Ash Wednesday

What is there to draw and hold the attention of a visitor to a cemetery –  especially if no one he knows either by acquaintance or by reputation lies buried there?

I recently sat in the living room and re-read for the first time in years what had been a favorite poem in high school, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” In my lap lay a volume of English poetry that I have owned for over thirty years, and I gave in to the lure of the opening lines of Thomas Gray’s masterpiece:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The poet seems not to have needed to know anyone in that country churchyard. He has simply settled there for a long evening of reverie and reflection. The fall of night in that quiet rural space in England awakens a sense of wonder that is palpable centuries later.

In a cemetery not far from my house I sometimes walk on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The roads and paths lined with tombstones – some dating from the Civil War – are not long enough in themselves to take more than ten minutes to cover if I were walking briskly and purposefully. But my pace in this cemetery generally takes its cue not from a need for exercise but from a need to attend to what is happening within me. I saunter, reverse directions, retrace my steps, stop sometimes and look around me and above me – and then start the whole routine over.

Various things within an older cemetery can engage my curiosity – the nationality of the residents of a particular plot, the relationships among the people whose names appear on the same stone, the personality of the person who had died the earliest among them, the flavor of the grief of the ones who survived to raise this stone and visit it and perhaps imagine one day lying below it themselves.

The shapes of individual and family tombs, the years inscribed, the relative state of repair of the grave, the softening of some lettering, the occasional presence of wreaths and flowers, the record of the shortness of someone’s span of years, another person’s year of death recalling a wartime world – so many invitations crowd around me, and I sink gently into speculation.

There is sometimes the experience of coming across a tomb that I must have passed time and again but about which there is that day something totally unfamiliar. I look at a name or a sculpture or a style of lettering or a symbol engraved or a sturdy thickness of greenery around the base of the stone. I wonder how I could have missed noticing this piece of the experience before.

There are days when I leave the paved road and wander into the grassy spaces between lines of older tombs. I feel the dips and curves of the ground under my shoes, and quickly there is no easy way to ensure that I am not walking directly over the bones of someone. The longer I stray over the grass, the more aggressively present seem the stones before me and behind me. I slowly get to feel myself surrounded rather than detached and merely speculative – no longer simply curious but increasingly engaged and almost ensnared.

And occasionally in the midst of my walking alone, there is the urge to begin speaking into the air around me, sometimes to work out with words an elusive or tortuous line of thought, sometimes to weigh and ponder a question slowly and methodically. Sometimes, though, there is the urge just to say what comes, to repeat again and again what starts to be a simple refrain like “Thank you.”

A walk through a cemetery, and my attention is drawn within.

A walk through an old cemetery, and my attention is drawn beyond.

But the call to attention is clear, insistent, ultimately soothing, invariably enriching.

I will return there again these next forty days of Lent.

There's No One Like

Some friends at work joined me today in discussing a plan for an exchange that could set this Valentine’s Day apart from others. Suppose two people agreed to complete these statements about one other – to spend time between now and Thursday of next week thinking about the answers, trying them out, writing them out, and then on Valentine's Day presenting them as a gift:

1. There’s no one like N (Nomen=name) for ___________.

2. Sometimes I like just watching N as (s)he ___________.

3. I know no one who can ___________ as deftly as N.

4. If I want to picture N happy, one place I see her/him is _____________________.

5. There’s no way I know as much about __________ as N does.

6. If money were no consideration, I can imagine no gift that N would enjoy more than ___________.

7. It always makes me proud to talk to others about N and about his/her ___________.

8. I know how to do a lot of things but maybe not as carefully as N when it comes to ___________.

9. No one knows what ___________ means to me as clearly as N does.

10. I remember why I like N so much when I hear him/her ___________.

I have to admit that I have not passed this plan by Marc yet. Here, though, are the statements that I came up with, their order rearranged to keep themes together:

Sometimes I like just watching Marc as he types an entry for his blog, sitting in his sweats at the computer.

There’s no one like Marc for writing with wry playfulness and multi-layered wit.

I know how to do a lot of things but maybe not as carefully as Marc when it comes to planning the menu of a dinner party or just compiling a weekly shopping list.

I know no one who can chop garlic and onions and measure a long recipe of seasonings as deftly as Marc.

There’s no way I know as much about movies, the Academy Awards and Pauline Kael as Marc does.

If I want to picture Marc happy, one place I see him is a restaurant called Celadon in the French city of Troyes in March of 2007.

If money were no consideration, I can imagine no gift that Marc would enjoy more than a year in France.

I remember why I like Marc so much when I hear him on the phone with his sister.

It always makes me proud to talk to others about Marc and about his way of staying in touch with friends, even friends he knew in high school.

No one knows what twenty-two years of Tuesday evenings means to me as clearly as Marc does.

Time will tell whether the plan my colleagues and I discussed with energy today will have the effect we envision.

We’ll certainly never tell you ourselves.

Photo of Troyes downloaded on Flickr by Dom Bastian

Bread Pudding

OK. Sometimes it just helps to admit a craving, especially when it comes unexpectedly and inexplicably.

I have been thinking about bread pudding recently. Maybe it will just take one serving with a ladling of bourbon sauce to calm me, soothe me, send me back to other, everyday treats. Or maybe not.

In moderation it might fit admirably with a diet of greens and grains and fresh fruit and vegetables. I'm hoping so.

Maybe it's the approach of Mardi Gras?



Photo of New Orleans bread pudding and bourbon sauce from My Recipes

Hearts and Flowers

What expectations does the approach of Valentine’s Day awake?

For Marc and me, one of the first thoughts centers on the right place to eat on that favorite evening of restaurateurs. This year Valentine’s Day falls on a Thursday, and we already have our reservation made for that night although it is over two weeks away. We are headed to a downtown restaurant where we’ve dined once this past year, a newer establishment that fits lots of our expectations of a good find for knowledgable diners.

We go out to eat fairly regularly, so what should a meal this special evening provide? I guess luck would locate us in a roomy but quiet booth from which we could survey our fellow diners without being distracted by them. We should be able to carry on a conversation without hearing other conversations around us or recorded music above us. We should enjoy our waiter without needing to take care of him or keep track of her. Our questions about the menu that night should draw helpful explanations, and the prices quoted to us for the daily specials should encourage us not “to settle” in our choice of an appetizer or entree. We should be able to lean back and survey the situation and smile contentedly in the knowledge that the night has all the makings of a special occasion. Nothing should mar a mood of happy reverie if that arises amid memories of the early days – and even hours – of our relationship. Marc and I should emerge from the dining experience with a confirmed sense that the universe is pretty happy that February 14 finds the two of us still together, still celebrating the way we know what questions to ask to make the other feel special, lucky, known, appreciated.

If there are other items to make this particular celebration of Valentine’s Day sweet, it might be a bit of chocolate or a vase of flowers.

It might be a card.

It might be an assurance shared that what the other person most enjoys and values, the ways he spends his time and the directions he feels himself drawn for enjoyment and personal enrichment, continue to make a claim on our own energies.

We should just be happy that the person sitting across from us at the table is there. We do not know what the journey ahead will hold. We are aware that one more year finds us together, and that is cause for gratitude.

Home from a Weekend Away

I took home from retreat this weekend no writing, no journal, no notes. The days simply called for my heart to be attentive, my eyes to be open, my ears to be ready, my steps to follow what I can only think was love's call under sunny winter skies. Things I wrote during the past months and posted here seem in retrospect to have been right on target.

“In a way that may balance my two days in a hospital in November, I will spend two days away, learning to listen as the mood quiets around me, and I will consider reading, thinking, easing my way into a space inside.

“The time away and the space may succeed in communicating a reassurance that I hadn’t known I needed.”

“Read from all those perspectives, the sayings that emerged in my prayer this Advent and Christmas season and that found their way onto pieces of paper that I kept safe in my prayer book constitute what seems a message that God wants – at this point in my life, still wants – what is good for me.”

“And something happened to Jesus at the Jordan… it was about being with John, AND it was about being with the other people who had gone there for the same reason, AND it was about being with the God who had brought them all together for an unforgettable experience… an experience until then, I would guess, not regularly available to Jesus either in the synagogue at Nazareth or even at the Temple in Jerusalem. It was a crucial experience for people who may have felt that some part of their lives wasn’t working, that their lives weren’t joyful enough or generous enough or honest enough and they didn’t know how to change that.”

Winter Evening Vistas

The winter twilight is something I walk quickly through these days, eager at day's end to be home and warm. The upcoming retreat weekend may afford me the opportunity to slow my steps and see what is around me.



"Winter Fields" by Massachusetts artist Kathleen McDonough

Reading Habits

These cold January days I am watching Marc read War and Peace. I mention watching because a hardcover volume of that heft draws attention in a domestic landscape. I see the book on the island in the kitchen before meal times, on the table next to Marc’s chair in our library in the evening, in a nest of blankets at bedtime.

Reading a thousand-page book is nothing unprecedented or particularly daunting for Marc. Someone who has himself tried his hand at writing fiction, Marc is good at keeping hold of narrative threads – even through multi-volume works like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Trollope’s Palliser novels. Marc seems to enjoy navigating through the fictional worlds that a crafty author can invent. Marc fundamentally gets a kick out of a good read.

Marc’s tastes regularly move to nonfiction, and then he can have a hard time choosing among the many topics that appeal to him. Film criticism, political biography, social analysis, French history and culture – representative works of these various genres line our bookshelves. Needless to say, Marc proves himself a well-read conversationalist at meals with our friends.

From my long ago days as an English teacher, I recall classroom discussions on the classic texts from British and American literature. Anthology open before me, I almost daily posed the fundamental teacher’s questions: “Where do we find that idea in the text?” “What is this writer trying to say about her life?” “Can you remember ever feeling this way?”

If I then listened well enough, if I paraphrased a student’s contributions carefully enough, if I subtly urged alternative ways that a text could open up the lives we each of us try our best to lead, I could sometimes feel an atmosphere of wonder begin to form around me and the students. I would feel somewhere deep within something like the start of tears.

Briefly it was hard to imagine leaving the boundaries of that classroom when the bell rang later for the change of classes.

The amazing thing for me to remember now is that often I was reading with a new group of students the very texts I had already read and taught a number of years. The energy came each new year from delving, from returning to a place where I may originally as a student have sat mystified myself, from tasting afresh the possibilities that just these words and just these phrases in just this context might reveal to readers on a day like this.

And so it is no surprise that often my own reading years later centers on a text with which I can sit for a long time – a poem by Mary Oliver, an ancient psalm, a naturalist’s evocation of a winter pond, a Belgian theologian’s attempt to pray the truths of his tradition. Sometimes I sit with a book and do not turn a page for half an hour.

I will not make it through War and Peace at that rate.

I will not hold a table of dinner guests spellbound and entertained.

I will hunger for the next quiet reading hour, though, and hold myself ready for revelation.

Snow Day Diary

The news of the work closings had started coming in last night, and I took advantage of this rare opportunity to sleep late into a snowy morning.

Marc and I had spent a relaxing Sunday evening. After a walk together in the afternoon, I set about writing and Marc started preparations for dinner. French onion soup and a salad was a perfect complement to what I had once heard a friend describe as "an ice-chip-cold martini." Afterwards we took out a recent Netflix arrival and watched the first half of Golden Door (2006), a film by Italian director Emanuele Crialese about Sicilian immigration to the US. The publicity poster with its image of a stalwart Charlotte Gainsbourg had decorated every Paris kiosque Marc and I passed last March.

This morning after breakfast, I took my cardiologist up on his reassurances and bundled up to do the first round of the shovelling while Marc settled in with his work at the computer. By the time I got outside, one of our neighbors had arrived with his snow blower and made a first sweep of our walks and driveway. Our own snowblower has been in the shop the past couple of weeks, so the help was welcome. There was still cleaning up around the garage and the basement door that was needed, as well as attention to the shrubs and tree branches that were dragging on the ground.

After I finished up and showered, I got comfortable in a chair in our library. I am now into the third chapter of Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America.

Life feels pretty good.

How the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus and the Experience of Retreat and the Nature of Love Letters Come Together for Me These Days

Think of someone you would like to have as a friend… or as a better friend. And then imagine somehow receiving this message from the person:

I don’t know how this will come out.
I have wanted for a while to tell you how much I admire you,
how highly I think of you.
I admire what you do with your days.
I like to watch you thinking.
I think people must be better and happier for being with you.
I hope one day to talk with you as one friend to another, face to face.
I will do what I can to make that happen. I promise.

I have recently begun to think that Jesus somehow wanted to get that kind of message to John the Baptist.

I think that Jesus admired John and what John did with his days. I think Jesus met people who were better and happier for having been with John. I think Jesus was excited by the way John the Baptist spoke about what was important in life. The way John spoke about life got Jesus—and crowds of other people—wanting to spend time with John. People went where they knew that the things important in their lives would get named.

And something happened to Jesus at the Jordan… it was about being with John, AND it was about being with the other people who had gone there for the same reason, AND it was about being with the God who had brought them all together for an unforgettable experience… an experience until then, I would guess, not regularly available to Jesus either in the synagogue at Nazareth or even at the Temple in Jerusalem. It was a crucial experience for people who may have felt that some part of their lives wasn’t working, that their lives weren’t joyful enough or generous enough or honest enough and they didn’t know how to change that.

When Jesus went into the desert after being baptized by John it was to savor the message that had come through to him with that experience… that there was a God who wanted people together in that way, that there was a God who wanted people – as they were.

I propose that it was that experience that became the heart of the mission of Jesus. In time it became the experience of the women and men of his day who welcomed Jesus into their lives. In the centuries that followed, it became the reason to gather people together and tell them to get ready to hear an amazing message, an incredible message. And the experience of the followers of Jesus over the centuries was that God had a message for each of them (for each of us) that sounded something like this:

I don’t know how this will come out.
I have wanted for a while to tell you how much I admire you,
how highly I think of you.
I admire what you do with your days.
I like to watch you thinking.
I think people must be better and happier for being with you.
I hope one day to talk with you as one friend to another, face to face.
I will do what I can to make that happen. I promise.

Heartsease

If going home from a hospital the day before Thanksgiving acted as one bookend for this holiday season, a follow-up appointment with my cardiologist this morning felt like the other. After assurances that my blood pressure was responding marvelously to the new medications, the doctor answered one pressing question of mine: were my days shoveling snow over with this new diagnosis and reinvigorated health regimen?

To Marc’s relief and even – I discovered – to mine, the answer was No.

Amid all the usual cautions connected to New England winter weather, my doctor urged the value of maintaining regular physical exertion as a help to maintaining a healthy heart.

In so many ways I could say that a key focus of mine for the past two years has been a healthy heart – experienced on the emotional level, on the psychological level, on the spiritual level, and now, it turns out, on the physical level as well.

Read from all those perspectives, the sayings that emerged in my prayer this Advent and Christmas season and that found their way onto pieces of paper that I kept safe in my prayer book constitute what seems a message that God wants – at this point in my life, still wants – what is good for me. I offer these sayings in the event that they might provide even one reader with a similar reassurance about the hopes in her own life or his.

Stay calm. Don’t run away.
December 1

Wait. There’s something you have to hear.
December 2

Still not yet. It can’t yet be seen.
December 3

There’s nothing you need that I don’t know about.
December 5

Healing is what I do.
December 6

I will be about joy.
December 9

How could I want anything but what’s good for you?
And what’s happy?
December 10

Have I not done good for you?
December 13

No part of you will be lost.
December 15

It doesn’t have to be clear now, does it?
December 17

Why would I keep anything good from you?
I will not take anything from you.
December 18

I will not make anything difficult for you.
December 19

I have done this much for you. Trust.
December 21

Patience. I am at home with you.
December 22

I have plans for you, plans for your welfare.
Seek me with all your heart.
December 23

It is no mistake, your heart.
Your love is a worthy gift.
December 24

I am so proud of you.
December 25

This is a learning day.
December 26

I want you free.
January 1

Happy New Year!