Feast of the North American Martyrs

I shouldn’t have liked them as a child but I did.

I shouldn’t have found the wilderness landscapes through which they pressed a source of fascination – nor the autumns and winters that darkened their travels.

On this yearly feast in the calendar of saints comes the reminder of a connection that is fresh and stubbornly powerful.

Not everyone chooses the French explorers Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf for soul companions. If I prefer to call them explorers rather than missionaries or martyrs, it is because I find myself on a day like this attuned to the unknown into which they kept venturing. Surer than any of the certainties I may at one time have imagined centering or grounding them was the inevitability of those unknowns – the next minute’s safety, the next day’s destination, the next chapter to unfold in a story that could go anywhere.

On a day like this I want the courage and the intensity that made those unknowns life-giving and profound.

Sunday Evening Kitchen

I was coming up from the basement with pants on hangers, fresh and warm from the dryer. The upcoming week's laundry was that much closer to being done, I thought. Shouldering open the back door of the kitchen, I should simply have headed down the apartment hallway to the bedroom.

But the evening sun stopped me. Movement and light in squirming squares on the wall above the kitchen counter stopped me. The tossing branches of treetops from backyards two houses away filtered the horizontal sun that found my second-storey kitchen wall.

The surprises that do come! And for free!

Please Touch

When you frame a photograph, you plan for it to be seen. You imagine at least one visitor who will stand before it or sit beside it and then turn to you, an expectant look on his face, saying, “Can you tell me about this?” You know that you will welcome that look and that question. You hope that the conversation is about to happen that the framing was originally meant to signal your readiness for.

Sometimes the better-than-expected happens. The pleasure you had first felt in fitting a favorite photograph in a frame and setting it in its space revives at the sight of someone else picking it up. You may not have known that you were waiting for that response on the part of anyone. There it is, though, the familiarity and confidence that your framing was after all – all along – an invitation.

And it was. Of course it was.

I might not explain to everyone the comfort I derive from the vintage portrait of an Australian curate and his dog. The priest’s thoughtful, intelligent ease, though, and his readiness for the dog’s companionship had made the purchase of the photograph a prompt and heartfelt one. I knew I wanted his company.

I am glad, even relieved that the flavor of that company appeals to others.

Speaking of Angels

That's exactly what I was doing one day almost twenty years ago -- speaking of angels. A group with whom I met regularly in those days had asked me to compose a reflection for the Advent season. A friend who remembers the talk asked me about it last week near the feasts of the angels. Some passages in the reflection sound like I could have written them twenty minutes ago rather than twenty years ago. I still need such angels.

Like Gabriel, angels appear in our lives in the people
who by their very presence invite our lives to be different.
Such angels appear in the people
who refuse to abandon a message before it has been heard,
in people who tirelessly ask us to respond,
to believe the good news of what’s possible.

Like Michael, there are angels in our lives
who fight and speak up for us.
They give us the courage to face whatever’s in our way.
Like Michael, these angels give us strength
against those voices that tell us we can’t do something,
that we’re not good enough.

Like Raphael, there are certain angels
who travel with us
through darkness, through pain,
even to the foot of a cross.
Like Raphael, such angels may be hard to see, to discern,
especially on journeys whose end we cannot guess or imagine.

An invitation has been quietly extended to each of us
to give a name to what we know is unnameable.
It is the experience of grace,
grace felt when we are inspired to pray,
to quiet ourselves,
to acknowledge that ours is a God
who protects us and challenges us,
who speaks to us and invites us to respond.

Gate Opens

No one needs what I am about to write.

I am the only reader who may want one day to be reminded of something.

Winds are moving. Some life needs no record in ship’s journals to convince that its power has cleared the decks and filled the sails.

If the logs are without detail, believe that a new tale is nonetheless ready for the person who can tell it.

Meanwhile meals are prepared, laundry is carried down to the basement, sandwiches are cut in manageable halves. Windows are closed against the customary fall in temperatures. Books lie open and candles are ready for lighting.

Seasons are noted by their changing.

Night’s dreams, vivid and relentless, recently make each awakening an adventure.

Gates open.

Another fall begins.

Roast Chicken

I am roasting a whole chicken this Sunday morning. Within an hour I turn on the oven and begin preheating.

This is the time of a meal when all is still prospect and possibility. I am guided by family memories of open windows in a September kitchen, a bulletin from 8 o’clock Mass on the counter, sections of newspaper stacked on a chair.

There is no television on and no radio. I get the flavor of Sunday quiet rather than Sunday programming as I change my weekend schedule and prepare a noontime meal.

Black-and-white photographs hang on the walls. A cat sleeps on the sofa. Lives move on in a way that consoles and surprises.

Writing in a Mountain Lodge

As a high school student I picked up a Scribner’s paperback edition of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe and fell in love. My oldest brother had purchased the book for a college course; he had written his name on the inside front cover. I was taken by the exuberant, lyrical prose of the North Carolina writer and hunted for Of Time and the River, the sequel which a New York editor had carved out of mountains of manuscript. It was easier to find paperback copies of two posthumous volumes of Wolfe's, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again. In time I took an unprecedented step in my life. I had a local bookstore order Of Time and the River, available then only in hardcover, directly from the publisher.
.
I planned a car trip to the author’s home state the summer after my freshman year in college. In the car that one of my best friends had received as a gift from his parents, he and I headed to the Smoky Mountains. The route was a familiar one to my friend from summer visits to a particular mountain lodge that his parents had favored year after year. Knowing my fascination with Thomas Wolfe, my friend had agreed to continue on to Asheville so that we could visit this favorite author’s grave and childhood home.

Look Homeward, Angel is autobiographical, and in a key section of the novel Wolfe narrates the days leading up to the death of his older brother Ben in the flu epidemic of 1918. Within an hour of arriving in Asheville, I got to the city cemetery, stood at the family tomb and read Ben’s name. The next day I toured the home where the Wolfe family had lived. I moved from room to room, reading next to each doorway passages from the novel about what had taken place in that room. It was particularly important to stand in the room where Ben had died and read the familiar passage affixed to the doorway.

In the presence of a close friend, someone who had known me well enough to accompany me on this pilgrimage to Asheville, I still could not summon up in that public place the kind of feelings that each private reading of Thomas Wolfe’s novel had inevitably evoked.

I was there – at the grave, in the room where Ben had died – and I could only acknowledge that something had happened there about which I had read and been moved reading. Miles and miles of travel, and I was not touched in the ways I might have expected.

At least not immediately.

Within twenty-four hours, however, in the mountain lodge where my friend had stayed so many times before, I began my writing about the Asheville visit. I wrote about someone who had been so moved by a favorite author that he had been willing to visit the place where that author had lived his early years and been buried.

The visit to Asheville sounded significant when I wrote about it.

It might also have felt significant – even as it was happening – if I had been able to sit still for a while in each of those places. If I had turned to my friend and said, “You know what’s happening now?” If I had thought to whisper to my favorite author, “I’m here. I came here for you and to thank you.”

I’m better at that now.

Back to the Writing Cabin

Almost three years after my first visit, I was hiking again today along the pond at Trail Wood. The visitors' register for the 200-year-old Connecticut farm showed only one other signature from earlier in the day. It was a quiet bridge I crossed to the writing cabin.


For a second time I had signed my own name in the register. Leafing back, I was able to find my signature from the Sunday in October 2007 when I first visited the home and study of Edwin Way Teale, the American naturalist writer whose books had lured me here.


For a second time I got to sit today on the stone steps leading to the front door of the log cabin that Teale had built facing his pond. A guide had unlocked the cabin that Sunday afternoon three years ago, and the chance to walk into the rustic space with the writer's desk and chair had been stirring.


When I understood what Edwin Way Teale had set out to do at Trail Wood at age sixty, I knew that dreams of my own were not negligible. Why not acknowledge the right to center my life on what my heart longed to do? Why shy from the journey that opened before me?


If the register I had twice signed in the last three years could not vouch for a larger number of visitors, it nonetheless testified to the power of something that I might otherwise have ignored or dismissed. Dreaming happens in the quiet of the night, in the stillness of a Saturday meadow. Such dreaming is everyone's right.


I knew people I wanted to contact today as I grew calmer and calmer in this holy site.I read out loud the handwritten letter from one friend. I spoke into the early afternoon air all the gratitude and wonder that I could muster at what human lives can manage to be. I thanked Edwin Way Teale for his dream on behalf of all the lives it has already touched.

It will touch more.

August 14 ... again

My father was ten days away from his sixtieth birthday when I sat – not yet twenty myself – in the back seat of the family Chevrolet on the entrance day assigned for my seminary class.

Each summer the anniversary of that drive looms, a drive with my parents on hot Louisiana highways to a rural seminary. Each August I expect the invitation to reflection. I never resist the reflection nor fear it. It is, in fact, a yearly challenge and even a delight to which I look forward.

The significance of the day derives from what I was finally stepping out of, a life at home that had not been easy. The significance of the day also derives from what I was getting ready to try, a life that I might still be leading if later discernment had not directed me elsewhere.

Where I got to do that reflecting this August 14 was new. The windows of my second-floor apartment were open to a drier New England morning than we have had for most of the summer. The neighborhood streets were quiet. After breakfast and coffee, I settled in an armchair that I had selected just for this living room. Despite its arrival two months ago, I had not yet spent a Saturday morning in it.


How had my father prepared for that drive almost forty years ago? I am barely two years away from the age he was that August morning. By this point in my own life, I know my patterns and my rhythms, my predilections and habits. I know there is nothing more natural for me than to review my life before milestone events and on anniversary occasions, to muse on it, to write about it, to sit before its surprises and directions. Two years in that rural Louisiana seminary may have taught me how and why to do that kind of reflecting – even, in some circumstances, how long to do it.

I do not know how my father went about facing the departure of another son from his household. We did not have a long conversation – father to son – about my decision. I wish I could say it was customary to hear my mother say to him, “Come, talk to me. You know this is an important moment in our lives as parents. When you get quiet like this, I know you’re mulling things over. Tell me about it.”

Like me, my father had an understated way of suggesting that things with him were all just fine. Like me, though, and like any of us, he could have used some patient prodding. He could have used a listener who knew how to get him to talk.

He could have used some help that August day forty years ago.

I could have, too.

Cézanne, Corona, Crawfish Étouffée

Sunday dinner nourished on all sorts of levels today.