Deep and Wide

One day this week I had arranged to meet a friend for lunch, and as I went to meet her it was one of those moments when it was not yet clear how the day was going to go. You know how it is: some days it feels like I am fighting some invisible monster, who flicks stains on my new shirt, directs fellow drivers to cut me off in traffic, knocks out the servers of the websites I want to visit and eats holes in the socks I planned to wear. Other days, though the monster is sleeping, and I glide effortlessly along, receiving the benefit of green lights, unexpected discounts, and resources that seem to fall from the sky. What was this day going to be like? I thought I saw a great parking spot, but was beaten to it by a swifter driver. As I tried to go back around the aisle to get to the other side of the lot, a big delivery truck blocked my lane and I suddenly found myself forced out of the parking lot and onto a side street. There was a spot there, though it was metered parking and I wasn’t sure all the change I scraped up was quite going to be enough to keep me from the dreaded red “Violation” flag which my town enforces with some vigor. As I walked toward the meeting spot my friend and I had designated, I saw some seminary classmates walking into another restaurant. We waved, and they hesitated, which I interpreted as, “Hey, come say hello.” But when I got over to them, I decided I might have misinterpreted the message. They seemed distracted, or maybe just dazed from their Greek quiz, and so I went back across the parking lot feeling a little foolish, hearing the opening bars of my endlessly looping inner narrative about what a dork I am.

As I stood there, a woman walked past me to get into her car, and as she passed, she asked, “Everything okay?”

“Oh, sure,” I replied, sort of waving her off with a flap of my arm. “Just meeting someone.” I wondered what she had seen in my face, a little downcast, or in my posture, where I noticed, I was standing hugging my elbows to ward off the jabs of the monster.

I called after the woman. “It was really very kind of you to ask,” I said, and she stopped at her car door. She smiled at me. “I normally don’t do things like that,” she said.  We regarded each other.  There were more than a few things, at least on the surface, separating us: age, race, maybe social class (her shoes were so much nicer than mine.) But just for an instant those things seemed outside what we were sharing.  “Well, thanks for taking the time,” I said. “If more people were willing. . .” and she nodded, filling in the rest of my thought with her unspoken agreement.

Just then my friend showed up and we had lunch, a very pleasant conversation that ranged from writers we had admired to the problem of friends who send us unwanted emails about politics we don’t share. Somehow in the course of the conversation, I used the word “lackadaisical,” and a member of the wait staff, gliding by, exclaimed, “That’s my favorite word! I love you!” A very fine word, indeed, I agreed. Tragically underused. Seems like the universe does like me today, I thought. She really likes me!

The woman at the parking lot had changed the trajectory of my whole day, because she had been able to step outside her day, her errands, and see me as someone who needed a little kindness or compassion or just a bit of attention. I can only guess that she saw something in me despite our differences that made her able to feel she might have been in my shoes. Maybe she’s an unusually intuitive person, maybe she is a social worker or a minister, maybe she’s a brilliant businessperson who quickly sizes up situations. I have no way of knowing. But her ability to see me as someone she could relate to reminded me of something Joseph Campbell wrote, about how the basis for all great religions is simple compassion, which comes from seeing ourselves in the other.

Campbell also wrote this. “The experience of mystery does not come from expecting it, but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes.” (From Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.)

I sometimes describe myself as a person seeking the mystery, searching the big answers. But maybe Campbell is right to suggest that the real experience we are seeking is not found so much in our striving, isn’t “found” at all, but realized in those moments when we fall out of the vessels of our expectations and into something bigger.

And then, as if I might have missed the point, as I walked back to my parking spot, I managed to intercept the meter reader and successfully plead for a chance to drive away before the ticket had appeared.

Photo credit: ©Gerry Thomasen

Buy This Soundtrack

Last week I saw the amazing documentary, Twenty Feet From Stardom. It’s about  backup singers, focusing mostly on three women who have helped make amazing music while remaining largely unknown. We know their music, like the songs of Merry Clayton, who was one of the key voices behind Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound, and the voice paired with Mick Jagger’s on the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” which is one of the most electrifying moments in rock and roll history. But for a variety of reasons, we don’t know them, the singers. Some of them despaired of the life on the road and found other work. Some were tricked and abused to keep them under the thumb of the people who control the “star-making machinery behind the popular song.” (Bonus points if you can identify the source of that quote.)

Some of them decided they did not have the temperament or the ambition to be the star, and preferred the backup work that let them have a life. As the singers and some of their famous cohorts discuss the choices they made or didn’t get to make, a narrative thread emerges about how becoming a star, finding solo success, requires some combination of narcissism and ruthlessness that these women did not quite possess.

There is something to that, and yet I wonder if that, too is a misreading of these artists and the process of turning into ourselves (as a great friend of mine puts it.)What my friend is talking about, I think, is what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “selving” the incarnational dance of finding the essence of what we were put on the planet to do or be or express. For some of us, finding that is just as natural as breathing, while for others, it’s a long hard slog. Some of us get told there is no category for who or what our soul cries out to be, and therefore no recognition, no reward. Some of us have to cobble together little bits and pieces of work and family life and volunteer work and side projects and wander in the wilderness for many years before someone else can see the pattern emerge of what we were really about, put a name to it. And having someone else see, and name, who we are and what our gift is can be the validation that makes us realize it really is a gift, and that the world might need it.

The process of selving is messy and painful, it’s kind of like being born. The single-mindedness it takes to peck open one’s shell might look narcissistic from the outside, or ruthless or cruel or ambitious, but from the inside it is about the divine leading, the call, which starts with the call to inhabit our own skin with as much particularity and authenticity as possible.

At one point in the film, Merry Clayton asks a question, something like, “If you have a gift, aren’t you really obligated to give it?” I would say we are; it’s a spiritual imperative. And the needful thing is to give, to announce our selving and add our voice to the song. Maybe only God sees the little tributaries, the branching off that kept a river from reaching the sea, and yet which brought water to a dry and thirsty place.

*********************************************************

Photo credit: copyright Adam Greig,  Eyjafjardarsysla, Iceland.

Water When the Well is Dry

Last week came amazing news from India, where the Constitutional Party led by Sonia Gandhi is pushing to declare a constitutional right to food. What an amazing, bold, ambitious idea that could lift millions from misery and signal that their country intends to live up to its ideals.

Here in the US, one might argue that we have implicitly made food a right. We don’t have people routinely die from starvation. We have a host of government programs, from WIC to SNAP, plus local food banks and soup kitchens that feed hungry people. But calling food a right seems unthinkable in our political climate, not because we don’t have the resources but because we don’t have the generosity. We like our poor people humble to the point of humiliation here. We want them to feel they are the ones that are wrong, not the politicians who use food stamp recipients as political punching bags so they can look fiscally responsible to their constituents.

The narrative about givers and takers in our economy continues to bubble up in ways that reveal us to be alienated, anxious, suspicious and pathologically addicted to convenience. We like to fly flags from our front porches but we don’t want to do the work citizenship requires. We claim to care about the earth but won’t give up our cars. We watch the cable news shows or read the blogs of the side that thinks the way we do and won’t listen to any serious political analysis that is not dressed up as entertainment. We say we support our troops but their salaries are so low some of their kids qualify for free school lunch.

 
And it feels like we are living in the wilderness right now, looking back to a time when our country did big things, when we stood for freedom, explored space, conquered diseases, marched for civil rights.  When we built schools, not prisons, when we were inspired by our leaders to dream and dare. The big river of our imagination and ingenuity has dwindled down to pathetic trickle. Maybe because because way upstream we failed to hear the prophetic call to let justice roll down like mighty waters?

We’re waiting for something, someone to inspire us again. Maybe we ought to take an example from India, to tie our political fortunes to those of the poorest and most vulnerable among us. What great things could we do if we decided to stop running in place on treadmills and start moving ahead toward one another, toward the place of common good?

The Fine Print

Back in the spring, I was writing a sermon that referred to the concept of pattern recognition, the thing our brains seem hardwired to do in order to learn from our experience, create symbols to carry meaning, use language and math and music. As I was looking for examples to explain this phenomenon, I happened to read a short piece in the New York Times magazine where a Nashville record producer, Callie Khouri, was asked about her Easter Brunch playlist, and among the cool music she singled out was the sentence: “I would definitely have some pop staples.” Now in the article, the words “pop staples” are lower case, implying they mean standard songs of the pop music genre, which, depending on who you are, might mean The Beatles or Smokey Robinson or Lady Gaga.

But I had a hunch that is not what she meant at all, having lived in Nashville for a while I believed that a hip Nashville record produced would not be recommending music so imprecisely. No, I suspected that what she actually was  referring to with the words “pop staples” was a proper noun, a person, Mr. Roebuck “Pop” Staples, the patriarch of the Staples Singers musical family, father of Mavis, a giant in the gospel world and the kind of staple you do want on your Easter morning ultimate playlist, maybe in their classic song, “I’ll Take You There,” which, if it does not make you glad to be alive, you might just better check to see if you really are.

And sure enough the next week after Easter, I just happened to notice in the Errata section a little notice correcting what they were calling a transcription error—the reporter recorded the interview and the person who transcribed the notes did not know the difference between pop staples, lower case, and Pop Staples, proper noun. And aside from pointing out to you what a terribly close reader of the NY Times I am, there is something there about this practice of examining facts and errors, setting the record straight, being willing to admit mistakes, that corresponds nicely with spiritual practices that help us sort out our actions and intentions, our values and our context, the pattern recognition of the inner life.

Add to that the following paragraph I noticed, back in the Times just last week:

A letter to the editor on May 5, about “Red Doc>,” a book of poetry by Anne Carson with some lines that refer to the velocity of a falling cow, misapplied the notion of a constant acceleration due to gravity near the Earth’s surface. The rate, 9.8 meters/second, refers to the increase of velocity per second, not the velocity itself.

It charms me and encourages me that we live in  a world where poets write poems about the velocity of falling cows, and readers write letters to the editors, and those editors try to keep the math and the poetry in balance. Surely, as long as we can give ourselves to such fancy and accuracy, creativity and precision, we have not unalterably wrecked the creation we were put here to make a garden of, or forever lost the pattern of its maker.

You're Doing What?!

Some families have traditions of owning property for centuries, legacies of membership in Ivy League clubs or family pews in certain old churches. My family is pretty much the mirror image of that—we have traditions of upheaval and change. So we are never much surprised when one of us announces that she is leaving her job to start a business, or writing a book, or going back to school. Especially the going back to school part.

And one reason why has to do with what my father, Bill Tidwell, did when he was almost forty. He left the military after twenty years of service and went back to college. The university worked with my Dad to transfer some of his military experience into college credit, but as a general studies student, he was required to enroll in the basic classes in literature, history, and science like any other college freshman. These classes became part of our family experience as my father struggled to make the transition from soldier to student. Most people can barely imagine their parents as young people, much less imagine how they responded to reading Virgil’s Aeneid or Spenser’s Faerie Queen. But I am one of the rare people who can tell you about my Dad as a college student, because I remember it. I was there.

I can remember a Sunday afternoon when we took a family drive in the country from our house in Anniston, exploring the small communities of Webster’s Chapel and Reed’s Mill, an area where my Dad would eventually buy some land and build a house. On this drive, my mother read aloud, as she sometimes did on long car trips (this being in the days before audio books had been invented). The story that day was the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” an eerie tale of a minister in a small town who literally hid his face in shame over secret sin. The story left us all little spooked, and maybe my Dad wanted to make a joke to break the spell. Later that day, when my mother was holding my two-year old sister, Beth, in her arms, Dad snuck up behind them and presented himself with a handkerchief tied over his face. Beth shrieked with alarm and wouldn’t come near him for hours.

I had the sense of how my father’s  studies were affecting how he looked at the world as we sat and watched the evening news about civil rights, antiwar protests and the moon landing. How deeply my father’s those lessons were integrated into his approach to life became very clear to me in an incident that occurred after his graduation, when I was a high school student. There was a misunderstanding and subsequent disagreement between my parents and I about permission to attend a rock concert on a week night. This story gets retold in my family now as The Night I Ran Away, but that is pure hyperbole. All that really happened was a dollop of adolescent rebellion: I was denied permission, but I went to the concert anyway. (A double bill of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Black Oak Arkansas—a southern fried rocker’s dream show).  I knew there would be some kind of punishment for my disobedience, and I nervously awaited my Dad’s verdict—how long would I be grounded?

But my father surprised me with a novel approach. He had remembered some readings from his political science classes about civil disobedience, and he assigned me the task of reading and then writing him an essay in which I compared the positions on civil disobedience of Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. Wondering what mad parental mind trick this might be, I read the short assignments. Gradually,  I saw what my father was trying to teach me: Socrates had broken the law of the land and willingly drank the poison that was his punishment, believing it was a just verdict he must accept. Thoreau, on the other hand, had resisted paying a war tax for noble reasons, but had let wealthy friends pay his fine and get him released from jail. My father wanted me to be willing to accept the consequences of my behavior, and when I told him I did, he replied that if I truly understood that, then I was not a kid anymore, and I didn’t need the rules governing my curfew to be quite so tight.

Socrates and Thoreau changed the quality of our family life, because my father was able to let his education be more than a hoop he was jumping through on his way to the next thing. I didn’t maybe grasp that then, I just thought my Dad was kind of quirky in his disciplinary methods. But now that I am a student again, at midlife, I so admire what he did then, and hope I can let what I am learning work its way into the texture of my life, so that it enriches who I am and how I relate to the world. If so, I’ll just say it’s family tradition.