Keeping Anniversaries for Healing and Peace: The Easter Mystery

I was one of the silent readers in the Salle Ovale of the Bibliotheque Nationale on Thursday morning of Holy Week a year ago. My desk was numbered 13, and the light of a green-glass-shaded lamp supplemented the illumination from the grand oval skylight. With my Moleskine journal open before me, I was a reader that morning, a student, a man probing and reflecting and putting into words some of the impressions of the previous few days in Paris.

On a break from the week’s professional duties, I had decided to head to a new and – for me – hitherto unexplored Paris. At the Richelieu site of the Bibliotheque Nationale I spent more than an hour before the haunting images of a Paris that was already being termed “old Paris” at the end of the nineteenth century when Eugene Atget was taking his famous photographs.

The sepia shots of streets and storefronts and roofs and courtyards were perfect for me that Thursday morning. With barely a human face or form in most of the images, the exhibit served to underscore the value of all that regularly goes without repair or attention or updating or cleaning or refurbishing, all that might appear outmoded or negligible or forgotten.

Again and again I found myself imagining families who had made a particular set of walls the landscape of their daily living; individuals who had found a way to make a living that might enable them to eat better, sleep easier, and dream happier dreams; even pets who had looked in hopeful contentment to human owners invested in enjoying their company.

So much human life was suggested in those still spaces caught on film over a century ago. I tried to capture that perspective in my journal as I sat in the Salle Ovale.

The other topic I could not avoid thinking about and eventually writing about that Thursday morning was a young Dutch man who had leapt to his death in the city three days earlier. All the richness of human life suggested by Atget’s photographs had not been enough, it seemed, to support and give meaning to that young man’s continued existence.

He is now part of my life, however. He is now part of the lives of all the people who were fated to be witnesses of his fall.

I cautioned myself Holy Thursday morning not to presume to know what had happened to the young man to bring him to this act. The truth I could not avoid, however, was that he had wrested from each of us who were on-lookers heartache and a significant place in the memories of our lives.

Two days later I was praying for him at the cathedral in Chartres. I was also praying to him, asking him now to do whatever he could to ease the hearts and souls of the people he had devastated by his desperate jump on Monday afternoon. I made a prayerful claim on him to work especially hard to help those who loved him, to help them find a way to healing and peace through the months and years that they would live with his absence.

Holy Week, I was reminded in the quiet spaces of the Bibliotheque Nationale, places us in the presence of that other life whose violent end was not allowed to speak finally only of devastation. The chance of recovery and the hope of heart’s ease and the dream of deep alleluias of joy are the stuff of the Easter mystery.

After Reading More Recession Headlines This Morning in Holy Week

Three portraits were on sale in an antiques store in Waterville, Maine, the summer of 2001. On the reverse of each cardboard frame was a signature – Bessie Chapman, Cora Benedix, Lucy Bailey – followed by a proud legend: “Class of 1919.” Someone had kept all three senior portraits for many years until unknown circumstances led to their standing, all three still together, in a chest of drawers in a store in Maine into which Marc and I would walk that sunny day.

The purchase was the first of its kind for me. Up to that point I had been pretty much immune to the charm and appeal of vintage photographs, and I frankly could not have explained that summer day exactly why I bought them. Within twenty-four hours, however, I was showing them to a family friend, and we began to weave stories about these three young women about whom we really knew next to nothing.

A few months later, reflecting on the three photographs in the aftermath of the events of September 11, I was surprised to find that I no longer viewed the portraits as a random acquisition. Bessie Chapman and Cora Benedix and Lucy Bailey, I was beginning to suspect, might have lessons to teach me about being ready for change at an hour I did not expect.

At the close of their sophomore year, in May 1917, the United States had declared war against Germany; members of the Class of 1919 had had to learn to say goodbye to older brothers and fathers and cousins and watch them walk down streets to train stations to prepare for the battlefields of Europe.

In October of their senior year, they had witnessed a flu epidemic that ravaged New England and then the rest of the country, eventually killing 675,000 Americans, primarily young men and women, often in a matter of only two or three days.

Ten years after Bessie and Cora and Lucy graduated from high school, the Stock Market would crash and the Great Depression begin.

And ten years after that, in September 1939, they would read in the papers that Hitler had invaded Poland.

And yet their portraits remain, and the bond between Bessie and Cora and Lucy can get me ninety years later reflecting on my own life, all perhaps because of one person who asked for their portraits and saved them through the shifts and challenges of the last century and would not part with the pictures or discard them – until she had to.

Six weeks after September 11, I was journalling about the Gospel passage in which Jesus speaks about houses broken into and masters delayed in coming home. To me, his words communicated a compassionate awareness that people live one way when they do not expect that things can really change or end in their lives. They live another when they find out or are reminded that things can and do change. “At an hour you do not expect,” Jesus says, events in your life can demand of you every ounce of courage and honesty and intelligence and wisdom. Lives change, Jesus is saying. Be ready for the change.

Let the Good Times Roll

I enjoy having a good time.

It seems odd to start what will be a post of some length with that simple confession. I ask myself whether there could really be people who would not admit this truth about themselves readily and happily. Recently, though, I find myself at times laughing out loud in my office, and I wonder if I surprise anyone by that laughter. I surprise myself, I guess. I have a suspicion that I may not always have struck others as someone who could say that he enjoys having a good time.

Serious, thoughtful, dependable John – in the time left over from daily errands and the necessities of healthy living, what makes up his life? After the professional responsibilities and the household routines, next to life with Marc and what I’ll term political commitments, what do I do for the sheer delight and satisfaction of doing it?

The first thing that would occur to someone who knows me is that I do this. I reflect. I mull. I pose the question that almost seems as if it would answer itself until someone actually tries to answer it. I sit with Marc in a bar in New York and I wonder – about the people who visit the bar regularly, about whether we would have enjoyed a bar just like this when we were single and in our twenties, about the memories we both have of friends we knew in our twenties and the ways we would have spoken with them about hopes and dreams. I wonder often what goes on for any of us under our carefully maintained appearances. I wonder what memories remain the most vivid and life-giving for each of us.

Another thing that would occur to someone who knows me is that I do this. I write. And I do it well after many years’ practice. I write about the things I’m wondering. I write about the things I want to remember. In a basket next to my chair at home is a collection of journals that I’ve kept at different times and on various occasions over the past three decades – vacation weeks, religious retreats, journaling workshops, trips home to my family in New Orleans. I have entries that I’ve written in front of a Christmas tree in Pennsylvania, on a train ride between Rome and Florence, in an Anglican retreat house on the New Hampshire border, in an inn on Cape Cod.

Something that becomes apparent to anyone who regularly reads what I’ve written and posted online is that I enjoy reading. Last year I read again and again Mary Oliver’s newest collection of poems Thirst. I read biographies of American Romantic Nathaniel Hawthorne and British Poet Laureate John Betjeman and Southern novelist Harper Lee. I read The Master by Colm Tóibín and The Gathering by Anne Enright, two recent novels that have garnered a considerable readership. I read a number of memoirs, Seminary Boy by John Cornwell and The Florist’s Daughter by Patricia Hampl and Chaque jour est un adieu by Alain Rémond. I read a journal by May Sarton and a collection of her letters to Juliette Huxley. I read three tales set in Edinburgh featuring Alexander McCall Smith’s unlikely philosopher-sleuth Isabel Dalhousie.

Something of my hunger for a particular kind of conversation becomes clear to friends with whom I walk or sit, talking – sometimes for an hour at a time – about our questions, our lives, the books we’re reading, the things we’re trying to write, the plans we’re hatching for art projects, the hopes we have for the years ahead, the things we remember about even the earliest months of our acquaintance. Confidences shared, fears confessed, decisive realizations explored in an earnest give and take – so the most memorable conversations in my life have been made up. One friend recently exclaimed over drinks with Marc and me when I recalled to him what he had once told me of someone’s failure to celebrate with him on his graduation from law school almost three decades earlier. Other friends share with me an energy and fascination in discussing the range of personality types as sketched by systems like the Enneagram and Myers Briggs and the cues for directions for growth that such systems can provide.

Scattered about the house are mementos, records of other ways I have pursued leisure hours over the years. There are albums of vintage photographs that I’ve purchased and collected. There are shelves of decorative papers and note cards and old postcards and paper punches and rubber stamps and black photo corners and bronze grommets and envelopes in a host of sizes and colors; from the materials on these shelves have emerged artists' books and greeting cards and even wedding programs. There are photos that I have framed of Marc and me at the Eiffel Tower and at St. Paul’s in London, others of family in Venice and North Carolina and friends on their wedding day in Trinity Church in downtown Boston and pets on the back porch. On the floor in our living room are two baskets of all the Christmas cards that Marc and I have received over the more than two decades that we have been together; a yearly review of them is a ritual that I keep each winter when the light is low and the cold grows deep.


Other important pleasures are waiting to be described. There are indeed people who visit churches on a vacation because of the architecture and the art and the ceremony and the associations that certain places have with the writers and poets and saints of the ages. When I enter a church in an otherwise empty hour on a trip to France or just on a visit to a neighborhood near home, I go with an added expectation of being invited deeper into my own life. I subscribe to the mood evoked by British poet Philip Larkin in “Churchgoing”:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in…

When I enter a church at a quiet hour, I enter a world where prayer books and rosaries and candles and statues speak a language that I understand. Far from hierarchies, it becomes the language of mindfulness that I find myself wanting to hear and to speak in settings like retreat houses and old cemeteries and even an armchair in my own house for an hour each evening. It is the language I encounter in the best spiritual writing and in the best poetry, in the breakthrough moments in therapy and in the conversations that I have to have or risk being untrue to myself. It is the language in which I hear myself asked on the deepest level "What do you want?"

This language feels like my native tongue, and to my ears I sound most like John when I am using this language in conversation or writing. I can speak other languages, but then I feel that I am translating what actually started in the language of my heart. At times I even avoid certain topics in conversation if I’m not sure I can translate what I most deeply want to say into a language that the other person will understand. What gets lost in translation, though, is some important stuff that makes me the John I am.

During social evenings that Marc and I spend with friends, it can sometimes feel that there is little or no chance for me to show up as someone with a history of these passions and interests. I know that not every meeting with friends has to accommodate major themes from my own life, and sometimes there is the delightful surprise of a new, refreshing focus around a play or movie that we are all attending or a new restaurant that we are trying. I know what happens to me, though, when an evening progresses and none of these buttons of mine has gotten pushed or acknowledged. I slow down, grow quiet, move inward, wonder what there is I can say or do to move back into the currents of the evening. I take it as a sign that there is more work I need to do to make the kind of conversations I want possible.

But I have been laughing more in recent months.

And I have been growing in a sense of the vitality of the interests by which I am delighted and strengthened and the non-negotiable need for the kind of conversation that recognizes that vitality and helps keep me the John I want to be.

In the language of my native Louisiana, “Laisse le bon temps rouler!”

Noah and the Flood of Loss

Sitting in the library at home on recent evenings, I have held in the palm of my hand an image of Noah greeting the dove with an olive branch in its beak. The ark from whose high window Noah extends a bearded face tilts on the crest of a powerful wave.

The bronze square that I have been contemplating is a miniature reproduction of a panel in a church door in Italy. I bought the article four years ago in Amsterdam in a religious arts store near Café Luxembourg, a favorite spot where I had my first taste of the Dutch drink known as genever. From a brown leather banquette, I could look through the tall windows at the back of the café and glimpse the steeple of the beautiful Gothic church known as the Krijtberg.

How can four years ago seem a lifetime away?

On one of those March days in Amsterdam Marc and I had an argument. Where would we celebrate Christmas later that year? I had proposed spending it in New Orleans for what could well be my mother’s last Christmas. Marc countered that this was the year for us to spend the holidays with his sister, especially since we had spent the previous Christmas – their first Christmas after their own mother’s death – with my family down South.

It had been a hard argument to have on the streets of Amsterdam. For each of us family feeling, fueled by normal vacation fatigue, made us look at the other in disbelief given what felt like a clear failure to appreciate the emotional needs of a partner.

Fate reduced our argument to an academic one. My mother would die two months later, my New Orleans brother’s partner five months after that, and my favorite aunt the first week of December. The devastation of Katrina the following year removed New Orleans from our consideration for any holidays in the foreseeable future.

In the close to two years since my first post-Katrina visit to New Orleans, I have worked hard to fathom the flood of loss since those days in Amsterdam, since the purchase of the image of Noah that I have held in my hand the past few nights. I have worked hard to repair the inadequate ways I long ago learned for handling anything that looked like grief, for handling changes in my life over which I had no apparent control.

Reflecting on the image of Noah this past week and wondering what this story from the Book of Genesis might have new to say to me, I recalled something about a flood.

The wave bears up at the same time that it overwhelms.

Despite the submerging of so much that had been familiar to Noah, I want to think that at some point he might have felt reassured. I want to think that Noah at some point might have realized that God had trusted him with this challenge, this opportunity, just this life – his life. Noah may have felt at times the critical glances of his family, the silent judgment on the faces of people recalling what they had lost of the routine goals of a life.

The dove brought Noah reassurance that somewhere over that endless expanse of water was life as he had known it – or maybe something even better, even stronger, even better suited to helping him start over.

The wave bears up at the same time that it overwhelms.

Noah will not be the same when he comes on shore.

Photo from Café Luxembourg

On My Way to NYC

An opportuntity for professional development is taking me to New York City for a couple of days. Wistful memories remind me that the city is not all Wall Street profit and Broadway glamour and Radio City Music Hall. Off-and-on wandering may take me into other neighborhoods of the city.



Photos from NYU

Second Language

"There are two languages in language, two ways of speaking, two levels of linguistic usage. There is a language of clear truths, concepts, and formulas… Things are as they are, you say what you mean, as precisely as you can and as unequivocally. Speaking then is deciphering a puzzle, defining, prescribing limits…

"It is good that we have this language… But we never use it when we want to pour out our heart and say what is really in us, hidden and almost impossible to name. In questions of love and death and God and man, this first language, this first way of speaking , is not only inadequate, but also dangerous.

"But there is a second language… It is the language of what cannot really be said. The language that you speak so as not to have to be completely silent. The language of emotion and ecstasy…

"Language given across boundaries and always digging into what cannot be said, into that infinitely double ground of reality, language which leaves veiled and concealed what has to remain veiled and concealed, which evokes the paradoxical and the inaccessible of man’s existence and makes it present in paradoxical words and images…

"Secret language, in which you live as you live with another person, by approximation, near enough to touch, knowing and not knowing, safe and unsafe. A language which does not force itself on you, but does speak with authority and which appeals to another’s creative understanding. The only language which is really daring enough for people."

From “The Second Language” in Open Your Hearts by Huub Osterhuis



Photo of Cabalus guesthouse in Vezelay uploaded on Flickr

Parigi

The snows that swept up over New England today allowed a mid-afternoon walk through the cemetery near our house. They allowed some moments of conscious praying in that place. They allowed some opportunities of speaking out loud into the cold air around me. They even allowed taking a photograph with my cell phone.



After returning home and shoveling the front walks, I indulged in a short nap in the chair in our library. Awake, I hunted in the CD cabinet in our living room and found the recording I had seen earlier in the week, a 1951 recording of La Bohème that I had not listened to in a long time. Nineteenth-century Paris in the language of Puccini – it fit the week I had just finished.

Through the wooden blinds the late afternoon snow created a light in the living room that I could not violate with a lamp. Bohemian Paris in the winter of 1830 demanded an appropriate setting. A votive candle, maybe. One cat settled on the folded blanket on the sofa back behind me; the other settled at my feet.

The mood in the room for the next two hours was gentle, sentimental, reflective, lyrical.

Solitary and tender, the experience fed my heart, fed my dreams.




Photo of London CD of La Bohème with Renata Tebaldi

The Big Dig

I was on an archeological dig Saturday morning in our basement.

The prospect of an extended weekend may have given me the energy for a task that had been on my mind for several weeks. Or maybe it was the afterglow of a satisfying celebration of Valentine’s Day. Whatever the reason, on a sunny Saturday morning I was approaching a row of boxes in our dark basement.

Inside these boxes I expected to find mainly books that Marc and I had stored there during the past couple of years. I had frankly lost track of how long ago we had first packed some of the boxes. Most had gotten down to the basement during the summer of 2006. Renovations that had initially called for re-carpeting the upstairs master bedroom led to sanding and refinishing the hardwood floors throughout our second floor.

Emptying rooms for the sanders had meant emptying book shelves. Emptier rooms with a new satin finish on the floors discouraged us from carrying back upstairs anything that was not immediately essential. Months passed without any books returning from basement retirement, and we must have gone with the common wisdom that whatever we had lived without for over a year might be something we need never see again.

Except, I discovered this morning, what we had lived without all those months was me.

I don’t mean to overstate the reaction I had to opening the first boxes and finding the books on Italy that used to line one of the shelves in our bedroom. It’s just that the books surprised me by their utter familiarity. For years I had woken up to them, for years I would go to bed able to survey them on the top shelf of the bookcase on my side of the bed. They were a record of three trips to Italy in the past decade. They were evidence that I had made those trips, planned them, returned from them, fed on them for months and years later.

With some of the books I had spent as much time reading and taking notes before the trips as I did during and after the vacations. There had been the delight of planning with multiple guide books open before me, Frommer's and AAA and Rick Steves and DK. In the boxes in the basement there were also Italian phrase books from whose lists of food names Marc and I had ordered our meals in Rome and Florence and Venice.

I found the program book and libretto of a 1997 Teatro di Roma production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Taming of the Shrew, which Marc and I had attended in the Teatro Argentino near our hotel. Not guidebooks per se but guiding books in planning and later recalling our Italian adventures, Henry James’s Italian Hours and Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark lay among the other volumes in the basement boxes. Purchases made in Italy itself included multicolor guides to the mosaics and artwork in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the Venetian basilica of SS. John and Paul, the Roman basilica of Santa Prassede.

One of the trips to Rome had been scheduled to coincide with the 1998 canonization of German mystic Edith Stein. Also in the basement boxes were my collection of writings by her and about her, volumes that used to stand together on the second shelf in our bedroom bookcase. Other spiritual writers used to be represented on nearby shelves; Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton had been particularly formative for me in my twenties. Coming out of a different vein of spiritual writing were the American Seasons series by naturalist Edwin Way Teale; all four volumes with their variously colored bindings had leaned against other books in that bookcase.

Some time back I bookmarked a website sponsored by La Gondola Circolo Fotografico. An exhibit entitled Venezia, frammenti della memoria had gathered online vintage photographs of Venice. The scenes depicted in the photographers’ images had borne testimony to the Italian charism of being willing to live among the visible signs of its people’s past. Living among the objects of one’s personal past is no negligible achievement either, and re-discovering the books this weekend prompted me to carry at least one box back upstairs from the basement.

I will try to find place for these volumes, as I will try to find place for the John whose present and past and future had once played around them.

Other worthwhile projects and challenges have clearly claimed my attention and energy over recent years.

Has no one, though, missed that other John as much as I have?

Photo from "Venezia, frammenti della memoria" at La Gondola Circolo Fotografico

A Poet I Mentioned over Valentine's Day Dinner

This Life

At the center of this life
there is a man I want to know again.
He has a new house,
a clear view of the mountain
and hidden in the close grained wood
of his desk
a new book of poems.

He has left the life
he once tried to love
now it is only a shadow
calling for another shadow

and this shadow
wants to become real again

it falls against walls
and fences
and stairways

the dark penumbra of my belonging

now let me cast my shadow
against life

before the specter haunts me to my
grave

from The House of Belonging by David Whyte

The Walk Home from Starbucks

It is curious sometimes to look at your own house when you approach it from a distance.

When your house is at a bend in the street – the way ours is – you can see it a block away when you’re coming home from a walk to Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon. A fifteen-minute stroll away, the coffee house gives Marc and me a reason to put on layers on a winter day and venture forth together and talk through the coming and going with our short cappuccinos and skinny lattes.

When what usually surrounds you comes slowly into view from a distance, you get to wondering what other people imagine when they see your house, what sort of people they think might live there. You happen to know what sort of people do.... or at least you think you do.

Sometimes you remember what you thought when you saw the place for the first time. You remember what you thought about the kind of people who get to live in a place like that. You wondered what it would be like for others to think that you were that sort of people.

The kind of people you might have hoped to become by living there gets suggested by a familiar comment after a realtor’s open house: “We could be happy living there.”

You might have walked through the house for the first time and later that evening pictured Christmas trees, logs in the fireplace, long dinner parties with friends.

You would not necessarily have thought that this might be the home to which you would either of you return after a mother’s funeral or a father’s. You would not necessarily have thought that this might be the place where the news of Katrina would signal the end of visits to a family hub as you had known those visits in the past. You would not necessarily have thought that this might be the front walkway up which you step fresh from a hospitalization.

There are times when you look at your house from a distance and you become curious about the kind of people you have become while living there. What would someone’s silhouette – your silhouettes – across the window look like or suggest? Purposeful living? Domestic contentment? A thoughtful engagement with another day’s duties and opportunities?

There might be times when you look at your house from a distance and you become curious about when the chance or the need to imagine other scenarios for your life will occur. You attend neighborhood meetings, and you wonder whether you might one day no longer be the sort of people who would enjoy living here. You watch economic indicators and oil bills, and you wonder whether you might one day no longer be the sort of people who could afford living here.

Really, though, you have few doubts that there will be many more reasons for joy, many more opportunities for love awaiting you in the months and years ahead as you walk home on a winter afternoon, short cappuccino and skinny latte in hand.