Don't Let the Boys See You Cry: Good Night, Irene

Coffee and donuts for servicemen - AP, from NPRs website

I taught US History but never heard of the "donut dollies" who followed troops in England, France, and Germany. They dispensed coffee and wise cracks, played jazz bands, and listened to private confessions.

Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea created fiction on the framework of experiences his mother wrote about in her journals. Until she died, he knew little about her story, except that she suffered from nightmares every night of her life.

Urrea builds his story with laughs, friendship, and a rom-com perfect romance with a (fictional) cocksure pilot named Hans "Handyman." Beyond that, the arc of the story follows the trajectory of Allied advances and setbacks.

Irene's commander tells her, "Above all, don't let them see you cry." The part that moves me to tears, again and again, is the gratitude that men express, as in this letter:

I was trying to hide my terror from the other guys, but all I could think of was home. Then I saw you.... I know I was just a face among hundreds of faces, but you looked at me in the eye and gave me coffee and made me laugh

Another side to that story is how many young pilots don't come back. The women's real job was to be "the final blessing from home."

One very tough encounter for Irene, and for me, is a few minutes at the bedside of a horribly burnt soldier so that he won't have to die alone.

I couldn't tell you what happened when, or name more than a handful of characters, but I also couldn't wait each night to get back into the world of Irene and her tall driver Dorothy.

"Unconditional Love" and "the Mystery of Faith": Now I Get It

Sunday I heard two phrases new to me that clicked into place a lot of what I believe.

First, our music director Bryan Black quoted Richard Rohr about "mystery" in our faith. It's not any secret of God's that cannot be understood; rather, a mystery in our faith is something infinitely understandable. Whatever we say to pin it down -- whether it's the doctrine of the Trinity, or the incarnation -- will be insufficient. There remains room for exploration and more implications.

Bryan naturally applied this to great music and the poetry we were singing Sunday, "Blessed be the Pure of Heart." The concluding line that God makes a pure heart "his cradle and his throne" is a good example.

Then, our curate Mother Megan Swett used a phrase new to me in her first sermon for St. James, Marietta. I've long heard of God's "unconditional love" for us, but she said it another way that gives us some agency: in light of God's unconditional love, we must accept our "unconditional worth."

The world, she says, doesn't accept that. Instead, we think we have to create a Self of Worth, and the evil of the world comes from defending that Self, putting that Self ahead of others, or becoming angry and hateful towards those who do not accept the Worth that we have constructed.

In the context of a gospel lesson about taking up our cross and dying to self, she said that's not some performative suffering we do, or some suffering we take on as punishment. It's our Self of Worth that we must give up.

If we were to live as if we believed in our unconditional worth, and in the unconditional worth of others -- well, that would be the kingdom Jesus preached about.

Loved Blue Beetle

I'm glad I took a couple hours this afternoon to see Blue Beetle, the first character I've seen in a DC movie with zero connection to my childhood comic collection. Also, the only one I know who speaks Spanish. NPR liked it, so I gave it a try.

The young actor Xolo Maridueña who plays the central character Jaime Reyes is so sincere that any scene focused on his face is a pleasure. The camera focuses on his face; he's often focused on a member of his family with love, amusement, exuberant pleasure, pain -- he's a giving actor.

Jaime gets possessed by a piece of wearable technology from outer space that flies, protects him, shapes forcefields into any shape at will, etc. etc. -- just what we've come to expect from supersuits. It's also good for a laugh, as during a battle when the generic assistant voice tells Jaime that it must run a system check and reboot. But I enjoyed how Jaime's sweet personality teaches its AI something about love and family; in a fight to the death, the suit teaches him empathy for his opponent.

I enjoyed Jaime's family. They're played for laughs in a kind of Latino family sitcom kind of way. But they're part of the action from the get-go and they come to the rescue. When the grandmother says, "Now is not the time to cry," we know that there will be a time to cry later -- and it touches. (I think back on the original Star Wars trilogy, how the feeling of family that grew around Luke Skywalker was what drew me back to see it so many times.)

The primary villain Susan Sarandan's Victoria Kord is a kind of Martha Stewart of arms manufacturing, energetic and poised. She's almost adolescent in her pleasure when she directs minions to "target the family" so she can watch what the Blue Beetle suit is capable of doing in such an emergency.

As Kord's niece Jennifer, Jaime's love interest, Bruna Marquezine is just as appealing as Xolo. She brings intelligence and determination and beauty to every scene -- and the two of them are a joy together.

A word about Bobby Krlik's music: During the first bars of Krlik's score, Sensemaya came to mind, a 1939 composition by Mexico's prominent classical composer Silvestre Revueltas. Krlik is British with no Mexican connection; I theorize that he took his cue from images of Mayan pyramids in the title sequence and turned to Revueltas' colorful piece. Sensemaya tells in music a Mayan legend about hunting a giant snake, using low brass and dry crackling percussion and massive drumbeats to evoke music of the ancient Mayans. With synthesized sounds and some hip-hop style sampling, that's what I hear in Blue Beetle. If you're reading this, Mr. Krlik, I'd love confirmation. Thanks.

The Reyes family tempts Jaime to open the box that Jenny Kord told him he must not open.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day May-July 2023

Every morning I read scripture assigned for the day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer and then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

May Fr Perry Pauley of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix AZ draws our attention to metaphors that I, for one, have not apprecicated before.

For example, to imagine what a "living stone" might be (1 Peter 2.4-5), Pauley refers to the stones of the cathedral in Phoenix. Because of the climate, the stones still bear the marks of their quarrying a century ago and thus "live" in the story they tell. The "heart of stone" in Ezekiel 11 cues memories for Pauley of times when he has been hard-hearted, and he observes that every one of those times, he was responding to a perceived attack on his sense of self and his place in the world. To react harshly was a natural reaction, "almost a reflex," Pauley writes, but Ezekiel gives hope that God can soften our hearts; a threat to our place in the world might be mitigated simply by remembering our place in God. Pauley, noting that God can't be contained in a temple built of stone, suggests that to dwell in the house of the Lord forever is a mindset; again, I like the idea that God's love is a place. [That idea is foundational to the wonderful Port William novels of Wendell Berry. See my article Love as a Place (09/2009).]

Pauley shows us the metaphors behind Romans 12, do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit. Zeal stems from a word for boiling, and ardent from a word for burning. Paul isn't telling us just to be cheerleaders: Pauley points out that both words are about transfers of energy that transform their subjects, as water becomes steam and wood turns to ash.

Our reluctance to ask for help comes up several times in Pauley's meditations. Pleas for help are plentiful in Scripture, but with the apostles' panic in the storm-toseed boat, Pauley wonders if Jesus snaps, "Where is your faith?" not because they woke him up in their terror but because they had waited until they were out of other options. The story of the woman who stoops to touch just the hem of Jesus's robe reminds Pauley of an ex-Marine who kept apologizing to his church for needing help: Jesus's tender response to the woman is a model for how we can offer help "with no strings attached." Pauley tells us that beneficiaries often report feeling worse after they receive help, because they feel themselves to be weak. "Recognizing our weakness can be liberating," Pauley writes, and "we can borrow strength."

Responding to 1 Cor. 1.22, Pauley writes about his favorite part of baptism, when he gets to "seal" the person "as Christ's own forever." He thinks of it as a "first installment" of joy to come. Around the time I read that, I attended a cozy evening service for Ascension at which the Rector invited our comments. A woman "of a certain age" whose illness has kept her away from church got very emotional as she seemed to realize on the spot that her life has been "an ascension from one stage to the next." She assured us that she's not at the last stage, yet.

June I filled fronts and backs of three envelopes with tiny notes about how I related to Terry Stokes's reflections on scriptures assigned for June. Confirmed at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem, educated at Princeton and Yale, he's now a youth pastor in New Jersey.

I personally identified with aspects of his life. Living alone, Stokes doesn't expect to form a traditional family. He takes comfort from the observation that John the Baptist, childless and alone so often, left such a legacy. He observes the effect on him of the rare visitors to his apartment, "how I felt when each person was in the space -- how the house felt, how each of them added a layer of significance to each square foor of a relatively small apartment." In Mt 10/12-13, Jesus seems to imagine "peace" as a "substance ... that can move ... from people to homes and back again," and Stokes resolves to put more into "bestowing spiritual fruit" through hospitality.

Stokes reads how Abraham was sitting at the mouth of his tent when angels approached, and writes how he has always wanted to sit on a front porch to call out to neighbors passing by -- an image I've always liked, too. Stokes challenges us to sit outside our homes and be open to meeting some angels.

Stokes and I both finish fries left on friends' plates at restaurants, though we'd never ask for the first bites. But the first bite is what God commands the Hebrews to give up to the temple. Like Stokes, I thought that was a discipline of self-denial, but Stokes draws attention to Dt. 26.11: "Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house." I'll remember that the next time someone disparages the Hebrew Scriptures for harsh legalism and exclusivity.

I appreciate a couple of insights to scripture that Stokes derives from childhood experiences that we have in common. Stokes remembers delivering the message I like you for friends who trusted him to represent them well to the girls they liked. I'll think of that when I read Paul's odd word to the Corinthians, "You are my letter." Reading about "the weight of glory" in 2 Cor 4.17, Stokes wonders, "Isn't weight supposed to be a bad thing?" Then he remembers how he loved to lug his heavy scooter up the hill to ride it back down. A weight can be a privilege.

Stokes explores a tension in the way we Americans read scripture. We tend to turn passages about property and poverty into teachings about our personal spirituality. He knows it's wrong for him to go the other way, as he tends to see economics and politics in parables such as the one about the unjust judge that's all about prayer, the gospel writer tells us. Stokes admits, "I run the risk of removing the dimension of personal piety from my interpretations altogether in favor of making everything immediatley practical and political." But neither will he ignore the other kinds of questions just because they're "on the surface." He wonders as I do, in this time when all churches are in decline according to the metrics of attendance and pledging, if this time might be an opportunity for the metrics Paul applied to the churches he started in Corinth and elsewhere, "collectivism, love, earnestness, energy, and generosity."

A couple other observations counteract our tendencies to confuse knowing about Jesus with believing in Jesus, and to judge others. Peter, he said, knew about Jesus when he denied him three times. When Jesus commissions Peter three times to "feed my sheep" and knows this time Peter will follow through to martyrdom, not because of the knowledge of Jesus, but love. Then, in Luke 22.31-32, it's Satan who sifts us like chaff from wheat, as he does in Job, where he "demanded a chance to reveal Job, the poster boy for wheat, for the chaff that he really was deep down." That urge that comes with phrases like "tough love" and "upholding standards" is an urge that Satan uses. Unlike Satan, Jesus "overwrites our denial with affirmation and recommissions us to strengthen our siblings."

[I reflected on the shadow side of standards in Standards v. Specifications (04/2015)]

Reading how unknowable are God's thoughts in Psalm 139, Stokes speculates how the experience of incarnation might have changed God's thinking from the Old Testament times.

I'm adding to my wish list Stokes's book Prayers for the People: Things We Didn't Know We Could Say to God, in which he has composed collects for everyday crises: engaging in small talk, for going into a Target, and for asymmetrical friendships.

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

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Photo from Simon and Schuster

12 year old Odie O'Bannon lies his way to expensive new shoes for himself, his older brother Albert, and their buddy Mose. In the tale he spins for the shopkeeper's wife, Odie expresses such longing that "even I felt sorry for me" (107).

His real story is tough enough: they're escaping a labor camp for orphans, heading down the Mississippi on a raft. It's the Depression in the Midwest, and the boys are wanted by the police because, first, Odie killed an abusive instructor and, second, the boys supposedly kidnapped the little girl Emmy. In truth, they have rescued her from the despicable matron of the orphanage.

So early in the novel This Tender Land, author William Kent Krueger is calling to mind both Charles Dickens' plucky orphans and Mark Twain's resourceful liar Huck Finn. Odie even takes the cover name "Buck."

Krueger shows a special affinity for portraying young adults who have intelligence, sensitivity, and a fierce sense of justice. In his crime series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, the most affecting storylines involve children, including Cork's own and also Cork himself in childhood. [See appreciations of the Cork series at my Crime Fiction page] Krueger's other stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace also features brothers forced suddenly to grow up -- along with their parents.

Each section of This Tender Land has its own arc, as the kids land in a different community, learn how to survive or thrive there, and then have to escape. Through all the episodes, we witness Odie's growing understanding of the love between him and his brother, Mose's deepening sense of identity, and the emergence of a kind of mystical power in Emmy.

Late in the book, we learn Odie's full name, Odysseus. How could I have missed that other literary connection? (Especially since one of the bad guys early on is a cyclops, "One-Eyed Jack"). While Dickens and Twain wrote in wholly material worlds, Homer filled the world of his story with gods and sorcery. Krueger, too, opens his story to the possibility of spiritual forces involved in the lives of his characters.

The first words of the book allude to Genesis, how God created not only the heavens and the earth, but also the gift of storytelling. Odie is not only a storyteller, but a musician whose harmonica soothes bitter men and brings people together. The most charismatic character among the supporting cast is a beautiful but scarred faith healer who calls herself Eve. Her section of the book is called "High Heaven" (as in, something stinks to...), but the miracles don't end when her deceptions are exposed.

By the end, Krueger has made us feel something that must motivate the novelist: Good storytelling doesn't just open up the past, or just entertain in the present, but can change the future.

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Hey, Flash, Read This

Ezra Miller as the Flash times two, and Sasha Calli as Kara El, a.k.a. Supergirl

 

Social media pundits bashed The Flash even before it opened, for reasons to do with schisms at Warner Brothers and extra-curricular activities of its young star Ezra Miller. If the actor's feeling down about all that, here's a pick-me-up aimed right at Ezra Miller, who perfectly embodied the charming vision of the director and writers:

Ezra, as Barry Allen, a.k.a. the Flash, you twitch with nerves, your eyes scan others' faces for social cues, and you're flummoxed when a substitute barista throws off your morning routine. Before you run at super-speed, you go through a wind-up ritual that's part Kung-fu, part Speedy Gonzales. When you blurt out what's on your mind (because, Wonder Woman's magic lasso), you say, "I know there's such a thing as sex but I've never experienced it." You have no friends except the super-hero celebrities whom you call by their first names (Clark, Bruce, Diana...) the way a freshman waterboy might drop the names of seniors on the team. You're as funny and lovable as any of the kids I taught in middle school who had great talent and no social skills.

You do find a friend, thanks to time-travel and movie technology. He's you, a couple years younger, and he's as geeky as you. You tell him, "People are always asking me to shut up, and now I know why." Like you, he's a slob. But in his alternate universe, he knows nothing of the tragedy that has shaped your life -- the murder of his/your mother and the wrongful conviction of his/your father for the crime. Growing up with two loving parents, he has the confidence you lack, and friends, young women among them. Innocent of the pain you've experienced, he flips out when he experiences loss. That's you, too, and it's very affecting.

So, too, is your emotional crisis when you encounter your mother (Maribel Verdu) on the day she will die. Her tenderness to you, a young man, a stranger to her, is at the heart of this movie -- though it happens in a supermarket. Her fate turns on whether or not she remembers to pick up spaghetti sauce for dinner.

Spaghetti shows up again in Batman's kitchen. Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne uses pasta to explain the multi-verse to you. Time isn't linear like the uncooked pasta he hands to you. He dumps cooked spaghetti in a bowl and says, the multi-verse is like that: some strands run almost parallel, while others intersect at different points. Dumping sauce on top, Wayne says your effort to change only one thing in the past has created "a hot mess." Listening as Barry and Barry the younger, you are clueless and more clueless. When Keaton adds cheese, you have to explain to your younger self, "the metaphor is over." Of all the explanations of the multi-verse I've seen in the last couple of years (Everything Everywhere..., Spider-man, and even Barbie), this was the most fun. Props to the writer Christina Hodson for using just words with the props at hand in the kitchen, and props to you, you, and Keaton for making it funny.

I enjoy how you and the creatives imagine the Flash's response to an explosion at a high-rise hospital. You climb falling debris like a ladder to study the mayhem. You see nine newborns hurtling from the top floor, along with knives, broken glass, a microwave oven, a service dog that looks like he's having fun, a gurney, and a screaming nurse. At first, you look bewildered.

Let's pause a moment to note that critics -- even one who admits he only saw the trailer -- cite this scene for its "bad CGI." The babies especially don't look real. But I understand the distortions to be how things look to a guy who perceives at the speed of light. Besides, one of the babies does look just fine, smiling and clearly delighted with free-fall -- the director's child, if I read the credits correctly.

Back to the moment: I like that we're watching you formulate your response and that you smile before you jump into action. I like that your first priority is breakfast: from the microwave, you pluck a burrito and devour it -- at light-speed, we guess. Then you manipulate all the other pieces into place like an extravagant Rube-Goldberg contraption so that babies, dog, and nurse line up safely in a row. Rescue with flair. You even take a bow.

I'm sorry that I seem to be the only one to applaud. I hope you get your life and career back together.

Bikin' Kiev

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Scott Smoot (right, in Ukraine jersey) with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, virtually.

We're all Ukrainians now. (See my poem, Ukraine, Second Week.) But even before Putin's invasion, I had reason to put Kiev on my bike tour of places in the world I've "lived or loved."

The world tour is virtual: I've biked 536 miles on trails around Atlanta during the last 32 days. That distance takes me from Moscow to Kiev.

Before the 1980s, I knew Kiev as the source of a chicken dish my mom sometimes made, and I loved "The Great Gates of Kiev," grand finale of composer Modest Moussourgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I'm touched by his transformation of his jaunty "promenade" into a monument to the composer's late friend, whose design for the gates was never realized.

Then I met Eugene from Ukraine, enrolled in 7th grade where I taught in Mississippi. I wrote about him in my essay about a great detective novel set in Ukraine, and Eugene's father Arkady contributed some comments. See Arkadya. I think about Eugene often, and told generations of middle school students about my adventures with this undersized kid who carried himself like Arnold Shwarzenegger. As often as I imitate his quirky English, I remember him with affection. He must be close to 50 years old now; he was funny, talented, and intense.

Miles YTD 2215 || 2nd World Tour Total 15,750 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

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Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Retired Middle School Teacher liked Barbie

Expectations weren't high for this one, and Greta Gerwig's Barbie was, for awhile, only what I expected. It starts as an elaborate comedy sketch as Barbie and Ken leave their perfect Barbie world for a visit to our real one. My own 8th grade drama class wrote the same sketch with fairy tale characters around ten years ago.

But then we realize that the core of the story is the estrangement of tween-age girl Sasha and her mother. Sasha now will have nothing to do with her old Barbie doll or her mom. The anxiety of middle school, the mother's sense of loss, and Barbie's shock and pain turned this comedy sketch into something I recognized as real. Barbie, embodied by Margot Robbie, sheds tears, a new experience for her, as Sasha attacks her for ruining girls' lives.

Ken has been only Barbie's accessory in Barbie Land where every night is Girls' Night, but, in the real world, Ryan Gosling shows the awareness dawning that a man is empowered simply by being male.

Gosling provides a lot of the comedy in this movie. Simu Liu as his rival Ken looks like he's having a lot of fun, and the two of them lead a cast of great dancers in a parody of an 80s power ballad. I'm also delighted to see Michael Cera back on screen as Ken's "buddy" Allen, a doll introduced then ignored in 1966. Cera was a comedy genius in the raunchy but touching Superbad ten or so years ago.

America Ferrera as the mother of Sasha delivers a soliloquy worthy of Shakespeare, cataloguing the ironies and paradoxes of what's expected of women in our society.

The movie has political resonances without even trying. Since the 1970s, one of our political parties has successfully branded itself as the party of hard men with the women who adore them, and has branded the other one as the party of effeminate men and shrill angry women. The schema is intellectually shallow, but emotionally deeply effective, hitting us in our sense of self. In the movie, the conflict of boys v. girls plays out in a cartoonish way and reaches reconciliation. If only it can be so.

One very simple line probably should be recited regularly by every young couple: Ken cries that "it's always 'Barbie and Ken.'" Barbie, on her way to enlightenment, teaches him, "No, it's Barbie, and it's Ken."

There's an odd moment when Barbie, dejected, sits at a bus stop next to an old lady. Barbie brightens and says, "You're beautiful!" The old lady says she knows. It made me think of how Barbie's story parallels that of the Buddha, who was raised a prince in a walled garden, shielded from illness, poverty, old age, and death.

This silly-seeming entertainment resonates.

Derek Walcott's Bounty: Quick Dispatch from the Front Lines

Since I read the selected poems of Derek Walcott, I've wanted more. Poet/critic Christian Wiman called the 1998 book The Bounty "a great book," enough for me to order it online with 1-click.

[See my appreciation, Never Get used to Derek Walcott's Poetry (01/2023).]

I'm only a few pages into it. As usual with Walcott, I've had to re-read portions and google some references to get oriented. He's worth the trouble. Besides, there are incidental pleasures that keep me going.

Here's a pair of lines that made me laugh out loud, they're so apt and so connected to what I see on my bike rides through wooded Georgia every day: Deer vault invisible hurdles and sniff the sharp air,// squirrels spring up like questions,...

Those are lines from stanza vii of the opening eponymous poem, which may be about a visit to his mother's grave, which may be located near a beach on the island of St. Lucia, but somehow is related to a seaside English town where Victorian nature poet John Clare is buried. I'll have to get back to the book on that one.

Bike in the USSR

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 Scott Smoot in Moscow, virtually

I visited Moscow in June 1977 on tour with the Westminster Ensemble, directed by Frank Boggs. My Kodak pocket camera took the photo of Red Square then. My Android took the selfie this morning. I thought I'd boldly declare my support for Ukraine with my new bike jersey, though I also thought to keep my sunglasses on so Putin won't be able to recognize me. Don't want Novichok in my Gatorade.

The distance to Moscow from Minsk is 444 miles, the distance I've traveled on bike trails around Atlanta since May 2. I post a photo from each place I virtually visit along with the story of my connection to that place. (To see stops from the whole world tour, use the arrows under the headline.)

I look back with regret on how we snickered at the Russians for accepting Communism's mindless bureacracy and petty tyranny. In private, we ridiculed a winter fashion show in midsummer; plumbing fixtures unconnected to any source of water; signatures required from three functionaries in different corners of a store to check out with one item; a museum of science and atheism squatting in a beautiful church; a sediment of boiled grey rhubarb in a drink that every restaurant served us; teens mobbing us after our show who dispersed at the approach of men in suits who corraled us upstairs for "open dialogue" with "young people" in their 30s. Finding fault was our teenage version of patriotism; but these people were our hosts.

I cringe thinking about a lot of the stuff I thought and did back then. At seventeen, I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about the things that mattered to me, and I had hardly an inkling of things that didn't -- such as American civics, other cultures, history after World War I, and current events.

About one thing, I was prescient. After rehearsals, our director Frank Boggs sometimes joined his teenaged cohort in a circle for sharing thoughts and feelings. One time I said how deeply grateful I was for the friendships I had developed with classmates and especially everyone in the Ensemble, but I wondered if adults experience friendships like that. Frank said, "You'll still have friends, but the intensity won't be the same."

When we returned to Atlanta from our tour, I burst into tears. This, I told Mom, was the end of something. "It'll never be the same again." I was right.

Miles YTD 1707 miles || 2nd World Tour Total 15,242 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Kiev

[Our Ensemble also toured Poland. See my virtual bike trip to Warsaw with a link to more about Frank Boggs.]

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Barbara Taylor Brown's Holy Envy: Practice the Evangelism of the Rose

Having preached that "God is not partial to Christians," a priest was challenged after the service by a parishioner who asked her, "Then what am I doing here?"

In Barbara Taylor Brown's book Holy Envy, the author acknowledges "that everyone wants to play on the winning team," but calls that feeling "the worst possible reason to practice any religion." She continues, "If the man who asked that question could not think of a dozen better reasons to be a Christian than that, then what, indeed, was he doing there?"

Brown became a priest to spite her atheist parents, but stepped away from the altar when she felt that she and the Episcopal church had confused Christ's "living water" with the well.

She took a position teaching world religions at Georgia's Piedmont College in the rural foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. There, she faced that same competitive approach to faith right away, in a young Christian man who asked if she was going to teach what was wrong with the religions. If not, he would drop the class, because he was afraid of losing his faith. (He dropped the class.)

I so identify with the fear that impinges on faith for Christians. A tract about the hell that awaits non-believers scared me to tears in 7th grade. Then I became angry at Christianity for condemning my Jewish friends.

That childhood fear of hell gnawed at Brown even as she was teaching. She dealt with that by remembering, "My best view of divine reality is still a partial view." She points out that Jesus says as much to the man who addresses him as "good teacher": Why do you call me good? ... No one is good but God alone. Playing off a metaphor by Thich Nhat Hanh that "the wave also lives the life of water", Taylor writes, "I am riding on the truth of that, trusting God alone to guide my wave and carry me ashore."

The most entertaining and moving parts of the book are anecdotes about her students.

• There's the young woman who bolted from Atlanta's Hindu Temple, sobbing for all those idol worshipers who were going to hell and didn't even know it. Weeks later, for her capstone project, she designed a beautiful interfaith worship space for the campus: a dark room, round with reflective wood panels, lit by pools of light so that people would see themselves among neighbors.
• There's the young man, unresponsive until he is suddenly moved by a Hindu exhibit, whispering to Brown over a bowl, "What chakra is this? It's speaking to me." She motions to her heart. Near tears, he just nods.
• Around twelve students, outnumbering the worshipers at a vast empty synagogue in Atlanta, were surprised when the rabbi invited them to join her on the dais to unscroll the Torah. Solemn and joyful -- the moment unaccountably moves me to tears every single time I think of it.
• There's Shlomo, the only Orthodox Jew on campus, very comfortable in his own skin and an eloquent exponent of his own faith. He wasn't out to convert anyone: since God already made a covenant with the whole world after the flood, why should anyone else take on the added requirements of the covenant with Israel?

Shlomo helped Brown to understand the Jewish approach: it's how you live, not what you think, that matters. The Jews don't even have a creed; the shemah ("YHWH is our God, the only God") is as close as they get. Observing how her students, meeting each other for the first time, would often quiz each other on beliefs ("Do you believe in the resurrection? Do you accept the virgin birth?"), Brown wondered how things might be different if these young Christians were to ask, as Shlomo might, How does your faith make a difference? What's the hardest part of loving your neighbor as yourself? What is your favorite way to pray?

Brown points out the historical fact that this "fundamentalist" approach to faith was born and propagated in the early 20th century by a reactionary group, the Biblical Institute of Los Angeles. She opines that polls showing a falling away from "institutional religion" and towards "spirituality" may be a reaction to a gospel message that it's our-way-or-go-to-hell.

She understands the element of competition baked into the scriptures of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Their books were written by people surrounded by oppressors and enemies. No wonder there's competition.

While there is a strong cord of triumphalism and exclusion throughout the Bible, she picks up a parallel thread, a "counter-narrative." It includes a string of "holy outsiders" from the Hebrew tradition (Ruth, Pharaoh's daughter, Cyrus the instrument of God's will, the magi, the Syro-Phoenician woman at the well with Jesus, Roman centurion whose faith "astonishes" Jesus...). The first sermon of Jesus recorded by Luke is on this subject: the foreign general Naaman and the poor widow who hosted Elijah are two outsiders who experienced God's grace. Besides, there are so many passages that warn us not to think that God thinks as we do (Is. 55.8-9), that anyone can own God. In the same sermon when Jesus says "no one enters the gate but by me," he also says, "anyone who knows God knows me."

But how, in the end, does Brown deal with this competition among the religions for which one is true, or most true?

First, Brown does NOT say "all religions are basically the same." That disrespects the uniqueness of these faiths. She does NOT retreat to the "default position" that "yours is true for you, mine is true for me." That shuts off exploration. The fact that she was attracted to aspects of each religion did NOT mean to it was time for her "to convert or -- conversely -- to start making a quilt of spiritual bits and pieces with no strong center."

She cultivates instead a "holy envy." A phrase coined by religion professor from Harvard turned Lutheran bishop in Sweden, "holy envy" is NOT projecting her own experience on other faiths in a craving for some of their intensity -- that's plain old envy. The bishop preached 3 rules of religious understanding: don't compare your best with their worst; don't confuse the container with the contents; don't think you know the other without listening. Brown likens holy envy to how athletes compare their best with the best in others, to make each better.

She gives some examples of holy envy from her time with the students:

• Christians were shocked to learn that Muslims pray more than most Christians do
• Protestant students were touched by the observance of Lent
• a visiting pastor was awed by the crowd at a large masjid bowing in unison

What they envied caused them all to reexamine themselves and what may have been neglected in their own religion -- meditation, for instance, or community pilgrimage in Islam.

This is NOT appropriation of what you like (which smacks of colonial trophies, Brown says). Like fine wines from different lands, Brown writes, "The things I envy have their own terroir." Brown explains, for example, how the Buddhist doctrine that we are responsible for our own salvation ("Be a lamp to yourself") helps her to see Jesus and the Holy Spirit "lighting a fire" in us so that we can each be "the light of the world." That's echoed in the epigram she chose for this book, Andrew Young's claim, "Before I read Gandhi, I couldn't see what difference Jesus made."

To conceive of this world of different faiths, Brown offers metaphors from other authors. The Church's discovery of other traditions was a Copernican revolution in religion that put God at the center and individual planets in orbit with their own qualities and perspectives. The faiths are like the rivers that nourish different lands (Rome's Tiber, Egypt's Nile, India's Ganges, USA's Mississippi...). To share the ground doesn't mean the ground is lost.

I re-read the book this spring in the context of a seminar I co-teach, Education for Ministry (see our EfM class blog). The theme for the year was "living out our faith in a multi-cultural world." We wondered what evangelism looks like when we respect others' faiths. I offered Gandhi's answer to that question, to practice "the evangelism of the rose" -- put it out there, let it be fragrant, allow people to respond as they will.

The World through Spidey-Colored Glasses

The world looks better to me since I saw Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse.

Not that everything's a-OK in the world of Miles Morales, 15-year-old Spider-Man, or in the alternate world of his adored Gwen Stacey. Not only is there a nerd-turned-super-villain wreaking havoc across multiple universes to make Miles sorry for laughing at him, but Miles is also grounded for two months. Meanwhile, in an alternate world, Gwen's father Police Capt. Stacey is relentlessly pursuing Spider-Woman, unaware that she's Gwen.

But so much good humor and goodwill went into the creation of this animated feature that I came out of the theatre cocooned in a protective energy-field of delight. The story zig-zags among dimensions that each have their own visual styles, so we're watching a kind of rapid-fire animated collage much of the time. The inventiveness and funny juxtapositions are exhilarating, with an emphasis on the hilarity.

At key moments, the story slows down for us to savor quiet personal dialogues. Of those, my favorite was at a picnic dinner with Miles and Gwen upside-down under an eave atop a Manhattan skyscraper at sunset. (From their perspective, we see the sun setting upwards, and Gwen's pony tail standing tall.)

My other favorite was any of the scenes when the mom and dad of Miles try to figure out how they can both encourage their fifteen-year-old's independence and yet protect him from forces that would make him doubt his place in the world. It's unspoken that this is a dilemma routinely faced by parents of color.  Even the sympathetic school counselor suggests that Princeton would be a stretch for a kid "like him."  

[The Young Adult novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds gave me a head-start on appreciating Miles and his parents. See my blogpost Behind the Spider-Man Mask (12/2019)]

The parents' fears for him are realized by a cosmic circumstance that has Miles feeling like he doesn't have a right to exist. But he fights back.

Miles picks up allies along his way. There's Spider-Man from "Mumbattan" on an earth where the culture of India predominates, and there's Spider-Punk, very funny, very fearless: in his cool anarchism, he defies authority to give Miles a boost when he needs it.

So I came out of the theatre also feeling better about humankind.

Is it my imagination, colored by the Spider-Verse, that some news is trending positive, at least for now? Polling suggests that most Americans, even most Republicans, object to state houses that interfere with removing books and with teaching children to respect others with differences. The compromise on the borrowing limit gave no side what it wanted, but gave the American people what we needed, the outcome our Constitution was designed to produce. NPR aired interviews with an author writing about how women in the Red Cross gave soldiers of World War II forgiveness and kindness besides coffee and donuts; with elders who as children participated bravely in demonstrations against segregation; with a rock musician who just wants to tell good stories. And NPR's critic Bob Mondelo put me and my friend Susan on to the Spider-Man movie with his rapturous review.

All together, these have me feeling grateful for movies, books, acts of kindness, acts of bravery, and programs that highlight decency through polite conversation -- gifts that we human beings give each other.

Scott and Susan with Miles: We give him two thumbs up.

Biking Belarus

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Scott Smoot (helmeted) with Suzanne and Dimitri at the Victory Monument in Minsk.

 

Am in Minsk. Meet me w/ Dimitri? I sent that text to my friend Suzanne when I knew that my bike path to Moscow would pass through the capital city of Belarus.

Minsk is the latest stop on a virtual itinerary of places I've lived or loved in the world. I apply the miles I ride on trails around Atlanta to my imagined trek. I make a postcard at each stop and write what's meaningful to me there.

While neither I nor Suzanne have been to Minsk, the family of her friend Dimitri immigrated from Belarus, so I took the opportunity to issue that euphonious invitation.

Suzanne's the one who could make such an impossible lunch date happen. One of her degrees is in project management, whereas I don't like to obligate myself to following any plan at all, even if it's just for lunch. So I've been grateful to her for pushing me into many adventures I might have missed: trips to Broadway, to New England, and to a cultural olio called Postmodern Jukebox.

I drew her out of her comfort zone to create roles for St. James Church's Mystery Dinner Theatre. We wrote scripts in-house that spoofed community concerns. For example, the name for Suzanne's character contained at least five different references that would amuse anyone from the Diocese of Atlanta, Sylva Candler-Stycks, Captain of the Altar Guild.

[Read about our plays Curse of the Waffling Bishop and What Slays in Vegas.]

To see more postcards of my world tour -- from NYC to LA, San Francisco to Quebec, Iceland to Ireland, and around Europe -- use the arrows (posted above and below).

Miles YTD 1320 || 2nd World Tour Total 14,855 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Moscow

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day Feb-Mar-Apr 2023

Every morning for years I've read the day's meditation on scripture in the quarterly Forward Day by Day, and every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

February
Page Pelphrey offers her reflections from Christ Church in Connecticut and her perspective as both a teacher of languages and a mother.

Her meditations are framed with comments about Forward Day by Day itself. Her grandmother gave copies to loved ones, and Pelphrey was reading it years before she got the gig to write it. She admits that she hasn't told anyone that she's writing for the publication, in case it somehow doesn't work out. That's her usual approach to good news, but Isaiah 58 tells us to "Shout out! Do not hold back!"

Pelphrey positions scripture and her life within a broader social context. For her, Isaiah's metaphor for Israel as a ruined vineyard resonates with her own small community ripped apart by partisan politics. She has changed her registration to "independent" as a proclamation that she will not trust her "tribe" more than the Lord.

She guesses that we all see ourselves as the poor widow in the parable, but admits that others see her as rich: "I need to focus on my life, not on the person in the pew next to me."

The peeved reaction of Jesus to the fig tree that bore no fruit is one of many stories of Bible heroes "losing it." They allow us to "forgive ourselves" for our own human frailty.

By the end of her series, she tells us how preparing to write her reflections for Forward has helped her to see all of life "through the lens of Scripture and [our] Baptismal Covenant." She challenges us to write our own. [I can attest to the power of writing reflections. Our parish produced devotion books for years, and the ones I wrote stay with me. See links to them at my page Theology for Breakfast.]

March
Episcopal priest Rob Gieselman at St. Stephen's in Belvedere CA is father of two grown children, a gardener, hiker, and dog-walker. He studied law and economics.

He lets us see his shadow side: formerly evangelical, he struggled with self-loathing, self-righteousness, his need for definite answers, the hard time he has admitting he's wrong. So he's also sensitive to some ways we fool ourselves. For instance, he admits to "a propensity to obfuscate, to hide like Adam in the Garden." He confesses to us that his confessions to God can become exercises in self-abasement when they should be about being honest and honoring God's word in himself.

We can imagine late nights during his evangelical phase when he tried to straighten what he calls a "tangled knot" in our faith: "You cannot earn grace, as it is a gift, yet failure to exercise your faith diminishes grace." He notes that Jesus doesn't ask the crippled man at the pool, "Have you tried hard enough?" but "Do you want to be made well?"

For those who think faith depends on definite answers, Gieselman offers a couple of homely alternatives. Gieselman's daughter was "not a hugger," but she would lean into him. Faith is "leaning into" God, not some certain things we think or do. As Gieselman's dogs bound from side to side in the eddies of a stream, Jesus doesn't speak in straight lines, either, but in eddies of meaning.

Having struggled with ego in his faith, Gieselman offers an effective switch: Imagine how God experiences us. Anticipating the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, Gieselman imagines the Holy Spirit being able to pass through time and alternate universes as easily as wind passes through a screen. That's why the Spirit bypassed David's big brothers for a boy with potential that no one else saw. Gieselman asks us to imagine seeing others as God sees them.

April
Priest and poet Kim Becker, Cherokee and self-confessed "word nerd," has helped me out with a poem. All April long, I've been struggling to complete a poem about words, how they're insufficient to convey the depth and breadth of God. Words, I've been thinking, are like threads of a net straining to contain fish trawled from just one corner of a vast sea. Near the end of the month, Becker meditated on a word from Jesus from Luke 5.4, "Put out into the deep water." She writes:

I love the ocean, but I have a fear of deep water -- and of whatever might live in that deep water! I prefer watching the waves to being in them.... [W]hen it comes to my relationship with God, I have often stayed in the shallows. It is easy to go it by rote, without allowing myself to enter more fully into the vulnerability of a life of faith... secure in the one who is ruddering our ship.

Becker recommends others' works in some of her writings. I like the title Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler. She has reminded me of a book encountered early in my adulthood, forgotten till now, that has influenced me ever since, Morton Kelsey's Dreams: A Way to Listen to God. Then, she cites a translation unfamiliar to me from Psalm 5.1, "Lord, give heed to my sighing." A sigh speaks without words, she says, and we should listen to the sighs of others -- including those of creatures with more than two legs.

[For many, many more reflections on tradition, experiences, and beliefs of the Episcopal Church, see my page Those Crazy Episcopalians.]

Sermon Puts the Us in Emmaus

Not three minutes after I laid aside the Gospel reading because I already knew it so well, the Rev. Pat Miller (a.k.a. Mo[ther] Pat) preached that the road to Emmaus is a story we skip over because we all know it so well.

She said that it tells the story of us, the regular Christians on our life journeys. It's about all the ways we encounter Jesus -- by hearsay, by Scripture, and, at last, by sacrament. That's so obvious; why have I never thought of that before? Cleopas and the one who doesn't even get named aren't part of Jesus' inner circle, just followers. They're heading the seven miles back home from Jerusalem in "that frozen state" after the death of someone close. They're preoccupied by their cares and the road ahead and somehow don't recognize Jesus. "Jesus kept a straight face while they told him about the crucifixion and the reports of the resurrection -- which they don't believe." Then he reviews the scriptures that lay the foundations for his mission.

They recognize him during an enactment of the eucharist -- that, I'd heard before. I'd not noticed that, by blessing and breaking the bread, Jesus performs the duty of their host. Mo Pat emphasized the joy that excites them so much that, having just arrived home, they leap up and run back, at night, to Jerusalem to spread the news. When they get there, the apostles have also been visited by the resurrected Jesus. Here's where Mo Pat reminded us of that state of mourning when we're like one of the statues that the Snow Queen made of Narnians -- melted and freed. I teared up there.

Mo Pat said, "Now, we may think, Why doesn't Jesus just pop in to see us the way he did for those in that upper room?" She concluded, he does. Of course, it's in communion, it's in the church community. "Go now, run out and tell everyone," she said, "only wait until the end of the service."

The Birds: 60 Years later, a Movie for our Time

The soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds is the soundtrack of our lives. We all hear it every day, played in the trees -- chirping, chattering and cackling. The natural world thanking God for His bounty? After streaming the film, I hear the raucous war council of alien creatures.

The Birds does what the best films do, change the way I see ordinary life. Since I last saw it on black-and-white TV five decades ago, I've had flashbacks to the film whenever crows looked up from their carrion to me, or when, perched on a street lamp, they glowered down at me and my little dog. I expected the film to have lost its potency, its effects and dialogue sure to be dated. Instead, this week it chilled me more than ever. This is a movie for our time.

Screenwriter Evan Hunter (a.k.a. detective novelist Ed McBain) agreed with Hitchcock to begin the film as a romantic comedy. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) "meet cute" at a pet store in San Francisco. He mistakes her for the clerk and she plays the part, although she can't begin to find the birds he wants for his little sister's birthday. When she realizes that he was playing her, she determines to get even. Bearing the gift of two lovebirds, she traces him to the coastal village Bodega Bay in her sporty convertible, sporting a long fur coat and high heels even when she rents a row boat. She's like Eva Gabor in the sitcom Green Acres, a classic fish-out-of-water.

For suspense, Hitchcock teases us with signs of what's to come. He starts with the eerie aural collage of bird calls that plays while silhouettes of birds in flight criss-cross behind the titles. A funnel cloud of gulls circling over San Francisco briefly draws Melanie's attention. When she's in the rowboat, a swooping gull nicks her forehead. But the characters are more concerned with their own lives.

As in all rom-coms, there's a rapprochement between Mitch and Melanie. The spoiled heiress tells sympathetic Mitch that she wants to live a life that matters.

She gets her chance in the very next moment. They're holding hands on a green hill above the little sister's birthday party, literally the high point of the movie -- when the birds attack. Children are screaming, birds are popping balloons, and Melanie joins Mitch in rescuing little kids knocked down by birds that peck and claw at their faces.

From then on, the story is how to find shelter, how to prepare for another attack, how to help each other through this emergency.

That's how I experienced the pandemic in March 2020. We'd heard news stories about outbreaks in distant territories. We discussed contingencies such as a couple of days off from school. Suddenly, it was lockdown, and all our plans from The Before Time were unworkable, canceled, never to return.

The recurring question in The Birds is, "Why?" A drunk quotes scripture to say it's God's punishment for our sins. A woman screams at Melanie, "You brought this on! Everything was normal until you came here!" An ornithologist (Ethel Griffies) says it's mankind who have made the world so inhospitable to nature.

Today, we're aware how our lights at night disorient millions of birds on their nocturnal migrations. Our mirrored skyscrapers are death traps. We've "developed" their habitats. Man-made climate change has shifted seasons so that migrating birds cannot find the insects and seeds they need, and shifts in territory have given avian viruses opportunity to spread. Sixty years later, the real question would be, why not?

I was late this morning. I'm going out to the deck to refill my feeder.

Tippi Hedren's iconic scene, now a famous meme

Warsaw Inspiration: My Return to Poland

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Scott Smoot at Warsaw's old town today, virtually.

Pozdrowienia z Atlanta! We greeted Poland with that slogan on our tee shirts when the Westminster Schools' Ensemble toured the country. Friendship Ambassadors Foundation sent us to win Communists over to Democracy with our repertoire of spirituals, Mozart, and Broadway songs. But my strongest memory of Poland is a Communist propaganda film.

I'm remembering Poland now because I've biked 417 miles on trails around Atlanta since the end of February. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Vienna to Warsaw.

In June 1977, Poles didn't need our help to resent the Communist Party. As our bus from the airport entered Warsaw, our guide Marek pointed to an imposing skyscraper and said, "We call that 'our gift from our Russian friends,' the ugliest building in Warsaw." The union Solidarity was already resisting Russian overlords in Gdansk, a port city on our tour that we would come to love.

Our tour started, however, with a documentary film screened for us by the official (Communist) tourist agency. Grainy black-and-white film showed Warsaw's old town square thriving during the 1930s. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded. Then the people of Warsaw rebelled. Hitler ordered the systematic destruction of the city to make an example for all subjugated peoples. A Nazi soldier with a camera panned 360 degrees to document that Hitler's order had been fulfilled, "not one brick should remain on a brick."

Warsaw's old town square, ca. 1945.

Soviet soldiers are presented as liberators in this propaganda film, but the image I've carried in memory all these years is all Pole: men and women picking their ways over a landscape of rubble. They stop, survey the scope of the task ahead, and then a woman stoops to place a brick in her basket.

The kicker was after the movie. We stepped from the grim images in the dark theatre into the beautiful town square of my selfie, rebuilt as it had been pre-war, with the original bricks.

Daunted by a pile of papers to grade, a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, or any impossible task, I've remembered the landscape of toppled bricks, that woman, her basket, and the beauty of Warsaw's old town center.

[I remember our choral director Frank Boggs here.]

Miles YTD 975 || 2nd World Tour Total 14,510 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Minsk, Belarus

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Poet Linda Pastan Doesn't Get Old

Studies confirm that poets generally don't live long. We're fortunate that Linda Pastan, who died at 91 this past January, sent updates in verse from the frontier of aging for more than 50 years. In her last two collections of new poems, it's good news, or bad news with her customary wry delivery.

Age has nothing to do with me, she writes for Traveling Light (2011). Alone, she tells us,

...I am any woman
fresh from the shower,
covering the newly rained upon
continent of her body -- hills and valleys --
modestly with a towel.

She's surprised when a gentleman offers her his seat. ("Any Woman" TL 45) An undergraduate during "Q & A" asks, had she known Emily Dickinson personally? Laughter erupts while Pastan weighs different degrees of sarcasm, but Surprise, like love, can catch / our better selves unawares (TL 47), and Pastan gives the blushing young woman a compassionate response that brought me to tears.

In her 80s, Lust still raises its purple flag ("Any Woman"). A bouquet from her husband inspires an erotic fantasia on vegetables ("A Dozen Roses" TL 41). She falls in love with him afresh when she finds an unfamiliar photo from his twenties (TL 9), reflecting on youth's inherent beauty, even an adolescent boy, awkwardness / shadowed by grace, in his own / invisible force field of desire. A lovely poem takes us to "Times Square, 1944" when she was that awkward adolescent, where sailors facing deployment wore their caps / at a cocky angle, like white seabirds / about to take flight as they moved in a roiling surf / through the traffic. They looked at women, but not at the girl who longed to reach out / and embrace them (TL 53).

Still, her body is no longer her friend as in the days when sleep like a good dog / came when summoned (TL 37). She wonders why old and gnarled trees are beautiful while I am merely / old and gnarled ("The Orchard" in Insomnia 2015). For "Anatomy," Pastan sets up an extended metaphor that she follows to its punchline:

In the tenement
of the body
generations have left
their mark

On the stairwell
of bones and the
walls of flesh.

While the genes do their scheduled work, she says, Clutch the bannister / hold on tight. (TL 7).

Favorite subjects for her never grew old. One of her last books A Dog Runs Through It selects poems across five decades brightened by the presence of the dogs she loved. Her many fears show up often: we know from an early poem how she learned from her Jewish grandparents to hear "the Cossacks" coming for her, a generalized dread that never left her: she writes of panic on a plane ("Flight" TL 65) and imagines in "The Ordinary" how it may happen while she's sipping tea or feeding the dog. But she's amused by her own fears. Her uncertain walk down the aisle of the plane brings to mind her walk down the aisle in marriage with only the vague idea of love to keep us aloft.

The Garden of Eden remains another inexhaustible subject for her. Eden poems fill a section of Traveling Light called "Years After the Garden." Every garden dreams of being Eden she writes in "Pastoral," (TL 12), adding slyly to expect apples in the fall. On her patio, a discarded Christmas tree becomes an Eden for wildlife that she refuses to drag to the dump, asking, Must one of us impersonate the serpent? (34). "Eve on her Deathbed" reflects with mild pique on what little is written of her in The Book, how no one noticed in the midst of all those begettings that she had taken a lover, and how, in the end we are no more than our stories (16).

Considering similarities between artists centuries apart who could not have known each others' work, Pastan also writes a good description of her entire career:

So artists dip into a deep but circumscribed pool,
fishing for something new
but sometimes finding
(still dripping with beauty)
the indelible, unknowable familiar. ("Flora" I 50)

But the best news is that she never grew too old to write. For her last collection Insomnia, she wrote

I string words together
wherever I am
in planes, in waiting rooms,

forcing the actual to sink
and disappear
beneath the bright
and shimmering surface
of the half-imagined.

[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]

On Holy Saturday, Poems of Remembrance by Dana Gioia

Good Friday at St. James Marietta, image by Android from a photo by choir director Bryan Black.

It's fitting that a cold steady rain falls in Atlanta on this day of the church's ancient calendar, a time of mourning Christ's death before the Easter morning. Also fitting is the set of poems I happened upon today when I turned the page to Part III of Dana Gioia's 99 Poems, called "Remembrance."

Gioia gives the section its own dedication "To the memory of my first son" with the boy's name and this phrase, Briefest of joys, our life together. That, and the day, primed me to receive all of the poems in this section as ones to cherish.

To the keeper of the small gate who is both jeweller of the spider-web and blade of lightning harvesting the sky -- a thrilling allusion to the Grim Reaper -- Gioia writes this "Prayer": I will see you soon enough...but until then I pray, watch over him as a falcon over its flightless young. Gioia's free translation of "The Song" by Maria Rilke includes the phrase from the dedication and this amazing thought, that all that ever touched us -- you and me -- touched us together like a bow / that from two strings could draw one voice. Gioia comes at grief obliquely and all the more strongly for it in poems about a March blizzard and about myths where humans escaped the whims of gods by metaphorphoses.

In some of the poems, grief is expressed as liturgy, and sometimes in what I would call a sacramental rite -- outward and visible signs of an invisible reality. Gioia tells us of a Sicilian tradition that a father plants a tree in thanksgiving for a first son. But in "Planting a Sequoia" the poet and his brother bury a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord with the roots of the tree which he hopes will stand long past his own life. In "Pentecost," the grieving father tells the grieving mother, amid their sleepless nights and the morning's ache for dream's illusion that We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.... "Litany" is a prayer to unbelief / to candles guttering and darkness undivided, / to incense drifting into emptiness.

Few of the poems relate explicitly to the boy in the dedication, and many of the poems honor others. "Night Watch" remembers an uncle, merchant marine, so much of his life passing between continents. At "The Veterans' Cemetery" The afternoon's a single thread of light / sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow. A short poem observes So much of what we live goes on inside and our tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. Gioia imagines what he would write to long-gone loved ones in "Finding a Box of Family Letters."

There's a startling moment when he shares haunting and touching memories of terminally ill children and their parents from "Special Treatments Ward." He was there with another son. There, the doctors are like "oracles" who pass in and out. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. Then Gioia tells the reader directly that he put this poem aside for 12 years because he wanted not to remember: I'd lost one child and couldn't bear to watch another die. But he's haunted by the ones he left behind when his son recovered.

He reaches accommodation with his feelings in "Majority." Having observed milestones reached by boys born the same year as his first son, he recognizes at 21 years that it's time for the son to move on.

I'm so glad that I discovered this set of poems today when I needed it.

Atlanta's Stone Mountain Bike Trail

Weather's been warm and dry enough to return with my bike to the Stone Mountain Trail. From the Martin Luther King Historic site, including one ring around the mountain, that's 38 miles round trip. There's a variety of neighborhoods, terrain, and sights. (See map at PATHfoundation.org)

In 14 years, I've seen a lot of development and improvements to the pavement, but there's a lot I've not seen. I realized that last week when I needed a bandaid. I took a detour at a light in Clarkston and pedaled over a ridge. Like Dorothy seeing the Emerald City, I was amazed by a vast marketplace, just out of sight all these years.   Dozens of shops cater to Clarkston's wildly diverse population of refugees who've settled there ever since the town welcomed Vietnamese "boat people" in the 70s. Families strolled past in distinctive dress, none speaking English, no families speaking the same language, and all of them smiling and bantering with each other. 

A couple of pieces on my poetry blog First Verse celebrate the trail. When I ride now, I remember Atlanta, Sunrise Saturday and smile at the sights I describe when I pass the sites I describe. A sunny day's ride and the live-streaming of a funeral come together better than I might have expected in Eulogy.

[IMAGE: Android turned a prosaic selfie into a lesson in drawing.  Stone Mountain is highlighted in the background.]