2017.05.28 Goodbye and Thank You Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle, a writer who made music with his words, just died yesterday.

I don’t write obituaries as news. I write today because I feel deep sorrow at the loss of a writer so supremely deft with words that I am left wonderstruck. (The formal obituary is below.) I did not know Brian Doyle personally. I grieve his writing, much of which I’ve read.

I would call Brian Doyle a Master of Words. He would, in his prose, pile words up—verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—in heaps, and he never heeded the scorn of those who advise writers to use fewer adjectives and never an adverb. He wrote about everyday things and made them all shimmer with soul. He shunned no word that said what he meant and felt. Brian gave me courage to use as many words as I needed to match the energy of my emotional investment in whatever I was writing about. 

Here’s an example of my own attempt to describe the mysterious power of an experience which is not earthbound:  

There’s no telling exactly why such attractions take hold and cement themselves into the human mind and heart, yet most of us know the experience, and most of us admit it feels irresistible, indispensable, immeasurable, irreplicable, mysterious, and tidal, all at once. So we follow it.

If I hadn’t borrowed Doyle’s word-courage I would never have dared to use so many adjectives, one not even a legitimate word. But I felt each one. To pay proper tribute to Doyle’s faith along with his skill with apt words, here is a poem he wrote called God. 
    
GOD


By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten
Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven
Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they
Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God
And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the
Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to
See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception
Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,
Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m
Not kidding and this is not a metaphor. I am completely serious.
Everyone babbles about God but I saw God this morning just as
The bus slowed down for the stop on Maple Street. God was six
Girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat.
Of course God would wear a brilliantly colored tall dinosaur hat!
If you were the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever
Was in this blistering perfect terrible world, wouldn’t you wear a
Hat celebrating some of the wildest most amazing developments?
                        by Brian Doyle

Doyle had a vibrant sense of humor and was obviously passionate about God, his Christian faith, Roman Catholic brand, and basketball—not necessarily in that order. He also adored little stories and noticed absolutely everything that crossed his path, things others would pass by without a shrug. Everything, everyone, and every story is sacred—maybe religious and always soul-shaking. To perceive in this way is a gift—let’s say it’s Holy. 

Here is a poem he wrote in A Shimmer of Something. Lean Stories Of Spiritual Substance about tiny unnoticeable events of eternal magnitude. Call these poems Incarnation, Resurrection, Creation—or just plain Life, true and on the bone. 

THE SPARROW

Or, hey, listen, here’s a story for you.
A friend of mine who is 96 years old
And blind but still living in her beach
Cabin hears her cat capture a sparrow
Which the cat then presents as a prize.
My friend cradles the bird in a sponge
And goes to the front door and throws
Out the sponge, and then goes to wash
The dishes, only to realize she’s using
The sparrow, who objects strenuously.
Now, this is terrific story from every
angle imaginable: deft murderous cat,
Sparrow who didn't die, lady giggling,
The grin that just opened on your face,
The child who will fall down laughing
Later when you say now here’s a story . . .

And a favorite of mine.

THE SQUIRREL

Here you go. Here’s a moment to ponder carefully.
We think that there are greater and lesser moments
But how immensely and ridiculously wrong this is.
For here is a boy riding along the street in summer.
He is perhaps six years old. His bike is wildly blue.
He sees a smear of squirrel in the street. He pauses,
Using the heels of his sneakers as brakes. He looks,
He dismounts, he sets his kickstand, he looks down.
He kneels and gathers up the shredded creature and
Walks to the shady ravine where we saw the coyote
That time and he gives the squirrel to the tiny creek.
He washes in a muddy puddle and then he rides off.
I am the man who saw and testifieth of these things,
And what I say is true. I saw a boy bow before holy
Things, for all things are holy, and he reminded me,
And so now I remind you. Go thou and do likewise.
            


Brian was born in New York, my own home city, in 1956. He has been the editor of  the University of Portland’s (that’s Oregon)  quarterly Portland magazine since 1991. Author Annie Dillard called this “the best spiritual magazine in the country.” Brian died on May 27th, 2017 at age 60 of complications related to a brain tumor. He leaves his wife and three children. Here's the obituary link.

https://www1.up.edu/news/2017/05/Brian-Doyle-passes-away.html

2014.08.17 Memorial Tribute

I loved Robin Williams. He made me laugh till I cried and cry till I laughed. He showed me true humanity, with all quirks and foibles, and perhaps a glimpse of true divinity as well. I also knew some of Williams's troubles with addictions and depression. With all this, he managed to share his gift of wise humor with the world. I mourn him. He died too young—63.

There's no sense, however, in making Williams an idol. He can't have been easy to live with (three wives.) The emotional climate he created rivaled biblical signs of any proper apocalypse, I'm sure. No idol, but an icon of grace, yes.

Charles Marsh, biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and pastor, writes in Strange Glory about Bonhoeffer's choice to give his blessing to the conspiracy to murder Hitler, a choice for which Bonhoeffer was executed.  "Bonhoeffer realized finally that genuine humanness would forever wander into abstraction if it were not anchored in the history, suffering and religion of the Jews."

Bonhoeffer didn't bother to unravel the moral paradox of his action. Neither did Williams when he chose death. 

Recently, Williams was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. It was, I imagine, one too many diagnoses to bear, so he chose death—a sad but wise and moral choice. By faith, I believe that he finally has the peace that passes all understanding. To Robin Williams, I say, Alleluia, anyhow.

Here is one of the most beautiful spiritual tributes I've ever seen, written in a letter  by Jape Shattuck of Newport, R.I and published in the Boston Globe, on August 14, 2014:

"Each time we dream we create worlds of astonishing depth and detail that function perfectly according to their own strange logic A sound in the dreamer's environment can sometimes trigger the instantaneous creation of a new world, with new logic, in which that sound fits seamlessly into a vast unfolding scenario. Robin Williams was the only person I've known who could perform that same feat while awake, in front of an audience, and in such convincing detail that it felt like I was sharing his exquisite dream, a dream whose code revealed punch line after punch line while gently proving that the goodness of his troubled soul was the same as mine."

To Robin Williams, I say thanks. I will remember the life you gave my soul.  Will I ever forget Euphegenia Doubtfire?

Perhaps it is so that the plumbline cast by Spirituality plunges deeper than the one cast by Morality; thus, choices made from Soul-depth can be quite preposterously immoral. Sometimes, I do think that God is not essentially Moral Being, but simply Beloved Being.