Behold the Man

In 1999, Mark Wallinger created a statue of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. He named the statue Ecce Homo ("Behold the Man"). It was not chipped out of stone or carved out of wood, but was instead made out of a plaster-and-marble-powder cast of a human body. The piece was a temporary installation that stood on the empty "fourth plinth" in Trafalgar Square in central London. Being made from a human cast, it was literally life-sized and dwarfed by the imposing surroundings of the square.

I wonder what is was like to walk by that statue. Men and women on cell phones. Students rushing to class. Tourists asking for directions. Hot dog vendors and souvenir peddlers pushing their wares. People hurrying by. And there, in the midst of it all was that small, lone, unimposing figure of Christ standing on his enormous plinth.

Ordinary, modest, and ignored.

We live in a world of breathtaking beauty, complexity, and design. A world with pain, yet at the same time, a world of drama and purpose and subtlety and joy. A world created by, and now being recreated by the redemptive work of the God-man who walked the earth. So will I pray with my eyes open or will I simply busy myself with the cares of the day?

The Tale of Entrails

Caesar. What say the augurers?

Servant. They would not have you to stir forth to-day. Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, They could not find a heart within the beast.

Compared to freshman year’s Romeo and Juliet, I loved sophomore year’s Julius Caesar. I loved all the weirdness, from the lioness whelping in the streets to the slave with the burning hand to dreams of bathing in blood. Then, all that oratory stirring up men to mad revenge—it was almost enough to make politics cool.

But it was the whelping lioness—love that word, whelping—and the stormy weather and the crazy birds that I really loved. The idea that all of nature was in tumult along with the ruling classes of Rome made nature and culture all of a piece, and I liked that idea.

Pivotal in this all-of-a-piece world were the augurers, or haruspex, priestly types that read nature via the entrails of animals in order to prophesy the future and test the will of the gods. It was a strange type of priesthood, so extremely earthy.

I began my own foray into entrails—so says the master haruspex to the apprentice—via the fish we caught when I was a kid. After filleting the larger game fish, Dad would slit the stomachs to find what else the fish had been eating, usually various sorts of smaller fish that were intact enough so we could tell what they were, minnows or perch mainly.

Now, with my own kids, the stomach-check has become such a highlight that they request it even before I begin. It’s maybe a little creepy, but over the years we’ve found a pretty interesting array in the stomachs of northern pike: the usual minnows or perch, but also crayfish and frogs—once five entire frogs—and another time something with fur. Now, we’re even checking the stomachs of sunfish where we have found snails and dragonfly larvae.

Of course, real fishermen do this sort of work to understand how to better catch fish: what are the fish in a given lake feeding on and how well? Then there’s the larger story of the lake: how well is the food chain working?   The larger story yet is that of the canary in the coalmine: what is disappearing from the food chain and what does that tell us about how sick we are?

Which brings me back to Caesar’s augurers, those improbable butcher-priests, looking down to look up, who could not find a heart in an ox. Recently, as I filleted a pike, my son asked where the heart was; the meat was already slid off and in a pan; the stomach was checked, empty; I reached in and found the heart, held it out slightly to show them, a tiny little rubbery muscle slightly smaller than a marble.

It beat, throbbing between my fingers, startling me, sending a shiver down my spine.

If it was an omen, it was an omen of life, and it made me feel small, there in the twilight, the world all of a piece.

The Motivation of Art

It is surely something worthy of merit that G.K. Chesterton’s quotable words have been equally employed by those from both right and left of spectrum. Rarely can an individual be used thusly. Perhaps this is because it is so easy to capitulate to the laziness of polarization. Anyway, in an angsty mood I was looking for easy ammunition from GKC. While thumbing through Chesterton titles, I stopped at Utopia of Usurers. Cute, right? To be honest, I was looking for easy ammunition against materialism. Indolence often reaches for the easy weapon, and I was guilty. Happily though, Chesterton in an essay titled “Art and Advertisement” served up something grander than a mere angsty quote: this time it was a timely inquiry into motive in the creation of art.

As Chesterton sees it, before the advent of mass advertising, a substantial motive for artists in their creation of art was to make a living.[1] No surprise there. Artists need to eat too, and we surely love sautéed stems of asparagus more than those of the thistle, despite the fact that the later are, indeed, quite edible (you can even make a hearty soup from them if needs be). However, many an artist was paid by a patron—oh, how sweet the sound of that word—who valued the art that s/he bought for its own sake. Of course not all, there are rich philistines as surely as there are poor ones, but art, so GK argues, was valued more for the thing it intrinsically was—a beautiful creation.

And herein, for Chesterton, is the dangerous difference: while the earlier motive for the creation of art was, among other things, for it to be appreciated by a patron, the motive in the advertiser is to employ human creativity to sell more stuff.

This bothers Chesterton greatly enough, for it is taking a creative power and employing it for an exclusive monetary purpose. Is there a better definition of this than pimping? And here I am reminded of how clever advertisers are in first inciting our emotions with such and such a picture or whatever, and then craftily weaving into that experience a self-serving purpose—invariably one that will line their own silken pockets. The ways advertisers try to incite us to buy stuff is legion. And they do it by using art—or, if you like, human creativity.

But what’s worse for Chesterton is that as the power of art is increasingly realised for its substantial ability to incite desire, advertisers will increasingly invest more and more funds into enlisting individuals adept in the arts. But, of course, whereas before art of value was largely made possible by patrons who knew that quality would cost money, now the advertiser is equally willing to spend copious amounts of funds for quality creativity, too. The difference being the motive: the first was for the sake of the art and the second is merely for the effective harvesting of more cash from the public. And to Chesterton, this is akin to prostituting out human creativity. And I might add, that for the less educated of the population, who might not have experienced truly “good” art, how are they going to distinguish between art and advertising? After all, both evoke an emotion. Now that the advertisers have truly embedded themselves in the very fabric of our culture, perhaps part of the answer is to, as Northrop Frye advised, help facilitate an “educated imagination.” And part of this education, and aiding in the ability to distinguish, would be as Iris Murdoch has so astutely said, to make known that “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.”[2]

[1] If you are looking for a philosophical reason why an artist does not have to make any money – what a thought! – in her or his art, and still be justified, see Josef Pieper’s Happiness and Contemplation. It will assuredly warm your heart.

[2] This quote, along with some other very grand thoughts can be found in her essay “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts.”

This Is So Late

This blog is late. I don’t mean a couple days after deadline. No, I mean it’s-been-months-and-I-still-haven’t-found-a-topic-to-write-about late. I have so many emails sitting in my inbox kindly, and more recently, desperately, asking me if I have a blog written yet. And would I please, please, please write something?

This week, a biography of the New Yorker journalist, Joseph Mitchell hit bookstore shelves. A reporter who immersed himself in the mid-century streets of New York City to capture the eccentric of the everyday, Mitchell immortalized a city between modernism and what came before—gas lamps and saloons and the Depression.

What has captured the imaginations of most of his readers (and is the subject of the biography) is not his prolific profiling and immersive journalism, but the thirty years he wrote nothing. For the final chapter of his career, Mitchell rode the elevator to the New Yorker headquarters. He sat in his office. He went to lunch. But his office was silent—no clicking typewriter keys, no shuffling of papers.

Several years ago, Anthony Marra stopped by Lemuria bookstore (and also my place of employ) to sign his novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. He wore the same blue, button-up shirt he wore in the author photo. He was kind and asked as many questions about us as we did about him. In a quiet moment, before the storm of people came demanding his autograph and a witty answer to their questions, Tony and I talked about writing.

A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a Stegner fellow at Stanford, Marra had done everything right. His debut novel was a smashing success and would go on to become a finalist for the National Book Award. We talked about his girlfriend who lived in New York City and the poetry she wrote. We talked about his Pushcart Prize, the short story that became the seed of his novel. And we talked about what he was working on next.

“Nothing,” he said. “I sit down to write, and all I can think about is what I have already written. It’s terrifying. What if this novel is the only story I have?”

Isn’t that what all creators fear—that what is behind us is also our last? “You are only as good as your last plate,” is the chef’s motto. But how many days, months, years can pass before you are no longer a chef, but instead someone who once cooked?

This week I found out that Anthony Marra’s next book releases in October. It might be a weak replication of his first, as second-novels tend to be, or it could be a step in a new direction. But that’s not what this is about. This is about trying and failing and trying again to write. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you are blinded by the blank page.

The first sentence is for someone else; prove to your audience, the critics, your high school class that you have something to say. The second, third, fourth, etc. are for you; to prove to yourself that you still have something to say.

Boyhood, Birdman and the Problem of Existence, Part 3

In my last two blog posts, I have tried to show how both Boyhood and Birdman seem bent on resurrecting a philosophy popular in the 1960’s: existentialism. While Boyhood seems to give a hopeful spin to its form of it, Birdman presents a much darker picture, linking existentialism to what was commonly thought then was the only truly authentic act in the face of the death of God: suicide. Albert Camus fought this notion, but many under the influence particularly of Friedrich Nietzsche, embraced it thoroughly.

Now, I am a Christian theologian, and I believe that Christianity spends a lot of energy encouraging us to realize that the present is the only moment we have in which to act responsibly. We share this in common with existentialism, this focus on the present in the journey of our own lives. We can do nothing about the past because we cannot alter it, and we can do nothing about the future because we do not know what challenges it will bring. Therefore, following the Good Shepherd in the moment is what we are called to do, and it is enough.

One does not have to look far in Christian teaching for support for this way of living. I think of Jesus’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount about not being anxious for anything: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Mt 6.34 ESV) or the ancient wisdom of Prov. 27.1: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.” (ESV).

These two statements are about the future, but, similarly, the regrettable past is forgiven and forgotten in a very real sense for the Christian, and, while the memories of works of beauty and goodness that may have been done to us or by us, are great gifts, we cannot change those gifts, nor would we want to.

But—and it is a very large “but” indeed—all our understanding of both the past and the future takes place in a universe in which God oversees the past, the present and the future from His eternal stance outside of time. He bestows meaning to our existential moments in the framework of both an ethical structure based in the law, which in turn is based on His eternal character, and a metaphysical structure based in His revelation of Himself as creator, redeemer, and sustainer. All meaning flows from Him, and provides us a rich and satisfying philosophy by which to live and in which to believe. He gives meaning to both the past and the future, and so we, His creatures, can rest assured about both the reality of, and the significance of, both the past and the future. We may not be able to change them, but we look at them with very different perspectives than do the existentialists.

I do not see any alternative better than this. Camus’s notion of revolt in the face of the absurdism of a universe without God is purely a decision to go in a direction he wants to go. His attempt in “The Myth of Sisyphus” to answer in the negative the question of whether or not one should commit suicide in the face of an absurd universe is unconvincing. Even worse is his attempt ultimately to justify the embrace—happy embrace, I might add—of the fate of pushing the rock to the top of the mountain each day, only to see it roll back down to the bottom every night. He simply gives us no reason to feel that this is a better alternative than simply to end it all in despair.

But the greatest fault of existentialism is its premise that God does not exist. The much better hypothesis is that He does, and that He has revealed Himself in Christ for the good of the world. The hope of Boyhood is not wrong; it’s just misplaced given its premise. The craving for love in Birdman is not wrong; it’s just misdirected from looking for God’s approval to looking for man’s (John 2:23-25). The Christian can hope and can love because of their faith, the faith that the one true God exists and gives life and meaning to the past, the present and the future.

Lenny Bruce

I get a lot of reading done sitting on the can. Evidently there’s something about filling my nostrils with my own stench that also makes me want to fill my mind. If I were smarter I’d conduct some Pavlovian-type research to see if the smell of crap actually increases my brain’s neuroplasticity. (DAMN. There’s a word that’ll make you slap your mama upside the prefrontal cortex. But let me tell on myself: Wikipedia.) Right next to my commode is a basket of books and magazines. The current selections include Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water, a Runner’s World that’s a couple of months old, some magazines about parenting and, from 1967, The Essential Lenny Bruce. It’s an original edition. Musty, with brittle pages and those tiny bugs that crawl up from the binding once in awhile (which straight up give me the creeps. After all I routinely open the book inches above my exposed junk.) Anyway, The Essential Lenny Bruce is nothing more than his act transcribed onto the page.

Lenny Bruce, the original filthy comic. He nailed topics like drugs, politics, pornography, religion(s), and made gorgeous art out of the word “motherfucker” while his contemporaries were riffing on their wives’ terrible cooking. Bruce got arrested all the time for the stuff he said. Sometimes the cops would climb up on stage and collar him right in front of the audience. How’s that for a show?

Lenny Bruce, the original comic’s comic. Bruce was light years ahead of his time. Without Lenny Bruce, you can forget about George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Roseanne Barr, Dennis Leary, David Letterman, Louis CK. The list goes on. Though I have a feeling we’d still be cursed with Andrew Dice Clay, Yakov Smirnoff, Dane Cook…it is a fallen world after all.

Lenny Bruce, an original modern prophet. Howzat? Yeah. Now, I think God is pretty funny. I mean, the Divine has a sense of humor and it’s kind of sick if you think about it. Dig. We Christian types like to say stuff about the Judeo-Christian prophets like, “Well, that was a different time and after Jesus, you know, we didn’t need prophets anymore so God doesn’t, you know, work like that. Anymore.” I’ll bet He does. Probably all the time. It’s just that we Christian types don’t hang around where His prophets do. That’s funny, man.

Of course it goes without saying that the Christian types chased Lenny Bruce around in his day. “Motherfucker” was just their cover. Bruce was more than dirty words. He stuck it to them right in the heart and it made them twitch. So they called him immoral and they all wrote him off. For bits like this: Imagining Jesus and Moses walking into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Bruce said:

Christ and Moses standing in the back of St. Pat's, looking around. Confused, Christ is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rocoque baroque interior. Because his route took him through Spanish Harlem, and he was wondering what the hell fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room when that stained glass window is worth ten G's a square foot? And this guy had a ring worth eight grand. Why weren't the Puerto Ricans living here? That was the purpose of church—for the people.

Some comic material goes with the times in which it was created and only with those times. It lacks the universality to propel it through the generations. I’m thinking of Mike Myers thrusting his crotch at the camera. “Shwing!” It’s irrelevant now and can only be appreciated in an ironic sense even if it does elicit laughter. But imagine Bruce’s bit above as it pertains to now. Replace the words “St. Pat’s” with “Willow Creek Community Church,” “Spanish Harlem” with “East Garfield Park” and “stained glass window” with “sound system.” Fifty years later and it still hangs true. I call that a motherfucking prophecy.

Review: No Parking at the End Times

No Parking at the End Times Bryan Bliss Greenwillow Books, 2015

When do you give up on someone?

In Bryan Bliss’s haunting debut novel No Parking at the End Times, twins Abigail and Aaron don’t agree on an answer to that question.

The book opens in San Francisco, ten minutes before the end of the world, the twins and their parents kneeling in Brother John’s church. Abby, the narrator, prays furiously, half-hoping her faith won’t be in vain, half-hoping it will.

Of course, when the world doesn’t end, Abby’s existence in the realm of childhood innocence ends quite definitively.

Several months before the end of the world, Abby’s family had been happy, lower-middle-class residents of North Carolina. Some time after Abby’s dad lost his job, he began following the radio preacher Brother John, selling off their possessions one by one in order to contribute to the end-times preacher’s “ministry.” Ultimately, they sell their house and move across the country, where they live in their van, praying daily at Brother John’s church. When the world fails to end as predicted, Abby’s dad’s faith is unchanged. Enthralled with the spiritually abusive cult leader, he even sells the van and turns the money over to him.

Though her own faith in God is deeply shaken, Abby refuses to give up on her dad, expecting him to come to his senses and take the family home to North Carolina. But Aaron is certain that they can no longer rely on their parents, and tries to convince Abby that they should leave their parents and take the bus to their uncle. I don’t want to give too much away, but as the twins broker their escape from the cult, they make friends with a group of local homeless kids and become embroiled in new conflicts before finding a way out.

In prose that is spare, certain, and lyrical—an economic style that matches the characters’ environment, no frills to cover the truth—Bliss tells a story of exceptional circumstances with universal relevance. Realistic teenage dialogue and a strong, reliable narrator anchor the story, which covers traditional YA territory (loss of innocence and conflict with parents) while also deftly and sympathetically negotiating larger social themes of homelessness, poverty, and religion.

I didn’t feel sure, as I ended the book, who had been right: was Abby correct to refuse to leave her parents behind, or was Aaron right that they would have to save themselves? I wanted a more conclusive answer. When is it ok to give up on someone—especially someone who has begun to perpetuate a cycle of abuse—spiritual, physical, or otherwise? When does love equal staying, and when must it mean to leave? After all, when your father’s captivity to an abusive cult leader leaves you homeless, shouldn’t you give up on him?

Maybe the closest Bliss comes to suggesting an answer is in The Trumpet Man. A homeless man in Golden Gate Park, the Trumpet Man sings simply, “I am bound!” And being bound means many things. We are bound to our families. We are bound to people who make mistakes, who hurt just as they’ve been hurt. Even the binds that should be cut can’t ever be fully loosed. But we are also bound for a Promised Land, where hurts will be redeemed, unjust inequalities will be set right, and relationships will be restored. No Parking at the End Times points us with hope toward that land.

The Supreme Moment

Whatever you want to be, you’ll be in the end. – The Moody Blues

 Subdued and faded to sepia tones, this 15^th century Byzantine-style icon of John the Baptist portrays the Forerunner beseeching Christ in heaven while his own severed head lies haloed at his feet—a grim reminder of the cost of commitment to a person’s deepest convictions. At face value, this scene is out of chronology, since Christ wasn’t in heaven at the time John was beheaded, and we’re not sure where in the story the man is here. But of course the meaning is layered, certain elements symbolic of something more enduring. So though the icon portrays the essence of the most defining event of the Baptist’s life, the overarching message is about the “supreme moment” of kairos at work in John’s life. It’s about who he became in the eternal realm, not the chronos, the chronology, of his beheading. And the icon is about each of us in that moment when all is said and done and we’ve become whatever we are in the end.

We need whole paragraphs in English to adequately explain what kairos does in one brilliant, ancient Greek word. When Greeks used kairos, what came to mind was something elastic, qualitative, an undetermined measure of an unseen substance that intersects with the present, chronological moment in some cosmic way that makes a difference. It referred to that exact moment an archer must release the arrow from his bow if it is to accurately pierce the moving target in his aim. The ancient god the Greeks named Kairos was said to be “ever running.” Like the old god, kairos is that magic that races through our moments as opportunities worth seizing, noble choices worth making. Kairos is about bringing a new creation out of rubble, something that endures out of the rough material of crisis each of us faces continually living in a fallen system.

We’re no different than John the Baptist, who lost his head to principle. Each of us will eventually lose ours to something, too. The Greeks had it right all those centuries ago, inspiring the ancient world to consider what looks a lot like the dynamic of human free will intersecting with the grace of Providence. Whatever we choose to call it, the beauty of kairos will be around long after every postmodern notion of nihilism is in its grave.

Time Travel And Fatherhood

The drive home from college lasted about fifteen hours. My dad and I talked a lot during these quarterly trips; but by the end, our topics were the equivalent of a “Coast to Coast with Art Bell” radio hour. For example, the efficacy of Time Travel.

Now in my mind it’s an appropriate conversation between fathers and sons. There’s even a niche in cinema for it: Back to the Future, Frequency, Field of Dreams. But nearly all of these movies are about a son who yearns to regain some lost moment with their dad. Richard Curtis’s About Time is also of the genre but asks: What happens to the father when the son becomes a father?

In About Time, Tim, like all the males in his family, has the ability to travel backward in time. And the first hour of movie devotes itself, comedically and touchingly, to this “talent.” But as he holds his first child, the movie shifts gears. Tim realizes, “Nothing can prepare you for that love.” It also brings a conundrum in the movie’s Time Travel logic: if he is to travel back in time to before the child was born, it will yield a completely different child. And so find himself unable to prevent a misstep of someone whom he loves.

Luke Ripley is the father in Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story.” He, too, finds himself unprepared for how deep the love of a father truly runs. When his daughter hits and kills a man with her car, he rewrites the incident and sets himself up to take the fall. Such an act compromises his faith and, in Ripley’s mind, “does not give [me] the peace I once [had]: not with God, nor the earth, nor anyone on it.” But he is steadfast and cries out to God, “I love her more than I love truth.”

Ever since becoming a father I’ve wrestled with the role. Is it like Luke Ripley, am I willing to “love in weakness”? Like it was for Tim, does fatherhood mean I will inevitably be kept at a distance from other relationships? When my son was a year old, I wrote that he had so filled my life that it seemed to overflow into the past. The truth is I couldn’t and still can’t imagine him not ever being in my life.

SPOILER: In the movie’s final act, Tim’s father has died and the prospect of Tim having another child means having to fully sever the relationship with his own father. Tim and his father make the choice only fathers can make. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of love. The kind of love that’s as simple as Tim and his father throwing rocks in the ocean.

Or discussing Time Travel.

Reading as an Alternative to Injury

During my junior year at a performing arts high school, there was an epidemic of foot and ankle injuries. This is one of the clearest pictures I have of that year: A group of girls sitting against the dance studio mirror with one leg crossed in front of them, and the other elevated on piles of ice packs. It could be the middle of that memory, but at that time there are at least four of them sitting there with their expressions straddling the line between looking sad and trying to look sad.I remember my instructors’ expression more clearly. They were annoyed. They would address us, the uninjured, and say things like “That’s why you all get injured. You’re not warming up properly,” or “Maybe if you would hold your arms properly your ankles wouldn’t hurt.” We would sigh and take it, adjust our arms, and save our sighs and grumblings for the dressing rooms after class.

These hostile attitudes changed a week or so later when one by one the injured girls limped into the studio wearing a sneaker on one foot and a large black and medieval looking boot on the injured leg. “Tendonitis,” they informed anyone who asked and sometimes people who didn’t. They would be unable to dance, climb stairs, carry their books and book bags, go through metal detectors in the morning, or show up to class on time for anywhere from six to twelve weeks. The girls once chastised and accused of simply trying to get out of a dance class where now praised for watching in padded chairs in the back of the studio. Occasionally, the injured few would perform the arm and head positions of the dance we were working on and the teachers would turn their backs to the ones who were dancing with their whole bodies to correct the partial movements of the brave and broken ballerinas. It was impossible not to notice the difference in treatment. I saw the praise, attention, and compassion that came with being hurt. I wanted that. I wanted an injury too.

Two weeks later, I would sneeze in the middle of a math class. When I went to bring my head up from the display, I found that I couldn’t.

“What is wrong with you?” my friend asked, cackling at my crooked neck.

I brought my hand to my cheek and tried to pretend that I was merely leaning on the elbow on the desk thoroughly bored with trinomials. Unfortunately, there were a good six inches between my elbow and the desk. “I think my neck is broken,” I told her. I went to the nurse, who wouldn’t give me Advil or call my parents. Instead, she attempted to cure me with her favorite antidote: a bag of ice cubes that would within ten minutes and send streams of icy water down my shirt.

The diagnosis was whiplash. Whiplash. From a sneeze. Not only is it a ridiculous way to injure yourself, but after that doctor’s visit and a conveniently tied scarf, no one would look at me and know that something was wrong.

The chiropractor nudged my neck back to its rightful place. She cleared me to dance before I could even practice my expression of grief with just the slightest hint of heroic acceptance. She sent me home with a special pillow, a set of exercises, and an ice pack stamped with the name and contact information of the office. “You’re a dancer,” she reminded me. “I know you don’t want to take time off.” I stifled a scowl. She knew nothing.

I think the thing that all bodies have in common is the ability to break and rebel, but not all injuries are external. They don’t all get casts, braces, or doctors notes. Sometimes they are covered with ace bandages, baggy clothing, smiles, or a cheerful “I’m good. How are you?”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, he talks about his motivation for writing. “Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’”

Obviously, Vonnegut and I are talking about two different things. He’s talking about writing, and I’m talking about sacrificing the use of my limbs for a little kindness from my classmates and professors, but even so, I wish I’d read that book during that time period of my life. With the injuries that come with dancing and living, those seen and unseen, that information might have been nice to know.

Do You Smell That?

My 8^th grade classroom smells like mint gum, and body odor. The gum is not allowed. I am to tell the kids to get rid of it, and then report it into a shared record system that’s stored on the computer. After a certain amount of gum busts, I think the student gets a detention or something along those lines.

There is no rule against body odor. Body odor is allowed in my classroom, and by the end of the day the smell is knock-you-over palpable. So I say nothing about the gum because each shift in a chair, each reach for a book, stapler, or clipboard, each step towards the “complete work box” brings with it a stench followed by a cool minty breeze.

“Mrs. Feyen,” one boy walks up to me while I’m standing at a counter in the back of the room sorting through papers.

“Yes?” I ask and pivot towards him.

“I don’t understand this assignment. You want me to write about something beautiful, but it has to be bad in some way?”

As he asks, I see bright green gum stuck to his bottom teeth. When I was a kid, I was so careful to keep the gum at the roof of my mouth. I could even fold a Fruit Roll-Up so it perfectly fit inconspicuously in my mouth and I could enjoy it from noon until three. My teachers never knew a thing. I am sure of it.

“I want you to write about a time when you saw beauty in a situation where beauty didn’t seem to belong.” He looks at me like I’ve answered in Japanese. He shifts, than scratches his forehead. If we are going to continue this conversation, I need him to start chewing that gum to balance out the smell.

“Like Mayella’s red flowers in slop jars in her front yard,” I remind him. We’ve just finished studying that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird and I want my students to do what Harper Lee did; write about beauty that baffles.

“Can you think of a time when you were really scared, or really angry, or really sad, and you noticed something funny, or pretty, or even interesting?”

He isn’t staring at me blankly now, and I think something is starting to take shape, but he wants more.

“The thing you noticed didn’t fix the situation,” I say. “I mean, it doesn’t make everything all better, but you noticed it. That’s what I want you to write about.”

He’s chomping his gum now and nodding vigorously. “OK,” he says, “I got something.”

I should tell him to spit his gum out now, but I’m afraid it’ll break the spell, so I choose not to, and he pivots, leaving me in a wake of B.O. and mint gum, and the unease of letting him off the hook.

****

In her book, Wearing God, Lauren Winner writes about finding God in smell. She tells of a homeless man who sued a public library because he was banned from it due to his smell. Other people couldn’t focus because of this man’s body odor. At first, the court sided with him, but in a second case, the court sided with the library.

Winner contemplates this incident along with similar situations she’s experienced in her city, and she decides that this sort of reflective thinking is a form of prayer. “Prayer in which you replay scenes from your day, scenes from your year, and try to see God in them, or try to see them with God standing alongside you, looking too…What do I see when I try to look with God?”

****

The kid writes about a park in his neighborhood where he goes quite a bit to play sports with friends, but he also shows up alone, on days when he wants to pray. He climbs trees and prays. He has a lot on his mind, he writes, a lot to figure out. But he likes those trees with their sturdy trunks and thick leaves.

“Jesus,” Winner writes, “was a sometimes homeless man whose body was not always perfumed by women bearing nard. He surely sometimes stank.”

I smell thirty-one images of God in my classroom. Sometimes they reek. Sometimes they blatantly break the rules. Always they bring with them beauty that confuses, overwhelms, doesn’t fit in. I believe it is my job to help them notice and name this ridiculous, life-saving beauty.

****

It is May. The last instructional day of class and my students have to write two exit essays to show where they are as writers. One essay is narrative: write about something memorable. The other is expository: explain something you know well. The kid who goes to the park to pray raises his hand, and I walk over. He switches his gum to the other side of his mouth. I guess he thinks it’s not as obvious there.

“Mrs. Feyen,” he says. “For my expository essay I want to write about baffling beauty.” That’s what I called their writing assignment back in October. “Do you think the high school teachers will understand what I’m talking about?”

I stand and take a quick survey of these kids I’ve spent nine months with. The kids I have to say goodbye to, who in less than four years will be adults. They’ll be able to chew gum whenever and wherever they please, and they’ll have this B.O. thing figured out by then. But right now, I get to work with the image I’ve been given, and that’s just fine with me.

I lean towards my student and I smell all of it: dry erase markers, the air-conditioning, carpet, mud, and yes, mint gum and body odor.

“I think you better explain what you think baffling beauty means,” I tell him.

Blood, Money, and Augustine

We're proof seekers. And for the last couple hundred years we're in pursuit of it as evidentialists with calculators, and scientism is the belief we want to justify. But here's an anecdote that suggests the corporately-funded feast might be nearing it just desserts. Mount Sinai's School of Medicine is accepting humanities majors from a handful of top-flight liberal arts schools after their second year of college. Yep. You heard me. Med school without the MCAT, guaranteed entry after two years of liberal arts studies. If absurdity marks the end of an age, prepare to take cover. Is this the harbinger of another Renaissance or the end of modern culture? The answer to that might be in how much money and blood you just sank into your pre-med degree. Statistically, though, it's a few million occurrences short of a trend. More proof will surely come as future doctors prescribe books instead of Z-Paks.

The Romans didn't see their end coming. Ends of things take a while to get going, and histories don't get written until a lot of people with skin in the game kick off. Augustine was born to people with skin in the game—people of Roman blood and money, with connections and influence. Even so, his sainted mother was a Christian and pursued Augustine's heart with her feet, following his travels, and her faithful prayer. And just years after he was appointed to a highly visible post as a rhetoric professor that would launch a political career, his will was transformed and, then studying with Ambrose in Milan, he was convinced of Christianity.

Augustine's forty years of work in Hippo Regius preceded the Middle Ages by about a hundred years but carved out for the generations a substantial intellectual heritage for Christianity's most holy tenets and defended her in the battles against Manicheism, Donatism, and Arianism.

Interestingly, his greatest work The Confessions, is at once a failure and in its failure, made essential. As inspiring and quotable as it is, it is also consistent with his Neo-Platonist education. Unlike today, the liberal arts were studied in adulthood or nearer the end of one's life than the beginning. It was undertaken to project one's thoughts toward the heavens and beyond in preparation for the next life. So these things were on Augustine's mind as he laid them out to God as an idealist's assent, or, as salvation by intellect alone. But the years of conflict and writing that followed became a convincing proof that cost him much. God saw Augustine put humble flesh and long labor on the honors of his youth. Enough so that in the end, even his enemies honored him.

As the Vandals laid siege to Hippo, Augustine lay there dying in the care of doctors. When he died, they razed all of Hippo except for his church and library. The city of the man who wrote The City of God was gone. Was it the end, or a new beginning (as we like to count things), or was it something more transcendent?

Pop

When I was a kid, I loved the movie Krull. My buddy Phil and I used to watch it at his house because he taped it off HBO. If you don’t know Krull, it’s an early 80’s sci-fantasy movie. The planet Krull is invaded by these evil aliens. There’s a big quest involving the main guy who has a weapon called the Glaive, which is this magical spinning blade that basically has a mind of its own. But it’s loyal to the main guy. Like, he can recall it to his hand after he throws it. It looks like a beautiful, golden ninja star but functions like a deadly, sentient boomerang. Anyway, the aliens kidnap the main guy's girl and he has to go save her and save the planet too. There is a cyclops and some wizards and quicksand and needless to say, as soon as we got Netflix, I made my wife watch Krull with me. But when it was over I thought, “What a piece of s***."

Krull didn't age well. I'm thankful that Hollywood hasn't rebooted it. God knows when that will happen, but it probably will. It'll be hipper, sleeker, sexier, and louder, but it will still suck. Some other absolutely unnecessary contributions to American pop culture that have been said and done (we assumed) in decades past but—flash forward to now—here they are again for some reason: A Jem movie (yep, that's comin'.) The reformation of New Kids on the Block (They hadn't been mercilessly ridiculed enough the first go-round?) Dancing with the Stars (an orgy, after-all, of has-beens whom we started tuning in to see because, "Oh, THAT'S what Urkel looks like now!")

We Americans must like to eat ourselves. We must like the taste of our own blood on our tongues. We must like the feel of our own skin wedged between our teeth. We must like the smell of our own muscle roasting in the oven. But we're plastic. Parts of us are indigestible. So we regurgitate them and cook them again, hoping for a more nuanced flavor (at least a palatability that wasn't there the first time) but not finding it once again, we choke them up, this time more desperately. We eat ourselves again and we gag on the rotten taste. But we eat ourselves like there is no other food. We're starving for ourselves.

Nostalgia is okay. It's okay for me to go into my parent's basement every now and then and look at my Star Wars toys. It's okay (mostly) that sometimes I watch clips of He-Man on YouTube. Once I even Wikipedia-ed the Go-Bots. But American pop culture is way beyond nostalgia and, truthfully, has been for a long time. I have no empirical evidence for what I'm about to say (call it a hunch), but I'm certain we cannibalize our pop culture past because we can't face our present reality. American collective sins, the indigestible parts of us—and I mean as far back as slavery all the way up to the way we worship billionaires now—are profoundly wicked. We know it. But we're still too proud to say, as one nation under God, "Forgive us."

Look, if a friend of mine called me up and said, "Come over and let's watch Krull," I'd say, "Cool, I'll bring the beer." Because, honestly, you'd need a lot of beer to make it through. We'd laugh and shout, "Oh yeah, THIS PART!" from time to time and maybe make up a drinking game where we drink every time there are terrible special effects (and we'd be passed out in fifteen minutes.) But also because I myself am an American. I'd rather chew my own bones than honestly face the ways I've done wrong.

Unending

Donald Judd’s one-hundred large aluminum boxes live inside an old army building, under the auspices of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, miles from nowhere. On first seeing row upon row of Judd’s boxes, I had to ask myself, what’s the point? How did we get here—the hot, unending desert, another world not my own, all these boxes.

My daughter Claire, who had just graduated from high school, requested this trip sometime in late winter as my gift to her. We had planned the trip for late May—before she shattered her ankle, trying to jump across a concrete culvert, chasing her boyfriend’s dog. After a surgery to pin and cast her ankle, she had hobbled across the stadium field of her small high school to receive her diploma. I was amazed that she still wanted to explore the desert areas of southwest Texas after the accident, but she did. We packed up and headed for Fort Davis and Marfa one hot day after Memorial Day.

So there we were, Claire in pain, leaning on crutches, willingly looking at the boxes, and me, worrying about her. The scene is so absurd, ironic—here we are, in the hot, godforsaken desert, inside an old, slightly remodeled World War II prisoner-of-war barracks, with warnings like Verboten! and Gefahr! still stenciled on the walls. And sidestepping the question of art for a moment, I looked from one end of the room to the other, beginning to think about how the artist put the boxes together. What processes did he use? What tools did he need?—just as I had wondered, after Claire’s accident, how the surgeons would fix her ankle. I had asked the doctors questions about what they would do, the steps they would take, what to expect after the surgery, how long it would take for Claire’s ankle to heal. For a long time, in the waiting room, I looked out the full-length front windows, imagining the surgery, imagining afterwards and the bones beginning to knit themselves back together, becoming integral and whole.

Inside Judd’s desert army barracks, full-length glass panes have replaced the long side walls. The large, cool boxes look out and reflect the high desert plains, the distant lost mountains. Throughout the day, the boxes’ reflect the landscape as the light changes. The variations would be most notable at sunrise and sunset. Yet in the brief time we were at the installation, I noticed the changing reflections as several high clouds briefly covered the sun. Then I saw. I saw. The boxes were no longer boxes but cubic mirrors, fluid canvases. The art—oh, this was the art of it—was grounded in the stark scenery and in the daily cycles of sun and moon and weather. The brief changes we saw had a marvelous effect on us; we were attentive to the present, in the rhythm of the earth’s turning. Claire’s face transformed, as if there was no pain for her at that moment, any nagging thoughts I’d had about the “rightness” of this trip dissolved, all was right with the world. Even now, several years after we made that trip, the moment endures. It lives with me. It remains perfect, eternal, abiding.

From the Mouths of Grandmothers

My fathers’ siblings, the story goes, had no idea their mother was pregnant with him until they were mysteriously sent to stay with relatives and then brought home a few days later to find a baby in the house. My grandparents were not alone in this failure to communicate. From other stories I’ve heard, one might say this was a cultural non-practice of the time.

Sure, there was a flipside: I had a funny great uncle who, my sisters tell me, doubled as a dirty old man. Still, in a culture impossibly opposite to the extreme sexual reticence of my grandparents, it’s tempting to think of these days-gone-by as somehow modest.

That’s the way it goes in a culture of opposition, it seems to me: we become able to conceive—no pun intended—of only two extremes.

Perhaps this is why I found the character of Grandma Thunder in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House so refreshing. Erdrich introduces Grandma Ignatia Thunder as one of those “Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.” The young man whom she primarily shocks is Joe Coutts, the adolescent narrator, who, upon visiting her house to get fresh fry bread and goulash, warns his friends to steer clear of any word she might twist into a double entendre—even words such as “hot,” “head,” and “come.”

The boys think they’ve successfully navigated the visit when another elderly woman drops by and uses the word “bony,” setting Grandma Thunder off on a bawdy tale that has the young men both blushing and transfixed. It’s a tale, as I understand it, very much within the oral tradition, full of both comedy and passion that—coming as they do from Grandma Thunder’s mouth—add up to real sex. And within the context of a novel whose central crime and metaphor is rape, Grandma Thunder’s sexual storytelling is both a hilarious and profoundly healing moment.

In fact, I’m advocating for more of it: more hilarious and healing sexual storytelling from the mouths of grandmothers.

Here’s my own experience: once, leaving for a date with a girlfriend from her apartment, her grandmother hollered something after us. The girlfriend, who would become my wife, scoffed, shook her head, blushed. “What’d she say?” I asked. Grandma Mouth (“Moot”), a Lao matriarch who spoke almost no English and occasionally chewed betel nuts, spitting an impossibly red-maroon spit into empty Folger’s cans, was utterly unpredictable to me.

“She said, ‘Don’t let him put his . . . in your . . .’”

As a young man, tempted to think I was discovering something that was anything but new in the world, it was a moment of humor and humility that I didn’t forget all through that night.

Or ever after.

Blue Ruin

 

On May 1, we settled into our chairs at The Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina, waiting for Mandolin Orange to take the stage. Mandolin Orange, a folk duo comprised of Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin, is well known for their introspective, often sad, songs and precise harmonies. We, like our fellow concert-goers, were sipping beers and chattering lightheartedly, expecting our fair share of sad songs—the duo has plenty of those—but not anticipating the grief of their newest song, “Blue Ruin.”

Frantz introduced the song, saying, “We’re going to take you to a dark place… but I promise we’ll bring you back again.” She told us that Andrew wrote the song after the tragedy of the Newtown shooting in 2012, and that they were unsure that they’d ever play the song live. The crowd immediately went silent, and the whole atmosphere of the room changed. I’ve never heard such silence in a concert hall—the couple’s music went uninterrupted even by a sneeze.

“If Jesus had been born just eleven days before, would the world have stopped to see—at least those on the street headed for Newtown?” sang Marlin. “And of all those on their way, could the miracle have made one lay his guns down?” The song covered heady ground in just a few minutes—anger, sadness, and society’s role in the tragedy, among other things—and included the heartbreaking question, “Well for now, who’d like to tell me that, on that morning when 27 fell, how any lesson and count could ever, ever amount to watching them fall? And why, worst of all, come Christmas morning, they’ll still be gone?”

A stunned silence followed the song until, sure enough, the pair led us into a happier place with their next song. But the gravity of “Blue Ruin” stuck with me, and I think it’s an especially important song now. On Mandolin Orange’s website, Marlin explains the purpose of the song:

I was thinking about all those kids who wouldn’t be there on Christmas morning. People can get so heated and so serious about change and addressing gun violence when something that traumatic happens, but a month or two afterwards, they've all cooled down and it's not in the forefront of their thoughts anymore. But two years later, those kids still aren't around on Christmas morning and their parents are still dealing with that.

It’s an important reminder, especially now that there are so many other tragedies in the public eye. Police brutality, shootings, murders, bombings, civil wars, and other tragedies of every scope imaginable dominate the headlines and 24-hour news channels. It’s easy to get caught up in placing blame, passing legislature, and hotly debating nearly every aspect of each calamity. I catch myself doing it, too. It’s hard to remember that the events we’re discussing affected real people—that they still affect real people—and that responding to those events with animosity instead of compassion won’t fix the issues.

By all means, please discuss the tragedies happening all over the world. Think of ways to help. Think of ways to prevent those tragedies ever from happening again. Keep them in mind as you prepare for the change in leadership here in the States that is coming next year. But do it earnestly, do it compassionately, do it with the human victims of each and every disaster at the forefront of your mind. Discussion and legislature and opinions are important, but it’s easy for us to forget that those victims are real people who are still dealing with the aftermath of each tragedy in a very personal way. Don’t forget.

Cameras and Community

In the spring of 2006, a crew of 400 volunteers converted the inside of a rented F-18 aircraft hanger into a working camera. The shutter was the size of a pinhole. The film was a 3,375-square-foot-emulsion-coated canvas that covered the entire back wall. The photo consisted of everything that could be seen outside the front door of the hanger. Everything. Once exposed, the film was developed in an Olympic-sized-swimming-pool liner. The net result was a landscape photograph that was three stories high and eleven stories wide. The unprecedented achievement was celebrated by holding a reception for the entire volunteer crew in the camera!

I sometimes think about that camera when I'm worshiping in church. To begin to understand the depths and riches and wonders of our God, to capture a sense of Him, to reflect and represent Him, takes something larger than me or you. It takes community. It takes people with different experiences. It takes people with different tastes. It even takes people I might not normally hang out with. People who are more staid and traditional than I am. People who are more audacious and expressive. Presbyterians and Pentecostals. Methodists and Mennonites. Congregationalists and Catholics. To begin to reflect and represent the depths and riches and wonders of God takes a worshiping community. It even takes sermons I would rather not hear, and music that rubs me the wrong way, and liturgies that do not line up with my immediate preferences.

Or maybe I'll just stay home and fiddle with my iPhone camera.

Poetic Shadow

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. - Wallace Stevens

My family has lived in this house for nineteen years. This spring, I noticed a shadow on a wall that I never noticed before. It appeared at the same time of day for a few days. I assumed it was cast by something in the room. But as I stopped to look more closely, I saw the blurred features of a chain link fence and a palm tree. The shadow was cast from the far right corner of the yard. Something about the image was intriguing. Wordsworth said a poet is someone with "a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present." A shadow is a paradox, representing presence and absence. In this case, a fence and tree that were present 100-feet and a few odd angles from where they were reflected—in their absence—on the wall. Poetic language plays varying roles: sometimes it’s the light shining on an object, sometimes it’s the object itself; but, it seems to me, poetry is always the shadow. As there are diverse styles of literature, poetic shadow inhabits a multitude of genres.

Sufjan Stevens’ latest album, Carrie & Lowell, was written after the death of his mom. Carrie abandoned her family when Stevens was one, and he saw her only a few times before she died in 2012. Her shadow drifts though each song. The duendic tones of vocals and guitar lament the bond and understanding that Stevens will always reach for. In the song “The Only Thing,” he says:

Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns to you somehow Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow I want to save you from your sorrow

Can you identify other types of shadow found in the following poems?

“The Insane” by Rainer Maria Rilke:

They’ve fallen silent now, because the wall that separates the mental from the concrete life is gone;
and there are too few articulate minutes in their hour to say what they go through.

Suddenly, however, and often late at night,
they get well. The hands lie among actual things,
the heart remembers how to pray, and the eyes gaze down, unaghast,

into the clarity—no longer even hoped for—
of a garden in the quiet square. A few can recall how it really appears when they return to their own strangeness forever.

Here’s an excerpt of a poem by Philip Larkin, “The Old Fools”:

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: Not here and now, but where all happened once. This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there Yet being here.

Isn't it the poets who show us that life is this pull between the shadow and presence of all we long for? As Charles Wright tells us in “A Short History of the Shadow”:

                                     Leon Battista Alberti says, Some lights are from stars, some from the sun And moon, and other lights are from fires. The light from the stars makes the shadow equal to the body. Light from fire makes it greater, there, under the tongue, there, under the utterance.

LOST Expectations

Six years ago, my wife and I binge-watched the first five seasons of LOST. It took four months. Many nights we watched three or four episodes in a sitting, sometimes as a way to pass the time while my wife was feeding our infant daughter… or because we hadn’t finished the package of Oreos yet. Other times compelled by a look or a glance to “keep watching,” a willingness to relinquish the joy of teasing out possible meanings.

This caught us up for season six. But like the rest of the LOST audience had been, we were then dangled out over the cliff for an entire week, week after week. I locked myself into a habit of trolling message boards and meditating over the copious and astute Doc Jensen recaps. I lived, agonized by this hope of what could happen.

This comes to my mind now whenever Pentecost approaches. Maybe you can see where I’m going. How I’m picturing the disciples living in a type of cliff-hanger following Ascension. Trying to figure out the meaning of Christ’s promise and exactly what they could expect.

It so happened that the final episode of LOST aired on Pentecost Sunday. At the time, I felt this was significant for plot reasons—the Season 6 cast photo staging “The Last Supper,” and the smoke monster’s desire to get uncorked from the island and into the real world. As the final episode played out, people felt abjectly betrayed, denied some hoped-for reality.

Awaiting the arrival of a sought after book, listening in the two years between a band’s albums, thinking a Patriot’s 19-0 season is a foregone conclusion, again and again I raise expectations for an experience or encounter. Then the book is disappointing, the album sounds like a group popular ten years ago, and David Tyree haunts my dreams. I think I should learn from this pattern. It leaves me falling in an abyss for weeks on end…like after Manningham reeled in that catch.

“To raise one’s hopes is to risk them falling further,” Anthony Doerr writes in All The Light We Cannot See. Yet, I can’t help but find myself continually uncorking expectations. Even when it leads to the despondence that was first and goal for the Seahawks on the one-yard line, or the slog of Doerr’s overwrought writing.

Where were the disciples after their second cliff-hanger in two months? Ten days of wandering in a gray world, lost, locked away? Was there ever the hope that the doors and windows would be thrown wide? Should I raise my own expectations when again and again I am let down? But I do. I always hope for a book or poem or song—or that interception—to erupt in me a fiery joy.

What Makes the Desert Beautiful

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

My priest said words to this effect, back in Lent when I went to confession: “We have this idea that life is about a good night’s sleep and a full stomach. Comfort isn’t a sign that all is well. It’s after vigil, prayer, and fasting that salvation comes.”

How this paradox works will probably always be a mystery to me. Barrenness, deprivation, silence—they look and feel like death, yet those yawning, hollow spaces foster a life that might be what Jesus meant when he talked about “the pearl of great price.” While on pilgrimage at a monastery in the Great Saguaro Desert of Arizona, I walked a Sabbath day’s distance outside the monastery gates. The sun was at its zenith in the brassy sky, the temperature 115 degrees, shade or no shade. I pictured scorpions and tarantulas in hiding, waiting for sundown. Patience. All fiery trials eventually abate. I wrote this in my journal:

“It isn’t even the heat. It’s the silence that takes the breath away. My ears are ringing with it. The silence forces a showdown with your inner wreckage; here there’s no place to get away from, well, me. But the desert should not be pitied. Only a pampered perception judges such a place needy, the human tendency to recoil from what is not overtly ample, lush, even excessive. Thirty-nine pairs of shoes in the closet. Super-size your lunch. No workout without an iPod blasting. But not in the culture of desert. Plants out here keep their distance from each other in the competition for moisture. When the rain does come, it suffices. The saguaro and comical teddy bear cholla don’t need much to thrive. This lean outback reminds me that I need far less from earthly surroundings than I think. To insist on more than presents itself naturally is to squander life energies. In the deafening silence I have grasped briefly—very briefly for this extrovert—why so many saints of the past chose the desert for the formation of their souls.”

For most of us, the desert pushes itself into our lives without an invitation. To the extent we resist, the more obvious it may be that we need its stark ministrations. And afterwards, the water comes.