Rainy Days at School

On rainy days the classroom

smells like mud from the swamp

the school is built upon. We stand

in an alphabetical line for lunch,

the mud from our shoes gradually

shading the floor with a grayish

patina. We walk/march in lined

unison to the cafeteria four our feast

of mystery meat in gravy, boiled

spinach with a slice of boiled egg,

beets and other delicacies to affront

the childish palate. I wasn’t Catholic

but I loved Fridays because it was

always fish on Fridays. At recess

we have Polar Bars or Fudgcicles or

Dreamcicles, to wash away

the taste of beets, the smell of mud.

Lunch is a quarter, ice cream

a nickel and much the better

value for the money.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visited the site. Links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time.

This is also one on a series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback. We didn’t have boiled spinach and beets every day in our school cafeteria, but those are the foods that have lingered in memory. (Our cafeteria workers also never looked as cheerful as those in the photograph.)

Photograph courtesy Grand Island Pictures from the Past.

Anointing and Prayer

Recently at our church’s worship service, a couple told the story of their little boy. When he was 8 ½ months old, he began to throw up anything and everything he was fed – and he threw up for 37 days straight. They eventually learned that he was allergic to a large number of common foods – dairy products and fish, to cite only two – and numerous environmental factors.

They family went on a lengthy journey of doctors, tests and prayers. The couple reached a point where they knew their son was in God’s hands, and no matter what happened, they would find solace, contentment and meaning in that. Not long ago, the couple brought their now three-and-a-half-year-old son to be anointed and prayed over by the pastors and elders. Some may question or scoff at this, but not long afterward the child began to gain weight and thrive.

Last December, I did exactly the same thing.

In June of 2011, I experienced a ruptured disc in my back. At first excruciating, the pain seemed to subside, and things seemed better through July. And then in August, the pain was back, and worse than before. I couldn’t drive for three weeks because of the maximum does of the painkiller I was taking around the clock. Numerous times I was lying flat on the floor, the only comfortable position I could maintain for any length of time.

For the next six months, it was doctors, an MRI, two rounds of cortisone injections directly into my back, physical therapy (two different therapists), using a handicapped parking tag and feeling grateful for it, constant use of a cane to walk, and pain that could only be held at bay with prescription painkillers. The second physical therapist I went to told me later that at first they thought I was beyond normal help and surgery inevitable. I was doing all kinds of exercises, the therapist was manipulating my leg in ways I didn’t think possible, and I was doing traction twice a week. That was my life for about five months.

In December, our pastor preached a sermon on the elders doing anointing and praying. After hearing that, and with the urging of my wife, I asked the pastor for the ceremony. After church one Sunday, several pastors and elders gathered together, anointing my forehead with oil and praying over me.

I didn’t expect a miracle healing, right there on the spot. I understood what this was really about – not so much healing as submitting to God. And no miracle healing happened that day, or the next, or the two or three weeks after that.

A short time later, we consulted with a surgeon, who looked at the MRI and said no surgery was necessary – the ruptured part of the disc was dissolving and healing on it its own, reducing pressure on the nerve and – eventually, he said – reducing the pain.

At the end of the first week of February, I was able to lay the cane aside. I used my handicapped parking sticker until the end of March. About then, I took my first bike ride in nine months. Physical therapy ended in early April, and now I’m working with a personal trainer to strengthen my core and get back into shape. I still get twinges of the pain at times. Occasionally, I can still feel a slight numbness in my left calf and foot. But the pain is almost entirely gone.

I don’t know the desperation and fear of parents with a very sick child. But I do know the desperation and fear of thinking that a medical condition requiring one of the strongest painkillers available might be with me the rest of my life.

I submitted that desperation and fear – and that healing was the real miracle healing.

Please pray for that family at my church. The little boy is doing better, gaining weight and beginning to thrive.

And please pray for Seth and Amber Haines. Their youngest son, Titus, has been in the hospital for some time, with significant feeding and nutrition problems. Seth and Amber have been walking a path filled with anguish, hope, faith, desperation, encouragement, and helplessness, and it’s been hard. So pray for them and for Titus. Information can be found at Seth’s blog and Amber’s blog. Titus is at home now, but the situation is still serious.

From what he chose

A small line of sweat

washing his upper lip,

he lay on a single bed

in a room with pale green walls,

searching through the catalog

for some sign of a future,

as if a course listing could

suddenly leap from the page

and encircle his imagination

or at least suggest what

to register for in the fall but

nothing suggested itself, and

the choice remained what

it had been all along, really:

theology or words, ministry or

writing, God business or news

business, both a priesthood,

both jostling each other

for his soul. From what

he chose he made a life.

This poem is submitted for today’s history (personal or otherwise) prompt at dVerse Poets. To see more poems submitted for the prompt, please visit dVerse Poets.

This is also a poem in the series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback.

Photograph: “Which Way?” by Mike Coates via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

An abandoned subway station in New York City. The Olympics. Billy Coffey asks “What’s your sign?” Maureen Doallas writes poems – from titles on book spines (and they are great poems). And did you ever consider that the Biblical character of Rahab had a job?

It was another good week for good stuff on the internet.

Prose

“The Cosmic Significance of the Cross of Christ” by Anita Mathias at Dreaming Beneath the Spires.”

“The Journey” by Kathy Richards at Katdish.

“Olympic Fever” by Amanda Hill at Hill + Pen.

“Rahab Had a Job” by Darlene at Simply Darlene.

“What’s your sign?” by Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

“The Slow Growth of Ideas” by Chris Yokel.

Poetry

“Homecoming” by John Blase at The Beautiful Due.

“Julia Spicher Kasdorf” by D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

“Book Spine Poems” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“There’s a House on My Block” by Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage.

“The Screw” by Harriett Gillham at The Other Side of the Mountain.

“He Who Has Ears to Hear” by Chris Yokel.

“Carnations” by Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’.

Paintings and Photographs

“New York’s Lovely Abandoned Subway Station” at Atlantic Cities (HT: Maggie’s Farm).

“A Red Letter Day” by Susan Etole at Just…A Moment.

“Go on, St. Thomas” by Jack Baumgartner at The School of the Transfer of Energy.

“Rings” by Tim Good at Good Photography.

 Videos

“Un Passo Verso Te” by Mario Frangoulis.

Photograph: Sepia Big Ben by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Travis Thrasher's "Temptation"

Solitary, North Carolina, can be one creepy place. And dangerous. And it’s getting worse for a 17-year-old boy recently moved there from Chicago.

The pastor at the big mega-church is anything but a Christian. The big man in town seems to run things from his rural estate/fortress. The police department may, or may not, be in the pocket of the powers that be. And then there are the visions, the haunting, the voices in the night, and the secret tunnels.

Life is tough enough for 17-year-old Chris Buckley, newly transplanted from Chicago with his divorced mother. But every time he gets interested in a girl, she disappears. Or dies.

Solitary is not a normal place, And it tunes out that Chris Buckley is not a normal teenager. Only he doesn’t know it. Yet.

Travis Thrasher’s Temptation, the third in the series of four Solitary novels, is officially a YA (young adult) novel, but it’s just as readable (and interesting) for OAs (older adults) (I just made that up). Thrasher has managed to suystain the pace and suspense of the first two books, Solitary and Gravestone, and create a satisfying, if often terrifying, read.

The strength of Temptation and its series novels is in the voice of the main character, Chris. He talks, acts and thinks like a teenager. The writing is also a particular strength – spare and lean, keeping the reader moving through the story at a fast and easy pace.

Chris is plagued by doubts and confusion, part of the normal trauma of growing to adulthood and partly fueled by his parents’ divorce. He finds himself increasingly estranged from his mother, who is tipping over into alcoholism. His most immediate concern is relief from the pressures f his life, but the powers of Solitary – and they are dark powers – have very definite plans for Chris.

The Solitary series has had a dark, foreboding feel from the beginning. In Temptation, the evil design at the back of everything is gradually unfolding and becoming more clear. The temptation of the title is the choice Chris faces – to fight or succumb to what he’s been told is his destiny. His decision is by no means obvious.

Travis Thrasher has produced another great read.

Related:

My review of Solitary.

My review of Gravestone.

Travis Thrasher’s web site.

Travis Thrasher’s blog, The Journey Is Everything.

Preacher Man

I was having an email exchange with a friend on the other side of the planet, and he said something that startled me.

“Your book,” he said, “is as if the author was seeking his vocation.” The reference to vocation was to the main character in Dancing Priest – a young Anglican priest.

I pondered that statement. In fact, I’m still pondering it.

I started college in a pre-med curriculum. By the start of the second semester, facing untold numbers of hours of chemistry ahead, I knew I wasn’t going to survive in pre-med. So I spent time thinking about my future, and one of the things I considered – seriously considered – was the ministry.

This was surprising. I hadn’t previously considered it. I had been raised Lutheran (conservative Lutheran), but I had never fell a call to ministry. My faith was lukewarm at best. I could answer the basic questions with perfunctory answers (I has taken two years of catechism and had had to memorize a lot) but I can’t say I was really serious about what I believed. Had I been pressed hard, it would have been obvious that my faith – if I had it – was shallow.

So why did I consider the ministry?

I don’t know. I do know I was feeling some kind of pull. But it wasn’t strong, and I eventually decided upon another kind of priesthood, a self-proclaimed one: Journalism.

But the pull to faith remained, and slowly grew, although I can’t say my general behavior would have struck anyone as being characterized by faith. More like the opposite.

“We pursue God,” writes A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God, “because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit…The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand.”

By the time I reached my senior year, events and circumstances led to more than a pull; in fact, I could say that I slammed into God. Hard.

I could look back from that moment and see the path, but I couldn’t see that I was on that path until I had reached the first stopping point. What I think I understood instinctively was that it was all “over” once I became a Christian; far from it. I understood that the “moment” was like a wedding – only the beginning, one certainly to celebrate, but all the hard work lay ahead.

Again from Tozer: “Everything is made to center upon the initial act of ‘accepting’ Christ ( a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.” There was some momentary euphoria, but I knew that the journey had only begun.

So when my friend made his statement, I remembered that path I was on 40 years ago. His words contained some insightful truth, but I don’t believe I was meant to be a minister.

But I was meant to be in ministry. We all are.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re embarking upon a discussion of A.W. Tozer’s 1948 classic The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on Chapter 1, “Following Hard After God,” please visit Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines.

He got it done

We’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist over at TweetSpeak Poetry, and today we finish it.

For about two thirds of the novel, I was ready to strangle the main character, a poet and critic named Paul Chowder. Chowder is trying to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems that he’s assembled, and has either the worst case of writer’s block or the worst case of EPD (Extreme Procrastination Disorder) or both that I’ve ever heard of.

I haven’t been this aggravated with a main character since Peter Mickelsson in John Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts (published 30 years ago). Mickelsson kept using his credit card long after it was maxed out, remodeling an old home that simply wouldn’t be finished. In the case of Paul Chowder, it is an introduction that would even be started.

In these final chapters of the novel, we get another discussion of the evils of iambic pentameter, invented by the French for their language and imported into England by Geoffrey Chaucer (lesson: never trust a diplomat). Chowder is still missing his girlfriend Roz, but there seems to be some hope they will get back together. He’s preparing for a trip to Switzerland, where he will be part of a conference panel and teach a class. I am not surprised when he discovered four days before his flight leaves that his passport is expired.

But he makes it to Switzerland, he makes up (to some extent) with Roz, and he writes 23 poems on the airplane home. And – at last! – he writes the introduction – 230 pages of introduction.

I was relieved.

We don’t learn much about what’s in the introduction, only that it’s written and packed off to the editor, who accepts it with vague murmurs of “we need to cut it.”

And then I realize that I’ve been reading the introduction all along, that this novel The Anthologist is really an introduction – a rather bizarre introduction – to a collection of rhyming poems. It is, perhaps, how introductions to anthologies should be written – a reader would certainly be more apt to read introductions if they were written this way.

And it did what good introductions do – it explained why what was to follow was important. It placed the subject in a context. It gave you insights you might have missed or not understood otherwise.

It also injected the personality of the anthologist into the poems to an extraordinary degree, but isn’t that one of the things that poems, really good poems,  can do – pull you into them, pull you into another world, into the mind and heart of the poet so closely that it becomes your own mind and heart?

As much as I would have liked to chuck a rock at his head, Paul Chowder taught me a few things. And I liked his self-deprecating humor and lack of inflated self-importance. I also liked the fact that he decides (wisely) not be try to teach again but instead to help paint houses.

There is much to like in The Anthologist, and much to learn. I’m glad I hung in there for the entire ride.

To see what’s happening (and concluding) discussion about The Anthologist, check out what Lyla Lindquist has to say at TweetSpeak Poetry today.

My two previous posts on The Anthologist:

Finish the Intro, Anthologist!

We Still Don’t Have an Intro