Unsure and Certain Hope

It’s the night before I’m leading a funeral service for a former parishioner who died suddenly this past Saturday while the regular pastor is on vacation.

Cimetiere Montparnasse

e

Apart from the past few months, I’ve been on a hiatus from parish ministry—though it’s true that in the last few months when I’ve been back in the parish, it comes rushing back to me that this is a worthy calling: to be with people when answers no longer apply and questions are wordless, however real. That’s when people need somebody to do whatever it is I do, which is, as far as I can tell, this: to point beyond the question to the mystery that surrounds it and—somehow, but with boldness--summon hope.

I don’t mean blind hope. I don’t mean stupid hope. I don’t even mean Emily Dickinson’s fey definition (and I don’t think Emily Dickinson was fey in any way other than how she defined hope, which is “The thing with feathers/that perches in our soul.” Really, Emily? Feathers?)

I mean the kind of inchoate hope that is at once vague and yet trustworthy. There’s a paradox. Still, that’s how faith operates. Paradoxically. I can totally understand why people get annoyed by faith. I do, too. But it grips me by the scruff of my neck and shakes me and before you know it I will be saying these words, these words I know by heart:

“Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant, Barbara. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive her into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.”

And after that, I will say this:

“In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend Barbara to her resting place, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her. The Lord’s face shine upon her and be gracious to her. The Lord look upon her with favor and give her peace.”   

What does this mean? What does this accomplish? I don’t know.

And one day—far away, I truly hope—I also hope somebody will say those words for me.

Decorating with Edgar Allen Poe

What? This surprises you?

But in fact, the man who gave us "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and that classic verbatim on the dysfunctional family, "The Fall of the House of Usher,"--to say nothing of the literally teeth-chattering (oh, and I mean that--literally teeth-chattering) "Berenice"--held quite strong views on interior decorating.

Just to sample a few phrases in the opening paragraph of "The Philosophy of Furniture" might amuse you: "The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are all curtains--a nation of hangman. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapps are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous."

Let it be said that Poe would not have shopped at IKEA. Or Anthropologie. Or West Elm. In fact, he was kind of against most things.And he felt that Americans furnished their homes exactly against what he thought was tasteful. And he was painstakingly tasteful. (Not that Poe, himself, had the kind of digs we might associate with Henry James, prig that he was. I'm sorry, James, but must those sentences be so damn long? At least when Poe wrote his long sentences, there was blood and gore and aberrant dental work--cf "Berenice"--to add some spice.)

Poe in "The Philosophy of Furniture," published in an 1840 issue of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine" (what I imagine as the GQ of its day), opined against people who thought they knew something about carpets: "A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of carpet must be a genius. Yet we have heard discoursing of carpets, with the air 'd'un moutaon qui reve,' fellows who should not and could not be entrusted with the management of their own moustaches."

Point is, he had strong feelings about carpets and I suspect those that shield my floors would violate his sense of what was an appropriate floor covering.

He also didn't like what he called "glare:" "Glare is a leading error in the philosophy of American household decoration." By this he means he doesn't like gaslight and he doesn't like glass. Of gas he says, "No one having both brains and eyes will use it." Okay, point made.

For Poe, glass equates to glitter. And glitter is bad. As he notes, "Flickering, unquiet lights are sometimes pleasing--to children and idiots always so--but in the embellishment of a room they should be scrupulously avoided. In truth, even strong steady lights are inadmissable."

And, he adds, "Female loveliness, in especial, is more than one-half disenchanted beneath its evil eye." Poe, I surmise, was not a morning sex kind of guy, perhaps not even with his first-cousin, thirteen-year-old wife. Before she died.

And he had a particular disregard for mirrors: "Considered as a reflector, it is potent in producing a monstrous and odious uniformity...if we add to this evil the attendant glitter upon glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing effects. The veriest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bidizzened, would be instantly aware of something wrong."

Anthropologie

But WHY am I telling you all this? I love Edgar Allen Poe. He's kinda my Home-boy. (But not really, because nobody wants Edgar Allen Poe as their Home-boy.) No, I'm telling you this because Poe was brilliant at writing short stories that still scare the pants off the toughest of us, if we are willing to muck through his long (though not James-eon-long) sentences. He's cool, he's scary. Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and a host of other good writers are in his debt. Or perhaps his karmic bequest.

But he lacks chops when it comes to interior to design. Moral of my story: as my daughter always says, eat cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory. Eat Pasta at The Pasta Factory. Eat seafood at Legal Seafood.

And when you go to Anthropologie to look for ways to spruce up your living room, plop Poe in the Husband's Chair at the entrance (even if he wasn't such a great husband, either).

Awash in Puddles

The rain is raining all around.

It falls on field and tree.

It rains on the umbrellas here

And on the ships at sea.

                 --Robert Louis Stevenson,                

                    A Child’s Garden of Verses

           

You know how good that feeling is when you’re just too grumpy to want to feel good? That’s how I thought I had made an uneasy peace with this endless rain.

My laptop is by the window and I watched while three little kids in yellow slickers and Wellington boots splashed in all the puddles up and down the street. Then they stopped in my front yard where there is not supposed to be a pond, but because of all this rain there is what kids would call--and grown-ups dispute--a pond.

The kids jumped up and down in the pond, over and over, like little human Superballs. One of them fell on her bottom, naturally unfazed. Another squatted down to bathe his face like next he was going to pull out his Playschool razor. They were soaked well beyond their skins.

Their mother watched, standing off to the side. Immediately I thought she must be a good mother, a patient mother, the kind who does projects with her kids and who would somehow be able to get them to actually practice the clarinet when they were old enough to be taking music lessons.

I was not that kind of mother. I sold the clarinet. The trombone we still have, entombed in its case and lying at rest in Linnea’s closet. As for projects, I never liked them. They required a level of spatial reasoning my SATs had proved I never had:  ‘Where can I set the piles of laundry so that little Madeleine will have some room to build the wind-powered generator for her Barbie habitat?’

And while my girls would have loved to become so muddy, so messy, so deliciously rain-drenched, I was much too curmudgeonly a mom to have let my kids puddle jump so egregiously (and almost subversively) on every neighbor’s lawn up and down the street.

No, that’s why God made irregular French verbs—for schoolchildren to keep busy on rainy days.

  

But as I sat at my computer, watching the rain-soaked urchins, I started thinking that they looked like illustrations from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses come to life. Of course, if they had been illustrations from A Child’s Garden of Verses, the very last place they would want to be is upstate New York in this convulsive dreariness.

Yet somehow, as I watched them, my grumpiness began to abandon me. This felt like betrayal. I had been safe and warm inside my grumpiness. I didn’t want to think of those lovely times when I had gone boldly and uncovered into the weather.

Like when I was in my twenties, too much in love, too young to know the consequences of climate, and had moved to Washington state just south of the rain forest. Yes, the rain forest. We had lived amidst flowers that bloomed while we slept—while it continued to rain. Mornings, before I could drive to work, I had to scrape the camellias from the windshield.

My beloved had lived in dry lands and the rain had seemed to enchant him. We found washed away roads, the brittle edges of their blacktop softened; we found bridges that had been built to allow for a change of course. And all the while the rain kept a swath of cloud like gauze around Gray’s Harbor. This wasn’t Brigadoon because it was real and from it real souls emerged. But still it seems as far away as that.

Which may be why there was a strange and wordless comfort in the night-black walk my daughter, Linnea, and I took last summer. When the rain seemed neither to threaten nor stop, we left our tidy bed-and-breakfast and made our way to the edge of a tiny harbor. There we stood, wet as clams, watching anonymous sail boats find their shelter where they could.

Their mast-lights were all that showed, gleaming like fireflies, but heaving in the waves like kids with sparklers on the Fourth of July.

Heidi Caswell Zander

We stood unseen on shore, the sea drawing away beneath our feet with each receding wave. We were barefoot, except for our CVS flipflops, and we had brought no umbrellas. The rain was warm. We had planned on getting wet and knew we would not get lost.

The harbor was tiny; the sheltered crafts were small. And I was not Matthew Arnold standing on the cliffs of Dover writing poetry anybody might ever remember or decide to forget. I was simply a mother with a blooming daughter by my side watching the pitch and shift of insecure vessels in a rainstorm. There was nothing—not even as yet our skins--at stake.

But in the blackness, the pitching lights atop the smallcrafts’ masts reminded us that terra firma is nothing more than a cloud in our minds. Maybe we spend our lives in a shifting search for safety--in a random harbor, or in a neighbor’s grassy front yard, a neighbor who will bless our puddle-jumping and splashing and say, let it be.

           

           

           

                         

50 Banned Words?

Don Herold, The New Yorker

But I simply couldn't believe anybody would try to ban words.

I simply couldn't take it in when someone I know posted a Facebook link to a site called Staten Island Alive or silive.com. (Admittedly, this story ran in March of 2012. But just because something happened in the past doesn't make it untrue). Anyway, in reading the article to which the link sent me, I discovered that "the [New York] city Department of Education is aiming to get 50 words removed from some city-issued standardized tests, and some of them are real head-scratchers."

"Head-scratchers" here has nothing to do with how these problematic words might challenge juvenile spellers or contribute to a rise in juvenile head-lice. It's meant more like the way a dog cocks its head when hearing an inexplicable sound, in this case the sound of a banned word.

I know the "n" word is more or less a banned word and I won't get started on that. Okay, maybe I will, just a little: words can be ill-used, or used to hurt or alienate. But any word itself is merely a signifier; it is not really what is signified. And attitudes of hurtfulness or prejudice can be signified with any number of words (or gestures) that don't employ the use of--in the case of the "n" word--the "n" word. So it's not as if words qua words are bad. But they can be used to cause bad hurt. And banning them won't stem that.

And now--back to the fifty banned words. Apparently the thinking is that these words will cause the test-taking students to feel excluded, threatened or victimized and that would distract them from being able to perform to their highest ability on these standardized measurements.

Harrumph, indeed. I remember a word problem from my 9th-grade Regents math test in which we had to calculate some kind of data about how the Martians performed a task as compared to the Venusians. I've spent the next few decades wondering who the hell the Venusians are. I mean, they're not from Venice, of course, because those are Venetians, like Marco Polo and Casanova and Peggy Guggenheim and the pastries. But we all learned in science class that Venus is uninhabited. Are math and science incompatible? Do mathemeticians not know what astronomers know? Shouldn't they be talking? Was I distracted on my math Regents? Sure was! (Did I pass? Yes, with an A.)

So why do the educators in the New York City Department of Education think students will be distracted--and bow to the corollary argument that distraction is necessarily a bad thing--by the following selection from their list of fifty banned words? Let's sample:

abuse - perhaps the issue here is that if we don't say the word, it won't happen;
birthdays - perhaps it's that for those of us past age thirty, if we don't say the word, we won't get older;
bodily functions - perhaps if we don't say the word, they will continue to function just fine--no matter what;
divorce - perhaps if we don't say it, it won't happen;
Hallowe'en - perhaps if we don't say it, we won't get egged;
junk food - perhaps if we don't say, we will not actually have eaten it
poverty - perhaps if we don't say it, it will go away;
sex - perhaps if we don't say it, teen pregnancies will simply disappear--pouff!;
slavery - perhaps if we don't say the word, it will not have happened/be happening;
weapons - perhaps if we don't say the word, we will not have to confront the question of gun control.

Tomorrow: a geography lesson about a very, very long river in river in Egypt. You know the one.