Hemingway and Human Beings

I just came across this, written by Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, entitled "A Second Glance," from The Christian Century, December 25, 2007.

It strikes me especially because recently I have had more than one client who came across as unusually intelligent, or sensitive, or interesting for whatever reason. As a professional, I have to guard against paying more attention, or giving more of my time, to such a client. And as a person in any situation that involves human beings, I have to continually ask myself why and how I unconsciously--and consciously--assign value to a person's life.

Good food for thought follows.

For several months during my time as a seminary student I worked the night shift at a local mirror factory. My title was prism inspector, and for every hour of work I was expected to check about a hundred car rearview mirrors for possible defects. But I was also required to take a ten-minute break each hour, to rest my eyes from intently staring at mirrors for the previous 50 minutes.

During these brief rest periods I would study for my seminary courses. Alongside the stacks of mirrors on my work bench was a small pile of books—Hebrew grammar, church history, systematic theology.

My attempts to cram some studying into my scheduled breaks were often frustrated, however, by the appearance of Jed, the night watchman. Jed always seemed to pass my way just as I was in the middle of some important reading. And he liked to talk.

I dreaded Jed's interruptions. Frankly, he did not strike me as a very bright human being, and he insisted on trying to engage me in conversations about topics that would not have interested me even if I was not so intent on studying. Jed seemed oblivious of whatever signals that I was sending about not wanting to be distracted from my reading.

Jed came along one night while I was reading a church history text. "You really like books, don't you?" he remarked. With a sigh I responded, "Yes, Jed, I really do like books, and right now I have to be reading this one in order to be ready for a test in class tomorrow." Jed was not to be ignored. "Yeah, Ernie really liked books too. He was always reading." Without lifting my eyes from my book, I mumbled "Ernie who?" "Ernie Hemingway," he responded.

Jed had my attention. "What do you know about Ernest Hemingway?" I asked him. He proceeded to tell me that he had worked for a while as a hunting and fishing guide for a wealthy physician who owned a local estate with large tracts of forest land. His employer often hosted Hemingway, and when Hemingway came to stay the doctor would assign Jed to accompany the writer on hunting excursions.

"Yeah," said Jed, "Ernie always had a book. He would read with a flashlight in the tent at night, in his sleeping bag. Sometimes the light kept me awake!"

As a college English major I had studied several Hemingway novels, and I always found him fascinating as a writer—and as a larger-than-life person. I was eager to hear more from Jed, who had suddenly become a more significant human being—a person who knew Ernest Hemingway, and who could call him "Ernie."

Later I realized that this experience with Jed pointed to a real defect in my way of viewing other individuals. I had come to see Jed in a very different light just because he had known Hemingway. A seemingly insignificant human being had risen to a new status in my eyes because he had spent hours in the same tent with one of the great novelists of the 20th century.

Here is what troubled me about the experience: I am not going to come across many people who will surprise me by having a connection to one of my literary heroes. If Jed had not told me about "Ernie," I would have continued to treat him as a person whom I could legitimately ignore.

Of course, Jed was related to someone greater than Hemingway, and I did not have to pump him with questions to find that out about that relationship. Jed was a creature of God, fashioned in the image of the divine. He was a person for whom Christ died. He had an eternal destiny—a fact about him that matters much to the Lord whom I serve.

Why did I have to wait until I found out about the Hemingway connection before I took Jed seriously? Why could I not have seen him right off the bat as a God-connected person?

OK, maybe I am being a little hard on myself. Jed did lack some people skills. And I was a student desperately trying to support my wife and myself while also wanting to succeed in my studies. Even after I found out about his experiences with Hemingway I knew that I could not devote too much of my time talking with Jed. And I suppose it is reasonable to say that even if I had kept Jed's status as a friend of Jesus clearly in mind from the start, I still would not have owed him the kind of attention that would have distracted me from other important commitments.

But there is still a point here that I cannot ignore. The Christian life is a special way of seeing. "Open mine eyes that I may see / glimpses of truth Thou hast for me." And other human beings are high on the list of what we must work at seeing in a Christian way. However else I might rationalize the way that I had been responding to Jed, there can be no denying that I had not been attributing to him the value that God had placed on him.

To be sure, we can't always be thinking noble theological thoughts about every person we come across each day. It is unrealistic to expect that when we're going through the checkout line at the local supermarket we will always remember to see the image of God in the person who asks whether we want paper or plastic. But we can try, and entertain those thoughts more often than we do. It is a good exercise to step back on occasion and think about some seemingly insignificant soul, someone we'd been ignoring, as a friend of Jesus. That is a lesson I learned while gazing at rearview mirrors. It took a story about Hemingway to bring the lesson home.

Twelfth Night

Tonight we put away Christmas things, always a bit hard for me to want to do. I decided to take a few pictures, and some interesting things happened.

This clay ornament, done by a friend in Croatia, is one of my favorites. I just set it on the nearest stable horizontal surface to take the picture. It wasn't until I had the photos in the computer that I realized I had set it on the only Croatian crocheted piece currently displayed in the house. The perfect setting!


These leaves are from my last trip to St. Columba. I was in the habit of saving leaves and pressing them to send to Father Stevens after he moved away. I did the same this time, knowing I couldn't send them to him, but needing to do it for myself, I guess. So they became stars on our table throughout Christmas.

I think that must be my hair that got in front of the camera, but I like this because it turns that one into a shooting star!


And here's the best of all. I didn't think about it until I had already shot the picture, but I got "A Merry Christmas" and the photo of Granddaddy and Grandmother Christmas side by side. And it is, I think, the merriest photo of the two of them that I have. (I know, it isn't a clear shot, but you get the idea. You can enlarge it to better glimpse their merriness.)

Good-bye until next time, lovely, merry Christmas. And Christmases.

Happy New Year and Eleventh Day

It’s the eleventh day of Christmas, and I have no pictures of lords a-leaping that I can put my fingers on.

It’s also hitting me that we really are in a New Year. I’ve mis-written the date a couple of times, but actually gotten it right often enough that 2008 feels real to me now.

And so, the photo….Anyone who has been to our house, or who has seen enough photos on my blog, will recognize it as our tablecloth.

Here, however, it is doubling as a runway. A taking-off place. A place where you build your momentum. Momentum is necessary, by the way, for leaping. Just ask any leaping lord you come across.

While I tend not to make bold resolutions for the new year, I do experience a hopeful energy with this new beginning. After the glory of Incarnation and angels appearing and human beings being unusually kind and generous for a season, all kinds of things really do seem possible. It is easier to believe in leaping, or flying, or simply getting my desktop cleared off.

And so I share the following article that I came across this evening, with a toast to new beginnings, to hope, and to possibilities.

Life is full of opportunities to start over

By DAVID YOUNT

Scripps Howard News Service

2008-01-02 00:00:00

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously lamented that "there are no second acts in American lives," having persuaded himself that any failure along the way consigns us to be losers for life.

Despite his early success and lifelong genius, Fitzgerald managed to fulfill his own prophesy. As his beautiful wife descended into madness, he became a bitter and violent alcoholic, dying prematurely of a heart attack at the age of 44.

The novelist's failure might be dismissed as the product of a morbid artistic temperament. But at this moment many professional economists echo his pessimism, teaching that humankind is condemned to inhabit a "zero sum" universe, in which life's winners succeed only at the expense of the losers.

Don't believe it. The weight of evidence from the beginning of recorded history demonstrates that the novelist and his disciples of gloom are dead wrong. Failure is not permanent, but predictable and passing.

The conjunction of Christmas and New Year's is no accident. At Christmas we take a fresh look at our old faith from its beginning, with a child in a manger. With the New Year we affirm the belief that our fates are not fixed, and resolve to renew our lives.

If the gloom mongers were correct, Jesus of Nazareth would qualify as history's greatest failure, broken in body and persecuted in spirit, ending his life as a criminal nailed to a cross. But two millennia later, more than 2 billion people across 260 nations feel blessed to call themselves his followers, persuaded that Calvary was only the final scene of Jesus' opening act. In the second act of his life he prevailed over death.

On a less lofty level, countless men and women throughout history have displayed a marvelous resilience in confronting their setbacks and handicaps, converting defeat into victory. Whatever else we may lack, hope is seldom in short supply, because most Americans are persuaded that we have second chances. The current fashion for "total makeovers" only underscores our confidence that it is never too late to pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and start all over again.

If we suspect ourselves to be handicapped in overcoming failure, it may be because we worship at the altar of what psychologist William James called "the bitch goddess of success," narrowly defining personal fulfillment in terms of financial wealth and physical beauty.

Although Christianity acknowledges distinctions in our gifts and accomplishments, it insists that we are all equal in the sight of God. If we can begin to regard ourselves as our creator does, and see what he sees, we can summon the strength to start over, again and yet again, reinventing ourselves.

Sally Jenkins, writing in The Washington Post, affirms that "every act is redeemable... and the days ahead are a blank gift in which a person can remake himself... in any fashion he pleases." But, as Jesus himself advised, for doors to be opened to us, we must first knock on them.

David Yount's new book is "How the Quakers Invented America" (Rowman & Littlefield). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com.

Sixth Day, Pissarro

We went to see the Pissarro exhibit at the Brooks Museum. Though I didn't think the exhibit was displayed very well, the paintings were wonderful, and learning more about the artist adds so much. As always, I leave wanting to take painting lessons! Someday....

This was one of my favorites. The House in the Woods. The other, the Farm on the Grounds of the Chateau de Marly, seems not to be anywhere on the Internet; or perhaps it goes by a different name. But I did find this, a quote from Cezanne: “We learned everything we do from Pissarro. … It’s he who was really the first Impressionist…He had the good luck to be born in the Antilles where he taught himself to paint without a teacher.”

So perhaps I should just start painting, without lessons? But that would still require a space to paint, which is also a problem at the moment. Anyway, it was a lovely afternoon. And this house in the woods most certainly has six geese a-laying somewhere about, don't you think?

Five Golden Rings

. . . Plus one—and the other one hidden underneath!

There is something to that color wheel we learned in elementary art class. Could this fruit look any better in a bowl of another color? I don't think so. I'm a little sad to keep eating these things, but I suppose keeping them indefinitely as a still life would ultimately result in a much less pretty arrangement.

For Calling Birds

(Nota bene: these are not my photos....)

Today I drove back from a visit in Arkansas. While there I visited friends and heard from each a story of struggle, of pain, of things gone wrong. I can’t say that it weighed me down, but it made me more aware than usual of the truth that we rarely know what is really going on in the lives of people around us, and that life is hard.

As I drove home, I was listening to a CD of Celtic Christmas music. It was the first time I had heard all the verses to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” And I heard all the words, and it was beautiful, and I was thinking about angels and finding hope in a hard world. Verse three especially stayed on my mind.

And then, just as the sun was setting, I was giving up on seeing any Canadian geese, as I had (I thought) passed all the watery areas. But to my left I thought I saw some fluttering. I looked more closely, and there were geese out in the field. It was a field of stubble, with water between the rows of golden stalky rice remains, so they were hard to see.

I kept looking (as best one can while driving) and realized that there were lots of geese out there. I was going too fast to stop, but I pulled over at the first place I could find, turned around, and went back to a side road where I could pull off the main road and park.

I got out of the car and watched in wonder as hundreds and hundreds of geese fluttered about in the field, and hundreds and hundreds more came in to land. V-formation after V-formation approached in the sky, and they circled and slowly joined those in the field. A host of geese, ascending and descending upon this field of mud in the middle of nowhere.

And the sound! I had never heard anything like it. Honking, squawking, whatever you want to call it. It all combined to create such a sound that at first I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. I wasn’t even that close to them, and it filled the air and filled my ears and filled my mind with amazement. Like trumpets, but they were voices. They were calling, singing the song that, I suppose, brought them all together to a safe place, helped them sort themselves out.

And the sun set, and the geese decorated the golden-pink and gray sky with their outstretched wings, and car after car drove by, and people didn’t even notice.

As darkness came, I finally got back in my car, turned the music back on, and drove on.

And I wondered how many times we go down the road and don't even hear the angels sing.

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men
From heaven’s all-gracious King!”
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.


Still through the cloven skies they come,
With peaceful wings unfurled;
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world:
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.

O ye beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh, rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

For lo! The days are hastening on,
By prophets seen of old,
When with the ever-circling years
Shall come the time foretold,
When the new heaven and earth shall own
The Prince of Peace, their King,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Christmas

The third week of Advent....I didn't write that after the Service of Lessons and Carols, my throat felt like fire. I lost my voice completely and was home sick most of the week. Poor timing for shopping, decorating, and sending Christmas cards. I didn't feel up to driving to get stamps, even, until near the end of the week. But it was a good time for resting and reading, and I was just so glad it had held off until after the singing.

Here is a clearer view of the tiny little wreath that I like so much. We had a larger wreath, but last year we left it unattended for just a few minutes, and it suffered damage in the fire that consumed the greenery and part of our tablecloth. Quite a Christmas morning celebration!

Back to the recent present: I did get better, and then Drazen came down with a cold. He was a trooper, though. I don't know if it was love of family, concern for me, or looking forward to the food (or all three)--but he chose to make the drive to Searcy for dinner with some of my family on Christmas Eve.

On the way there we saw thousands of Candian geese, sitting quietly on the flooded fields of Arkansas between Fair Oaks and Augusta. How does the sight of migrating Canadian geese bring tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat? I am not quite sure, but it did, and I thought that might be my favorite Christmas present for the year.

But then there was the full moon. My dad and I had gone for a walk around the Harding campus, to see the Christmas lights. Which were lovely and even in a way enchanting. But then that moon, just over the horizon, still goldish from whatever it is that makes it that way, and huge, huge, and so beautifully round and quiet. That was entrancing. I wish I'd had a camera with me. The memory will have to suffice. We drove home that night under that glorious moon.

After a too-short nap (Drazen went on to bed), I went with a friend to an Orthodox nativity service. An experience I won't forget. This friend didn't tell me until we were on the way there, that they stand for the entire hour and a half, except for about five minutes of the service! I actually appreciate the reverence it implies, but my foot is still hurting from the long time spent in shoes that weren't meant for such an experience.

Christmas Day, we were both exhausted. Drazen from his cold, I from being up late and recovering from my own bout of illness; and both from the interrupted sleep that comes with one or more people blowing their nose throughout the night. I woke up with not a host of heavenly angels singing, but a host of depressing thoughts. I feel awful, I'm exhausted, this day is going to be impossible. Why did we invite someone over for dinner? How am I going to get it done? What if Drazen doesn't like the gift I got for him? etc.

But we got up, I put cinnamon rolls in the oven and coffee on the stove. And Drazen found the channel 3 airing of our Lessons and Carols service, which infused my spirit with joy and refocused me on heavenly hosts, and shortly I was smiling and laughing again. We opened presents, tried our new coffee, enjoyed the morning.

By afternoon, it was a different matter. I was tired. I took a nap while Drazen spent two hours on skype with a long-winded friend in Croatia. I woke from the nap feeling tired, sad, lonely. Wishing for things that I always thought would be a part of Christmas and are not, and may never be. Doing the crazy comparing thing, which always means comparing ourselves to those who have the things we wish we had, rather than comparing ourselves to those who do not even have what we have. I missed Grandmother, and extended family being together, and children being a part of the picture.

Just in time, Drazen got off the phone and we went for a walk. Which clears the mind and invigorates the body, and gave me the energy and good will I needed to come home and do the cooking and cleaning before our guest arrived.

Justin came over. And we celebrated Christmas together, with scripture and prayer and food and life-sharing and dog-petting and laughter. At one point Justin and I somehow got into a laugh that wouldn't end, and we both wound up in pain from it! It gave new meaning to "side-splitting" laughter.

Later, Drazen and I watched the movie First Knight, a gift from my sister's family. By the end of it I was again exhausted, with a headache starting, and having those thoughts again. Why did I want to stay up late watching a movie? Now I won’t be able to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be awful. Etc.

I had seen the movie before, but this time was struck by a line I didn't remember from before. It seemed appropriate to the day. Guinevere, trying to explain herself and her love to Arthur, says something like, “Feelings come and go like the wind. But my will is what sustains me, what keeps me true to my course, and it is with my will that I love you.”

Christmas Day my feelings came and went like the wind! But the day wasn’t about my feelings, and at the end of the day, body and mind and soul sat at the table with the wreath and the candles and thought once more about Light coming into the world and how blessed we are to have something more hopeful and sustaining that our own feelings and even our own thoughts.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And the Light is real, and full of Grace and Truth. Even when I'm not.

Merry Christmas!

Window

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.

And we have the prophetic word made more sure.
You will do well to pay attention to this
as to a lamp shining in a dark place,
until the day dawns
and the morning star rises
in your hearts.

-from recent Advent readings in Isaiah and II Peter

This is the view from the window above my prayer desk. I have the bottom covered with (sigh of embarrassment) tissue paper, which was a quick fix when we moved in some years ago and did not yet have curtains. You can’t tell from this photo, but it actually looks nice, lets light through but blocks my view of the neighbors backyard, so I haven’t changed it all these years.

But the top of the window is best. Here I see the leaves come out green, turn colors, and fall. Here I see the birds flutter about, the squirrels run through the trees. And just Tuesday (the day I took the photos) saw a hawk soar up from a branch, just as I looked up.

On Tuesday the light struck me. It was cloudy much of time I was sitting there, and then suddenly came the light, and here it is. Light in darkness. Much like prayer, sometimes.

Second Week of Advent (and a Half)

The little advent wreath is so sweet I took pictures of it last week, but obviously haven’t written anything until now.

Today I saw yet another article in some publication about “surviving the holidays.” I read it, and it was a good article with some practical advice. But my main response was sadness and mild frustration.

We have become by choice fairly low-key about “the holidays.” This is probably made easier by our not having children, but I would like to think that even if we had children, we would consider honoring God with a sane life more important than whatever all the things are that make “the holidays” such an unholy time for many people.

I just think it’s sad that so many people look at this as a time they have to “survive,” which has the connotation of just getting by, enduring, hanging on till better times come.

In Italian the word for “survive” is “sopravivere,” which more clearly than the English gives the meaning of “to live above.” (Only because most of us don't realize that "sur" here means "above," same as in surcharge, surplus, etc.) I think that’s what we have to do when a culture gets so crazy. We have to live above the craziness, the materialism, the secularism, the unrealistic expectations that the media and even our friends might set for us. Not indulge in it all and barely come through alive, but choose to live in a way that lets us live above it.

Part of that is the practical stuff. Schedule carefully. Eat healthily. Practice saying no both to others and to yourself. Think through what really matters and let go of the rest. Stop trying to impress people.

But the other part, the biggest part for me, is the advent wreath and what it represents. That our focus is on Jesus, his coming as a human into the world, his presence in our lives day in and day out, and his eventual coming to stop the craziness for good, and to bring “joy to the world” for all time.

The choir I sing with did our service of Lessons and Carols this past Sunday evening. It was glorious. One of my favorite pieces is below. It’s a Gregorian chant, with wonderful old sounds, sounds of light and mystery and dissonance and peace, harmonized by one of our choir members. And it’s the sort of thing that, when you go around with it in your mind, makes it not hard at all to “survive the holidays.”

They become, actually, holy days, to be fully lived and treasured.

From lands that see the sun arise,
to earth’s remotest boundaries,
the Virgin-born today we sing,
the Son of Mary, Christ the King.

Blest Author of this earthly frame,
To take a servant’s form he came,
That liberating flesh by flesh,
Those he had made might live afresh.

In that chaste mother’s holy womb,
celestial grace thus found its home:
So God, in ways beyond all thought,
the means of our salvation wrought.

She bowed unto the angel’s word,
accepting what the Father willed,
and suddenly the promised Lord
that pure and holy temple filled.

All praise, eternal Word, to thee,
whose advent set thy people free;
whom, with the Father we adore
and Holy Spirit, evermore. Amen.

Father Stevens' Final Journey

This morning I was blessed to attend the memorial service of precious Father Stevens and to hear the stories of other people whose lives had connected with his. It was a beautiful occasion in honor of one of the most beautiful people I have ever known. For now I will only share the obituary from the newspaper, which was written by one of the men I met today. My own reflections will wait for another time.



FATHER ANTHONY-GERALD "Lee" STEVENS, a member of the Order of the Holy Cross who founded the Mbalotahun Leprosy Relief Program (MLRP) and the first Anglican indigenous religious order for men in Liberia, has died.

Born in Durham, Maine and graduated from Bates College, Father Stevens' early career was in acting. The Rev. Anthony-Gerald “Lee” Stevens, 95, served as a naval chaplain in the Pacific, then entered the Order of the Holy Cross, making his life profession in 1951. From 1952-65, he served primarily at the order’s monastery and school in St. Andrews, Tennessee.

But it was while serving the order’s Liberian mission, and particularly at the leprosy clinic and colony at Mbalotahun, that he “lost his heart forever,” as he was often quoted. He was a supreme example of Christian love and caring in the Holy Spirit to this remote clinic originally founded by his Order of the Holy Cross in the 1920’s. To facilitate his work at the clinic, he trained and was licensed as a paramedic in leprosy. He also studied the Bandi language and developed a leprosy rehabilitation and control program.

The remainder of his years in the order alternated between the time spent in his beloved Liberia and years spent as the resident monk, first at the priory in South Carolina and later at Iona House in the Diocese of West Tennessee. During the recent civil war in Liberia, he lived at Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, N.Y.

Last year, when the political situation calmed, he returned at the age of 94 to establish at the request of the bishop of Liberia an indigenous religious order for men, the Community of Love in Jesus (CLJ). This was a very fitting name for this order as this dearly loved man left many such communities throughout his life wherever he went, especially here in the Diocese of West Tennessee.

Father died on September 22, 2007 at 4:45 p.m. local time in Bolahun, Liberia (11:45 a.m. CST) in his little cell at the St. Francis monastery where he was surrounded by his primary caregiver and first ordained priest of the CLJ, two novices and two aspirants plus an American doctor summoned from a nearby village. A single candle was burning as the monsoon rains poured down outside the monastery and Father Stevens peacefully passed into God’s hands as he breathed his last breath. His body was buried at his request in the cemetery of the leper colony at Mbalotahun.

A memorial service celebrating Father Stevens’s life will be held on Thursday, December 6 at 11 a.m. at St. Columba Episcopal Conference and Retreat Center (901-377-9284), http://http://www.stcmemphis.org/, 4577 Billy Maher Road, Memphis, TN 38135. A celebration luncheon will be held afterwards and reservations are requested.

Father Stevens’ vision was the support of all children of the leprosy patients in this area through a full tuition program for education aimed at freeing “the poorest of God’s poor” from the circumstances of poverty and disease, the care of leprosy patients in Mbalotahun, and the continued development of the Community of Love in Jesus as a Missionary Order whose purpose is to reclaim Liberia for Jesus.

Father's constancy of praying for numerous people and his affable, gentle, and loving personality and his shining example of being a follower of Jesus Christ are the qualities he impressed on all those who knew him. One of his most heartfelt spiritual directions given to those seeking it was that, “the Will of God will never lead you where His Grace will not sustain you.”

All memorials are requested to be made to The Father Stevens Liberian Leprosy Trust Fund through the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee.