Nobody's Looking

My grandmother went white water rafting for the first time in her fifties, and my aunt began painting and owling in her forties, and another went back to school in her thirties to earn her bachelor’s degree and then her master’s. 

So maybe it’s in my blood, but a month ago I found myself in bare feet and tights in a dance studio, facing the mirror. I’d signed up for a six-week workshop: introduction to modern dance. I’m no stranger to dance studios; in my thirty years, I’ve had about twelve years of ballet classes — in college I went two or three times a week — and even own a pair of pointe shoes from a class I took when I was about twenty. I’ve never been very good at ballet, because my body is close to, but not quite the right type: I’m built a little too close to what women’s magazines call “athletic,” slim but not quite slim enough, and my hamstrings have always been preposterously tight.

Modern dance always intrigued me, though — I make a point to see a lot of it — and so, there I was.

And one week in, I was googling, “Can adults become advanced modern dancers?” I could already tell it was far different from ballet, more about the movement and the rhythm and gravity than hitting the right shape over and over. I was grinning by the end of the first class, enjoying the movement and the feeling of freedom. Just to hold out your arms and spread your fingers and fling yourself around a bit, all to music: it’s wonderful. It’s freeing. It actually really feels like dancing.

That said, any time I start enjoying something, realizing I’m sort of okay at it, I want to set a goal: publish an essay, teach a class, run a half-marathon. Within a week, I was already thinking, This is something I could do. I could really be a modern dancer. For fun, of course, but still. Something about putting my hard work out there in the open where other people can see it makes it real. Right?

Is the work really worth doing if nobody notices?

So I guess maybe that’s the next new thing I need to pick up as an adult: doing the work of learning something new for the sheer joy of it.

(Photo by Lois Greenfield)

The Life of the Local Instagram Celebrity

I followed this blonde woman on Instagram. Her life seemed like an unending vacation: bikini pictures with beautiful friends on white sand beaches, cocktail parties on high rises with cityscapes in the background, jungle hikes to secret waterfalls. I thought she was a local celebrity of sorts, popular and adventurous. I thought maybe I’d meet her someday. Actually, I did.

At work I was called in to the Emergency Room to help a patient without any insurance. I found her lying on a bed, high on drugs. I asked her the necessary questions for the paperwork. “I’m broke,”she said. I couldn’t believe it was her. In her social media profile she was so put together, so perfect. I didn’t imagine this scene in her life would make it onto Instagram.

How do we navigate the complexities and nuances of ourselves? How do we share our lives full of mistakes and sins? It’s not only that we like to broadcast the best story of our selves. It’s that we’re unable to reconcile how to tell the actual story of our life with cultural expectations. So we don’t tell those stories. The truth, we think, is too much. We create unrealities, fictions, because telling stories, the full story, the real story, the ugly story, is too damn hard.

In the Gospel of Mark, when an unclean woman tries to sneak in through the crowd and get healed, Jesus turns around and calls her out. “Who touched me?”The woman, now healed through the power of Jesus, could have snuck off into the crowd, could have hemmed and hawed, said it was an accident. She could have continued her new, healed life without the crowd knowing who she really was or what she had done, what kind of uncleanliness had defined her for so long. But she doesn’t hide her story, her shame, her struggle, her embarrassment. And Jesus, as he’s wont to do, redeems her.

There are tools at our disposal that allow us to tell the real story. Specifically Scripture informing the Christian imagination, and the miraculous work of Christ giving new hope and new life. It’s not Instagram filters or Snapchat stories, but a language and an opportunity to spread the joy of redemption. There is hope in our truth, the truth we can bring to Jesus. That’s a story worth sharing.

Angry at Andalusia

All my pilgrimages are improvised en route –– last minute treks to hallowed sites I never expected to discover along the way. The pilgrimage to Milledgeville, conceived while passing through Georgia the instant I glimpsed the town’s name on a highway sign ––“That’s where Flannery O’Connor lived. We’ve got to go!”–– couldn’t be researched adequately during the twenty-minute detour owing to a weak cellular signal, but no matter. There would be a bronze statue, I figured, probably in the town square, and a bookstore in which to purchase yet another copy of the collected works. Would there be souvenirs, trinkets –– a Misfit t-shirt, peacock keychains, Made in China ball caps bearing the author’s image? I certainly hoped so. Kitsch is not my thing, but for O’Connor kitsch I will make an exception.

We arrived in the rain and had to scour the city for any sign of her. Up and down the stately streets, through downtown and across the glistening cobbles and genteel columned buildings of the university campus, we could discover no indication, however minor, that Flannery O’Connor had ever set foot in the place. No statue, no square, no cottage industry catering to literary tourists. What Milledgeville wants you to know is that it was once the state capitol. That it was once home to the state’s greatest author appears to be a matter of relative indifference.

Eventually we came across Andalusia, the O’Connor homestead, out on a highway across from a car dealership, its location pinpointed by several mismatched signs. By now it was past six and the front gate was locked, so we contented ourselves standing on the muddy drive, gazing down the curved path until it disappeared in the trees.

Ours was the sort of pilgrimage that might have pleased Flannery, I suppose. She might have made a story of it, with myself the object lesson. Still, I grew frustrated, resenting the town for not taking more decided measures to honor the great writer’s memory.

“If this is what she gets,” I told myself, “you can’t hold out much hope for yourself.”

In a parking lot a week later, still unsettled by the abortive pilgrimage, I sat with the engine running and listened to a recording of O’Connor reading her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Her accent is divine, and the 1950s audience laughs in the right places, a comedy club crowd right up to the moment the story takes its turn, at which point an awkward silence descends. Police sirens echo in the background of the recording, and I felt annoyed (as Flannery herself must have at the time). Couldn’t they have been more considerate, these cops? Bank robbery or not, it was hardly worth spoiling a rare recording of the author’s voice.

My silly anger spilled over onto Milledgeville, which could also stand a lesson in consideration, then spread to encompass the whole state of Georgia past and present, then the nation. (“This country doesn’t honor its literary greats. Those sirens would never have sounded in France.”) Eventually I was mad at the world.

“Why are you so worked up?” I asked myself, but myself was not forthcoming. It had nothing to do with the sirens, anyway, or with the closed gate or the statue that isn’t in the town square. I suppose I was angry at history more than anything, the way the marks we leave –– regardless of how large they loom in the mind –– don’t make much of an impression on the actual world. They’re as easy to miss as a sign opposite a used car lot marking a muddy path down which, an hour earlier, you had no intention of traveling.

“The Unforgettable Fire:” Human Destruction, God’s Judgment, and Our Refuge

Seeing U2’s "Gloria" video for the first time changed my life; I was amazed that these four seductively scrappy Irish lads were singing so overtly about Jesus, and that the music was not formulaic, cheesy, or sentimental. It had an honest, raw, edge—and this seemed to match its message. When watching and listening, I let out a junior high sigh of relief without even understanding why. Perhaps I first understood my desire to see the jagged edges of our reality reflected in art by those who endeavor to have a relationship with the author of a Reality beyond those jagged edges.

The title of U2’s fourth studio album, 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, is grounded in the painful history of our collective ability to destroy ourselves and others; the album title was taken from a 1982 exhibit at the Chicago Peace Museum of artwork painted and drawn by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb dropped in 1945 was an unforgettable ball of fire to those that were physically and emotionally damaged by its power of fragmenting destruction.

The U2 album that takes its name from the exhibit refers both directly and indirectly to the human capacity for inward and outward violence, including such harrowing topics as heroin addiction (“Bad”), racism and murder (“Pride”), and the sad decline of a cultural idol (“Elvis Presley and America”). But the title track itself, a deeply evocative song full of longing, sadness, and hope, does not initially seem to specifically allude to the exhibit or tragic event that gave it its name.

But on revisiting both the song and video through a lens of Psalm 46 (a line is quoted in the song itself), I would have to disagree with the many music critics and fans that share this view. Although the lyrics are admittedly cryptic in many parts, they make sense on an emotional level—and this emotional richness is intensified by the video’s images. Both the song and the video open with a vivid image of “these city lights”that “shine as silver and gold.”The song also speaks of the seductive lights of a carnival where the “wheels fly and the colors spin”. Yet as the music builds dramatically, we see video images of a fairground ride transforming into an exploding atom bomb and a cityscape that is struck by lightening before experiencing a violent rainstorm.

Yet directly after these images of violence and destruction, Bono alludes to Psalm 46: 2 as he sings “And if the mountains should crumble or disappear into the sea, not a tear, no not I.”But how does any of this of this relate to the bombing of Hiroshima? Psalm 46 speaks about the “trouble”that we must endure on this blood stained, war loving earth—but that God Himself will bring “desolation”to the earth as “He breaks the bow and shatters the spear.”In a sense, the Psalm speaks of God’s judgment and his ushering in of justice and peace, putting an end to human cruelty and injustice.

At the very beginning of “The Unforgettable Fire”video, just as we see Bono’s grief-stricken face against a dazzling cityscape, we also see the rising of a blood-red moon. In one of the accounts from the exhibit titled The Unforgettable Fire, a survivor drew and described a moment when “the sun appeared blood-red in the dark sky.”We also read in Acts 2:20 and Joel 2:31 that “The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood”before the “Day of the Lord”comes. In these allusions, the video opens by alluding to both human destruction and God’s judgment.

The same city that we see throughout the video is emblematic of modernity’s narrative promise of an efficient, comfortable, and exciting heaven on earth. Later, the members of U2 descend into the bowels of the city itself as they walk into a large blue-tinted factory space; here we see the promise of technology. Soon after, we see the carnival ride explode in a mushroom cloud and realize that the same seemingly messianic technology that produces our amusements, also enables us to annihilate other human beings as we appoint ourselves false gods of this earthly “paradise,”the city. As the lightning strikes and the rain waters come down, the video alludes to even more biblical narratives of God’s judgment against those who have taken this heretical role.

The video’s images are not, however, only of the doomed city; as Bono sings that one should “walk on by, walk on through,”we see a transition to a shot of The Edge walking a lonely, snowy path in an open space. We see the same beautiful scene as Bono sings“I am only asking but I think he knows. Come on take me away, take me home again….”. Although the mysterious lyrics do not name God, there is no other reference point that would possibly explain the mention of a knowing “he.”

Towards the end of the video, there is a striking image of Bono’s face, illuminated by a flame, superimposed over another image of the band warming their hands over a fire in a snowy field. As Larry Mullen, Jr. smiles, we see the familiarity and connectedness between the band members, the only moment of warmth and joy in the video. As the video and song both end, Bono tells us to “save your love,” and we see the same serene face dimly light by a constant fire. Perhaps the title “The Unforgettable Fire”has a two-fold meaning: it alludes to both the horror of the A-bomb, its image forever burned into the psyche of its survivors—but it also alludes to the eternal fire, giver of life, warmth, and illumination. Just as Psalm 46 tells us that God is a refuge and fortress, a constant source of strength that we will know profoundly if we can “be still,”“The Unforgettable Fire”video reminds us that justice will be done, that even if “the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea”there is a constant source of strength and calm.

What Communicates

When my two-year-old wants a drink he says, “Up. Up.” When he needs my help with something, he also says, “Up. Up.” “Gra-gra” can mean motorcycle, cracker, airplane, or Grandma. When he says “Oosh” he may mean he wants juice or that he wants to put on his shoes to go outside. If he goes, “Zha-zha,” he may be talking about his sitter, Andrew, his favorite person, Suzie, or the Frozen soundtrack. He refers to himself as “Unh-unh,” but he may do so to indicate that he wants the same treat his brother just received or that he wants to walk in front of the stroller. About the only things he says that don’t have multiple possible meanings are “Mama,” “Dada,” and the sign for hungry.

The wonder of raising a child is that all these things actually communicate. They don’t always work smoothly or without confusion and false starts, but they usually, ultimately, work—I eventually figure out the proper interpretation of his sounds and my son gets his needs met.

Working at a Christian college, I think a lot about interpretation. Protestant thinkers, in particular, are very concerned with interpretation because it seems to represent a problem of getting at the truth. James Smith, in The Fall of Interpretation, engages some major figures for whom interpretation was not part of the original creation and will not be a part of the restored creation. For these thinkers, we don’t want to interpret; we want to just know. Interpretation doesn’t produce the certainty that we want to base our lives upon.

But Smith argues that interpretation would seem to be part of being a finite creature, and though Heaven may entail the conferral of eternal life, it doesn’t obviously entail the conferral of infinitude. To become infinite would be to become equal, intellectually, to God. It doesn’t sound right when put that way, does it?

Part of the trouble is training our minds to get away from a propositional truth and into something different that still preserves the authority of truth. The medievals thought our propositions about God were at best analogically true, that is, were true enough but unable to express the whole truth, but since the scientific revolution, we have wanted to have a propositional truth that was adequate and complete.

Actual language use teaches us otherwise. In the relatively trivial truth that my son wants popcorn or to ride the swings, what communicates does so not because we have found a precise and complete language but because we have worked out a language game within the context of our relationship. The truth of his needs extends well beyond his ability to express it, but we make up for that through knowing one another.

That word "context" was a big problem in the late-70s/early-80s when Jacques Derrida appeared to suggest that, because context can never be finally pinned down, meaning itself is impossible. Smith patiently explains that Derrida never actually made any such self-contradictory claim, but that he in fact was emphasizing the risk of communication, namely, that it won't communicate. Consider how many of our jokes are about failed communication or miscommunication. Every attempt to speak to another exposes our speech to interpretation, but amazingly it works more often than not.

Comedians make us laugh at miscommunication because it is, at times, a source of anxiety and insecurity. But I'm not sure it has to be a scary idea for Christians, however. Extended to the Bible, it suggests interpretation depends on our relationship with God and with the Christian community rather than the direct communication of the translated words. Don't we already believe that? Maybe the problem is that we feel like God is the two-year old saying, "Oosh," and we're stuck trying to figure Him out. Maybe we should assume we are the ones going, "Gra-gra," and have faith that God is able to interpret our ill-expressed needs.

Edge Effect

“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying,” ~ Pablo Neruda

Life liquefies at the shore. The apparent boundaries of unique eco-systems collide in powerful, beneficial exchange. In landscape architecture we call it edge effect. It is primordial. In Genesis, it happens in three acts of separation: dark from light, water from water, and the lower waters gathered from the ground. The waters are called sea, and the dry ground, land, and it was good. It was good. The dynamic shore. Edge effect.

My wife and I are an it. We are in our thirtieth year of it-ness and will celebrate this year in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine, and with thanks and hope, we will contemplate the mysterious lobster. Blessing and prospect are clearer at the shore. A few Saturdays ago we went to Indian Rocks Beach. As we walked from the public parking lot and crested the dunes I was astonished by the hundreds and hundreds of us already gathered, sunning, running, sheltering ourselves from the bright sun. We all looked helplessly bipedal ambling north and south on the shore. The birds and breezes moved where they would. But we were fixed within a ribbon of sand and shallows as far as we could see. The flat, wet land accentuated our lengths, walking foot to foot with our reflections posted beneath us as if on the sky. We walk for a time, though we'd swim like fish if we had gills, fly like birds, given wings. Edge effect attends to prospects.

Pelicans are the ungainly gods of Indian Rocks. Everything about them is other. Clumsy on land they are made for water, and there they are lightly buoyed, bill to breast, resembling some sea-born monk, bobbing. Then convulsing, thrashing the water with fearful wings, they break with physics and glide the currents. The one I watched saw beneath the water to fish, folded itself and scissored violently into the gray waves, rose to the surface, clapped its bill and swallowed, bobbing again. I made some frantic notes. How shall we be convinced of a transformation we can taste except in the desire exposed by a force of limits? How shall we imagine it without strange beings that transgress those boundaries before our eyes? Edge effect glimpses the imagined place.

The Spanish word for pelican is alcatraz. Alcatraz Island was named for its pelicans. In 1827 a French Captain wrote "...running past Alcatraz's Island [it is] covered with a countless number of these birds. A gun fired over the feathered legions caused them to fly up in a great cloud and with a noise like a hurricane." The eponymous prison would have been the right place for a penitentiary, but it was a prison with windowless cells. It housed the least penitent of those in the Federal prison system. As was said, “If you break the rules, you go to prison. If you break the prison rules, you go to Alcatraz.”Inmates lost their names to a number. The last inmate to leave when it closed was AZ-1576, Frank Weatherman. He said, “It’s mighty good to get up and leave. This Rock ain’t good for nobody.”Today, even the pelicans are gone. Edge effect has its limits.

As Saturday ends the earth hurtles eastward toward the dark. Gulls chide in last flights and the tide licks our feet. We sit quietly on the sand, listening, and watch the western sky.

Intercessions

At 4:30 a.m., the respiratory therapist wheeled his apparatus through the open door. The order called for medicated oxygen to be forced into our five-year-old daughter’s lungs. For the treatment to work, the seal of the mask over her mouth and nose would have to be airtight.

“No, thank you,” Maddie murmured as he tried to fix the strap behind her head. She pulled away, and broke the seal again and again. By then, she’d been awake for eighteen hours. A failing lung had made her breathing shallow and rapid.  Sleep was all she'd wanted, but strangers kept breaking in, jolting her awake: red strobed light, motion, punctured skin.

The technician grew impatient. Again he held the mask against her skin; again she wriggled free. He straightened his back and let out a breath, which was when my wife snatched the mask from his hand, clambered through the tangle of tubes and wires, and huddled close to her daughter’s body. She drew the mask toward her own face and held it there. She breathed. She smiled. She placed it back upon the air between them. “Please,” she said. "We need to do this.”

My daughter’s eyes were wide with recognition. She nodded. The seal held.

She was not cured overnight. We remained in intensive care for two more weeks, including the ten days and nights she lay intubated beside us, forced asleep as the ventilator breathed. There were, to use the word that doctors do, many interventions to come. But the one my wife performed that morning — the one compelled by love so selfless and savage it cannot help but interpose between life and death — is the one that taught our daughter not to fear.

Earlier that year, my senior class and I had read a Raymond Carver story, about a couple who lose their child in an accident, and, disoriented by distress and misplaced anger, find themselves in a bakery, where the owner, a relative stranger, absorbs their anger and takes them in. He offers them a place to sit, a shared space in which to be still, and a warm loaf of bread. “You have to eat and keep going,” he tells them. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”

And then those same seven seniors from our small school appeared at our door at St. Francis, with a bag of pears, and coffee, and handmade cards.

And all of this comes to me now, intervenes, when something in me wants to wallow only in the wounded part of time, wants to feel that life is made of loss and the fear of losing. It wakes me from my torpor and turns me toward my daughter, reading here on the patio with me, seven years nearly to the day when her lungs were proven clear.

(Painting by Edward Knippers)

Other People's Stories and My Own Meaning

I keep a personal blog in which I sometimes quote part of a good book, and then I write a brief comment on it. When I read a novel by Pearl S. Buck called The Time Is Noon (1966), I knew I couldn’t write about it. I loved it, but I wasn’t going to admit that publicly. A few weeks later, the story festering on me, I wrote about this quote from The Time Is Noon:

“She was making her life, shaping it about the children. One had to take life and make it, gather it from here and there–yellow curtains, carrots, a bed for a little boy, milk for a sick baby, sheets of music to write, her unfinished child, a house–out of such and everything she would make her life. And underneath was the strong sustaining web of love unspoken. What if it were unspoken and unreturned? A phrase came flying out of her childhood, her father, from the pulpit, reading, “And underneath us are the everlasting arms.” She had caught the phrase then because it was lovely, listening to him idly in the careless fullness of her childhood. But now when all childhood was gone she could take the beautiful words, like an empty cup, and fill them to the brim with her own meaning, her own secret meaning.”

You see, the book is about Joan, a pastor’s daughter, and the beginning of her adulthood. Though her relationship with her devout father grows, even beyond his death, her relationship with God stops. She denies there is a God. She chooses to change the meanings of spiritual things to suit herself. The problem with all this… I sympathize a great deal with Joan. And that makes me uneasy because I do not deny God. I don’t know if I ought to admire and relate to Joan so much.

And yet, the book has its charms, drawing me into the story, into Joan’s life and her family. Perhaps I can take the story, like an empty cup, and fill it to the brim with my own meaning. I don’t have to remain true to the unfaithful spirit of the book. I can bring my own faith to the story and see how despite trials and deaths and unwise choices, my story differs from Joan’s. My triumph is everlasting, while her triumph is something lovely but fleeting.

- Guest Blogger, Amy Krohn / Read more of her writing in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.

Creative Process and Rest

Most Bibles say that God rested on the seventh day of creation. “Rested” is a good word. I have always imagined God relaxing on Sundays — maybe kicking back in an armchair and watching the world progress, or maybe taking a Sunday nap. It’s a nice image.

“Rest” is a pleasant word, but the original text implies a much deeper rest than mere relaxation. What we translate as “rest,” the word shavat, may more accurately be translated as “abstained.” The 12th-century Torah scholar, Nachmanides, interpreted the passage to read “[God] ceased to perform all His creative work.” God’s rest, then, surpassed kicking back in a lawn-chair for an afternoon — God stopped creating entirely. He stopped his processes. He Rested.

To relax is hard enough; Resting is nearly impossible. The body may be still, but the mind goes on, full tilt. We rarely indulge in the Rest that was part of God’s creative process.

That lack of Rest is to our detriment. Studies are beginning to show that our contemporary disdain for true Rest — our immersion through technology, to news, to each others’ social lives, to our work — has a huge, negative effect on everything from our sleep cycles to our manners to our creative abilities. We are, as Tolkien wrote in The Fellowship of The Ring, “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

It was with this thought that I left for the mountains to traipse around Asheville with a large group of friends. It was not a restful weekend. We climbed waterfalls, we toured pubs, we sat around a fire pit and hacked small trees into firewood with hilariously inadequate hand-tools. We watched a rockabilly band in a dive bar and sampled hoppin’ john from a cook with a black eye and a crocodile mask. We collapsed into bed, exhausted, every night and rose again each morning with full schedules. We did not rest, but we Rested. We set aside worries about work, endless social feeds, familial obligations, and personal stressors to fully enjoy the beautiful surroundings and the companionship of others.

And what a difference it has made. Now firmly ensconced in my regular routine, I again find myself planning projects and chores when I should be relaxing. I worry, as usual, about deadlines and relationships and obligations. I fret about not sleeping enough which, humorously, prevents me from sleeping. But now I have the energy to do so; I have mimicked God’s seventh-day practice. I am no longer butter scraped over too much bread. I have Rested.

How do you tell yourself the story you're in?

How do you tell yourself the story you're in? “Literature differs from life,”says James Wood, “in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice.”In time, the amorphous details will fall into place, or else we’ll forget them. We will be able to frame our life in narrative. The purpose of our pain will be revealed. But until then?

Photographer Uta Barth says “people are slightly puzzled by how to relate to [her] work, because it doesn't give them any of the things that a traditional photograph would give them.”What the photographs offer is basic: light. Light shining onto a wall through a window. Light that is usually the background, or an accent, cropped so that this periphery is now our focus. Her photos are clean and well-composed. The plays of light she captures are familiar. Initially, it seems too ordinary.

Barth makes her viewers aware of the act of seeing. It is the initial confusion, the “questioning and reorientation" that is "the point of entry and discovery....The 'meaning' is generated in the process of 'sorting things out.'"

I find myself now noticing the way light falls on my carpet, the way it composes itself on my wall, shifts and fades throughout the evening. This is more useful to me than encouragements that eventually, I will look back on my life and it will be a grand story. Will this longing be fulfilled? Will I outgrow it? Maybe I don’t need an answer. I can notice the amorphous details without explaining them. I am at a point of entry, and right now, that’s meaning enough.

(Photos by Uta Barth)

The Holy Going, Writing as Exploration

Annie Dillard’s essay “Expedition to the Pole” takes two threads— observations from a real or imagined Mass at her local church and details she culled from historical records of failed expeditions to the North and South Poles—and begins winding them together in alternating blocks of prose. Her deft juxtaposition creates a third thread, at first invisible, to make a remarkable weaving which turns its nose up at the flattening simplification of allegory and rises above the common mystery of metaphor and seems to strain for the hallowed ground of the parabolic.

God knows one of the last things we need in the world is another reductive division of humanity, one more faulty ‘us vs. them’ delineation to add to the heaping bag we are carrying around. Just for a minute, though, and just for fun, let’s say there are two kinds of writers: those that adhere to the ‘write what you know’ creed and those that are in the ‘write what you want to know about’ camp. There are fine and enjoyable writers on either side of that fence, but my favorites are those skilled (and brave) enough to take both imperatives in hand and set off blazing a different track in the wilderness.

Early in the essay Dillard references the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. Wikipedia tells us it is “a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline. The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon. Subject to varying definitions, it is of interest mostly to explorers.” Her essay becomes, right in front of us, a writer’s travel diary of her expedition toward that Pole. With what she has known and lived in one hand, and what she believes is out there and wants to know in the other, she goes, and asks us to join her, not just as readers, but as fellow explorers.

At one point she makes the aside: “There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception is.” So, shall we let her lead us, or would you like to cut drifts in the snow for the rest of us awhile?

Our Violent Muse

The universe is no narrow thing. - Cormac McCarthy, from Blood Meridian

Violence is a fitting theme for depravity. It paints lavish images of darkness in books like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and NBC’s new drama about Blackbeard, Crossbones. I've been following Sundance’s Rectify since last year, its first season. While the violence makes it difficult for me to stay with it, I keep returning because the characters and story are intriguing, the same reason I stayed with the other titles I mentioned.

In Rectify, Daniel Holden has just been released from death row after 19 years for the death of his 15-year-old girlfriend, Hanna. New DNA evidence clears him and he awkwardly attempts to re-enter relationships with his family and small community. At the end of season one, a group who knows the truth of Hanna’s murder leaves Daniel beaten nearly to death.

I look for something redemptive in a violent book or show and I wonder if the writers of Rectify will use the violence to point to something beyond itself. But do they need to?

When Harold Bloom speaks of the violence in Blood Meridian, he doesn't talk about it in redemptive terms. Bloom says, “The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate...the book is the ultimate dark dramatization of violence.”So he says the book dramatizes violence, but he doesn’t unpack any insights for us about the violence.

Violence can point to something greater, and artists have used it in this way for centuries. In his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, Malcolm Guite talks about the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. The poet was intent on explaining the gospel to Saxon warriors. He used a myth his audience was familiar with (about violence Odin endured on the tree Yggdrasil) to shed light on the violence Christ suffered on the cross. By doing this he in a sense redeems the violence for a significant purpose.

David Lynch did a masterful job of bringing redemption our of violence in Twin Peaks. I’ll try not to give away the story, but the rescue of the last victim in a line of serial murders involved sacrifice. Does sacrifice have to occur for violence to be considered redeemed? Maybe the writer/director doesn’t exactly have spreading the gospel as a goal, but is the gospel inherent in a myth or story that shows sacrificial rescue?

I love this phrase the Anglo-Saxon poet uses in his poem: “forwunded mid womum.”Guite translates it as “deeply wounded by defilement.”Mankind’s defilement does wound, very often through violence. The violence of prison life and violence done by a handful of the town’s people in Rectify is a fitting frame to see not just Daniel who is wounded by defilement, but his family, and the ones who are wounded by their own violence against Daniel. Should the use of violence in Rectify be redemptive? Is it enough for it to be a metaphor for depravity? If so, is there a line between gratuitous violence and violence that portrays depravity?

Seeing into the Life of Things, Perspective and "The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper"

While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.                                              -  William Wordsworth

I’ll never forget the feelings I had the first time I saw Salvador Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper”in the stair well of the West Wing of the National Gallery. Replete with my advanced degrees in theology and clear in my worked out apologetics, I, like many others, castigated it for its arrogant docetism, its sarcastic orderliness, its in-your-face anti-intellectualism. There was Jesus with a see-through body, the groveling disciples all bowed in perfect symmetry, the Father with no head. What a horror. What a travesty of the true beauty of the incarnation.

The painting was criticized by as widely disparate authors as Francis Schaeffer and Paul Tillich. Schaeffer accused it of providing a “mystical meaning for life…, a vault into”—in classic Schaefferian language—“an area of nonreason to give [Dali] the hope of meaning”. Tillich, more prosaically, called it “simply junk” in part because of its portrayal of Jesus as a “sentimental but very good athlete on an American baseball team” and a technique that was “a beautifying naturalism of the worst kind” (Michael Novak, “Misunderstood Masterpiece", America).

Dali himself, having embraced Catholicism in 1949 and broken completely philosophically with the Surrealists, apparently felt that he was simply portraying the Lord’s supper—emphatically not the Last Supper—as the miraculous thing that it is: a sacrament, a mysterious meeting of the transcendent God with every day mortals. The transparent Christ demonstrates the “real presence”, though unseen, of the Son of God. The headless Father fulfills the Scripture “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20, ESV).

So now I view the painting differently, but not really. I’m afraid most who see this painting will not have any idea of the painter’s intention. They will simply see a headless God, and think, “Yep. This is a pretty good portrayal of the Christianity I know—ignorant and slavishly medieval.”They will see the blue sky where the Father’s “heart”would be and think, “Just like I think. The church is just a bunch of cold-hearted creeps with no compassion for anyone not like them.” And they’ll see an irrelevant Christ, blond-haired and blue eyed, hand cocked like a faux pistol, and think, “This surfer dude is pretty cool but, man, is he out of touch.”

The painting now has its own life, and that life has a hard time depicting the reality of the suffering, magisterial, triune God to those without eyes to see.

What are you having for dinner tonight?

Last night I watched Babette's Feast, a bowl of luscious Rainer cherries in one hand, a nursing baby in the other. This film is about appetite.

The opening scene shows a small isolated 19^th century village on the Jutland peninsula in Denmark — bleak and gray, yet enchanting. The ocean is close — fish hang drying, slit and bloody. The viewer soon learns that these fish are a staple for this simple community and the family that forms the center of the film — two beautiful sisters and their father, pastor of a small close-knit sect. The pastor is beloved by the community and, though not unkind, is severe, warding off potential suitors with the argument that his daughters are his right and left hands for serving God. The sisters themselves, in fear, deny love when it almost captures them. They instead spend their lives in service to their neighbors, feeding the poor and feeble with simple fare — soaking and boiling the hard, dried fish and making a thick, unappetizing brown soup by boiling dry bread in ale.

A cloaked figure arrives unexpectedly one night during a thunderstorm. She will change the appetite of the entire community. Babette is an exhausted traveler from France. Her husband and son had been shot in the civil war. She has nowhere to go and no ties left to France, except her annual lottery ticket.

Babette finds refuge as a housekeeper with the sisters and takes over their duties of cooking for the poor. She bargains with the local merchants, buying onions and fish, using herbs and making the food tastier. Babette serves the sisters for fourteen years. Then she receives post from France. She has won the lottery.

Around the same time the sisters plan to celebrate their late father's 100th birthday. Although they envision only a small gathering with coffee at the end, Babette clutches the gold cross hanging at her breast and proposes a real French dinner. The sisters hesitate but accept, and then are horrified when shipments arrive containing the preparations. Such riches, such ostentation! It could only be the work of the devil.

The night of the feast, the parishioners gather beforehand to pray. It is obvious that the tight community has become quarrelsome and somewhat bitter in their later years.Their prayer? That God would protect them from the food! They make a pact among themselves not to talk about the food, not to let it affect them.

But it can't be helped. Babette's virtuosity washes over them in waves of wine and delicacies. With each course, another vintage. With each taste, a new world. It is a feast of feasts. Slowly, the faces relax and forgiveness begins flowing.

The simple village folk can hardly appreciate what is placed before them; they have no idea what they are tasting. But one man can — a worldly man, a general, a former admirer of one of the sisters. The general relishes the meal, expressing wonder at each new glass and dish, until finally one course suggests the famous female chef of the most famous Parisian restaurant —Cafe Anglais.

When the meal is over, Babette reveals that she is indeed that chef and that she spent her entire lottery fortune preparing the meal. She gave all, yet she was not sorry for having provided such a costly meal for a group of people without the capacity to properly enjoy it.

This meal also affects you, the viewer of the film. You want to be there. You want to dine with them. You call your spouse and ask for wine on the way home. You want a taste of what they're having — a meal that makes no distinction between bodily appetite and spiritual appetite, a meal Babette turned into a love affair. What are you having for dinner tonight?

Freedom Summer and Poetry

In 1964, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. The summer before, Martin Luther King Jr. had led his famous march on Washington. And in Jackson, Mississippi Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP was shot and killed outside his home. His children were in the house.

That summer, in a civil rights fervor, college students from around the country were bussed into Mississippi from Oxford, Ohio to break Jim Crow’s strangle hold on Mississippi. The 300 students were in their mid-twenties, black and white, self-educated and college-educated.

This summer marks 50 years after Freedom Summer.

I moved to Jackson, Mississippi 8 years ago. I had studied the Civil Rights movement in high school, had read MLK Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. But nothing prepared me for the stark contrast between white and black in the Deep South.

So much has changed, but also nothing has changed. Everybody can ride the bus and sit in whatever seat they would like, but in Jackson, mostly African-Americans ride the bus. The schools are not segregated, but the public schools of Mississippi’s capital city are comprised mainly of African-American students.

50 years ago, the Freedom workers established Freedom Schools throughout the state to teach disenfranchised people their rights. They came to register voters, but they also came to educate. Many of these freedom workers taught poetry.

One such worker wrote in her journal about a student in Indianola on August 17, 1964: “I can see the change. The 16-year old’s discovery of poetry, of Whitman and Cummings and above all, the struggle to express thoughts in words, to translate ideas into concrete written words. After two weeks a child finally looks me in the eye, unafraid, acknowledging a bond of trust which 300 years of Mississippians said should never, could never exist.”(110).

Poetry, but more importantly, the ability to understand the power of words and naming, the subtlety of language that kept so many African-Americans locked in slavery years after it was abolished, broke chains.

Here is one such poem:

A Negro Condition

by Lillie Mae Powell, Pilgrim’s Rest Mississippi

On a day while I was visiting a certain

City this is what I saw. A Negro

Soldier with a broken arm who

Was wounded in the war.

The wind was blowing from the

North; there was a drizzle of

Rain. He was looking from the

Last place; his arm was in a sling.

The Negro soldier didn’t go

Home. He was looking to the east

And to the west. His broken arm

Was in a sling.

I live in a state that struggles with its past, tries to reconcile wrongs done generations ago. The battle lines have been smudged. Fifty years ago, bravery was found in walking across picket lines, in refusing to move, in silent (and sometimes not silent) protest. And in poetry. Always in poetry.

Naming the Silence

Tuesday, I give my junior high ESL classes a simple homework assignment. As you speak English, I say, pay attention to where you fall silent. Notice the words you don’t have English for. Then choose one of those that you think you really ought to know and look up the English definition.

I assign this mostly because my students, who speak Chinese at home, are having trouble wanting to speak English. I want them to start listening, and to be a little curious.

The next morning, the students remind me that they are ready to share their words. For once, everyone has done the homework. Their words are scribbled on small bits of paper: bride, executioner, honesty, forgive, ensue, barrette, vacuum cleaner, voodoo.

Lilith has brought in phenomenon. She says she means a word for “the strange and beautiful clouds.” Phenomenon fits, sort of, but I suspect that her Chinese word is more casual, less scientific. There are so many words like that. Words that fit perfectly in the shells of their original sounds. Words that resist being pried out and served up in just any language.

I help each student pronounce the English they’ve chosen. After I do, the students teach me their Chinese word.

Or rather, they try. Chinese has always been hard for me. My students wave their hands like orchestra conductors, trying to signal the up and down inflections of the Mandarin tones that fit so naturally on their tongues.

It takes a long time for all 19 students to share words. I keep expecting the class to get restless, but they stay focused, listening in a sort of reverent silence.

I’ve been thinking about that silence ever since. That’s just not an everyday mood in a junior high classroom. What made that assignment so different?

I had asked my students to teach me something very personal about their learning, and about their lives. It was something that allowed us to step into each other’s experience. Together, we were naming the silence between us—now we could both say the word in our home language.

Really, poetry is a similar act. As poets, we learn to listen for moments in life for which we don’t yet have language. When we find these unnamed spaces, we translate them for others. It’s not always a perfect translation, but in the act of naming what was a silence, we are drawn together.

- Guest Blogger, Christina Lee (Read her poetry in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.)

Photo by Mikko Lagerstedt

Finding Courage in Community

I love my job. I get paid to read and write and have deeply edifying conversations (i.e. teach classes) with talented and motivated fellow truth-seekers. Despite the difficulties that can arise, I live in the space of Frederick Buechner’s well-known definition of calling: “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”The word “job”doesn’t begin to cut it. I can’t speak a whole lot to other kinds of environments, but teaching literature and creative writing at a small Christian liberal arts school is a lifestyle choice. We’ve worked to cultivate a sense of community that extends well beyond the classroom. Sometimes community unfolds in Reade Center, room 241; sometimes it’s in the dining commons, The Jumping Bean, a van ride back from a conference, a hammock at our retreat, Twitter, or my family’s living room floor.

One of my favorite spaces is the lounge on the second story of the Euler Science Complex, with its massive wall of windows ushering in abundant afternoon light. Tuesdays@2 is our time to sit on couches and take turns reading from new work, old work, favorite books, or miscellany. Based on The Thomas Parker Society, we share poems, essays, and stories. We laugh a lot. We’ve invited guests: last spring, Marilyn Robinson joined us. (In the spirit of Tuesdays@2, she read an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Lila that she’d never before read publicly.) Once in a while, we’ll gather and, after ten or so minutes, it becomes clear that we won’t get to any reading, as the conversations that unfold have proven too important and enjoyable to cut off. And that’s okay with us.

This space and the community that has developed in it give us the courage to face the more difficult facets of our lives at home, in relationships, at jobs, in classes, and elsewhere.

*          *          *

When our students graduate, they leave behind expressions of community such as Tuesdays@2. While that is necessary and good, it sometimes worries me. I’m often in touch with alum who have been thrust into a different kind of space, what Richard Rohr calls “liminal space.”Suffering in a liminal space means you’re not in control; it means your desires are not translating into results. It can feel like a profound loss or humiliation, a step backward. Maybe you’re unemployed or supremely underemployed, or perhaps have taken a good job in a place where there are no friends or connections at all—much less folks who are invested in literature and writing. Even as we celebrate impressive alumni success stories every year, I talk with graduates who have, for a time, become cut off from the kind of art-and-faith community that helped shape their identity.

I’ve been there. And I want to speak now to those who no longer have access to the sacred spaces they once knew, especially those going through deep difficulties.

Suffer. There’s no getting around it. Feel the full weight of the loss without trying to run from it. Punch in to your soul-sucking job if you’re lucky enough even to have one, and be present, attentive to its tasks and to the people around you. Don’t do this because you think that God will reward your good behavior by suddenly making all your dreams come true. Do it because you have no choice. Experience the fear that such primal emptiness brings with it. Has the spark gone out of you? Will you ever thrive again? In the face of scary questions, be yourself, your best self that you want to be when times are better. Decide to be that self right now and moment by moment each day. Go back to the page and get something down, anything.

Though some people need to learn how to be alone, many of us are prone to avoid people when we’re in a dark place. We feel embarrassed about our failures, or think we should wait to meet new people until circumstances are more favorable.

Ultimately you must reach out. Timothy Radcliffe OP writes about “combatting fear by building community.”He recounts the story of Nelson Mandela: “On Robben Island, Mandela and his companions kept their courage alive by sending messages to each other. They hid messages in the false bottoms of matchboxes and left them by the paths; they concealed messages in the bottoms of their slops, and hid them under the rims of the lavatories. Courage refuses isolation.”(What is the Point of Being a Christian).

Obviously, leaving college does not compare to Mandela’s imprisonment and suffering. Wherever we are in our lives, though, we can learn a lot from his utter refusal to be cut off from connection.

Find some people with whom you can build even the smallest art-and-faith community right now. Create your own version of Tuesdays@2. I know several such groups that have existed over the years. (One was called, most appropriately, Come as You Are.) Don’t be discouraged by false starts, awkwardness, or apathy. Keep sending the message however and wherever opportunity opens.

Above all, trust that “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”does not refer only to some decisive dream, some buy-a-house-and-have-kids career move. We must believe that it can be cultivated even here, even now, wherever we are, when we reject isolation and find courage in community.

Worried about your camel?

In the city of Padua stands a church; it's called the Scrovegni Chapel. From the outside the church is not much to look at but the inside is another matter altogether. Every interior wall of the chapel is covered with richly colored frescos. The frescos are the work of the Florentine master Giotto di Bondone. Together they tell the story of Christ.

The most famous fresco in the chapel is The Kiss of Judas, but my favorite is The Adoration of the Magi. I stare at the painting. I think of the magi on his knees, deeply worshiping as he kisses the feet of the baby Jesus. I think of the other two magi, clutching their gifts as they patiently wait their turns. I think of Mary and Joseph taking it all in, marveling that men would travel so far for an infant so small. And then there's the young attendant at the far left. Do you see him?

The invisible has become visible.

The infinite has become finite.

The Word has become flesh.

The resplendent miracle of God is in the arms of a virgin, yet it all goes unnoticed for a man worried about his camel.

Beauty and Saving the World

 Beauty will save the world.  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the Orthodox Church, from Easter to the Ascension, an ethereal hymn is sung while the faithful partake of Eucharist. The brief lyrics implore all who will, to receive the Body of Christ, drink of the Fountain of Immortality. Assuming this transformation of bread and wine into God-flesh and fluid to be mystically true, one can only wonder why an earthquake doesn’t rupture the flooring or angels crack the rafters wide as we small and salvaged ones string forward like ducks to water to ingest Life itself. I’m reduced to a whisper as I sing, as the beauty, the “high art” of this hymn enmeshed with Eucharist, incrementally saves me.

My composer friend Don Newby explains that technically, the musical setting of this hymn feels the way it does on the human psyche partly because its composer has introduced suspensions—non-chord tones—into the line of music at strategic places to create tension, which is then each time given over to release. To the emotions and unconscious mind, these suspensions and subsequent releases feel familiar, mirroring human experience with its constant tensions and releases, dejection and joy, wretchedness and nobility. The music reflects life’s troubled splendor.

Yet I wonder, is my perception of the hymn’s beauty subjective, or is there something inherent in this piece, as in any work considered high art, that appeals to a common human urgency, consciously recognized or not, which is longing for unity with God. Given exposure to the “Body of Christ” hymn, would an un-churched teenager immersed from infancy in rap music find his throat constricted too, because the need within him for salvific beauty is the same as mine, who was weaned on Bach and sacrament?

Art theorists suggest that true art must ask the Big Questions, and sometimes seek to answer them. “Art should start a fire,” says artist Wes Hurd. If, as human beings, the thing most needed is inner brokenness made whole, sobriety of spirit wrought from turmoil, shouldn’t that be enough to ignite that fire?

Artists Anonymous

A friend recently told me of a ninety-three year old woman she met at an art show in Denver. The woman has painted her entire life and never had an exhibition. She is happy with what she has made and doesn’t care that she hasn’t had a show.

My wife and I recently watched Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, a quiet film about the relationship of art to life. Set mostly in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the movie gazes at and muses on paintings from the European masters. The musings are voice-over narration from a security guard at the museum named Johann—at one point, he stands off to the side while a guide lectures guests at length on Bruegel. Later, as we pan across paintings on the wall, he tells us that many of the paintings are the work of artists who went unrecognized and unrewarded while alive, while others were celebrated. “They hang here side by side,” he says. He then asks if we can tell the difference between them.

The ones who remained anonymous and yet labored on are the ones who fascinate me. I think of Joseph Grand, the hapless writer in Camus’The Plague. Grand works hard every day at combatting the disease, but when he goes home in the evening he works on his novel—actually, he obsessively rewrites the first sentence of his novel, trying to perfect it before he moves on to the next. He tells the protagonist Dr. Rieux that he dreams of a day when editors will read his perfect sentence, stand up shaking their heads in appreciation and say, “hats off, gentlemen.” Yet, knowing how unlikely this is, he labors on in obscurity trying to write the perfect sentence. Rieux calls him the story’s true hero because he has a little goodness and an ideal. His ideal is simply that the work itself is important and worth doing well whether or not anyone ever stands in admiration.

Many of my friends are writers, and artists, and musicians—often all three at once—but I have friends who do various other kinds of creative work. One friend designs and sews funky children’s clothes. Many teacher friends are constantly seeking creative ways to reach their students. A couple of chef friends of mine create delicious and fun dishes. Just like me, they want recognition for what they do well; recognition is not their goal however, not the people I have in mind. They labor on at their creative work for the joy of a thing done well.

If you knew you would never receive recognition for your creative work, would you still do it?

(Drawing by M. C. Escher)