Aimez-vous Brahms...

The used bookstore was nearby. A work friend and I had just finished Sunday brunch, and the basement store, that warren of narrow aisles lined with books that had already spent time in other people’s homes, exercised its customary lure. I had no precise title in mind, and I was ready to be surprised on this midday visit.

Truth be told, it had been a while since I had even thought to include a stop by the French language shelves. I had made analogous online crawls at different times in search of a particular softcover edition of Aimez-vous Brahms… by Françoise Sagan. I had loaned my original copy to… I don’t remember who. A purchase made in a Montreal discount bookstore provided me with a later Livre de Poche edition; the text of spare French prose was intact (intégral in the phrasing on the cover), the font identical to that in the earlier edition, but the cover featured a photograph of a heavy-lidded woman’s face reflected in her make-up mirror.

I don’t know when – or exactly why – I began to crave a replacement copy of the slim French paperback with the vase of flowers on the cover – the cover I associate with my first readings of the novel. How proud I had been to negotiate my way through a French novel in its entirety, a book not assigned for a course but chosen for sheer pleasure! A heady experience for someone in his twenties and a French major in his back pocket.

The edition with that cover is no longer in print. But there it was this Sunday afternoon. Three dollars later, and it was mine. Again.

I make no exaggerated literary claims for Françoise Sagan. My first reading of that novel followed a television showing in the late 70s of the movie Goodbye Again. A friend watching the movie with me yelped and waved his tall glass of tea and crushed ice when the forty-year-old character played by Ingrid Bergman calls after the twenty-five-year-old lover she has just dumped and shouts, “I’m old!” For two gay men approaching thirty, her admission had the ring of high camp. My friend would begin that night to include her words in his repertory of lines to be invoked against a background of disco recordings as he showered each Saturday night before heading to the bars.

If the novel retains some compelling message for me from reading to reading, it is contained in the title. The character Paule, a successful career woman in Paris, has been invited by the younger Simon (Philip in the American movie) to a Sunday concert of Brahms; he prefaces his invitation with the question “Do you like Brahms?” She later remarks to the older man named Roger with whom she has maintained a steady but unfulfilling relationship that she was startled by the question, that she had actually forgotten whether she liked Brahms or not, that it had been so long since anyone had asked her what she liked. Roger appears not to understand why Paule might respond so earnestly to the question nor why she would think to recount her reaction to it. His apparent indifference confirms Paule in her decision to let Simon more significantly into her life.

Let me simply go on the record right now and say that I do indeed like Brahms. Were someone to ask me why some day, I will answer the question earnestly – and hopefully.

Lincoln BeautyWare

Breadbox and canisters – the language of another era of kitchen design.

For four years a movers box containing items from my parents’ New Orleans kitchen stood in my New England basement. Nostalgia rather than utility had motivated me to ask for these remnants of my home growing up. Kitchen renovations here two years back made the fate of these items nebulous.

The past two weeks I have had the task of outfitting a small room as a kitchen – or a kitchenette in older parlance. Guess what finally escaped basement shadows for a new life?

There are four canisters and a breadbox in the chrome Lincoln BeautyWare set that used to sit on my mother’s kitchen counter. I will follow her example and ignore the labels affixed to some of the canisters. There will probably not be coffee in the canister labeled “Coffee”; foodies’ habit suggests a refrigerator or freezer for beans or even ground coffee. Nor could anyone in good conscience these days use enough sugar in a year to warrant the tall canister labeled for “Sugar.”

Rather than prominently displayed in a symmetrical row on a kitchen counter the way they had been in my mother’s day, the canisters now line a shelf behind the doors of a wooden cabinet.

On the other hand, the breadbox has too many ready functions to be hidden in that way. Perched on a butcher block counter against one wall, the breadbox will, I am sure, be opened and closed frequently each day. A simple turn on a black knob releases a door on the front of the breadbox. Imbedded in the back of that chrome door is a wooden cutting board that lies flat when the door is open. One of my brothers reminded me of that feature just this past Sunday, on what would have been my father’s 98th birthday.

It struck me this weekend that my father had died within sight of this breadbox. His body as he fell to the kitchen floor after emptying the dishwasher that November morning may have been reflected one last time in the well polished chrome of the familiar door.

In the years after my father’s death my brothers and I would take turns visiting my mother, usually a week at a time. I used to sit at the kitchen table in the evening after my mother had gone to bed. Not five feet from this same breadbox, I would write or read alone, sometimes a novel, sometimes from a book of prayers. Far from my New England home, I would wonder about what I had learned and what I had not learned from my years growing up in this household years earlier.

I still wonder.

Imagine if I had actually heard my father asking my mother one day what she liked particularly about this Lincoln BeautyWare set. If I had heard him asking what it did for her to buy something this fashionable for her kitchen, how it made her feel. If I had heard them discuss together whether there were other ways she wanted a kitchen in her home to look and feel.

I wonder how I would feel today if I had actually heard my father ask her if she knew how happy it made him feel to see her happy.

Last night I turned on the lights in a mahogany case with my parents’ wedding china. I sat in a favorite chair nearby, and by the light from the china cabinet read through the messages that had emerged from my prayer last December. I have recorded them here before. One message in particular stirred me afresh last night:

I have done this much for you. Trust.

God has done this much for me in my life. I keep trusting.

Images of Lincoln BeautyWare from PeacockModern

Let Me Just Be

In late September 2000 I made a weekend retreat with members of my worshipping community. I recently came across writing I had done on the final day of that retreat. It is personal writing, revealing writing about a troubled time in my life. I would gently warn off any readers for whom this effort is more than they need just now.

It is Sunday morning, an hour before the closing liturgy of the retreat. I am sitting in my room, using my desk for the first time, lighting the candle before the hinged icons I brought from home. Who wanted to be holed up in a room when all the sky and coastline rocks and walkways and chapels beckoned these past two days?

On the other hand, it seems only fair to the time spent away from home to attempt a thanksgiving for these hours and interior movements. I have just opened the window in my room to allow in the sound of distant waves and gulls and the smell and feel of rainy breezes. Autumn approaches, and the God of my autumn is waiting, it seems, for me to let him get close.

The retreat started with a vivid sense of the reality of past retreats. My usual attempt to imitate or re-create those earlier retreats seemed useless this time, but I wanted to know myself as someone who still wants to know God and find God. It has pained me at points in the past months to imagine that I had made facing God a venture too fearful or shameful to attempt or even envision. I thank God for trying to get the real me in touch with the real him in these forty-eight hours of retreat. Even listless hours, waiting for focus or insight or clear reward, sitting in the sun with a breviary lifeless in my lap, were contact of a sort.

“I wish I knew more… I’m not at all sure.” That was the refrain that came this Sunday morning sitting in the small chapel from 6 to 7:30. “I am someone worth living with.” That phrase as well was key to realizing the ferocity of the self-judgments with which I have been living. Later I sensed an anger building within me as I thought of what I had put up with over the years by my eagerness to be liked, to meet with approval, to get on people’s good side, to charm and disarm. What a waste of time, what a waste of energy! I pray now to take a little pity on myself, to unlearn lessons about how to get along with powerful people who could, I thought, make my life miserable.

I want to be chaste, I want to be good, I want to be strong, but ultimately I think I just want to be God’s. And why do I persist in thinking that I may not want that or that I am not in fact God’s? That real God – beyond my feeble, ferocious attempts to grab and capture his attention and ultimately control and show him how to do his job!

O Mary, Mother, calm me, rock me into careless abandon, accompany me as I age and become someone with friends in their fifties and sixties. Let me know my true worth and stance before God with you by my side. Let me welcome this task of being a 48-year-old man, a 49-year-old man, a 50-year-old man. Does everyone fight it so much? Does everyone play the sad clown attempting to pretend it’s perfectly okay with them when it galls them, hurts them, seems like one more piece of evidence that you were a mistake all along, a bad bet, someone not worth living with?

Let me just say “Amen.”

Let me just say “I love you.”

Let me just say “Thank you.”

Let me just say my name.

Let me just sleep and sigh.

Let me just be.

Let me praise.

Let me sing.

Let me live till I die.

Let me die when I will.

Amen.

I love you.

Thank you.

-- only John

Photo uploaded by John Fenzel

A Place of Honor

Last weekend I had the privilege of officiating at the wedding of my niece Theresa and her fiancé Carter. After submitting the requisite applications, I had received a one-day authorization to be the solemnizer at their service. My niece is a church musician, and Carter is a research psychologist one of whose recent projects required a stay on Mount Everest. Reflecting on the readings they had chosen for their ceremony was an opportunity for me to wish them well on their venture and to say some things about the journey they were undertaking:

Theresa and Carter, you are on a high mountain today. This is a high holy day in your lives.

Theresa, you know better than most how to make an hour on a Sunday feel elevated, how to make it feel different and important, at once festive and inspiring. You choose your music to help people feel elevated and festive and inspired; in a way you choose music to help people feel that their lives are important – with all their dreams and mysteries.

Our Gospel reading today comes from the Feast of the Transfiguration which Christian churches celebrate this week. Jesus leads three of his closest disciples to a high place, and they see and hear things about Jesus that overcome them with wonder and with fear.

Carter, after your time on Mount Everest this spring, you know better than most of us what begins to happen when people live too long at an altitude to which they are not accustomed. They may see or hear things that disorient them without their being aware, things that can overcome them with wonder or with fear.

So, Theresa and Carter, between the two of you, you appreciate better than most of us how important it is to live well the rest of a Sunday AND how important it is to live with our feet on solid ground. I think that’s what the Letter to the Romans means by “thinking with sober judgment.”

Theresa and Carter, it will be hard for you ever to hear the words of Ruth again without remembering this day on the mountain. Live all your days in the confident belief that you deserve to hear those words spoken to you. Over the next twenty-four hours, over the next twenty-four days, over the next twenty-four years, you will need to keep finding ways of saying to one another, “Your God will be my God. What is important in your life will always have a place of honor in mine. I cannot imagine the day when I will stop being your strongest advocate, your best friend, the person whose dreams and mysteries I will not tire of asking about and marveling over. It is still good for us to be here.”



Photo of Everest by Himalman

Among the Mainers

It was important for me to get out of town this past weekend. In years past, that strategic exit from the city signaled the end of my availability to answer the kind of questions with which my office can be deluged at this time of year. I took advantage of a friend’s offer to play tour guide, and I settled for a few days in the Portland area.

As part of my Maine venture I reached Winslow Homer’s studio in nearby Prouts Neck. I visited the Portland Museum of Art another day and caught a great exhibit on the role of photography in the career of Georgia O’Keeffe. I sat with my morning coffee on benches lining the docks of the Old Port section of the city. I learned about the influence of Portland architect John Calvin Stevens as a tour bus carried me past houses he had designed in the Shingle Style and others he had designed in Colonial Revival.

I drank homemade lemonade, walked along rocky coasts, smelled the unmistakable aromas of Scarborough Marsh, and watched tanks of blue lobsters bubbling out their final hours in dockside shacks.

A surprise of the three days was a chance to visit the Portland Head Light one morning. I walked a little ways from the lighthouse and the museum next to it, pulled out my phone and captured my own image of a kind of structure that has stirred my imagination for as long as I’ve lived in New England.

I read a plaque near the lighthouse commemorating Longfellow's passion for this dramatic corner of his Maine home. Words from his poem "The Lighthouse" line the monument:

Sail on! sail on, ye stately ships!
And with your floating bridge the ocean span;
Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse.
Be yours to bring man nearer unto man.

Night Air at Open Windows

I recently had dinner with a friend who for some time in college had seriously considered a monastic vocation. Our conversation reminded me of something I had written awhile ago. It will soon be August, and an anniversary of sorts looms ahead for me.

Leaning against a windowsill at night and breathing in the cool air, I am sometimes awakened to an old hunger for truth, an early yearning for something real and dear. I imagine myself again as someone I can trust to welcome the best there is in a world so large and wild and worth being vulnerable before.

In the language of my upbringing and training, God is in that air, in that wild, fresh darkness right outside a window at night.

And briefly I become twenty years old again, sitting by a window that is not in my parents’ air-conditioned New Orleans home. I become someone sitting by an open window in the 70’s in a seminary building in the rural South where I had recently begun a program of studies that over the next nine years would lead me close to ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

When I entered the seminary, the Roman Catholic Church was still within the first decade of energy and upheaval resulting from the "new Pentecost" for which Pope John XXIII had prayed in 1962 at the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The final message of that Council in 1965 had been addressed to young women and men, exhorting us to do two things, to open our hearts "to the dimensions of the world" and to find in the Church "the face of Christ." I think I was trying to do both that August day that I walked with my parents into the dim, high-ceilinged front hallway of the seminary.

Even that first day, I marveled at the building that was to be home for most of the two years awaiting me. It was not a particularly elegant structure, but it was a place that would become mine as I explored its four floors and its extensive grounds. I imbibed the flavor of the place through long, solitary walks.

The front driveway late at night, silent and black, led to an empty road and a glimpse of a distant traffic light.

Early morning there were fogs in the front of the house that you could smell and feel through the screens in the doors and parlor windows.

Walks at night on the dark road behind the chapel led to moments of standing and staring into the night sky through the black, spreading branches of the oaks, waiting for a clearer sense of a presence that seemed out there waiting for me.

And indeed, I would realize more clearly years later, God had been there, had been with me in each of those places.



Photo by georgeindenver

Persuasion

I need air-conditioning before I can try on my new LL Bean Adirondack Barn Coat.

I don’t live in the Adirondacks – or in Maine for that matter. I don’t own a barn or work near one. No coat is necessary on a steamy July day. I have to open the package from UPS, however, and find out whether the color “Dark Mushroom” is something I’ll look good in.

Part of any purchase involves a mental picture. I picture myself using something new or listening to it or drinking it through a straw as I walk across a hot parking lot back to my car.

I take what other people recommend into account when I make a purchase. I trust an auto repair shop because a colleague backs it. I order a CD after an email pal sends me the YouTube video of Richard and Teddy Thompson singing “Persuasion” on Scottish television. I visit a friend’s home to see whether a curtain can really look good hanging from a steel cable system that West Elm sells.

I think I know what I generally prefer, and then a week like this comes along, placing me in three new settings. So much of a good life is comfortable routine, and then three friends say things and I end up in what are unusual poses for a man named John. One day I am serving rice in a soup kitchen. The next day I am sitting with my elbow on the bar of a local tavern. Later in the week I am tasting a decidedly good mushroom soup in an oversized booth at a nearby Cheesecake Factory.

The mushroom soup is darker, however, than the "Dark Mushroom" of the LL Bean barn coat. I still like the coat, though. And I'd still like the soup.

Part of any purchase involves a mental picture. I picture myself wearing something new in a few months when it will be hard to remember temperatures in the 90’s on a Saturday afternoon in mid-July. I hope you will like the look too.



YouTube video of "Persuasion" sung by Richard and Teddy Thompson downloaded by joni39

Photos from LLBean and West Elm

New England Landscape

It was the right place for me the long Fourth of July weekend.

Travelling to a corner of New England, I was startled to remember that my first abbey visit had taken place twenty-five years ago. Before leaving home on Friday, I searched for any journals I may have kept on earlier retreats with the monks. It was on the ride down that I recalled that my first impressions of the place show up in the large hardcover journal of my first years living on my own after divinity school – a journal I had not thought to look for that morning.

That first visit to the abbey had taken place on a March weekend. My elderly friend Katie had just died in her convent in the South, and I had written in my hardcover journal about the rituals of the monastic day and the support they provided, likening those rituals to the ways Katie had made our own visits memorable. There used to be prayers together – just the two of us usually – in the convent parlor and then a stop before the Blessed Sacrament at the close of each playfully earnest visit.

Between glances at the pages of Mapquest directions on the seat beside me, I eventually remembered writing in the hardcover journal about a vase of anemones I had left in my apartment that March weekend. I had written about how I expected to find the flowers ripe and wilted upon my return home from my stay with the monks.

I got to talk about that stay with one of the monks who has managed to remain in contact over these twenty-five years. Walking together after Compline on Saturday evening, I mentioned how impressed I had been by the chapel that first visit, by the high wooden ceiling and the clear-glass windows through which the pines of a New England landscape were visible. I think that first abbey visit was an occasion for me to be freshly awakened to my Catholic roots and to my readiness to respond to its liturgical life. Beyond anything merely religious or doctrinaire, I found myself quickened inwardly by the rhythms of singing and praying, of community and silence, of ritually meeting in the morning and dispersing into the night.

It was good that evening a week ago to have someone with whom to share those memories. It was good to walk comfortably with a friend under a summer sky that was already retreating into the inky blue against which fireworks show up so magnificently.

Questing and Questions

I recently visited the library of a divinity school that I had attended in my late twenties. It was a rainy summer afternoon, and no one was stationed in any of the study carrels on the second level or sequestered in the stacks nearby. I got to indulge a rare mood of reverie in that public space.

I stood near one of the reading tables where as a student I had been accustomed to spread out textbooks and other course materials. It had been difficult for me sometimes to stay continuously focused on a scholarly article when shelves upon shelves of theological volumes beckoned just a few feet away.


All those books! Some old copies, some recent arrivals – they lined the shelves wherever I looked on my recent visit. They reminded me of the almost visceral yearning I used to experience passing my eyes along the titles during a break from study. I would pull this volume or that, page through it, read an opening paragraph, check on the frequency with which the book had been borrowed and how long ago.

I would mull on why this particular book might have been taken out. Perhaps a professor had assigned it for supplementary reading in a course. Perhaps a random perusal of titles twenty years earlier had led someone much like me to check the tone of the author’s writing. Perhaps a student or professor had tracked down the volume after reading a remarkably perceptive passage quoted in a scholarly journal. Perhaps in a rare instance a reader had stood in the stacks for an hour with the book in his hands, mesmerized by the point of view he was encountering for the first time on the pages in front of him.

I used to be most fascinated by the prospect of someone reaching for the book who was engaged at that moment in the quest for wisdom.

I imagined that searcher aware of the university professors and distinguished clergymen represented by these volumes on the shelves, the religious women and parish curates devoting years of prayerful effort to slim treatises on liturgy and moral formation, ancient scribes and Renaissance saints entrusting to the written page the insights once entrusted to them by exemplars and religious founders.

The fundamental questions of the heart – were the answers to those questions any closer for someone reading this volume of sermons or that history of the Church?

Or perhaps those questions of the heart got their strongest articulation in a conversation with a fellow student standing near your study table. Or sitting with you in a pair of reading chairs by a window. Or opening the library door with you at the end of the academic day.

The heart that once learned to respond to the mystery of the books, however, would never lose its longing for the promise of those shelves and the beauty of the questions they strove to name and honor.

Photo of North Reading Room, UC Berkeley from Curious Expeditions

Stunned by a Paragraph II

From The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

But at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts grow louder. "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva take flight," noted Walter Benjamin, quoting Hegel. Time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness and sleep in which the world can be comfortably reimagined. My movements feel unwittingly furtive, my activity secret. I turn into something of a ghost. The books are now the real presence and it is I, their reader, who, through cabbalistic rituals of ­half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up and lured to a certain volume and a certain page. The order decreed by library catalogues is, at night, merely conventional; it holds no prestige in the shadows. Though my own library has no authoritarian catalogue, even such milder orders as alphabetical arrangement by author or division into sections by language find their power diminished. Free from quotidian constraints, unobserved in the late hours, my eyes and hands roam recklessly across the tidy rows, restoring chaos. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A ­half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful ­muddle.

Read "Stunned by a Paragraph I"