Living word by word

The Middle Place

    Just finished The Middle Place, by Kelly Corrigan. It's been a while since a memoir really grabbed me, but this one did. Her story is partly about the dual battles with cancer that she and her father fought, but more about that "middle place" many of us find ourselves in at this stage of adulthood -- both a daughter and a mother at the same time. One could say it's about discovering that we are the grown-ups now.

   It's particularly affecting to me because of the number of peers I have dealing with cancer now, and because Corrigan and I became mothers in exactly the same year. But Corrigan's humor and ability to capture some of the realities of growing up when we did in the 80's is wonderful. Anybody remember the status of Guess jeans in high school?

There's a tricky balance between the utterly honest confessional voice that we associate with Anne Lamott and pure self-absorption that gets whiny and irritating. I couldn't finish Eat, Pray Love because I felt like Elizabeth Gilbert couldn't get over herself. Corrigan, maybe because she is so consumed with love for her family, made me care much more about her emotional journey. Take and read, my friends!

Ashes coming. . .

 Every year my birthday (2/24) falls somewhere near the beginning of Lent. I call it a good year when it falls before Ash Wednesday, and this year is a particularly good year, since it coincides with Mardi Gras!!

Then again, I'll have only one day to celebrate a journey around the sun before we're called to contemplate mortality, and this year the vulnerability of aging is striking especially hard. . .too many of my peers are dealing with chronic or life-threatening illness.

I love the fact that Ash Wednesday deals in a physical sign of this vulnerability though, because ashes are a prime reason many of us do not contemplate our bodies' temporality much these days. As cremation becomes more and more the standard, our society seems to "slough off" the bodies of our beloved dead all too quickly.  We will gather to 'celebrate life,' but not so much to be reminded that those eyes we knew so well are closed forever.

Thomas Lynch has written powerfully on this subject in several places, most recently in an essay in Best American Spiritual Writing 2008. He gives the vivid picture of a woman who comes to pick up her sister's ashes, because no one else will, and as he watches she goes out with the urn  to the trunk of her car, thinks better of it, then places it in the back seat, then reconsiders again, and finally places the ashes in the passenger seat, and buckles the seat belt around them.

"Just a shell," people say of the body of the deceased, but our actions sometimes speak otherwise. We know that this dust formed of the ground has not only been breathed into by God, but molded, shaped, and blessed by divine hands. They will return to dust, but in the mean time they are marked with a holy sign of God's ultimate love.

sliding into Epiphany

  

Even though it's a rare 2nd Sunday after Christmas January 4, we're going to slide into Epiphany on January 4 this year.  See my former post on the Gift of the Magi for thoughts on the Matthew text.

    And, though it commits the usual sin of melding Matthew and Luke's nativity stories, I'll be reading my kids  Humphrey's First Christmas as the Magi approach. Humphrey is a child-like camel who wants nothing more than a blanket like the other camels -- until he is moved to give it to the baby Jesus.

 Our ace nanny gave this book to my son, who treasures his blankie above even his trains. The illustrations are what really make this book a treasure -- something about camel's teeth brings home the way the Incarnation is a gift to all creation.

recovery reading

I'm reading The World Without Us, recommended to me by a number of friends as "more hopeful than it sounds." In parts, it is. There are many places which are a testament to human ingenuity and the resiliency of nature. But there are places where I've just had to stop reading. I understand why most people find it easier to deny climate change.

So, as recovery, I'm re- reading a book I already knew I liked, Leaving Church. I was irritated the first time around that Barbara Brown Taylor had, in the end, left parish ministry. I'm still not happy about that, but this time I can read her spot-on descriptions of parish life and simply enjoy the good writing. For example:

"On my worst nights I lay in bed feeling like a single parent, unable to sleep because I knew I did not have enough love in me to go around. God was the boundless lover, but for many people God was the parent who had left. They still read about him in the Bible and sang about him in hymns. They still believed in his reality; which made it even harder to accept his apparent lack of interest in  them. They waited for messages from him that did not arrive. They prepared their hearts for meetings that never happened. They listened to other Christians speak as if God showed up every night for supper, leaving them to wonder what they had done wrong to make God go off and start another family."

One of the things I love about Advent is that the season of waiting is a time we're allowed to acknowledge our sense of orphanhood, our worry that God has indeed given up on this world. I know it is not true, but I also know the worry, the longing , is so very, very real. It's good to hear a writer as gifted as Taylor acknowledge it.

grieving someone you never knew

    Because I've been news dieting lately, I was slow to learn that David Foster Wallace committed suicide recently, a true literary tragedy. We've lost a  writer of startling talent and breadth -- who else could write a laugh out loud funny essay on the Illinois State Fair and a readable history of the concept of infinity?

   Of course, it feels weird to say "we." I never knew the man, though I did hear him read at Ruminator Books in Saint Paul about ten years ago. He looked scruffy, uncomfortable and, of course, brilliant. Adam Felber of NPR's Wait, Wait  has blogged a moving lament.

  It makes me worry a bit for my other favorite truth-teller comics. People who are that smart and that funny -- people like Aaron Sorkin, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart -- are often also very familiar with the depths of despair. Jon Stewart talked in the NY Times of taking his "morning cup of sadness" before transforming the real news of the day into a comedy show. I just pray that he can continue to transform it into the honest,  slap-in-the-face dose of humor we all need in these troubled times.

Sara Miles on radical gay left-wing Christians

   I'm so excited that Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread, will be coming to ECLC in February.

  

Don't miss her piece on beliefnet, on being part of a Christian community in an election season. "Read the Bible, and pray for your enemies." (And turn off the damn TV -- I wouldn't skip that part of the advice). And, if you dare, read the comment section and pray for someone who is as bold as Miles to publish her beliefs in such a public way. I'm not sure I could withstand that kind of hostile commentary.

back home

 

One of  my favorite scenes from West Wing features the staff staring at a wall of time zone clocks, debating about when the President will return from a trip to China.  One of them finally says, "How can that be? He's been gone for 38 hours. . .and it's all been Thursday." That was nearly our experience this week as we flew home. Between the jet lag and malaria medications, my sleep patterns are pretty whacked out.

  But it's so, so good to be home. 89 degrees? No problem. We had maybe two days of blue sky our entire time in China, so I'm happy to see the sun, and relieved that I don't sweat the minute I walk out the door.

  Today we rode our SUV (tandem plus trail-a-bike plus Burley) over to the Powderhorn Art Fair, a lovely event with lots of local artists in ddition to some who have traveled far. (The difference between Powderhorn and Uptown's Art Fair? Uptown has beer. Powderhorn has puppet shows). The highlight was meeting Betsy Bowen, the Grand Marais woodcut artist who has captured the North Woods in several great children's books.  Check out her blog and prints. She also has a great 2009 calendar now.

Festival reflections

I'm still reflecting on the orgy of words and thoughts from the Festival of Faith and Writing. I always come away from this event determined to read more and to write more, but it was wonderful to hear Katherine Paterson's closing charge on Saturday night: go play. Good advice for sabbatical, though illness this week -- our child's and our babysitter's --  has made some of those plans a little harder to carry out.

It's always fascinating how the in-person voices and egos of these writers compare with their writing. Generally speaking, it seems that the best writers (not necessarily the most successful) are the most likable and consistent with what you read on the page. I'm also drawn to the older ones, like Katherin Paterson, because in general they seem to have gotten over themselves. There's also, I have to say, a preponderance of Anglicans and Roman Catholics among these writers. Not so many Lutherans.

Yann Martel was the most memorable in speaking about claiming faith in a secular world -- humble, smart and activist in his own way. He has started a "book club of two" with the Conservative Prime Minister of Canada. Every two weeks he sends the PM a classic work with an explanation of why it is important. His argument: if we have the right to ask our leaders about their taxes and finances, we have the right to know what is informing their imaginations. Check it out here. (That's Stephen Harper in the photo, not Yann Martel).

from the festival

I'm having a lovely time in Grand Rapids at the Festival of Faith and Writing. Great talks from Mary Gordon, Michael Chabon, Mary Karr, Franz Wright, Jon Muth. . .oh, my goodness, so much. It's like trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant.

One odd thing, perhaps a sign of how I should approach the sabbatical. . .

My cell phone -- newly replaced after Johann's attempted swim last week -- was working fine at home. Here, I can call, the call goes through, and I can hear my friends and loved ones on the other line just fine. But they can't hear me. Will just gives the report from home, and I have to hang up. My friends here at the conference tell me where to go to meet them. But I can't reply.

So maybe that's the point, for these first few days, at least: shut up. Just receive.

wild awake

   Sunday night I went to see Mary Oliver at  the State Theatre. It was a magical evening -- an almost-full house gathered simply to hear an aging, unassuming woman read her spare poetry for an hour. For once, the standing ovation felt completely natural and deserved.

I was also struck, having never heard her speaking voice, how much the voice I've heard in my head as I've read her work matched the one I heard from the stage. She is clearly a writer who has, as they say, "found her voice" and translated it to the page perfectly. She's also one of those writers whose work is so spare, so simple and so direct that you walk away thinking, "I could do that." But, of course, I can't. Making it sound that easy takes fifty years or so.

She confessed that her work is shifting a bit in recent years more toward the human landscape, and that she is more willing to speak directly about situations of injustice and violence in her poetry. She got the most raucous applause for a poem in which she imagines taking her dog to the White House, where Donald Rumsfeld would get down on the floor and play like a boy, "for once, a rational man." But clearly, the natural world is still Oliver's first love, and her attention to it the gift she offers to us all.

Until Thirst was published, few people would have called her a religious poet. Now that she occasionally invokes God or prayer or a biblical scene in a poem, she brings to humankind the same attention and compassion.  "Gethsemane"  reflects on how the natural world is always "wild awake." But then she shows true compassion for the disciples, and all us humans, so often not attentive to holiness:

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not

keep that vigil, how they must have wept,

so utterly human, knowing this too

must be part of the story.

I am so grateful Oliver is still waking early, wild awake to God's grandeur around us.