On the same day here in Minneapolis, Memorial Day 2020, my mother died of Covid infection and George Floyd was killed by police. It took about 6 weeks for me to sufficiently steady the mix of grief inside before I could make the pilgrimage to 38th St and Chicago Ave where Floyd was killed, just a few miles from where I live. Yes, there were banners of outrage and memorial painted across outside walls. Yes, there were flowers heaped at the corner of his death. Yes, the intersection’s core was a growing ad hoc monument to the mattering of Floyd’s life and black lives. But there on the quieter northwest side of the intersection was a garden someone had started, with dirt and mulch and plants of all varieties right along the edge of Chicago Ave, right where the tires of a thousand and one cars have splashed through standing water and where a thousand and one cigarette butts and candy wrappers have in the past been tossed. Into that garden, someone had placed painted rocks, and the rocks spoke of beauty and hope in the midst of grief of multiple varieties.
Evidences of beauty and goodness, anything that prompts joy
I’ve been slowly rereading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. Perhaps you read it when it first came out in 2010. This popular book is known for modeling keeping a daily list of that for which you’re grateful, not meaning just “things” but evidences of beauty and goodness and thought and any sightings that prompt joy no matter how small. The book moves from gratitude to joy, with lots in between and beyond, and this second read has been valuable. This morning as I was reviewing the passages I’ve underlined, this one popped out and offers a clue regarding this newsletter’s first entry so I thought I’d post it here.
“Give thanks to keep eyes on heaven.”
Since starting to reread this book I've restarted keeping a gratitude journal. It’s a practice I suggest to you as well particularly during these strange days of uncertainty. Start a numbered list. Each day add 5 or 10 things. Keep it going. For what are you grateful this day? Where have you seen beauty or goodness or had a thought that calms or energizes? How and when have you felt joy?
Their eyes were watching God
The last several weeks a section from the book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Thurston, a classic of black literature, has come to mind a number of times. I cited it long ago in Just Think, and since it’s been revisiting me recently I want to call it your mind here as well. The book is set in Florida in the 1920s, and the quote here is when Janie, the main character, and her husband are taking shelter as a hurricane, the “screaming wind,” is coming through their town.
“The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
Their eyes were watching God. I’ve always loved that line. It begs the question—regardless of who you are or where you live or the color of your skin or what storm is approaching or overhead (Covid perhaps?)—what does it mean be “watching God”? I think this question is key to hope. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What might it mean to be watching God from behind a face mask? From our couches as we watch the news each night sitting in company with others but from whom we’re isolated?
Staying Put, Listening Well, Being Changed
This week I finished reading Benedictine Promises for Everyday People by Rachel Srubas. Rachel is a Presbyterian minister, a spiritual director, and the author of several books. I met Rachel several years ago when we both were participants in a summer writing program at Collegeville Institute. I’ll admit that when I started reading the book I expected that it would be applicable to my life but in a small sense, as in here are a handful of things that Benedictines do that may help you, the reader, in your life. But I was wrong. The book suggested much to consider and apply.
The book focuses on three key parts of the Benedictine rule: staying put, listening well (which is another way of saying obedience), and being changed by God. So much of life falls into this rubric. I was particularly struck by Srubas’s writing on staying put, because staying put is what was at the heart of one of my chapters in Finding Livelihood. In the chapter titled “Centripetal Centrifugal Counterpoise,” I wrote that “Staying in place is a pilgrimage too.” We tend to think that movement is good, particularly movement up the ladder, up the power grid, up the chain of command, up the salary structure, up up up. Or at least movement of any pleasant variety: seeing the world, visiting all the new restaurants. But the essay I wrote came from a place of feeling stuck until I looked at things another way. I’m writing this sitting in front of the same window where I’ve written for more than two decades.
Now Srubas helps me further in understanding the good that comes from staying put (please note, there’s no implication in this book to suggest staying put in a place that’s unhealthy or dangerous). Listening well to God and being changed by God follows on this point of staying put. These are the reasons for staying put. There is an intentionality to staying that goes far beyond the fact of a 30-year mortgage or vesting in a retirement plan (wait, is anyone vested anymore?), or a lack of imagination for any other place to be. The intentionality is to put one’s energy into listening well to God and being changed by God.
Srubas writes:
“Whether the vow of conversatio morum [lifelong conversion] is understood as fidelity to monastic life or more broadly as a commitment to turn to God daily and be changed, it is a promise to undergo lifelong conversion. The other two Benedictine promises, stability and obedience, make conversatio morum possible. We stay put not because we have no other choice, but because we choose to abide in Christ with these particular people in good times and hard times alike. This frees us to give ourselves completely to God where we are. Once we’ve become stable, undistracted by a life with too many moving parts, we can listen well enough to detect the voice of God speaking to us through the Scripture, other people, and daily life. It’s this attunement to God, cultivated through a pattern of prayerful living, that allows us to be changed over time into healed people who do more good than harm.”
We’re not all called to be Benedictines or to follow their rule, but Srubas shows us that it can be both exciting and challenging to re-imagine how staying in place is part of a high calling. What are you to be about sitting at the same window every morning? Sitting in the same chair, sitting at the same computer, lying in the same bed? Worshipping in the same church? To whom are you listening? What do you hear? How are you being changed?
~~~
[Photo: My grandmother’s embroidery.]
Blessing as an act of hope
The Old Testament holds a blessing that I love: The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Numbers 6:26). I’ve prayed this blessing over my children numerous times.
Blessing is an act of hope.
This week, through Kate Bowler’s The Everything Happens Book Club, I learned of a book by Jan Richardson that offers blessings for difficult times. Richardson is a minister, an author, a poet, and an artist. She wrote The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief after the death of her husband. At this link (scroll down to February Book Club) you can listen to a video of Bowler reading one of Richardson’s blessings (so beautiful!) and download some questions for reflection. Listen and you’ll find that such blessing is not limited to those who are suffering the grief of death but is there for those bearing all kinds of small as well as large griefs as well.
~~~
[Photo: taken of a winter scene on a nearby lake]
Handwringing versus joy and expectation; talking versus serving
The most recent issue of Comment (fall 2019) carries an editorial by the journal's editor, Anne Snyder, which I've been thinking about since first reading it a couple weeks ago. You can read it here at this link, and I encourage you to do so.
Snyder contrasts two approaches to societal concerns based on and expanding from her observations of two groups within a single weekend. One approach was full of handwringing, while the other was full of joy and expectation. The first emerged primarily from the elite while the second primarily from those who were "indigenous, immigrant, Asian, Latin, and African American." The first featured panels and debates while the second featured actual service in churches, social agencies, schools, and counselling centers within home neighborhoods."
She suggests the first group has much to learn from the second group. The churches associated with the first group tend to focus on preaching and teaching, whereas the churches associated with the second group often tend to function as the "field hospitals Pope Francis speaks about—welcoming everyone, regardless of sin or circumstance, and caring for the needs of the whole person, not just the soul." They often offer job banks and homeless shelters to their community in addition to the preaching and teaching.
"This realism," writes Snyder, "grants these local churches moral authority—not only in their home community, but in the world at large. And they offer an important lesson: If you want entrée to a hurting if skeptical world, care for it, don’t try to rule it."
And here’s one more thing she wrote in this editorial, "There’s a growing awareness that love can never be abstracted—we’re touched by incarnational living and doing, less prescription from on high."
So much is abstract these days with our social media tweets and Instagram shots, our disagreements about the evening news; I write this as a challenge to myself as much as to anyone. I do hope you’ll read her full editorial and consider what she wrote.
~~~
Interesting coincidence: when writing this post I found that the link in the above editorial by Anne Synder went to the same article featuring Pope Francis, which I had first read 6 years ago, that I had linked to in the prior post. Of all the pieces that have been written about Pope Francis what are the odds that my two little posts, whose origins are years apart, link to the same one? I believe there is something significant in coincidence, that a message of "pay attention" is being given even if I don't understand why. Maybe it is saying something to you? I wrote a bit more about this in my newsletter.
~~~
[Photo: taken of stars in the windows of the American Swedish Institute.]
Everything Far Becomes Near: A New Poetry Chapbook by a Dear Friend
Ann Conway, a writer currently living in Pittsburgh, has been my dear friend for more than 15 years. We first met in a writing workshop in Santa Fe, both of us trying to navigate a working life and a writing life. She has recently released a chapbook of poetry, Everything Far Becomes Near (Finch & Fellow). Here is one poem, among many between the book’s covers, that stunned me into silence, quickening my spirit.
Hearing Test
Once I dreaded you,
all I could not hear,
the long pauses indicating failure.
But inside the grey padded booth,
I am amphibious,
My chambered heart thudding
as I listen to a symphony of sonar:
small beeps
far away trumpets and bumps
some imagined, most not.
I listen as hard to what I hear
as I did when a child at Scarborough Beach,
lying with ear to sand
that I knew was full of sea water,
all I loved and dreaded most.
In a world muted between beach and breeze,
I heard a whale call miles beyond the undertow.
I sensed his questing eye,
his barnacled heft
a citizen of the maplessness
where I have always longed to live,
in the country without test
that of Ysma’el, meaning
”God harkens, listens.”
