Just as he was

Let us go to the other side

he said, 

                      just as he was

A fishing boat would take him

and them across 

                      just as he was

They took him along

to the other side 

                      just as he was

black clouds thickening

above their heads 

                      alone, he slept

terrified as the boat titled

they woke him 

                      just as he was

he spoke, the wind, the waves

died 

                      just as he was

                      completely calm

On Thursday, Nov. 20 at The High Calling Retreat at Laity Lodge in Texas, Laura Boggess used Mark 4:35-39 as the basis for a Lectio Divina (sacred reading).  I took two notes: “just as he was” and “completely calm.” Laura is the author of Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grownup World (2014).

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ingeborg Bachmann’s “War Diary”

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was an Austrian-born poet, essayist, novelist and radio dramatist. Not as well known as other members of her circle, Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, she is still considered an important member of the post-World War II literary generation that helped Europe find its way out the physical and psychological devastation of the war wrought by Nazi Germany.

Jack Hamesh (1920-1967) was a soldier in the British Army. He had been an older member of the Kindertransport – the evacuation of thousands of Jewish children to Great Britain after the Nazi violence of Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) in Germany in 1938. After World War II, he settled in Palestine, eventually finding employment as a dock worker and later in harbor administration.

No one connected the two until the publication of Bachmann’s War Diary in 2010 (in German; 2011 in English). The summer of 1945 during which they met Bachmann would always refer to as “the loveliest summer of my life.”

At the end of the war, Bachmann and her family fled to a home in a rural village. Her father, a schoolmaster, was a soldier in the German army and had been captured by the Americans. Their place of refuge was occupied by the British Army. Jack Hamesh was part of the occupying forces.

They discovered love – a love of literature. Bachmann has hated the Nazis, and part of her “resistance” was to read forbidden books – Thomas Mann, Rainer Marie Rilke, Karl Marx and others.

Hamesh had lived in Vienna before he was sent to safety in Britain. His parents had died before the war; his uncle used influence to get him included in the Kindertransport. As a soldier in 1945, what had been left of his family had perished in the Holocaust. He had read many of the same books as Bachmann. And so a friendship began.

Bachmann as a teenager

War Diary, a small work (108 pages, including notes, afterword and translator’s statement) is divided into two parts. The first part in Bachmann’s of the period right after the war. The second is Hamesh’s letters, written after his unit was moved to Italy, his discharge and emigration to Palestine. (Her letters, often referred to in Hamesh’s, no longer exist). He wrote for almost two years, the last posted from Tel Aviv in July 1947, and their tone suggests he was at least a little in love with her. Bachmann was more interested in figuring out how to get into university.

And yet she kept his letters until her death, part of the record of that “loveliest summer.”

To read the diary and the letters today is to see two people sharing their love of literature and a sense of loneliness and displacement. The worlds both of them knew, on different sides of war, were destroyed. She at least had family left; Hamesh had nothing except himself. But they shared their mutual love of books and reading, even if it was only for a few short months.

War Diary also serves as a reminder that our parents and grandparents were young once, with hopes and dreams interrupted by war. It’s a small work, but a moving one.

Top photograph: Ingeborg Bachmann in the 1950s.

This well of stone

I sit in this well of stone

of limestone silence, circling

and semicircling around me

I sit on a narrow ledge

convenient for sitting

preferably in silence

the empty sky is loud

above me

It is a sculpture I sit within,

a cocoon of stone of two rooms

one a single space

with a turret, entered

by bending low before

standing up again, a bow

of obeisance.

Two rooms, two thresholds

within a threshold, one

equipped with a back entrance

an escape, unexpected

Photographs: The permanent art installation “Threshold” by Roger Feldman, Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas.

Giving Thanks This Day

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever. Psalm136:1

I live in a country where I am free to worship, free to speak, free to vote, free to pursue my dreams.

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever. Psalm 107:1

I have a family through whom I have been immeasurably blessed: my wife Janet, my son Travis, my son Andrew, my daughter-in-law Stephanie, my daughter-in-law –to-be Jessica, my grandsons Cameron and Caden, and my grandson-to-be.

I have an extended family through whom I have been immeasurably blessed: my two brothers, my sister, their families, aunts, uncles, cousins and family by marriage.

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever. 1 Chronicles 16:34

I have a faithful God, who has always met the needs of my family and always met my needs, even when I didn’t understand what those needs were.

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever. Psalm 118:1

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on my country, for we are sinners.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I have no wisdom to offer

On Monday night, my wife and I sat in our suburban St. Louis family room and watched St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough tell reporters and the world that the grand jury did not return a true bill against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In other words, no charges would be filed.

Since the death of Brown in August, I have heard and read much about the case, and early on I understood one thing.

Tell me how you vote, and I will likely be able to tell you your opinion on the Brown case.

I first saw it two days after Brown’s death. A good friend published a blog post, which was as extreme as any I have seen since that time. Anyone who gently pointed out that we didn’t yet know the facts to draw any conclusion was rudely dismissed – this happened because of endemic and institutional racism, and because white police officers are by definition racist.

My friend is an otherwise gentle soul. I like his writing and his books. I’ve reviewed his books, and favorably; in fact, that’s how we introduced ourselves to each other. I wasn’t surprised at his feelings; I was shocked at the absolutist way he responded to even mild criticism. He seethed with anger.

Many people have been writing about Ferguson. The writing is largely predictable, even among most Christians. I’ve seen lots of feelings, beliefs, arguments, and advice. What I have yet to see – from any sector or individual – is wisdom.

And let me say right here I have no wisdom to offer. This is not the time for wisdom.

Yesterday I watched the press conference by the mayor of Ferguson, followed by the press conference by the governor of Missouri trying to explain why the National Guard wasn’t sent into Ferguson last night until after the business district was looted and burned. (Looters hit corporate targets like Walgreens, McDonalds and Toys R Us; they also hit a cake shop, a beauty supply business, a Chinese restaurant, a public storage facility and the convenience store where Michael Brown was filmed stealing cigars minutes before his death). I did not watch the press conference by Attorney General Eric Holder.

It was the Ferguson mayor’s press conference that has stayed in my mind. With the mayor were ministers from local churches, urging calm and an end to the violence. One, an African-American woman whom I bet can blow out the windows when she’s in the pulpit, gave a mini-sermon. None of them offered words of wisdom.

They offered something more: love and hope.

If our community is to find our way through this to something better, it won’t be politicians, who have generally made the situation worse, who lead us. It won’t be the anarchists who seem to have arrived by the busload from out of town. It won’t be the media, and it certainly won’t be the editorial writers at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

It will be the church.

Not  churches collectively, but “the church,” the Christians who belong to various denominations and attend various churches. I saw them at the mayor’s press conference, and I recognized them. I see them at my own church, which is still a buttoned-down Presbyterian kind of place. I see them at a lot of churches in St. Louis, and I see some who don’t attend church at all.

In The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, authors John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall say this: “We’re learning to live with a community of people who trust God and others with what is true about them. We discover we’re part of a destiny bigger than our own. While we have an individual destiny, the community we are part of also has a destiny, and we are intertwined with it.”

It will be the church who leads us, the church led by the Spirit.

Politicians will not be able to do this.

Only the Spirit-led church can do it.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Cure. To see more posts on this chapter, “Two Destinies,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. This concludes our discussion of the book.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Fierce Convictions of Hannah More

She may be the most famous person I never heard of.

Hannah More (1745-1833) wrote plays for the great 18^th century actor David Garrick. She was a friend of Dr. Johnson (yes, Boswell’s Dr. Johnson). She knew the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. And Horace Walpole. And Edmund Burke. She worked closely for decades with William Wilberforce to outlaw slavery, and died a few months after seeing that cause successful. She was a poet, and an educator, an intellectual when women intellectuals were frowned upon.

Karen Swallow Prior brings More to life in Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist. It’s a biography, yes. But it’s more than that as well, a work of love reflecting a determination to bring to life a human being who should not have been forgotten.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting of Hannah More by H.W. Pickersgill (1821).

Adam Arenson’s “The Heart of the Great Republic”

This is a strange book to be reading about St. Louis right now.

Adam Arenson published The Heart of the Great Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War in 2011. He’s focused his academic studies on the American west and its settlement; his other books include Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (2012) and Civil War Tests: Testing the Limited of the United States (February 2015). The Heart of the Great Republic is about the role St. Louis played leading up to the Civil War and after, and how the great forces of slavery, abolition and manifest destiny converged on St. Louis.

St. Louis is the prism through which Arenson examines the major American themes of the 19^th century, and he largely confines himself to the 19^th century. What is both strange and surprising is that some of those themes – perhaps all of them – continue to be played out today.

For most if not all of the 19^th century, St. Louis was a larger city than Chicago. It was the gateway to the west (the theme of the Aero Saarinen’s Arch in downtown St. Louis), the place where all the wagon trains started to head to the promised lands of Oregon and California. Henry Shaw, an Englishman who founded St. Louis’ beloved botanical gardens, made his fortune selling hardware to the settlers traveling west and passing through St. Louis.

St. Louis was the largest city in a state where slavery was legal. It became the home of thousands of German immigrants, many of whom left Europe after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848. These Germans brought their fierce notions of freedom with them; they would turn out to be strong supporters of abolition, settling in a slave-owning city.

And thus the fusion of the great themes, the ideas that became the realities of conflict, war, and reconstruction. St. Louis escaped the physical ravages of the Civil War, but experienced the psychological and political ravages perhaps more than any other city of the North or border states.

Arenson, a professor and historian, discusses how these themes developed Arenson discusses how these themes developed in St. Louis through the great fire of 1849, which destroyed much of the city; the Compromise of 1850, whose popular sovereignty led to Bleeding Kansas and Nebraska; the impact of German immigration; the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (Scott and his family lived in St. Louis); the Civil War itself, and how competing factions battled for control of the city; emancipation and reconstruction; the movement to make St. Louis the new capital of the United States; and what happened when St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis separated themselves in a popular vote marred by corruption. (This separation continues to have a major impact on the metropolitan area today.)

Adam Arenson

The author’s point is that the conflicts of the 19^th century were a cultural civil war, and St. Louis occupied the physical location where that cultural civil war converged. And more than that: the landscape of St. Louis today still reflects the larger history of that cultural civil war. “The local history is national history, and St. Louisans sense it,” he writes.

And that’s precisely where the strangeness of the book is. If Arenson is correct, and I believe he is, then what does the current troubles and tension of St. Louis – arising form the shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white police officer – suggest for the larger reality of the United States? What if the themes of the cultural civil war are still being played out on the streets of St. Louis?

As I write this, the grand jury investigating Michael Brown’s death is still deliberating, and an announcement could come at any time. The city feels like something of an armed camp. If there is one dominant emotion, it is fear. But there is also the understanding that what is happening is here is larger than St. Louis, extending across the nation.

St. Louis history is still American history.

Photograph of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis by Yinan Chen via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Sit on a rock

Sit on a rock

and stare

across the water

and the road

to the bluff,

limestone

and rock soaring

to the sky

blue and hard.

Consider the effort

required

to carve and layer
these mounds of rock.

Wonder if God’s hands

got dusty.

Christian Wiman’s “Once in the West”

I’ve read a lot of poetry over my lifetime, and likely more in the last 10 years than the rest combined. Rarely have I been as taken with a collection as I have with Christian Wiman’s Once in the West: Poems.

The poems originate in Wiman’s childhood and coming of age in Texas. They extend beyond that, into the reader’s mind and own experience, a collection of sharp, piercing stones with cutting edges that leave blood on the floor – the blood of life and of a life lived.

Some may mind the occasional profanity. I didn’t, and it surprised me that I didn’t.

I’ll have more to say later, but here is one example of a poem from the collection.

 

Calculus

A soul

extrapolated

from the body’s

need

needs a body

of loss

is that, then,

what we were

given

in that back-

seat, sweat-

soaked, skin-

habited heaven

of days

when rapture

was pure

beginning

and sinning

praise?

Related:

Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing

Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss

Tumbling at the Nightstand

Photograph by Silviu Firulete via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

St. James Park Tube Station

A small station,

St. James Park is,

threatening inconsequence,

caught as it is in the space

between the riot of people

that is its nearby sister Victoria

and the riot of government

and tourists that is

its nearby brother Westminster.

But it has a reach, it does,

bordering on the formidable:

Buckingham Palace

the Horse Guards

Scotland Yard

Westminster Abbey

Victoria Street

Birdcage Walk and the park

the Ministry of Justice (all

those CCTV cameras) and sharing

a building with the tube’s HQ.

It even merits a ticket office,

attended by personnel, where

we wait in queue, quietly,

for our Oyster cards, topping off

with more pounds. 

We stand on the platform

waiting for the train

from Victoria (eastbound) or

from Westminster (westbound)

making sure as we board

to mind the gap. 

The St. James Park tube station in London has three entrances – one on Broadway, one on Petty France, and one on Palmer Street. We used all three, although the Palmer Street entrance was the closet to our hotel. 

Photograph: Exterior of the St. James Park tube station, Petty France entrance.

Theresa Rebeck’s “Seminar”

As we rather quickly planned our vacation to London (the flights and hotel finally came together three weeks before we actually left), we bought tickets for a play that a friend had recommended. It starred Roger Allam, an actor we had seen in a number of British television programs, including Endeavour, the series on Inspector Morse when he was a young policeman (Allam played Morse’s boss, Fred Thursday). Allam is most famous for first playing Inspector Javert in the stage production of Les Miserables when in opened in London in 1985.

When I ordered the tickets online, I discovered that the play was close to sold out. On the night we planned to go – our last Saturday in London – there were two tickets left – right in the middle of the orchestra, six rows back from the stage (the Hampstead Theatre seats 325). Someone must have just turned them back in. I grabbed them.

The theater is in near northwest London; we maneuvered our way there via the tube, exiting at Swiss Cottage (the theatre must be all of 50 feet from the tube station entrance). The building is on the contemporary side.

The play was Seminar, written by American playwright Theresa Rebeck. The play debuted in New York on Broadway in 2011, in which actor Alan Rickman played the role Roger Allam had in London.  

Exterior of the Hampstead Theatre

In addition to the programs, I also bought the script – it cost five pounds, about the same price as the ebook on Kindle. Reading the script after seeing the play allowed me to see the small but important changes in the stage play to accommodate a largely British audience (mostly references to writers’ colonies in the United States).

Seminar is a play about writers and writing. Four young writers (Kate, Martin, Izzy, and Douglas) are meeting at Kate’s apartment for a writing seminar, taught by an older writer and editor named Leonard. They share the insecurities common to all writers – the fear of being bad, the fear of rejection, the fear of fellow writers becoming more successful, or even being published first. Leonard, with the subtlety of a charging bull elephant, runs over all of them.

Interior of the Hampstead Theatre

Leonard, as it turns out, has his own insecurities (what writer doesn’t?). He had had a promising writing career until accused of plagiarism. It wasn’t true (or was it?), but it was sufficient to derail him, until a friend got him a job as an editor, which he was brilliant at.

And so they listen and spar, argue and scream at each other, have affairs with each other (and Leonard), and make more than ample use of the f-bomb. For a group of writers, their vocabulary seems limited, and the f-bomb is clearly one of their most commonly used words. (There’s also brief nudity; Izzy lifts her blouse for a few moments while she walks around the stage to make a point.)

But still, the play is about writing, and what it says about writing and writers is familiar to anyone who has picked up a pen and sat in front of a computer screen to use words. 

It was also a treat to see Allam; he played the part of the aging writer/editor to perfection, f-bombs and all.

Desires, Dreams and Destiny

We see a lot of advice these days about following your passion. Determine what your passion is, pursue it, and you will find happiness. Huffington Post even has a whole section on the subject. It ‘s a subject usually but not always associated with “Gen Y” or millennials – those who were born roughly between 1980 and 1995. Yet I’ve heard Gen X-rs and Baby Boomers embrace the same idea. It’s usually tied in with the idea of quitting your existing job and pursing that desire or dream that’s been rattling around in your head.

However the idea got started, the inevitable pushback has followed. “Follow Your Passion is Not a Career Plan,” says Business Week. George Washington University professor Cal Newport says it’s bad advice. Mashable reposted the Cal Newport video and then elaborated on why it’s bad advice. So did the Minimalists. So did Fast Company. (That Cal Newport fellow has had a considerable influence.)

The appeal of the idea of following your passion is understandable. You find yourself in a boring job, or a job that’s taken turns you didn’t expect, or the organization reorganized itself three months after you walked in the door, or that great new boss you were working for suddenly quit, or the company was acquired and layoffs are coming. Or perhaps the layoffs have started. None of this leads to happiness, and it is happiness that has come to be the main goal of life in Western culture.

What I think we do is confuse passion with desire, or even dreams.

I have a great desire to spend more time in London, seeing cool stuff, like we did on our recent vacation, and preferably staying at the hotel we stayed at. It’s a desire – and a quick way to spend a lot of money.

I have a dream of being a full-time writer, writing what I would like to write. It’s been a dream since I was in my 20s (it’s an old dream). I didn’t begin getting really serious about it until about 10 years ago. Yes, I’ve authored two novels and a book about the poetry of work. I won’t be living off the royalties any time soon. The dream is still a dream, and one that I believe I’ll be closer to realizing in a few short months, when I retire from the day job.

Ideally though, you never quite realize the dream. You keep reaching for it. The reality of the dream is in the reaching.

And then, say John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall, the authors of The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, there is destiny.

Their definition isn’t what you might expect. Most of us today would define destiny as fate or perhaps providence. What The Cure suggests, however, is that we typically look at this from the wrong end of the telescope.

“Destiny,” the authors write, “is the ordained intention God has sacredly prepared with your name on it.”

That’s the desire we should have, the dream we should reach for, and even the passion we should follow.

Yes, it’s about you, but it doesn’t start with you.

And it won’t end with you.

But you do have a destiny.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Cure. To see more posts on this chapter, “Two Destinies,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines and Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Anne Lowe via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.