When No Answer Means Not Yet

This week I got a great piece of writing news:  I've been invited to write  intercessory prayers for Sundays and Seasons, an Augsburg Fortress worship resource. For more on the difference between types of prayers, see this piece on my theology blog.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I've already written prayers for Augsburg Fortress.  I've written before, in numerous places, about my experience over the past few years writing prayers for Bread for the Day, which is a book of devotions. I was given the reading for the day and asked to create a prayer. It was a wonderful experience.  I've done it several years and found it rewarding.

So I said yes to the invitation to write intercessory prayers.  It's similar to what I've done, yet different. 

When I told my spouse about this invitation, he said, "Cool! That's my favorite kind of prayer!"


I had no idea that intercessory prayer was my spouse's favorite kind of prayer. I've known this man for 30 years, and I didn't know that fact. There's still so much to discover.

But I digress. 

Getting this invitation made me not only think about how much I like writing prayers, but how I came to write them in the first place.  Back in 2007, I had been writing meditations on the weekly Gospel lesson.  I'd been doing this for several years, and I thought a series of them compiled together might make a good book of devotions.  I prepared a query letter and a writing sample and sent it off to Augsburg Fortress.

I didn't get a reply, which I took for a rejection.  And in a way, it was.

Except that years later, in 2010, I got an offer to be part of a different project.  And it's because I sent that query, and the editor put my name in a file of potential writers.  It took years before a project came along, but the seed was planted.  I didn't know it was planted, but it was.

We are told again and again that it's important to send the work out, even when we get rejected, even when we get no answer.  We just don't know what's going to take root.

Sure, I'm like everyone else.  I'd like a book contract to fall in my lap out of the clear, blue sky; if I'm being completely honest, I'd like that contract to be accompanied by a hefty book advance.  So perhaps I should ask myself, what seeds am I planting now to make that happen in a few years?

All Our Useless Currencies

My poem "Currencies" is the featured poem for the day at the website of Rattle.  Go here to read it--and you can hear me read it, if you're so inclined.

Those of you who are familiar with me and/or my writing will say, "Yes, I recognize these apocalyptic themes."

I'm trying to remember the specifics of how I came to write this poem.  I had watched Hotel Rwanda again, and I'm always thinking about apocalypse in some form or another.  I thought about how we watch traditional apocalyptic movies with the assumption that it cannot happen here.

In the case of zombie take-over, that's probably a safe assumption.  But with other types of mass disaster, it's not so safe.  Hotel Rwanda shows us how quickly society can collapse, and the body-choked rivers run red with blood.

I had been thinking about how we try to hedge against disaster.  We get additional degrees, and we stock up supplies.  Some of us have something in reserve, like the family jewels.  And so much of it will be ineffective against what we might eventually face.

We can't prepare for every disaster, of course.  But it's staggering to realize how self-supporting skills have vanished from the culture.  So few people know how to cook, let alone preserve food.  Could you mend a shoe?  Most people say, "Why should I know how to mend a shoe?  I can replace it cheap."

But that supply line might get cut off for so many reasons.  What if the shoes on your feet were the last shoes you'd ever have?

I live in hurricane country, and it's clear that should there be a big storm, we'll be on our own for awhile.  It's easy to stockpile food.  It's not so easy to stockpile water.

We can see a storm coming; we'll have days to prepare.  But what if the water supply was disrupted with no warning?  I used to keep a bathtub full of filled water jugs.  That supply, used sparingly, would only last for a few days.

Eventually, during one day of our dry season, we poured the stockpiled water on the seedlings.  If something happens to suddenly disrupt the water supply, we'll hope that it's not a nation-wide problem.

As I've watched/read various apocalyptic narratives, I've been struck by how many of them depict survivors wandering the countryside, as my poem's character is about to do.  As a woman, I've decided it will be wiser to shelter in place. 

It would go against my grain.  Even during flush times, I'm always wondering if life would be better elsewhere.  If there had been a disaster, that trait would be even more pronounced.  But apocalyptic narrative after narrative shows how much risk comes with travel, especially for women.

Would I have disaster on the brain, even if this poem hadn't appeared today?  Perhaps.  We're under a tornado watch here, until 11 a.m., as the first named storm of the season swirls in the Gulf of Mexico.  It's still a tropical storm, and I'm not expecting much beyond a lot of rain--of course, a lot of rain can do more damage than wind, as the soil gets saturated, and drenched trees fall right over.

We'll likely be fine here.  I'll keep the rest of the Eastern seaboard in my thoughts and prayers today.  And I'll keep a nervous eye on Syria and that region which seems closer to meltdown than ever.

And I'll write a poem--my hedge against catastrophe.

Are You Willing to Suspend Your Disbelief?

Yesterday was full of those moments where I thought, if I saw/read this scene in a movie/book, I wouldn't believe it--no willing suspension of disbelief, to use the famous phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Since real estate transactions require much in the way of paperwork, phone calls, and money, I found myself headed to a lawyer's office yesterday.  The lawyer's office is right at the edge of Wilton Manors, which is famous for its huge concentration of gay men.  So, in between regular businesses, like the Dairy Queen, are businesses targeted to gay men.  There are bars and some of the best thrift stores in the county.  But there's also the furniture store that advertises that it's always the 50's, 60's, and 70's inside the store.  There's the plumbing supply store, which seems to be an old-fashioned plumbing parts store--just several blocks away from a huge Home Depot.  There's a sign for LeatherWerks--not sure of what this business offers, in specifics, but I'm fairly clear about the people it hopes to attract.

I'm aware of the smirking possibilities in the stores that have no gay theme, the Dairy Queen, the plumbing store, and the fact that the signs have no sense of irony at all.  You wouldn't see that in a movie.

The lawyer had a landmark, for which I was grateful, but disbelieving when told to look for it:  a cream and orange colored rocket.  I couldn't quite imagine.  But yep, there it was, a rocket in creamsicle colors.

My spouse had looked up this lawyer before writing the checks that will serve as our earnest money.  He's legitimate.  The inside of his office looks fairly normal--except for the stuffed alligator, which sits right next to the stuffed bears.  The bears are toys, the alligator the work of a taxidermist.

I drove home, feeling delighted that I live in such a place, that I'm about to make an even larger investment in living here.

At the end of the day, I came into the living room to find my spouse watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, a show we both have hated.  That might seem strange enough--but he was watching it in Spanish.

If that had been a scene in a book or a movie, it would have been a portent--but of what?  Last night it symbolized only boredom

The show doesn't improve in a different language.  I've never been able to relate to a show about a family with members who treat each other in that way.

This morning I feel gratitude that I can't relate to that show.  I feel gratitude that a show about a family who verbally abuses fails the test of my willing suspension of disbelief

Keeping the Flame Alive

I've noticed how many lives seem to be unravelling right now.  What happened to the easy living of summer time?

In case that's you, here's a photo to inspire you:

It's one of the many things made at the Create in Me retreat back in April.  If you're thinking, I'd love to have more photos to help my brain focus, go to this post on my theology blog.  There are photos of a variation of a Zen sand garden to inspire tranquil calm and photos of whimsical garden figures to inspire a smile.

I've had a good morning.  I began by doing some simple revisions with my memoir manuscript.  Let me define what I mean by that.

You may remember that I began this process by going back through my blogs looking for any post that would fit into the idea I had for a memoir:  a Kathleen Norris like collection of essays that are tied together by the theme of trying to create an integrated life in a workplace that doesn't particularly support a healthy spirituality or creative work.  My workplace isn't usually outright hostile, but it's not supportive either.  I had Nora Gallagher's Things Seen and Unseen as a model, and I organized the manuscript around the calendar year.  So, blog posts that are clearly about Advent, for example, go in the December section.  At the end of the manuscript, I put the essays that seem relevant but not particularly tied to the calendar; I'll weave those through later.

So, the easy task is to dive into the manuscript and find a blog post that's fairly close to essay form already.  I change the things that need to be changed to make it more like an essay and less like a blog post.  I change the type font, so that I'll know it's been done.  

There are other revisions tasks that aren't so easy.  I don't tackle them on a morning like this one when I don't have as much time and I've been feeling frazzled.

You might say, "What kind of revision tasks aren't so easy?"  Here's an example:  I have multiple essays on Vacation Bible School.  Do I blend them into one essay or keep them separate?  If I keep them separate, then they become easy tasks again.  If I decide to blend them, I need to figure out the best way to do that.

And then there will be the task of integrating the bulk of blog posts at the end of the manuscript, the ones that don't clearly fit in one section or the other, throughout the book.  Do I put all the blog posts about music in one place or weave them throughout?  I face lots of questions like that one.  They're not particularly tough, but they do require some analysis, which will require some concentration.

As I reflect, I realize how often I divide jobs of all sorts into these two camps.  At work, I have some tasks that are easy and quick.  There are other tasks which I tackle only when I have a stretch of time, when I can close the door and focus.  I divide housework chores similarly:  for example, getting laundry done is easier than doing the mending.  Any number of creative projects have both easy parts and parts that need a different part of my brain. 

I think we often doom ourselves creatively by insisting that we must have huge chunks of time where we know we won't be disturbed with anything else.  For most of us, we could wait a whole lifetime and never have the ideal conditions in which to get our best creative work done.

The good news:  the small tasks are important too, and they must also be done.  So on a day when you feel like you can't possibly make progress, try choosing a smaller goal.

Journeys to the Land of Sickness

I have stayed up half the night reading Nora Gallagher's Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic.  I read a bit before I went to sleep, and then I woke up 45 minutes later and read some more.  I slept a restless sleep for about 5 hours, and then I couldn't fall back asleep.  I thought I might get up, read a bit, feel sleepy, and go back to bed.  But I never really felt sleepy, so I kept reading.

It's a good book.  It tells the story of Gallagher's journey through an illness.  She begins losing her peripheral vision, and her doctors can't find the cause.  As they do more exploring, they find more cause for concern.

I did something I rarely do, which was to read the last 20 pages before I got very far along in the front of the book.  I couldn't take the anxiety.

When I was young, illness narratives didn't disturb me, except for the rare book I'd read about a young mother with cancer--and then, I didn't identify with the mother so much as with the child who would be left motherless.

Now, as I move through midlife, I find myself terrified at the ways that illness cuts us down.  Once I assumed I wouldn't face much illness until the last 8-10 years of my life.  Now I know it's only the lucky ones who escape that long.

Gallagher paints a vivid picture of how lonely it is to fall through this rabbit hole.  She makes me think of all the ways I've failed friends facing similar crises:  the one whose house burned, the one who had her hip replaced, all the friends who faced the loss of those they loved.  I have tried to be present in the face of tragedy, but it's not a skill that I feel I'm good at it.

And yes, I know that I've thought of becoming a hospice chaplain, and that the skill of being present in the face of tragedy is very necessary.

Obviously the book is compelling, and yet, it left me wanting more.  She talks about losing part of her faith, and she gives the outlines of that part of her journey, but I wanted more.  Maybe that will come with her next book--but it's such a long wait between books!

Even though I couldn't put it down, it's not a book I can imagine returning to again and again, like I do with her previous memoirs.  Would it give me a kind of comfort if I find myself in the land of illness?  Or would it be unbearable?  I do not know.

I think of the poems I wrote in a time that feels very long ago, poems where I take on the persona of a sick person.  My undergraduate self would have declared that we shouldn't create a black narrator if we were white, that men couldn't tell the stories of women.  My undergraduate self would have hurled accusations of appropriating stories.  Did I do the same thing with the poem below?

I wrote it about 15 years ago, when I was young and didn't really know anyone, except for my mother's cousin, who had suffered breast cancer.  Now I know far too many people who have been afflicted.

This poem first appeared in the journal Lynx Eye.


Radiation Sicknesses



All through adolescence, I longed to be lean.
I tried every diet, existing on a concentration
camp allotment of calories, trying to ignore
my fierce cravings, waking up with covers in my mouth
or sleepwalking to the refrigerator.

Now a skeleton stares back from my mirror,
eyes I’ve only seen in photos of Hiroshima victims.
I have achieved thinness, successfully svelte
beyond my wildest imaginings. I crave
no nourishment, cannot force food on myself.
Radiation treatments and chemo work miracles
my teenage mind could not create.

I spent my younger years dreaming of thinness, dreading
nuclear holocaust. I scanned the horizon for the flash
and mushroom cloud that never came.
I expected to lose my hair and vomit away my adult
life. I just didn’t expect to expose myself intentionally.

Bomb my breast with radiation.
The only thing missing:
the wail of air raid sirens.

Snippets from a Saturday

My attention feels increasingly fragmented as we get further and further into the house-buying process.  Right now I don't want to blog too much about the house-buying process--I have irrational fears of jinxing it all.  So, let me connect some snippets from my Saturday here, the snippets that didn't involve discussions with the seller, discussions with the loan officer, the downloading of documents, the fretting about interest rates, the terror that comes with big financial purchases, and the dread that comes from the juxtaposition of the start of hurricane season and Oklahoma tornado footage.

--My favorite part of Saturday:  I returned to my memoir!  I decided that much the blog post that I assembled for Friday's meditation on the Feast of the Visitation was better than what I had put in the memoir manuscript, so in the morning, I put the chunks of Friday's blog post into the manuscript, and I kept part of what was there, and got rid of some of it.  Then in the afternoon, I did a bit more revision on a few other essays.

--This kind of revision is good for times of fragmented attention.  I'm not reorganizing the whole manuscript or doing those kind of tasks that would take sustained attention.  With revising blog posts into essays for a memoir, I can dip in and out and make quick decisions and do the formatting that is required.

--We sorted more stuff.  We haven't moved since 1998.  A lot of stuff has come into our house since then.  We are aggressive in our quest to make sure that only the stuff that we really want to keep comes with us to the new house.

--Despite the stormy looking skies, we did some grilling.  I had a head of cauliflower that I bought because it was on sale.  I want to like cauliflower:  I know it's a nutritional powerhouse of a vegetable.  But even when I have it on hand, I often don't want it (I feel the same about salad greens).  But I also don't want perfectly good produce to rot in the refrigerator.  So, I cut up the head of cauliflower and made up foil packets.  I drizzled olive oil over the packet, sealed it up, and put it on the grill.  After the grilling, I sprinkled fresh-grated parmesan cheese over the cauliflower--wow!  I ate the whole thing!!  I now have a new favorite way of cooking cauliflower.   

--I wrote an old-fashioned letter.  One of my favorite undergraduate professors is not online, so I use old-fashioned ways of keeping in touch.

--My favorite memory of that professor is when we went to a small college several towns away to hear Helen Caldicott give an anti-nuke speech.  I think there was a whole conference, but I mainly remember the Caldicott speech.  Caldicott was a famous crusader in my circles, so the chance to see her in real life in rural South Carolina was too good a chance to pass up.

--But let me confess what I really remember:  we went to the conference in my professor's VW bus.  I returned and said, "I GOT TO RIDE IN THE VW BUS!"  And I had friends who understood.

--My small, liberal arts college barely survived a financial crisis in the 1980's.  To help survive, faculty were let go (my, how familiar).  My favorite professor took her severance package and went on a pilgrimage.  Perhaps the seeds of my fascination with monasticism were planted then.

--Back to my Saturday.  Once the stormy looking skies delivered real storms, I turned off the electronics and took a nap.  Ah, the joys of a nap!

--We finished our Saturday with a quick trip to Target, which was delightfully empty.  There's a joy to getting this chore done.  It's not the same joy as a nap.  Perhaps more of a contentment.

What joys will come today?

Christian Wiman on Poetry, Faith, and Practices

Many of us poet folks know Christian Wiman as the editor of Poety magazine--although I try not to think of him as the one who personally rejects my poems. Some of us may know that he's had a fight with a rare form of blood cancer. Perhaps fewer of us see him as a theological thinker, but his interview on the NPR show On Being proves otherwise.

On this week's episode of On Being, he talks with Krista Tippett about issues of faith, practice, illness, and poetry. Even if you normally avoid anything with a whiff of spirituality, this interview is worth your time.

Here are some quotes to whet your appetite:

--"Well, you know, I've been sick lately and I actually had a bone marrow transplant and was in the hospital for quite a long time. And one of the things, poetry died for me for a while. I found that it just wasn't speaking to me. I think I had certain expectations that took me a while to realize were false expectations. I think we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world and taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. I have to say, when I was, you know, faced with the actual ineffable, I didn't want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.

I wanted the world, you know, in front of my eyes, and the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete, sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again."

--"You know, I think we have these experiences and they are people reacting against the word spiritual these days. But I don't know what other word to use at this point. They are spiritual experiences and then religion comes after that.

Religion is everything that we do with these moments of intense spirituality in our lives, whether it's whatever practice we have, whether it's going to church, whether it's how we integrate sacred text into our lives. Being religious or taking on some sort of religious elements in your life, you're not necessarily saying I agree with everything that this religion says. What you are saying is that I've had these incredible experiences in my life of suffering or joy or both and they have demanded some action of me and demanded some continuity of me. And the only way that I know to do this is to try to find some form in it and try to share it with other people."

--"Doubt is so woven in with what I think of as faith that it can't be separated. I am convinced that the same God that might call me to sing of God at one time might all me at another to sing of godlessness. Sometimes when I think of all of this energy that's going on, all of this what we've talked about, these different people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief, I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms."

--"So the title is "Every Riven Thing," and riven is kind of an Old Testament word meaning broken, sundered, torn apart. This was actually the first poem that I wrote after years of silence, all those years I mentioned. I had gone I think it was three years without having written a poem. And in the middle of all those dramatic things happening to me, this was one of them. I sat down one day and found myself writing again and this poem came to me all of a sudden. It was quite a shock to write a poem and quite a shock to write a poem especially like this one.

'God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made / sing his being simply by being / the thing it is: / stone and tree and sky, / man who sees and sings and wonders why / God goes. Belonging to every riven thing he's made, / means a storm of peace. / Think of the atoms inside the stone. / Think of the man who sits alone / trying to will himself into a stillness where / God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made / there is given one shade / shaped exactly to the thing itself: / under the tree a darker tree; / under the man the only man to see / God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made / the things that bring him near, / made the mind that makes him go. / A part of what man knows, / a part from what man knows, / God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.'"