind. The answer "you" come to is both easier and harder than you might expect.

In CNF, Angi Kortenhoven shares an encounter with one of her own students, years later, seeing all his potential being rubbed away by the banalities of daily life. Kortenhoven ends on a bitter note, clinging to hope almost in a plea to the reader to nod in affirmation. She's not offering hope, but asking you whether you can find it in yourself.

Finally, in poetry, Bob Denst adds a subtle twist of playfulness to scenes that are ultimately about great beauty and sometimes sublimity. His "Wildland," in particular, powerfully reverses the normal questions we ask about God's actions or will when natural disaster strikes.

These authors represent some of what I love most about what we do at Relief, finding the stories and memories and metaphors that represent the mysterious or ineffable without trying to tame it.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

Self-Made Monsters

Rolling Stone recently published an interview with Dong Nguyen, creator of the viral hit game "Flappy Bird". The interviewer, David Kushner, writes about Nguyen’s experience as his app surged in popularity:

He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he’s saved. One is from a woman chastising him for "distracting the children of the world." Another laments that "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves." Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart.

Nguyen’s intention had been straightforward: build a fun game for mobile platforms, easy to play and hard to master. But as his app went viral, it garnered a darker reception. People attacked Nguyen. They designated him an author of evil. Their vindictive reaction peeled back the app’s popularity to reveal an addicted and infuriated world where guilt was eschewed by appeals to ‘distraction’ and ‘addiction’.

Wrapped up in low-fi, Nintendo-esque graphics, Flappy Bird is a feathered fiend for the modern disposition. Its simplicity is infuriatingly addictive, and its difficulty chafes against impatience and demand for easy victory. It’s easy to love, but even easier to hate. And the app’s fallout, directed toward Nguyen, shines a spotlight on a basic human proclivity: our readiness to shift the responsibility for our destructive impulses onto anyone or anything other than ourselves.

Mike Carey and Peter Gross write in the fantasy series The Unwritten (Vol. 1), “We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.” For many, Flappy Bird provided that insight.

What’s your monster?

Loving the Expanse

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. . . . For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have a deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey.

  — Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

On New Year’s Eve I had the privilege of attending the wedding of two of my dearest friends in cold, lovely Georgetown, Ontario (bonus: I had set them up). I pulled double-duty as a groomsman and reader. The passage I read—shown above—surprised me when I first saw it. I had read Rilke’s famous book of advice when I was young, but I’m sure I arrogantly passed over some of the language about an “expanse” between us, and the “impossibility” of merging. I was twenty and in love and those words didn’t account for how I felt! But here was this wonderful couple on December 31^st, 2013—in their late twenties, well-read, self-aware—who had chosen a passage focusing on the distance between them to be read at the very event that would bind them together.

I read the passage in the ceremony. And I’ve contemplated it many times since. I’ve been meditating on the facts that “even between the closest people infinite distances exist,” and that if people can accept such a truth, “ . . . then a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

2014 will mark, to my eternal gratefulness, my sixteenth wedding anniversary with the woman I love. I’ve begun to wonder how many of the problems Beth and I have lived through over the years can be traced to my failure to honor, much less love, the expanse between us. Instead, at my worst, I try to change her, to transform her into something much less that the fullness of who she is. That robs her—robs us both, really—of our “freedom and development.”

And that robbery is, frankly, nothing short of evil.

So I think back to New Year’s Eve when I celebrated two dear friends pledging vows. One of those vows was a profound determination to love the expanse between them. As I look toward spring, I’m thankful that this long winter will be over. I think of the increasing warmth of the sun, and the return of living, growing things. Yet I can see that true renaissance—rebirth—will only come into my life if I, too, vow to see Beth each day “as a whole and before an immense sky,” and to love the expanse between us.

Let us go forth and gather honey.

Diversity and Unity: Further Up and Further In

C. S. Lewis says of human nature and destiny,

"[God] makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. … Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance." (Problem of Pain, 151-2)

Elsewhere he states life works “like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good” (Great Divorce, viii). The one statement describes human persons in all their variation and particularity. The other alludes to the ever-expanding complexity of that variety, like an ever-increasing richness of musical polyphony. And as Dorothy Sayers mentions in The Mind of the Maker, "the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity" (53).

I was driven to reflect on this question of the nature, potential, and teleology of humanity when recently I was reading M. I. Finley's The Ancient Greeks and came across this statement:

"It is sometimes said that the anthropomorphism of the Homeric poems is the most complete, the most extreme, on record; that never before or since have gods been so much like men …; that this is a terribly naive view of the divinity. No doubt it is, but it is also something else, something perhaps far more interesting and significant. What a bold step it was, after all, to raise man so high that he could become the image of the gods." (27)

Finley adds that this perspective was “pregnant with limitless possibilities” (ibid.). He affirms how naive was the Greeks’ anthropomorphism of divinity, but suggests the other side of this coin shows how high was their view of man. This seems to be a common view among academics but the idea is rather problematic. It’s unclear how a low conception of divinity can imply a high conception of humanity when the latter is simply the image of the former. If the gods are small, then man, bearing their image, cannot be great.

It is rather the case that the greater one’s view of the divine, the greater must be that which bears its image. The lower one’s view is of the divine, the lesser is that which bears its image. Within the Christian vision of the Imago Dei, in which humanity encapsulates a kind of analogy of the infinite God, the meaning, worth, and potential of the image of God cannot, in a sense, be described as finite (limited) as it bears the image of the infinite. In other words, within this (meta-) narrative the image of God is a finite being but with genuinely limitless potential for ever-increasing love, joy, creative activity, and every other human capacity in an eternally dynamic dance with the Infinite.

This is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’ memorable phrase from The Last Battle, for humanity to ever move “further up and further in,” into the unceasing and inexhaustible outpouring of the life, love, joy, and creativity of God, thereby always expanding the human capacity to image God more fully to one another and back toward its source in love and bliss. Surely, this is a divine image worth bearing.

Oh Lord, maker of our futures...

We are 14 and 16, my big sister and me, halfway up the California coast with our parents when she snaps the photo: two nuns, habits swirling in the Bay breeze, gazing out at a hint of the Golden Gate. Idle beside them stand two vintage tourist viewfinders, made useless by impenetrable fog. Maybe, like us, the sisters are furnishing from memory all the familiar, invisible landmarks: the iconic red suspension bridge we’ve just driven across, an expanse of green water, San Francisco like a child’s block city in the distance. We make this family road trip every year, and if we’re disappointed in the view this time, there’s always next summer.

Except this time, there isn’t. We cross some final bridge come September, my freshman and her senior year of high school. The next summer brings college plans for her and a first job for me, and with every summer after that, the bay widens between childhood and the unfamiliar territory of adulthood. Years later, she sends me a watercolor version of the photo, and I’m instantly 14 again, the fog-cloaked Bay a symbol for my future-in-the-past: a strangely familiar unknown still lying ahead of me.

Seventeen years have passed since we took that trip. The painting hangs on the wall of the house I share with my husband. Several hundred miles to the south, my sister and her husband are raising two lively little boys. When I look at the painting, my mind furnishes the blank wall of fog with everything that has happened since. I see the girls we were, dizzy with ambition. Ahead of us, I see travel and struggle, the work we would each fight for and learn from. I see the darkness that would mark us, and the love that would shape us.

I guess I get a little nostalgic when I look at the painting, with all of that living behind us. We’ll never again be 14 and 16, slightly bored and either fighting or ignoring each other in the back of the family minivan. Our lives are widely different, distant, and moving too rapidly for us to capture in photos. So when we catch up between work and errands, I cast a wider frame around the picture: Oh Lord, maker of our futures, writer of our pasts. Hold onto everything for us. Let none of this be lost.

Writing and Seeing | 7.1 Poet Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo

7.1 Poet Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo writes about a broken wrist and the ritual of seeing.

A few weeks ago, I broke my right wrist, the one I use to write. It’s currently immobilized—under the skin, with metal plate and screws, and over the skin, with a cast of purple fiberglass.  This has disturbed my regular rituals and rhythms of writing.

After more than twelve years of writing poetry regularly, I have developed more than a few. Some have to do with time of day, and others with how I set up my laptop or tracking system.  But the most important practice of what makes the poetry happen is opening the poetic eye. Not unlike Emerson’s transparent eyeball, it creates a kind of mystical awareness of the world.  But in true twenty-first century form, my poetic ‘eyeball’ doesn’t always let the self drop away.  It is a net in which ideas can be caught and held up to the light.  My juxtapositions are often between the sacred and the profane—a news report, a piece of art, commercial detritus, a personal experience--in the same field of vision as a religious idea or image.

The profane is everywhere, but connecting the sacred takes practice. Sometimes the sight of an unfamiliar object, or a snatch of conversation, reminds me of a particular theological idea, frequently one that I have sought to explain to students in my Hinduism or Judaism classes. A hesitant churchgoer, (I practice a kind of attendio divina), my beloved Episcopal Eucharist can also provide another sight of the liturgical God. Just reading scripture is not enough; the poems require the physical engagement of religious practice.

Close attention—visual, tactile, aural—requires practice too. It is symbiotic with the discipline of writing. Otherwise, what I notice can just pile up and rust into a poetic junkyard. I must keep writing to keep seeing.

Right now, I am watching for the purple cast’s reflection--what opens into the world (and in scripture) when life gets broken. And I’m learning to type with one hand.

Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo is author of "Flies" and "In Which Buddah Reads Aloud Firecracker Instructions"  in issue 7.1 of Relief.

Interview with 7.1 Author Jay Torrence

7.1 author Jay Torrence tells some of his motivations for writing Ivywild while sharing his faith, story and creative process through an interview with one of our volunteer staff members, Alyssa Dixon.  

What formal education did you receive?

For my undergraduate, I got an English degree from Wheaton College. For my MFA (Masters of Fine Art), I studied Creative writing at the University of British Columbia which is set up to dabble in different genres. I went in with a nonfiction focus and then played with nonfiction, graphic novel and play writing. I had done about ten years of professional play writing, and I wanted to play around with other creative writing genres.

How and when did you begin your career as an actor and playwright?

I actually started performing after I received my undergraduate degree. My younger brother, Ryan, and I created a sketch group in our home town, the Amish country of Ohio. Every month, we would put on a show in our church’s youth room, eventually as our crowd got larger we rented out the local high school’s auditorium.

We had a lot of fun in those years and it taught me a lot about performing and writing. I wrote the majority of what we performed and after four years of doing this, I auditioned and was casted for the Neo-Futurists. Their work was very similar to the work that I was doing with my brother.

How does your faith play into what you do as an artist?

I grew up in the church and heard these stories about flawed people and how they related to the world in very important ways. I think that these stories were meant to teach me how to think and how to respond to large issues that were beyond me as a child, adolescent and even at times as an adult. As often times, we are in the world and can not grasp these big issues. Those stories were always teaching me how to interact with the role of story telling and its relationship to real people and large concepts of wisdom and truth. That connection is in my work because it is the complexity of being human. I hope it is a small thumb print on our grasp of truth. It is not something that I am really thinking about all the time, but it is something I try to recognize and honor in my work.

How does your team work together to produce the plays you write?

Halena Kays, the creative director of The Hypocrites theatre, of whom I worked with on Burning Bluebeard and Ivy Wild, creates a collaborative room where we come together and play with what I have written. My team really does grow the pieces I write, and I totally depend on the group as a source of inspiration, when I start writing something new. They are constantly offering ideas and voice to further what I am trying to do.

I really credit the smoothness of the collaborative process to Halena because she is really good at leading a collaborative group. We all have this goal in mind and all of our ideas are meant only to serve that goal and not ourselves at all. That creative process is a love of ours.

I have found as a playwright, getting something as far as I can creatively and then bringing it to a collaborative table allows my work to go a step further.

What I like about art is taking something from an idea and pushing it through the creative process into a final thing. I like being on that journey.

What do you love about the writing process?

For the writing process, I usually get something about history which motivates me to do the research.

The act of writing, in this process of art, is the most miserable part for me. It is the most isolated and lonely part about theatre. Sometimes when I am there, there is inspiration, but for the most part, that part of the process is pretty agonizing. It is just such an intense birthing process going from nothing to something.

I haven’t found that I am good at it and I definitely haven't found a way to avoid the misery of it. However, I have gotten good at recognizing the fact that, oh, this is familiar and I can get through it.

I wish I could say that I love sitting down and writing, but I do not. That is the part that feels like work and it is good work, a discipline. But it does not end there for me, I love hanging out and creating with the people on my team. Then getting it in front of an audience is really fun and that usually is the most rewarding and satisfying part of the process.

What was your motivation for writing Ivy Wild?

Halena Kays approached me about writing something for the The Hypocrites theatre. So we sat down and threw out a couple of ideas for new plays. When I did my research for Burning Bluebeard, I had stumbled upon the Levee District and the names “Bathhouse John” and “Hinky Dink.” I decided to come back to it when writing Ivy Wild.

I had researched about this red-light district and all the vice that was concentrated in one terrible neighborhood in Chicago. And at the helm of it was this duo Bathhouse John and Hinky DInk. The people loved John and he was this loud, brass character. He would walk down the street and people would just follow him. His partner, Hinky Dink, was the fist behind John’s life, on the sidelines taking care of business. But as a duo, historically, they set up the biggest money laundering scheme the city had ever seen.

When I stumbled on these characters, I got so excited. I get fascinated with the historical things of this world that are forgotten. I often get this romantic idea of paying tribute to people that are forgotten and I relate that to the art and the type of art that I make. Theatre happens for the people that are there, and then it disappears like a circus leaving town or like a tragic fire that consumes everything, it is very temporary. So I relate to these people who spent their lives creating art in the way that I create art, and then they are forgotten or dead. History has forgotten them.

I was fascinated about why he went to Colorado and decided to build this amusement park, it just seemed weird to me on paper. When I do research, there are always these gaps and conflicting ideas. I am just piecing it together and often take the liberty of putting myself into it and trying to answer the question “why?”. I mean, I don’t know who Bathhouse John was, other than what these people wrote and described him as. I don’t know the intentions behind his actions.

Through exploring these ideas, I became fascinated with the idea of penance, atonement and what it means to live a life of good works. I asked questions like; “Do our good works make up for our bad?” “Is that true and what does that mean?”, and “What is forgiveness?”.

I did know for sure that John went to Colorado to make an amusement park that was fun for family and kids. As I read, it felt like his life there was very distinct from his life in Chicago. I inferred that Colorado meant something to this guy, but it failed miserably.

So, I was very curious about this idea of what it means to be forgiven.

Through my research, I never knew if John’s heart was really pure, because for every gesture of goodness, there was also this flip side of gain that could be read into it. John did take a train full of dying prostitutes to Colorado Springs to get treatment. If he were a sincere person, the act of trying to help these prostitutes would be a selfless and wonderful act. However, then the Hinky Dink side of that was like “ya! get those girls better so we can make cash off of them.”

Historically, I do not know where they landed on that spectrum because its a mixture of goodness and gain. There was this tension between the two of them that I tried to create: Bathhouse John was all heart and Hinky Dink encouraged that heart because of the money it produced.

Bathhouse didn’t really think in those terms, at least in my play he didn’t. In reality, historically they could have been totally different. Their gestures of goodness are seemingly good, but what was it motivated by? Was it motivated by heart or by gain? In reality, none of that is clear historically.

My heart for my play was this: Bathhouse John returns to this abandoned park and he is given another chance to make it a place of beauty and wholesome goodness. John is hoping that it will be enough to release him from whatever void or guilt that he was in.

The first scene is just him walking around in the void, holding this consumptive amusement. That image is really specific and I wanted him to enter through nothing. He is back at the place where he got it all wrong. Now is his chance to do it all again, where he might be released from this blind empty place of guilt.

I also wanted the art of my story to celebrate fun parts of their lives and different details about the park. Some of that allows me to celebrate their lives historically and also this story of Bathhouse John trying to get it right. Ultimately, he fails again and the park burns and what he doesn't want to happen, happens. He tried to create this beautiful place that people could come and be happy at. I believe his effort was self-motivated because he wanted to make up for all the bad that he had done and in my play that was not enough.

At the end, I wrote this monologue of him owning the facts of who he is and what he did. It ends with a simple statement of him just earnestly apologizing and when he does, the park comes alive. The park in a sense accepted his apology.

Jay Torrence is author of the drama "Ivywild" in issue 7.1 of Relief.  

A Need for Order | 7.1 Author Lindsey DeLoach Jones

7.1 Author Lindsey DeLoach Jones talks rituals and the need for order. I like my drinks very, very cold.

A plastic tumbler, 6 ice cubes, and a can of Diet Coke chilled at least twenty-four hours in a 35-degree refrigerator. Limit one per day.

Occasionally, I joke about being obsessive compulsive or a control freak or both, but I’m neither of these things really.

Maybe it’s the pressure to confront the veiled chaos of the blank page or the daily, private rumpus of my soul. Maybe it’s the anger I hear already in the voice of my one-year-old daughter, anger I didn’t put there and can’t control. Something compels me to keep a very few things in a very particular order.

Writers need ritual, I tell myself. We look for order everywhere, but it often seems in short supply. And so the soda-slush that predictably forms on the ice cubes in my cup are a solace. Order is present, at least, within the insulated confines of my preferred chalice.

A few other things compel this same rigidity: the temperature of the house at night (so cold my husband pleads for just one extra degree), my position on the sofa in front of the television, the relative greenness of my morning banana. It is a ceremonial pleasure to peel back the skin of a banana and find fruit suitably firm and tart.

My inflexibility embarrasses me. My husband should not come home from the grocery store beaming, having found an entire bunch of bananas for me “so green they’re practically neon.” People all over the world would love to eat a mottled yellow banana, drink a lukewarm soda.

How do I know the difference between a tradition that serves something greater than me – the ritual “confession of sin” we make in our church service between hymns numbers 2 and 3 – and a tradition I have begun to serve? Have I become a slave to my man-made rituals?

At 7:30 every evening, before my husband and I sit down to dinner, I zip up my daughter in a sleep sack, spin the volume dial on the sound machine that sits on the floor of her room with my big toe, and push her hair from her forehead before leaving the room. This liturgy is her safety.

And yet soon, she will need to learn to sleep without the sack, without the sound machine, and – one day – without me.

I can excuse the custom Diet Coke experience, for now, can’t I? I can pray that when I am called, perhaps I will be ready to move from ritual into the wild, where lives tepid soda and mushy bananas.

Lindsey DeLoach Jones is author of "Cutting Our Fingernails" in issue 7.1 of Relief.

Wanting Freedom | 7.1 Poet Joel Fry

7.1 Poet Joel Fry talks about being free.

I hardly ever remember writing first drafts, unless they are connected to a specific event, and most of my work is not.  My poem "Such a Bright Future" describes my varied thought life, in which I attempt to get at the meat of my existence, but ultimately I realize Jesus Christ is my refuge, and like Paul, I feel that I am being poured out in a sense, and that God is pleased with me.

My life entails defining my existence in a way that makes sense to me.  I can do what I want, but that soon leads to addiction.  I am even addicted to Facebook.  So true freedom (or at least the highest form of freedom) seems to be the liberation from selfish desires, not so much the ability to do whatever I want.  I like what the Lord says: "If you drink of this water you will never thirst again."  This is also like the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd.  I shall not want."  Everyone is free to be included with God in Christ.  That is the ultimate, and very simple, revelation.

Joel Fry's poem "Such a Bright Future" appears in issue 7.1 of Relief.

The Liturgy of Listening | 7.1 Poet Kerri Snell

7.1 Poet Kerri Snell tells about the importance of listening for writing poetry.

A poem that “works” for an audience is at once both personal and universal. It is still a mystery to me how some of my poems transcend ambiguity and self-consciousness and become living works. I write to understand, and yet my poetry usually provides me with more questions than answers about God, about Nature, about relationships.

Why do I write poetry? I think it is because reading and writing poetry comforts me in a mothering sort of way. I can bed down with my own lack of knowledge and feel that through creation of a poem, I can accept, as I believe God accepts, my glaring limitations. Poetry is for me an experience of Grace.

I have immersed myself in the poetry of Maurice Manning of late, stunned to discover the form he has mastered in capturing old ways and old voices. His poems are linguistic artifacts described through one of the purest voices I have encountered. Like Manning, I write from a distinct geographical landscape. His is Kentucky and mine is Oklahoma. Nurturing my poetic landscape is my personal window into the heterocosm of a poem and it is for me worship. My landscape requests certain liturgical activities more in keeping with Emily Dickinson’s concept of the Sabbath than with the Evangelical Church.

In order to enjoy a successful day of writing, I must get outside every day, usually for a walk or a run. I have to engage in some form of physical exertion in order to slow down my thought processes so that I can record them. Creating on optimal environment for poetry to happen is integral to my success as a writer. I seek light, open, minimally-cluttered space, and of course, solitude. My writing process involves engaging the works of other poets, remembering old hymns, reading the Bible, reading a ton of nonfiction, and then writing, writing, writing. It is remembering loved ones. It is reading history. It is contemplating the future. Mostly, it is prayerfully working to respect the perspectives of others. Poetry requires courage, as does faith. In the midst of doubt, we must create a fluid knowing.  When we begin to see everything as a possible prayer, we begin to learn to listen. Listening is the pivotal liturgical act of poetry.

Kerri Vinson Snell's poems ""Freedom", "The Well", and "Bride"" appear in issue 7.1 of Relief.

Rituals | 7.1 Author Timothy Reilly

7.1 author Timothy Reilly talks about daily rituals ranging from oatmeal to writing.

For the past several years I have eaten oatmeal for breakfast, six days of the week.  I suppose it’s a ritual: I eat the oatmeal at about the same time each day; I prepare it the same way; it comforts me.

At my age (62), a risk comes with admitting to an oatmeal regiment.  I could be accused of stodginess: one of those “old guys” who gives up wearing belts in favor of suspenders, filling his wallet with store coupons.

I’ll take that risk. I am a firm believer in Rites of Passage (sans suspenders and coupons) and the maintenance of productive disciplines.

I first learned the beauty and benefits of ritual and discipline through my upbringing in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. (I will not go into my pseudo-agnostic hiatus, but I will say that I have returned to reciting daily the Apostle’s Creed).

I spent my early adult life as a professional musician: a tubaist.  It takes a good deal of mental and physical discipline to maintain a professional level of musicianship.  The ritual of regular daily practice is an absolute necessity.

My music career was cut short by something called “dystonia,” a cruel condition that strikes right where it hurts: the musician’s physical means of making music (with brass and wind players, it hits the embouchure).

For the past 23 years my creative ritual has been writing. I write first thing in the morning, six days a week (before oatmeal).  My wife, Jo-Anne (a poet and scholar), maintains a similar writing ritual.

Listening to music is a ritual.  Lately we have been listening to the music of Morten Lauridsen.  O Magnum Mysterium is our favorite.

The other day I found a dead sparrow on our patio.  Jo-Anne cried.  We both thought about Matthew 10:29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will.”

I buried the sparrow under a tree.  I marked its grave with a stone painted with a cross.  It was a necessary ritual.

Timothy Reilly was a professional tuba player in both the United States and Europe (in the latter, he was a member of the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy). He is currently a substitute elementary teacher, living in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti, a published poet and scholar, who also teaches university English courses. His short stories have been published in The Seattle Review, Flash Fiction Magazine (UK), Blue Lake Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Amarillo Bay, Foliate Oak Literary Review, Passenger, and several other print and online journals.

Literature, Apocalypse, and National Tragedy

In the following (a reprint of the editor's note for issue 6.2, available now at a presale rate.) EIC Brad Fruhauff tries to figure out how literature may help us process real life tragedy. Only a few days after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary I sat down to watch the first episode of season two of The Walking Dead. The tragedy was not a relevant context in my mind when I began the episode, but by the end the two had nearly collapsed upon one another in a powerful way that, I think, is quite typical of fiction.

Without giving away too much for those who are even more behind than me, the episode ends with a shocking act of violence against a child. When it happened, my breath froze and my heart leapt and all the normal physiological responses to something truly horrible. I was in tears with something like real fear and distress for the child, and for the parents I felt something more like fellowship than the sympathy of the outsider.

As I decompressed during the credits, I thought, “Why—when real tragedies are happening to real children—why am I watching fictionalized versions of them?” The immediate possibilities were discomfiting. Am I simply that perverse? Am I so out of touch with my experience and my world that I don’t feel the contradiction? Am I seeking an escape from real pain in some aestheticized form?

No response to these questions can entirely escape the possibility of being mere rationalization, but the more I thought about it the more appropriate the whole thing seemed, and the reasons had a lot to do with how art works and what it does for us.

I have two small children at home, one of whom attends preschool twice a week. When the news from Newtown, CT, came across the radio that Friday morning, I reacted in disbelief and confusion like I imagine most people did, and I almost couldn’t think about it or my children at the same time. Later that morning, I scanned the Internet for more information, the kind of information that we need to construct a narrative that makes reality possible again. I realized it was not going to be available anytime soon, but I had to get to work, so I took a moment to meditate and live in the grief and despair, to offer my own helplessness up to God in prayer and to seek forgiveness for any lack of love in my own life that may be contributing to a world in which such grave sins befall us. And then I got to work.

My grief began to ebb from that point, as it must have done if I was going to go on living. My sympathy with the parents, families, friends, and citizens of Newtown, however, was necessarily distant. The only route from my experience to theirs is one of imagination—of moral imagination, even. A fictional narrative of the trauma of a child’s injury or death will never be identical to the actual experience (who would want it to be?). But it may have the power to bring one closer to that experience than any process of reflection could. I certainly felt the gravity of losing a child via the fiction much more powerfully than I did via the Internet.

The scandal of such a claim is actually that it seems so old, so dependent, apparently, on a mimetic theory that judges art by its consonance with some pre-existing reality and that comforts itself with the illusion that art provides real presence. This theory undergirds Aristotle’s account of catharsis, for instance. As Romantics like Coleridge realized, though, art need not imitate the reality of our senses so much as the reality of our human or moral nature, the kind of being all artists and audiences share by virtue of consciousness.

This is not, I think, the same as presence. I don’t know if Aristotle thought it was, but the Augustans of the 18^th century seemed to. They didn’t make strong distinctions between the sympathy you feel for a person and the emotions you experience in literature. But this is problematic, and not because it treats reality like fiction but because it treats fiction like reality. It’s actually quite important that fictions are not real and that we know they are not real. There are some realities that we cannot quite process—that’s why we have trauma and repression. One of literature’s powers is to create a play-space wherein we can actually begin to feel traumatic emotion and to work through it alongside characters, through a narrative, or through the accumulation of and relationships among tropes—those revealing “twists” of reality we sometimes call images. The whole point of this play-space is to shift the stakes to the level of moral imagination, away from the deadly seriousness of our everyday physical survival.

Aristotle had an insight like this when he compared the pleasure of imitation in theater to the pleasure children take in imitation. And, just like when children play, this kind of imaginative engagement is not escapism but something more like therapy, art’s way of helping reconcile us to our reality, and if it returns us to the high stakes of life a little sadder and wiser, it also helps us to get back on with the business of life.

This is Relief, however, not the Midnight Diner, so there won’t be any zombies or the like. The works in here all act more subtly, inviting you into another’s experience and offering the opportunity, for those who will let the words work on them, to have an experience, to be taken somewhere and to return to a point different from your departure. To approach the world of someone trying to find a normal life after breast cancer, to deal with a rape in a small town and a mother’s anxiety about her daughters, to see a biblical tale anew as a miracle of moral action.

In the wake of a national tragedy, when we are all vulnerable to the impulses born of shock and fear, literature becomes all the more important. When reality becomes unreality it is in fact most real, the veil of comfort is ripped away and the world appears as perverse and inverted as it actually is. Good literature serves as the survival guide for this post-apocalyptic unreality, from which it will not let us escape. Every time apocalypse fires a warning shot across the bow of our complacency, we can choose to respond with the violence of our illusions or with the ennobling force of visionary art. May this issue of Relief serve you well as the world marches on towards its end.