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August 23, 2024

love thy neighbor ain’t always easy but it’s where it begins

maybe my world is shrinking, or maybe pragmatism comes with creaky knees and hair turned pewter white. once upon a time i dreamed i might figure out a way to end world hunger. nowadays i spend my days worrying about how to make peace on the little block of houses where i live.

i’ve somehow shrunken my visionary zeal, realized i’m no melinda french gates and will never swipe the planet of those scourges — polio and TB and cluster bombs — that wreak a hardly-holy hell.

what consumes me nowadays is the hard task of human beings bumping up against each other with their curious quirks and rough spots. long ago, when i had my nose in books about saving the planet from the scourge of hunger, when i failed to set the dinner table cuz i was on the phone with a friend in tears, my mama used to drive me nuts with her refrain: “charity begins at home.” i thought that was just another way of getting me to mind my chores.

but, decades later, i get it. i get how hard it is to attend to the one simple command at the core of nearly every world religion: love thy neighbor.

yes, love the lady who shrieks out her window. love the guy whose dog barks through the night. love the ones who park their fancy car in the middle of the alley and don’t think they might be blocking your way.

it’s in the fine grain that we stumble. and that where the grit pits our knees.

it’s pie in the sky — and a cheap way out — to talk in platitudes. it’s a whole other thing to meet that someone on the sidewalk, to look into her eyes, and talk it out. to say i am so sorry you were hurt. to say, i’ll fix it. to invite someone in for coffee — after she’s made it clear she doesn’t much like the way you leave your christmas lights strung up till easter.

i’m not the one who’s in trouble at the moment. but i happen to know that of the eight houses on my side of the block, four are deep in scuffles. and it sickens me to know that in a single ZIP code we cannot find a way toward peace.

and it throws me back to that radical jesus, and maimonides not too long after, and buddha, and mahatma gandhi and mother theresa too, all of whom made it seem so clear, who gave us three words to live by: love thy neighbor.

work it out.

dig deep in your soul’s well, and pull up forgiveness. find compassion. try to imagine how deeply the hurt must be for someone to yell out their window to “mind your own ******’ business.”

this humanity is complicated stuff. not everyone seems to have read the same play book. and no matter how hard we wish, we cannot write the script, nor spew the lines for all to recite.

so how to be the instrument of peace? how oh how, is the question i ask over and over. i don’t have too many answers here. but i do know this: my one holy task, the one way i am choosing to spend my days, is to try. to wake up every morning with that code in mind. to catch myself in the rough spots, just before the fall. and to ask if there’s a kinder, gentler, humbler way to be.

it’s down here in the weeds of our own backyards where the hardest part comes. where it boils down to something more than everyday civility. where if someone’s house was burning, i might run toward the window to catch whatever was being thrown out the windows. where if someone fell on the sidewalk, bleeding, i’d run and hold her hand. wipe her tears. cradle her till the doctors came.

it’s not so hard to send off money to the middle east. what’s hard is walking down the sidewalk, or watering the garden, when someone turns the other way.

it’s in the squeeze of that human vise when we need call on our better, finer, wiser, kinder angels, to not only turn the other cheek, but to figure out a way to span the divide. to sow love where there is hurt. to be the living, breathing instrument of peace.

for that i pray. day after day after day.

diana butler bass, an author and historian who calls herself a public theologian, is someone whose voice i’ve been listening more intently to these past couple years. she points her focus on the intersection of modernday culture (often political culture) and religion and spirituality, and she scythes through any hint of hypocrisy and flat-out baloney. she stands, unflinchingly, for the good. this past week, she was writing about bread and wine and wisdom, and i stumbled into this one paragraph (bolded below) which held me for a long while. wisdom is something i look for, hope for, reach for. i love the way bass takes the hard turns in our lives and sets them as the building blocks upon which the wisdom rises. i love that “bad choices” is part of her mix of what might lead to wisdom. it’s not just that we’re the recipients, that bad things “just happen to us.” sometimes, she wisely puts it, we bring the dark times on. we can be culpable. we can stumble. and do dumb things. words we wish we could stuff back in our mouths. invitations we wish we didn’t turn down. chances we wish we were brave enough to have tried. she makes me wish i could turn back the clock of time just long enough across the arc of my life to tap little me on the shoulder to let me know the dark days i was stepping into were going to be the days that in the end would grow me into the wise old woman i’d long prayed i’d become. here’s diana on hard-won wisdoms…

Central to bread and wine is the exact same principle: In order to become what they are, they must be transformed from one thing into another. When a leavening agent is introduced to flour and water, it becomes a dough that bakes into bread. When yeast consumes the sugar in juice, it ferments the fruit and turns it into wine. Wheat and fruit are, in effect, broken down and simplified by an outside agent, turning them into bread and wine. That’s what fermentation does.

But this process takes time. Bread must be worked, kneaded, left to rise, reworked, and baked. Wine is the result of weeks or months or even years of yeasts breaking down sugar and slowly turning fruit into alcohol. Bread and wine are staple foods for everyone, and yet they demand great patience of bakers and vintners. Neither happens immediately. One must learn the craft of these foods over time. They cannot be rushed. Staples, yes. Slow foods, absolutely. The best things to grace our tables — those things that sustain us and give us joy — result from an intentional and gradual undertaking.

Wisdom is like that, too. How does one pursue wisdom? Where do you find it? Perhaps it is like bread and wine. It begins as something else — an experience, a loss, suffering, bad choices. But when some leaven — like the Spirit — is introduced, these original ingredients are transformed into wisdom through a process of fermentation that takes time. Wisdom cannot be rushed. You learn, you craft, you wait. Eventually, what was becomes something else — something lasting and satisfying.

i didn’t mean for this to line up quite so charmingly, but another thing that utterly grabbed me this week was this bit of poetry sent by my beloved poet friend win. it’s a poem called “butter knife.” bread and butter, how perfect. but first a word about win, who this year started up a wisdom gathering she sends out every monday morning. it’s called metta monday, and in it she gathers up a bouquet that stirs me, fuels me, and often draws out a tear. her well is deep, and she harvests broadly, drawing on sages and poets and zen masters. i’m not quite sure how you’d sign up for it, but if you leave word here, i will be sure win finds you. she starts your week with a rocketblast of all you need to make it to the other side. . .

click here for butter knife, a poem by hollie mcNish about wonder, and specifically about the wonders and wizardry of the human body and the interplay between blood, sweat, tears and the soul….where “teardrops can be conjured out of thoughts…” it’s a beauty! we might all climb on the hollie mcNish train….

do you have a story to tell of watching love blossom and break through darkness?

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August 16, 2024

gathering a congregation of sages…

if you asked me today what church i belong to, i might stumble into an answer that wasn’t much of an answer. it might go round about. explain that sometimes i feel like an orphan. yes, there is a place where i go on the sundays when i’m on duty. i’m an altar girl at a church that welcomes my presence, where the sermons are great, but where i’m not much of a signer-upper which makes me feel a bit like a slacker. i have a synagogue, where sometimes i wander in to talk with the rabbi. where i can find myself in the deepest of prayer.

but the truth i’ve been wrestling with all summer long is that, mostly, i feel lost, adrift.

i didn’t grow up with a deep congregational sense. i talked to God most of the time from behind the closed door of my childhood bedroom. i found God in the notes i wrote, night after night during high school, to a motley band of the broken-hearted, the lost, and the otherwise looking for warmth. for a friend.

good thing i grew up with a mama who quoted emily dickinson more than anyone else. who taught me the lines of this poem that’s been ground into my soul in the finest of fine-grain elixirs:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236)

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

the other thing my mama taught me––the one line she etched onto my soul was this: don’t let the Church get in the way of God.

my mama, a girl who grew up in a convent where the nuns taught her to curtsy each time she dashed past the statue of the Pink Madonna (a story is told that one of the nuns–these are Sacred Heart nuns–once tried to paint a portrait of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and what she painted was so godawful, they tossed a rug over the thing, to hide it, and some time later when the rug was pulled off, lo and behold, there was a breathtakingly beautiful Mother of God decked out not in the usual blue but in pink. thus, the Pink Madonna that Sacred Heart girls (and their dutiful daughters) seek out whenever and wherever in the world they sense themselves in breathing distance of one of the few extant copies), my mama, as devout as the day is long, is far more radical than you might imagine for a girl who grew up in a convent in the most parochial burg of cincinnati, ohio. and that might be one of the things i treasure most about my mama.

and maybe that has something to do with my unwavering quest to find my way in this world along a path populated by sages, and not always of the churchly persuasion. i find holiness in unorthodox moments and places and, often, smack dab in the thick of a sentence.

i might not belong to a particular church these days. but i gather a goodly––and godly––congregation of pathfinders along my way. my church, quite often, rises up from the page.

i read, hour by hour, and day after day, with an eye out for wisdoms and truths, and guideposts to stir me. something akin to wandering an orchard, plucking from trees the lushest of fruits. i find my convictions deepened. my heart, often on fire. my intent: to make this blip that is my life as blessed as i can make it. i live by a gospel of love, one with an emphasis on that which is tender, and gentle not harsh. i believe, more and more, in humility. in understanding how little i know. and how much there is still for me to learn. to understand.

we live in a world that some days feels like it’s spewing all that i detest: there is cruelty, and hubris, and parading around as if no one else matters.

but then i open a book. or click on a text from a most blessed friend. and i read words that resonate. that underscore what seems to be Truth with a capital T. and i feel less alone, and less lost.

these are the lines that spoke to me this week in this holy space of my own making; one is from hafiz, the 14th-century sufi poet, another from thich nhat hanh, the blessed buddhist monk who died just two years ago, and the third is from greg boyle, the jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehab program, based in east LA, and whose book, barking to the choir, is now on my most-wanted list.

first up, a prayer poem sent by a beloved friend, one from hafiz, the sufi poet, from a translation by daniel ladinsky, and which my blessed friend found in the pages of greg boyle’s barking to the choir:

Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come Dance with Me, come dance.”

i love a God who whirls with me, who invites me into the dance.

next up, thich nhat hanh:

Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.

oh, that we should enter deep into the wounds of another. and therein find the walls of our own hearts widening and deepening, and our compulsion to hold a trembling hand the surest thing we can do.

and, finally, once down the greg boyle rabbit hole, i just got deeper and deeper, and then i found this:

“For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow . . . only now.”

― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

tenderness, the connective tissue of love . . .

to which i whisper, amen…

who do you gather in your congregation of sages?

photo above, of Mater Admirabilis, the Pink Madonna, is from our trip to rome back in may, during which, dutiful daughter that i am, i trekked to the top of the Spanish Steps, rang a bell at the convent of the sacred heart (my mother’s breed of nuns), turned over my passport for entry to the upper chapel where Our Lady resides, and beheld her.

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August 9, 2024

of pickled onions and a particular fondness for kentucky’s homegrown farmer bard

in which the somnolence of summer has settled into its seasonal adagio so much so that pickling a red onion or two, and slow-reading the poetries and musings of one wendell berry is as fever-pitched as it gets around here. welcome to my slo-mo world of the week.

it started when i stumbled on the poem below, a poem that captures the quietude of a couplet of humans who’ve breathed in unison for so long they can fill the silence richly. so it is here in this old house of late, where only two of us now reside. where we know the choreography of most days by heart. and come and go as in a wordless waltz. there’s an ease now, one i never imagined, as i balked mightily long ago about the idea of two lives squeezed under one roof and in a labyrinth of too-tight rooms. but over time, across all these years (near 33), the respirations of our souls have aligned, at least enough to feel our echo in the lines below. those lines, by wendell berry, the poet, novelist, and conservation farmer whom i count as one of my heroes, were just enough to take me down the rabbit hole that is the life and work of kentucky’s homegrown literary treasure. and, besides, mr. berry’s birthday was this week, the fifth of august, wedged, it so happens, between the birthdays of two of the three humans whom i count as pillars holding up my world and whose arrivals to the planet are marked across the week in that steady beat of 4-6-8.

here’s the poem that got me started:

They Sit Together on the Porch
By Wendell Berry

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

i shared the verse with the one with whom i share these walls, and he wrote back that he found it “haunting,” which made me see the lines anew. and was just enough to prompt a bit more poking around, again reminded how much i love the poetries that come with accumulated lifelong wisdoms. and that’s where i then re-bumped into this 2019 dispatch from the new yorker, a days-long interview between bard and scribe, one distilled and put to paper. it’s worth a read in whole (link below will take you straight to it), but i’ll pluck a few parts should your summer’s day demand a snappier pace than mine (or should a paywall keep you out):

the dispatch, titled Going Home with Wendell Berry, is by amanda petrusich, a new yorker staff writer and writer-in-residence at the gallatin school of individualized study at NYU. a 2016 guggenheim fellow, she writes often about music, and blessedly for us she takes the occasional road trip down kentucky way. in this case, she wound her way to where berry’s farmed for more than four decades, a little town that goes by the name port royal. sixty-three miles from the dot in the blue-grass map my papa called home (paris, KY), and one mile from the meandering kentucky river, it’s a town you might think ol’ garrison keillor pulled from his imagination. (in 2010, its population, according to the U.S. Census, was all of 64 humans.) it’s a town one writer (sandra mcCracken, a singer-songwriter) described thusly (and not too surprisingly given the threadworn quilt that is rural america these days): “Port Royal is a patchwork strip of storefronts, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of spot made up of a local bank, a post office, a general store with a built-in diner (with little printed signs about their town’s famous author, Wendell Berry), and an old Baptist church. I am sad to report that, like most small towns in our country, Port Royal looks as though it is dying.”

here’s how the new yorker‘s chronicling of that luscious conversation between journalist (petrusich) and poet (berry) begins:

Two and a half years ago, feeling existentially adrift about the future of the planet, I sent a letter to Wendell Berry, hoping he might have answers. Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he’s perhaps best known for “The Unsettling of America,” a book-length polemic, from 1977, which argues that responsible, small-scale agriculture is essential to the preservation of the land and the culture. The book felt radical in its day; to a contemporary reader, it is almost absurdly prescient. Berry, who is now eighty-four, does not own a computer or a cell phone, and his landline is not connected to an answering machine. We corresponded by mail for a year, and in November, 2018, he invited me to visit him at his farmhouse, in Port Royal, a small community in Henry County, Kentucky, with a population of less than a hundred.

Berry and his wife, Tanya, received me with exceptional kindness, and fed me well. Berry takes conversation seriously, and our talks in his book-lined parlor were extensive and occasionally vulnerable. One afternoon, he offered to drive me around Port Royal in his pickup truck to show me a few sights: the encroachment of cash crops like soybeans and corn on nearby farms, the small cemetery where his parents are buried, his writing studio, on the Kentucky River. Berry’s connection to his home is profound—several of his novels and short stories are set in “Port William,” a semi-fictionalized version of Port Royal—and his children now run the Berry Center, a nonprofit dedicated to educating local communities about sustainable agriculture. Our correspondence would continue, but, before I left, Berry gave me a broadside letterpress of his poem “A Vision.” I think often of some of its final lines, which clarify, for me, what it means to truly know a place:

Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament.

here’s but one of the questions captured from their conversation (with a few lines in bold for emphasis):

Q: Have you always farmed here?

A: Right away, we had a large garden, and we kept two milk cows. We fattened two hogs to slaughter, for our own meat. We had a flock of chickens. And we had some fruit that we produced ourselves, and some that was wild. We were sitting down during that time to a lot of meals that came entirely from under our own feet by our own effort. And our children came up in that way of living. The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel. You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing.

and here’s another exchange:

Q: It’s funny, clarity is often undervalued in art. One of the things I admire about your writing, especially the essays, which feel like polemics, is that you’re very clear in your arguments. They’re beautifully supported. In the new book, you talk about how you often read seeking instruction. I’m curious how you balance that idea with reading for beauty, savoring the visceral pleasure of words.

A: You’re being fed in an essential way by the beauty of things you read and hear and look at. A well-made sentence, I think, is a thing of beauty. But then, a well-farmed farm also can feed a need for beauty. In my short story “The Art of Loading Brush,” when Andy Catlett and his brother go to a neighbor’s farm, there’s a wagonload of junk, and it’s beautifully loaded. Andy’s brother says, “He couldn’t make an ugly job of work to save his life.” In the epigraph I use from Aldo Leopold he questions if there’s any real distinction between esthetics and economics.

and here, in case you’re even a little bit hooked, is a poem worth reading in whole. it’s from a 1965 volume of Poetry magazine, and it’s excerpts from an early Berry wonder, titled, “The Handing Down,” a poem about a grandfather and grandson sitting on a porch and the quiet conversation that unspools between them. read those excerpts here.

oh, and about those onions. . . my kid, the one who turned 23 yesterday, finds himself a line cook these days at a chicago eatery of some notoriety; girl and the goat, it’s called, and stephanie izard, who dreamed up the joint seems to have a particular fondness for things pickled. she pickles everything from kumquats to mushrooms to beets. i decided pickled red onions might be a summery thing to do, and besides i like a little crunch amid the strata of my sandwich. and, as with many a task in my kitchen, i pickle the easy way. no cauldrons steaming for me. no sterilizing jars and lids. i dumped a little of this, stirred in some of that, and by next morning, i had a jar of garnet rings shimmering in my fridge. i’m not fond of sugar these days (i never was, and then a dear friend told me cancer is fond of sugar, making it something of a foe of mine, thus i’ve perma-sealed my lips to sugar’s sweetness), so i searched for pickling roadmap that steered clear of the sugar bin. here’s what i found: (and ps i have no real clue what whole30 compliant means, so feel free to disregard.)

what captured your fancy this week, quick-clipped or slow?

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August 2, 2024

all these years later

forty-four cakes. three-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-eight candles. that’s how many cakes and candles we’ve missed since my papa died in the winter of 1981. i counted it up because today would have been his 96th birthday. he didn’t make it past 52.

all these years later the second of august is still a day i remember.

i remember the sunny sunday mornings when honeydew melon and handmade cards were strewn at his place at the dining room table, birthday brunch a step-up from the requisite eggs, bacon, and toast after ten-o’clock mass. i remember, in the preambles to birthday dinner, the glistening of his pewter mug, summer’s sultry humidity meeting the cold of his ice cubes and tonic and gin. the quarter of lime floating canoe-like near the rim. eight-minute burgers on the grill, corn on the cob littering all of our chins.

i remember his laugh.

much, though, fades.

i can’t remember the sound of his voice. or the way he called me barbie. i remember a few lines, but not the ones my brothers often remember. i remember the time he told me he’d prayed and prayed and could not understand why he was driving me to the hospital. i remember the time, driving home from my college graduation, when he told me he’d felt his mother right beside him when they called out the names of those who, like him long before, were graduating with highest latin honors, and he watched me rise from my seat in the crowded arena.

i remember how one late summer’s afternoon he called me from the office and asked me to meet him for burgers on the outdoor cafe of a place called jerome’s in lincoln park, a place he deemed “kicky.” my papa liked things that were “kicky” or “cool.” my papa, born of a locomotive engineer and a country school teacher in little bitty paris, kentucky, never shed the marvel of being a big-city ad man in the heady era of Mad Men and martini lunches and sixty-second commercials whose jingles and cutlines stoked the soundtrack of america’s bell-bottomed woodstock-and-watergate age. my papa liked to travel the globe. to give speeches in sydney and meetings in munich. he liked his corporate apartment in mid-town manhattan. he loved new york city. a place he never wanted to move us; he’d moved his moptop crew too many times, he and my mama agreed. one more uprooting might do us in. so he more or less made a weekly commute to the big juicy apple.

and home base for all those years was the two-story colonial with all the big trees at the bend in the dead-end lane. he brought the “neat, keen, cool, fab, it’s a blast” to our dutch backdoor, and on in to the big oval table where, at 6:30 sharp each night of the week except for on sunday when we pushed it to 5:30, we sat down for dinner, all seven of us. if there was something new out there in the world, my papa wanted us to know. didn’t matter if it was a word or a box soon to be labeled “hamburger helper.” he was our conduit, our passport, to all that was grander and jazzier than our sleepy little burg one in from the lake.

those are the things, all these decades later, i still remember––like yesterday. i remember, too, the year after he died when i thought i might never stop crying. how there were nights when i wailed a wild-animal sort of a wail, and bit into my pillow to muffle the sound. i never thought i would know joy again.

i never thought the ache would stop aching.

but here we are: two kids, a long marriage, and a whole career later. my papa had no idea i––a nurse when he died––would take his and my shared love of words and make a life of it. but the first day i sat down in the chicago tribune newsroom and they told me i needed a password, i knew just what i’d type each time i needed to rev up my desktop computer: my papa’s initials and mine; he was a part of every start to every story. and i never dropped his last name, cuz i wanted my papa to stay in the news. and in print. day after day. byline by byline.

here’s where i fell short: no matter how many stories i’ve told my boys and the man i love the most, i have not come close to bringing my papa to life. and, believe me, i’ve tried. no story, no matter how animated, no matter the gleam in my eye, can ever, ever come close. the man was a human high-wattage bulb. he was known for his wit. but i remember the tenderest parts. i’ve tried to bring all of it forth over the years.

but all these years later, it fades. and the truth is, my papa fades too. there’s too much i cannot remember.

grief and time make for an odd, sometimes cruel calculus. yes, the aching abates most of the time. though the piercing can come and come strong. in a grocery aisle. when a certain song comes on. when you’re trying to tell––or to catch every word of––a particular story. (writing these words here this morning, the tears have come too. if i’ve wallowed in moments, in memories, here, it’s only to make it all last. to live in those moments again.)

as much as the gasping for air is no longer a part of the grief, so too the frames of a life reel on, and the erasing begins. after so, so many years, you sometimes forget the one who’s no longer there. not always, and not in those crucible moments, when time itself feels condensed and magnified all at once. i too have felt my papa beside me when my firstborn walked a graduation stage; when my firstborn became a professor of law (a profession my papa once yearned for). i’ve watched how tender my so-called “little one” is, especially to my papa’s widow (“grammy” to both of my boys), and i know my papa would melt. but, truth is, ordinary time mostly hurls by, and i don’t remember. and then i might catch myself with a twinge. or i might not catch myself at all. there’s an anesthesia in grief that i never saw coming. maybe it saves us. maybe it’s cruel.

maybe that’s why there are birthdays, even when the someone is gone. especially when someone is gone. they become remembering days. they are days without cakes and no candles. but, in the silent chambers of the heart and the mind and the soul where time knows no rules, those someones return.

my papa rumbles in me this morning. in the only way i know how, i just brought him back. and i didn’t need to close my eyes, or make a wish, or blow out candles to make it happen.

he’s here. right beside me. in each of these stories. i know it.

happy birthday, dear papa. i love you forever.

at our house, we have an august birthday parade, a 2-4-6-8 of celebrations. so most blessed of birthdays i wish for my brother david (4), my blair(6), my teddy(8). i love you each and all to the moon and mars and beyond.…

tell a story of any someone you miss. any story. any someone. we’ll make this a party.

17 Comments

July 26, 2024

summer is for cooking. no, really.

when the day presents itself as sooty afghan, gray and soft and without shadow. when the air is cool, so cool that cranking the oven is not an act of self-destruction. when the bins at farmers’ market are nearly tumbling to the parking lot below, so weighted by their zaftig field-plucked wares. well, on summer days like that the itch to cook begins.

and so it was the other morning i woke up with eggplant visions. eggplant layered lushly with cheesy-herby oozy pillows in between. all bathed in marinara. baked. dubbed summer’s abbondonza eggplant lasagna.

i promised easy reading here in summer time. and thus, below, i keep my promise, with nothing more strenuous to read than a grocery list of things to gather, and step-by-step notes so you can play along.

abbondonza eggplant lasagna, with more than a few idiosyncratic twists

(as always, i read a few recipes, extract a few cues and follow my whims from there. this began from something that zipped by me on instagram, and led me to a website called mediterranean something or other, and wound up so delicious i gobbled two oozy squares the size of my dinner plate. my annotations below in italics, which is basically me talking back to the recipe. . .)

Ingredients

2 to 3 eggplants (about 1 ½ pounds), sliced lengthwise into ½-inch thick slices (about 10 to 12 slices)
1 zucchini, sliced into coins (or honestly any shape you choose)
1 pint cherry tomatoes
Extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
1 large egg
1 15-oz tub part-skim ricotta cheese
1 ½ cup part-skim mozzarella cheese, divided
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
3 garlic cloves minced (i squeezed mine through garlic press)
1 teaspoon dried oregano
10 oz frozen spinach, thawed and fully dried (wring out all the water)
1 cup packed chopped fresh parsley
½ cup packed chopped fresh basil, ⅔ ounce
Black pepper to your liking
2 generous cups marinara sauce of choice (i used trader giotto’s organic tomato basil marinara)

Instructions

Season the eggplant slices on both sides with kosher salt and set aside for 20 to 30 minutes (if you don’t have the time, this step can be optional). i skipped this part, because i didn’t have time and because i recently read that these days eggplant has been cured of its bitterness.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and position a rack in the middle.
Wipe the eggplant slices very well with a paper towel (you want to dry it well and remove any excess salt), then arrange on parchment-lined baking sheet (or two if needed). Brush both sides of the eggplant with extra virgin olive oil. Roast in the heated oven until the eggplant softens and becomes pliable (about 15 to 20 minutes or so on the first side, at least another 10 minutes for the B side, which might be because i have a cranky old oven). to this step i added sliced zucchini, and a tub of cherry tomatoes, similarly brushed with oil, and roasted on their own sheet pan.
While the eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes are roasting, prepare the ricotta filling. In a mixing bowl, beat the egg. Add the ricotta, 1 cup mozzarella, ¼ Parmesan, garlic, oregano, spinach and chopped herbs. Add a small pinch of kosher salt and black pepper to your liking. Mix well to combine. i wandered out to my so-called farm (a raised bed alongside the back alley) and snipped a cup’s worth of basil and another of flat-leaf parsley; the freshness filled the air surrounding my cutting board.
Remove the eggplant, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes from the oven. Lower the heat to 375 degrees F.
Prepare a 9 x 13-inch baking dish. Pour a bit of the pasta sauce (i used 1 cup of trader joe’s marinara) and spread it out into one layer. Lay a few eggplant slices (anywhere from 4 to 6 and it’s fine if they overlap a bit). Next, add half the zucchini slices and half the roasted cherry tomatoes. Spread 1/2 of the ricotta filling, then spread a thin layer of the sauce. Repeat the process in the same pattern. Spread the final layer of sauce and follow with the remaining ½ cup mozzarella cheese and ¼ cup of Parmesan.
Cover the dish tightly with foil. Bake in the heated oven for 15 to 20 minutes, then carefully uncover and return to the oven. Bake for another 10 to 20 minutes or until the cheese has melted and the edges of the lasagna turn a nice golden brown.
Let the lasagna rest for 10 minutes before cutting and serving.
Slice and savor. And then daydream about it till you get around to making it again.

not all who wander to the chair believe in the stove as kitchen essential, and thus for those good souls and anyone else who never minds a blessing, here’s a treasure sent to me weeks back by dear beloved chair friend nan. it’s a blessing from kate bowler, who is herself something of a wonder. a four-times NYT best-selling author, a professor of american religious history at duke divinity school, the scholar who wrote the book on the prosperity gospel, a wife and mother and 35-year-old when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, deemed incurable, and now (nine years later) is cancer-free, she’s taken as her mission “giving you permission to be human.” fully human: warts, dents, soft spots, wonders, glories, whole truths and nothing but the truths.

i’ve been in a room where kate was speaking and she is hilarious. and self-deprecating. and doesn’t present herself as the eighth wonder of the world (which isn’t always the case at writing festivals that showcase those who’ve gained fame by building sentences that grow into paragraphs that fly off the shelves and rack up fine profits). so, with no further ado, and deep thanks to our beloved nan, here is a blessing from kate that, to my mind, gets to the heart of so much that matters:

the blessing above is from kate’s book of blessings, co-written with the lovely jessica richie, and titled “The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days.”

may all of us work to be the ones who notice the light in their eyes, or when that light dims, and to always not be afraid of scooting up close, close as need be, to their suffering.

and that’s the news from the summer kitchen this week. xox

where did you find blessing this week, at the cookstove or otherwise?

a little step-by-step picture guide: blops of ricotta-herb-spinach

10 Comments

July 19, 2024

summer idyll: another name for “idle”

summertime is for slow. and slow i am this summer. i watch bunnies make breakfast buffet of my flowerpots. i keep vigil for a redbud tree that might be on its death march. i cut corn off the cob and dump it into confetti-like salads, delicious salads of tomato, armenian cucumber, and fists full of basil. i swim, slowly and gasping for air at the end of the lanes, in a pool where i am the youngest by a few decades.

and of course i read, an exercise that requires little other than the moving of one’s pupils, the occasional blink, and the turning of pages should one resort to that quaint document, the page.

and so it was in reading this week that those pupils of mine––and the braincells behind them––paused for deep consideration when i came across a commencement address by the late great russian poet and essayist joseph brodsky.

in the summer of 1989, two years after he won the nobel prize in literature and two decades after he fled the soviet dictatorship with the help of w.h. auden, brodsky stepped to the podium at dartmouth college to give the commencement address, later published in a posthumous collection titled, “on grief and reason: essays” (farrar, straus and giroux, 1997).

the topic he chose, curiously, was boredom. but brodsky being brodsky, he soared with it. and because i found it altogether mesmerizing, and because his closing passage stuck with me in what amounts to the cerebral iteration of gum to the bottom of your sneakers, i’m bringing it here to the old make-believe maple table.

what’s true, in these months of living fully awake to the ephemerality of time, is that i soak in especially the wisdoms of those who understand that fleetingness to be central to the sanctifying of time’s each and every parcel. to understand that time is not endless, but rather bracketed and with certain end, is for me anyway the gravitational force that drives my attention out of malaise and into full-on savor.

i hold each grain of time, as often as i pause and catch myself, up to the incandescent luminescence that reveals and magnifies its wonder. in other words, i aim to live with one of these in my back pocket, gliding time beneath my ever-ready looking glass:

here then is where brodsky begins his deep-dive into boredom, as he looked out upon a sea of soon-to-be-graduates at that ivy-covered college in new hampshire’s piney countryside (i’d endorse reading clear through these next few grafs, but if you’re pressed for time, leap down to the bottom of read to see if you, too, are struck by brodsky’s likening our time here to a ride on a runaway train, and his admonition to seize each blessed frame as it’s passing by):

Known under several aliases – anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, acedia, etc. – boredom is a complex phenomenon and by large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won’t supply you with that option, for life’s main medium is precisely repetition.

[…]

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it. That’s what accounts, perhaps, for one’s dread of lonely, torpid evenings, for the fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck of dust swirls in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, the day is hot, and your willpower is at zero.

Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speakes the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life – the one you didn’t get here, on these green lawns – the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. “You are finite,” time tells you in a voice of boredom, “and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.” As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust swirls in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those fleck! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small. And do you know what the dust says when it’s being wiped off the table?

“Remember me,”
whispers the dust.

Nothing could be farther away from the mental agenda of any of you, young and newfangled, than the sentiment expressed in this two-liner of the German poet Peter Huchel, now dead.

brodsky closes his address with the words that first caught my eye this week, and that i––once again––will aim to not forget:

[…]

What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doesn’t stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck — not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past… receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck. So… look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past.

i reached for that confetti salad glamour shot above because it was a bit more visual than trying to find an image of boredom. it was perhaps the most delicious thing i made this week (the grilled salmon that arrived with the salad was mighty good, but i did nothing other than introduce it to the heat of the grill), and if you’re now hungry, here’s the recipe, courtesy of david lebovitz, a former pastry chef from chez panisse now a cookbook writer living in paris. lucky david.

fresh corn, tomato, cucumber, avocado, basil summer salad

2-3 ears of fresh corn
2 cups (350g) cherry tomatoes , (or 2 cups fresh tomatoes, diced)
1 ripe avocado
1/2 cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 cup (75g) loosely packed chopped fresh basil, (reserve any small leaves for garnish) Freshly ground black pepper
Vinaigrette
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1-2 small shallots, peeled and minced (1-2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon sea or kosher salt
6 tablespoons (90ml) extra-virgin olive oil

Shuck the corn and remove it from the cob.
Remove any stems and slice the cherry tomatoes in half.
Peel the avocado, remove the pit, and dice the flesh. Cut the cucumber into similar sized cubes.
Put the corn kernels, tomatoes, avocado, cucumber, and basil into a serving bowl and season with freshly ground black pepper.
In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mustard, shallots, salt, and olive oil. Pour the vinaigrette dressing over the salad and gently mix together. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if necessary.

Serving and storage: The dressed salad can be served right away or in a few hours. (It can be stored in the refrigerator or at room temperature, but should be served room temperature.) It’s best the same day it’s made.

your thoughts on the runaway train (above) welcome here, with the related question, what are the ways you remind yourself to live each day mindful of the preciousness and miracle that it holds?

5 Comments

July 12, 2024

summer reading: the writer who gave us spider webs and a little mouse, plus other wisdoms

elwyn brooks white, best known to those who loved him as “andy,” and best known to you and me alphabetically as “e.b.,” taught me as much about love as just about any author i’ve ever read. and that includes the sacred texts of just about any religion i’ve happened upon.

every time i’ve pored over the words of charlotte’s web, or stuart little, or “death of a pig,” among the most masterful essays put to paper, i’ve felt the walls of my heart widen, and the bottom go deeper. perched against pillows in the old four-poster bed where both our boys inhabited the dreamland of their youths, i recall the sobs coming in echoes––from the one who was reading and the one being read to––as i choked my way through the tear-blurred words at the top of a still-splotted page 171: “she knew he was saying good-bye in the only way he could. and she knew her children were safe.” (i can’t even type that last sentence now without the tears coming again, filling my sockets.) “. . . she never moved again.” and then “. . .no one was with her when she died.”

we are reading, of course, of a spider. a spider we have all come to love, named charlotte.

and any writer who could make me love with all my heart an arachnid is a writer about whom i can never ever know enough. so it was with purest, geyser-like joy that i turned the pages this week of the first-ever fully illustrated biography of the legendary elwyn brooks white.

part collage, part scrap book, with excerpts of e.b.’s letters, and sketches, and reprints of early drafts and revisions in his own handwritten manuscript, Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White, by the caldecott honor winner melissa sweet, is at heart a love story told of one of the great disciples of love in its quietest, most undeniable forms.

e.b.’s life’s work, as he saw it, and as he wrote in a letter to a reader of charlotte’s web, boils down, pretty much, to this:

love these days seems to be a commodity of which the world is running short. but andy, or e.b., set out to make us see it, and feel it deep in our bones, by telling us the stories, as he put it, “of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart.” he calls those matters “the only kind of creative work which i could accomplish with any sincerity or grace.”

well, dear andy, my gratitude to you is etched on the chambers of my heart, a graffiti of the highest order. to teach a child that love comes in the corner of a barn or even atop the manure pile where wilbur the pig so merrily huddled, well, that’s a blessing pure and certain. and imperative, i’d argue. and too often missed, i’d add.

because he’s earned his post as ballast for my wobbly, sometimes-too-tender heart, wasn’t i delighted when i turned to page 132 in this charmed and charming illustrated biography, and found this excerpt from andy’s letters, which seemed to me a prescriptive for these hard times and the dark clouds under which we find ourselves:

“things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. it is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. but as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time, waiting to sprout when the conditions are right.“

i’ll stop there with my old friend e.b., because that’s the line i want to consider, the line i want us to latch onto and live.

and so, what a curious thing that the next wise soul i wandered into this week was one olga jacoby, a german-jewish englishwoman and mother of four adopted children, who, in 1909 at age 35, had received a terminal diagnosis from her doctor, and sat down to write him a letter on the subject of living and dying without religion, but with moral courage, kindness, and a stunning receptivity to beauty. their correspondence would unfold until jacoby’s death four years later, and her letters, “by turns funny, touching, and intensely sad,” were published posthumously and anonymously by her husband in 1919.

in her first letter, to “my dear doctor,” she boiled down her belief to this:

“To leave a good example to those I love [is] my only understanding of immortality.”

and a year into her diagnosis she illuminated that notion:

“. . . More and more to me this simplest of thoughts seems right: Live, live keenly, live fully; make ample use of every power that has been given us to use, to use for the good end. Blind yourself to nothing; look straight at sadness, loss, evil; but at the same time look with such intense delight at all that is good and noble that quite naturally the heart’s longing will be to help the glory to triumph, and that to have been a strong fighter in that cause will appear the only end worth achieving. The length of life does not depend on us.”

and, she leaves us with this bedrock of lived truth:

“. . . Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give. Once given out love is set rolling for ever to amass more, resembling an avalanche by the irresistible force with which it sweeps aside all obstacles, but utterly unlike in its effect, for it brings happiness wherever it passes and lands destruction nowhere.”

who teaches you on the subject of love? what seeds of goodness harbor in you, and how will you coax them to sprout? and how might you put into practice the avalanche of irresistible force practiced by spiders and pigs alike (at least in the rich imagination of one e.b. white) and that, to the dying mother of four, was the most lasting thing that ever there was?

Some Writer! came to me, as so many of the best so-called children’s books do, by way of my best longest friend, auntie mullane, the children’s librarian, who prescribed it as the sure cure for summer blues, or any blues that might befall us in this dark-clouded era.

12 Comments

July 5, 2024

of joy and hope in hard times

evidence of joy lurking somewhere in the house

joy comes in curious form. in simplest form sometimes. it arrived deep in the night last night in the form of tiptoes up the stairs. and then a creak of bedroom door. had i not been lost in the murky land of dreams i might have been startled, might have worried that burglars were afoot. instead, i somehow thought it was the mate asleep beside me, that he’d roused and went out lurking. but then i felt the lump beneath the sheets. and as the murk faded i realized the night visitor must be the very one who’d called that room his own for so many years.

a night visitor, sometimes, brings joy.

and so it is that the simple knowing that, come the waking hour (his waking hour clocks in hours beyond mine), i’ll be at the stove tossing berries in a pond of batter, is enough to wash me in a morning’s joy.

it’s as simple as that sometimes. as narrow-focused.

these days, i contemplate strategies for making joy. and survival.

we live in dark times. not so dark as other moments in history, perhaps, but dark enough to make it hard to dodge the shadow. or the pit in my belly that will not subside.

i found myself turning, this week, in three different instances to albert camus. not the first on my list when it comes to literary prozac, but thrice he and his wisdoms came through for me. his words, drawn from a collection of posthumously published essays, speak across the decades, and if a writer born into one world war, who lived through another, could find it in his soul searching to seek and find a trail of hope, well then he’s one to whom i’ll listen.

in the year i was born, camus (1913-1960) became the second-youngest laureate of the nobel prize for literature, awarded for writing that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience.” the problems he mined were these: art as resistance, happiness as our moral obligation, and the measure of strength through difficult times.

one of my modern-day muses, as you might have gathered if you read here very often, is the cultural critic maria popova who rarely fails to pluck gems worth tucking in forever chests. in a trail that led me to her this week, i found that some years ago she too took a turn into the deep well of camus. she wrote:

“During WWII, Camus stood passionately on the side of justice; during the Cold War, he sliced through the Iron Curtain with all the humanistic force of simple kindness. But as he watched the world burn its own future in the fiery pit of politics, he understood that time, which has no right side and no wrong side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that ‘real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.’”

she goes on to point out that in camus’ writing she hears the echo of the young dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed (“to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart,” dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its task”). these giants of literature belong on our nearest shelves for, in so many ways, they’ve left us instructions––or is it imperatives?––for living.

and here we hear camus:

“What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.”

not realizing i was tracing camus through the week, the first time he caught my eye this week was in the single short first sentence below, which hit me as a fist to the belly as i count my days under the penumbra of those first three words:

“Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?”

and finally, at 27, camus wrote this, speaking for this moment as well as the dark, dark times of 1940 when he wrote them:

“Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.”

as if all that was not enough to carry me across the tide of this july’s miasma, it was with joyful inkling of recognition that my reading unearthed this most unforgettable line of camus: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

do yourself a favor and check out camus’ lyrical and critical essays. and consider leaving the front door unlocked lest any night visitor might wander in with reservation for blueberry pancake breakfast.

and may we all find that invincible summer.

what carried you across the abyss this week?

my night visitor, of course, is the boy we rarely see these days as he is ever toiling in the kitchen of stephanie izard’s famed girl and the goat eatery. but the holiday upon us drew him out of the city to an old friend’s house, where the hour was late enough that trains must have ceased their chugging along the track, and thus we scored him for the night. good thing the sheets are always clean, and the griddle ever at the ready.

the cookie dome above, scattered with bits of brownie crumb, is one of the few clues left behind by the night visitor. i always delight in remnant evidence when i awake in the morning and find the kitchen not exactly as i’d left it. those crumbs bring volumes of joy to me…

6 Comments

June 28, 2024

where my rabbit hole led me this week. . .

one in a series of summertime esoterica, in which for no particular reason my attention is drawn to this, that, or the other thing…

deep in my summertime poking-around ways, a pursuit of reading akin to ambling barefoot through dew-sodden grass, i found myself the other day burrowing into a rabbit hole, following the trail of a late-19th-century theologian with radical ideas and gloriously poetic prayers. (i might just as effortlessly follow the trail of what to do with too much zucchini, or why banana-peel-steeped waters are so fine for my fledgling tomatoes…it’s a carousel of wonders here on curiosity row…)

the theologian of the week, here in rabbit-hole land, is one walter rauschenbusch, the late 19th-century clergyman and theologian who led the Social Gospel movement in the U.S., and whose work is said to have influenced a litany of great 20th-century social-justice warriors, among them martin luther king jr., desmond tutu, lucy randolph mason, reinhold niebuhr, and george mcgovern. his animating idea was that not just individuals but the whole of society needed to work toward what he termed “the kingdom of God” on earth, a place where justice and peace as well as equal rights and a democratic distribution of economic power were holy and necessary works, ones that demanded constant and unrelenting effort.

rauschenbusch’s radical theology, it seems, was informed by eleven years working as a baptist pastor in NYC’s aptly-named Hell’s Kitchen, where he presided over the funerals of hundreds of children who died from the ravages of impoverishment—malnutrition, domestic violence spurred by overcrowded tenements, or any of the other ills born of economic destitution.

rauschenbusch wrote: “I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me.”

of the hundreds of children’s funerals over which rauschenbusch presided (many of them for children younger than five), he wrote:

“At each funeral I would find myself crying out to God, ‘Why do the children have to suffer in this manner?’ I recall on one occasion one of the church members, a single father who worked at a factory for 12 hours each day. His daughter was dying at home and calling out for her daddy. The employer refused to allow the father to go home to be with his daughter in her last hours.

“It was not uncommon to see grown men near our church just begging for work, just so they and their families could survive.

“It was in this context that I began to understand sin in a new and radical way. Baptists had always been known as railing and condemning the sins of alcoholism, smoking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity, such as were exemplified in the lives of the many prostitutes who lived and worked very close to our church. . . .

“The radical conclusion that I came to was this: all of these personal sins which were so obvious to everyone were somehow connected to the sin of structural injustice. So many people saw no hope, no way to extricate themselves from their living hell, their dead-end street. So many would resort to alcoholism. Women would feel compelled to become a prostitute so they could feed themselves and their families. Charles Dickens in his writings helped us see and somewhat feel the environment that could ensnare anyone who was trapped in a world of deprivation and desperation.

“The less obvious sins to most Baptists and other conservative leaders were those that were represented by the vast gulf between those who were extremely opulent, you might say ‘filthy rich,’ and the vast majority of people who were barely able (and oftentimes not able) to get by.”

finding wisdoms from the past for these arduous times is, perhaps, too futile a pursuit. but i believe in the endosperm of hope. and rauschenbusch’s prayers––and his theology––seem apt for a dusting off. and, besides, his prayers are beautifully wrought.

my eye was caught first by one of those prayers, the evening prayer (below) but as i kept reading it was the line above––“I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me.”––and the children’s funerals that informed it, that clutched me at the gut and won’t let go.

here, as a place to begin, is but one of his prayers, with particular resonance for one who delights in all of creation, especially the trials and triumphs just beyond my own back door:

FOR OUR WORLD, OUR EARTH

O God, we thank You for this universe, our great home; for the vastness and richness of our cosmic environment; for the manifoldness of life on the planet of which we are a part.

We are thankful for the morning sun and the clouds and the constellations of stars.

We rejoice in the salt sea and the deep waters and green leaves of grass.

We thank You for our sense by which we experience earth’s splendor.

We would have souls open to all this joy, souls saved from being so weighted with care that we pass unseeing when the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with beauty.

Enlarge within us a sense of fellowship with all that lives and moves and has being in space and time, especially with all who share this earth as their common home with us.

Remembering with shame that in the past, we human beings have all too often exercised high dominion with ruthless cruelty, we admit that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to You in song, has been a groan of travail.

May we so live that our world may not be ravished by our greed nor spoiled by our ignorance.

May we hand on earth’s common heritage of life, undiminished in joy when our bodies return in peace to You, our Great Mother who has nourished them.

and here is the beginning of his evening prayer:

LORD, we praise thee for our sister, the Night, who folds all the tired folk of the earth in her comfortable robe of darkness and gives them sleep. Release now the strained limbs of toil and smooth the brow of care. Grant us the refreshing draught of forgetfulness that we may rise in the morning with a smile on our face. Comfort and ease those who toss wakeful on a bed of pain, or whose aching nerves crave sleep and find it not. Save them from evil or despondent thoughts in the long darkness, and teach them so to lean on thy all-pervading life and love, that their souls may grow tranquil and their bodies, too, may rest. And now through thee we send Good Night to all our brothers and sisters near and far, and pray for peace upon all the earth.

if you’re interested, here’s a link to a PDF of rauschenbusch’s 1910 collection of prayers, For God and the People: Prayers of the Social Awakening.

in the book’s preface, rauschenbusch explained the collection’s genesis: “The language of prayer always clings to the antique for the sake of dignity, and plain reference to modern facts and contrivances jars the ear. So we are inclined to follow the broad avenues beaten by the feet of many generations when we approach God. We need to blaze new paths to God for the feet of modern [women and] men.”

amen, pastor rauschenbusch, amen.

as long as we’re quoting old white men, i admit to being an admirer of the writings of that old-time radio humorist garrison keillor, who has mellowed beyond measure with age. in an ode to summer’s slow pace the other day, he wrote this about morning light, one of the blessings that comes with waking early, a habit i consider essential to the deep breathing of my soul:

It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary.

what ordinary beauties or big ideas captured your imagination this week?

and here’s a harder question (to ponder in your own soul): what shall we do so as not to stay silent in the face of the social sin of the world?

and happy blessed blessed day to my beloved andrea, who makes me laugh hard and often, and whose goodness seems vaster than the circumference of this big blue globe. (A is one of the chair friends who reads dutifully nearly every week, and more often than not sends along a note that melts me or makes me laugh every time…)

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June 21, 2024

of darkness and sunlight in shifting proportion

night was on my mind this week, as the sunlight upon us stretched to its longest shift of the year, the apex of the solstice on thursday, and now the night grows longer minute by minute till winter’s solstice takes its turn, a doh-si-doh of celestial bodies. the interplay of light and shadow is eternal, has been, according to genesis, since the beginning, day one. and it was good.

it might seem counterintuitive to contemplate night when the day is at its longest, but it’s often through the paradoxical that insights are gleaned. a wise and soulful priest pointed me toward considering the illuminations that come in darkness, at a saturday morning retreat in the great gothic-revival church that so often stirs me these days.

and then through the week, i kept stumbling on poems that made me marvel, made me think deep and deeper of the hours of darkness. here are two:

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

––Night in Day by Joseph Stroud

Night Ferry
by John Burnside

Had I been less prepared, I would have left
in springtime, when the plum tree in the yard
was still in bloom,
the windows open after months of snow,
one magpie in the road
and then another.

I could have slipped away, late afternoon,
while everyone was busy somewhere else,
the fish van at the corner, children
dawdling home from school
in twos and threes, a porch light
lit against the dusk on Tollbooth Wynd.

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to prow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

it’s the last stanza of burnside’s that spoke to me most profoundly. “give me these years again and I will / spend them wisely.”

and then, with celestial bodies on my mind, i stumbled onto john burroughs, the naturalist whose wisdoms and poetries never fail to stir me.

“If I had my life to live over again, and had my choice of celestial bodies, I am sure I should take this planet, and iI should choose these men and women for my friends and companions. This great rolling sphere with its sky, its stars, its sunrises and sunsets, and with its outlook into infinity — what could be more desirable? What more satisfying? Garlanded by the seasons, embosomed in sidereal influences, thrilling with continents — one might ransack the heavens in vain for a better or more picturesque abode.” — John Burroughs

but mostly this week i indulged in the sunlight of one of the oldest, dearest friends i have on this planet: my roommate in college, my roommate after college, my maid of honor, godmother to my firstborn, and my heartmate and soulmate through life’s most scouring hours. she’s a california girl, blond still (naturally so), and more beautiful than ever, and she married a man who might be the twin separated at birth from the one i married. not only do they both wear the exact same spectacles, they both dress in old-line khakis and oxford-cloth shirts, and think deeply about the subjects they love (film for the one from LA; bricks, mortar, and marble for the one i married) as well as the ideas that animate the life of the mind. we played, the four of us, at being playful: took long walks through woodsy ravines, gobbled ice cream from cones, motored downtown to see georgia o’keeffe at the art institute, and before we got there stumbled into one of the world’s great symphony orchestras rehearsing schumann’s piano concerto in frank gehry’s bandshell with someone billed as one of the world’s greatest pianist. all for free. and all in the sunlight.

and tomorrow, my firstborn marks another spin around the sun at the center of it all. there are not enough blessings under that sun for me to wish and hope and pray for my boy, but i wish every last one for him and his heart and his soul and his dreams. happy blessed life, you who made me a mama.

how did you mark the solstice, the day when the sunlight shines longest?

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