Father's Day: Caring for the Next Generations

It's Father's Day, and so of course, I have fathering and larger metaphors on the brain.  We live in a landscape more increasingly wrecked by poisonous models of caretaking; I'm thinking primarily of the fractured political world we inhabit, whether we want to or not.  We're at the end of a week where we saw a man shoot congressional male leaders on a baseball field during an early morning practice, and it didn't take long before we saw lawmakers derailing conversations into tired gun control arguments.  It's clear to me that we need a different model.

One of my early morning Father's Day readings was this wonderful essay by Parker J. Palmer.  He talks about the ways that his father, an Eisenhower Republican, modeled upright behavior for his children.  I am sure I am not the only person who finds herself yearning for more of that upright behavior. 

Every time I hear people spewing vitriol about Republicans, I think about my own father, my earliest experience with a Republican.  While we disagreed often over politics, we usually had reasoned discussions.  I think about our conversations about the U.S.S.R., which always led to a discussion about what freedom means.  At the time, in the early 80's, I assumed that the Soviet Union was taking care of the basic needs, like food and shelter, of all citizens, giving them a freedom from hunger and homelessness.  My father pointed out that the freedom to make one's own life choices was more important.

I will always wonder why we have to choose, and it was from my parents that I learned to think about these choices.  We spent a lot of family time in Lutheran churches, where our task was made clear again and again:  to care for those in the world who didn't have the advantages that we had.

I want to believe that everyone believes this fact to be true--that we have an obligation to care for those who are less well off.  Sadly, I have seen the behavior of those who govern who do not seem to have any sense of that at all--it's different from past political eras when we had conversations about how we help others by leading them to self-sufficiency.

I still believe that most of us have a yearning for a more civil society, where everyone has the potential for creating a better circumstance, at least--maybe not that everyone can have an equal shot, but some sort of shot at a better life.

On this Father's Day, I'm thinking of how many fathers I know who have done a good job on an individual level at caring for the next generation.  They're much more involved in their children's lives, regardless of the age.  They change diapers, they braid hair, they fix lunches, they teach children the skills they will need, and they help older children find their way in the world.

If we can do this for our own children, we can do this for all children who will come after us.

Mepkin Photo Walks

A week ago, at 5:30 a.m., I'd have been walking back from my breakfast at Mepkin Abbey.  I have often thought about the fact that I so often keep monk's hours, although I worship less throughout the day than monks do.  At Mepkin last week-end, I woke up between 4 and 4:30 a.m., but that's not unusual for me.

If my camera takes good pictures at night, I can't figure out how to give it those commands.  I spent some time in the early morning as I walked to breakfast trying to capture the full moon:

A week ago, I would miss the Eucharist service on Saturday morning.  I was waiting for my friend to knock on my door for a walk, and somehow we missed each other.  I looked at my watch, realized it was 7:25, and not only was I going to miss my walk with my friend, but also the Eucharist service.

So I decided to take a walk by myself.  It was a different kind of communion service.

I have been walking the Mepkin grounds for over 10 years--sobering to realize.  I've been taking pictures since 2009.  I brought a camera to the retreat with me; I was determined to figure out how to make it work.

Let me hasten to say that these are not super sophisticated cameras that I have.  I don't change lenses.  I keep the auto function on, even though I could be the one making the artistic decisions--there are only about 9 choices on the slightly more sophisticated camera that I inherited from my sister when she decided that she would mainly take pictures on her iPhone.  In fact, one reason I would get a smartphone is to have an easy camera feature on a device that would fit in a pocket.

Since I have been taking pictures at Mepkin for 6 years now, I challenge myself to find new angles.  For example, here's a picture of a statue that I took in 2009:

Last Saturday, I noticed that some of the tree branches and twigs behind the statue have a thorny appearance.  I tried to capture that aspect.

Of course, the advantage of taking many pictures is that you get the occasional surprise.  My spouse delighted in this one, with Spanish moss not thorns, which I didn't even remember taking:

I feel like I see the world differently when I'm walking with the camera.  I notice angles and colors and the way the light changes a shot.  I can't always control what the camera sees, however.  Here was another shot that my spouse liked.  The cross didn't have this glow when I saw it with my eyes, but the camera caught it:

One of my friends asked me how I learned to take such good pictures.  I said that I take a lot of bad pictures, and every so often, one of them stands out.  It's one of the blessings of a digital camera:  one can take lots and lots of pictures.

The Many Ways of Looking at Exile

A week ago, I'd have already been on the road for 2 hours.  This morning, similarly, I've been awake for awhile, but I've been grading.  However, my mind wanders back to my time away at Mepkin Abbey.

We gathered to talk about the power of story.  We talked about the types of stories we might tell, and we focused on these four:  Hope, Exile, Repentance, and Home.  Our leader pointed out that almost any story can be framed as a story of one of these elements.  And since it was a retreat at a monastery, we focused on how religious traditions, particularly Christians, have seen these elements in telling our stories of the larger faith.

I thought we'd be writing our stories, but we told our stories--one of our retreat leaders modeled the process by telling by telling his story as we moved through each module.  We discussed, and then we broke into groups:  first pairs, then a group of 3, then 5, and then for our final gathering, we stayed as a large group and each person took a turn.  It was a great way to help us get to know each other.

During the retreat, the topic of exile was the element that most moved me to take notes.  I have always had this sense of exile--that I'm displaced somehow, never really home, never finding my larger tribe.  I've always seen this feeling/condition as one that needed fixing--and as soon as possible.  As we discussed exile, I had a moment of insight:  what if this feeling of exile is the norm?  Or what if it's actually a preferable state?  After all, when we're in a state of exile, we remember our true home (God or Heaven or something better, if you're not inclined to use religious terms).

We are to live our lives fully while holding onto them lightly.  Think about what this means:

--If we're in exile, we don't need to hoard anything.  We might as well use it.

--Exile re-orients us away from our things and illusions about our lives and towards what really matters.

--If we didn't end up in exile, we might forget we need God.

--When we're displaced, we're more in tune with the moment.

We talked about this idea in spiritual terms, that our true community (church, God, social justice co-workers, etc.) may not be the larger community (the U.S., the world).  But I also see this dynamic in places where we might not expect it to be at work; for example, how do we deal with the fact that we may feel in exile at places where we'd expect to feel at home, say, at church?

I wrote an e-mail to a friend upon my return.  She responded:  "I know, however, that I would have been abjectly unhappy if I had stayed in the village where my cousin still lives today.  So, what to do:  follow your dream of the big world, or then regret having lost your home for the rest of your life."

She's hit on an essential question:  how do we remain faithful as we live our lives as resident aliens?  The answer to that question is as varied as humanity itself.  More to come!

Thoughts on the Day after an Early Morning Shooting at a Baseball Field

At some point, will I wonder why I'm not writing more about current events?  Will we look back to see 2017 as a pivotal year, much the way that 1968 or 1974 were pivotal years?

In fact, yesterday I wondered if this year was more like 1967, a year before a pivotal year.  One of my colleagues posited we're at 1970, with innocent people being gunned down (Congressional ball teams yesterday, Kent State students in 1970).

Yesterday I headed out to find a better deal on Styrofoam cups--our campus goes through an amazing amount of them every week, and I'm the one with the credit card for the campus.  I happened to be on the road when Trump spoke about the shooting, and I was somewhat impressed.  I thought his speech was a good speech--for him.  He's like the student who usually hands in such bad work that when you get mediocre work, you might be overly impressed.  When I say "you," of course I mean me.

I was less impressed with some first year Congresspeople who got bogged down in a gun control disagreement when interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered in the afternoon.  And on TV, I watched various Congresspeople vow to work together to end partisanship--and I had the uncharitable thought that it was too bad that it took a horrific shooting on an early morning baseball field to get these people to do their basic jobs.

But let me not get bogged down in negative stuff.  Let me return to a scene a few days ago, in a gas station in Georgia, when I remembered again how much I love this country.

I was gassing up my car, and I saw a group of guys in crisp, white shirts and pressed long pants.  They had fairly short haircuts, and I thought, are you guys trying to look like Mormons?

And then I caught site of the name tag of one of them--why yes, they were trying to look like Mormons, because they are Mormons.  They were trying to put exactly $40 worth of gas into their SUV, which I assumed was rented, but I don't know why I would assume that.  They were so happy when they achieved their goal.

I looked around the gas station that was a mile away from I 95, one of the nation's main vehicle arteries, and thought about what an interesting group of people had assembled.  There was me, a woman solidly in midlife, with the music of monks in my head.  There was the group of young, Mormon men.  There was a pick up truck--not the super expensive kind, but a regular one, with a fishing boat in the back (once we called them john boats--they're the kind made out of metal, painted green, like a wider, shorter canoe).  Most of us were non-descript:  the middle-aged black guy (bigger, but not obese, but not muscular either) coming back to his car with a super big drink, the woman in polyester shorts filling up her non-descript sedan car. 

Here we all were in southern Georgia, a part of the country where not too long ago we'd have made efforts not to need gas so that we wouldn't encounter ugliness.  Think of how many of us might be at risk:  the Mormons, the women travelling alone, the black guy.  Yet here we were, peacefully travelling along the road, gassing up our cars, and as long as it's daylight, we're all relatively safe.  And even after dark, we're likely to be safe.

Let me remember that fact, on the day after Congresspeople were shot as they practiced for a baseball game in the early morning hours.  These events are still rare.  Let me offer up this prayer that they continue to be rare, that on almost every morning, we can all put fuel in our cars or show up for baseball practice, with the relative assurance that we will not be attacked.  And let me also offer up a prayer for our fellow humans who live in much more dangerous settings, who don't have that assurance.

Of Poet Laureates and Poetry Progress

I am just seeing the announcements that Tracy K. Smith will be our new poet laureate.  I am so in awe of her work and so intrigued to see how she will use the power of that office.

In the interest of honesty, let me also observe that this news makes me feel inadequate.  She's 45, the winner of many prizes, the head of Creative Writing at Princeton.  I am a woman who will be 52 one month from today, and my publication roster is smaller.  I cannot imagine that I will ever be invited to work at one of our nation's more prestigious universities; but I also know that if I did work there, I'd be worried about the nation's dispossessed who aren't being served by those universities.  I am working with those populations, and I confess that I am no miracle worker.

I was thinking about the paths my life has followed as I drove up Highway 17 towards Charleston. I don't usually take that route, but I was meeting my Mepkin friends for lunch in Mt. Pleasant before we went on to the Abbey.  I thought about some of the past times I've travelled that road, both when we lived there and when we came back.  I thought about the time that I read at the Piccolo Spoleto festival, which felt like a highwater mark of my career.  I had one chapbook published, which meant that I could read at the event.  I felt sure that I'd have a book with a spine soon--and surely, I could than translate that success into a different kind of teaching job--I wasn't naïve enough to think it would be a Princeton kind of job, but perhaps a liberal arts school or a smaller state school.

That was back in 2005, and while career/artistic doors have opened to me, they haven't been the ones I expected.

I feel fortunate to have had friends along the way, and our stories are similar.  I think of good news that came to them, good news that I thought might be transformative--and yet, the paths that came afterwards aren't the ones we expected.  Perhaps our new poet laureate has similar stories.

I'm also struck by the fact that I read at Piccolo Spoleto in June of 2005.  I think of 2005 as one of my worst years, bookended by the horrible, drawn out, death-by-hospital of my mother-in-law and the worst hurricane season in Broward county in almost 100 years.  But it was also a year of creative success, and the year I returned to France (where I was born on an Air Force Base) with my parents--it was a trip that I knew would be one of my favorite memories, even as we were making those memories.

I feel like I've taken a bit of a sabbatical from good writing practices--in the past two months, with the accreditation visit and the follow up, with the intense pace of my ENC1102 online class, I haven't returned to my writing desk as often as I would like.  Let me now begin to plan for the bit of time that I see on the horizon, where the pace of my various work lives lightens a bit.

A Quick Overview of My Mepkin Trip

I am back from my quick trip to Mepkin Abbey--before I head back to work, let me write down some impressions.  I expect to do some deeper pondering in the coming weeks.  But for now, here's an overview of what might come later.

--The drive up was grueling.  I left at 3 a.m., and all was going well, until I came to a stretch of highway at Jacksonville that had not one but two accidents.  It took me almost half an hour to go two miles, and I know it could have been much worse.  And at the end of my trip, Highway 17 was very congested.  We took a back route to Mepkin, and I got lost--made a left onto the road I thought was the correct one, since the sign said "Junction with 402" with an arrow.  But that road was Cainhoy Road, whereas the correct one was just ahead.  Luckily one of my friends had a GPS and came to get me.

--What's really strange about the drive up--I hardly recognized the Charleston/Mt. Pleasant area anymore, despite having lived there and making periodic returns.

--For the first part of the trip, I listened to commentators on the BBC dissect the British election of the day before, where Theresa May lost seats in the election that she called 3 years before she had to do so.  On the way back I heard some NPR pieces on the one year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

--The weather was fairly beautiful, although it was June, so it was hotter than I'd like--but not as hot as it often is in June.

--The moon was beautiful too--I expected the full moon to keep me company on the drive, but it was mostly behind me as I drove north.  I kept trying to catch it rising, but I only got a glimpse on Friday night--a gorgeous, orange full moon.  The clouds and trees kept it obscured.

--It was strange to have the light of the full moon having just reread Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, visiting a monastery that's a former slave plantation.  I thought about slaves making their escape, how scary the landscape seems even with the benefit of electric light.

--One morning, I heard the sinister call of the alligators, but I never actually saw one.  I thought of the T. S. Eliot line about the mermaids singing, and wondered how I might transform it with alligators making the song.  And then there's the plainsong of the monks . . .

--This year at Sunday Eucharist, we had a harpist--how cool!

--I knew that this retreat would be structured, but it was even more structured than I thought it would be.  Luckily, the subject matter (the power of story) continued to interest me, and I liked all of the people on the retreat.

--The most important idea that I took away:  I tend to see a time of exile, a feeling of displacement, as a situation that must be fixed as quickly as possible--but what if those times are the norm?

--The two friends I regularly meet at Mepkin were there too.  We carved out time to reconnect.  That's always wonderful.

--I didn't do much of my own writing, but I did get an idea for a poem that I will write this week.

--I didn't get to every service, the way I sometimes do.  There were times I sacrificed a service so that I would have time to walk with my camera.  That experience, too, was a worshipful one.

--I took a lot of pictures--over 500.  I brought a set of fresh batteries, but to be on the safe side, I should have brought 2 sets.  This trip is the first one where I brought the more sophisticated camera that I inherited from my sister.

--Back in January, when we decided to come, I thought, oh, good, summer, a time I haven't experienced at Mepkin--I'll see what the liturgical season is like.  But it was Trinity Sunday, a high festival, which was interesting too.

--I brought books, and I scanned Wired for Joy, a book I found on the Mepkin shelves, while I was there.  Wired for Joy irritated me, so I put it aside; it seemed fairly self-evident to me about being aware of moods, although the writer would call them wires, not simply moods, and wires get fried and can be rebuilt and such.  I read Rob Bell's How to Be Here, which also seemed a bit simplistic, albeit with good nuggets here and there--along with lots of white space.  It was not the kind of retreat with lots of reading time.

--The drive back was much easier, which is not always the case.  There is that feeling that I'm hurling myself across the southeast.  And I'm somewhat haunted by all the other trips I've made, both with others and all by myself.

--I got home by mid-afternoon, and it was good to have time to reconnect with my spouse and with my life here.

Mepkin Bound!

This blog will be quiet for a few days while I go up to Mepkin Abbey (don't come burgle my house--my spouse will be holding down the South Florida fort).  In fact, by this time tomorrow, I will already be on the road if everything goes according to plan.  I will be attending a retreat on The Power of Story.

Readers of this blog will remember that last year I was going to Mepkin Abbey to do a poetry workshop with Kathleen Norris, when she had to cancel.  I went anyway and had a great time.  But it wasn't the kind of structured workshop the way that I imagine this week-end will be.

I would be happy to go to Mepkin Abbey for time to study just about any subject, but this one will be relevant to me in many ways.  I'm telling everyone it's a writing workshop, but I'm not sure.

I haven't been to Mepkin Abbey in the summer; I've been in every other season.  Will we still take long, rambling walks when the temperature soars?

I will meet two friends there; we have a long history together.  I am anxious to catch up with these old friends, who began life as work colleagues long ago when we all worked at a local community college in the Charleston area.  In those days, I was not interested in monasticism and couldn't have even told you that there was a monastery nearby.

Will the gardens be beautiful?  I've found something to treasure in each season that I've visited.

I'll bring a pile of books, real books printed on paper, because that's the way I travel.  I'll bring my laptop with vague ideas of the creative work I want to do.  I'll bring the camera.  I'll bring extra batteries.  What will I actually do while there?

I know that I will take pictures.  I know that I will walk, even if I sweat through my clothes.  I know that I will attend many services in one day.  I know that I will write something, although I'm not sure what (the long drive usually leaves me with lots of ideas).  I know that I will read, although it might be a book that I pick up at the monastery.

My hope is that I recalibrate myself in ways that are important.