2021.04.11 Doubtless?

We are in Easter season, a time to rejoice over a Mystery most cannot comprehend, fully grasp and hold. Death, grief, murder, doubt, fear, and despair we get. We know these realities all too intimately—personally and globally. We expect them. But when confronted with no body, with Resurrection, well, it’s unexpected, not easy to believe at all, except to say that by faith we love, trust, and adore a God who brings life out of death, even ultimate biological death.

This poem is about an experience of abuse I had when I was eight years old at the hands of a stranger who happened to look just like the traditional bearded image of God. For a time this experience dimmed, but did not obliterate, the strong connection I’d experienced with God from early childhood. Writing puts it out onto the page where it has less power over me.

Missing the Rockettes

The theater darkened
    slowly.
Chatter and patter died
    down.
A thin line of light
    blinked
        winked
From beneath the thick maroon velvet curtain
    hidden wonders glowed.

A small girl edged forward
    eager
         ready, ready.

Now music from the orchestra pit
    arose.
Now the curtain lifted slowly
    slowly
    
Exposed two stories
    the one
        flashing, daring, dashing dance
    the other
        untold, unclean, unseen, unbidden

As the old man’s withered hand
    crept lightly up the child’s thigh
        it stole the show. 
 

Healing, for me, was a process of resurrection. Like Thomas, it took me a while before I could touch my wound or trust my God.  
 

2015.01.11 Let's Start a Post-Fear Era

“Fear has in this moment, a respectability I’ve never seen in my life.” 

Marilynne Robinson said this in an October 5, 2014, NY Times Sunday Magazine, interview conducted by Wyatt Mason. Robinson, 2013 recipient of a National Humanities Medal at the White House, is one of the few contemporary writers who is not afraid to speak out about fear. She is also not afraid to speak out about being religious—a “bent” she seems to have been born with, she says. Even clergy these days are hesitant about their religious "bent" and couch their religious faith in currently acceptable terms of spirituality. 

It’s post-Christmas time. It’s post-Christian, post-modern, post-everything, as far as I can figure out. For me it’s post-menopausal, at the least. What’s ahead? I get tempted to “respect” fear too much when I let it hold me back, when I over-anticipate negative outcomes. What if?—and the like. 

Every Christmas season we engage in our annual ritual of watching the film, “A Christmas Carol,” based on the 1843 novelette by Charles Dickens. We watch the 1984 version with George C. Scott playing the aging Scrooge, frozen in his ways by self-preservative strategies, derived from a cruel and humiliating early history. Fear ran Scrooge's show—fear posing as greed. Scrooge shut out the clamor of the world, amassed as much money as he could, never looked back, or forward, or round about him. 

We sat on the edges of our seats, pulled along by the old familiar story we knew by heart. Or did we? It was like Holy Scripture—everyone’s story in all its naked ugliness, yet without any easy answers or security that it will, in fact, turn out all right, just because some people notice what is holy, good, and, yes, divine. But will they (or we) choose good?  Will Scrooge? Oddly, our hearts were never quite sure until Scrooge ended up on his knees, weeping and full of grace. It was the emotional incredulity that kept, and keeps us every year, watching to make sure fear does not have its way entirely and looking forward to pure rejoicing, once again, at the end.

This year a phrase, or idea, from the script I hadn't noticed before struck me. Call it Scrooge wisdom. It went something like this: remember your past well, in order to live fully aware in your present, for these two combine to influence the yet unknown future you are creating. All three of Scrooge's Spirits are connected. The past, the present, and the future are never completely separable one from another in the human psyche. I call this the healthy internalization of one's personal cycle through time. As in Scrooge's transformation, the impact of all three time "zones" had to be known and integrated before his heart unlocked, defrosted, softened, and turned from fear to love.

Marilynne Robinson writes similarly compelling narratives. Her characters evolve and change, less dramatically than Scrooge, but then Scrooge needed several brickbats. Robinson's assessment of our current cultural condition isn’t too far from Dickens’s, however: that we have become overly fearful, and that our fear has become a respectable excuse for not acting as we should.

My gosh, I can identify with that when I hurry by the many beggars I pass on the city streets in Boston and hastily drop money into their cups or guitar cases. I’m generous, yes, a kind of good thing, yet I confess that I feel fear underneath. I’m not sure exactly of what. The future perhaps? These folks are always courteous and always say thank you, or God bless you, and sometimes have a musical offering. 

Mason asked Robinson: “What do you think people should be talking about more?” She talked then about fear as a default position and connected it, specifically, with faith-fear. Some of her religious students, for instance, come to her because they feel inhibited from speaking about the sacred in life, and they know she is faith-friendly. “How it [fear] has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should do something”

Robinson is 70 now and has always been unafraid to write openly about internalized religious faith through story. Her characters have “soul voices” struggling to be born as they learn to speak for themselves. They often seek guidance from religious resources, like the Bible, while they are working out the scriptures of their own lives.

Dickens did the same. He was critical of religious hypocrisy and pious practices, so religious faith expressed itself from the inside out. We see Scrooge’s soul go through hell and back. And do we know it’s all a dream? Sort of. Scrooge, like the biblical Saul on the road to Damascus, stands out for his powerhouse, overnight conversion. Robinson’s heroes stand out by a similar process, though more nuanced like the slow awakening that begins for the disciples on the biblical road to Emmaus. 

I'm afraid to be called a crazy religionist, so I take courage from Robinson and Dickens. I share a portion of their fine writerly souls, and delight in the enlightenment that comes to their "fictional" heroes. They help me notice and appreciate the steady stream of transformative moments all around me every day.

Honestly? I take more courage from the solid faith of minor characters, supporting roles, who, though less central, are just as luminous in their steady recognition of the sacred in all life—the medicine for fear-driven living.

2014.03.16 Stalling Out?

I feel stalled out. Maybe it’s winter blues, or world and church systems run amok. More likely it’s personal disappointment because my consistent, persistent, persevering,very good efforts to get my little memoir published have not born fruit—yet. Plus, it's Saturday with nothing to do.

Thus, I feel like Alexander having his “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” (1972 book by Judith Viorst)  I’m not a fourth grader like Alexander, therefore I’m having not one but a series of such days. Perfectly age-appropriate, no doubt, yet clever rationalization doesn’t get me out of the stall.

You know what it feels like when your car stalls out, right?  Suddenly you lose your GO-power. The stalling out phenomenon is worse in an airplane. I learned about it when, back in the 70s, I took a pinch-hitter course, learning how to fly a small plane. My then-husband was a pilot and owned a Piper Cub. He was an excellent and safe pilot, and I was confident I’d never have to pinch hit. The real reason I took the course was to write about the experience, and also get a photo of myself standing at the wing of a small aircraft—grinning. Those were my Brenda Starr Girl Reporter days on staff for a small local weekly newspaper—my first paid job ever.

My instructor talked a lot about stalling out, especially while taking off. I know little of aerodynamics but a stall on take off, he said, was more dangerous than a nose-down stall that could cause a tailspin.

Technically, a stall can be described thus:  Sufficient airspeed must be maintained in flight to produce enough lift to support the airplane without requiring too large an angle of attack. At a specific angle of attack, called the critical angle of attack, air going over a wing will separate from the wing or "burble" causing the wing to lose its lift (stall).

When the plane stalls on takeoff it feels as if it starts to slide backwards, hovering there, threatening to descend tail first.  In this image, the lower plane is in stall—like me just now.

A skilled pilot knows how to get out of a stall. My ultra-calm instructor was my co-pilot making sure I didn’t overdo the power trip, a big temptation, and stall out. I loved powering up—rising into the air. In a small plane you really feel, well, as if you yourself are a huge bird. 

But how do you "pilot" your life when a stall happens? I have no idea really. I hovered around for a while, doing nothing purposeful, moping. I gave God my worries, but not my aspirations. Were they too high? I had no idea.

So here’s what I did: I mopped the disgusting bathroom floor covered with winter grit; I went for a walk in 50 degree weather; I met a friend for lunch. She felt blah too, so we ordered pizza, one for each of us. I ate some bread before my pizza arrived. Really!  My friend was more sensible and restrained. We laughed a lot. Back home I ordered some new skinny jeans from a catalog because I’d punctured a small hole with my pointy fingernail in the ones I got for $20 at CVS. I called another friend who wondered if I were "too attached". I told her no, I’m sleeping and eating fine. I’ll detach tomorrow—maybe.

I marvel that the high point of days like this is enjoying a glass of wine in the evening with my husband and watching a British soap, like "Doc Martin"—the local doc in a tiny town in Cornwall.  Martin is perpetually ill-mannered and grumpy as hell—and we love him.

Writing about my stall-days helps. Godde knows why but I feel better just getting it out and onto a page.  Feel free to take it all on yourself but don’t feel too sorry for me. Hope and energy return slowly, like wind on wings. I remember this from other stall times in my life when I didn’t crash.

Behold!  The psalm reading for evening prayer was Psalm 138. I use Pamela Greenberg's translation. Verse 8 flew off the page and into my heart. The psalmist prays: If I walk into the thick of my sorrows, you keep me alive—against the wrath of my fears.

End of slumpy stall for today. I'm alive. Sadness and fear can't kill Soul.

2013.10.27 Prayer is Poetry and Poetry Prayer

"I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) wrote the above quote, along with the beautiful poem below. She was born in England, served as a civilian nurse in WWII, and published her first book in 1946 after which she came to America.

I get the prayer/poem connection.When I write I am drawn into the process as if I were a deer and the computer screen bright headlights.  I’m not dazed or in a trance.  I’m just engaged with something so much bigger than I am and with so much fascination I forget that it’s me doing it.  Some days, not all, it can seem as if words write themselves. I wonder if that’s how Godde created— electric with the fierce runaway energy of mutual potentiation. Deep prayer, when I let it happen, is just like that: I become We.

Levertov intuits this kind of connective mystery, a natural, near-quotidian holiness that does not dissolve.

Come Into Animal Presence (1961)

No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

Oh,by the way, no one is good, or bad, at praying.  

2012.09.26 Outrageous!!??

I had an outrageous thought just this morning, one so heretical I gave it a mental cancellation—but it wouldn’t go null or void. 

I thought: What if writing were not all that important and as crucial to communications as educators and others, writers for example, think?

I’d been reading laments and worrisome statistics about the high percentages of today’s college students who simply don’t know how to write, that is to construct an intelligible sentence with decent grammar and punctuation.  It seemed a catastrophe. How would they get jobs? Get along in their relationships? Write papers?  Sermons?  Be a professional of any kind???—and more.

I’m a word person. I love words all by themselves,  and words strung together to make a meaning. I’m also someone who has always loved to read which is how I learned that writing was important.  I’m also a wordy, and sometime last-wordy, person. AND I write books—not for a living I’d starve. Still, to say in writing what I mean so that other literate persons can understand means my life to me—it’s a sacred practice.

Could my heretical insight mean that a whole new language, way of writing is emergent? A whole new language evolving thanks to the internet and texting? What if abbreviations and shorthands and acronyms become the way to write—for everyone? 

Esperanto didn’t work well as a universal language. Language is too personal, a sign of one’s identity, one’s flavor.  Who would sing their ABC’s?  Or practice each stroke of lovely symbolic letters of Eastern languages?  Will we have a language called Unitext? Scriptext? OMGI<3u br="br" dlt="dlt" pos.="pos.">
This is crazy. Or is it?

If it’s not nutz (see?) I hope I’ll be dead to “see” it.  And even more dead if Robo-books (books put together by googling a title of interest and then compiling all the data on that topic into a book which Nimble Books will then print and bind and sell for cents—automated publishing and a proliferation of books of all kinds) becomes the norm. 

Ah well LOL..........what the wise priest in the Bible, Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes, wrote is true: There is  nothing new under the sun.  Thank Godde everything IS under the sun.

2012.02.10 A Famous "Cliché"

“Old Marley was dead as a doornail. This must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Writers take note. These are two sentences in the opening paragraphs of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.(The quote above is taken from the screen play for the movie version starring George C. Scott, fyi.)

The punch of the point, however,is more important than assignation and is written in a, heaven forbid, cliché. (It might not have been in Dickens’s day but he alludes to it as such.)

A cliché today would be enough, especially on the first page in the first sentence, to render one’s manuscript “dead as a doornail” indeed and buried in the slush pile.

A doornail is a stud set in a door for strength or as an ornament. Useless, hackneyed, overused, trite, lackluster AND lifeless? Maybe, but don’t you have doornail days? As a writer those are days when my every word is dry, zestless, blah, and every sentence deader than a doornail.

Thank you Charles Dickens for giving me the courage not to be so afraid that every darn word I put on the page MIGHT be a cliché or some other sin inviting death.

Write free as a bird, happy as a clam, cool as a cucumber!