Baptism of the Lord

Jesus rises from the waters of John’s baptism. Needy for the waters that stream from him, we raise our simple towels to his Body to learn hope and compassion.



Project Hope (www.prohope.org) is a multi-service agency at the forefront of efforts in Boston to move families beyond homelessness and poverty. It provides low-income women with children with access to education, jobs, housing, and emergency services; fosters their personal transformation; and works for broader systems change.

This Christmas season, which closes today with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Project Hope received a request from a mother for towels for her family. We are probably all of us aware of a time in the past six weeks when we made a shopping trip with a difference. With a prayer for God’s blessing in the lives of two particular friends, I was happy to do something simple and see that bath towels, hand towels and face cloths were delivered to that mother through my local parish.

Baptism of the Lord, Tapestry by John Nava, in the Los Angeles Cathedral

François Truffaut, "Fahrenheit 451" and Narratives of Personal Change

A staple in classroom discussions of short stories and novels when I was in high school was the question: does the main character change from the beginning of the narrative to the end? It was the easiest prompt a teacher could use. It required of students an analysis of the character, based on concrete facts from the text. An easy kind of first question to ask and an easy kind of question to begin to answer, because it seemed a character almost had to change who was involved in or at least aware of the events that make up the plot. A high school student would eventually learn that the most damning judgment possible of a character is that he or she has managed to remain substantially untouched and unmoved by what is happening around or within him.

I treated myself this first week of the new year to a home viewing of a movie that had been a pivotal one in my high school days. Fahrenheit 451, adapted in 1966 by François Truffaut from a science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury, is the narrative of a future society that has banned books as destructive of the intellectual and emotional equanimity of its citizens. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper will catch fire, a fact important to “firemen” charged with destroying books that rebel members of society might attempt to hoard and read and share.

The appeal of the movie to a high school student in the 1960s was the ease of its theme to recognize and support. The added appeal to a student who loved to read was the appearance of covers and title pages of familiar paperbacks in various scenes of the movie. This futuristic society still had renegade copies of J.D. Salinger’s Cather in the Rye, and watching the opening pages of an assigned reading text as they curl and blacken in one scene of conflagration could make the action seem closer to possibility. A student viewer might feel pretty good about himself for having read a text that a future society would consider burning.

My surprise last night was the power of this narrative of an individual in the process of changing. Montag, played by Oskar Werner, starts as a fireman who seems entirely identified with the values of his society and who is proud of the place he has succeeded in gaining as a result of that identification. This man should not be ready for change or interested in it or on any level available to it.

I watched, startled when I realized what I was going to witness in the two hours of the movie. I was going to watch an individual fight the growing evidence of a life that was not fitting him. I was going to watch an actor’s face that only slowly registered anything of the turmoil within this character whose future was slowly losing its clarity and safety. I was going to see the moment when his actions start supporting a conscious separation from familiar paths and goals.

It is amazing to remember a much younger John who could not have imagined how much the changes in a human being’s life – including his own – will elude easy prediction and defy easy explanation. Artists are drawn to portray such change, however, again and again, no matter how it unsettles the intellectual and emotional equanimity of otherwise good people. Thank God it does.



Scenes from Fahrenheit 451 on YouTube

Night Walks

There are times when you have to walk out under a night-time sky and talk to your life.

You have to hear what you sound like when you don’t care how much it’s going to hurt to say the things you have to say.

You can’t have anyone around as you walk doggedly forward and around and back and forward again.

Last night I put on my down parka around eight o’clock. I had no clearer goal than to be outside and to follow the pavement for as long as I needed. I had on my leather gloves and a cap as I closed the front door behind me and slipped the familiar keys into a coat pocket.

Compared to recent nights, the air around me was bearably, I might say refreshingly cold. I was not going to be driven inside by relentless currents of frigid air or by sudden gusts. And it was also a safe neighborhood through which I would be wending my way; the only fear I might possibly face would arise from my own thoughts and the future toward which they had been leading me this past year.

I have a friend in New York who almost only calls me when she is out walking, unclear when she starts out how long she will last on the sidewalks, city block after city block. She arranges her route to bring her near a bus line in case fatigue suddenly surprises her. She can opt then for the harbor of a well-lit, over-heated bus, but it is seldom her first choice.

My friend seems to think remarkably clearly as she marches forward, the cell phone up to her ear. I occasionally hear the burst of a vendor’s harangue as she passes storefronts on her way. There are other times when the bus she is not yet taking drowns the sound of her voice as it passes her. She laughs well on New York streets, and we sometimes enjoy launching observations that verge dangerously close on peremptory dismissal of anyone with whom we happen that moment to disagree; briefly we are heedless of the outrage our spoken judgments might cause within the hearing of anyone on whose good opinion we ordinarily count.

Another friend who calls me sometimes late at night is all heartbreaking earnestness. Never raising his voice as he speaks into his phone, he is walking home from work along the sidewalks of his city neighborhood. Between work and home he has a chance to hear himself speak without the customary confidence or bonhomie to which those among whom he generally moves are accustomed. When we talk, he is asking questions about God, about a self he once knew more intimately, about a future he hopes he has the courage for.

Home is a beautiful goal for human beings, but when you are somehow between homes you have to admit it and take responsibility for it.

There are times when you have to walk out under a night-time sky and talk to your life.

Celebrating Christmas 2008

I do not know if I will do it right.

I do not know if I will do this week approaching Christmas right.

In years to come, will I always think of “celebrating Christmas 2008” as a phrase that requires mental quotation marks? Will celebrating seem a tricky word for a process of adapting day by day to a different emotional landscape from which to view the approach of the great festal event?

It hits me in the waiting times – waiting for a lunch companion, waiting for a bus. Late yesterday afternoon, I stood by myself at a bus stop where five major roads would normally be teeming with traffic at that hour. Instead, only occasional ploughs and sanders crisscrossed the area in the midst of a snow event that was significant but foreseen early and forecast accurately. No one who did not need to be out on the roads was out.

It was actually calm although the air about me with its windblown snow was growing darker and darker. Across the road someone was waiting for a bus travelling in the opposite direction, but I could not make out much about the person in her long winter coat and hood – neither her age nor her mood as the wait continued for both of us. I was only a twenty-minute walk from home, but I had opted for the bus ride to avoid the effort of planting boots in all those blocks of uncleared sidewalks.

I was tired but I was in good spirits after lunch with a friend. He and I had arranged to meet when the snow forecasts signaled an earlier than usual let-out for many of the city’s workers. It was a comfortable time to claim four hours of a waiter’s attention in a popular restaurant. We would not get to toast one another’s Christmas any closer to the actual day, so we sank into long and earnest conversation, treated ourselves to oysters, unwrapped what I kept referring to as a “gewgaw or two” with which we showed what we remembered about the other person’s interests and history.

So I should have been fortified to face the half-hour wait for the bus. I had taken care of myself. I had shared time with a thoughtful, dependable friend who was ready and eager for the kind of conversation I love. We had talked dreams and asked questions and heartily laughed over the inevitabilities of our lives.

The bus arrived that was travelling in the opposite direction from the one I wanted, and my lone company at that snowy intersection boarded the well-lit coach. The bus started again and moved into the darkness of one of the five roads. Soon I was back by myself with the ploughs and sanders.

It was an intersection at which three churches stood, none of them now open. Snow swirled around the random steeples of this New England town center and smudged their outlines against the evening sky. It was a Matthew Arnold moment as the normal uncertainty with which any commuter awaits a bus scheduled for every half hour turned into an awareness of standing by myself – in more ways than one – on that darkling suburban plain a week before Christmas.

What kind of waiting had I opted for?

What certainties had I foregone months earlier – familiar home, familiar companionship, familiar patterns – for… well, for what? For standing by myself? For waiting with no obvious one person to call should the waiting extend longer than expected? For watching the outlines of church and other familiar havens smudge as the hours went by?

I would have done well then to recall a moment five hours earlier when I had sat in a major city church in another part of town waiting for my lunch companion. I had arrived unaccountably early and with some pleasure entered a church that has always been a favorite. Up in the sanctuary two individuals were working to prepare the church for the greening later this weekend. After I texted my lunch friend about my location, I got to sit undisturbed in a pew and look up into the ceiling murals high above me. I was suddenly praying and admitting silently to God and to myself that this was a strange way for me and for other people I have known so well to be awaiting the arrival of Christmas.

I cried. I grew quiet. I stayed looking up even while I heard doors open somewhere behind me. Without needing to turn, I felt my friend enter the pew and take a place beside me. I knew from the kind of quiet that followed that he was praying too.

And with a quiet, snowy lurch my bus rounded the corner and pulled up in front of me.

I boarded, and I was heading home.




Photo of church ceiling uploaded on Flickr by innusa

Advent Joy, Advent Waiting

The first morning in a home with a freshly decorated tree feels different.

Maybe it’s a visceral awareness that within your familiar walls there are now unfamiliar branches – the nearby presence of some organic mechanism still intent on surviving, even growing if it can, drinking in whatever water is nearby.

The day before was about leaving home in quest mode. It was a day aimed at locating and acquiring, making fit and making sure, a day of arriving back home with a longed-for prize. Years of instinct and example then came into play in deciding and arranging, illuminating and decking, occasionally venturing to say “No, this year why don’t we…”

The first morning in a home with a freshly decorated tree is exceptionally quiet after the previous day’s inevitable mulling and reverie. The freshly seeing and the freshly smelling. Memories stirring and sometimes tears needing to be quieted. Some unsuspected cycle is recalled with the installation of even the humblest of table top trees.

That was the case for me yesterday.

Against the backdrop of a bookcase, a tree brought the parts of my life into the orbit of its lights. An occasional brightness picked out book titles, enamel roses on a family vase, a hammered pewter frame.

Growing peace, growing contentment.

Yesterday was about surveying a job well done – conscientiously, earnestly done.

It was about the ancient call of Gaudete on this Third Sunday of Advent.

Advent joy in Advent waiting.

Image of firefly lantern from Firefly Forest

"Winterwise" and Zephine Humphrey

This week I begin the observance of an annual tradition. I take down from the bookshelf a 1927 copy of Winterwise by Zephine Humphrey and begin my yearly reading.

December 1st:

It is snowing today, and the mood of the world is hushed. The crests of the mountains are not to be seen, even their lower slopes climb vaguely into the shrouding mists; there is no sky at all.

When I first read those opening lines almost fifteen years ago in the aisle of a used book store in Boston’s Back Bay, I was smitten. The Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, now an online establishment, used to be located on a block of Newbury Street. It was standing in the shadow of its tall bookcases that I made my acquaintance with Zephine Humphrey, a Vermont writer whose books – long out of print – I would subsequently track down on other online sites and carry with me and pore over and savor in the years to come.

A Southerner happily transplanted to New England, I responded deeply to this journal of one particular winter in Vermont, a record full of musing and unabashed reverie:

Winter is the supreme season of reconciliation. Stripped and austere, the earth ceases from her long activity and gives herself to the repose which waits at the end of every cycle of growth. The naked trees are reconciled with the gray sky, the brown hills with the russet fields, and when the snow falls, as today, even the white houses are merged and lost.

Steeping myself afresh in the first ten pages of Winterwise can make me aware that the seeds of my own blog are recognizable in how Zephine records the flavors of her life with artist Wallace Weir Fahnestock. Zephine might be a guest blogger writing a post for Writing Cabin:

But it is in the evening that the living-room is at its best. Then, with a lamp and the fire lighted, Christopher in his big chair – Tommy on his knees, I in another which I share with Grizel, the daily paper disposed of, books and a pipe in action, the winter wind without, the wall-flower smelling very sweet – then the quintessence of home seems distilled for our beatification.

Home. What can people have in mind who do not prefer it to any other place? Home: one’s own life, one’s innermost, ultimate concern, the center from which alone one can radiate effectively and mean anything.

Maybe passages like that, the instincts that prompted the author to include just those details and feed a full range of the reader’s senses, first captured my attention and my eye and made me suspect a kindred spirit.

I want to travel some of December with Zephine Humphrey again this strange, new year. I intend to face the approach of winter in the company of her words and her moods.

And so I settle down to read.

As soon as I was clear of the house, swinging down the road with my hands in my pockets, I found that the day was not really dismal at all, only very solemn. The hills underneath the low-travelling clouds were dark gray and lavender, purple and brown, with a delicate brushing of silver frost on their tree-rough summits. They were not depressing – quite the contrary; but there was something stern and inexorable about them. The incredibly brief December day (I never remember from year to year how short a day can be) was already drawing in and dusk was preparing to claim the world. Winter dusk, of all earth moods the most mystical.



Image of "Snowfall" by Wallace Weir Fahnestock at AskArt

Advent Wreath 2008

The month before Christmas is busy enough. Who in their right mind – to use one of my mother’s favorite expressions – adds an Advent wreath to the December to-do list? My mother balked one Christmas season when I insisted on finally lighting some candles that had been given her as a gift several years earlier. Candles were décor to her thinking, and I had just marred her setting of candles, intact wicks ready for a hostess to light before the arrival of her guests. It’s how Better Homes and Gardens must have instructed her.

The idea of an Advent wreath whose four tapers had to be lit every night for almost four weeks would have affronted my mother’s sense of home safety and economy and cleanliness. Let the sisters in the local parish school light as many candles as they wanted to, both in their convent chapel and in their classrooms. The well-heeled ladies of the parish who played the role of rectory groupies might boast of the family devotions they orchestrated in their houses as well. Matches were for lighting the gas heater in the bathroom wall of our New Orleans home and for jumpstarting the gas range when the pilot light went out.

I would have loved occasionally lighting a votive candle before the statue of the Blessed Mother on the dresser in my parents’ bedroom. The David and Ann series of grammar school readers used in my parochial school had an illustration of a frightened child waking up in the darkness of her bedroom; through the open door, however, she can glimpse her parents saying the evening rosary, standing before a home shrine with its statue and votive lights.

I knew I would not be able to talk about that picture to my parents or to my brothers. Despite the devout upbringing we all received, the idea of a family devotion that might aid family communication in ordinary times of difficulty and stress was a foreign one.

So I was drawn to it even more.

A home with religious devotion as a way to feel close to the other members of your family must happen somewhere. A home where people talk about the hopes for their lives could not be impossible – a home where the mystery of our individual lives and the decision to confront that mystery together in the presence of God could be a reality.

Deep down I had hoped for that kind of home when I entered religious life in my early twenties.

The hunger for other aspects of home life, however, made it difficult for me ultimately to feel “at home” with the vows and the kind of community they created.

Last Saturday evening I had an experience that reminded me of what I had wanted during some of those early Decembers of my life. I had a friend who went with me to the Christmas tree lot a mile from home and picked out a wreath with me for my kitchen table. Then I drove with him to the nearby Whole Foods and purchased four clear-glass votive holders.

The remarkable thing was that his interest in each aspect of the trip was as keen as mine. When we had assembled everything back at home, I lit the first votive candle. No other light in the room, we each took a seat at the kitchen table. We settled ourselves before the light of the wreath and began to talk about the times in our lives when we had watched other Advent wreaths. We talked about the people long ago who had communicated their delight in this winter devotion and made us each want to welcome it into our homes as adults.

Suddenly I knew that I had not been mistaken earlier in my life. A home with religious devotion as a way to feel close to other people can happen – a home where the mystery of our individual lives and the decision to confront that mystery together in the presence of God can be a reality.

That was an Advent grace worth waiting for.

Photo by David Ennis

Crafting a Christmas Card

People don’t usually get to explain why they send the Christmas card that they do. Truth be told, they usually don’t want to. Enough that they found a card, got the envelopes addressed and stamped, and got them to a post office in time for a Christmas Eve delivery at the latest.

On November 29, the day before the First Sunday of Advent, I met the deadline that I had set for myself two months ago. Contact information that needed to get to the people to whom I usually write Christmas cards is on its way to them.

In the best of worlds, the exchange of Christmas cards takes on some of the spirit of an exchange of gifts. The choice of card is no haphazard thing because the potential recipients are no haphazard addressees. I always have had the hope that people opening the envelope that I addressed to them will find a card whose design and message cause them to pause, to evaluate, to conclude, “Ah, now there’s a John card par excellence. And with a John message!”

The yearly exchange is made. Two parties get once more to enjoy the expectation, the execution, the satisfaction of recognition and even gratitude for a worthy exchange.

Except... I know the speed with which I myself work my way through the stack of cards arriving any one day of December. Skipping summarily over envelope and address label, I briefly register the image on the front of the card, ignore the printed message inside, and head for any handwritten comment prefacing or following or facing their signature.

If the goal of the person sending the card had been to spend time with me via card stock and letterpress, I have thwarted their aim to delay me in the busy press of December duties at the end of each day.

They may know, however, that I am someone who will re-read their greeting after the evening meal, read it again before placing it in a basket in the front room, and potentially read it a third and fourth time at a moment of Yuletide reverie with eggnog in hand and sugar cookies on a plate beside me. Their efforts then will pay off – I will even wonder why this card, why this wording in their message, why this Christmas meriting just this greeting and no other. Why a photo card? Why a religious card? Why a funny card – again?

This analysis may give the lie to the time and planning that preceded my own trip to the post office on Saturday, plastic bag in hand with stamped envelopes safe from any weather that might have smeared an address or loosened the postage stamp with its Botticelli Madonna.

These cards that were two full months in the making were intended to get to recipients in a few days and make them pause – despite that fatigue at the end of a December day, despite that eagerness to finish with the holiday mail and get to cocktails and online shopping. If only because of its early arrival, my card wanted to get people to think a little longer about me than usual, about the things important in my life these days.

Will I succeed?

Will the chocolate brown envelope trump the white and red and green envelopes amid which it will lie? Will the texture and weight of the paper out of which the envelope is made recall the importance of formal announcements rather than the seasonal frolic of snowballs and holly?

A chocolate brown envelope begs for an address label lighter than chocolate brown. White labels are certainly available, but a special envelope is no longer special when the label reduces it to the status of one more piece of bulk mail. In an online search I found labels in the rough texture of kraft paper, a tan that shows up fine against the chocolate brown.

So... will the oversized kraft paper shipping label stand out in the way it was intended? Will a recipient briefly enjoy the exalted font size for his or her name in bold above the centered address? Will the smaller return address label on the flap of the envelope appear clearly linked in design to the label on the front?


Will the photo card inside the envelope surprise by not showing a face shot of me or anyone I know? Will the image of Willoughby Elliott's oil painting of two trees in a late summer landscape get a chance to make an impression when the card is placed on a mantle lined with red candles and brass stocking holders?

christmas 2008
in the open
in the light

Will the three lines in the tan message panel to the right of the image of trees seem unnecessarily cryptic or poetic or self-congratulatory when no sender’s name appears printed beneath them?

Even heavy with
art and
illumination,
a tree
dreams
of its summers
in the open -
of the light
toward which it faithfully aimed
its every newest growth.

Will the poem on the enclosed cream-colored card get a careful enough reading? Will it appear to justify the earlier three lines as a message about Christmas and the way the radical hope at the center of that feast can enlighten and change real lives?

Will it make sense that I had something to say that may have needed two full months to become clear to me?

Will the multi-layered gift that the card attempts to be find a moment with each recipient and call forth from each of them a prayer for the power and hope of this feast in their own lives?

Two Warm Trees by Willoughby Elliott from Harrison Gallery

An Unsettled Anniversary

Last week a friend sent me word that his grandfather had died the night before. The grandfather had not lived at home for two years; nevertheless, his final hospitalization had been sudden and unexpected. My friend’s grandmother was the only person whose voice had seemed able to summon the briefest of acknowledgements from the ninety-year-old man in his comatose condition.

I wanted to be supportive and asked questions that would give my friend an opening to talk about this loss if he wanted to. I had no idea whether the tie between the two men had been a close one. I recalled my own parents’ reactions to my grandparents’ deaths, though. I knew that if someone had not witnessed a parent’s grief before, the funeral of a grandparent – even one who had not been the special friend that some grandparents manage to be – could trigger an unsettling sense of apprehension.

At a funeral the generations of a family reveal themselves as a moving, transient reality – not eternal and unchanging as early childhood sometimes expects.

My friend’s response to one of my questions stays in my mind. Asked whether he were ready for what the day of the funeral might demand of him emotionally, he replied: “I don’t know what to expect.”

It is a statement that should have been on my own lips last week as this Monday before Thanksgiving approached. Last year on this first day of a short work week I had experienced a discomfort in my chest while walking upstairs after lunch. Following the directions I had received at a recent cardiologist’s appointment, I contacted a nurse in my building.

Within fifteen minutes I was being rolled down the hallway on a gurney by paramedics. At no point were there any severe pains; it was determined fairly early that I was not indeed having a heart attack. The look of my day, however, and indeed the look of my year changed as I watched the ceiling of a work place corridor passing overhead.

Three days and a heart catheterization later, I was home. A wedge had been inserted, however, between me and what should have been the utter familiarity of the setting to which I was returning.

So I should not have been surprised by the mild unease that began last week to characterize the approach of this first anniversary – the first Monday before Thanksgiving since my hospitalization last year.

Another friend sent a text message this morning after an earlier telephone conversation between us: “Are we a bit on the tired side today?”

Yes, I admitted to myself with sudden recognition. I was indeed tired. Truth be told, I was probably most tired of the uncertainty with which I had approached this first anniversary. I was tired of keeping at bay the unsettling sense of apprehension that accompanies all the more pointed reminders of the reality of time’s passing.

I am grateful for the patient understanding of good friends on days like this.

Book Fair

An international book fair is worth a little travel, and so this past Saturday a friend and I arranged our schedules to meet for the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Hynes Convention Center in Back Bay.

Coats and umbrellas dutifully checked at the door, we entered a book lover’s dream. Briefly we checked our notions of frugality and economic realism at the door as well. The price of admission had purchased us the right to handle some remarkable first editions and old maps and manuscripts. We practiced nodding sagely at booksellers’ courteous presentations, letting some of the higher figures like $20,000 and $35,000 elicit from the two of us the merest roll of the eyes.

The love of reading is a strange catalyst in a setting like this. A favorite author or two and many authors who had never figured in our favorites’ list got us wondering whether we might be willing to part with a couple of hundred dollars for the ownership of a first edition with dust jacket virtually intact. With such a purchase we would have felt entitled to weave a narrative with which to entertain and possibly impress future guests to the house and friends at work.

“It was a little bit of a surprise to see this volume by Auden and Isherwood at the book fair last November…”

“I know I don’t need another edition of Anne Sexton…”

“Yes, see how well the print in this early edition matches the coarseness of the paper on which it appears…”

The book itself as object of reverence and desire and even financial speculation – how far from the experience of reading with which some of us first experienced the liberating potential of an articulate author’s view of life! I still remember what freedom had seemed possible when I first saw a television production of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. I had realized that my own stifled sense of home life was not unique in the lives of men and women who were considered intelligent and successful.

Almost three hours after we entered, we were at the door ready to leave. I suddenly asked for five minutes. Briefly postponing the falafel sandwich I pictured waiting for me at nearby Cafe Jaffa, I hurried down the aisles and rows of book fair stalls, looking down one and then another for a certain booth at the edge of the conference area. Earlier I had seen something that seemed an affordable memento of the day – and even an enjoyable if quirky read.

Within the requested five minutes I returned to my friend waiting at a booth near the exit. I had decided to purchase for fifteen dollars a 1960 children’s book titled Amelia and the Angels by Muriel Hooper. It was designated “scarce” in the bookseller’s pencil jotting on the flyleaf. Appropriately, it seemed to me, it was about a church mouse named Amelia.

I looked forward to the simple pleasure of reading the tale later at home, but for a short time I could relish the satisfaction of walking out of the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair with a brown paper bag secured by a yellow sticker identifying the contents as a purchase made at the fair. No one needed to know whether those contents had cost me fifteen dollars or fifteen thousand dollars.

They simply needed to know that I loved books. Seriously.