From Ache to Amen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas Gifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case for Krampus

Good holiday stories need a villain. Ebenezer Scrooge, The Grinch, Hans Gruber. And of course, Krampus.

Krampus is having a moment—he’s acquired a Los Angeles fan club with a pretty spiffy web page, he’s been featured on the Colbert Report, and he’s even starring in a film. This half-goat-half-devil Austrian folk creature dates back, most believe, to Norse mythology. He’s St. Nicholas’ other half—he handles the kids who’ve been nicht so gut. 

He’s horrific, yet Austrians seem to view him rather fondly. They send kitschy cards stamped with “Gruß Vom Krampus!" (Greetings from Krampus), and host Krampuslauf (Krampus runs) in which hoards of young men don devil-goat costumes and drunkenly run the streets on the eve of St. Nicholas’ visit. 

It feels a bit goofy to ascribe deep symbolism to Krampus, a character dreamed up largely to terrify children into behaving. If we’re looking for meaning though, it seems obvious that Krampus and St. Nicholas act as foils—the evil preceding the good. As Mental Floss puts it, they form a “Christmassy Yin and Yang.” Krampus reminds us there is darkness as well as light in the holiday season. 

North Americans generally prefer their holidays free of ancient goat devils. Our classic tales, even the really good ones (think Charlie Brown or Miracle on 34th Street) involve only one horror—a lack of the holiday spirit. (Die Hard, it should be noted, is a refreshing exception to this rule.)

I assumed the movie Krampus would be different, but in the film, Krampus is summoned when a boy loses faith in the season and tears up his letter to Santa. Our narrative, “be merry or die trying,” runs deep. 

If you, like me, feel sick of this storyline, please consider as antidote this Youtube footage of an Austrian Krampuslauf. It’s pretty grim. I only made it three minutes in, right to the part where one of the thousand Krampuses rips a little child from his mother’s arms and hisses in his face. I was cowering in fear at my laptop screen, but the kid? The little dude smiles. Tough as nails. He was probably brought up on a steady diet of horrifying Bavarian folk tales. 

Yes, the Krampuslauf seems awfully brutal for the holiday season. But there's a villain in the nativity story, too—Herod. And he isn’t stealing a roast beast or shouting “Bah Humbug.” He is committing infant genocide. Lurking right outside the glow of the manger is a madman, thirsting for power and control. 

I’m not saying we all need to sub out our shiny family photo Christmas cards for Krampuskarten. But it is problematic to remove all darkness from every Christmas story we tell. That’s like editing John 1:5 down to just “The Light shines.” So what? 

The holidays can seem like a very small light in a very dark world. Christmas comes in the midst of war, in the wake of tragedy, mass shootings, devastating personal loss, systemic injustice. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

With that in mind, our obsession with cheer for cheer’s sake feels just as bizarre, and maybe more pointless, than any Krampuslauf.

So Merry Christmas. And "Gruß Vom Krampus," too. 

The Little Drummer Boy and Me

A few Christmases ago, I heard Johnny Cash’s version of “The Little Drummer Boy” for the first time—and heard words in the song I never had before. That gravelly voice brought a certain realistic cadence to the carol, the cadence of a human soul before the Son of God, lying as he is in a container that holds food for cows and donkeys. And it’s also, I realized, the cadence of a musician, an artist, giving what he has. (The video of Cash singing the carol is well worth watching.)

How can I not picture the man we know as Johnny Cash into the persona of the drummer boy? For here is Cash, singing first-person about the little drummer boy who had nothing to give but his drum-playing. When Cash sings the line “I played my best for him,” it’s hard not to compress all the songs he sang in all those jails into such passionate, self-giving words. This is the privilege when craftsmanship and faith infuse—they spur each other on, with whatever material we’ve got—paints, words, muscles, pebbles, flour, sound.

But there is a line in “The Little Drummer Boy” that says more about this faith-craft connection. The drummer boy, in the first verse, is called to bring a gift to the king. The second verse starts with the drummer despairing—

Little Baby, pa rum pump um pum I am a poor boy too, pa rum pump um pum I have no gift to bring . . .

I am a poor boy too. When Cash sings this line, he somehow gets the whole meaning of the word poor—not just without coins or trinkets—but poor as in poor in spirit, in need of help and courage and a way forward.

There’s days when I have a kind of zest for the craft work of fiction writing—figuring out a plot, re-tackling a dialogue exchange for the twenty-third time, researching how beeswax candles were made in the fourteenth century. But other times it frightens me how empty my well is. Exhaustion seeps into the edges of the page, turning my words into inky and confused puddles. Ideas feel brittle and old. Why is the story so frayed, my vision so fuzzy? Will I be able to make what I yearn to? What do I really have to give?

After the drummer boy admits his poverty, he picks up his drum and plays. Any craftsmanship I’ve practiced is certainly a gift I can give—but I wonder if I’m wrong to assume I should give from my strengths. What if I were to create from my poverty? What if it’s okay to make, fashion, create, labor, from a place of having very little? I am poor. I am in need. I don’t have the right words or the right story; my opaque heart makes it hard for me to be honest, even on the secret white page. But all this, the blurred edges and scared inadequacies, is part of the gift.

To create from this place of being “a poor boy too”—what else does it yield?

Maybe a gentleness towards ourselves, working as we can in the edges of the day. Maybe a gentleness towards others making what they can, be it poems or children’s lunches, in tiredness and constraint. Perhaps too, to create from a place of lowliness means creating out of a deeper human awareness towards those who feel they have nothing to give. The little drummer boy, empty of a gift, saw that Jesus was poor too, and this gave him courage to play.

This meekness of Jesus at birth curls into the heart of craftsmanship. We can pick up our worn drums and play the best we can, and play whatever we can, under the stable’s low eaves.

Distillation

Underneath my mother-in-law's table sits a bucket with a lid. In it, fish sauce—made from four ingredients: fish, salt, water, time—rots its way beyond rot to the salty-savory goodness. It's fermenting, condensing into a flavor so intense that it will almost level you, like strong drink.

She tends to it by opening the pail occasionally—though never in the presence of guests—and turning the contents, perhaps adding more salt. Then she closes the pail again and returns it to its position under the table. And waits.

I think I first heard the word distillation used, literarily, in association with Emily Dickinson. That ideas could be that intense yet held in your hand, distilled, that was a powerful thing.

It's counterintuitive, distillation. In a country of gushers and booms, and in a time of series and tomes, the idea of waiting on a few distilled words seems, ironically enough, wasteful. Then again, this just isn’t something one says about the Harper Lees of the world.

I suppose ripening is a handier metaphor for the process of writing growing into itself. Then again, ripening may be what reading groups and MFA programs are for. But what happens post-reading groups, post-MFAs?  I’ve waited so long for some of my essays to take shape that I'm afraid their peak flavors are past and they’ve moved into the logical outcome of the ripening metaphor: rot. Distillation, too, can be a cover for procrastination.

It can also backfire. There are essays which I put in the pail under the table and come to stir them only to find a sweet, cloying smell where there should be umami. This is the hardest, to throw something out.

But in general what’s the advantage of time?  And how much time?  

I found the ending to an essay—in writing a Relief blog, no less—about a year after I thought that essay was finished. Fermentation. Others of my essays, bloated to self-important lengths, I seem to be waiting to reduce down.

But how long is enough—or too long? Why do some combinations of words, like aged liquor, just get better?  And is there really a recipe? Is it really as simple as the right ingredients, process, vessel, and time?

Returning

My brother-in-law died on Thanksgiving. His death took him away from a suffering that began, in truth, the day his wife died suddenly nine years ago. His wife’s death did not mark a tragic beginning. It was a bookend holding up decades pressed against the day his father drowned trying to save his life in the Spring River.

The news about Mike stunned me for a moment, and then I breathed a little easier. Mike was free. The cancer didn’t get him. That was our biggest fear. Pneumonia eased him into a greater life unburdened by softball-sized tumors and excruciating pain. If vices exist in heaven, he can now drink without becoming an alcoholic. He can smoke without getting cancer. He is made whole. This is what I am to believe as a Christian. That’s good news in my tradition.

Here’s the problem. Now that he’s been relieved of his pain and angst, I’d like him returned back to us, whole and renewed. He’s been dead for over a week. That’s plenty of time to rest. In my book, he’s had a decent break from this messed up world and his broken body.

I never knew Mike before his wife died. I’m told he was a pillar of his community. I don’t need him to be a pillar. I wouldn’t mind if he returned in a cloud of cigarette smoke. I just want to see him restored, free of pain long buried in a riverbed. I need his stories, his expressions, his laughter, and music. I need him to be a brother to my husband and a father to my niece and an uncle to my husband’s children.

When my husband was fighting for his own life in a Seattle hospital a few years ago, I talked Mike out of driving 2,200 miles to break his brother out of ICU. I don’t doubt Mike’s conviction that his little brother was better off in his hands. Now my husband and I are released from our worries. We will no longer wonder about Mike’s mental and physical health. This trade-off feels like a bum deal.

The shape of my husband’s family is made by the endings of family members gone too soon.

I’ve known about death in the pot since I was little. My parents never shielded it from me. Mike’s death is different. It’s uncomfortably fresh. I feel such relief that he is no longer afflicted that I forget he’s dead. And then I remember. And it’s stunning.

A sharp December wind strikes my face as I walk to church on this second Sunday in Advent. I am supposed to be preparing, literally and spiritually. I put my Advent wreath out a week late, and the center candle is missing. I can’t find it anywhere. I should be writing about snow globes and, instead, all I can think of is this ridiculous arrangement I’m forced to consent to. Mike is dead and will not return.

Each year, I celebrate the birth of Jesus without fail. I try, with little success, to block the holiday ads and treacle songs. I try to focus on the raw story of Mary and Joseph and a messy birth in a barn. I imagine what it must have been like to be part of such wonder. It’s hard for me to focus on newborn Jesus right now. I light two candles of my incomplete wreath. At least it has some greenery, I think. I feel selfish. I’m more focused on Mike and his body and spirit made whole so far from our reach.

I know this is magical thinking, wanting Mike to come back as if he’s been away at a cosmic rehab center. But it’s Advent. This is the time of waiting for the unexpected, the miraculous. I am trying my best to prepare, but I can’t even find the dang center candle on Amazon.com. Logic dictates Mike is not returning. This means we will never go fishing on his beloved St. Francis River, nor will he and my husband drink a tallboy in a backwater bar.

Maybe I don’t want what I’ve been taught, at least not right now. He is in a better place. True. That doesn’t change the gaping hole left in our family. It doesn’t alter the fact that my husband lost his only sibling. I don’t want tidy expressions of grief. They are too much like the holiday ads. I need the freedom to be messy in our tangled loss. I’ve got no choice but to wait in the muck and long for impossible things until the longing becomes part of an unforeseeable making. I need permission to want Mike back. He was my husband’s brother.

I find a broken white taper at the bottom of a moving box. It’ll do.

Good Dog

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. ~ Oscar Wilde

So there we are. It's Black Friday and we're stuffed like the turkey we ate a day ago. Bev is decorating for Christmas and I should be enjoying a day spent writing. But I'm anxious instead. My rough draft is late and the animals of my ideas scurry and hide like scared, hungry strays let in from the cold.

Last month, dear reader, I tempted you with a reductive version of the Christian hope. I isolated Truth and looked at its wasteland. In a reversal of the old fable – where Truth roams naked and unwelcome in the village, then Story wraps it with goodness and finds it a home – I instead annulled its adoption and kicked it back into the street. Brutal!

So, this month I imagined Goodness naked and wandering, but I have found myself overrun with a menagerie of abandoned, ill-mannered notions of it that I feared I could never make presentable. I think every writer is part zookeeper, part animal trainer – each idea needing a bath and the startling redirection of a sharp clap. But I was stuck on one in particular. It had been here a month with no progress. It would snuggle, hairy and hot, morphing as it slept against my body like a large, ungainly dog. And it was a hybrid. I feared it would become the Indominus rex of Jurassic World we had just watched. Ideas have consequences, you know. I looked at the animal. It looked back and drooled. Nights passed slowly.

Today I tried naming it. Leviathan. Doglizza. OMG-itsaurus. Nothing fit. It still stank. It was grimy and matted in ways that looked like extra body parts. I thumbed through books for facts about breed and keeping. I cruised the vast Big Box of the Internet hoping to find the perfect behavior modification, or a sweater. Maybe a bow.

Now and then I would glance up, pensive and vacant. The television was showing Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The sound was off. It was that part near the end where the massive, bright spaceship is rising and dwarfs Devil's Tower in black silhouette. The science base in front is even smaller. I'd seen it twenty -five times but stripped of it's music and sound effects it appeared strange and new. It penetrated my preoccupation and I saw something I'd never seen before.

“Speilberg. You dog,” I said out loud. “This whole movie you've isolated the ground of contrast in that damn tower.” I felt something wash over me. “The whole dog-gone movie.”

It combed through my tangled thinking. Director Speilberg had exaggerated a distraction only to make it disappear like a background with scale that allowed me to see the enormity of his grand idea. The protagonist's obsession became the swirling center of the movie's vortex where all the conflict resolves. As Tom Snyder writes about it, “Light and music transcend the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the human and the alien, the real and the imagined.”

Then, I looked around our house and I saw it was Christmas. Beverly's handiwork, even in the throes of my self-consumed darkness, had surrounded me with extravagant goodness. And suddenly the animal of my idea was groomed, powdered and seemingly well-behaved.

I wrote quickly: Puppy to a good home. Free for the taking. 

Ambiguity

“God will find the pattern and break it.”    - From John Ashbery’s “Anticipated Stranger,”

In the TV show The Last Man On Earth, the plot develops to where three people are left in the world; and Phil, who reluctantly agreed to marry Carol since she was the last woman on Earth, now wants to be with Melissa, the second to last woman on Earth. It was too easy for Phil to persuade Carol and Melissa that he needed to have sex with both of them to repopulate the world. The question Phil slyly asks and Carol takes up as her own rallying cry is: “Do you want our babies to have sex with each other?”

Watching them grapple with the consequences of a two parent world was uncomfortable, because it brings up awkward questions like, wouldn’t Adam and Eve’s children have had to been incestuous in order for them to be fruitful and multiply?

The whole broken world is flooded with ambiguity. How do we humans, who craved knowledge of good and evil from the start, live in a world where there are so many things left unexplained? Aren’t there always questions we can’t really answer about the Bible, creation, the universe, the human brain? The realm of poetry is also steeped in ambiguity. There is a John Ashbery poem written across the beams of a bridge in Minneapolis. Even after discussing it with people who are fluent in Ashbery, I still can’t make much sense of it. Megan Snyder-Camp writes an essay on the challenge of ambiguity in Ashbery’s poems. She says, “It’s where I remember, after that lyrical tumble, that I’m not alone in this poem, but rather have to make room for the poet and his discovery as well.” I think she’s saying that sometimes we just have to leave room for the poet to know what we cannot know. The realms of the ambiguous are one way we’re reminded who we are. Another line from Ashbery’s “Anticipated Stranger,” says “Oh well, less said the better, they all say.” Maybe this is God’s conclusion. While he speaks to us through his word, he also speaks without words, in metaphor, through trees and stars and rivers. God’s reign goes beyond the Ashbery quote. He doesn’t just find the pattern; he makes the pattern, and breaks it as he wills. Can we be at home in ambiguity?

Joy Williams and the Psalms

Joy Williams’ recent release, VENUS, received lukewarm reviews. Rolling Stone claimed Williams’ voice couldn’t “hold the space" of her orchestration. NPR, not unkindly, labeled the album “Lilith Fair 90s'."

I can see where they’re coming from. But I’m still into it. It’s music that makes me want to scale a mountain in a glittery sports bra brandishing a fist and shouting “Womanhood!”

Or, you know, fold a giant pile of laundry on a Saturday morning.

I’d rolled about half my mountain of socks when I realized something was off. Spotify was shuffling through all of Joy Williams’ records, and not just VENUS.

That explained the Prozac-fueled ballad (“It’s all good/ask me to explain it and I could/ I’ve got the love of my Lord and I could/it’s all good”) next to the warbled lament (“I’m gonna stand here in the ache / until the levee of my heart breaks”).

On shuffle, Joy Williams’ canon is…unnerving. It’s odd to hear her so giddily sure of herself and then immediately so devastated. It made me think of the Psalms.

Her album covers reflect this tonal shift. Her three early albums all feature a toothy blond in a cute sweater, squinting at the camera through sun-rays. On VENUS? A naked brunette, hunched over and in shadow, face obscured.

Williams herself, of course, is aware of the changes. She left a blossoming career as a Christian artist because of its limiting nature. In 2009, she said, “Everyone sees life through a grid. Part of my grid is faith. When I was in CCM, I was just singing about the grid. I’ve come to a point where I want to sing about what I see through the grid. In CCM, I was always pushed to sing about faith from a “victorious” angle, when I feel like so much of faith is wrestling through questions.”

In Case for the Psalms, N.T. Wright echoes this, saying when we “invent non-Psalmic ‘worship’ based on our own feelings of the moment, we risk being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy.”

Clearly, Williams knows her early records would benefit from a more emotional honesty. I’d argue, however, that she might have “filled that space” better in VENUS if she’d balanced those emotions with one less lament.

Balance is hard. Just a glance at Williams’ album covers show they are packaged to sell an image. Shorthand for “Christian artist” seems to be is soft-focus grinning blond who will breathily assure you that “it’s all good.”

This is a frustrating image to every Christian woman I know, but especially to artists. It’s natural to want distance from that. But I also know (from experience) that if my art is only created as a reaction against that “it’s all good” girl, I quickly veers into melodrama and navel-gazing.

Wright reminds us that the Psalms encourage us not only to write out of the “truthful, sincere outpourings of who and what we are” but also to “trust that we will be remade". This Advent, I’ll be reading them through again as a reminder that high highs and low lows—hatred and the contrition and ecstasy and shame—can all exist together, as sacred text no less.

Quiet Grace

Photo by Richard Carl Pearson on Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Flannery O’Connor said her fiction was concerned with “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” and that “violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace” and that “[a]ll human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” So it can be nothing like news—though it is thrilling—to discover, as several of my high school students did in tandem during class discussions in September, that the color of bruising marks O'Connor's “Revelation,” the story of the essential humbling of a certain Mrs. Turpin.

As they led me to see, the acne borne by the young vessel of truth, Mary Grace, is “blue,” betraying the deepest of influence. Mary's coloring becomes the bruise above Mrs. Turpin’s eye (born of Mary Grace's thrown book) as slowly she is made ready for alteration, her suffering come to render her sensitive to the conditions of others.

Just before she's given the revelation of a divine ladder (a vision that appears within a field of blue-black sky), upon which Turpin sees her self-satisfied kind at the very end of a procession that's triumphantly led by the very people she’d labeled and categorized--just before that vision, she finds herself watching her husband drive the African-American farm workers home. For "five or six minutes," she stands in anxious stillness, watching the "tiny truck" ("it looked like a child's toy") make its slow way along a darkening road, a road lined on either side by lavender. Only when she is certain that all are safe can she move, "a monumental statue coming to life."

It felt like a revelation in itself to be led to follow this circle of painful coloring in the story. I love O’Connor's work. I know change can feel like breakage. I know resistance to change can feel as powerful as the force that can cleave the earth in two. But I know too that grace need not feel like imposition. Sometimes it falls as gently as a hand slipping silently into another’s.

It was Thursday morning. I was rushing to dump my half-drunk coffee into the travel mug; I was worried about papers I’d failed to grade the night before; I was worried about the car and about health insurance, which is to say that I was worried about money; and I was worried about being late. One of my former students was coming to speak that morning at convocation. I needed to greet her at the door; what kind of host would I be if I didn't? And I needed to think about my introduction. And I needed--

A hand. My wife’s. Without a word, without one sound, but with a smile, my beloved towed me through the kitchen, through the dining room, across the corner of the living room, through the French doors of the little library, across the rug her friend had given us, and stopped to stand beside me at the window set within the eastern wall. There I saw the crimson sky, spread upon the bare branches of the oak.

I arrived at school in plenty of time to talk to Alexis, who had already made her way to the converted garage that served as our convocation hall. She was not, in the least, put out that I had not been waiting for her on the front porch of our schoolhouse. She didn’t mind the time to herself, she said. Then she told me that she had decided to talk about mindfulness.

Her first year away at college had been difficult, she said to us that morning. Then one Sunday, she was talking to her brother on the phone.

“Are you enjoying your coffee?” he asked her.

“Of course!” she told him. “I have to caffeinate to power through the day.”

“No,” he said. “Are you enjoying your coffee?”

"It seemed the simplest thing," she told us. "Silly almost. Until I tried it." She looked up from her notes. "It is hard to sit for five minutes without an agenda,” she said. “But those are the moments when life can rush in."

Doubting at Christmas

. . . But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband— that is quite another matter. —C.S. Lewis, Miracles

Christmas: God breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics to snatch the cosmos from its ultimate decay. In other words, a miracle of upward mobility. The Orthodox icon of the Nativity teems with the theology and symbolism of this upswirl, this “redemption of the universe:” the ascending pull of light over the landscape; the bright celestials straddling the razor edge between time and eternity; the ethnic diversity of the Magi, God’s redemptive scope encompassing all peoples and all creation. And in the postures of Mary and Joseph we see the full gamut of human response to this event that couldn’t happen, yet did.

Here the figure of the Virgin is appropriately spacious and central. Mary casts her eyes not toward the babe but away from this one whose swaddling clothes and cradle resemble grave wrappings and a sarcophagus. Her restraint is a reminder, for who can look upon the face of God and live? Yet any minute Mary will pick up that normal looking baby and stare into omnipotent holiness, her soul taut with paradox. Mary’s power of belief is organic to who she is, a chemical and spiritual grace.

Yet in the figure of Joseph the Betrothed in the lower left we witness the other effect of miracle, the Church’s concession to the difficulty of grappling with blissfully mangled universal laws. A study in body language, Joseph slumps in the throes of mental torment, questioning the baby’s alleged origins. He’s under direct assault from Satan, come to once again sow his tedious doubts, this time in the guise of an aging shepherd. The shepherd’s short tunic and rigid profile symbolize duplicity and gross inadequacy—this father of lies who would keep Joseph’s eyes in the dust with no reference to the divine. (See: “Becoming Two-Eyed”)  

In the battle to make peace with mystery, the human mind has a remarkable capacity to see blank sky where in fact shines a sight-giving star. The downward drag of psychic inertia is ever present here among the shambles of the Second Law. Yet though God may approach with “infinite speed,” his home is no longer a manger, but our embrace.

Writing for Sport

 

“I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.”  — Joshua Ferris

A woman I barely knew once asked me what I would be if I weren't a writer. The list was not a prepared one, but it flowed with that sort of ease. In fact, I had, and have, no trouble thinking of other things I’d could spend my time and emotional energy doing. The list ranges from the realistic (a dancer), to the unlikely (a CIA agent), to the completely ridiculous (a house cat).

Only after listing my career ambitions did I pause to consider that I probably should have an all-or-nothing relationship with writing and that my answer should have sounded something like, “Oh, I don’t know. I would waste away into emotional turmoil if I could bring the pen to the page every day.”  I know for a fact that this simply is not true. There are days when I don’t write, and I survive to tell the tale.

I was a soccer fan once. I was living in Philadelphia at the time, which, it should go without saying,  meant that I was a very passionate Eagles fan. Being a Philadelphia Eagles fan means that you own a jersey (or because the roster changes so frequently, a selection of Eagles-praising t-shirts). It means that you hate the Dallas Cowboys, tolerate the New York Giants, and don’t really care about any other team in the league. It means that you know the lyrics to “Fly, Eagles, Fly” or at least know when to join in for the spelling of the team name and the subsequent cheer. Sometimes, it also requires some familiarity with the defeat song to the same tune, “Cry Eagles Cry.”

I reveled in all of this:  the regalia, the trash talk, the drama, the game. However, after the final loss of the 2013/2014 season and a rather spirited rendition of the defeat song, I came to a decision. “I am done with football!” I announced. “I’m switching to rugby, and I’ll be an All Blacks fan because they rarely lose.” As it turns out, though, rugby games are surprisingly difficult to find in a city dominated by football enthusiasts or without the added cable package, and since I was broke grad student, I decided on soccer instead which was an easier ship to climb aboard.

That summer, the World Cup was on, and my friend who had moved to Philly from Amsterdam dragged me a bar to watch the Netherlands vs. Spain game. I say “dragged” because, at this point, my passion for soccer was no longer fueled by the betrayal that comes with unsuccessful Eagles season. But something happened at that game. The team that had my support won, and by a ridiculous amount by soccer standards, and I got to cheer with, high five, and hug total strangers, and gloat at the end of the game. I suppose that was wanted from a sport. I wanted to write self-congratulating statuses, and work long-past victories into conversations about completely unrelated things.

Netherlands would go on to beat Australia, then Chile, and then meet up with Argentina for the semi-finals. My friend and I caught the bus to New York to watch it with like-minded fans.The bar was crowded, there was a cover charge, and the kitchen was closed even though the game was happening in the middle of the day. 

“Exciting game, right?”  a bearded man asked me during a commercial break. I smiled and made a sound that could pass for a yes. "We’ve waited four years for this,” he told me. 

“What did you do in the meantime?” I asked shifting my weight from one foot to the other. My feet hurt and because it was New York there were more people than seats.

He told me how the teams come together for the World Cup, but between that some of them who were playing together that day were rivals during the regional season. “It’s more like the Olympics than your Super Bowl,” he said. And that was it. That little comparison, the vocally italicized use of “your,” the too-long line to both the bathroom and the bar, and a game that seemed to be the athletic equivalent of “The Song That Never Ends,” putting all of that together meant that I was done with soccer. It also meant that I would care less than the people around me when Argentina won the game during overtime.

“You just don’t understand,” the bearded man, now close to tears, told me. “You’re American.”  

“I don’t understand?”  I muttered angrily. “You feel this way once every four years. I’m Eagles fan. This,” I looked at the defeat all around me, “is what I do.”

I think I have a long list of things I would rather do with my time because I want the soccer equivalent of a career. I want something that is easy and glamorous. Plus, since any particular world cup team only exists once every four years, I don’t need to put that much time or effort into it. What I think that means, is that there is a part of me that wants the victory without the fight. I  suppose it was easy for me to give up on soccer and start counting down the days until football season because I never tried or fought for soccer and therefore, didn’t feel the need to hold on to it. It is difficult to like things that don’t challenge your loyalty, your will, and your patience. Along with the challenge comes the choice to continue trying being a fan. Simply liking something is easy. You can walk away from it and never look back. Being a fan is hard because it is a choice not to walk away just because thing are going awry. It is a choice to keep believing in your team’s ability even while belting the words to the defeat song.

Being a writer is also a choice and not an obligation. Like being an Eagles fan, it is one I have to make, and make again, and again, through rejection letters, writers block, un-liked blog posts, and other people’s success. I sometimes forget that I can walk away, but if sports imitate life the way that art does, I can, and probably will, walk back, pick up my pen, and think of something to say. Why?  Because I am a writer, and this is what I do.

Retreating together

Writing is an act I do alone. In my home office before anyone is awake (just as now). In my school office between course prep, grading, and the dozens of other tasks that demanded my attention. Even at one of my local coffee shops, when others are present, I’m still by myself. Solitude is my preferred working method.

Yet one month ago, and for the second consecutive October, I reserved time and money to attend a weekend writing retreat in a three-story house facing Lake Michigan, a retreat with a dozen other writers from various states. For a self-acknowledged introvert, for someone who works alone (preferring it), what is the draw?

The gorgeous fall colors that are absent back home in Central Texas, sure. The temperature thirty degrees cooler than the above-average fall temperature back home, yes. The walk along the Lake Michigan shore, my bare feet chilled in the off-season sand, yes. Still, those aren’t the only reasons.

*                *                *

For much of Saturday, each of us carves out hours of space in the lake home to work on our projects. I sit in a lower bunk in my room, small reading lamp on, windows open to the breeze rushing in off of Lake Michigan, the heater set low enough to offset the brisk air, coffee cup within arm’s reach.

My first project is tightening a forthcoming creative nonfiction publication. I read aloud off the paper copy, marking it up, the task wonderfully slow. Next, I transition to completing those edits in the file itself. By late morning I have finished this first big project, and there is a feeling of success, a feeling of momentum.

I slide in socked feet down the hallway: others are still sleeping. Two rooms over, a friend is reading Dante’s Inferno. I descend the creaky stairs, each step a tree limb snapping, despite my attempts to be stealthy.

In the kitchen, someone has claimed a spot at table, gathering essays for a book-length manuscript. Another person is editing a collection of poems. We chat in snatches, each respecting the need for quiet. I pour the last of the coffee and prepare a new pot.

In the living room, a few people sit on the world’s most uncomfortable couch, each working with words in some way. I sit down, stretch my legs, having already written for several hours, the most my brain can handle in one span. I ask others what they’re working on; I share what I’ve been doing. And then it’s back upstairs.

*                *                *

Back in my room there’s a new sound. I approach the window, glance down. My friend sits on the deck two stories below playing her fiddle. It’s one thing to listen to music when I write (which I often do), another to listen to live music by someone whose written words months earlier moved me to seek help. Instead of being states away, she is in the sunshine bowing melodies that help me sort through images and scenes.

I am ready to work on the next project, a piece about something that has bothered me for decades, something I am not yet ready to disclose, and the revision comes easily. I acquire a new vision for the piece. Although I am alone in this room, I am supported by community around me in this three-story house, and that is enough to move me forward, to brave my way through what is painful to write.

*                *                *

Oh, it’s not all quiet, no. A bunch of writers together?

Over three days I laugh more than I have in months.

Over three days I’m a part of a community of writers, some of whom I know well, some of whom I barely know, some of whom I’ve just met, and somehow something creative, something sacred happens over this quick span.

Over three days there are communal activities: the evening meals preceded by our rendition of the Doxology, the evening jam sessions (my fingers aching from playing an acoustic guitar for hours), the reading at a nearby public library where each of delivers a couple poems, a short prose piece.

Over three days my heart is filled, and when I touch down in Austin on Sunday night, my heart still overflowing with fellowship, I have already been plotting the probable retreat dates for 2016.

Feel the Pull of Darkness

I volunteered to drive the night shift during a cross-country road trip last year. That meant the long drive through South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Maybe my enthusiasm to take the short straw was the prospect of what singer/songwriter/writer Josh Ritter calls being “pulled by the American darkness/the mountains, the rivers, the fields at harvest”. Or maybe it was the goal of meeting the sunrise in Missoula. (I had long ago been lured in by A River Runs Through It.) I didn’t want to come to such joy by sleeping until the morning.

A writing mentor told me once, “You really like to write about losers.” I do. I like stories whose characters experience the weight of evil and suffering dragging them down far short of redemption. I like stories and books and movies where evil— and I’m simplifying here—wins.

In a recent conversation in Granta, Ben Marcus and George Saunders discuss ‘dark’ literature. Both writers make no apologies about being pulled to stories that, in quoting Joy Williams, deal with “the horror and incomprehensibility of time.” Stories not fleeing from fear or hopelessness or sadness. Characters whose experiences do not bloom into rainbows and sunrises at the end. Marcus sums it up best, “Relishing this kind of writing does not mean we do not love life. It means we love life enough to want to be present to its difficulty and complexity. We experience pleasure when we feel that someone has arrived at something essential.”

Growing up with faith I have been assured I am part of a great cloud of witnesses. But too often this “cloud” is paraded around as a heavenly choir singing only of “glad tidings of great joys”. Faith, like literature, if it is to “arrive at something essential,” needs to be honest with darkness, allow space for doubt, and ponder questions with answers that leave us far short of redemption. As Madeleine L’Engle says, “pretending there is no darkness is another way to extinguish the light.”

It was nearly 2 a.m. when I crossed the Montana border in March 2014. Rolling hills were covered in frost and sparkling in the starlight. Just passed the state sign I pulled the car over and stepped outside. And, right now, as I’m thinking about what I felt out there, another of Josh Ritter’s lyrics rings true,

A sky so cold and clear the stars might stick you where you stand and you’re only glad it’s dark ‘cause you might see the master’s hand you might cast around forever and never find the peace you seek.

Visiting

 

My grandmother was crazy. I stand at her grave in Virginia and know this is true. She was also achingly beautiful. I have seen old photographs from her youth. She is buried next to her parents who loved my mother unconditionally.

My grandmother's grave is near another relative who may also have been crazy. Both women were institutionalized. Both lived during a time when treatment for mental illness bordered torture—or simply was torture—and was certainly a life sentence for disgrace.

My grandmother’s grandmother died of tuberculosis when she was 29. I visited her grave too. My parents and I found her tombstone in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her name was Elizabeth Whaley, and she lived in the woods near the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River in Tennessee.

We did not intend for our eastern road trip to become an ancestry hunt. One discovery led to another and fed our hunger to piece stories together. My mother found a description online for how to locate her great grandmother’s grave in the national park. She took my father’s arm and used her cane to move rocks from the path. We walked the half-mile, following the edge of a mountain stream lined in yews and rosebay rhododendrons. We found the family cemetery on a rise in the land. A canopy of gold and green leaves shaded the burial ground. We found dozens more relatives. The weathered tombstones still bore the Whaley name. I had no idea this cemetery existed. I had no idea there were so many strong mountain people in my family.

I remember my mother saying a few years ago that she had family who were real country.

“What do you mean,” I asked.

“They spent a lot time on their porch,” she said.

I have known for decades about the mental illness in my family. In truth, though, it was my grandmother and another distant relative, Lucy. That is all. The rest of the women share a remarkable trait. They may have been stubborn or fiercely independent, creative or stern or effortlessly generous, but they all seemed fortified by an unshakable strength. This should be the observation I cling to. Yet, I’ve often focused on the two women afflicted by mental illness and how my grandmother’s mental illness led her far away from strength. She was abusive, manipulative, and unpredictable.

A fear has chased me for years. I have worried I may be like my grandmother.

When I told my cousin, Kelly, about my fear, she set her iced tea on the table and pointed her chin down so I could see her eyes over her sunglasses. “You’re kidding, right?”  Her disbelief forced me to also laugh at the unlikely prospect, but I still feel this pesky fear. Swirling in my blood is the potential for downward spiral. Even if this were the case, though—even if I did manifest mental illness—we live in a time of improved access to good health care. The stigma is changing. I know these things. What I do not understand is this irrational fear.

My mother brought a Hillary Clinton campaign sign on our road trip. We posed for photographs next to the sign on our way through the Mississippi River delta to the Smokies, into the Appalachians, down into the Piedmont and finally to the Virginia tidewater where my mother learned how to survive her own mother. We talked about the lack of strong female leadership in our culture. “The main problem I see,” she said, “is that women don’t have accessible role models of female leaders who use their feminine energy to lead instead of trying to act and dress like men.”

She’s right. She’s absolutely right, I think to myself.

My mother grew up at the confluence of the Mataponi and Pamunkey rivers. She lived on a peninsula and could walk from her house to the water’s edge. Sometimes she found fragments of peace pipes exposed by lapping waves. Her grandparents farmed across the Mataponi, and she would walk the land with her grandfather on Sundays.

While crossing the bridge toward the farm, I asked, “Did you ever swim across the river to your grandparent’s house?”

“No,” she said in a wistful tone.

While driving across North Carolina, I learned about my mother’s first job after she graduated from medical school. She worked for the state health department. “I rode around in a mobile clinic, kind of like an RV, and administered IUDs and handed out birth control pills and gave women pelvic exams in small towns near Memphis.”   

“Really,” I asked.

“Yep. I called it my sex-mobile. The driver was Roman Catholic, but she never said a word because she needed the job.”

I wish there was a photograph of my mother and her sex-mobile.

I took photographs of my mother standing next to her great grandmother’s grave in the national park. Elizabeth Whaley’s son was five years old when she died. He would live in the Tennessee wildness until the U.S. government forced the Whaleys out in the 1930s. He would marry Annie, and they would have a daughter, Florence, who would be my grandmother one day. My mother and I share the same name. It formed by combining my mother’s grandparent’s names together: Joe and Annie became Joanna. My mother’s relatives would worry for her safety as a child. My mother does not know that I know this.

At my grandmother’s cemetery, I found Lucy’s name nearby. Her tombstone was practically hidden by a bush and covered in leaves. I snapped branches and used a twig to dig dirt out of Lucy’s name. I do not know if Lucy was actually crazy or if she was sent away to an asylum for other reasons. Perhaps she showed signs for strong feminine energy, and her family did not know what to do with her. Maybe she really was ill.

I sit here on my porch in the Arkansas Ozarks. It has been a week since we returned from our eastern road trip. Oak leaves drop at my feet. There are hundreds of lifeless leaves covering the ground. I am only beginning to learn the stories in the land. The leaves remind me of the smallness of my worry. My fear is not remarkable. It is a shape amongst hundreds of shapes. What is remarkable is my mother emerging from her childhood, scraped and wounded, full of resilience.

At my grandmother’s cemetery, I take a photograph of my mother standing next to her grandparent’s grave. She sets her cane aside and leans against the stone. The look on her face is of vulnerability, gratitude, and unshakable strength. I want what she has.

Thanks for Driving

“Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”      — Simone Weil

Sam Scoville is my Facebook friend of some years. We share similar upbringing, similar make-up. We've shared some startling conversations about life's real and painful things. Sam is a walking confessional and a skilled trickster. Moreover, he's a practiced truth-teller.

At Warren Wilson College, Sam's job is to jump-start the thinking of first-year students and to introduce them to their brains. It's a job that requires some initial demolition. His class is like a surprise Pamplona. Students come to shop for trinkets— koans of thinking to display in their heirloom cases— and then Sam springs the bulls. There is a lot breakage.

Sam gets to the elemental things and supplies the objectivity to sort through the litter left on the ground. Questioning words, meanings and mythologies help challenge fragile concepts of identity, authority, love and other souvenirs of off-the-shelf culture. It's unsettling for a first-timer. They're confused and complain. But getting run out of the garden shops and into the street is necessary. Does that seem harsh?

Did you ever notice that Adam is banished using the same word Mark's gospel chases Jesus into the wilderness with? The word is driven . And the Spirit of Truth is doing the driving.

Truth's harshness is a judgment we might make before the fact. Its benefits may occur to us in retrospect. But truth is its own justification and exists above our ability to imagine it, much less articulate it. As such it is pure adventure, treacherous and compelling. It is a wild and scenic river we go with as it drives us—to see, think and respond with clarity.

Everything else we'd load our lives with is baggage. Four gospels invoke the great commission of the Christ to “go.” We don't desire it. But the once-spoken logos is gone and still going, so the Spirit of Truth breaks in and drives us to follow. No bag. No purse. No sandals.

Just go.

Genesis and the Fig Tree: The Creative Life

I got lost in it and didn’t hear her at first. “It’s time to go,” my mother called out from the back porch of our neighbor’s house. Mr. Roberts lived alone, the oldest man in the neighborhood, over a 100 years old. I thought the fig tree must be that old—it was massive. It was easy to get lost inside the leafy, twisting branches. The tree, while two or three times taller than my ten-year-old self, also spread over a good quarter of Mr. Roberts’ backyard.

While my mother had a cup of coffee with our neighbor, I circled around in the tree’s low-lying branches, content to be by myself. Leafy doors to “rooms” inside this treehouse opened before me. Other branches bowered over me, the leaves crossing one another to make ceilings, yet there were plenty of skylights, too. When I brushed against the fig leaves, they set off a spicy smell like cinnamon and nutmeg.

My young mind was hooked, enchanted. I sat in one spot a while and made up stories of the fortunate girl living inside this extraordinary home, in charge of her siblings, because she was the only one who knew how to navigate the halls and rooms. I couldn’t live there for long, however. After a short half-hour, it was time to go home.

My mom and I walked home, just up the street. There, I wasn’t in charge. Home was a houseful of brothers, ever-active and more competitive than I was, particularly my oldest brother, who seemed to live and breathe just to taunt me or best me or race me. The only place I could be myself, it seemed, was in my imagination.

So I’d made my closet into a little room to hide myself away, a place where I could read or draw or live in my thoughts. This may be the real genesis of my creative life, but it is always connected to that fig tree, too. My closet wasn’t exactly a lovely place: it held a shelf of my toys, clothes skewed on hangers and hooks, shoes, and dust bunnies. The fig tree, by contrast, was a natural wonder and brightened all my senses.

Its huge leaves and swirling branches have charged my imagination all my life. I’ve got other early memories of fig trees. My grandmother and grandfather in central Texas, near Austin, had a huge backyard garden where they grew pomegranates, figs, tomatoes, squash, and beans. I felt that same state of wonder when I helped harvest the pomegranates or figs, or worked down the garden rows with my grandmother, picking the vegetables.

I’ve found I’m partial to stories that mention the fig tree, too, a tree which has been around since biblical times. There’s Katherine Anne Porter’s story “The Fig Tree” and Barbara Pym’s novel  A Glass of Blessings. Fig trees complicate and enliven the sacred stories as well. They appear in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden. The trees fed the first humans their plump fruits. I can see how the fig tree also made a convenient place to hide. And the amazing leaves—of course they could be used for a quick covering. Adam and Eve sewed the first clothes from fig leaves.

Included in the promise of the Promised Land is the fig. This place, sought by God’s people, was  “a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey” (Deuteronomy 8.8, NIV). The fig tree also makes its appearance in other books of the Bible. George Tsakiridis, in “Vine and Fig Tree,” commented that George Washington often used the phrase “under their vine and fig tree” in his correspondence. He says Washington was referring most likely to Micah 4.4: “But they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”

For Washington, the phrase symbolically indicated “the independence of the peasant farmer who is freed from military oppression,” an apt image that early American settlers aspired to. Washington’s own fondness for life at Mount Vernon can be tied to this image, his own place “under the vine and fig tree.” I think this is the pull of the fig tree for me as well. It represents the place of my independence, where my imagination took hold, and I began to grow aesthetically and intellectually.

Exteriority

The first time I washed myself in sage smoke, it was my introduction both to smoke in ritual and to sage. I vaguely wafted the smoke around my head as I had seen others do, but the experience was entirely foreign to me. I’d stepped over this prairie plant all my life and never wondered about its character, its smell, its purifying capabilities. Wrapping myself in its smoke was a baptism of sorts. We were out on the prairie, at a Lakota burial site discovered on an Englishman’s farm, which the Lakota had come to re-consecrate. The foreignness I felt was entirely my own.

Back at the pot luck up at the farm, someone said, “Did you notice the hawk that was out there, blessing us?”  

I had not noticed that either.

When I first read Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem,” it helped make manifest what I’d missed. “To pray you open your whole self/ To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,” the poem begins, “To one whole voice that is you.”  

I’m a stumbling pray-er. Too often for me prayer has been akin to a grocery list and un-akin to an opening.

Right off in “Eagle Poem,” too, we’re in an exterior setting powerful with heavenly bodies. This I know. I have a particular memory of fall in mind: sunset and one heavenly body ignites a sliver of the other, sending a shiver among the corn.

“And know there is more,” the poem continues, less as command than as a statement about the nature of being in prayer:  You “open” yourself and “know” there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion. Like Eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings.

This is the first sleight of hand. The poem takes us from the more that we cannot see, and bypasses language, replacing it with the circles of motion there in the sky, with the eagle circling. And subject is joined to object: the exterior circling of the eagle sweeps clean the interior of the heart.  

We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out this morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty.

I see the circles, feel them even, external in my mind until the sky flips and suddenly it’s “Inside us.”

It’s the kind of thing I want from art, when the interior becomes the exterior, entangling Self and Other, till the Other is I and I, Other, and I have to disentangle again the one from the many, the firmament from the waters, the man from the dust.

Or do I?

Letters to Self

At some point each semester, I talk to my writing class about the importance of keeping a journal.So much of what writers produce must be attached to deadline or assignment.  Under these conditions, we check our tone, weigh risks, and write beneath the shadow of an imagined and rolling eye. Under that kind of constraint, it’s important to have a place where our voices can crack with the terror or silliness or strain of the immediate moment without the pressure of public presentation.   

So, I press fresh paperback journals into young hands and quote Flannery O’Connor famous words, “I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I tell them to write without burden because keeping a journal will make a space for discovery that even the most exacting assignment might not produce.And while I fully believe the possibility of this sort of discovery is real and true, I almost forget to expect that sort of discovery for myself.  

In a letter to college freshman, Alfred Corn (now a famous poet), Flannery O’Connor addresses Corn’s concern for new and intense doubts about his Christian faith. As any reader of O’Connor would expect, her responses are profound and thoughtful. Assuring him that real faith must encounter real doubt, she reminds him that “doubt is an experience that belongs to faith.” Using her method of letter writing as a catalyst for a free-write, I direct students to “write a letter to your past self that suggests experiences of doubt and faith without using either of the words doubt or faith.” And when I go home and search my own shelves for an old journal, I am surprised to discover that I have been writing these kinds of letters to myself for a long time.   

For a fevered hour, I sit with my own journals, the stiff-spined and the scraggly paged, cheap composition books and mahogany moleskines. I read and reread and find that beyond the images and ideas I left for myself to develop into poems and papers, I have also been writing very personally to my own self. I stare a long time at four sentences that lament the doubt a past self felt about my capacity to “really” write, and I begin to remember, flanked by my own words, that the doubt I experience today in my writing life is nothing new. Suddenly, I wanted to hug the author who admitted this struggle, to high-five her, embracing “yesterday’s” voice with an abandon I would never direct at “today’s”. The experience of having my own past voice directly address my present one was like encountering an inheritance someone else had earned and carefully saved for the benefit of another generation. Yesterday’s voice admitted angst that today’s voice still understood. There was such relief in that mutual understanding.

A letter, in its nature of direct and intimate address, clasps my imagination in the same way my grandmother’s old hands cup the face of my daughter. There is something about a voice that belongs to a moment I intimately know; I can believe in that voice because I can believe in the reality of the moment from which it speaks. How shocking, for the writer, so used to falling in love with other voices, other stories, to find her own voice worth listening to.

Metaphysical poet, John Donne, writes that “More than kisses, letters mingle souls.” While the act of writing letters naturally lends itself to the passionate longing of lovers, I am moved by the letters that I have, even unknowingly, been writing to myself. I am breathless for notes scrabbled in margins and smudged blue into spidery paragraphs. How vital our own voices can become, shimmering in margins of shelved journals, waiting to reach across time and distance like a letter addressing us in a moment we most need to hear from a friend.

Give Me Batman, Mostly

I want to play along with our pop culture superhero obsession, I do. I've seen the movies and the TV series, I've read several dozen superhero comics. My boys pretend to be the Flash and Captain America. But at the end of the day, I don't care that awful much about Superman or the Avengers or even Spider-Man. Give me Batman.

Mostly. I do have a thing for Wonder Woman, and I've developed an affection for Spider-Woman that's kind of hard to explain. I'll watch the next season of Daredevil and I’ll follow Arrow until it jumps the shark. My interest in those characters, however, is pretty limited, even casual. But Batman? I'll read pretty much anything with his name on the cover.

For me, Batman has the most spiritual narratives. I'd venture to say that, in general, D.C. excels Marvel in exploring the hero's soul, and no soul is darker than Bruce Wayne's.

Bruce Wayne suffered the ultimate psychic injustice in witnessing his parents’ murders. That fact, combined with the Gothic setting and the hard-boiled tone (a descendent of Gothic), makes for a hero not just up against incredible odds but against a fundamentally unjust world. Every criminal is his parents’ murderer. Every supervillain embodies the pervasive moral evil at the heart of us all. Other heroes live in worlds where most people are basically good. Batman, like the hard-boiled detective, lives in a broken world and knows he’s as broken as anyone, but he fights tooth and nail to do good anyway.

Arguably, Batman’s mythos is the most nihilistic in that it depends the least on luck, i.e., on something happening just in time because the good guys always win. Batman wins because he spends his free time thinking of and planning for every contingency; he wins by sheer force of will. And, yet, it remains the most spiritual precisely because it takes the pervasiveness of evil so seriously and because Batman opposes absolute evil with moral absolutes: criminals must answer to the law; no killing.

I think that’s why fans often favor him over Superman, and why in Justice League stories Batman somehow manages if not to be the key hero to somehow still be right. Superman, as Frank Miller showed in The Dark Knight Returns, is too public and thus can become co-opted by national governments. Wonder Woman is an outsider. The other guys are aliens or simply lack adequate cool. Batman stands for the capacity of the individual human to do what’s right in the face of insurmountable odds.

I’m aware of the merits of other heroes, and I’m sure you can point to a storyline here or there that’s worth reading, but I have my doubts that any other superhero story can really look into the abyss like Batman can. Iron-Man’s cool. Hulk’s anger mirrors our own inner rage. But for the icon of the human fronting an evil world, give me Batman.