Saints and Poets

A few weeks ago I watched the movie Titanic on an airplane coming home from New York. Rather incongruous, this gigantic story on a tiny screen 35,000 feet in the air. Never a big fan of the film, but, too tired to read, I opted for the three hour distraction.

The proximity of my seat to the screen brought the epic tragedy into tighter focus. I found myself thinking about the desperation of the poor souls whose lives came to an ironic end that fateful night. I grew up with this story, frequently recounted by my mother, whose distant relative gave up her seat in a lifeboat for her maid in order to remain aboard to die with her husband. But that story was always told in conjunction with the one about the courageous musicians who continued to play until just before the ship sank.

I watched the James Cameron film and thought about this act of bravery and love. What else was there to do? With their own watery grave beneath their feet, these musicians performed a transcendent final act of beauty and mercy, serenading the passengers to their death. One witness reported that their final song was "Nearer my God to Thee."

In the Catholic church, there is the tradition of canonization - the elevation of an ordinary individual to the level of sainthood. Among the criteria for this recognition is proof that the person being considered for sainthood performed a miraculous act. As I watched the depiction in Cameron's film of these musicians aboard the sinking Titanic, I couldn't help but think that what those musicians did was nothing short of miraculous. Generous with their gifts and talents to their hopeless end, they kept playing.

Art and music as a transcendent force in the face of human suffering has always interested me. No story so clearly exemplifies this as the story of Theresenstadt (Terezin) - the town outside of Prague in the Czeck Republic, that was converted by the Nazi's to a Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. Music and art thrived there in spite of inhumane conditions and near certain death. Children were encouraged by teachers to write poems and draw pictures of their experiences in order that they not be forgotten. They buried the poems and pictures throughout the town only to be discovered by survivors after the liberation. Theresenstadt housed many artists and musicians before their transport to Auschwitz. While hopelessness engulfed the ghetto, music brought a sense of humanity and joy. In the face of death, beauty.

Our capacity as human beings to create in the face of the greatest horror and tragic circumstances is one of our greatest gifts. These two extreme examples should provide us with an important lesson. Artistic expression should be nurtured, encouraged and valued. As the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht said, "In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times."
Or, as Emily in Our Town asks of the Stage Manager, "Do any human beings ever realize life as they live it every, every minute?"
"No. Saints and Poets, maybe. They do some."
The musicians aboard the Titanic. The teachers in Terezin. The writers. The artists.
Saints and Poets all. Their stories live on.

Dancing with the Demons

In the Saturday, October 17th edition of the Wall Street Journal, an article by writer Jeanette Winterson entitled "In Praise of the Crack-Up" caught my eye. Next to the text appeared a semi psychedelic graphic imbedded with sketches of writers' faces - the usual suspects - whenever the topic of mental illness and creativity is explored. Silvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemmingway and others - whose artistic brilliance is matched only by their tragic deaths brought on by manic-depression.

I've read a lot on this topic. Among the most notable books on my shelf is Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire which explores the seemingly indisputable evidence that a touch of madness produces good art. Of course her book goes far deeper than this over simplification in exploring the psychological causes for both depression and mania but the essence of at least part of the message is clearly that artistic expression is often born out of pain.

Jeanette Winterson illuminates the French origin of the word blessing.

"The French verb "blesser" means "to wound." Original etymologies from both Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon bind "bless" with a bloodying of some kind - the daubing of the lintel at Passover, the blood smear on the forehead or thigh of a new warrior..."

Winterson continues,

" Wounding - real or symbolic - is both mark and marker. It is an opening in the self painful but transformative."

This definition resonated deeply with me. One of my favorite quotes of all times is from St. Augustine, "In my deepest wound, I saw your glory, and it dazzled me." Woundedness, blessing, pain, creativity, transformation, healing - this is the vocabulary of my life. The rich composte of my being - from which my artistic self has grown.

My struggle with depression surfaced in the early nineties after a siege of losses that stripped away my very identity - the death of my brother to AIDS, the loss of our forty-nine year-old family business and near total financial collapse.

Jeanette Winterson, in her Wall Street Journal article writes,

"Longing is painful. Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss. The pictures, the music, the poems and the performances are an intense engagement with loss. While one is in the act of making, one is not in loss and one has meaning.... "

This has most definitely been true for me. Winterson admits that creativity takes its toll - that it often does leave the artist "ravaged." Though I wonder, is it the act of creating that leaves one ravaged, or is it the circumstances and the response to the circumstances based on one's personality that causes the suffering? Might it be that the creative act is in fact, the salvation rather than the damnation?

Ultimately, my creative passion has been the source of my healing. The act of creating has been transformative. And, now, fifteen years after dancing with the demons that defined and re-defined me, I have emerged with greater self-awareness, compassion for those who suffer from depression and grief, and a belief that it is all a continuum.

The artist is the one who feels it all, expresses it all, and yes, suffers it all. Passion. And this, I believe is true blessing.

Ode to Pine Street

I like an old neighborhood.
Its long and narrow sidewalks. Its trees and porches.

In an old neighborhood, you walk down a path to pick up the newspaper.
Mailboxes are in the door.

In an old neighborhood, you wave to people who live across the street.
You walk around the block.

An old neighborhood is a good place to live.
Pine Street is one.

On Pine Street, the steeple of St. Boniface casts a shadow.
The Church bells ring at noon.
The sound of the marching band filters through the air from St. Catherine's Military School.
Taps is played at sun down.

Kids play hopskotch, ride big wheels, and skateboards on uneven sidewalks.

The street sweeper is a common enemy. With few driveways, the neighbors on Pine Street become acquainted in robes and curlers as they dash to move the cars out of the way of the city's monster machine with its roaring engine.

On Pine Street, there are people who've lived there a long time
and remember when.

There are young families with new babies. Toddlers who are told not to run in the street.

There are roof lines and people choose the color of their stucco or wood framed houses.

There are front yards with grass and shrubs and Magnolia trees and Lilies of the Nile that bloom once a year.

People come and go.
Wave and walk.
Skip and run.

People grow up, grow old, get sick and die.

I prefer a neighborhood like Pine Street to a planned development or a gated community.
I prefer weeds in the yard to perfectly manicured beds with automatic sprinklers.
I prefer grit .
I prefer a lawn mower pushed by short-clad dads on Saturday morning to a blower wielded by hired hands.

I like the sound of children playing and babies crying.

Pine Street.
A Street to grow up on. I'm glad my kids did.
Pine Street.
A neighborhood to live in. I'm glad we did.
Pine Street.
For twenty years we called it home.

Anaheim Born and Razed

Small town memories stir each daylight savings. When darkness falls at five, I am again, Anaheim's child waiting anxiously for my turn to walk amidst cheering crowds down Center Street on Halloween. The Kiddie Parade! I remember the year I was a gypsy. I remember the year I was chosen to hold one end of the banner proudly displaying my school's name, St. Boniface.
You could taste the holiday spirit in the air. A carnival atmosphere in a city with a down town. Local shopkeeper festively decorated their windows with bright orange pumpkins and spooky goblins. Banks transformed into haunted houses and fully costumed tellers distributed candy to children making the rounds - marching between home grown businesses like Mitchell's Gift Store, Weisser's Sporting Goods, Hurst Jewelers, Jackson Drug's, Leo's Coffee Shop and the SQR Store.

I didn't know it at the time, but my childhood may have been among the last whose memories include the Kiddie Parade, the SQR Store and a down town Anaheim. You see, I'm Anaheim - born and raised. I made my debut on February 10th, 1959 in Anaheim Memorial Hospital at about nine o'clock at night. I grew up right over on Resh Place, beneath the steeple of St. Boniface Church. Harbor Boulevard to the east, Citron Street to the west, Wilhelmina to the north and St. Catherine's Military School boardering the south. I grew up going to Elvis Presley movies at the Fox Anaheim. Stopped at Center Drug first to buy a nickel's worth of candy to eat while sitting in the front row watching "Girl Crazy" and "Speedway."
Mother bought my saddle shoes from George in the shoe department at the SQR.

I'm fifty now and so are my classmates of '73 from St. Boniface School. A school that no longer exists. I left Anaheim to go to college, I got married and moved back home to raise my children in a city with no down town.

My kids never got to march down Center Street in the Kiddie Parade on Halloween. Robbed of that magic in the name of progress, my kids never had the chance to stand fascinated at the counter of the SQR as the sales slip was tucked into a tube and sent through exposed brass pipes up to the mezzanine. They never knew the little old lady with the thin red hair who cranked the elevator up to that mezzanine where she also wrapped the presents.Their memories do not include the pungent odor of shoe polish at Hoffman's nor the deer antlers that hung from its walls over the shoe-shine stands.
No. Those memories went out with the wrecking ball. As daylight savings descends - buried in the rubble - childhood dreams, a small town spirit, the Kiddie Parade and down town Anaheim.

Kairos

I've just returned from a Kairos retreat with a group of forty-seven students. Kairos means "in God's time." It is the opposite of Chronos which refers to sequential time. Surrendering to a belief that there is such a thing as God's time creates a completely different perspective on one's life.

Perspective is something that cannot be hurried. One simply cannot gain perspective without time. It is one of the gifts of a long life. Perspective helps us to make sense of the events in our lives. It helps us to derive meaning, to connect the dots, to see the continuum.

Perspective gives us a lens through which to take stock of the choices in our lives. Choices that define who we are and what matters to us. Choices that we make out of opportunity, or the lack there of. Choices made out of pain, fear, obedience, self preservation or self loathing. Choices made from a desire for acceptance, a yearning for change or a need for control.

There are consequences for every choice we make. It is perspective that allows us to reconcile ourselves with the consequences. Perspective gives us clarity.

It is clarity I gained this week. Clarity allows for forgiveness, understanding, and purpose.

One of the ways we gain clarity is through the telling of our story. Our shared stories help us to see that we are not alone. That our pain, though unique to our particular journey, is not unique. It is part of the experience of being human.
And when we share our stories, we help others to gain perspective.

A perspective that there is a purpose to every single thing that occurs in our messy, complicated, complex, confusing lives. Everything. As Rilke says,

"Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist:in understanding as in creating. In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernably silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything."

Jean Pierre Medaille, SJ, wrote in his Maxims of Perfection in 1657

"Never go ahead of grace
through imprudent eagerness
but await its moment in peace
and when it comes to you,
follow it with great gentleness and courage.
Once you have obeyed,
take care
lest complacency
rob you of the fruit of your obedience."

In order to live like this, we have to trust that as the medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich says,

"All will be well. All will be well. All manner of things will be well."

Trust. Even if we don't live to see the purpose in the event. Even if we don't gain perspective. In God's time, it all has meaning.
I am grateful to have been reminded of this. I feel reconnected with a renewed sense of purpose. Because of the clarity I have gained, I can embrace the "is-ness" of my life. I trust in Kairos.

My Mother's House Coat

I dreamed last night that I was wearing my mother's house coat. White with little flowers of yellow, red and blue printed all over it. Snaps down the front. Mother wore a house coat like that every afternoon for as long as I can remember. Not a great fashion statement, perhaps, but it was what she put on after work to relax.

I can see my mother, lying on the couch in the living room. Every afternoon she took a little nap for as long as I can remember. Her feet were crippled with arthritis. Amazingly twisted toes that once were straight. She had taken pride in her spike heels once upon a time. And the "Reid" legs. Mother's calves were nicely shaped and she gloried in them. Dancing with my father in her high heels, he would often say that it was how she kicked her foot up when she danced that had caught his eye at the Eagle Dance Hall in Cincinnati. He said he knew then that he was going to marry that girl.

It was an indignation to my mother when she had to start wearing practical shoes - a progression from pumps to loafers to something akin to a nurse's shoe.
But on the couch, she was barefoot and her gnarled toes would twitch a little. I marveled how she squeezed them into a shoe at all.

Mother would lie flat on her back, her legs, crossed at the ankle, her hand usually up at her neck sort of playing with the loose skin that fell into wrinkles beneath her chin. Her face looked as if she was thinking or dreaming - relaxed and peaceful. "I'm just going to close my eyes for a few minutes," she would say.

She would work in the yard. Clipping her camellia bushes, skimming the swimming pool, and washing down the patio. Mother was always busy with chores. Except in those moments when she would close her eyes for a few minutes.

Mother was a fastidious house keeper. When I was growing up, I would no sooner get out of bed in the morning, when she would have the bed all made up. She took pride in how she made a bed. Never did she fold the top of the bedspread down and set the pillows on top of it. She would pull the bedspread up over the pillows and then with a karate chop movement create a straight crease. I never tried to flip a quarter on the bed, but if I had, I'm certain it would have passed the military standard for bed-making. Yes, Mother made my bed. She did my laundry. She cooked me breakfast every morning and we sat down to a hot dinner every night. An "Irish washer woman" she would sometimes call herself. The washing machine seemed always to be going. Her kitchen tile gleamed a shiny yellow. She loved a broom and dust pan and used them daily on the kitchen floor.

I knew she was slipping when the kitchen began to look grimy. It got sticky actually. And the dirt grew over an inch thick in the louvers of the service porch door. She still managed to do the laundry but making her king size bed was a chore. Sometimes there was no crease under the pillows at all.
The phone calls in the early morning became more frequent. Panic in her voice, she would ask, "What do I do now?" And I would give her instructions about her next step. Eventually the phone calls stopped. She couldn't remember how to use the phone. And so it went.

But Mother wore a house coat until the end. She took her last breath in one that was lavender with small flowers printed on it. My sorority sister, Camie Lee had bought it for her at Mervyns hours before. We had run out of clean clothes.

I'd not done the laundry.

She was cremated in it. There seemed no reason to change her outfit for the occasion.
She lay on her back, relaxed, peaceful.
Her hands crossed on her chest where I placed a camellia.
Her work was done.
No more chores.
Now she could once again kick her heel up while dancing in heaven with my father.

Once Upon a Time

In The Spirituality of Imperfection Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham make a compelling argument for the power of storytelling.

"What can we do in order to be? Listen! Listen to the stories! For what stories do, above all else, is hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves. Stories are mirrors of human be-ing, reflecting back our very essences. In a story we come to know precisely the both/and, mixed-up-ed-ness of our very being. In the mirror of another's story, we can discover our tragegy and our comedy - and therefore our very human-ness."

This is precisely why being a part of a writer's group is such a powerful experience. The generosity of spirit within the trusted circle allows each person to hold a mirror up for one another. We find our own stories because of another's. And in finding our story, we find ourselves. Where we came from. What influenced us. What changed us. We no longer hide from ourselves, but rather, stare ourselves in the face - and see ourselves for the first time.

Our stories reveal truths that can only be discovered through their telling.
No small talk here.
The writer's group is a sacred trust.
At times, a container for the pain.
At times, a vessel from which the courage pours.

It's good to be back.