Stonework Issue 1

Allison Brown is a senior completing a writing major at Houghton College. She will be serving on the staff for issue 2 of Stonework. Her future plans include an MFA.

Hugh Cook, Professor of English at Redeemer College in Hamilton, Ontario, is the author two collections of short stories, Cracked Wheat and Home in Alfalfa and the novel, The Homecoming Man. Born in the Hague before immigrating to Canada with his family when he was seven, Cook’s fiction resonates with the Calvinism and life of the Dutch immigrant community. His multiple visits to Houghton have made a valuable contribution to the campus writing community.

Jonathan Hartt holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University. He currently teaches in the English department at the Maimonides School.

Mari Lamp is a junior at Houghton College.

Eugene H. Peterson is best known for The Message his contemporary translation of the Bible. Professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, he currently lives and writes in Montana. His most recent book is Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Eerdmans, 2005).

Thom Satterlee is a 1989 graduate of Houghton College where he majored in philosophy. He holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and currently teaches creative writing at Taylor University. His translations of Norbrandt’s work have appeared in journals such as Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Literary Review. They were collected in The Hangman’s Lament (Green Integer, 2003). His first collection of his own poems, Burning Wycliff, will be published by Texas Tech University Press in the spring of 2006. Selections from it will be featured in the second issue of Stonework.

Luci Shaw is the author of more than ten books of poetry including The Green Earth: Poems of Creation and Water Lines: New and Selected Poems (Eerdmans). Writer in residence at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, she serves as Lay Eucharist Minister and lector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Bellingham, Washington. Her most recent book is The Crime of Living Cautiously (InterVarsity Press, 2005).

Christina Turner, a 2005 graduate of Houghton College, is currently in China teaching English at the Jiangyou Normal School. The winner of second and third place for fiction in the 2005 Conference on Christianity and Literature Student Writing Contest, her work has also appeared in Boundless, Relevant and Brio.

James Wardwell teaches in the Honors Program at Houghton College. He holds an MDiv from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Ph.D from the University of Rhode Island.

Paul Willis is a author of two chapbooks of poems, How to Get There (finishing line press, 2004), and The Deep and Secret Color of Ice (small poetry press, 2003). Visitng Home, a full length collection of poems is scheduled for publication by Pecan Grove Press in 2006. His essay featured in this issue of Stonework first appeared in Bright Shoots of Everlastingness; Essays on Faith and the American West (WordFarm, 2005). Willis is Professor of English at Westmont College.

Linda Mills Woolsey has published widely as both a scholar and creative writer. Her poems have appeared in Descant, Crux, The Sow's Ear, The Cresset, and Midwest Quarterly. She is currently Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English and Communication at Houghton College.

2006-01-22T19:48:00.000-05:00

Linda Mills Woolsey teaches literature and writing at Houghton College, where she serves the chair of the English and Communications Department. Her written work has previously appeared in The Other Side and Sojourners. Mills Woolsey lives with her husband in nearby Rushford, New York, and is an elder at Franklinville Presbyterian Church.

Poems this edition:
Fragment of an Angel
April Snow
Solstice
Temporalia

Called Into Art

2005-12-18T14:31:00.000-05:00

"Gold Gash Vermillion"

Ted Murphy decided on the role of an art professor, because it is “a life of the mind, and that’s what I wanted.” He enjoys the opportunities he finds to share artistic ideas with the few art professors on the Houghton campus, as well as professors and students in music, creative writing, and other practices of the arts. He makes few distinctions between the role that art plays in his work as a professor, artist, father, and individual. As he puts it, “the college pays me to read books and paint pictures- I am an extensionist, in the sense that what I do for work is what I do anyway.” Murphy also believes that he was “called into art” in a way similar to being called into ministry

Murphy has always been drawn to abstraction, though he has also painted in a very realistic style. He abandoned his original non-objective work to pursue photo-realism during his years of graduate school; however, he has now returned to his first form of expression. As he states, “Abstraction is a language that all art students should familiarize themselves with, even if abstraction is not his or her true artistic voice.”

"Willow Cabin"

Some artists that Murphy resonates with include Diebenkorn, Morandi, Rouault, Motherwell, and Joan Mitchell. In his words, “These are people, when I look at them, I feel like I am reading a text in a language I know by heart. Art is a difficult language, but it can be learned.”

In order to develop this particular conversance between artists and styles, he encourages students to be aware of the art world in all its forms, so that they can better understand their place in it.

When describing more about his own “Art is difficult, there isn’t some kind of outward use of language that explains it. Some of us are just predisposed to thinking like this. We can do it. As a society, we’re always looking for the footnote guy. Sometimes he doesn’t exist. Artists show better than tell. Filmmakers too. There’s nothing more dreadful than a film that talks too much. People rush to texts… they misunderstand information for understanding. I can give you a lot of information, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to understand it. It really is a different level of communication.”

While this form of communication is very distinct and often impenetrable by many individuals, Murphy greatly appreciates the communication that occurs when someone understands a piece. I asked him whether there was a particular driving force behind his sense of aesthetics. For him, it is highly rewarding when a person understands something about the piece to such a degree that he or she doesn’t know what to say. One woman entered his studio and commented, “your pieces seem sad.” Murphy states, “There is something always melancholy about my work. Elements of depression, or guilt. I want that feeling in the work that I see in other people’s work. Sometimes it’s a formal issue, the juxtaposition of a color next to a line that will achieve that feeling. It means a lot to me when someone senses that there is something there that they connect with. I like the world of shared meaning.”

I asked Murphy about the sometimes subtle, sometimes extreme developments in his style as a painter. He explained the endless process of painting, contemplating, revisiting, and observing his own pieces. “Matisse would often put out his work, and take notes on it. He looks for a certain continuity--every piece I do is making a place for the piece following it… “ I make a lot of paintings that are failures. Sometimes I don’t know if they’re failures. If I look and then realize that I’m repeating myself I change. But let the historians figure it out. We’re the birds, they’re the ornithologists.”

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of describing abstractions with paint is communicating content to the viewer. For many painters with aesthetic styles and modes of communication similar to Murphy’s, paintings serve as a kind of crystallization of all the thoughts and feelings that would otherwise drift away unremembered. Murphy agreed with that thought, saying,

“I think that’s true. And often art makes us recognize ourselves in those things. That’s the magic. In the last line of “Middlemarch” by Eliot, she refers to ‘the unremembered acts of heroism of people buried in unremembered graves.’ That’s what a person is, a collection of all these things. As artists, with our emotive tendencies and something akin to despair, we place our hope in works valued by posterity. We cheat death by creating something that will be valued by someone beyond us. Like children.”

Murphy continues to create visual windows into an outside realm, beyond the constraints and bounds of linear thought and time itself. In these painterly pathways toward freedom and the preservation of memory, he subtly persuades and informs the viewer: “As individuals, we are very persuaded by the arts. That’s why I love it so much.”

Sarah Richards for Stonework

Prof. Ted Murphy lives with his family in Houghton, New York, teaching art, art history, and the history of film at Houghton College.

Artwork, in order of appearence:
Gold Cash Vermillion
Willow Cabin
Southern
Attic
Ohio Light
Quiet Italian
Young Ones

Solstice

2005-12-14T15:12:00.000-05:00

By Henrik Nordbrandt
Translated by Thom Satterlee

In midwinter the sun fell so low
you could see
under every gate in the world.

The sawmill above the valley came to a halt
and tore
the crumbled wallpaper of childhood.

I walked into the pine forest
like someone I once knew casually
and could forget
just as easily.

A drop fell, lighting up the darkness
and burning a hole in the carpet of spruce needles.
It sounded like steps in a sacristy
just before a baptism.

Three Poems about Flowers

2005-12-14T15:11:00.000-05:00

By Henrik Nordbrant
Translated by Thom Satterlee

1.
When I looked up, the rain had stopped.
The sun struck a branch with white almond bloosoms
and the glare blinded me
so that I spilled my coffee on the unanswered letters.

2.
White flowers and black frogs
divide the spring night between themselves.

I can't sleep
and because I can't sleep
I can not sleep.

For the same reason
I can't fly either
which means
I can't bring you

the blossoming branch
before it turns green.

The moon may not shine
on your city
as it does on mine,

but now you know
how it shines here.

3.
The light-rain of apple bloosoms
harden like tin

and flatten the garden.

After the slow years
come the fast ones.

I open a drawer
and am sorry I did.

~~~~~

Next: The Rain

The Rain

2005-12-14T15:10:00.000-05:00

By Henrik Nordbrandt
Translated by Thom Satterlee

It's raining.
And because it's raining
it has never not rained.
In fact, there is
nothing but rain
and all dreams
are dreams about raining.

And still it’s my fault,
the rain.
It’s my fault
because it’s my fault to have been born.

I was born because I lied
about the rain.
Once I said,
"Suddenly the sun comes out
and lights up a white gable."

That’s a lie.

That's why I was born,
because of the rain.

That's why it's raining.

Do you begin to understand
how I feel on rainy days?

~~~~~

Next: Solstice

Nordbrandt Introduction

2005-12-14T15:08:00.000-05:00

By Thom Satterlee

The following poems by Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt (1945—) find their specific images in nature, but transform them into something more like a dream or daydream. The rain, the flowers, the moonlight, and the sunlight featured here may be common to us, but the poet’s treatment of them is anything but common. By his magical way of thinking, the poet finds himself responsible for the rain that won’t stop falling; similarly, the sun glistening on a branch becomes the culprit for a spilled cup of coffee; and the low sun, in the last poem, causes all kinds of damage—from a broken sawmill to torn wallpaper.

This kind of “dream logic” is typical of Nordbrandt, and one of the reasons I have found his work so compelling to translate over the last twelve years. In his more than twenty volumes of poetry, he is constantly seeing the world around him then transforming it into the fantastic. This quality may help explain why Nordbrandt remains among the most popular contemporary Danish poets in his home country and throughout Europe.

~~~~~

Poems by Henrik Nordbrandt

The You The Me The Sudden Elsewhere

2005-12-12T20:22:00.000-05:00

By Jonathan Hartt

I
Isla De La Luna

The longboats were being launched.
Women were mending nets.
But that was a village away
and I saw only fires. We ran the beach
as crabs rose and scattered
before us: under us
the polished distance
of stars some people pretend
burn silently. Breathing heavily
the boy beside me stopped.
I said maybe we will be caught.
He asked for the brick.
I hesitated. A wave fell in the dark.
He said maybe I am getting weak.
That I should just watch.
I said I am fine. Here it is.
For a moment he smiled
to feel its weight. Then he was gone.
I could hear him running.
Behind me a wave broke quietly
and whispered its withdrawal.
It will be like this always and always
between us, and I have warned you
about the nature of things, I thought.
At least I wish I had.
Instead I turned to follow
and laugh at a large dead crab:
even crushed
the pincers opened once more.
A gesture that seemed to say it will be like this
in the end, and I have warned you.
So beneath my laughter
I was afraid.

II
Upon Arrival

An egret is crying in a papaya tree, in a salt marsh,
in the world’s name.

You will see such things: cacao seeds arranged in squares
on the road to dry.

The farmers’ wives naked to the waist, slapping rocks
with their garments. Lovely and grim at the river.

Under the swaying papaya, now a vulture
stands over a nestling.

Anything to declare. The man asks from his counter. Only then
I recall the rows of palm fronds

folded down
like vultures’ wings. So silent.

III
The Time Comes When

The wind shifts west. No sound
before the curtain falls, sending its endless idea
of hail
bursting over riverrock and roofs.
Tell me little ones what string wore thin.
You jump
as if something has been traded.

Will you join us
we each
throw ourselves down.

No I have finished with falling objects.
I longer speak the language.
Once as a boy
I climbed to watch the sun
drop behind a crater’s rim.
Shadows went before me
over the shale.
I wondered why I had come
to depend upon the sulfurous moon.
That night I waited while the mountain slept.
From my bunk I watched my father dress.
I pulled my blankets higher
in that small Andean refuge
and pictured ice flows with deep unspoken
chasms each foot closer
to the sky. Soon the men tethered to my father
would each nod
like paratroopers before an open door
and duck out into the dark.

IV
Interjecting with a Line by Muir

Sometimes through wavering light and shadow
an albatross called. Sometimes it was nothing,
or the creaking rafters
of night. Sometimes breeze. He was sometimes shirtless
on the porch, sometimes heeding
black waters. Beyond the breakers, buoy lights
on the horizon
marked the shrimp cages. His stilted shack
sometimes smelled of coco,
or ceviche
or hermit crabs—
they scratched sometimes the insides
of a steel pail. He would sometimes need bait
to cast into dawn, and sometimes
he set the planetary drag.

V
A Gesture, Lastly There is Only This

And if you want I will
in the open field of farewell
call out,
ripples rounding out like hills
and some sea falling
in the long grass now
like that
hoped for something—
it quivers quivers
and still
this breath at life’s breakwall,
the sudden elsewhere
no one really deserves.
If you’d like try this sometime.
Try standing in place.
There is a great field that runs the sunned length and breadth of
sanity where
even the edges you cannot be ready for.
So faint this field
it might be blinked away.
You might be
the flax that bows its head.
Soon small birds pass over.
There is only this
quiet, this
flesh and dust and backward looking.

They say the rose is hard to kill. So too
memories of peaks: distant,
distended,
inverted blooms. I haven’t forgotten their names.
But in the end
snow caps melt, this new laid bed of hail
melts. Only the moment remains.
O bird on the wire, I’m told so many things.
Love some claim
replaced religion
and I am a private spectacle.
You seem to have heard this too.
Your beak turns gold,
then black.
Tell me do you wait
for words behind the seedling
sky.
Maybe you listen.
Maybe you lift those clouds
across the eye of heaven.

Luci Shaw Appreciation

2005-12-12T20:18:00.000-05:00

By Eugene H. Peterson

Luci Shaw is a poet of the ordinary, the quotidian—the stuff of everyday living—as it is lived "on earth as it is in heaven," specifically, on North American ground. She gives dignity to what so many of us pass by, too much in a hurry to get to the big event, the spectacular show, the important meeting. She stops us in our tracks and we see Christ where we never expected to see him. We also see some of our friends in a way that we never expected to see them.
The first poem of hers that I memorized—it was thirty years or so ago—was titled “Royalty”:

He was a plain man
and learned no latin

Having left all gold behind
he dealt out peace
to all us wild men
and the weather

He ate fish, bread,
country wine and God's will

Dust sandaled his feet

He wore purple only once
and that was an irony

Left to ourselves and the influence of many of our well-intentioned teachers, we find ourselves trying to understand and proclaim that Jesus is very God, Jesus as the Son of God, the Savior of the world but out of context, out of the necessary context of a cemetery or kitchen, the Oregon coast and a Montana river, the waves breaking at Cape Cod. In the process of making our language adequate to the grand design of salvation, we lose touch with what is equally true and essential if we are to comprehend the uniqueness of the Gospel, that Jesus is very man in a very local place: “He was a plain man/ and learned no latin…dust sandaled his feet.”
Through the years Luci Shaw and her poems (the poet and her poems are virtually the same thing) have installed themselves in my imagination as valued colleagues in the work of giving clarity and accurate witness to the Christian faith. Language is under constant threat of being eroded by big words, abstract ideas, faceless principles. The world and the people around us are insiduously generalized into a vocabulary put to the service of causes and concerns, opportunities and resources, solving problems and blueprinting visions. Meanwhile the precious details, so dear to the hearts and minds of lovers, get blurred in a fog of well-doing, well-meaning religion.
The Christian community is particularly at risk when language is condensed into systematized Truth and programmatized Evangelism and Mission. True, we do have big, eternal things to deal with: heaven and hell, making “disciples of all nations,” and “looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…seated at the right hand of the throne of God." There is much to do, the "fields are already white for harvest" and the time "is very short" The systems and programs certainly have their place, but if along the way our capacity for dealing personally and leisurely and attentively to the particular details of color and shape in our gardens and the particular wrinkles and idiosyncrasies in the faces of our friends atrophies, we depersonalize the very people and things for which Christ personally died.
Luci Shaw is a significant presence among those in our Christian community who notice and help us to notice the glory in furrowed fields and flawed faces as Jesus deals out peace "to all us wild men/ and the weather." She keeps us attentive to what is here right here and now, in this place, at this time. She is an irreplaceable friend and ally to all of us who not only want to live to the glory of God, but in, right now, the glory of God.
There is also this: for those of us who find ourselves identified by the adjective evangelical: she is one of us. She grew up in and knows the details and particularities of our evangelical world. She has an intuitive feel for the world we live in, a world that is often flattened under unwieldy loads of unassimilated doctrine and eviscerated by frenetic and impersonal activism. Over and over and over again, she provides just the insights and stimuli that counter our cultural predispositions to platitude and cliché and slogan.
In the company of Christians who are not conspicuous for poetry, she has quietly but persistently taken her place among us for something like sixty years now, writing poems that immerse us in the stuff of creation and the pangs of birth and new birth.
But she does more than notice, giving us fresh images and sounds to feel and hear and see what we no longer feel and hear and see because our hearts are fat and our ears heavy and our eyes blind (see Isaiah 6:10). Luci Shaw makes us participants in the feeling, hearing and suing. She writes poems—all good poets do this--in which we become participants in the reality in and around us. A poem is not a catalogue of information. It doesn't inform us regarding life and the world; it forms us as an active participant. We cannot speed-read a poem. A poem slows us down to the pace of prayer in which the Spirit creates and shapes Christ in us. Poets do this for us. Luci Shaw does this for us.
One of the commonest ploys of the devil is to get us to think right thoughts about God and leave it at that. Or to do right things for God and leave it at that. Neither the thinking, nor the doing getting inside us, becoming a life, our life. But one of the fundamental convictions of the spiritual life, and especially the Christian spiritual life, is that we can only know a thing by becoming it. No truth is Christian if it is disembodied: "the Word became flesh" in Jesus. He also becomes flesh in us, "Christ in you the hope of glory." Poetry is Luci Shaw's craft; spiritual formation is her art: she involves us in God's making of blackbirds and oak trees, enables our participation in the Eucharist and baptism of Jesus, engages us as the Spirit breathes new life through our chaos. Her poems involve us in the becoming. They gather us into rhythms and sounds and metaphors of gospel living so that we become actively participant with the poet in the making, the becoming.

~~~~~

Scriptural references, in occuring order: Mt. 28:19, Heb.12:2, Jn. 4:35, 1 Cor. 7:29, Jn. 1:14, Col 1:27

~~~~~

Poems by Luci Shaw

Fragment of An Angel

2005-12-12T20:13:00.000-05:00

By Linda Mills Woolsey

Three Postcards from the Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park

I

As I study gray folds of your stone sleeve
I wonder how the curious scholar guessed
your humbled form angelic. Was it
your face—unmoved beneath the blow
that slashed your marble cheek?
Only the fallen are scarred
like this. At least that's what books say
shaping Paradise
as a dream of permanence.

Perhaps some hint of vanished wings
betrayed you. But your marred shoulder
might just as well have borne
a burden. Your wreck is hard to read
as yesterday's words. Still, you persist,
riddling evangel. And still refuse
to meet the tourist gaze that gropes
for souvenirs
of shattered certainties.

II

Only a splinter of a host, still
you keep your wingless watch
over the Lady throned
in Langdon Chapel.

Her honest wooden face
looks out, uneasy
at this staring crowd
who bear no gifts.

Her golden shoulders hunch
to shield the headless Child
regal and stiff
in her gracious lap.

The hands that maimed Him
fell to dust. So, too, the hands
that saved these fragments
of God's house,

hiding saints and angels
in the churchyard earth
beside the sleeping dead.

So many ruins, who can count?

Granite grows smooth
and blackens at the touch
of living hands.

Carved birch and alabaster
alike bear wounds
of doctrine and desire.

Your gaze discloses nothing,
judges none.

III

Now in Cuxa Cloister's garth
the pears blush bronze,
unblemished in exacting light.
Their dense perfection curves
like paradise, complete
as contemplation.

Even here, time glides through every cell—
these pears will bruise and burst
with ripening.

Stone, wood, fruit—all whisper
alchemies of grace
that must dissolve to mend.

Within the solid space they sing
the stones themselves are fragile.

~~~~~

Next: Temporalia

April Snow

2005-12-12T20:12:00.001-05:00

By Linda Mills Woolsey

Raw. The morning
claws its way
into existence.

A season of cold
for every season of bloom.
So this is the winter
of blackberries--
the walk shines against
white-dappled grass,

a scar of snow forms
against the maple stump,
slush gathers in the curves
of the tulip leaves, in the cups
of the daffodils,

on the phone wires
dazed robins
refuse to sing.

~~~~~

Next: Solstice

Temporalia

2005-12-12T20:12:00.000-05:00

By Linda Mills Woolsey

When you read this poem, time
vanishes. The words
were set down and are. The hand
that inscribed them appears
in a line, reduced to a word.
As you read it, the actual
hand may be peeling an apple,
carefully sending a spiral of red rind
into the sunlight, or, it may have rotted--
only a core of bone remaining.
Still, the conjuring words
peel back time
and in you the poem is now
being written, the shadow
of a living hand
still falls across the page.

~~~~~

Next: April Snow

2005-12-12T20:11:00.000-05:00

Solstice

By Linda Mills Woolsey

In the mud room the mercury's red trace
droops—eighteen degrees, and falling.
The white side yard is webbed and frayed
by rabbit feet and blown snow licks
the wound at the base of the youngest maple.
In the spirea, rumpled sparrows hunch
on brittle stems, awaiting pity's seed.
Why don't they all just bolt—flow
south as fast as wing and foot can fly—
at the first touch of frost? At least
barn swallows have sense enough
to vanish neatly. Even the sun has fled
as far as earth's wanderings allow.
But in their blood these winter creatures know
the turning sky, and stand their ground.
White-tailed deer nuzzle the buried field,
scraping a skin of snow from the bruised edge
of the frozen wood. In the dining room
a furled bud breaks from the green sleep
of the cyclamen, lifting white hands
in the wintry light. In the dark cupboard
beside the sink, a single bulb of garlic sprouts
every last clove bursting madly green.

Everyone Wants Something I Guess

2005-12-12T11:33:00.000-05:00

By Mari Lamp

So there we were, a few hours after Sam’s little blow-up and Charlotte and I were keeping well clear of that mess. I was kind of wondering how things would be when I came in for my 2-to-8 shift, it being just him and me poking around behind that register. He didn’t say much of anything though, which figures. He was always some kind of statue back there, writing on his clip-board and wheeling the new shipments in from the back door. The canned goods are to be moved to the 3rd shelf down Carey, or Why don’t you and Charlotte get those invoices filed before break? And that’s about all we’d get from him.

That afternoon though, when the truck was late and some ladies were all riled about there not being any baking soda and then the display of cereal boxes fell over out of the blue –I swear it wasn’t me- man oh man, you could hear that yell rising up out of him like a cat with its tail on fire.

It’s not like me and Sam and Charlotte have it in for each other, though, we’re all pretty good most of the time. Sometimes Sam likes to pull rank, him being older and Head Manager, but we all know that Lane’s isn’t big enough to have much of a Head of anything, and so mostly the Head Manager and the two cashier girls pretty much do the same things. We're a kind of little grocery store with a few booths and tables for drinking coffee and reading the paper. Mostly we get local kids and commuters 'cause we’re out next to the highway, just before the turn onto Regal Dr., which takes you right downtown. Not that’s there’s that much of a town, Billings is more of a pit-stop in between Calliham and South Cornish, but we do have a library and that big Presbyterian church.

I got the job last year when I graduated from Central. My best friend Jenny, who tells everyone to call her Jen now, is going to college at Cornish Community, but most of us took up jobs around here, waiting around for the next thing I guess. Charlotte goes there, studying Business I think, and wants to move to some big city and start her own company or something. I didn’t know her before I got this job but she’s from Billings and has been here working for the past few summers so I’ve seen her around. She’s great to work with, but doesn’t say too much and of course I don’t either so it’s pretty quiet.

I was thinking about going to college once too. I had this teacher, Miss Taylor, taught English grade 10-12, says she wish I’d study writing. Her class was the only one I ever really paid attention in, actually it was mostly just that I did the reading we were supposed to. I liked her class a lot but never was much in school.

So anyway, it was a couple days after Sam cursed real loud at the ceiling and took off out the door, which wasn’t any better for his punching it as he went. Me and Charlotte were taking our noon break in the little booth right inside the front window. We usually sit in the back room even though Sam doesn’t like it –says he doesn’t want us smoking back there but I think it’s ‘cause he doesn’t want us hanging around his stuff.

But today we were keeping clear of him and all things that would piss him off even a little, so we sat in that crusty orange booth looking out at the highway and smelling gas fumes. Charlotte had her latte and I already gulped down a cup of black coffee by that time. Usually me and Charlotte don’t say too much when we have our breaks together, but today she was all fidgety, kept shifting around and looking into her cup and sighing a little.

Then she asked me,“Carey, do you think I look alright?” Now, at first I didn’t know what to say ‘cause of course she looked alright, she always looked alright. I have this thin, limp hair, dyed too many times my mama says, and I’m kind of dumpy all around, but she has that long blond hair that goes all flippy at the ends and make-up everyday that I ever saw her. She wears white button-down shirts with straight collars and little denim skirts, sometimes with beads and things sewed onto the pockets. Yep, Charlotte is definitely the pretty one, which is why I was so surprised when Sam gave me head cashier over her.

“Well, yeah I guess. There’s a mirror in the store room you know, you might not want to trust my opinion of it.”

“Well, I mean.. do you think I, you know.. look pretty, in general?”

She didn’t say anything else but just kinda sat there looking at me with this look, and I thought I should probably not say something dumb like I usually do.

“Well, sure you are. I mean, I think you are. Always looking nice ya know? The professional kind of look I guess.” Truth is, I didn’t really know what to say. Charlotte never asked me anything, not even where to put the new stock of cake mixes if she didn’t know.

She was quiet for a long time and didn’t answer me, so I thought maybe we were done talking about it, but then she set her cup down and said, kinda in this sad voice, “Well, I don’t know..sometimes I think maybe it’s all just delusions. Like I’ll graduate and go somewhere and find out that I’m not really worth anything. And I’ll say, what did I do all this for anyway, ya know?”

Well then I really didn’t know what to say and was kinda scared of saying anything at all. But I was thinking, why is she telling me all this? So I just kinda sat there and then she stood up, saying “Ok, well never mind,” and went back to work even though we had 10 minutes of break left.

I sat there for a minute seeing her go back around to the big fridge to add the new cartons of milk. I mean, it was weird but I could see it coming from her too. Charlotte was always wanting to go somewhere and do something extra like be the smartest and prettiest I guess. I didn’t ever really care about that. Well actually I did probably, but I knew it wasn’t gonna be any use really.

So I was sitting thinking a little about all this, but then I didn’t have anything to do, so I got up and went back to work too. Sam stayed in the back for a good long time so I sat behind the register and flipped through a couple home decorating magazines that were lying around.

Sometimes when I'm bored like that I write a few things down, just little verses mostly. Once I showed some to Miss Taylor and she seemed to like ‘em a lot, but maybe she was just being nice. She said Carey, this is very good. Have you ever considered studying writing in college? I said that I hadn’t really thought about it and wasn’t really planning on going to college, that I had this job at Lane’s all set up. She kinda gave me this look and said So, what do you think you’ll do after you work there? Then class was starting so I kinda walked away and got out of that one.

After that I didn’t really know if I wanted to talk to her much. I mean, I kinda still did, it was nice to have someone to show that stuff to, but I didn’t really want to see that look again. But next class she didn’t say anything, just gave me this book of poems by a man called Edgar Lee Masters. It’s this thing where he wrote about a whole town’s worth of people, a little poem for each person talking about their life and stuff. It’s pretty interesting to me I guess, I like thinking about the names actually being people, alive and thinking all these secret things to themselves. Sometimes when I’m stuffing things into my green corduroy backpack in the morning, I shove it in there and read a little when things are slow during the day. So when I was sitting there wondering when Sam was gonna come back, I got it out and found a part I like. It goes like this:

At first you will know not what they mean,
And you may never know.
And we may never tell you:-
These sudden flashes in your soul,
Like lambent lighting on snowy clouds
At midnight when the moon is full.

That’s not the whole thing, but I like that part best. Like keeping a secret from everyone but then getting to tell it after you die. Sometimes I think about what it would be like to write a letter to the whole world so that everyone would read it. That’s pretty scary though, to think of all those people all over the world reading and me not being right there to tell them what I really mean. I was thinking the other day that it’d be nice to talk to Miss Taylor again, just show her a few things I’ve been doing. Maybe when she comes back for the start of school I can ask her if there’s any places around here that might teach some writing. I shouldn’t think about it too much though, I can just hear my mama saying Now don’t you go getting your hopes up about things like you always do.

Well, I’d been working since 2. It was now 7, and Bill walked in all regular on the dot like he did. Bill comes in most nights. He sits down at the table next to the register with his old brown bag and he pulls out 2 or 3 thick books and a mess of loose papers which fly around and half the time end up on the floor.

Bill’s been coming in here as long as I can remember, even when I was a little kid buying ice cream after school with Jenny. He comes in with his khaki field coat and stringy hair gelled back onto his half-bald head looking something like a dressed-up professor, which is what he likes to call himself. The little private school outside of Calliham told Bill he could teach one class each semester called Local Field Biology or something. I wouldn’t remember the name except he’s always talking about it. Seems like he doesn’t do much else beside that class and coming in here. From what I gather, he mostly drags the students around to fields to look for birds and some kind of moss or something. Bill is our only regular at Lane’s and we can’t really kick him out ever ‘cause he’s been coming her since before any of us worked here, before I was born maybe.

Sometimes when Sam’s in a good mood he sits behind the register and talks with Bill a little. And sometimes Sam teases him about not being a real professor, and then Bill says Now don’t start that, you know I have as much natural training as any of them wrinkly-faced academics sitting in the second-floor offices. I’ve traveled the world looking at birds and fossils and grasses. So Sam asks where did he go in his world travels, and Bill says he went on two trips to Germany. Sam pries in further though, and finally we get it out of him that it was about 30 years ago with his great-aunt’s touring group. He still has a notebook he brought with him though, marking down notes and little doodles of things. He showed it to me one night a couple weeks ago. That was after Sam left for the night, I was closing, so I know Bill didn’t want him to see it. I thought that was real nice of him to show me since it was so important to him. And I thought maybe sometime I’d show him my little book of verses too.

Well, this was the second week of August so things were really starting to pick up, I guess with school starting in a couple weeks, folks were starting to gather around back in town. Things felt different too. Instead of 13-year-old boys coming in for Gatorade and whatever little thing their mamas had sent them for, it was more professional business as Sam calls it. Teachers and some businessmen come in just looking like something’s going on, like things are about to start up and leave behind anyone who’s not paying attention.

So about this time Sam’s been telling us not to slouch and for God’s sake stop reading those magazines, which he never did before so how’s I to know he was going to get all paranoid all of a sudden? And Bill's getting all fidgety too, shuffling papers all over three tables and muttering about schedules or something. Finally Sam, who was back and doing his normal sulking around by this time, walks over there and tells him to go make a mess somewhere else.

Anyway, so things were considerably more busy, and somehow I didn’t even notice when Miss Taylor’s cousin Edie comes in, must have been right behind that group of moms on the way back from their evening walk and talk. I was working the register like crazy and missed my break, so when Charlotte comes in I tell her to quick cover for me so I can go to the bathroom. I was just coming out of the back room when I see Edie with her head inside the freezer door. I stopped and looked around real fast, thinking maybe Miss Taylor’s around somewhere too, considering she lives with her cousin. I didn’t see her, but was thinking that doesn’t mean she not behind one of the aisles I can’t see, me not being too tall. The fact of the notebook in my backpack lying there close by comes in my head. I looked over at the register and Charlotte seemed to be doing ok, so I stayed where I was, pretending to rearrange a pile of potatoes until Edie comes walking down the aisle toward me.

“Why hello Carey!” she says, with this big smile and I think she really did mean it.

“Hello” I say, trying to figure out how to ask what I need to know. She said a couple other nice things that I forget now, and then there was one of those pauses that means I should say something like how I need to be getting back to work. But instead I said, “So, how’s Miss Taylor doing these days?”

“Oh, she’s doing real good. I don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but she won’t be coming back to Central this year. She got a job in Burkett at the prep school, so she’s already up there for beginning-of-the-year meetings. But we’re all real happy for her, I think she was looking forward to a change.”

“Oh yes,” I said, just staring at that big lipstick smile.

“But you’ve graduated haven’t you, Carey? I’m sure high school is ancient history to you now. I remember Susan always said you were a bright star in the class, wanting to be a writer was it?”

“Yes, a writer.” Then I didn’t say anything else, with her just looking down at me.

“Well, I need to be getting back to work now.”

And then I turned around and walked straight back into the backroom, where Sam was sitting at his desk looking at some papers. Oh Carey, I need to talk to you he says, kinda half over his shoulder like that. I need you to work tonight. I have to run up to Duncans to talk to the organic guy and Charlotte says she can’t. Well I just got so mad, I don’t even know why, but I knew I had to get outta there. So I mumbled something about feeling sick and walked out the back door into the parking lot, where the air was thick with that August heaviness. I didn’t really have a plan in mind, just walked out there and kept walking down the street and I was thinking about how it seems like everyone wants something they don’t have. Bill and Charlotte and maybe Sam even, I don’t know. And me.

So I walked until I was past the gas station on the right and got to the highway and just kept walking down it, even though I usually don’t like walking out there. So I walked for a while and in the end just stopped thinking about anything. And sometimes a car would come down the highway and I could see it coming from a long way away and feel it coming closer until it just passed me all of a sudden. It kind of made my heart jump every time that happened, but it was exciting too. So I walked and waited for the cars to pass me and kind of liked it out there, all alone walking and knowing no one was going to stop and ask me questions about why I was doing what I was doing. And I don’t know what that was either, besides just walking.

George Herbert, Secretary of Praise

2005-12-08T21:08:00.000-05:00

By James Wardwell

Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Only to Man thou hast made known thy ways,
And put the pen alone into his hand,
And made him Secretary of thy praise.
(“Providence” 5-8)

Nothing measures the depth and beauty of life in Christ like devotional poetry. As an augment to, not a replacement for, the use of scripture and the other spiritual disciples, devotional poetry helps us find and feel the truth, meditate upon it, and put it into action. In this way, seventeenth-century, English cleric and poet George Herbert’s words profoundly penetrate the marrow of a life lived in commitment to God.

In spite of the early dates to his life (1593-1633) and my own immersion in the English renaissance, Herbert has always struck me as remarkably contemporary. Inasmuch as the centrality of the Bible and a personal relationship to God through Christ are hallmarks of contemporary Christian faith, Herbert seems one with us. These two tenets of faith season his collection of poems, The Temple, with insight.

The continuing English reformation was a neighborhood event for George Herbert as a youth. When he was twelve and living near Charing Cross, Guy Fawkes and other Catholics attempted to blow up Parliament—building, members, and King—just down the street. In the same year, when King James first commissioned an Authorized Version of the English Bible, Herbert family friend and mentor Lancelot Andrewes was chosen as one of the translators at the Westminster School where George was a student. In his first sonnet entitled “The H. Scriptures,” Herbert refers to the bible as a “mass of strange delights” and God’s ambassador in this world. Not surprisingly, then, presenting the scriptures becomes a significant mode of operation in The Temple. Herbert aides us with three devotional exercises of sola scriptora: reminding us of the Bible’s content, constructing and teaching theology by aligning divergent passages, and challenging us toward “practical piety,” i.e. living out biblical injunctions.

Herbert wrote when most people were illiterate. He may have hoped people would hear scripture read or recited in his poems, thus calling it to mind. Thus Herbert was a participant in the reformation initiative to translate the Bible into the vernacular.

Translating the Psalms into your own language (a practice still commendable as a vehicle for personal spiritual development) was a private enterprise of literate Christians in the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon dedicated his versification of “certain psalms” to Herbert while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Herbert included his own version of “The 23 Psalm” in The Temple.

Yea, in death’s shady black abode
Well may I walk, not fear:
For thou art with me; and thy rod
To guide, thy staff to bear. (13-16)

The translator’s work may also be observed in Herbert’s “Anagram” on the Virgin Mary’s name.

How well her name an Army doth present,
In whom the Lord of hosts did pitch his tent.

This may be a very precise allusion to John 1:14, as the Greek word translated “dwelt” in the Authorized Version is etymologically connected to the building of the tabernacle and can be literally rendered “the word became flesh and “’did pitch his tent’” among us.

Scriptural references become titular for Herbert as in “Ephes. 4.30. Grieve not the Holy Spirit, & c.”. “The Odour, 2. Cor. 2” asserts the words “My Master” to be the sweetest aroma of praise God might hear and “my servant,” recalling the “good and faithful servant” of Matthew 25:23, the sweetest reply. Elsewhere, Herbert smoothly embeds the verse on the diagonal in “Coloss. 3.3 Our life is hid with Christ in God.”

My words and thoughts do both express this notion,
That Life hath with the sun a double motion.
The first Is straight, and our diurnal friend,
The other Hid, and doth obliquely bend.
One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth.
The other winds towards Him, whose happy birth
Taught me to live here so, That still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high:
Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure,
To gain at harvest an eternal Treasure.

Herbert reminds his readers not only of what the Bible says but also of how it says it. He writes in biblical genres. He sings God’s praise like the heavenly host in “Even-song” and “Praise (2)” or like the new heavenly choir in “Antiphon (1)” and “(2).” When a star lands in his lap and speaks to him in “Artillery,” Herbert’s persona creates a parable. His poems are spotted with proverbs, like the conclusion to “Businesss.”

Who in heart not ever kneels
Neither sin nor Saviour feels. (37-38)

Displaying a personal affinity toward the proverbial, Herbert collected a notebook of 1,024 axiomatic expressions (some from recognizable sources but most not) which has been published as “Outlandish Proverbs.” The long introductory poem to The Temple entitled “The Church-porch” uses proverbial expression extensively. Like the book of proverbs, Herbert’s poem is addressed to a youth that it might “Rhyme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure” (4).

A verse may find him, who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice. (5-6)

On ribald humor, he writes,

He pares his apple, that will cleanly feed (64).

On honesty:

The stormy working soul spits lies and froth.
Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby. (76-78)

On material wealth:

The way to make thy son rich, is to fill
His mind with rest, before his trunk with riches:
For wealth without contentment climbs a hill
To feel those tempests, which fly over ditches. (109-112)

On moderation in drinking:

Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame,
When once it is within thee; but before
Mayst rule it, as thou list; and pour the shame,
Which it would pour on thee, upon the floor. (25-28)

On parenting:

Love is a personal debt (278).

On charity:

Man is God’s image; but a poor man is
Christ’s stamp to boot: both images regard. (379-380)

On stewardship:

Restore to God his due in tithe and time
A tithe purloin’d cankers the whole estate. (385-386)

On fashion, he recommends “cheap handsomeness” (187).

On preachers, he humorously contends:

The worst speak something good: if all want sense,
God takes a text, and preacheth patience. (431-432)

And lest we take the foibles of preaching too seriously, of your minister Herbert adds “love him for his Master” (443).

Not only does Herbert aid us devotionally by calling the scriptures to mind, but he employs them to build theology in his poems. He delineates such a process in his second sonnet entitled “The H. Scriptures.” “This verse marks that, and both do make a motion / Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie” (5-6). By laying divergent passages of scripture side by side in poems Herbert builds a systematic theology. His belief in prayer may serve as a case in point.

Lacking a verb, “Prayer (1)” stockpiles descriptive phrases as if to answer the question, "What is prayer?" Many of these phrases are derived from the Bible. Prayer is the “Church’s banquet” alluding to the harmonious, apocalyptic feast of Isaiah 25. “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” (2) claims the life force God breathed into Adam (Gen. 2:7) is rightly returned to God in prayer. The second quatrain of the sonnet proclaims the power that is at our disposal in prayer. Unlike that one in Babel, this “sinners’ tower” lifts us to the presence of God. The “Christ-side-piercing spear” brought forth the literal blood of our Lord, just as confessional prayer brings forth the blood of Christ that covers our sin. “The six-days-world transposing in an hour” suggests that an hour spent in prayer can be as productive as God creating all the world in just six days. In the last six lines of the poem, the images are less jarring and the rhythm smoother as Herbert positively celebrates in quiet confidence the surety of prayer. It is “Exalted Manna,” the miraculously sufficient, otherworldly provision of God to his sometimes grumbling, vagrant people. Prayer is “something understood.”

Lastly, Herbert uses the Bible to challenge his readers to live as it directs. Speaking of friendship in “The Church-porch,” Herbert wrote, “If cause require, thou art his sacrifice” (273). “No greater love hath a man than this that he lay down his life for a friend” (John 15:13) was not just an avenue to love for Jesus and the twelve disciples. Actual “drops of blood” may be required of Herbert for a friend.

In “Lent,” because “The Scriptures bid us fast,” Herbert teaches,

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, with no evasion,
When good is seasonable (13-15).

Although in fasting we can not reach “Christ’s forti’th day,” Herbert quotes “Be holy ev’n as he” (cf. Matt. 5:48) as our inspiration to try. For “Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone / Is much more sure to meet with him” (37-38).

Herbert’s repeated application of Romans 8:26 is both a challenge and a comfort. “In the same way the Spirit also helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” In spite of the fact that he works in words, Herbert resorts to “Sighs and Groans” to express the anguish of the sanctification dialectic. After “The Church-porch,” “Superliminare” invites the reader of The Temple to move on to “taste / The church’s mystical repast” (3-4). The profane are excluded; only the good may read on into “The Church” which is the central section of Herbert’s book.

Nothing but holy, pure, and clear,
Or that which groaneth to be so,
May at his peril further go. (6-8; emphasis mine)

“The Sinner” recognizes his own inadequacy, finds in himself “quarries of pil’d vanities” and “shreds of holiness.” “In so much dregs the quintessence is small” (9). The soul of his soul, the “good extract” of his heart is only a “hundredth part,” i.e. one percent! Yet he begs God to hear and restore him.

And though my hard heart scarce to thee can groan,
Remember that thou once didst write in stone. (13-14)

“The Pearl Matth. 13.” combines Herbert’s uses of the Bible to record the sale of his own personal accomplishments to purchase a loving relationship to God. Teaching in parables Jesus said, “the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it” (Matthew 13:45-46). Herbert sold learning, honor, and pleasure to achieve intimacy with the Lord.

When Herbert starts the poem “I know the ways of learning,” he is simply stating biographical fact. As a boy he had studied Latin and Hebrew under Lancelot Andrewes, the Master of Westminster School at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Andrewes is reported by one of Herbert’s classmates to have said that he thought his teaching would be praised by their teachers at Cambridge or he “would never hope for it afterwards by any while he lived” (Hacket qtd by Plume qtd by Charles 54). The longest period of Herbert’s life spent in one location was 1609-1623 at Trinity College, Cambridge. After receiving a B.A.(as salutatorian) and M.A., Herbert worked his way up to the position of University Orator, i.e. their spokesperson. As one who knew how to “feed the press” (2), he was a published author. He knew “what reason hath from nature barrowed” and “what nature willing speaks” from his friend and correspondent Francis Bacon the proponent of rational empiricism and scientific method in natural philosophy. He had discovered “new-found seas” (he writes explicitly about America in “The Church Militant”) in books and from people like his sea captain brother Thomas or member of the Virginia Company friend Nicholas Ferrer. But he concludes the first stanza,

All these stand open, or I have the keys:
Yet I love thee. (9-10)

Knowing the ways of honor in the second stanza includes cognizance of the “quick returns of courtesy and wit” (12). Could this be applause to which he refers? World-conquering ambition seems to be the way of honor in lines 14-17. As a member of parliament, Herbert must have known about “party gains.” He was granted a royal benefice worth three thousand pounds in 1628. As public orator, he spoke directly to King James. When, after having been spurned by a Spanish princess, Prince Charles sought approval for invading Spain, Herbert in a public address told the Prince that his proposed invasion was unjust. Herbert learned how many “drams of spirit” it takes to sell one’s soul for honor in the rumors of civil war which his eldest brother and step father waged at home from opposite sides. He and his family had gained honor in the political arena. Yet Herbert wanted God’s love.

The last bartering chip by which we might purchase the pearl of great price, pleasure, is advertised in the third stanza. The persona begins with the vocabulary of musical pleasure, which he clearly loved. As a musician, Herbert cherished the “sweet strains,” “lullings,” and “relishes” of musical expression. Perhaps the greatest musicians of the time, William Byrd and Dr. John Bull were known visitors to and performers at the Herbert household. George is known to have walked hours to Salisbury Cathedral and back on a regular basis to play his viol at evensong. Not a despised thing, but an enriching art, he will sell musical pleasure for the kingdom of heaven.

The next two lines connote allusions to Herbert’s father and mother respectively. As a local authority, his father is recorded as having died in “propositions of hot blood and brains” from a skull wound through to the brain. Although fatal, there was nevertheless something admirably heroic in the elder Herbert’s sense of community service. A generous hostess, Herbert’s mother’s stewart records a household continually filled with “mirth and music” including dance parties. “[W]hat love and wit / Have done these twenty thousand years” may allude to any number of entities, but literary pleasure, which George Herbert seems to have known and enjoyed, must be seen as one of the possibilities. In seeking to obtain the pearl of great price, he is willing to sell those things dear.

Herbert rarely writes of sexual temptations, In “Sonnets I” & “(II)” and in “Love (I)” & “(II),” he decries romantic love as the ungodly usurper of poetic praise. But in “The Pearl” his persona sounds like a man who has faced unchasted desires.

I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five. (26-29)

May be reason or spirit is the one ganged up on by his five senses; however, extending the equestrian diction, this person is hot to trot. But he is willing to sell the satisfaction of “unbridled” pleasure to secure the kingdom of heaven.

In the end of the poem, knowing and possessing all the above described wealth, the persona seeks a better buy. He does so not as the falcon who was hooded to prohibit flight, but soaring into “the main sale” “with open eyes.” He knows the trade value of what he has tendered and at what “price” he may have God’s love. Herein lies a maze. We have been bought with a great price paid by Christ’s sacrifice (1 Cor. 6:20 & 7:23). Even with the exchange of our learning, honor, and pleasure, it is God himself who provides us access to his presence.

Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me,
Did both conduct and teach me, how by it
To climb to thee. (37-40)

Perhaps more striking in his post-reformation milieu than his elevated employment of scripture in his poems was Herbert’s insistence on personal faith. His contemporaries were not writing in this fashion. Shakespeare (1564-1616) was decidedly mute on matters of faith. (I’ve come to favor explanations of this that say the great playwright was a Catholic so he feared reprisals for any declaration of his faith.) Milton (1609-1674), a late contemporary of Herbert, presents Christianity more as a system of thought than a way of living. We can only trace how Milton embraced faith occasionally in spite of the dictates of epic form. Although many in Herbert’s time were addressing issues of Christian doctrine, few did so with the attachment of George Herbert. Family friend and, it would seem at times, something of a mentor, John Donne had explored personal faith struggles in some of his Holy Sonnets, but these coterie poems were only published posthumously. Personal faith was more the province of earlier fringe writers like the mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Herbert, then, engendered the next generation of devotional poets such as Henry Vaughan who explicitly calls himself a “son of Herbert.”

One way Herbert generates expressions of personal faith is by his use of narration in his lyrical poems. Poems like the quasi-allegorical “Love Unknown” and mini beast fable “Humility” entertain us with stories. The latter culminates in a general melee between the virtues over which of them should be honored with the peacock’s feather. A rhyming “plume/fume” ensues. In the end, “Humility” triumphs by throwing down the feather gauntlet like “saying, Here it is / For which ye wrangle”(26-27), it would seem shaming them back into virtuous conduct.

The sonnet “Redemption” tells the story of a tenant seeking his landlord out for a new, less demanding lease. Tellingly the poem is sequenced between “Good Friday” and “Sepulchre” which is immediately followed by “Easter.” After “measure[ing] out” Christ’s blood in “Good Friday,” “redemption” is naturally “sought,” but that it is “granted” espouses Herbert’s belief in the salvific necessity of Jesus’ suffering and death. In “Redemption[‘s]” story, the tenant moves to “cancel th’ old” covenant of law and enter into a new relationship of grace. When he seeks the landlord out in heaven, he is told that the Lord is out on a business call to earth about some land “that he had dearly bought.” Returning to earth, knowing the landlord’s “great birth,” the tenant seeks him “in great resorts;/ In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts” (10-11). Although these are all places where God is present, it is not till the seeker turns to the “ragged noise /Of thieves and murderers” that he finds his Lord, who before the supplicant even speaks, “Your suit is granted, [says], and die[s]” (14). The impact of the cross on Herbert’s “sudden soul” is accented by the rapid plot twist of that last line.

The use of first person point of view contributes greatly to personal nature of faith reflected in Herbert’s poems. This is not, however, exclusively the case in Herbert. At times other voices break into his poems effectively, particularly God’s. In “The Pulley,” Herbert writes a creation day monologue in God’s voice (Trialogue? “Let us (said he).” The one God speaking to himself in three persons?). Wanting to endow humankind with all the blessings he can, God describes pouring strength and beauty, “then wisdom, honour, pleasure” (7) onto human beings. Realizing that the “Rest” “of all his treasure” only remains in his gift bag, God stops to ponder:

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore his gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast. (11-20)

While perhaps reflecting an untoward worrisomeness to omniscience and omnipotence, there is a reassuring playfulness in God’s voice punning on the “rest” that remains and that which replenishes. Such playfulness mitigates the arch rationality of God’s syntax and resounding ars and esses. The physical logic of God using human “weariness” as a pulley levering us to his breast encapsulates the monergism of divine love.

God’s is not the only other voice heard aiding Herbert’s usual first person persona. When Herbert considers the quandary of writing worthy praise to God in “Jordan (2),” in the end “a friend” pipes in

There is in love a sweetness ready penn’d:
Copy out only that, and save expense. (17-18)

Furthermore, not all the other voices Herbert creates are positive. In “Misery” as to prove “Man is a foolish thing,” sarcastically parodying a living for the day philosophy, a voice drunkenly sings,

Man is but grass,
He knows it, fill the glass. (5-6)

But the dominant voice in Herbert’s poems is “I.”

Interestingly, unlike our post-romantic poetic tastes, Herbert’s persons seem only rarely, if at all, explicitly autobiographical. Although Arnold Stein has made an interesting case for “The Forerunners” being one such exception, it remains hazardous to read the details of Herbert’s life back into his poems. For instance, upon seeing Herbert’s portrait, we might observe some self referencing in these lines from “The Size:”

A Christian’s state and case
Is not a corpulent, but a thin and spare,
Yet active strength: whose long and bony face
Content and care
Doth seem to equally divide,
Like a pretender, not a bride. (31-36)

The drawn face, sunken cheeks, Roman nose, deep eyes, relatively straight hair covering the ears and boxing the head, and the tightly trussed up collar of the portrait may have modeled the thin, spare, long, bony face described in the poem, but if Herbert is referring to his own visage, then he does so in a highly uncharacteristically self-aggrandizing fashion presenting himself as the Christian prototype. This seems unlikely, for, although he would never think so, Herbert was good at humility.

Proceeding with caution then, reading Herbert’s great poem “Affliction (1)” autobiographically can nevertheless enhance its power.

Affliction is Herbert’s most repeated title: he writes five poems with this title. In them the persona is afflicted. Number two starts “Kill me not ev’ry day,/ Thou Lord of life.” “My heart did heave, and there came forth, O God!” (“Affliction (3)” 1). What afflicts this person is his desire to reciprocate God’s love for him while remaining simultaneously aware of his own inability to do so. “My thoughts are all a case of knives;” “Nothing performs the task of life” (“Affliction (4)” 7 and 16). “Affliction then is ours” (“Affliction (5)” 19). Reading the five poems together with the rest of The Temple, “working out his own salvation with fear and trembling,” the sanctification quest, afflicted him.

Then for thy passion—I will for that—
Alas, my God, I know not what. (“The Thanksgiving” 49-50)

The first affliction poem in The Temple gains emotional strength by arguably autobiographical references. It builds to the marvelous concluding couplet:

Ah my dear God! Though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.

The play on love as an emotion he feels versus an action he performs emanates from a pattern of life events in the poem, how he reacts to them emotionally, and what he has been able to do in reciprocation.

“At first” through most of the first four stanzas the supernatural “joys” of knowing God “augmented” his “stock of natural delight” so as to be “wages.” Implying some change, conversion-like, the natural stock of his birth blessing was so enriched by his spiritual development that he comprised “No place for grief or fear” (16). “Milk,” “sweetness,” “flow’rs,” “happiness”: “There was no month but May” (22). The quaintness of the lines and thought intimate an untested faith.

But in the fifth stanza trouble starts with much more specific biographical allusions.

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses cleave unto my bones;
Consuming agues dwell in ev’ry vein,
And tune my breath to groans.
Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed,
Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived. (25-30)

Herbert seemed a sickly man. He refers to his ill health in extant letters, particularly that attached to perhaps his earliest known poems (Sonnet I & II). Referring to his “late ague,” he writes “For myself, dear Mother, I always fear’d sickness more than death, because sickness hath made me unable to perform those offices for which I came into the world, and must yet be kept in it” (qtd by Walton qtd by Charles 73). From his ghostly appearance depicted above, the features of perpetual ill health (literally “consuming agues”) may be deciphered. His earliest biographer Izaak Walton records an extended period of illness preceding his death at age forty. He is referred to as being “at death’s door” as early as 1622, over a decade prior to his death. Most telling perhaps are the records of how often Herbert took meals in his room instead in the dining commons at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent most of his adult life (1609-1624). Dining in rooms was commonly practiced only by those suffering from disease. Whatever Herbert’s particular disease was, it seems to have been a lifelong affliction. Notice how in lines 26-28 he awkwardly changes the verb tenses from past to present to suggest that illness is still with him. The last two lines of the stanza are nearly existential; his pain, sensory experience, convinced him he was alive. Yet it is in the midst of physical and emotional suffering that his belief deepens. The first four stanzas were “scarce[-ly]” believing.

The sixth stanza alludes to a still worse time for Herbert when his “health” was restored but his “life” was lost. Such an odd juxtapositioning stems from the harshest cruelty of life, as Herbert starkly puts it “my friends die.” Rather than the simple, jealous death wish of a sickly man, this, as Amy Charles has argued, may be the angst of a loving brother. The most discernable, immediate biographical reference could be the deaths of his two older brothers, William and Charles, as soldiers on the continent in 1617. Familial bereavement was a profound, early experience for Herbert as his father had died leaving he, his mother and nine siblings when he was only three years old. His existent letters reflect great grief over the ill health and death of his mother and sisters, one of whom’s three daughters George took in to raise. Walton thought the reference alluded to the death of Herbert’s “courthopes” at the loss of key political allies. Herbert’s famous friends Francis Bacon and Lancelot Andrewes both died in 1626. Any or all of these deaths may be the affliction Herbert suffered from in the death of his friends. Line thirty-five reiterates that he is “without a fence or friend.”

Being fenceless may be seen as an allusion to the afflictions homelessness and poverty. At the death of his father, George’s mother took the children to live with Lady Newport, their grandmother, at Eyton-upon-Severn. After a couple of years there, the family is found living in Oxford. Next they live in the vicinity of Charing Cross, London from whence George probably walks up to St Paul’s Cathedral as a Westminster School day student. His mother doesn’t remarry until 1609, thirteen years after the death of his father, then relocating in Chelsea. Herbert’s oldest Brother, Edward, Lord Cherbury, inherited the family estate including Montgomery Castle. In one year, 1624, George is on six-month leave from his job as Orator of Cambridge, elected to parliament from Montgomeryshire (Wales), attends sessions from February to May in London, is ordained a deacon by the Archbishop of Canterbury and named to a minor clerical position back in Wales. These are geographically widespread places. He doesn’t settle into the rectory at Bemerton, the only “home” he knows as an adult, until 1630, three years before his death.

Not only was being “without a fence” homelessness in Herbert’s life, it was also being impoverished. His letters are often appeals for funds. Interestingly, late in his life monies are sought for the rebuilding of the church at Bemerton. He suggests that lack of funds for books keeps him from “setting foot into Divinity,” i.e. he’s too poor to be a minister.

It is difficult to see the reference at the beginning of the seventh stanza to “my birth” which “took / The way that took the town” as anything other than an explicitly biographical reference. Herbert was born into the privileged class, to an influencial English family in a Welsh border town. His mother was from the Powys line perhaps the most important family of Welch ancestry in the region. His grandfather and father were members of parliament, bailiffs (a cross between a modern day sheriff and mayor), and justices of the peace.

Yet his complaint is that in spite of his high birth God has “betray[ed]” him to “a lingring book” and “gown” (39 and 40). While these references may be taken as referring to either Herbert’s career as minister or as a scholar at Cambridge, the “Academic praise” which sweetened the confining affliction from God makes them seem appeals to his scholarly calling. At this point in his life, as in the poem, even his vocation, which Herbert would have understood as a religious call to service, inhibits his sanctification quest.

Then he falls into “more sicknesses” (52).

In the end of the poem, the vicissitudes of Herbert’s life “cross-bias” him. The stark antipathy of this pun, where he is angered by favoring Christ while not being able to effectually show it, reflect the manic nature of his affliction. In the last two stanzas, he bounces between his desires to complete God’s work in him or to quit trying altogether. The conflict of the poem, as unresolved as his life quest, culminates in the anguished plea, “Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.”

Where “Affliction (1)” presents direct autobiographical vim, “The Collar” receives empowerment from only the general connection between the persona and Herbert. Both seem to have experienced frustration in ministry.

The title begins these associations. In the seventeenth century, ministers would have usually been identifiable by wearing a clerical collar in public. Homophonically, the palpable anger of the person, “choler,” also echoes in the title. Because civil and ecclesiastical law were not fully compartmentalized, if someone had broken the law, like the requirement to take communion at least once a year, she might be seen in the back of the sanctuary with a wooden or iron collar clasped around her neck as punishment. In spite of or because of these associations, the poem is a vigorous complaint to God by the persona, i.e. “the caller.”

The poem commences in aggressive action. “I struck the board:” pounding the communion table, the very spot where the country parson administers “the excitings of grace,” and shouts his intent to quit: “No more!”

Out for a calming walk, he airs his complaint in a volley of questions focused on the fruitlessness of his ministry. “Have I no harvest?”

Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted? (13-16)

It is not consummate with his talent and effort that he should go so unaccomplished. He is “free” to “forsake” the “cage” and “law” that bind him to anonymity. He need only take a little initiative into other fields to yield a worthy harvest. The turgid prosody of both rhythm and rhyme through most of the poem reveal his angry, addled state of mind.

However, in the last four lines the rhythm and rhyme are regularized as God calls back placating all callers/collars/cholers.

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I reply’d, My Lord. (33-36)

God only speaks one word in the poem, but he addresses a load of anxiety. “Child” is at once diminishing and endearing. The parent knows more than the child and corrects judiciously, but not without love. The response acknowledges authority while proclaiming an intimate relationship. Therein lies the beauty and depth of the divine-human relationship: taking our concerns to God, being heard, graciously responded to and even embraced.

The ultimate expression of such communion with God for Herbert was “Love (3).” He insists on its strategic placement at the close of the central section of The Temple.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who dore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

Interestingly, the poem apes some of the earmarks of the lyrical subgenre the seduction poem so popular in Herbert’s time. Poems like Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” and “Corinna”s Going A-Maying,” Waller’s “Go, lovely rose!” Donne’s “The Flea,” and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” serve as a necessary backdrop to understanding the full impact of Herbert’s conception of love. Agape love is at least as emotionally enthralling as sexual intimacy.

“Love,” the declared “Lord” (13) of this poem’s “I,” pursues the liaison. There is a catty give and take to the movement. Love asks “If I lack’d any thing” as a bartender today might ask “what can I get you?” Love smiles and takes the reluctant one’s hand. The persona is shy to have eyes meet but sighs endearment. At the persona’s feigned unworthiness Love graciously imputes “you shall be” my guest and creatively puns on the I/eyes entitlement. Love makes three inquiries, one in each stanza, each becoming more pointed in its allusiveness. Lines 13-16 define God’s grace to us as not what we “deserve” but rather, because of “who bore the blame,” a love relationship.

My dear, then I will serve.

From the context of the poem there is no way to definitely determine who speaks this line. The two manuscripts we take Herbert’s poems from include no quotation marks. Both characters have previously referred to themselves in the first person singular. Theologically, service is a mirrored manifestation of divine initiative: we love because he first loved us. Love says I will serve you by bearing the blame; the persona responses, I will serve you for bearing the blame. This simultaneous expression is a model of communion: the two voices have become one.

Stanley Fish has asserted that in the last line of the poem the persona obeys as an automaton: God tells him that he “must” sit, so he sits. He can do no other. What Fish seems to miss is that obedience to God, even to his commandments, is not a guaranteed response. In “Love,” God invites us to the table to commune with him, “taste [his] meat.” It is up to us to accept the offer, and “sit and eat.”

FURTHER READING:

The poems of George Herbert can be reasonably purchased in hardback as George Herbert: The Complete English Works, editor Ann Pasternak Slater, Everyman’s Library 204, London: David Campbell Publishers, 1995. In addition to the poems discussed in this essay, I would recommend as starters the following list of favorites: The Call, The Church-floor, Church Monuments, The Dedication, Denial, The Flower, The Holdfast, A True Hymn, JESU, Life, Love-joy, Man, Man’s Medley, Mortification, The Posy, The Quiddity, Sin’s Round, Virtue, and A Wreath.

Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert ( Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) is commendable as a biography and Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: UCBP, 1985) reads well as a discussion of the use of the Bible in his poems.

Heron River

2005-12-08T20:55:00.000-05:00

By Hugh Cook

Adam is finished doing the breakfast dishes without Jay and goes to his room to see whether there’s anything else he has to do. On his bedroom wall there’s a vinyl board that lists his chores for the day. He sees that other than doing the dishes the space for this morning is open—the first thing written for him in blue felt pen is dishes again after supper with Jay. That means he will have to do most of the work. Tacked to the wall beside his job board are framed photographs of him with his mother and his brother Jesse. He doesn’t have any photographs of him with his father. His father left a long time ago and he does not remember what he looks like. His mother takes him somewhere every Saturday afternoon. Jay’s parents don’t ever visit but Donnie’s mother and Eric’s father come to visit. He takes the harmonica he received at Friends several days ago and sticks it into his pocket.

He tells Roseanne he’s going out for a while.

Where to, Adam? she says.

He shrugs. There are times he feels he’s looking for something but when he tries to think of what it is, or where and how to find it, it escapes him. Going for a walk, he says.

Back by lunch, right? Roseanne says.

What time are we having lunch?

Twelve.
He leaves the house not sure where he’s headed and not knowing where his feet or his
moods will take him but just starting out walking without thought of where he will end up. As he does often. Habit takes him toward town that morning because town always gives him things to do and see as opposed to the times he sets out in the other direction because he wants to get away from people and complications and he will walk for hours until he realizes he has not paid attention to time and he’ll see that it’s late and that he will not be able to make it back before dark. Then he will have to go up to a house and knock and show whoever comes to the door the card in his wallet that gives his name and the telephone number where he lives and Roseanne or Woody or Lionel will drive out and get him and they’ll be friendly to him on the drive home because they’ve been worried about him. There are also the times when he’s angry because he’s been told to go to his room after he’s lost his temper or has refused to do chores and he will slip out without telling Roseanne and begin walking knowing he will go farther than he can walk back that day and then he will be gone two days or even three until he feels ready to come back and will show a stranger the card. Those times it will not be Roseanne or Woody or Lionel who drives out to get him but sometimes the police and when he arrives back home Roseanne and Woody and Lionel will ask him where on earth he’s been all that time and where he has slept and they will be somewhat angry with him. But today is not one of those days. He has not been chewed out and so he heads for town. He’ll be back before twelve.

He walks the sidewalk that passes by large brick houses and underneath tall trees and then by the cemetery that has round stones larger than cantaloupes standing on a low stone wall. He’s walked it off: one stone ball every twelve steps. Between the headstones inside the cemetery a large yellow machine is digging a hole in the grass. Somebody will be buried tomorrow. He walks past the high school where his mom teaches. The schoolyard is quiet with the students inside but other times when he walks by students will be playing soccer or just fooling around. Girls stand together in little groups and the guys’ push each other and their voices will be loud and sometimes they swear or use dirty language at each other. He reaches the drive-in restaurant that has a huge picture of an ice cream cone with its edges lit in orange and white neon. Just beyond the drive-in the bridge begins. He stops at the edge of the road and looks both ways because the road curves slightly there and cars sometimes come off the bridge without being able to see people crossing the street, and when he sees it’s safe he runs across to the other side.

He steps onto the bridge and leans over the concrete railing and looks down at the brown water flowing by beneath him. He stands watching the water a long time. When he looks up he sees a large grey bird standing in the middle of the river very close to the bridge. He knows the bird’s name. Heron. Blue heron. He sees the birds often, standing still along the banks of the river or at either tip of the island that lies in the middle of the river below the dam. He stands watching the heron. It has long yellow legs and stands halfway up to its knees in the water. He can tell the river is shallow where the bird stands not only because the water does not come very far up the heron’s legs but also because the ripples in the water are made by rocks and small stones just beneath the surface of the river. The heron’s legs look strange because they do not bend forward at the knees as human legs do but its knees bend backward. A black stripe runs back from the top of the bird’s eyes and down its long white neck and it leans forward peering into the water. It stands very still. Adam watches it a long while. Suddenly the heron’s head shoots forward into the water and when it comes back out it holds a small fish speared in its pointed yellow beak. A moment later it swallows the fish head first.

He begins walking across the bridge in order to get closer to the heron, walking slowly so he will not scare it away, but then a strange thing happens. As he is walking across the bridge he sees that the bird no longer stands looking down into the river but is turning slightly in the water so that it never has its back toward him but always keeps sideways to him as he’s walking toward the middle of the bridge. The heron keeps turning slowly as he gets closer to it. When he reaches the middle of the bridge the bird stops turning and stands watching him. He is very close to the heron now, closer than he has ever been to a heron before, and he remains absolutely still and looks at the bird standing still and watching him. He wants to be sure of what he thinks has just happened so he turns and begins to walk back the way he came so that he can see what the bird will do and again the bird turns slowly to keep itself sideways to him. He knows it’s because the bird does not trust him and he wishes it would know he would never do it any harm.

He is not sure then whether he should walk back toward the middle of the bridge where the bird is and possibly frighten it away, but if he can come up close to it again he can show the bird he will not harm it so he begins walking toward it on the bridge. He is almost back at the middle when the bird crouches and then rises out of the water stretching out its giant wings. It takes off flying low over the brown water of the river with its head tucked in towards its body so that its white neck is bent double and its yellow legs stick out straight and long like a tail behind a kite. The bird flies upstream with very large wings that are blue-grey on the inside and black towards the tips and he stands watching it fly, something inside him flying off with the bird, until he can no longer see it against the dark bank of the river.

Maybe if he walks upstream he will catch sight of the bird again. He sees them standing under trees in the shallows of the river above the dam. Dam, he knows, is not the same word people use when they say damn cops or those damn Indians. Roseanne won’t let them use that word.
At the end of the bridge he takes the concrete steps that go down to the river until he’s at the water’s edge directly beneath the bridge. From above him comes the whoosh of cars and the deep rumble of trucks crossing the bridge. No one is under the bridge. Sometimes high school kids come here to smoke or paint things on the cement and younger kids come to throw stones or bottles into the river. Three months ago after the snow had finally melted the water in the river was deep and driftwood would float down the river and come to rest against the concrete bridge supports but now the water does not come as high up the bank anymore and it rushes by in the shallows directly in front of him and forms little whitecaps as it streams over the rocks and then drifts toward the middle of the river where it joins the slow deep current that slides beneath the bridge. Just below the bridge a small grassy island large enough for one tree to grow on it lies in the middle of the river and there are times when he would like to live on this little island or on the larger island below the dam with no one bothering him. He looks into the water now and sees an automobile tire covered with sludge and green moss and not far from it a half-buried cinder block. Off to his left the peeled trunk of a dead tree hangs above the surface of the water. By the end of the summer he will be able to see even more things he is not able to see now. Pieces of green glass and pop can tabs and beer bottle caps.

He turns away from the water and climbs the riverbank towards the long concrete pillar supporting the bridge on which kids have painted various messages, which he knows how to read. One uses the F word which Donnie says when he gets angry but which Roseanne does not allow them to say in the house. On the concrete pillar one message in green letters says, the magic of the mushroom—WEED IS #1. He does not know what this means. Another in blue paint says AMANDA IS A WHORE. It’s a word the high school kids say, hooer, which Woody says is not a nice thing to say about a girl. Kids can be mean and he thinks Amanda is probably a nice girl and probably attends the high school whose yellow brick walls he can see across the river from underneath the bridge. Another message in white paint says JIMMY HENDRIX and he wonders whether Jimmy Hendrix also goes to the high school with Amanda.

He climbs the steps back up to the crushed gravel path along the river. Something high in the trees overhead is making a sharp whining noise, and he doesn’t know whether it’s a bird or an insect, but they seem to make their nose only when it’s hot outside. He walks past the ball diamond and the tennis courts where the green paint has begun to peel on the cement surface, past the swimming pool with the blue bottom and the kiddies’ cement wading pool which will be filled with water and kids when school is out.

By the railroad bridge ahead two fishermen stand up to their knees in the water just past the island below the dam. They’ve walked in from the other shore and are flicking their fishing rods towards the water that slides down the dam fast and smooth and brown compared to the way it flows choppy and white in the shallows underneath the bridge in town. In summer it’s possible to walk into the river from the opposite shore. He’s waded to the island in the middle of the river and got sopping wet up to his knees but the two men fishing by the dam today wear green rubber waders to their armpits. They keep throwing their lines towards the dam but neither of them catches a fish. The water slides over the dam and into mounds of white foam that look as if a giant might have taken a bath in the river and pieces of the foam separate and drift downstream like small icebergs. He doesn’t know what causes the white foam.

On the riverbank just ahead a man and woman are also fishing. The man sits in a green lawn chair smoking a cigarette, and the woman is standing beside him. The man turns to him when he comes up to them. Long black hair comes down almost to the man’s shoulders from beneath a blue baseball cap. The fabric on the front of the man’s cap has started to come apart. The front of the cap says Labatt’s in white handwriting, then Blue in capital letters. Labatt’s Blue is beer. He finds the brown bottles beneath the bridge left there by high school students after they drink. It’s already hot out and the man is not wearing a shirt. On the ground beside the man’s feet are a fishing net, an empty plastic pail, and a green tackle box full of silver fishing lures and white bobbers and spools of fishing line. In front of the woman sits a plastic margarine tub half filled with dirt. Two or three large worms squirm their way into the dirt. Adam stands beside the woman, looking at her a moment. She’s pretty. She wears jeans, leather sandals over bare feet, a blue T-shirt that says ROOTS on the front. The man and woman have cast their lines into the water here where there’s a back current from the dam and the water lies brownish-green and still. He watches the woman’s line with a slight slack in it looping out to a white bobber which moves up and down lightly with the small ripples of the water.

He wonders if they’ve caught anything, but does not see anything that might hold any fish. It’s not a likely spot here, he thinks, not like where the men in waders stand in the middle of the river where the brown trout are.

Any luck? he asks.

Nothin’ so far, the woman says. She takes out a kleenex and blows her nose. Do you fish?

He shakes his head.

Neither of them says anything. Talking about fish reminds him of last summer when Woody and Lionel took him and Eric and Donnie and Jay to Niagara Falls. I’ve been to Marineland, he says.

The man looks at him. How did you like it? the woman says.

I liked the dolphins. Do you have kids?

No luck there either, she says. I must not be using the right bait, if you know what I mean.

The man in the Labatt’s Blue baseball cap looks at her.

What’s your name? Adam says.

Mona. What’s yours?

Adam.

Do you come here often, Adam?

Most days. I haven’t seen you before.

The woman shrugs. Come just now and then. Sometimes in the mornings like today when Randy here works afternoons.

Look what I got, he says, holding out the harmonica.

Let’s hear you play it, the woman says, do you know how to play it?

He’s practised but it’s been difficult to play a tune. He can’t figure out when to breathe in and when to breathe out. He puts the harmonica to his mouth and plays a few notes.
It’s got a nice sound, the woman says.

The man flicks the butt of his cigarette into the water and goes back to watching his line. Adam wants to tell the man not to throw his cigarette butt into the river but doesn’t say anything. He puts the harmonica into his pocket and looks at the woman’s line, ready to let her know when her white bobber disappears.

You must live nearby, the woman says.

Down the road there, he says, pointing toward the end of the bridge half a kilometre downstream. Do you know Jesse?

The woman shakes her head. Don’t know any Jesse, she says. Jesse who?

My brother. We don’t know where he is.

The woman doesn’t say anything.

I live with Donnie and Eric and Jay. We each have our own rooms. Roseanne and Woody and Lionel look after us. Me and Jay do chores together. Sometimes he washes and I dry or I dry and he washes.

The man looks at him. He dries and you wash, you mean.

Randy, the woman says.

At the water’s edge large green stalks of grass grow just like the grass he remembers from when Paula read the Bible storybook at church about the baby Moses whose mother put him in a basket and hid him in the grass at the edge of the river so he would not be killed by the wicked pharaoh of Egypt and then the boy’s sister Miriam hid on the river bank and—

Suddenly the woman hollers and he sees her rod dip toward the water and she sweeps her rod up sharply so that her line sings as it rises out of the water. She raises her rod slowly, then drops it and reels in her line with a whir of her right hand, raises it slowly, and drops it again and reels in. The rod bends in an arc toward the river.

Could be a decent one, the man says, make sure you keep the line taut.

Randy, I know, she says dropping her voice the same way Adam does when Woody or Lionel tell him something he already knows. The man reaches down and grabs the fishing net and walks with it toward the grass at the water’s edge. The woman keeps reeling in her line which stands straighter now as it comes close to the river bank.

Easy now, the man says. Don’t wanna lose that trout dinner.

Adam watches, waiting for the fish to appear as the fishing line creates a small upside down v in the water as the woman reels in her line.

Then he can see the fish’s head break the surface, its mouth open. The fish snaps its tail with a splash and disappears again into the greenish-brown water.

Don’t give her any slack, keep her taut, the man says. I think it was a brown trout.
The woman raises her hands slowly and begins reeling in. Once more the fish breaks the surface and the woman reels in while she brings the tip of the rod down towards the fish swimming on the surface of the water. He can tell by its mouth it’s not a trout.

That’s it, the man says. The end of the rod keeps dipping and dipping as the fish tries to swim upstream.

Then the woman lifts her rod and the fish comes up out of the water and the woman swings the rod to her right to bring the fish onto the riverbank while the man lunges to catch it with the net. He misses but the fish lands in the grass where it flops several times and then lies still. The woman lays down the rod and begins to place her left hand over the fish’s body but the fish flops again in the grass and she draws back her hand sharply until the fish lies still and she places her left hand over the fish’s body again and pins it to the ground.

Don’t know whether this one’s got stingers, she says.

I’ll get some water, the man says and gets down on one knee and dips the pail into the river. He comes over and takes the fish from the woman with both hands and begins removing the hook from the fish’s mouth with his right hand, twisting and twisting the hook. C’mon you sucker, he says, and then the hook breaks free. The man places the fish in the white plastic pail.

I could have done that you know, the woman says looking at the man.

Thought I’d do it for ya, the man says and shrugs. He tips the front of his baseball cap with his thumb and looks at the fish in the pail. Don’t think it’s a trout, he says. Looks like it might be a channel cat or something.

Adam walks over to look at the fish. It flops several times in the water and then hangs still. A brown fin comes up from its back and its sides are covered in yellowish green scales in a diamond pattern. Its mouth is located below a blunt snout. Small rubbery spines stick out from the corners of its upper jaw.

It’s a carp, he says. They’re no good for eating. Too bony.

A carp, eh? the man says. You the authority on fish around here?

Randy, the woman says.

If you want trout you have to fish in the middle of the river like those guys out there, he says, pointing at the men fishing by the dam.

Well if you’re finished gawkin’ maybe you’d like to leave us alone now, Mr. Field and Stream.

Give it a rest Randy, the woman says.

He turns to go and as he’s turning he sees the blue heron standing in the shallows on this side of the island in the river. The heron—how had he not seen it earlier? It had turned to watch him when he was on the bridge and he felt the heron had let him come up close and that when it flew off it was leading him to some special place. He sees now it’s the island.

The water on this side of the river is too deep even in summer but if he wades across the other side where it’s shallower he can reach the island. He knows exactly where the water is no deeper than a foot and the river bottom is gravel. Once he’s on the island he can crawl through the grass and trees so the heron won’t see him and he can get up close. He’ll have to walk over to the other side. He looks at the bridge half a mile downriver. It’ll take him too long to walk there and cross the bridge and walk all the way up the other side past the old mill and to the island. By that time the heron will be gone. He has to get to the heron.

Then he sees a way to cross the river. The railroad bridge. He can walk across the railroad bridge.

He runs to the embankment where the bridge crosses above the road and he scrambles up the dirt and grass until he’s standing at the beginning of the wooden bridge. He looks back and there’s nothing behind him but the curve of the railroad until it disappears behind trees. Ahead of him the river flows far beneath the bridge. The tracks crossing the bridge lie bright in the sun. He’ll walk between them to the other side.

Beneath the rails the heavy wooden beams are tarred black. They’re about a foot apart. Too close to walk on comfortably but too far apart for him to skip one with every step. He knows the gravel stones between the beams means he’s not on the bridge yet. He begins walking slowly. A step for every beam. When he’s taken seven or eight steps the gravel between the beams suddenly disappears. He can see the pavement of the road now far beneath his feet. It’s higher than he thought. Much higher. Higher it seems than when he climbs up into the top of
the old mill. He stops. He doesn’t want to look down. If he could just look ahead of him as he’s crossing the bridge he’d be alright but he’ll need to look down in order for his feet not to miss the tarred beams. After a moment he forces his feet to start moving again. Six or seven steps later he feels he’s finding a rhythm. Left. Hit the beam. Right. Hit the beam. Never mind what’s underneath. Then he sees he’s crossed the road and is now high above the grass of the riverbank. He stops again a moment and looks ahead. The bridge seems to run forever and it’s a lot narrower up here than when he’s looking at it from below. And no railing. He hadn’t realized looking at the bridge from below that it didn’t have a railing. The tracks on the bridge run in squiggly lines but beyond the bridge the tracks run in nice straight lines until they curve to the right and disappear. He begins moving again. Left foot hit the beam. Right foot hit the beam. Never mind what’s underneath. It’s a long way down. There’s water beneath him now.

He keeps his feet moving left foot right foot looking at the beams rather than at the water between them. It’s awkward taking such short steps but he’s getting used to the rhythm. He doesn’t want to look back to see how far he’s come and concentrates on hitting the beams. He’ll know when he gets there. He can keep his arms at his sides now instead of having to hold them out. He can feel the wind ruffling his hair and flapping the sleeves of his Maple Leafs sweater. Beneath his feet the rails are nailed to the beams with huge spikes. The heads of the spikes are rusty and black. The bridge smells of tar—something sharper and deeper than tar.

Suddenly he hears someone shouting to his left and he turns. The voice is shouting at him from below:

Get off the bridge, idiot, you trying to kill yourself?

He crouches down so he can look to see who it is and not lose his balance. It’s Randy,
the man fishing with Mona on the bank of the river far below. Randy’s not looking at his fishing rod but looking up at him and he’s hollering again:

Get off the damn bridge_

He’s frozen now. He knows he has to get away from there. Away from the man’s voice shouting at him. He can see it’s still too far to the other side. He’s not anywhere near halfway across. He’ll have to go back. He stands up to find his place on the bridge and focusses on getting his feet to turn without falling into the gap between the beams. Then he’s facing the direction he came from and begins moving his feet again in a rhythm on the beams.

He’s walked six or seven steps again—left foot hit the beam right foot hit the beam—when he sees something beneath his feet. A dark shadow moving. Large and grey. He stops.

Below him to his left the heron suddenly appears from under the bridge. It’s flying above the surface of the water larger than he has ever seen it. As large as something he might see in a dream. Its huge wings beat the air and he stops to watch the beautiful bird make its way unhurriedly yet steadily upstream. Its huge wings move in rhythm carrying the blue heron over the water away from him and it’s as if he’s flying with the heron above the water and after a while the bird slowly grows smaller as it flies farther and farther away. Then it veers to the right and he loses sight of it behind some trees.

He sinks to his feet. Both his hands grip one of the iron rails for support. After several minutes he forces himself to stand. Then he forces his feet to begin moving again and he’s walking back toward the beginning of the bridge without looking down at the beams beneath his feet.

He was higher than the heron_

Ahead of him the trees beyond the bridge blur through the water in his eyes. He feels hungry and looks at his watch and sees that it’s past twelve-thirty. Roseanne will remind him he was supposed to be back by twelve. I know, he will say, as if to let her know he has not forgotten.

Spring Cleaning

2005-12-08T20:31:00.000-05:00

By Allison Brown

“Crazy, crazy, crazy,” she sighed. “I swear I’m going crazy.” Marian kept turning around and around, as she forgot what she was looking for. She stood in the hallway, beside the doorway to the living room, where she seldom went; it was reserved for company. The long skinny table along the side of the hallway was scattered with weeks of mail, ripped into and left. Mittens, a few scarves, and an old fashioned muff that smelled like mothballs were laying there along with the mail.

Marian was looking at the floor though, not at the table. She knew she meant to look for something, something on the floor. She had dropped it—no, it had fallen. No, the wind had blown it from the other room. Oh, she couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember what it was, even. A hairpin? She was going out, so that could be it. She was going out wasn’t she? Yes, she was almost sure of that, because she just got off the phone with her son, and she distinctly remembered him saying “ok mum, I’m on my way over.”

It must have been a hairpin, she decided. Then again, there was nothing visible on the floor. She kept the floor so clean usually. That’s why she noticed it there in the first place. Then she was about to pick it up, but, oh after that the phone rang. So it couldn’t have been a hairpin after all—she hadn’t known she was going out when she noticed it. She came back, intending it pick it up, but now there she was, all bent over, giving herself a sore back looking for something that wasn’t there. What was it? What was it? Oh my, she couldn’t even remember where she had seen it. Was it in that corner? Or under the table? She stood up momentarily, exhaling heavily and holding her hands on the small of her back to support it like a very pregnant woman might. She, much too old to be pregnant, carried the figure of a women blessed with five sons and a daughter, and this part of her past weighed noticeably on her legs and weakening back.

She stood, still breathing hard, surveying the hallway. She tightened her pink housecoat around her waist, and smoothed her gray hair behind her ears. The old, dark wood creaked as she shifted her weight, and the cracks in the white paint glared at her, but she could never get up the energy to putty them up. She was trying to sort out in her head what she needed to do. The weather was getting warmer—the storm windows needed to be replaced with screens. Marian sighed, and forgetting about whatever it had been on the floor, turned to go into the kitchen. It was no use thinking about switching the storm windows, no use at all, she said to herself. The screens were stored up in the attic, hidden safe behind a trap door and a shaky old ladder that she had been forbidden to climb up for years now. Her children took good care of her, she would say to herself, when she had to remind herself that they loved her and only wanted to help by keeping her from breaking a hip. She cursed her hip for being more susceptible to breakages than it was twenty years ago.

Oh you poor old house, she thought, as she ran her hand along the white wall. They’d been through a lot together, she and that house. Almost sixty years she had lived there. She prided herself on this consistency. It was only my stubbornness that kept you from being sold long ago, she reminded the house.

A whistle came from the kitchen, low at first, but then raising its pitch and urgency. Surprised to hear that the kettle began to boil, she turned towards the kitchen. She scrunched up her face, confused. When had she put the water on? It was probably tea time, but she couldn’t recall the time exactly. Hadn’t she just looked at the clock? She couldn’t remember. With one last deep, heaving breath, she tiredly moved her body to the kitchen, where she lifted the kettle off the stove, quieting its screams. She reached up above her head to a cupboard, not even having to look where she put her hand to fetch her favorite tea, English breakfast. She hummed to herself—what was that tune called?—as she dipped the tea bag repeatedly to make the water turn a deep brown. She liked her tea strong, strong as death (that was the song, she remembered: set me as a seal upon your heart, was how it started. It was from the Bible; I think, she tacked on. It could have been Coleridge) and she liked it with cream. She had always drunk her tea with cream, except when she was pregnant with her third son. She couldn’t keep any dairy down for much of the nine months—and still cringed at the memory of those stomach aches. Replacing the kettle on the stove, she went to get the cream from the refrigerator. The scream of the kettle once again pierced the silence of the kitchen, and she was so bewildered that she let go of the cream, letting it slip from her hand to the floor and glug its contents around her feet. My slippers, was the first thing she thought, and she watched them soak up the cream like sponges. The kettle was still whistling. She shook her head.

What in the world was going on? The kettle’s scream pitched higher, and as if kicked from behind, Marian stood up straight. She tsked at the cream, stepped out of her slippers, and went to turn off the stove. Of course—she had forgotten to turn off the stove. That was all, nothing to get in a fuss over. She took a dishtowel, wet it, and wrung it firmly in her hands. With much concentration, she got herself on her knees and started to mop up the spilled cream. It reminded her of when Norm, her youngest, was mad at her that one time. He stood in the middle of that very kitchen, with the meanest, most defiant face he could muster, as she told him that, no, he could not spend the night with Tom, he had to go to his sister’s dance recital because that’s what good brothers do. She remembered that he let out a wild, frustrated scream and crashed the milk jug he was holding as hard as he could onto the floor. It splattered everywhere. She chuckled. The cream made a much smaller puddle. With Norm’s spill, she was finding milk splatters on the cupboard doors days later, after she thought she had cleaned it all. Some times she imagined she could still smell the slight scent of sour milk in the kitchen.

But this was much smaller, this she cleaned up in a few swipes of the dishtowel. She never did keep much cream in the house, anyways, now that it was only her. Not many people over for tea, nowadays. And besides, the slippers also soaked up most of the cream. She laughed, using the slippers as sponges to help soak up the rest, and threw them in the sink along with the rag. Now, what was she about to do. She looked around the room. The image of Norm’s seven-year-old face was still stuck in her head. None of the others got mad at her like Norm did, she thought. Norm was just stubborn. The others were lambs like her husband, but Norm was like her, stubborn and strong. “Stubborn and strong,” she repeated out loud to herself.

Now she stood looking from the kitchen into the hallway. She could see clear through to the front door. That doorknob looked dusty. And dull. She wondered if she should shine it up. They replaced that when they moved in. She always wanted to live in a house with doorknobs shaped like roses. Big ornate roses cast in brass that made you want to pause at the door and run your finger over the smooth brass petals. Was that the third anniversary, or fourth, that Paul gave them to her? Anyways, they were looking dull.

Oh there it was! A glint of gold on the floor in the hallway caught her eye. From the kitchen the light hit the object just right, making it glow. She walked towards it, not moving her eyes. She would not forget what she was looking for this time. A she got closer, she saw it was a delicate gold ring, wedged between the floor boards. Marian picked it up, letting it rest in the palm of her hand, and then held it between her index finger and thumb, at arm’s length away from her face. Her eyes were not as good as they used to be. Where were her darned glasses anyways? She could barely make out what design the tiny ring had on it. She strained her eyes and felt the tinge of a headache coming on, but focused her eyes enough to see that it was a small Claddagh. It looked familiar, and felt familiar as she ran her thumb over the surface of it. But she couldn’t place whose it was, or when she had seen it last. It could have been her daughter, Kelly’s. Or one of her friends. How long had it been there? She usually kept the floor so clean, wouldn’t she have noticed it? It couldn’t have been there very long. But then again—didn’t they used to have a carpet in the hallway? One of those long skinny ones. Hadn’t she? She couldn’t remember. If they did used to have one, when did she take it away? Maybe she had spilled something on it. Or maybe they had never had a carpet in this hallway. Marian stood, dazed, still looking intently at the floor, trying to visualize what kind of carpet they would have had there(green, she decided—it was her favorite color), and what had happened to it.

There was the creak of footsteps on the porch. Marian looked up. Who would be coming at this hour, so early in the morning? She hoped it wasn’t a salesman: she was too busy to bother with their long boring stories and descriptions of their merchandise. She walked forward slowly, trying to get a glimpse of the visitor through the slender windows on the front door. She could tell it was a man. She could hear him talking quietly to someone that was with him. Reaching the door, she placed her ear over the crack to hear what they were saying. The sounds were too muffled to make out.

“What are you selling?” She called to the man. “I don’t want any. You better just move on, young man.” She waited to see if he left. He didn’t. Salesmen these days were so pushy. “Didn’t you hear me? Move on!” The floor creaked as the people shifted their weight, and she heard more muffled talking.

“Mother? Mother, it’s me, Norm. Mother, let me in.” Norm? His voice was much too deep.

“Mother, don’t you remember? We just talked on the phone. I have a surprise for you.” She couldn’t remember the phone call. She just wanted to know why Norm had such a deep, old voice. So she opened the door.

A man walked in; he was tall and slender, and moved gracefully, automatically owning the room with his height and knowing expression. Behind him crept in a young woman, wearing baggy slacks and a scarf on her head. She had a bulky bag thrown over her shoulder. Marian had no idea who she was. Was she supposed to know her? Her face didn’t look familiar at all. The tall man looked like he belonged, but she, she looked out of place and bewildered. Both the man and the woman looked behind them out the door. Marian craned her neck to see what they were looking at. A small boy still stood outside on the porch, bouncing a ball on the floor, and catching it as it fell. He looked up and saw Marian.

“Grandma!” He stopped bouncing the ball and came to give her a hug. Ah, this was Norm. This was the right face and voice. The man must have meant that he was bringing Norm. That was right, bringing Norm home. He had run off, she reminded herself, after she punished him for throwing the milk. She hadn’t seen him for several hours and was getting worried.

“What has gotten into you?” She took his face in both her hands. “It’s Ma, not Grandma to you, young man. Now come inside.” She playfully pushed him past the door way, and shut the door behind him. Norm backed away from her as she turned around to face them. He stood partly behind the tall man. His teacher, perhaps, or a neighbor? Oh my, she hoped he wasn’t in trouble again. Norm was always making mischief. “Come back here, Norm. What do you think you’re doing? I was worried when you ran off; I called all the neighbors. Go up to your room right now and get ready for your sister’s recital.” Norm didn’t move, but clung to the tall man’s pant leg.

She moved forward, hand outstretched to shake the man’s hand. “I hope Norm hasn’t been causing any trouble. I know he can be a handful sometimes. Thank you for bringing him home.” The woman looked uncomfortable, and the man took Marian’s hand in both of his. Marian looked at him suspiciously.

“Mother,” he said gently. “Mother, I’m Norm. This is Ben, my son—your grandson.” She looked at him blankly. Norm? How could this be Norm? He was so tall. His eyes, though. Yes, he had Norm’s eyes.

In a flash she recognized him, remembering that her children were grown now; they were all tall, like their father. And Ben! How could she forget him? Her youngest grandchild, who was already seven. “Of course,” she said, “of course,” pretending the mistake had never been made. “And who is this?” She turned towards the woman, whom she still did not recognize.

“Mother, this is Anita. I’ve hired her to help you around the house. You won’t need to worry about cleaning anymore.” Marian suddenly stiffened. Some other woman cleaning her house? Oh, no, no, no.

“I,” she said, standing up a straight as she could, “do not need a maid. I have been taking care of this house for almost sixty years now, and I am just as capable as I was when I was twenty.” They were all silent. The woman—what was her name again?—looked like she wanted desperately to leave. Marian gave her a stern look, hoping she would just run away. But she did not.

“Come on Ma, let’s sit down and talk about this.” Oh, she hated that tone of voice. It sounded like her husband used to when he tried to reason with the children. He always tried to be gentle and persuasive, just like Norm was being now. “Come on, come into the kitchen. We’ll talk about it over tea.”

“No, thank-you,” she replied, throwing the ring she had been holding hard on the floor at the feet of the strange woman, and walked past all of them to the kitchen. How humiliating! Her own son thought she was incapable of taking care of her own house. Oooh, she was mad. She paced around the kitchen, not sure of what to do. Norm followed her in.

“Ma, listen. I know you don’t need someone to do everything for you. I just thought you might need a little help around here, with spring cleaning and all. I mean, now that Kelly’s moved to Wichita she won’t be here to help.” Wichita? What was he talking about? Kelly lived across town, not even ten minutes away. “And I thought you could use some company down here. I mean, you’re alone in the house all day long.” Well, that was true. It did get lonely get here spending all day in this empty house. And she wasn’t supposed to leave.

“Why don’t you move in?” Marian looked at him expectantly. If his family moved in she would never be alone. She had plenty of room.

“Ma, we’ve been over this. I can’t. It’s too far away from my job.” His job? Where did he work again? Maybe it was in Crantson, the next town over. He was looking in the sink. “Ma, why are your slippers in the sink?” Oh, she couldn’t remember. He looked at her, concerned.

“Crantson is not that far away,” She told him. He looked at her, bewildered.

“No, ma, my job’s not in Crantson, it’s in Glibbsville. I live in Glibbsville.” Glibbsville? Why would he live in there? it was much too far away. Norm was looking at her carefully. “How about we all sit down and have some doughnuts together, huh? I brought some doughnuts from the bakery. I’ll go get them out of the car.” Marian calmed down. As long as he stopped talking about living two towns over, slippers in the sink, and Kelly moving to Wichita. She sat down at the table and looked out the window. She heard Norm call to Ben. “Come on, Ben, let’s get the doughnuts out of the car.” The front door opened and then shut behind them, and she was alone. Taking a deep breath, she smelled the spring air. It was getting warmer. She could smell the thawing ground, and the weather change, reminding her that she needed to change the storm windows and put in the screens. Kelly should be coming soon to help her with spring cleaning, but she should get a head start and at least change the windows.

She stood up, determined to get started before it got too late in the day. She turned to walk down the hallway, and jumped back in surprise. There was a woman there, in her house, standing in the hallway.

“What are you doing? Who are you?” Marian demanded to know. “Stay away!” Looking closer, she saw that the woman was holding her mother’s gold Claddagh ring—she had thought she lost it years ago. “Thief! Trespasser!” She picked up a wooden spoon and shook it at her. The women backed away, looking frightened.

“I’m just...I’m here to help. Norm brought me.” She held the ring up to Marian, but kept backing up.

“Liar! Thief!” Marian yelled. “You get out now, or I’m calling the police.” She still didn’t move. Marian kept shaking the wooden spoon towards the woman as she backed up to reach for the phone. She picked it up and dialed 911. There was a click at the other end of the phone. “911 Emergency,” a calm voice answered.

“Hello, hello? There’s a robber in my house, stealing my jewelry!. Maybe a murderer. I don’t know who it is. She broke in. Can you send someone?” Marian was getting more and more frantic.
“Ma’am, calm down. Can you tell me your address?” Her address, yes. It was…oh dear, what were the numbers? “Ma’am, are you there? Hello? Can you see the intruder?”

“Yes, yes, she was standing right there in the hallway.” Marian turned to look down the hallway. The woman was gone. “She’s gone!” she shrieked. She stood there, breathing hard with fear. She could be anywhere. Marian turned around quickly to make sure she wasn’t sneaking up behind her. The woman was nowhere to be seen. She stood silently, listening hard for footsteps somewhere in the house. After a few moments, her breathing slowed.

“Hello? Hello?” The voice in the phone said.

“Hello?” Marian answered. She didn’t even remember the telephone ringing.

“Ma’am, can you see the intruder?” “What?” It must be a wrong number. “You must have the wrong number,” she explained politely.

“Are you alright, ma’am? Are you certain no one is in your house?”

“Someone in my house? No, I don’t think so. You really do have the wrong number, I’m afraid.” Marian hung up the phone as someone began knocking on the front door. Salesmen. She would just pretend that she wasn’t home. The pounding got louder and louder, and someone shouted something. She just wanted to be left alone; she wanted to start on her spring cleaning. Marian left the kitchen cautiously, walking slowly so that the salesman couldn’t hear her as she passed the door. From the hallway, she made her way to the stairs, and started up, just as cautiously. The steps were awfully creaky, and she hoped the salesman couldn’t hear it. She reached the top, finally, and stopped to rest.

She needed a nap, she decided. The house needed to be dusted. She could tell because the railing all the way up the stairs was covered, and now it was on her hand. But she was tired, exhausted really. What had she done to tire herself out so? She couldn’t remember, but she was so tired. She walked into her bedroom, sat down on the bed, and then laid down carefully. There was still pounding on the door, over and over, and she could hear distant shouting. “Go away,” she murmured tiredly. She looked down her body, clad in a pink house coat, at her bare feet, and wondered where her slippers were.

Light Gathering, January

2005-12-08T20:29:00.000-05:00

By Luci Shaw

Yesterday the sky began to drop small
handfuls of snow, randomly, like fine
seed being scattered onto the rooftops
to rumor some generous intent. Or like pinches
of salt rubbed between bunched fingers
to season the season.

Crumbs of the white sky fall
and fall like so much mercy, hushed
and persistent, each crystal startled after
the long descent, a glistening prism that rides
down the window glass of the world
on the sled of its own melting.

Unexpectedly, the sun ignites the dust of
fallen stars and folds a congregation of light
into the half glass of water someone has left
on the window sill. The eloquence of fire in the room,
enameling the white wood and the pale wall
and the back of one hand with fans and feathers
of color so bright they’re unearthly.

I think a thaw is beginning, and now
I bless this afternoon for its golden drizzle,
drops of it hanging radiantly from the dogwood’s
naked branches as if everything,
everything, is suspended in their dazzling
lenses, the tears of the firmament caught
and held in strings of small planets.

~~~~~

Next: Revival March

2005-12-08T20:27:00.000-05:00

Revival

By Luci Shaw

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
uplifted little faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up too, ready to sign on
for conversion.

~~~~~

Next: Bonticelli's Madonna and Child, With Saints

2005-12-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

The Sound of a Circle: Nepali Singing Bowl

By Luci Shaw

I balance it
on the hollow of my left palm
so that its base rests
on my hand’s bones.
Cool, flawless,
an unbroken circle,
the rim a ring of light—
brass-bright from
a polishing rag and only
a little rubbing.

Like a pen outlining
the shape of the world
I draw the wooden baton
around its perimeter
with my right hand,
moving it against the curved lip
slowly, smooth as a wing
in flight, so as not to start
a shiver against
the metal.

And again.
Five orbits of the little
hemisphere. Listen: At first,
a low drone, then higher,
a treble voice filling the hollow,
circling the room, fluid
as a bell of water. When
I lay the instrument back
on its shelf, the sound dies,
but not the music.

~Luci Shaw

~~~~~

Next: Light Gathering January

Botticelli's Madonna and Child, with Saints

2005-12-08T20:17:00.000-05:00

Luci Shaw

Jesus looking like a real baby, not
a bony homunculus, solemn and all-knowing.
The quill in the hand of his newly-minted mother
stretches toward the bottle of ink a beautiful boy saint
is holding out. He has waited for centuries for her
to write in a book the next words of her own Magnificat,
for the Gospel of St. Luke, and for us to sing in church.
Two other youths try to lower a crown onto her head.
It is too large for her, and they’ve held it there for so long,
but she seems bored with royalty, eyes only for
her son, and his for her. In her left hand, as she
supports the child, she holds a pomegranate
under his fingers for him to pluck, its red leather skin
peeled back to expose its packed rubies.
Centuries later the paint and the fruit are fresh
and tart as ever, glowing like blood cells.

I wonder about sound in the room--small talk among
the impossibly adolescent saints. Mary talking baby talk,
perhaps, or singing as if she has swallowed a linnet--
Mary with the pale green voice, nothing coloratura,
more like grapes glowing from a low trellis.
In the moist Italian twilight, a cricket is likely to be sawing
like the sawing of cedar boards in the work room just outside
the painting’s frame--Joseph laboring on a baby bed.

But there isn’t a bird or an insect. There is just this lovely girl,
waking to motherhood, humming, content in this
moment in time, to be God’s mother, to hold Jesus,
when he cries, to her leaking breast.

As Botticelli lifts with his skilled hand a fine brush
to add the next word to her song, we look with him
through the lens of his devotion into this ornate room.
He paints love pouring through her skin like light,
her eyes resting on the child as though
he is all there is, as though her knowing will never
be complete. Right from the beginning
“How can this be?” circles her mind with its echo.

Every Word the Right Word

2005-12-08T20:06:00.000-05:00

Edited by Adam Sukhia

The author of three award winning books of short stories, the Canadian fiction writer Hugh Cook took some time from teaching at Redeemer College to speak at Houghton College’s writer’s festival in April 2005. Cook read a selection from his book of short stories Home In Alfalfa and is currently working on a novel. In an interview with Professor and author John Leax, Cook talks about writer’s block, subject matter, and the struggles and joys of writing out of a Christian community.

Leax- Faulkner once quipped that all novelists are failed poets. I have always been fond of that, because I started out to be a novelist and failed into poetry. Faulkner lets me say I failed into the better thing. I bring this up because I know you started as a poet and made a transition to being a fiction writer. Can you talk about that transition and what was involved?

Cook- As a youth, for me poetry was a way in which I could express certain feelings when guys were not supposed to have feelings. When I was 27 years old and had been writing poetry since I’d graduated from college I hit a writer’s block that lasted five years. That was a very frustrating time for me.

I think I had the writer’s block because I had not found my true medium or subject matter yet. I happened to begin reading Flannery O’ Connor at the time, and the way that she dealt with her community in the south as a Christian writer proved to be an example for me, and I began to think fiction rather than poetry. I realized I could write about my own Dutch-Canadian immigrant community.

At the same time, if I look back on my writing of poetry, I see it was a very strategic thing for me. First of all it taught me verbal economy. By writing poetry I really learned there had to be a reason for every word and every word had to be the right word.

I also began to value the importance of the concrete image. That is why I have always admired a writer like Alice Munro. When she places you in a room, you know what pictures are on the wall, and what is stitched on the cushion on the couch, and what the linoleum and carpet look like. Not piling needless detail on needless detail, but every detail there for a purpose.

I’ve always believed in the old mantra of creative writing classes: tell me and I forget, show me and I remember. To that I would add, involve me and I understand. And I think you involve the reader by communicating through concrete imagery. So that was very important for me; an apprenticeship as a poet was very strategic. Then I began writing fiction and applying these very basic literary principles to my writing of stories.

Leax- Yesterday, describing your writing process, you said that working all morning on a paragraph is not unusual for you. You have to get each sentence right. Is that partly connected with having been a poet first?

Cook- It’s partly personality and it’s partly your upbringing. Maybe my personality is not essentially lyrical but narrative. I just want to progress very deliberately.

Leax- So you would not be at all responsive to William Stafford’s suggestions that when you run into difficulty, you simply lower your standards, forgive yourself in advance, and just to keep things flowing.

Cook- It would be hard for me to do that. I would probably try to muddle my way through that writer’s block. One thing that does work for me is to do a lot of reading. I discover as I am reading other people’s books, memories or ideas will come up that are totally unrelated to what I’m reading. I always write those ideas down.

I also keep a notebook by my bed with a light. The times of falling asleep and waking up are times when your subconscious is very active. Writing down what comes to you then is one thing that can help break writer’s block.

Leax- I think that those moments before sleep or waking up are also the moments when your censors are turned off. You don’t think those ideas are necessarily bad ideas. Everything looks good. I think that is what Stafford is talking about. Don’t be afraid of an idea. Judge it later.

Cook- I have a lot of stories now, especially in Home in Alfalfa that I had no idea when I started the story where it was going to take me. You just trust the process and trust the writer in you to take over with whatever you’re working with and just start writing. Sometimes you discard the material and it will be a dead end. But other times you’ll discover that where you thought the story was going to go is nowhere near where the story itself wanted to go.

Leax- In an essay that refers to the writing of “Good Country People,” Flannery O’ Connor claims that she did not know that the young man was going to steal the woman’s wooden leg until just before he did it. I find that hard to believe.

Cook- Me too, but I can see how that happens. God’s creation is too multiple and rich to be accounted for ahead of time by the human imagination. The human imagination is probably one of God’s deepest gifts to us, yet our imaginations are incapable of accounting ahead of time for all the possibilities inherent in any given situation. Often you do not know what the right action will be for that moment in the story. So, theoretically I agree with O’ Connor, but whether she was right about the wooden leg I don’t know.

Leax- You often write about the middle class and trades people. How do you stay in touch with those characters when you’re spending a great deal of time as a professor in the academy?

Cook- I do a lot of research and visit the places where I set my fiction. I had some characters in mind for the novel I’m writing now, and decided to visit small towns. The first town, south of Hamilton, was very picturesque with a river running through it, a nice stone bridge and a flower mill. Sitting there on a beautiful May morning, I suddenly realized that this is where my characters wanted to live. This is where my novel will take place. I spent a lot of time in that town going to the barbershop and talking to people who live there. That is how I stay away from writing the cerebral story.

Another experience came when I was writing a story about pig farmers and having a hard time with it. The story just wasn’t coming even though I knew what had to happen. Then I realized I was breaking the cardinal rule of knowing what you’re writing about. I didn’t know the first thing about pigs.

I called someone in my church congregation who is a pig farmer and asked if I could come and spend a day at his farm just looking at pigs. Before I left for the farm, I wrote down all the questions I wanted to ask him. He told me what it was like to be a pig farmer in detail, and I observed and made a lot of notes. After that I had the concrete detail necessary to finish the story. That is how I avoid writing academic fiction that becomes too consciously literary. I just keep grounding it in reality and pigs.

Leax- I want to pursue this aspect of research for the fiction writer. How do you approach strangers? You said you actually go sit in barbershops without getting your hair cut. Do you just start talking? Or do you tell them you are a writer?

Cook- I generally don’t tell people I’m a writer because that makes them too self- conscious and feel that they have to live up to something. They need to be as much themselves as possible. But in approaching people, you just need to be extroverted and outgoing. My experience is that when you ask people about something they do, they’re quite flattered. I’ve gone to a butcher shop, barbershops, and a greenhouse and just asked people if they mind that I come and observe for a while. You really just need to get out there.

Leax- Can you talk a little bit about what it has meant to teach for as long as you have at a Christian college?

Cook- It has meant the world to me. I think I would have felt more lonely and isolated spiritually at a secular college. Being part of a community of faith and teaching in such an environment has totally nourished my faith journey. It has made all the difference for me to have taught 35 years in a Christian college setting. To talk about books with students who share a basic faith commitment with me is very special and I thank God for being in a Christian environment.

Leax- You said you would have felt more spiritually isolated if you had not been in a Christian college. Have you felt that in relation to being a writer?

Cook- I think any Christian college is a little bit like a greenhouse. On the back of the sign welcoming guests to campus our students at Redeemer once painted an arrow pointing straight ahead and the words “The big bad world” so that it was visible to people who were leaving campus. But at an evangelical campus you tend not to have very divergent worldviews or people who are virulently anti-faith like at a major university. I’m a firm believer of Christian education at all levels. We sent our children to Christian schools and some times I run into parents who tell me I am an isolationist for making that decision. I think you are an isolationist either way. Either you isolate yourself from the world or you isolate yourself from God’s truth. A system of Christian education allows you to keep in touch with God’s truth. So you’re going to be isolated one way or the other. It is just a matter of what you want to be isolated from and I’d rather not be isolated from God’s truth.

Leax- Several years ago, on a panel at Calvin College, you made the pronouncement that if you walked into a Christian bookstore and found your book there you would be embarrassed. You did not want to be associated with the other books. At that time my novel had just been published by a Christian publisher and was being pulled from the shelves because one of my characters cursed. But it seems there is something more involved here because there is a sense when I walk into a Borders now there is a lot I don’t want to be associated with. That is part of what you’re talking about I think. There is isolation either way.

I resonate with that, about the embarrassment in the Christian bookstore and Christian literature. There is a certain kind of badness that we experience, but also a certain kind of richness within the Christian community that as a writer I have been trying to get in touch with. How does one maintain a membership within the two communities? That Christian community and the literary one that you also value. So how does one work in these two communities?

Cook- I consciously chose not to send my stories to Christian magazines but to literary journals and was fortunate enough to have them accepted. I didn’t want to have to choose between the literary community and my Christian community. I assumed if I wrote first to the literary community and was published there and took the strategy of obtaining a secular publisher, my writing would filter down to my Christian community anyway. That is what happened and in a sense that strategy has been vindicated.

In regard to the bookstore, that was no doubt a bit of hyperbole. But it’s true that when I walk into a Christian bookstore I basically realize looking at those books and the cover designs that those books all present an idealized reality. They’re not dealing with life as it is. I don’t believe in idealized characters. I don’t think that the purpose of fiction is to make people feel good. One of the functions of literature, rather than to affirm our already too easily held opinions, is instead to challenge them. I see most of the novels in Christian bookstores providing a sort of comfort and idealized reality and I just disagree with that.

I think early in your life as a writer you decide whether you’re going to write books like that or be honest. I feel as a Christian I can only try to be as honest as possible. That’s part of the difficulty I have with Christian romances. I just don’t find them honest and that troubles me.
There is also the fact that Christian writers whom I admire are not in the Christian bookstores. You will not find Christian literary writers like Flannery O’ Connor, Graham Greene, Kathleen Norris, or Anne Lamott in Christian bookstores. And I’d rather be with those people.

Leax- You seem to be very conscious at a certain point in your career where you want to go. What happened to me working out of Houghton was that I got waylaid by the Christian community. At the age of 25 if someone told me I would spend 37 years at Houghton College and be published by Christian publishers I would have just laughed. It was not my dream and my early publishing was all in literary journals.

But out of the consequence of working within the community, I started to be asked by Christian publishers for work. Suddenly I was a Christian writer. I never felt very Christian in my writing and so what has happened for me is extraordinary. I have managed within my Christian community to write literary work.

When I was in my 50’s I had to deliberately go back to the journals to prove to myself that this work was real. That leads me to my last question. What could you say at this point in your career about the stewardship of your gifts?

Cook- I think every writer has to work that out in the sanctity of his or her writing room. What works for one writer doesn’t necessarily work for another. I believe too that there are different types of Christian publishers. When a publisher says my characters have to be a certain way and that there may not be certain type of language, immediately I know that publisher is not for me.

You really have to ascertain what God’s will for your life as a writer is. What it meant for Flannery O’ Connor it did not mean for Frederick Buechner or for Kathleen Norris or for Jack Leax. We’re all individual and look at the world in our own way, we all have our own subject matter that we write about. I think in your heart you have to try to search what God’s will for you as a writer is in terms of what you write about, where you publish and who your audience is. What I have tried to achieve in my life is not necessarily what someone else should aim for. I think here too we have freedom in Christ. That freedom is there for a purpose and we have to work that out with fear and trembling.

Leax- Fear and trembling and struggle. And it’s never easy. Thank you.

Tenting, Burr Trail, Long Canyon, Escalante

2005-11-21T01:20:00.000-05:00

By Luci Shaw

Even when I close my eyes, even later in
the tent, dreaming, I see banks and rivers running red.
My blood has drunk color from the stones as if
it were the meal I needed. I am ready to eat
any beauty—these vistas of stars, storms.
The mesas and vermillion cliffs. The light they magnify
into the canyon. The echoes, the distances.
The rocks carved with ancient knowledge.
But after vast valleys I am so ready for this
low notch in the gorge, the intimate cottonwoods
lifting their leafy skirts and blowing their small
soft kisses into my tent on the wasteland’s
stringy breath. The spaces between the gusts are rich
with silence. I am ready to stay in this one place, sleep,
dream, breathe the grace of wind and earth that is
never too much, and more than I will ever need.
In this parchment land, the scribble
and blot of junipers and sagebrush, each crouched
separate, rooted in its own desert space,
spreads low to the sand, holding it down
the way the tent-pegs anchor my tent, keep it
from blowing away. The way I want my words
to hold, growing maybe an inch a year,
grateful for the least glisten of dew.

~~~~~

Next: Sound of Circle

Where Are the leaders of Tomorrow?

2005-11-21T01:17:00.000-05:00

By Paul Willis

Sometimes, when I think about my years as a student at Wheaton College, that evangelical Vatican of the Midwest, I remember Wordsworth’s thoughts in The Prelude about his days at Cambridge University. The poet who loved the mountains of the Lake District so long and so well could only look back on his time in the foreign fields of East Anglia and say, “I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place.” I wasn’t from the Lake District, I was from Oregon. But I loved the Cascade Range in much the way that Wordsworth loved his own green hills, and I couldn’t see much use in a satisfied suburb in a dull, flat country. There weren’t too many trails to hike, and people were always going shapping, as they say it so quaintly in Chicago.
Unlike Wordsworth, perhaps, I made my dissatisfactions known. I wasn’t some loser from Illinois, I told anyone who cared to listen—I was a climber guy from the Northwest. I rappelled out my fourth-story dorm window every decent chance I got, and climbed up and down the elevator shaft at night. I scaled a women’s dorm, the science building. Even the old cottonwood trees on front campus. Soon I had earned a name, and when Major Winslow demanded it the day I showed up for ROTC in red, white, and blue boxer shorts, I told him it was Cliff Hanger. That cost me several demerits for “giving false name to superior,” not to mention “disrespect to uniform,” but it was the name I wanted, the name I had.
Sometime during my first year, Mark Hatfield was disinvited to speak in chapel. I took this rather personally. Hatfield was a senator from the State of Oregon. When I was in the fifth grade, Mark Hatfield was our governor. Mark O. Hatfield, to be precise. I knew because my class had made a field trip to his office in the capitol, and we were each given a letter with his signature. The name was printed out for us at the very bottom, but the signature was a series of squiggles that flatlined like a fatality. Which he apparently was, as far as our college president, Hudson Armerding, was concerned. Armerding was the one who disinvited Hatfield, even though the entire faculty begged to differ. He would never say why, though most people thought it was because of Hatfield’s opposition to the war in Viet Nam. The president was very proud of his own time in the Navy, and I think it was because of him that we still had mandatory ROTC in 1973. I also knew that Armerding went on lots of trips to Texas to raise funds for the college. Our Texas supporters were not a very dovish lot.
A few of us thought to stage a protest, only to find that according to the revised rules in the student handbook, demonstrations could not be held inside of, in front of, or across the street from any college structure. Meaning: no protests on campus. These new rules were a legacy of the late sixties, when demonstrations evidently had occurred on campus. We, the students of the seventies, were very often complimented for our relative quiescence. We didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of this. Our older siblings rolled their eyes, but our chapel speakers praised us for being “Wheaton’s kind of students”—the kind shown in recruiting ads for the college, invariably pictured as a well-dressed young man sitting erect at a tidy desk.
So instead of staging a protest we held a little prayer meeting on the day that Hatfield did not speak. We offered our miserable, whiny prayers in the basement of the old chapel across the street from the new one. We were so pained, so sincere, so restrained in our efforts. It made me sick to pretend to be so longsuffering. “Dear Lord,” we said, “we just pray that your truth would shine in the hearts of those entrusted with the power to make decisions on our campus, and that they would see your light. We trust your sovereign guidance in this disappointing situation, and bublah, bublah, bublah.” If you have been in the evangelical subculture long enough, you can say these kinds of things in your sleep.
And then there were The Boys. The Boys were a group of senior jocks who lived in a house off-campus. They were not particularly nice, especially to the freshman jocks. So these freshmen raided their house one night and made off with some prized items. Then the next night they asked Cliff Hanger to help them to display these items in prominent places. The tropical helmet we stuck on top of the flagpole. The letterman’s jacket ended up on the cornice of the new chapel. And a yellow diamond highway sign was seen next morning dangling across from the library, eighty feet up in a cottonwood.
The Boys never figured out who had heisted their stuff. But thanks to my cherished reputation, they found out who had hoisted it. The Sunday afternoon before final exams, I was reading my Bible in my room when one of The Boys walked in. He sat in a chair uninvited and leveled me with a long stare.
“The Boys know what you done,” he said, and planted a very big pause. “You’re wanted at The Boys’ house at seven o’clock tonight.”
“Thanks for the invitation,” I said uncertainly. “Are you serving refreshments?”
“No funny business,” he said. “Be there at seven o’clock.”
“Can you tell me where it is, exactly?”
He looked at me with pained contempt. “Everyone knows where The Boys live,” he said with drama. Then he gave me another stare and walked out.
I knew what The Boys had been up to lately. Two weeks ago they had broken the arm of a campus cop. One week ago they had summoned a guy from a neighboring dorm, and when he showed up, they stripped him naked and spray-painted his body green. So I cleared out of my room that night, well before seven o’clock, and spent the rest of finals week with a friend in another dorm. That summer The Boys went on a road trip to Oregon and threatened my father with legal action. Years later, one of them had a short career as a head coach in the NBA. Everyone said what a swell guy he was, and what a shame that he got fired.
By the time I got to be a senior, I lived in an off-campus house myself. I sublet a room from a climber friend and his new wife, recent graduates of the college. In their basement they ran the U-Neek Food Co-op, which consisted of three usually broken refrigerators they kept stocked from their nightly rounds of dumpster-diving behind the local grocery stores. Once, in March, we found seven huge heart-shaped boxes of Valentine’s chocolates, still wrapped in cellophane. I sent three of them to some very deserving girls on campus, and saved the rest for a climbing trip to Colorado.
My roommate for that year in the house was an 18-year-old senior on the debate team—like many at Wheaton, a driven child prodigy. His parents had firm plans for him to attend law school, and threw a fit when he decided to go into the Peace Corps instead. Halfway through the year, they told him to move out of the house because of my bad influence. I was offended. “It’s not a Bill Gothard world,” I told him. “Your parents can’t make all the decisions. Especially these kind.” He listened intently and wrote a letter to his folks, telling them his determination to remain in the house, under my deplorable influence.
On graduation weekend, we hosted a party at the house for our friends and their families. They crowded in and chattered brightly about our prospects. It was a lovely spring afternoon. At some point I found myself on our back porch, looking out at the weedy lawn with the father of a brilliant young woman who did not much like to climb. He was the director of a Bible camp and conference center on the New Jersey shore, and just now he looked distressed. For a while he said nothing at all. Then he burst out, pounding his fist on the porch railing as if he were shouting from a pulpit, “Where are the leaders of tomorrow?”
I realized immediately the question was rhetorical, that I wasn’t being personally addressed at all. Only publicly accused. The answer to the question was that tomorrow’s evangelical leaders were not to be found inside this house. We had gone untrained. The ship was sinking, and the younger generation was lounging poolside with martinis.
During baccalaureate, the graduates sat on risers on the ample platform of the chapel and sang together, a cappella, “May the Mind of Christ My Savior.” It is for me a sweet and moving song to this day. President Armerding, seated in front of us, got up out of his chair and, while we were singing, looked each of us in the eye, one by one, nodding his head. He was commissioning us. I liked that. In that moment, I liked him.
I remembered a time the previous year when, desperate to transfer out, I had paced the streets feverishly, trying to decide what to do. After several weeks of turmoil, I sat in the bushes against the wall of the library and just cried. Real hard. When I finished crying, I knew I would stay. And I knew, in a strange way, that I didn’t have to work so hard to be Cliff Hanger anymore. That I could just be me. A somewhat new me. That I could be for this hour and for this place in some temporary sense, and that Oregon would be there when I got back. I felt very certain of this. It was as if God had spoken to me. And perhaps he did.
But I still have to come to terms with the strangeness of my college experience. We were supposedly the best and the brightest, the hope of the future for the subculture. Not for the gospel but for the subculture, a subculture in which war protestors do not speak in chapel, much less demonstrate in front of it. In which we all march in ROTC in full and spotless uniform. In which we go into law school but not into the Peace Corps. In which we make an impact on the larger culture by, say, serving as a coach in the NBA.
My guess now is that what we seldom reckon on is the mind of Christ, which may not want any leaders for tomorrow at all—at least not in the sense that we usually think of them. What I liked so much about that moment in which President Armerding nodded at me was the sense of release. “Go,” he said. “Do what the mind of Christ suggests. Whatever the mind of Christ suggests to you, do that.” That may not be what he intended, but that’s what I will keep on taking. I figure it is up to Jesus to transform our culturally bound gestures, and I’d like to think he transformed that one. On the spot. That the eyes of Hudson Armerding were the eyes of Jesus, looking into the mind of Jesus.
So this is the moment I most want to hold on to—this moment of leaving, this moment of blessing. And even now, if The Boys come knocking on my door—say, at seven o’clock some evening—I hope that I will welcome them home.

~~~~~

Silent Incarnation

2005-11-21T00:31:00.000-05:00

by Christina Turner

Lo, in the silent night
A child to God is born
And all is brought again
That ere was lost or lorn.
Could but thy soul, O child,
Become a silent night!
God would be born in thee
And set all things aright.
-15th century carol

I can hear the creak of the floorboards. Each time my mother stays out late like this, I grow nervous in the silence. I have been watching television for two hours, the sound echoing through the empty house, but the laugh tracks and forced humor have made me anxious, and I have turned off the set. Now, alone in the living room, staring at the blank screen, I realize that the television sits in the same spot where my father’s hospice bed sat three years ago.

When I was a child, whenever I found myself unexpectedly alone at home, I was afraid that Jesus had whisked the rest of my family away to heaven in some secret Rapture. He had forgotten me, or he was getting back at me for not talking to the girls at church with greasy hair and dirty sweat pants.

As the chiming clock in the living room strikes twelve, my old fears are back, not that Jesus has raptured my mother away but that he’s harmed her, by a car accident or some perverted janitor that has seen her light on during the night rounds at her university office building and decided to take advantage of the situation.

I like to have sound. Whenever I have music playing, I sing. I take comfort even in the vapid church praise tunes that I refer to as the “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend-songs.” Singing the songs, I praise a good God. Saying the creeds, I praise a good God. Listening to the preaching, even though it sometimes winds around like a dog chasing its tail, I praise a good God. But as the clock dongs and the floorboards creak and my heart throbs and I remember my father lying in the bed in the living room, I feel the mound of faith that I’ve buried myself in beginning to blow away in the wind. In the absence of singing, God does not seem good.

I dial my mother’s office number.

“Hello?” She sounds weary. I can almost see her sitting in her office, typing on the computer, her desk littered with coffee mugs, student papers, and Bible meditations. She is wearing a pantsuit, and her short hair is probably by now tousled and cowlicked like a little boy’s. She has been working overtime this year to grade papers, finish her dissertation, and distract herself from thinking about my grandmother, who passed away a month ago.

I sigh. “Mom.”

She sighs back. “I know, I need to leave. I just have a couple more of these things to grade.” I hear music in the background at her office. Like me, she likes noise and activity.

“Come home soon,” I tell her, and I place the phone back on its cradle. She works to forget, to avoid the silence. The garage door will grind open in an hour or two, and she will come into the house to fall into bed, rising the next morning to do it all again. It is hard for her to be still with moments steeped in memory.

* * * * *
I sit in the halfhearted woods and listen, the wind rustling the branches and blowing against my face. This is a strange place, a clearing in a patch of woods in middle-of-nowhere New York, next to a two-lane highway.

I am here for a retreat, and this morning, we all gathered in a room to sing before we separated for our two hours of silence. Already, I am eager to hear noise. After a few minutes, my ears become accustomed to the stillness, and I can identify the almost artificial sounds of insects with their chirp, buzz, and hum. A car passes by, its blaring music mixing with the sound of the insects, and I wonder if the sound of the cars is our chirp, our buzz, our hum.

“I’m not good at this,” I whisper.

As I write in my journal, the cars and the chirping birds become a psalm. I listen and write them. After an hour and a half, I decide I should be still. “Lord, I’m going to be quiet now,” I whisper, and after the words escape my mouth, I realize that it sounds more than a little presumptuous. “Speak to me,” I add with what I hope is humility, but sounds more like demanding.

Then I close my eyes and hug my knees against my chest as I sit with my back to a tree. The wind blows the branches; there will be a storm soon. It is beautiful and frightening now, like the silence in which God may or may not speak. I shut my eyes tighter as if I am squeezing a dishrag, trying to coax out the last bit of water.

Though I try to keep my mind clear, my thoughts scurry around like puppies. I take each one by the scruff of the neck and hand it to God, making a gift of my lack of focus. “I am afraid,” I pray when the thought comes to mind. As I present this thought, another one replaces it.

My grace is sufficient for you. I open my eyes, trying to figure out if I have made this up myself.

Be still and know that I am God. It is no new revelation, but I feel privileged, unforgotten, and pray a thank you. Opening my eyes, I look at the sky above that is pulling a mask over the sun, preparing itself for rain and winds. Each time I look at the sky in New York, I hope for snow, eager for the quiet beauty to fall around me and blanket the earth like manna. Even this pensive grayness, though, is the character of God, I think as I pack up my journal and walk from the woods.

* * * * *
The clock in my college room reads 2:00 am. “You’re ridiculous,” I tell myself. I want to sleep, but I must work first. I have decided that I need a break in the middle of it, to keep the time of silence that a few friends and I have agreed to.

“I should be able to do this, to be quiet for a little bit,” I whisper, and I am not sure whether I am talking to myself or God.

Sitting down, I intend to get quiet, spend my fifteen minutes, and leave, my duty completed. It takes me twenty just to clear my thoughts and steady my breathing, and it strikes me how silly it is that I think I can live a noisy, busy life and yet escape into silence instantly. I have always considered time as the greatest enemy of my waiting before God, but maybe it is the loudness: a loudness not just of sound but of spirit, rising from the schedule I have given myself.

The absence of sound prods me, and I realize how unnatural it is to be sipping coffee after midnight, long after night has set and the rest of those I know have gone to bed. I try to remember the last time I had a truly restful night or a truly lucid day, the last time I have read myself to sleep with a children’s novel or a book of poetry, or the last time I have read the Psalms and offered my honest prayers along with the psalmist’s.

“I’m sorry,” I pray, and I am. The only sound I hear is the heater beside my bed humming. There is no word from God, only the realization that I want more than the noisy life I am letting myself lead. Maybe that is word enough.

* * * * *
Here in Idaho, I can almost see the constellations from my window. The car hum lulls us as we pass through the Idaho foothills filled with pines, along the river that is clearer than any we have in West Virginia. It is serene here. My uncle and brother have fallen asleep on the drive home from the restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, a small town in Idaho, near where we are staying with my aunt and uncle. My grandmother has died, an event that should make me miss her and mourn for her life. Instead I mourn for the fact that, other than knowing about her cravings for sliced avocados and good cheeseburgers, I never really knew her.

My brother and uncle wake when the engine grows suddenly silent and my mother insistently whispers that we are back. As I step sleepily out of the car, my breath is stolen by the passion of the burning stars. White as opals, they cluster together. I picture lines connecting the stars into constellations.

I rarely look at the stars. My house at home lies near the interstate highway, lit by enormous lights that throw a jaundiced glow on the road and somehow into the air. One of the strip joints nearby has recently bought a searchlight, and every night, it roams the air, inviting people to the land of booze and topless girls. The sky is loud with light.

Here, near my aunt and uncle’s house in a clearing in the Idaho pines, the sky is silent with stars. Sometimes the silence is not darkness; it is a night sky in full bloom. Sometimes silence is not dead quiet; it is stillness in sound. I realize that silence is a type of order, an order that I am missing in my life. This order draws me, the stars joyful and neat as a Mozart minuet, tranquil as my soft footfalls padding inside my aunt and uncle’s house, even as my breathing as I lie down to rest.

* * * * *
For the past two hours, I have been talking and staring out the window, the full moon glancing out behind the clouds as my friend drives us north and back to college. On breaks, Josh and I drive eight hours from college in western New York to our homes: mine in West Virginia and his in Kentucky. As we pass the sign for Erie, Pennsylvania, I realize that we have been talking nonstop for six hours about Thanksgiving break, our families, God, and the movies. Now he is telling me about graduate school applications and The Future, a phrase that I always mentally capitalize.

“I just don’t know where to go or what to do,” I say. “I don’t know.”

For me, “I don’t know” is usually a gateway phrase, a signal that I will take a breath and elaborate or finish my thought. But this evening, I am trapped there.

“Have you thought about taking a day to spend some time in solitude and meditation about it?” he asks.

I want to smile at his polysyllabic words, but instead my lip curls in frustration at myself. “I just don’t think it would work,” I say. “Every time I try to be quiet, I just get anxious or distracted and then find out things that I don’t want to know.”

He tilts his head back suddenly in a kind of backwards nod, almost like the words have given him a little push. “What sort of things?”

“When I was out in Idaho for my grandma’s funeral, my mom and my brother missed their plane and had to come the next day.” I stop to bite my thumbnail and peel away a cuticle that is hanging loose like a hinge. “And I was sitting there, just trying to be quiet, when I realized that I was thinking about my dad and his cancer, and I had this fear that my family’s plane was going to crash or something.”

Pausing again, I touch the cool glass of the window. “It’s like I’m afraid to be happy because then I think that God will send me some other tragedy. I don’t like finding that out. Some things I’d rather not know.”

We stay quiet for a while, and I want to add more. The skin between my eyebrows is furrowing in the helpless way it does when I have no words. I don’t know how to explain how I am feeling, that I am not just afraid of God. I am also afraid of God’s people, specifically the ones who would rip everything physical out of my arms and give me only spiritual fluff to hold. I remember people telling me when I was younger that spiritual things are what matter, not physical things. I think of the preacher hired to give my grandmother’s eulogy, who mispronounced her first name and stumbled through her obituary, using her life as a brief vignette in his sermon about salvation. I remember ladies hugging me at my father’s funeral, telling me that he would always be with me in spirit--that it would be just like he was there in person.

Every time I am quiet and alone, I almost fear that everything I love will go away, that some shabby brand of Gnosticism will invalidate all the ways in which I wonder at God. The light reflecting obliquely off the purple taffeta dress of a little girl. The hundreds of pouches of fluid inside one slice of peeled orange. The mournful loveliness of the Poulenc clarinet sonata I played in high school.

“I don’t know,” I tell Josh.

We say nothing, listening to the whir of the car tires on the road. A few minutes later, he speaks again. “Maybe you could just start small, five minutes or so, and see if that’s better for you.” He pauses. “And maybe that won’t be the way God speaks to you the most.”

I do not voice the thought, but I do not want to be one of those people. When others talk about what God has shown them, I want to be shown. Some of my longing rises from genuine desire to know God, some from a desire for others to think of me as one who thinks and lives deeply.

I change the subject back to details, things concrete and physical, the place where I feel most at ease. “The moon looks beautiful,” I say. “Whenever it’s full, it always makes me think that something important must be happening.”

Outside the car, the weather is surprisingly warm for late November. As we keep driving north, I wonder when it will arrive: the snow we have all been awaiting for weeks, the snow that must be coming soon.

* * * * *
On Saturday mornings, I sleep until my eyes open without effort. Saturday is my idle day, when I immerse myself in the pleasant work of cooking a homemade meal for my friends, washing my dishes, and folding up the clothes that I have hung from the posts of my bed. I let myself jot incoherent phrases in my journal, read poetry, write letters, and page through the Bible that has sat unopened on my bedside table for days.

I turn to Luke, to the passage about the Annunciation. The Mary I have always pictured speaking with the angel is not the vague Mary of a Renaissance painting but a frail girl, her body not comprised of curves but of jutting lines, her eyes growing wider to hold mystery. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary says to the angel. “May it be to me as you have said.”

I have been helping first-year students with their essays in the writing center for the past few weeks, and I nearly underline the passage and mark it with the words rewrite in active voice. I catch myself and laugh at the ridiculousness of trying to change the phrasing of inspired words. I want Mary to say, “I will make it happen,” or “I will do what you have said,” but she does not.

After the angel calls her blessed, the only response of Mary is praise. She accepts her situation, quiet before God, before she does anything. She walks around with the weight of a child in her, faces the snide comments, and gives birth, but first she says, “May it be to me as you have said.”

I bless Mary for being quiet and holy without ignoring the world and its simple, tangible beauties and pains. She says, “May it be to me as you have said,” but then she finds comfort in the embrace of Elizabeth. She breaks the quiet night, screaming in childbirth, and she nurses God. She treasures up all these things and ponders them in her heart, and I realize that stillness is not something to be discovered but nurtured.

Quiet, like sleep and rest, is a form of humility. When I am quiet, I accomplish little. Just to be still is an obvious act of faith that there is someone or something worth being still for, that the world will not end when I stop darting around.

Perhaps the entire Christmas narrative depends upon the grammar of receiving. I repeat Mary’s prayer. “May it be to me as you have said.” I invite my anxieties into the prayer, and to my surprise, it does not seem like clutter but adornment.

“May it be to me in my mourning,” I say. “May it be to me as I worry about my family. May it be to me in my confusion about love. May it be to me in my exams and the papers I have to write.” I feel silly as I always do, applying the mystery of the enfleshed God to myself, a girl living in a messy dorm room with a flickering overhead light. But I keep on because maybe this is itself the mystery: that God loves even my silly anxieties, validates my worries by holding them to the breast like a mother. “May it be to me as I try to get in shape. May it be to me as I figure out what to do about the future. May it be to me as I try to find your compassion.”

I reach the end of my list of worries, and I find that I can sit there, still. “You can speak if you want to, Jesus,” I say. “But if you don’t want to, that’s all right.”

I am too busy enjoying the moment to realize that I’ve stopped striving. The silence is not empty; it is full of presence. I close my eyes and smile at the simplicity and joy of sitting there, bringing my doubts almost as a gift.

* * * * *
I decide to take a nap to escape the lazy fretfulness of mid-afternoon. As I open my eyes an hour later, I can hear laughter down the hallway of my dorm and the spray of the shower. A pot boils in the kitchen. Rubbing my eyes, I walk to my computer to check my emails and begin to consider starting my reading.

I delete two junk emails and open one from a friend who is away this semester. “To get you in the mood for silence and contemplation,” she writes, “here’s a poem.” She usually sends me long, witty emails and signs them “Love, glad tidings, etc., Rachel.” Today she sends me Denise Levertov, and I feel my eyes welling up as I read the poem:

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

As the icons on my computer screen blur, I feel completely present in a way that I have not felt for days. I want to chide myself for crying in front of the computer at nine lines of a poem, but I feel like breaking the moment would be a small ingratitude, a tiny blasphemy.

I walk to the window in the corner, pull the cord that opens my blinds, and stand there, my palms cupping my face. I take a breath, and as I exhale, its warmth travels up my neck and back through my shoulder blades. It is dark outside, but it is snowing, the flakes of it falling as soft and light as powdered sugar.

“That there is anything, anything at all,” I whisper at the window.

As I stare at the snow that I have been awaiting since August, I am aware of everything. The still hum of my computer. The catch and release in each breath. My heart, suddenly so life-giving, so essential.

“You still, hour by hour sustain it,” I repeat, awed at the otherness of the moment. I run my hand across my fissured lips, and every crack and imperfection feels strange and foreign, a wonder.

I imagine doubt and faith as a quarreling couple beginning to reconcile, one tentatively holding the other’s arm. “I am afraid of you, but I love you,” I tell God.

It is a quiet revelation, as quiet as the snow accumulating outside, and maybe no one else would see it as a word from God at all. I open my mouth, but before I move my lips, I discover that I don’t want to speak. I let my breaths pray for me, and as I watch, the falling snow seems more and more a silent incarnation.