Always We Begin Again

“I said the donkey.” That was the first line of the children’s lesson this Sunday, Palm Sunday, a lovely story about the donkey who carried Jesus into Jerusalem. I did not hear another word of it. I was back in time with another donkey, the one who carried Jesus into Bethlehem to be born. In this memory, I was about 10, the year I had a solo in the Christmas pageant. Our song was “The Friendly Beasts” a carol that allows each animal in turn to share the story of how she or he aided the holy family on the night of the birth of Jesus. My verse went like this:

I, said the donkey shaggy and brown.

I carried his mother uphill and down,

I carried his mother to Bethlehem town,

I,  said the donkey, shaggy and brown.

I had practiced this song for weeks, picturing the friendly beast in my mind, a dependable sturdy animal with a soulful gaze. I was ready, but when the performance began, something went wrong. Maybe it was a bit of stage fright. I began the first line just fine but for some reason I repeated it again. I looked over at my director, my eyes wide with alarm, but she somehow signaled for me to keep going, and I did, finished it off pretty well, and then the next kid stood up and I sat down, mortified.

I cried in the car on the way home, and moped for days. “You’re being ridiculous,” my mother said, finally, impatient with my extended suffering. “No one even noticed.” She was probably right. I stumbled, but since I kept going, and the organist managed to keep up with me, it is probably the case that almost no one realized I had made an error. And even if they had, their response was most likely sympathetic. But I was abject. I have never been good, then or since, at making mistakes.

But yesterday it occurred to me for the first time that maybe if someone had noticed my mistake, they also noticed that I didn’t stop. Maybe a few people thought, good for her, sticking with it. Maybe I could be a tiny bit proud for that. Maybe instead of having been the symbol of ineptitude, I was, for the few that noticed, another kind of sign, of vulnerability and resilience.

It has been months since I have had the time or creativity to write this blog and I have considered just forgetting the whole thing a few times. But I was really inspired by a story a friend told me last week. She shared that she had tried many times to keep a journal, and she would buy a new journal and begin faithfully to make entries for a few weeks, and then the entries would dwindle and tail off. She said she had a stack of journals that each had only a few weeks worth of entries. I suppose she thinks of this as a failure of some kind, a mistake. But really, what a lovely sign of faithfulness, that she keeps returning to the practice of journaling with hope, she keeps buying new journals to represent her fresh start. That stack of journals is a testament of deep commitment, of vulnerability and hope, like a sturdy beast with a soulful gaze, in whose steps I will try to walk.

This photo of the Etowah River is the one with which I first launched this river-loving blog. Though I seem to have misplaced the source, thanks go to all the generous photographers who share their work.

The Mothers Point The Way

Being a student is inspiring and humbling.  I read a lot of brilliant work from scholars who have dedicated themselves to one corner of the Big Questions. I get daily glimpses of some fascinating idea to explore—it’s as exciting to me as gambling or skydiving must be to others. I sometimes imagine myself as one of these scholars, and then reality brings me down with a thud when I think of how much I would have to learn to really grasp the complexities of a single area of my multi-disciplinary field, how much Greek philosophy or Latin philology or cultural anthropology I would need to study, not to mention the German and French I would need to learn to read the big works in those fields. Probably my other life as an academic needs to remain as the road less traveled. But once in a while the heavens open up, and the angels of learning throw down a shaft of pure bliss (nerd division).

I had one of those recently in Hebrew class. I am already predisposed to loving Hebrew—I love everything about it, the sound of the words, the elegant calligraphic beauty of the letters, the deep pools of meaning that can be contained in a single word. Our class had been introduced early in the semester to group of Hebrew letters called matres lectionis, “mothers of reading,” which our tutor calls the mother letters. Sometimes these words are used as consonants or vowels, but other times they have a special function, to be little pointers that alert the reader to notice the way certain vowels work. Occasionally our tutor would say, pay attention to the mothers and I would think, word to the wise.

So, we were sitting one day recently in our small tutorial group going over our vocabulary words for the week. One of my classmates was puzzling over a word, saying, why doesn’t this one have any vowels, and then we realized that the word was the Tetragrammaton, the four letters, YHWH, that represent the holy name of God. The ancient Jews that preserved the text of the Hebrew Bible believed that name is too sacred to be spoken by the profane mouths of mortals, so they came up with this holy monogram. When it appears in the text, the lack of vowels reminds the reader not to vocalize those letters, but to substitute another word, Adonai, which means “Lord.” If you see the word LORD in small caps in your Bible, that’s the Tetragrammaton. There are others words that mean God used sometimes, but this word represents, not just the concept of God, but God’s name, the answer God gives to Moses when Moses asks who God is, what name he should use when going to the Egyptians to seek the freedom of the enslaved Hebrews. That answer, as a word, is a verb, a verb of being, which you could translate as “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” This points towards some ideas about the nature of God, the dynamic character of God who exists beyond—well, everything—beyond the limits of language, our small imaginations, the way we try to control things by naming and dissecting them, beyond our desire to have neat categories and solid answers, toward a realm of God’s continual renewing, becoming, inviting.

That day in Hebrew class as we sat around the table, reflecting on the holy name, one of my classmates pointed to the four letters again and said, “Have you ever noticed that all four of the letters are mother letters?” We all looked at each other, quiet for a moment, soaking in the perfection of that metaphor. These letters, YHWH exist to do what mother letters do, to be like arrows, pointing towards a reality so big, words don’t really cover it, so glorious we can really only stutter with awe. And so this word, this name, made up of mother letters is the ultimate big flashing neon sign of a pointer, saying, look around. You are breathing the air that is God every second of your life. Pay attention! You don’t want to miss this!

The mother letters are kind of like Mother Wisdom, gently pointing us toward the Big Questions, and reminding us to be aware that words have great power, not only the sacred name of our creator, but all words. The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Words create worlds,” and he may have been referring to the way, in the creation story, that God says the word “light,” and light comes into existence in the world. And he also meant that the way we name our reality shapes that reality. In large ways and small, the respect and compassion with which we speak becomes the compassion we can imagine and therefore give, which the world so desperately needs. The mothers guide us away from falseness and self-seeking toward the becoming of more justice, more kindness, more room for God’s big ideas to take root and make the deserts bloom.

Photo credit:

Nubra River, Kashmir, India

Copyright by Yodod 2006

So This Is The River

The name of this blog, Reading the River, bubbled up from a deep place of personal meaning. I have had the feeling that the river was my own deeply encoded personal metaphor for much of my life, and I have gone about for a long time collecting river rocks and river poems and occasionally falling into rivers and having my life changed.

One reason this is my metaphor dates back to my childhood, and my funny dear deep semi-mystical Mama, who read to her children constantly and consistently. Part of our annual calendar of rituals involved the reading aloud of The Wind in the Willows, a book that has a river as its spine. I say she read it, but that word is no match for what she made of it—she performed it, giving life to the voices and spirit of the characters. On long trips to visit our Alabama relatives in the ancient days before audio books, she was the audio and the book and the characters and the author: my mother incarnated this book, even inventing tunes to go with a few songs that are part of the narrative, like the Christmas carol performed by a chorus of field mice.

The characters in this book are all animals:  the shy but ardent Mole, the rich vain Toad of Toad Hall, the dashing Water Rat, assorted bad guy stoats and weasels. It sounds simple, but hidden in the charming descriptions of the English countryside and Edwardian gentlemen beasts who wear velvet smoking jackets is a book that contains serious stuff: a hero’s journey, valor and faith in a spiritual awakening, and a true, deep, life-changing friendship.  For my family, this was our book, almost as much as the Bible was, and like any sacred text, it had several functions. Its story showed the good and negative sides of the characters to instruct us in proper behavior. I learned from the flighty and irresponsible Toad not to be like him—one day in love with boating and then, when he flopped at sculling, to act as if he had never seen the inside of a boat, on to the next shallow enthusiasm. But I also learned from Toad what happens when one finds the real thing from his reactions when he found his one true thing, the thing that made him so possessed with joy he was willing to steal for it, lie for it, be disgraced for it. Mostly I learned from the relationship between the Mole and the Rat, who meet each other at the river, where Mole confronts the powerful call to a wider life than his dark tunnels, and Rat befriends him as a river guide, travel partner, and boon companion.

For a lot of my life, I thought of myself as the Mole, the introverted rather shy fellow who wants to explore the wider world, but quietly, noticing the way the river is always changing and what sound is made by the wind in the willows. Like Moley, I spend a lot of dreamy, gazing-around time, a lot of solitary time. I like solitary pursuits, reading and writing and puttering around in a garden.

But I also have a bit of Ratty in me. He’s the bolder of the two, the one who loves to go off on adventures. He isn’t afraid of tipping over in his boat from time to time, shaking it off with “what’s a little water to a water rat? He is willing to push, to argue, to insist, to confront, and when I have to summon up that spirit on behalf of justice, I hope to do it with the bold genius of the crusading Rat. 

Ratty rescues Mole from time to time when Mole gets himself lost in the woods (though let it be noted that Mole rescues Rat from some of Ratty’s more outlandish ambitions). When Mole gets overwhelmed with a task and wants to lie on the couch and moan it’s all impossible, Rat pulls him together and helps him see how truly capable he is and what remarkable things can happen if he can stop fearing the unknown and trust his sense that the river will carry him.

So here’s the thing. I wrote a book. It’s a Mole kind of thing, sitting in the quiet while my friends went off to movies and parties and spa days, grinding my little wheel of words, editing and whittling and searching for the right way to say what was in my heart. It was challenging and fun and sometimes impossible, and I did from time to time lie on the couch and moan, and luckily I had a water rat friend who would come along and take me off on a walk to clear my head. (Thank you, Laura.)

Eventually, the book got done, and my dear friends at the publishing house let me know that my job as a writer was not over when the last disputed comma (thank you, John) had been resolved. No, part of my job as a writer is to—oh, dear—sell the book.

I do not like selling things very much, was never the top Girls Scout cookie saleswoman, cannot force myself to do phone banks, even for causes dear to me, because asking people I know for stuff is hard enough but asking strangers is impossible. I have never gotten over this, even though I have at times in my career worked in marketing, even though I know how matching up a person with a book they will love is a lovely kindness, a gift.

Still, I have been so vague and tentative and surreptitious about this that some people near and dear to me have no idea that I have written a book or that it has been published or that you could, like go into a store and get one. (You can, if you are still lucky enough to have a bookstore near you.) So I have decided to invite the Water Rat to help me out with a bit of invented dialogue to get the party started.

Ratty:  Tell me this: if one of your friends finished years of working on a project and wanted to throw a party to celebrate, wouldn’t you be hurt not to be invited?

Me: Well, yes, but—

Ratty: And haven’t you been going around saying you have been working on this incarnation thing for 20 years—is that true?

Me: Maybe closer to 30, really. Yes.

Ratty: So how could you possibly object to the notion of telling your riverbank friends what you have been doing all this time, and why it was worth all that doing?

Me: I certainly don’t object, it’s just that—

Ratty: Excellent. So you just stand right here by the river and I’ll go shoot off the fireworks.

So, thanks to some Water Rat stalwart friends dragging me along by the collar, (Thanks, Janice) I have managed to set up two fun book release events: First, with the Columbia Seminary Bookstore October 9, during community coffee hour at 10:30 a.m. in the refectory, and then at Charis Books and More, November 7, at 7:30 p.m. If you are in town, do come by and say hello and celebrate with me. I’ll be the one in the smoking jacket, looking a little embarrassed, and fiercely pleased.  

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image: Ernest Shepherd illustration from Wind in The Willows

Time and Again

 Back around the turn of the century, when a lot of people were into the idea of the calendar turning such a big page, I read enough about the history of the calendar to realize how arbitrary it is, how we might have organized weeks and years into different blocks and so formed a different world. While the big civic calendar-making job feels pretty much set in stone, there is another kind of personal calendar making, the way we feel the passage of time,  the way we blend the religious and civic events we observe alongside homespun rituals and important life passages to make up our own seasons. The first appearance of the forsythia in a backyard heralds spring much more reliably than what the calendar says, and the birthday of a loved one makes dull wintry February shine with a warm glow.

Some of the important days I observe include Opening Day of the Baseball Season, which involves sneaking off from work to see the first game if at all possible; and the annual ritual of getting the music issue of the Oxford American magazine, which comes with a CD crammed with great music, some old some new, some obscure, some you know by heart. And one of the unfixed holidays very important to me revolves around the harvest of the first great tomato, a celebration of some of the best stuff God ever imagined.

But really, whoever picked January One for the marking of the New Year? Terrible choice, the middle of winter, jammed so close to Christmas. My new year starts in the back to school impulse of early fall. Every year, I want to buy new notebooks and hang my clothes up neatly in anticipation of a new start. It makes sense that sixteen years (now it’s up to almost 20!) as a student starting a new school year will pattern one’s brain in a permanent circuit.

Come Labor Day, I am always thinking about a fresh start, a clean blackboard, and a chance to be a different kind of person. Who will I be this year? The smartest? The class clown?  The moody introvert or the sunny popular kid? Each year we get to choose again, though our choices are constantly being shaped, winnowed by biology, geography, fate.

By the end of September, I have ink on my cuffs and a dozen new writing projects and am reminded that the choices for me always come down to my connection to language, words, writing, creativity. And I return to a beloved poem by Marge Piercy that speaks to my sense of vocation and my sense of time. It is, fittingly a new years poem, written for a celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year that we celebrated last week. In it, Piercy writes:

Like any poet I wrestle the holy name

and know there is no wording finally

can map, constrain or summon that fierce

voice whose long wind lifts my hair

chills my skin and fills my lungs

to bursting. I serve the word

I cannot name, who names me daily,

who speaks me out by whispers and shouts.  

Coming to the new year, I am picked

up like the ancient ram’s horn to sound

over the congregation of people and beetles,

of pines, whales, marshawks and asters.

Then I am dropped into the factory of words

to turn my little wheels and grind my own

edges, back on piece work again, knowing

there is no justice we don’t make daily

like bread and love. . .

Though I am not Jewish, this poem feels like a liturgy I want to pray. It combines the natural world, the social world, the inner and outer art of living. It touches on the way time is both a reality and illusion, a motivation to be mindful of the precious present moment and to the sweeping force that catches us up in its tides.

So happy new year to you, whoever you choose to be this year, whatever subject life will offer you to consider and learn from and teach. Blessings on the way. 

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Poem "Ram's Horn Sounding," by  Marge Piercy from The Art f Blessing the Day: Poems With a Jewish Theme  (Knopf, 1999). 

Photo of the Coosa River.