Let our soul breathe hope

A reader of this blog/newsletter—a friend—recently recommended to me the book Praying with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace by John Philip Newell (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011). For each day of the week, morning and evening, the book includes a “prayer of awareness,” a “prayer for the life of the world,” and a “prayer of blessing,” as well as scripture and prompts for meditation. On this Monday morning, December 31, one of the prayers of the day seems so fitting for the New Year that I want to share it with you on this New Year’s Eve day.

For the freshness of this new day

thanks be to you, O God.

For morning’s gift of clarity

its light like the first day’s dawn

thanks be to you.

In this newborn light

let us see afresh.

In this gateway onto what has never been before

let our soul breathe hope

for the earth

for the creatures

for the human family.

Let our soul breathe hope.

Blessings to each of you in 2019!

~~~

[Photo: some wood ready for a New Year’s fire.]

Beyond work

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I watched the 2016 film Paterson for the first time. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Paterson the film is about Paterson the man who lives in Paterson the village. Paterson the man, played by Adam Driver, is in his late 20s or early 30s and drives a city bus. He is married to Laura, played by Golshifteh Farahani, who is passionate about many things, including home decorating, learning to play guitar, and baking and selling cupcakes at a weekend community market. Paterson does more than drive a bus; he also writes poems.

He writes poems in his head as he walks to work each morning. Before he drives his bus out of the garage, he writes down the lines that came to him during that morning’s walk in the notebook he always carries with him. At lunch, while he eats his sandwich and drinks coffee from his thermos, he again takes out his notebook and adds the lines that came to him while he drove. At home, he goes down to his basement office—a desk and some shelves in an unfinished basement—and adds a few more lines. His wife begs him to read some of his poems to her, and he keeps promising he will but never does. She begs him to send his work out to some magazines. Instead, he just keeps writing, line by line.

The world around him seems to give him signs that what he’s doing matters, although the signs are not profound or recognizable to anyone else. No readers show up cheering his work, and no agents or publishers suddenly appear. He has no social media account that magically gains followers. The signs are more along the lines of “I see you.”

As he writes line by line in his head and in his notebook, he has a steadiness about him and an inner drive, not toward success, which is usually how the word ‘drive’ is used today, but a drive to keep putting the words together until they fit, and the final click unlocks some inner release and the eyes widen and the soul opens.

I wish this film had been around while I was writing Finding Livelihood. It probably would have made its way into one of the chapters. While the film features a man writing poetry while he also drives a bus, the broader implication can be a fill-in-the-blank sort of prospect for any of the rest of us. What else are you about beside your work or alongside your work? In what ways do you seek the opening of eyes and soul to what is beyond your work?

~~~

[photo: taken of the juniper berries on the table at the American Swedish Institute while I drank my coffee last week.]

Fred Rogers and Repairing Creation

A little over a week ago I watched the new documentary about Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Have you seen it? I have fond memories of my sons calmly and happily watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on television when they were little, and while I have always been grateful for Fred Rogers, I was ever more so after watching the documentary.

I’ve been thinking since about how Fred Rogers became who he was and what he has to say to us, even us grown-ups, about who we become. From all that was shared in the documentary, two things, in particular, stand out.

The first is that he was a minister with a degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He worked in television before going to seminary and after he graduated from seminary. He knew that being a minister was not limited to standing behind a pulpit, as valuable as that definition of minister is. A man or woman who has prepared to serve God, or intends to serve God whether or not a degree is behind that intention, can do so in a multitude of ways.

The second is what he had to say to all of us, even and especially us grown-ups, about what we do with our lives. In a special television appearance after 9/11, he challenged his listeners to be about something big:

“No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be tikkun olam, repairers of creation. Thank you for whatever you do, wherever you are, to bring joy and life and hope and faith and pardon and love to your neighbor and to yourself.”

Read that phrase again: Repairers of creation.

Today with the strong, and sometimes misguided, emphasis on finding one’s unique vocation or “call” and following only that perceived path, this reminder that each of us is to be about the mending of creation by bringing joy, life, hope, faith, pardon, and love to the world around us no matter our job—in any job, in every job—is so needed.

If you haven’t seen the documentary, maybe you can still catch it in a theater. If not, for about the cost of a hamburger or large latte you can watch it on iTunes or another online service. I do hope you will.

~~~

[photo: taken on a recent autumn walk]

Try anyway

This past Sunday in church, our minister said something that I keep circling back to in my thoughts: "It is hard. We will fail. Try anyway." He wasn't talking about making your first million or running a marathon. He was talking about living righteously, following God through all of life, doing what is yours to do. On the surface, with those first beats of hard and fail, the lines strike as pessimistic. But read it again, this time with a clear and calm emphasis on the last line. Try anyway. Say it like a breath. Inhale; exhale. Say it with your eyes closed, then open them and say it again. Try anyway: an intention, an assurance, a hint. Say it with a smile, a wink.

~~~

[photo: taken of new fake dried flowers that look ever so real]

On writing a word of thanks

Each Friday I receive a newsletter from Dan Blank a gracious and generous man who works with writers and artists about how to share their work. A couple weeks ago, one of the things he wrote about was encouraging his readers to write a word of thanks to an author of a book that's been meaningful to them.

Years ago, after similar encouragement in the book Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, by Carolyn See, I started writing notes of thanks to writers and often heard back in kind and grateful correspondence. I lost the practice somewhere along the way, though, and only recently have tried to pick it up again, at least occasionally.

Dan's email was a good prompt and so I sent a note yesterday. I haven't heard back yet and likely, I won't. But that's not the point. I feel good for having sent it because who doesn't long to know that work they poured themselves into meant something to someone else. Consider doing this: send a note/email of thanks to someone who wrote something you loved. Maybe think back to the last book that meant something to you and start there.

Hope on the pages of novels

Because I've been writing about, and working on a book about, hope, I've been trying to keep my eyes open for the role of hope in the lives of characters in novels.  It's quite interesting how often hope is a key force in story lines.

A couple years ago I wrote here about reading Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. The book's main character, Olive, was continually in her own self-imposed exile, but nevertheless always held out her hand to pull someone else back from their exile, or demise. In this novel in stories, Olive meets up with Kevin, the boy-turned-man whom Olive had helped as a child when his mother was crazy, as he sits in his car on a cliff, suicidal yet contemplating hope. Olive opens the door and climbs into the front seat. Kevin likes that Olive has joined him: “Again, Kevin found himself liking the sound of her voice...Don't go, his mind said to Mrs. Kitteridge. Don't go. But this turbulence in him was torture. … Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn't want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer.”

But then Kevin sees a young woman, an old friend, fall off the cliff just beyond his car and into the ocean below, and he moves from fighting against hope to enacting hope. He jumps in to save her, and he is saved in the process:

“He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. … he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on."

If you like the idea, pay attention in the next novel you read and see if you don't see hope somewhere on the page.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a bench at Trinity Lutheran church in Hovland, Minnesota]

Images of hope

"We started with the belief that the act of creation—photography, in this case—is an act of hope," wrote Alice Rose George and Lee Marks in their introduction to Hope: Photographs, a collection of about 100 photographs that these editors selected for their ability to convey something about hope. The book also includes essays by Robert Coles, Reynolds Price, and Lionel Tiger.

From the essay by Reynolds Price: "An ability to ignite and cultivate hope in our lives must be consciously taught to hopeless creatures and carefully learned by them, and its presence must be constantly invoked in every human life. For hope is born and dies by the moment, even in the most focused and optimistic mind. That’s why one of the hardest tasks of a parent, a kinsman, a friend, or a sworn mate lies in the unceasing duty to pass on to younger or frailer creatures an undiscouragable taste for hope, “the desire and search for a future good.” [quoted from The American Heritage Dictionary definition of hope] No one can rest in maintaining that taste in himself.”

And a few pages later in the same essay: “…the gift of hope demands that we hand that same gift on to our fellows.”

The editors made the point that while there's so much in our corporate awareness to cause despair or an absence of hope (the book was published in 1998), the reality is that we consistently seek and document that which is hopeful. When we start paying attention, hope, of many varieties, is everywhere.

On the book's pages there's a photograph of Apollo 11 blasting off on its mission to the moon; there's a black-and-white photograph of a couple dressed in street clothes dancing on a dirt road next to a barbed wire fence; there's a photograph of a tailor sewing on a sewing machine outdoors in a Rwandan refugee camp. There's a photograph of a young couple sitting in a bar or cafe in a spotlight of sunshine and another of an older woman smiling with her eyes closed as someone combs her hair and another of a gravesite with a picket fence marking its perimeter, planted sunflowers growing inside.

What photograph have you taken lately that speaks of hope? I don't often open the comments section but I'd love to hear your response or thoughts.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a couple tiny stone pillars someone had built and left on the shore. An image of hope, yes?]