The Ethics of Elfland

In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton wrote a chapter evocatively titled "The Ethics of Elfland," in which he relates how his philosophy of the real world is best mirrored in the world of classical fairy tales (think Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, George MacDonald, or the like). For example, the nature of the world in a fairy tale is magic; for Chesterton, likewise, the real world itself is magic. As he stated, "stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege." The world of the fairy tale and our own world are equally inexplicable in terms of why they are there or are the way they are. Both are equally startling and unnecessary, equally wonderful. Reality is a pure gift. The sun and planets and stars all "hang about" in the sky. Does "gravity" make that fact any more inherently explicable since gravity itself just adds one more thing equally inexplicable in its being and nature as the rest? Is the explanation of gravity any less peculiar, or indeed logically any different — on an ontological level — from saying that a magic spell holds them there?

The being of the world, and of ourselves, cannot be "solved" by pointing to a natural causal chain. Each link is as inexplicable and "magical" in its being as any other. A place where eggs turn into birds and caterpillars transform into butterflies, for Chesterton, is best captured in the language of the fairy tale: "We must answer that it is magic. ... A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. ... The sun shines because it is bewitched." The "magic" of a world that enchants us is not merely an impression but an insight.

The only reason the "real" world is not a realm of "magic" but one that is "disenchanted" (as Max Weber said) or dead is because it has been narrated that way, and it has shaped our consciousness and imagination. It perhaps gives us a sense of complacent calm or control to think of the world as not "magical" in this way, for it calls forth no response from us and we may shape it according to our will. But when we think of a fairy tale as magical and lived life as "just the real world," these are mere abstractions of our minds. The question is, are we going to interpret reality according the "dead" and "humdrum" metaphor of "the real world" or according to the profound depths so well captured in the metaphor of the fairy tale? The modern world sees the universe as dead because it is looking in a mirror at itself — its own abstraction projected onto the world. Yes, the natural world is full of interrelated patterns, but its patterns are that of the artist or the storyteller rather than of the fatalist or determinist.

Chesterton was not disparaging the legitimate place of scientific inquiry and discovery, though he thought that science pointed to a world as magical in its wonders and mysteries as any fairy tale. Rather, he was speaking of the nature of ontology, and the all-too-common fact that we take the being of the world and all its particularities for granted, when they are anything but "granted;” or rather, properly speaking, they are granted, and that's what's so astonishing — we are, they are. As I've quoted Chesterton before, there is within us "a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence" that we search for (Autobiography, 97). He concludes with this:

"Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think ... I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. ... The thing is magic ... Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently."

(Painting by Teun Hocks)

I think this is a metaphor.

In the winter quarter of my junior year of college, I convinced my roommates to run away from school. It was 1973 and I was nineteen years old. We drove from Bowling Green, Ohio to Chicago, and after three days of feeding our stomachs with deep-dish pizza and 3.2 beer it seemed right to feed our souls with a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. We wandered from one gallery to the next, when we stumbled upon a special exhibit featuring the works of contemporary artists. On a far wall was a massive painting of the head of an attractive woman. It was by the American artist, Chuck Close and it was unlike anything I had ever seen.

The painting was highly detailed. I would later learn that most of Close's work from this period was painted in a style called Photorealism. I walked closer. The woman who looked attractive from a distance began to change. Her lips were cracked. Her skin was a bit wrinkled and greasy. I could see open pores, and split ends, and caked makeup. I kept walking closer. I stood in front of the wall-sized painting. Everything was now massive —the cracked lips, the wrinkles, the open pores, the split ends. But I also noticed something else. It was an unexpected beauty. A complexity, and a depth, and a sense of design.

I turned to one of my roommates and said, "I think this is a metaphor."

Becoming Two-Eyed

When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light. ~ St. Luke 11:34

 In accurately rendered Orthodox icons of the Mystical Supper of Christ, both eyes of each of the human subjects present are viewable to the observer. Except one, for Judas the traitor is painted in full profile, a single eye exposed. This is a common iconographic technique, to depict evil persons or the demonic obliquely, sometimes smaller and darker, their faces usually obscured. The use of this artistic form serves as powerful theology in the Church to symbolize spiritual and psychic absence — the half self — the body language version of the inner choice to succumb to spiritual disintegration.

Weak and double-minded though the eleven still were on that fateful night the Lord broke bread in their midst, the hearts of these men were ultimately captivated by Christ, a state never rendered more beautifully than in the ardent bending of St. John’s ear toward the locus of the divine pulse. Judas alone moves outside the symmetry of the circle, his one-eyed view and compulsive, grasping movements signaling a departure from the others’ resolve, to bring themselves calmly and fully to the table, as it were, waiting on Christ.

The tilt of our countenance can say it all, and the eyes really are windows to the soul. The Old French root of our word countenance means to contain. We are each image bearers. But we do not yet participate in the full “weight of glory” that grounds one in absolute boldness to face God directly, a state of heart requiring utter integrity to admit just how broken we really are. Yet in icons, even those in three-quarter profile are considered saints. Christ God, above all things, make us two-eyed.

The Purpose of Evil?

Colin Hanks tweeted that they re-wrote the script for the ending of Fargo, the TV show, multiple times before they gave up re-writing and just went with what they had. They weren’t satisfied, but there wasn’t anything they could do to fix their dissatisfaction. It’s the same dissatisfaction I feel when the closing credits roll. Molly, Gus, and his daughter sitting cozy on the couch. Molly will be police chief soon. Gus earned an award for bravery. Life in Bemidji continues. The bad guy, Lorne Malvo, is shot and killed by Gus — he gets what’s coming — but evil, that persistent thing, is never finally dealt with. Fargo doesn’t know what to do with evil. 

Flannery O'Connor said of her own work, "I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” O'Connor is specifically speaking about her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” where an escaped convict senselessly murders a family: mother, father, children, baby, grandma. Fargo lacks any of the grace O’Connor refers to. In Fargo, death is for the unfortunate, not for those on the verge of eternity. This is why the ending is so unsatisfying: the absence of grace. The only thing at stake is “normal” of life in Bemidji.

The moral of Fargo is about vigilance. Don’t become one of the unlucky ones. But the story of violence should propel us beyond vigilance to a confrontation with the eternal. Not for the sake of normalcy, but for the sake of souls.

What keeps us writing?

I am up this morning, discovering that today will be the first day in many months that the Texas sky is cleared for go on all the blue it can project, and the temperature a wonderful 75 degrees, with not an ounce of wind. Finally.

I fire up my computer and prepare for a day of writing. I notice an email from an author and close friend who provides me feedback on my stories. She writes to congratulate me on my short story Rehabilitation and for it having made it into Relief's 7.2 edition. She writes, "I will miss Jake and Kitty and the early days when their story was being written. Now they belong to the world."

It isn't often that I come face to face with why I sit down in front of a blank slate and write, and more often than not, take walks, brood over non essentials, and spend days procrastinating until something dislodges and I find my way back to letting a story unfold. And then when things really start to happen, and I'm being drawn into another world, into other lives, that I can't be exactly sure where the words and the sentences and paragraphs are coming from. This is why my friend's point that ". . . they belong to the world," hits home.

Only yesterday, I was struggling with a plot issue in a story that has been on my plate for months. It needed something more, and nothing was coming to me. I leaned back and reached for the 2013 Pushcart book, fanned through the pages and found Sonny Criss, a short story by Jeanne Shoemaker. Well, for obvious reasons, with her name almost my own, except for the "r," I had to read it. Forty-five minutes later, I'm crying. I sat wondering, how did she do that. I said to myself, I've got to read this story again and analyze it. I asked, who is this author that can keep me turning pages and bring me to tears in the end? It was then I realized that by studying it, I would steal the beauty of it, take the gift, as it were, and start looking for the price tag.

Maybe, writing is, first and foremost, an imaginative process before it is anything else. The same lesson keeps coming back to me, that the story must come from a place that is beyond my own ability to make happen. No matter what I might do in the way of framing the elements of structure, plot, theme, characterizations, voice, and settings, whatever it is that draws me into the world of language and story, is pure imagination. What else can it be? Apart from imagining, there is nothing to work with. After reading Sonny Criss, I found my way back into my own story and the plot problem disappeared. I saw something deeper in my main character and it was all I needed to let the story achieve is purpose.

So, here I am again this morning knowing that the character Sonny Criss and his Wyoming family has changed me. And, I realize I've been given the gift of introducing Jake and Kitty in the story Rehabilitation, and they too, to find their way into our world.  As for those of us who bleed at our keyboards and worry everyone close to us, we become forever connected with the characters who speak through us, and we offer them like newborns, unique, memorable, and full of purpose. Maybe it's this that keeps us writing, like parents, never letting go of the work we have to do.

(Photo by Fausto Padovini)

- Guest Blogger, Mike Shoemake (Read Rehabilitation in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.)

Dancing the Big Question

A woman and a man are on a stage, hugging as a husband and wife in a kitchen late at night, comforting one another in some common grief. A man from behind walks around and moves their limbs like mannequins until the woman is cradled in her man’s arms. His arms slowly give way and she falls. She immediately jumps up and embraces him in their original hug. The man from outside returns, places her back in her man’s arms. He cannot hold her. She falls. On like this ever more quickly until the outsider is gone and woman is repeatedly hurling herself against her man, who cannot hold her even for a few seconds anymore. She jumps on him and crashes down. She jumps and crashes. This is one of the many unsettling scenes from Wim Wenders’ movie Pina, about late German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.

Although generally critics appear to agree that Wenders’ moviemaking skills are at top form in Pina, it came in for harsh criticism for other reasons. For example, Joan Acocella in the New Yorker believes his use of her early work failed to do justice to the despair of her late work. Acocella also criticizes Wenders’ choice of filming many of the scenes outside. She claims that it removes the feeling of “no exit” that we would feel in a theater setting. “Once the torture is taking place outdoors, you think, Why doesn’t she just walk away from that terrible guy? Why doesn’t she go across the street and get a cup of coffee?”

A homesteader I once knew told me he did not fence in his goats. Instead, he strung a small fence around some of his fruit trees and vegetables, and the goats would stay of their own will, searching for a way to get to the fruit on the inside. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that it is a good representation of why the woman wouldn’t leave. Pina said what she wanted to portray in her works: “What are we longing for? Where does this yearning come from?”

In The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera writes that the novelist’s job is to explore the protagonist’s “existential problem.” This is what Pina does with her dance. There it is, the pieces repeat, just beyond reach. We damage one another as we hurl ourselves at it, but we do not give up. Is the portrayal of humanity’s dogged pursuit of connection one of despair? Or is it hopeful?

Ye are my. . . ?

A little while back, I read a lovely piece by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, “Ye are My Friends.” It got me to thinking about the difference between viewing ourselves as friends of God or servants. To be both is hard. Am I facing tension or something leaning towards the mutually exclusive? I know, I know, we are supposed to “live in the tension,” according to our post-modern friends. Yet, it’s not tension that bothers me, it’s things that seem mutually exclusive. I have long wondered at the varying flavors of doctrine which Christians seem to gravitate towards: taken individually they are okay, but together they seem, at least a bit, inconsistent.

“The keyword of the Christian gospel is not service but friendship,” asserts Macmurray. Indeed he goes on, “I believe, we have been thinking too much in terms of ... service of God and of the world.”

We have!?

This seemed nearly blasphemous to me.

The main trouble Macmurray has with service is that, to him, it is inexorably bound up with the idea of duty.

As any devoted fan of words would, I stopped there and started rifling through the OED for the word “duty.” Here are the primary meanings:

The action and conduct due to a superior; An action due to a feudal superior or lord of a manor; That which is owing to any one (i.e. legally due); Action, or an act, that is due in the way of moral or legal obligation; that which one ought or is bound to do; an obligation.

After getting back into the text – and dare I say that duty isn't looking particularly friendly according to the definition! – Macmurray asked his readers a similar question which I am going to ask you.

Suppose you are sick, not just sick with the sniffles, but ugly sick; the kind of sick that makes all food and drink repulsive (thus you become a fast friend with the toilet bowl and its pleasant and soothing coolness). Now suppose in the middle of a particularly tenacious retching session, you hear me knocking at your door downstairs and telling you in a drawling voice that I had just come from a church service where I was reminded that it is my Christian duty to sacrifice my Sunday plans of fun and merriment and, instead, out of my pious obligation – born of Godly duty – offer my precious time to you.

Now after this charming and inspiring speech which has included the right words, do you feel like graciously stumbling down the stairs, a trickle of sick running down your un-wiped chin, to accept my “sacrifice”? I think you would tell me to go and take my “duty” and “sacrifice” somewhere else – maybe even the hot place. And of course nearly everybody would agree! We would concur, Macmurray suggests, “in friendship the personal things—warmth and intimacy of feeling—must be the springs of action.” Otherwise, such dutiful actions are mere impersonal and cold obligations. One does not help the sick friend out of duty. That’s not what friendship is.

Actually, here is the OED definition of “friend”: “One joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy (not necessarily lovers or relatives).” Duty hardly fits in there.

“The fact,” says Macmurray, “is that in friendship we are beyond law and obedience, beyond rules and commandments. ... [In fact] the more deep and real our friendships become, the more what looks like sacrifice from outside is found to be the free and spontaneous expression of our own soul’s necessity.”

So back to my pondering on servanthood versus friendship when it comes to God: Jesus calls us friends, yet Paul signs off his letters with “the servant of Christ.” What’s more desirable? Maybe Paul was able to remove the duty part of servanthood? Or maybe he was living in the tension, too? I wish Macmurray was here.

(Photo by Elliott Erwitt)

Wake Up

The heat waited till the end this year, but it’s started now. It’s already hard to breathe when you step outside for the paper at dawn. Deep, soupy humidity in September is no more pleasant than it is in June, but the days are noticeably shorter already, and we know fall is coming, with its TV pilots and ankle boots and gallery openings and pumpkin spiciness.

The actual new year begins in January, I know, but this is when I mark the passing of the old and the start of the new. I see children on the sidewalk in their uniforms en route to their new classrooms, and last week I printed new syllabi. I notice the leaves on the still-verdant trees beginning to get crispy. I remember this week as the one in which, eight years ago, I lost my father and married my husband in the space of seven days, where I changed my life status irrevocably.

All this makes me want to make resolutions, to change, to make a new beginning, to clean the windows and see everything more clearly. My Pinterest feed is full of encouragements to be the best I can be and get out there and make my way in the world and become a better me. I can do it, with enough elbow grease. I can claw and scrabble toward the light.

But I’m not so sure anymore that trying is the point. In Ephesians 5, Paul quotes an early hymn from church tradition: “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Or, as Eugene Peterson renders it in The Message, “Wake up from your sleep, climb out of your coffins; Christ will show you the light!” And in his song “All Things New,” Andrew Peterson sings, “Rise up, O you sleeper, awake! / The light of the dawn is upon you. / Rise up, O you sleeper, awake! / He makes all things new.”

So I guess what I need to do is wake up. The renewal part, the new light of the new year’s dawn, is not coming from me.

(Photo by Mikko Lagerstedt)

Envy of Angels

What God must have told Adam makes no sense to us now. The problem, as Robert Farrar Capon saw it around the time of writing An Offering of Uncles, was that we had a sense of space but no sense of place, we always knew what time it was without realizing what it was time for, and we were content to be told what had happened never asking what it had happened for –– never even grasping this was a question that could be asked, let alone answered.

Capon summed up the dilemma with a kind of metaphor. A gray flannel man cruising down the turnpike in his automobile, stopping at one service plaza after another, each of them as identical as it was artificial, on a journey to nowhere through a manufactured landscape.

The solution, Capon figured, or at least the beginning of one, was to go for a little walk.

When you travel by foot the space you’re accustomed to traversing becomes a place again, a landscape you cannot pass through without first entering. This enlarged ground throws up challenges in the form of hills your car would flatten. It slows you down. It tests you. Scenic vistas yield themselves, spots you never would have suspected the existence of when speeding by, but their unanticipated beauties must be earned. On foot, you learn that the best views are only visible to those who arrive at them winded and aching.

My own recent habit of walking has born out most of this advice, though my landscape hasn’t yielded any marsh reeds. Yet. After a month on foot I knew my neighborhood better than I did after six years’ acquaintance from behind the wheel.

Along the way, Capon advises, you should pluck a marsh reed and bring it home with you. Tall as it is, the reed can only be carried like a prophet’s staff, or a king’s scepter. You will feel silly, which seems to be the point. How you get where you’re going matters. It matters, too, what you carry. In surprising ways the journey forms you.

Unlike us, the salaryman of Capon’s imagining still had somewhere to go. His places-become-spaces retained a physical presence at least. They could be found on a map. (And after half a century, if you travel from the generic chain store suburbs of one city to the next, Capon’s critique has lost none of its power.) Our spaces are becoming more ephemeral, though, as they become more virtual.

We travel them without feet and without cars, too. Without bodies of any kind, we find ourselves “present” in places which have no actual location or landscape, places that exist nowhere but the server farm, where they are as apparent to the eye as thoughts are when you gaze at a brain. I’m not sure where the marsh reeds are to be found.

The power of the reed, by the way, isn’t the embarrassment it causes, the make-believe prince or priest you become while forced to carry it. No, the power comes from realizing that there is no cause for embarrassment at all. A priest, a king is what you are. It’s what human beings were made to be.

Dominion over the land is ours by right, and whatever blinds us to the existence of the land, whatever makes us forget it exists or that we exist — that we are more, much more than disembodied desire — whatever does this to us is a usurper. That’s what God was telling Adam, more or less. “Do what you like; it’s yours,” Capon has him say. “Only look at its real shape, love it for itself, and lift it into the exchanges you and I shall have. You will make a garden the envy of angels.”

What we’ve made the land is anything but that, which might explain why we seem to measure progress in terms of removing ourselves from the landscape, even removing ourselves from our selves. The staff and the scepter are as embarrassing to us as the marsh reed would be, perhaps more so. It makes no sense that it was ever otherwise.

(Cover art from the first edition of An Offering of Uncles )

A Little Experiment

At Relief we’re always interested not just in great writing, but in getting that work into the hands of ordinary church-goers—no English degree required. But while plenty of people think of themselves as novel readers or even nonfiction readers, very few people think of themselves as poetry readers; the poetry people are always presumed to be in some sort of world of their own. But this summer I decided to try a little experiment and run a church small group on reading contemporary Christian poetry.

The good news is that it worked. Mostly. Some of what didn’t work wouldn’t have worked with another kind of small group either. But the fact that it worked at all was, frankly, a little surprising. As I think back on the experience, I’ve learned a few things I’ll try differently next time:

1. Go for it. I just submitted the idea without asking anyone. The church leadership was very open to it, and a lot of people were pleasantly surprised by it.
2. Set the bar high and your expectations low. That is, aim for as many people as you can hold, and ask everyone you can, but don’t be surprised if there is more enthusiasm than commitment — especially during the summer months.
3. Meet somewhere comfortable and quiet. A café can be nice but still noisy, and people are more likely to come out to someone’s home, anyway.
4. Choose a convenient weeknight. Most of us, including myself, had a hard time making every Sunday evening, for a host of reasons. Folks are a little more likely to be in “go” mode on a Monday through Thursday.
5. Find the right pace. This will be slower than you want to go and probably a little faster than the group thinks it wants to go. Hopefully this means most people will have the time to read during the week and that you’ll usually leave feeling like there was more to say (which will be true). We usually read 12-20 poems per week and actually talked about 3-4.
6. Empower your group. We began with Tania Runyan’s How to Read a Poem as a nonthreatening entrée into reading poetry, but anything you can do to permit people to respond honestly and candidly is important. I tried to model honest inquiry and authentic enjoyment as well as openness to ambiguity and mystery. It wasn’t easy for everyone, but we generally avoided the anxiety of the “right”
7. Don’t teach, but do lead. I didn’t come each week with any real agenda other than to help folks enjoy poems I also enjoyed and to learn how they responded to new poetry. Thus, I didn’t feel the need to lecture at them, though I sometimes did explain concepts or trends when relevant. What I did try to do, however, was to hold us all accountable to the text. I’d let us wander on a tangent inspired by the text, but if I felt someone was misunderstanding or getting a little loose with their reading, I’d call us back to the text to make sure we had solid footing. Occasionally, I’d see that I was misreading.
8. Our Community Life pastor always reminds us that small groups succeed when their leaders pray. Pray of course for the needs of your group, but pray, too, prayers of praise for the beauty of the written word.

(Painting by Edward Coley Burne-Jones)

Monday Silent Lunch: Learning How to Taste and See the Real

L’Abri Fellowship has the unpredictability, fragility, and sacredness of conversation —real conversation— at the heart of its day-to-day life. But every Monday, the L’Abri community pushes a pause button on its traditional daily “discussion lunch,” and we all eat in silence. Together, but in silence. Monday also happens to be the international L’Abri day of prayer. So from 1-2 p.m. in a Manor House in Greatham, England we try to still our racing minds and anxious movements in order to just “be.”

The L’Abri worker who heads the table always plays a CD of music — usually sacred, often choral — that lasts the entire lunch hour. Some of us read a book, some of us pray, some of us just sit, wondering, thinking. Although we are free to sit elsewhere on the property, as long as we are silent for an hour, I enjoy it most when the majority of students stay in the large dining room; a community of 30-40 people sitting together in silence is something so intimate and fragile and beautiful. And as I sit in the beautiful dining room, sunlight spilling onto the faces of those sitting near the windows, the entire scene becomes somehow more Real.

Immersed in crowded solitude, I am forced to be present, forced to notice. This forcefulness is gentle, not violent, and it comes from simply making a space to be still, to look, to listen. As the scene is filtered through the rich compositions of Tavener, or Part, or Preisner, I see things that I have not seen before, such as the simple, stunningly beautiful red skin of strawberries sitting in a bowl before me. It’s almost like I momentarily gain the attentive eyes of the artist, and I see, as Wordsworth says, “into the life of things.”Looking around at the dining room’s four crowded tables, I am amazed by the diverse beauty, the life, the animating “Image-of-God” soul of each individual. The only response to the overwhelming fullness this gift of seeing brings is a simple “cup runneth over”prayer: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The director of English L’Abri, Andrew Fellows, often speaks about how contemporary Western culture has become “utterly banal” because the capacity for experiencing “things that are rich and profound” has become dulled. We are dulled down daily by repetitive excess consumption, by an endless desire for frenzied entertainment, by the lack of any ability to slow down, contemplate, and savor the present moment like a steaming plate of lovingly made food from a friend’s garden.

Fellows’ comments and my own frequent inability to “see” reminded me of a conversation that I recently had with my doctor after I had started a diet devoid of any sort of processed food or sugar. He told me that once the artificial has been cut out, one can actually begin to really taste again. Fruit will become much more sweet and delicious and we will lose our cravings for the false surrogates.

We all know that the “banal” world of artificial stimulation can dull our taste buds. And it can take away our sight. I am amazed that just by stopping to pause for one hour during a Monday lunchtime, I could taste — and see — again.

Breathing Patterns, Part 2: Exhale

We go to wilderness places to be restored, to be instructed in the natural economies of fertility and healing, to admire what we cannot make. Sometimes, as we find to our surprise, we go to be chastened or corrected. And we go in order to return with renewed knowledge by which to judge the health of our human economy and our dwelling places.

~ Wendell Berry, Home Economics

In Part 1 of this post I introduced you to my morning coffee partner, Joe. We met at the Glen Workshop West in Santa Fe, New Mexico and set out early each day for coffee and fellowship. Dr. Joe Gascho is a cardiologist. He focuses his skill on the cardiopulmonary system, the intertwined inner-workings of the heart and lungs. Joe says that his work relies on “seeing to the limits of the slim spectrum of human vision and knowing what to do.”

Joe looks at echocardiograms –images of the tissue and function of his patients’hearts and by the course of years of practice can distinguish the slightest anomaly from the patterns of health and make the right diagnosis for therapy. “A healthy heart pumps out the exact measure it takes in,”Joe says. As with breathing in and breathing out, there is a moment between those movements when everything changes. In the lungs, oxygenated air is exchanged for carbon dioxide to be expelled. In the heart, blood is pumped to the lungs to be enriched with oxygen the body needs. All in live-giving economy.

Against the perception of his industry, Joe sees his work with two sets of eyes. He watches his patients who trust against the alien context of the medical facilities, the probing tests and the unsettling truth-telling about their condition, in hopes their bodies might be healed and their lives enhanced. So, in addition to the professional, clinical rigor, Joe remembers that each “echo”he views is embodied in a person. He sees the thumbprint of their lives outside the body as it impresses upon the body. He sees them from the inside out as a gift, then transforms the data into poetry, the therapies into image, and bears it to us who too often presume too much about life, health and happiness. As doctor and artist, Joe helps us see how fragile and wonderful we are. He sees hearts as both muscle and part of the poema, or “workmanship,”as “the gift of God”described in Ephesians 2. Echoes that were once nameless, backlit mylar become name and soul –the pathos of broken bodies asking to be restored, and in an imaginative turn, the inspiration and flourish of art.

The week flew and then we said goodbye to the Land of Enchantment. Among the many serendipitous occurrences of my week in Santa Fe was Lewis Hyde's “The Gift” as reading for the plane-ride home. Hyde says, “We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies.”An epigraph quotes this Czeslaw Milosz poetry, “There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth.”

Such inspiration cannot be hoarded, but instead must be breathed into the rhythms of life until sunset and sleep when sunrise calls again. The art of gift practiced within these few breaths and heartbeats given is what it is to be transfigured –the in-breaking faith becomes faithfulness in gratitude –the gift of its fruit to give away.

By what art, calling, and inspiration will you give the gift you have been given?

(Photo by Jerry Uelsmann)

Breathing Patterns, Part 1: Inhale

 Oh, I am out of breath in this fond chase. The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace.

~ Helena, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Breath and heartbeat are gifts we fail to value chasing the enchantments of our professional lives. My most recent awareness of this fact occurred on a week's vacation to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Flights of stairs and sprints between concourses at DFW reminded how out of shape I am. But on arrival in the mountains I woke to true enchantment, at once breathless and inspired. I was at the Glen Workshop West. Glen West is an annual gathering of artists, writers, musicians, photographers, film makers and poets for encouragement, craft and fellowship. It is held on the campus of St John's College, which sits on the western slopes of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. On Monday morning a few new friends and I drove down the narrow, circuitous roads into Santa Fe for coffee, setting a pattern for the week.

Up the mountain. Down the mountain.

It was Joe's idea to go and I was a willing traveler –both of us from the east coast where morning starts hours earlier. He was my bunk-mate in Polyhymnia, the dorm we slept in, and sometimes couldn't sleep in, for a week. Small metal beds, unfitted sheets, coyotes, wee-hour voices in the courtyard, and, one of the nights, all the smoke alarms at once. My heart was located an hour later fibrillating inside the North Face bag in my closet.

Over coffee, we were two and three and four depending on which day it was: theologians, professors, doctors and questioners. Our conversations were often about contemplation as a means of encountering God beyond our intellectual notions, to sharpen our imagination, intuition and sensorial abilities as sources of inspiration and energy, and to gain new directions for work in the world. “I'm learning that it starts with an awareness of breathing,”Joe said.

Inhale. Exhale.

A dozen years ago Joe attended a photography workshop at Kanuga with his first real camera, a Nikon D100 (a gift from his wife) and he was changed. He now talks about his life as “pre-Kanuga”and “post-Kanuga.”In those mountains, his workshop instructor first corrected any self-concept of expertise by sending the class out for several shots and then saying, “Delete the images.”It was a necessary measure in order to see with new eyes. Joe's ability to see beyond the apparent would change to a way “of looking at a thing until you no longer know its name.”One might say, to submit to its essence, or to see its light.

Pre-Kanuga. Post-Kanuga.

We worshiped each day with the whole group. As it happened, Wednesday was The Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. Father Richard Rohr, our chaplain, led our mass. The disciples, he said, would see differently —the Son of Man brightly reconciling the Law and the Prophets, the Father foreshadowing our own adoption as his human children. When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan valley, God says (in the iambic music of the King James Version), “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” At the mountaintop transfiguration, when Jesus is revealed as divine, God says it again, adding, “Hear ye him.”And changed, inspired, they walked down the mountain into vocation.

Author/actor Ben Crystal says of the poetic rhythms of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, “[It] is the rhythm of our English language and of our bodies –a line of that poetry has the same rhythm as our heartbeat. A line of iambic pentameter fills the human lung perfectly, so it’s the rhythm of speech.”

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

           ~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII

Our hearts beating in the space of a breath, inexorably linked in the body they serve. Must we climb mountains for inspiration? In what valley do you hear your call?

Ghost Stories

In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field to ponder and dream; And lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.

— Bvt. Maj. Gen. Joshua L. Chamberlain

Through a tinted window. That is the most common way to tour the fields of Gettysburg. Whether you hop onto one of the bigger bus tours or opt to follow an audio tour in your own car, you can usually grasp the basics of the historic battle in a few air-conditioned hours. Other than the occasional photo-op at a monument or the perusal of an inscription, the whole affair — although interesting — can feel somewhat pedantic.

Recently I had an opportunity to revisit this battleground from a different perspective. Our little group spent the day marching up hills and across fields, following the Confederate advance through those three fateful summer days. The trip overturned my formerly nonchalant perspective. No longer was I a sunglassed surveyor. In some remote way, I became a participant.

Through the journey, our guide carefully tied each step into the historical narrative. A ridge before us was not just “a ridge that troops crossed”. It was the location in which the 26th North Carolina Regiment broke the lines of the Union’s famed (and previously undefeated) Iron Brigade. The 26th lost 687 of their 843 men that afternoon.

But the stories were more often personal than strategic. Here was the spot where Confederate George Washington Kelly was shot after crossing Willoughby's Run with his regiment’s battle standards. Up ahead was the place (nine flag-bearers later) that Col. John Lane was shot through the mouth while holding those same standards, yet lived to lead another regiment. On a different hill, we stood where 19 year old Union Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson severed the remnants of his leg with his personal knife after being hit by an artillery shell. He died hours later of blood loss.

As we moved along in the gory narrative, I could almost hear the soldiers shouting around me, the mass of grey coats surging forward against the blue. The air seemed to ripple with a silent cacophony of gun blasts. The ground cried out with the blood of brothers. Despite a century and a half of distance, the battle’s oppressive weight was still there, nearly tangible in the afternoon haze.

The wraiths within these spaces enveloped me. They left me, not with facts and figures, but with ethereal snapshots: a terrified groan, a rebel yell, a whispered prayer. Data is far more comfortable for me; these ghosts were foreign. A thousand stories strong, they advanced together, filling the empty fields with faces, names, and families.

The echoes of Gettysburg, the poignancies of its moment, are not finally preserved in its maneuvers or numbers — important as those may be. Rather, the heart and soul of Gettysburg is found in its storehouse of narratives, drawn from sonorous tones of old veterans and bloodstained letters pried from cold hands. Through them, Chamberlain’s “shadow of a mighty presence” endures in an amaranthine theater full of tragedy and promise.

Rehearsal Space

chair

It’s coming on autumn. Soon, I will feel compelled to read a poem by Gregory Orr to my senior class. I might ask each of them to read it aloud again for themselves. I will likely do the same in the spring, before they leave.

Ghosts at Her Grandmother's House

It is autumn and I can see the lake
because leaves have fallen.
The distant water becomes blue leaves
on the bare branches of oaks.

I look back at the house:
two empty armchairs on the porch.
She is sitting in one of them, and my wife
is a child in her arms.

I will say this poem for their sakes, but also for my own. To read a poem is to breathe where it breathes, know as it knows. Inhabiting the consciousness of this poem, I become as composed as I struggle to be in life, as capable of seeing and trusting in the endurance of life, as capable of love. To read such a poem is a rehearsal.

After all, I am standing outside a house that holds few or no memories for me, within the gathering cold of a season of harvest and dying, and the rhythm of my perception is so untroubled, I feel at home. In such stillness, I am given to see living water, present to my sense precisely because the apparent fell away. In apprehending this moment, what’s far grows near. Distant blue (that mirrors sky and holds life unseen) limns the weathered trees before me. The convergence is so complete — conflating, as it does, earth and sky, water and air — it should shock my cognition, disorient, leave me bewildered, but the rhythm goes on being serene. The images that arrive are of deep rehabilitation, and they come as though expected: ghosts, guests. The attended imagination, I understand, is nothing to be feared.

How easy it would be now for me to become entranced, fall in love with the richness of the vision I've been given. Instead, in this consciousness, I turn. I turn from the element that filled an earthly depression and dazzlingly replenished life thought to be lost; I turn as though guided by what I saw, as though looking for its kin. I turn toward the life of my beloved. Again, loss and death are transfigured—necessary conditions, I see now, for me to see what I see now: the unending nature of remembered life. Here is my wife, years before the time I say I came to know her. And here is her grandmother, on this same porch, cradling the girl I will call my wife. Standing in the open air of autumn, I love what they love, and love them more for knowing them more.

For the time it takes to say the poem, I feel and know what it is for my self to dissolve into attentiveness, for time to coalesce, and for love to become more present.

And so, when soon I say this poem out loud and ask others to do the same (for I am a teacher), I will do so in the belief that when the bell propels us from the poem’s depths up to our own clamorous surfaces, and sends us out toward other people within a world that seems to be falling apart, something of this poem's consciousness will stay with us as we go.

Dancing for the Crowd

I spent the afternoon before I gave my first poetry reading drinking wine in an outdoor café in Santa Fe. Although I’d set aside the time as a sort of toast to my two years of grad school, although I instagrammed a glow-y shot of the wine and my manuscript and the robin’s egg sky (#nofilter), I was miserable.

As the hours passed, I grew increasingly terrified at the prospect of giving a reading. I read a few of my poems, felt sick to my stomach, read a bit out of the amazing chapbook from the visiting poet at our residency, re-read my own work, grew more nauseous.

My carefully chosen words suddenly felt all wrong: obvious, trite and forgettable. Fears choked me: Would my images be clear enough? Would anyone fall asleep? Would the audience provide the appropriate amount of guttural, congratulatory “hurrrms”?

I ordered another glass of wine.

I’m (usually) far too proud to discuss this sort of thing. Also, I also have a poet’s revulsion of the cliché (e.g. tortured artist drunkenly mopes in cafés). This means I can’t really even indulge in self-loathing without loathing the very self-loathing in which I’m attempting to indulge. It’s layer-loathing. To me, it’s akin to layer-cake, not in that it is enjoyable, but rather in that it usually ends with me stress-eating a layer cake.

It was getting dark. I packed up and shuffled out, hoping I’d make it back in time hit up the residency dessert table (e.g. cake).

On the way to my car, I passed a crowd gathered for an outdoor concert in the Plaza. A man strummed a guitar on the gazebo stage and buzzed his lips into the microphone like a trumpet.

As I edged in to get a better view, I noticed a young couple dancing. They caught my eye because they didn’t really look like dancers. They clothes were simple, almost grungy. The guy’s smile was masked by an unkempt beard; the girl’s hair was cropped, showing off a harshly pretty face. They looked more like backpackers a few days out on the trail.

But they were amazing dancers. They moved with the smoothness of water. They shimmied and twisted and slunk. They didn’t seem to be following a routine. The guy would just whisper something in his partner’s ear and she’d sort of glow and nod and then they’d start moving together differently. Every few minutes they would lock eyes and laugh—not embarrassed laughter, or ironic laughter, the way I would have laughed dancing for a crowd. Just deep, satisfying, honest laughter.

They didn’t even notice us watching. They were too lost in the mercurial joy of moving together. They made me think of Eliot's still point of the turning world.

The musician switched to a new song, and others began joining in. First a white-haired woman in a floppy-brimmed hat stood up. She moved like a fish caught on a wire, jerking toward the guitar player when he strummed a percussive downbeat then springing away to lift her face and hands up to heaven. Then a mom pulled her daughter, who had Downs syndrome, onto the floor. The girl spun and clapped and beamed as they shuffled.

As the courtyard fluttered with dancers, I could still catch glimpses of the couple, laughing together and slipping deftly through the crowd they’d created.

Dean Young calls for poetry that “has the supreme confidence of handling elemental fuels.”Those two dancers moved like fire, like the best kind of poem. Their confidence made me ashamed of the way I’d spent the afternoon, paralyzed by my own ego and fear of failing.

The next morning, as my name was announced, as I strode to the podium, I pictured the dancers. I channeled their ease and their relaxed joy. And I took a deep breath and started to read.

We need rituals

Every morning, I array my tools — lotions, liquids, powders, brushes. I darken my eyes, shadow and line. Some days I sing softly, some days I work in steely silence. I call it my war paint. The ordeal is part of my ritual, the morning routine that separates my time at home to my time in the real world. The shower, the clothes, the meditative time standing over the stove — all a liminal time between those two worlds.

There are other, less mundane rituals. We all have them, we humans — the ones that mark us moving from one stage to another. Hovering over birthday candles, illuminated between one age and another; weddings, a transitory period between single life and a life of matrimony; bar mitzvahs, suspended between boyhood and manhood; silence in the pews, when the church prepares to move from the secular world into the sacred. Rituals are important; they make us aware of our stages of life, of our positions in the world, of our roles and relationships to the rest of humankind.

Joseph Campbell, an American mythicist and author, notes that rituals are ubiquitous, a universal part of the human experience. We need rituals to separate the phases of our life, to give us closure as one period of life ends and another begins. Some rituals were ordained long ago; communion, for example, and the liminality of being “outside” our world and present in the sacred. Other rituals are manmade — birthday parties, weddings, Halloween. Some are our own. If we do not have rituals imposed upon us, we often make our own. Campbell even suggests that many instances of teenage rebellion or adult neuroses stem from the absence of rituals and the subsequent insecurity in our current stages of life.

Whether man made or sacred, communal or individual, we move through our own rituals. The ordeal of brewing coffee smooths the transition from sleep to work; a child’s first day of school marks their advancement from babyhood to student; elaborate preparations and ceremonies denote major life changes. Ritual has proved important for millennia, used for everything from minor daily routines to major spiritual practices.

And so, every morning, I join the rest of mankind and perform my rituals. I shower, I dress, I cook my breakfast. I apply my war paint. At night, I perform the same ritual in reverse — I retreat again to the kitchen, I wash my face, I change my clothes. I am, again, my home-self. At least until tomorrow.

The Bible, the Detective Novel

Raymond Chandler co-created the beginning of a new sub-genre of writing: the hard boiled American detective novel. At one point he wrote some rules for writers working in his wake: you can read his Ten Commandments For Writing a Detective Novel here. I will circle back to Chandler’s Commandments in a moment, but I want to say I wish someone would write some thoughtful rules for reading a detective novel. I know that does sound spurious, or just silly, especially when detective fiction is so often a guilty pleasure for serious readers or literature students of all stripes. I wish it though, because I’m more and more curious about both sides of this wonderful, terrifying, transcendent mystery we are caught up in: how to write and how to read.

Nothing fuels this curiosity more than my attempts to read the Bible. It’s interesting how the difficulty of entering into our sacred text brings out some different attempts to find footing, or a way to enter into it, or … something. One category of attempts is to superimpose our ideas about what we know of other kinds of writing, what we call genres (all of which were born after the Bible was written) over the text or into the filters in our minds. Watch. The Bible, we sometimes say, is a Big Love Story. And we take what we know about romance novels or films and try and get at the text through that lens. Or, the Bible is a History Book: the story of God and his people and the world, and that becomes a primary lens. And then there is (perhaps) the saddest lens of all: the Bible is a Textbook. We flatten the whole thing into small, “learnable”bits of instructive information on how to make our lives work well (better? okay? something?).

I think these attempts to consider the Bible through a lens we think we can understand are inevitable, potentially helpful, and invariably flawed. There is a small army of questions marching around in my head at this point that I’m putting aside in order to call this one question to the fore: why don’t we attempt to read the Bible as a detective novel? If you want to object to my question, or chime in with some answer, please avail yourself of the comments section on this post, where you’ll find me waiting. For now, I shoulder aside the inevitability of finite creatures trying to make sense of the Infinite and the invariability of our flawed attempts to do it, and consider the potential benefits.

For one, if we tried reading the Bible as a detective novel, we might actually finish it.

For another, we would be more apt to be caught up in, and maybe even enjoy, the scalding plot line and the “characters”and the unraveling-even-as-it-deepens-mystery that run through the whole of it.

For another, it simultaneously opens both a door for our recalcitrant humility and our wonderful, God-given powers of deduction and reason: we might be forced to own the fact that we don’t know exactly what is going to happen in the story, or why, and we would be encouraged to pay a bit more attention to the details (not to mention the unwritten subtexts).

But even with such tantalizing benefits at these, I submit to you that we stubbornly refuse to even attempt to engage with the Bible as The Mystery of God and His Disappearing Son.

Why?

When you’re done answering (or ignoring) that question, circle back to Chandler with me. Though he was certainly under no compulsion to do so, I believe that God has written a book that beautifully, wonderfully adheres to each of Chandler’s Commandments, including the First: “It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the denouement.”Also, especially, the Sixth: “It must baffle the reasonably intelligent reader.”Are you ready to consider enjoying the Thriller that begat all thrillers? There was this dame, a real looker, see, but decked out with troubles like a lit-up Christmas tree when she first walked into my office…

There Likewise is God

The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there. There likewise is God, there are the angels, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace; all things are there.  ~ St. Macarius the Great

The human heart: deceptively replete with dragons and lions, but also the raw material of heaven—angels and the treasures of grace. I wish I’d had a little plaque with St. Macarius’s words at the head of my babies’ cribs when they were tiny. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have been so caught off guard later on, when angels seemed in short supply and dragons appeared to rule.

I wrote about my daughter’s dramatic expression of her deep unhappiness as a teen (“Law of Universal Gravitation”) a couple of years after the fact. For months I could hardly think about that day without the superstitious foreboding that by recalling or playing over the events in my mind, the awful thing might be set in motion all over again. Once I finally applied good, solid words to my nebulous grief and fear, the thought occurred to me that what had happened could not kill me, nor would it. Neat rows of words that made fair sense helped dissipate my own self-condemnation and my terror of the dragons my daughter was fighting.

The change in perspective I got from the writing reminded me of the time as a kid after I’d seen a particularly traumatizing vampire movie and kept the covers up to my chin every night for months. Then a very hot summer was upon us, and I could no longer bear this ritual. I threw back the sheet and told the vampires to come and get me, because I no longer cared. It was only after this relinquishment the imaginary blood wraiths finally dissipated.

The man who wrote of the human heart as a habitation of the evil as well as the godly ought to know of what he speaks. A disciple of St. Anthony (father of Christian monasticism), Macarius spent years in the arid Wadi of Egypt doing battle with both internal and external demons, as was the wont of the Desert Fathers in general. Here was a Christian clearly not in denial about himself.

Tradition has it that when Macarius first arrived in the desert, he heard the words, "God has given this desert to you and your [spiritual] sons for an inheritance." Most people don’t think about parenting in terms of a desert. The contents of a T.V. commercial for the latest family SUV is more to our liking, with plenty of seaside getaways, putt-putt golf in coordinated outfits, and endless camaraderie and laughter to fill our days. But I’m beginning to relax with the idea that when it comes to learning the ways of our children, a desert of mystery is more to the point of reality. And though the scary animals are present, there likewise is God.

(Painting by Paolo Uccello)

- Read Jean's essay, "Law of Universal Gravitation," in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.

"Can We Guess Who You Are in 20 Questions?"

“Here is our best guess at who you are: 1. You are male. [I’m female.] 2. You are still a teenager, but won't be one for very much longer. [I wish!] 3. Your future worries you more than you'd like to admit. [Nope.] 4. You have beautiful, silky brown hair and big eyes. [I don’t even want silky brown hair!] So, how did we do? How many of these did we get right? Tell us in the comments!”

----

None of it is right. Not one thing.

This was the latest of the popular Buzzfeed quizzes I’ve taken. I still remember the first one: Which Middle Earth race to do you most resemble? This was the question I had waited for all my life. I may be trapped in a hobbit-like body, but inside I knew there was elvishness---mystery, poetry, and, of course, immortality. Come to find out, I am actually an Ent. Though I wasn’t excited about these results, I pressed on with the quizzes. The color that best represents me is white, on Downton Abbey, I am the Dowager Countess, and if I lived in Riverdale, I would be Betty Cooper. My accent is Pennsylvanian, I should visit France, and I am only a fraction “Midwestern.” It’s all been enlightening, particularly the last question on the Middle Earth quiz:

“So why did you take this test?

(a) You had better give me good results. Grr.

(b) I was hoping for some insight about my personality.

(c) It sounded like fun.

(d) I wanted to know what race in Middle Earth I am. Wasn't that the whole point?”

I definitely wanted to know that race in Middle Earth I am. I would live in Middle Earth if I could. But why all those other quizzes? They’re fun, I guess. They don’t take much of my time, and they promise a quick answer. Everyone else is taking them. But I already know where I live, where I’ve come from, what I like, and what I don’t. According to Newsweek, quiz pages track all of the answers we provide, creating customized profiles of our preferences. Why isn’t the suspicious part of me stepping up to put her foot down? (I can see that quiz now: “What percentage conspiracy theorist are you?”) The Washington Post reports that “millions of people have answered the inane and occasionally probing questions with the hopes of learning just a little bit more about themselves.”

Why don’t we already know who we are? Perhaps all the messages sent to us by our culture have left us with an identity crisis. “Just be yourself” and “express yourself” are in opposition to the not-so-subtle messages to drive the right car, wear the right clothes, laugh at the right jokes, and use the right phone. With all of those messages, it’s hard to know who we are, so maybe we hope that something on those quizzes will reveal solid truth about us.

George MacDonald points us in a direction that gives us some real ground on which to stand when he notes that “I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.” I can’t help but wish he had considered making me an elf, but at least I know who I am.

(Photo by Mattie Porter)