Adventures in Prayer #1

Pray without ceasing.
1 Thessalonians 5-17

With all prayer and supplication, pray at every opportunity in the Spirit.
Ephesians 6:18

There are many thousands of books on prayer. Why? I don’t want to sound cynical, but prayer sells. If you do a search at Amazon for “Pray Always,” you will immediately find numerous books incorporating variations of that title.

Again, why does prayer sell? I think the superficial answer is obvious: we desperately want to talk to God. Perhaps, more importantly, we want Him to listen to us. In our most desperate moments we question why God should bother to listen to us at all. We question whether we even know how to pray. Paul’s invocation to pray without ceasing is beyond our comprehension.

Alongside the desperate are people who seek some kind of transcendence through prayer. Many of them seek correspondingly transcendent guidance. Others look for personal healing or some other tangible result that is far too important to leave to their own prayerful devices. Surely, someone has discovered a better way to pray.

Over the years, I have come to believe that this appeal to our prayerful insecurities is not always without foundation. Some of us may very well have reason to be insecure. After five years of Catholic schooling and daily mass and twelve more years of Catholic indoctrination, one would expect that I would have learned how to pray. In fact, I know now that I did not. Although my recollection may be unfairly distorted, all I recall of prayer was words. Words in a particular order, the Our Father, Hail Mary, the Gloria. We were instructed to grab our rosaries, hang on, and fire repetitive volleys of words at the heaving breast of Satan. I do not recall being instructed what those words meant, but in fairness perhaps I was.

The same was true for the mass, which back then was recited in Latin. As “Knights of the Altar” we boys were required to memorize reams of Latin, most of which we did not understand, all except mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, which we all knew. Again, it was just words, something to get through until we could make our escape into the clean, fresh air unadulterated by incense and candles.

The origin of my first personal experience with prayer is long forgotten, a suggestion or reference in class perhaps, after which I felt it my obligation to say seven Gloria’s every night before retiring, which I did faithfully for years. Seven became eight, then nine and so on, as I sometimes increased the nightly number to avoid any temptation to weakness. For years I could count on my fingers how many nights I had missed. It was no streak like Gehrig’s or Ripkin’s, but it was something of which I did not want to let go. Night after night I rattled off those prayers silently at my bedside. I don’t remember what was going through my head then, but it is doubtful the words held much meaning for me. I was more concerned with counting, counting the number of prayers, counting the number of nights missed. Somewhere along the way, God took pity on me and released me from my obligation.

In fact, I felt myself released from religious obligation of any kind. Maybe God existed, maybe he didn’t. If He did, maybe He was Catholic, maybe he wasn’t. But eventually I returned to the fold, returned from the dead cleansed of all my Catholic indoctrination, returned on my own because I had found Him on my own and realized He bore a striking resemblance to He of Whom I had been told as a boy.

I think it was Thomas Merton from whom I first heard of something called The Liturgy of the Hours, although I can’t be sure anymore. I found my breviary about thirty years ago in a small Catholic bookstore that no longer exists. Since then my morning readings have been the closest I have ever come to a prayerful discipline, which is to say not very close at all. For one, The Liturgy of the Hours by its very title is intended to be read, recited, prayed throughout the day, not just in the morning. Further, my breviary never seemed to provide me with the same supplication I got from reading more thoughtful works, such as Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. I craved insight and wisdom. The Liturgy of the Hours provided psalms, antiphons, hymns, readings…prayer. Words. I read it out of a sense of Christian duty while my mind wandered to the things of the day as the words passed aimlessly by. Sometimes when I was pressed for time, I skipped it in favor of lower pursuits.

Lord, open my lips to praise your holy name. Cleanse my heart of any worthless, evil or distracting thoughts. Give me the wisdom and love necessary to pray this Office with attention, reverence and devotion. Father, let my prayer be heard in your presence, for it is offered through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Such is the Invitatory to the Office that I memorized so long ago without really understanding its purpose. Never understood because to me the words were still just words. It never really occurred to me that the Invitatory was in fact an invitation to prayer; that sincere prayer required a moment’s preparation in order that the mind might be cleansed of all other distractions. It never occurred to me that for those few moments God truly did deserve my full attention, reverence and devotion. That He deserved my love. And although I know this now, it still is extremely difficult to actually pray the words that I am reading. It is difficult to understand just what they mean or to offer them in the proper way as prayer. I keep trying: maybe someday I will get it right.

This is actually where I intended to begin this post. Paul teaches to pray without ceasing, and yet for some of us it is difficult enough to pray even when we are trying. Even when we are alone in a quiet room with no distractions and no excuses, attention wanders. Perhaps a time comes to set the breviary down and refocus. Sometimes it seems a hopeless task. I have even closed the book entirely, so beset was I with the concerns of the day.

Nevertheless, I take heart. I am one of those who is a sucker for guidance. For even reading about prayer is better than the forgetfulness which lies beyond in the world of work, responsibility and distraction. Sean Finnegan begins his book The Book of Catholic Prayer with this: “I am convinced that the important thing is not how one prays but that one prays.” He quotes an old mentor who advised to “pray as you can, not as you can’t.” So like the apostles in the garden, even though we fall asleep, willing spirits though we may be, I believe God gives us credit for trying.

Perhaps praying the Liturgy of the Hours would command more attention if prayed aloud, as it is truly meant to be. There is benefit in saying the words with our own lips and hearing them with our own ears. Circumstances do not always readily permit this. Certainly, St. Paul in commending us to unceasing prayer did not intend us to walk around mumbling all day. Ultimately, we must learn to pray quietly, to become fully recollected in God throughout the day as we tend to our duties. The Liturgy of the Hours, read or said six or seven times a day, is intended to start us along this path. It took me decades to fully understand this. Some of us are slow learners.

The Most Remarkable Books: The Jesuit Relations

"Some say to us : ' Do you think you are going to succeed in overturning the Country?' Thus do they style the change from their Pagan and Barbarous life to one that is civilized and Christian. We reply that we are not so presumptuous, but that what is impossible to man is not only possible but easy to God."

-- St. Jean de Brebeuf, Ihonateria, July 16^th, 1636; as reported in the Relation of 1636 by Fr. Paul Le Jeune,Volume X, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents.

It was a pilgrimage of sorts, the first trip I made to the Wisconsin Historical Society to find a copy of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Although the gray monolithic building looms over a well-traveled campus mall directly across from the Memorial Library and I’d spent seven years at the UW-Madison, I had never set foot inside of the place. I wound my way up and around the stairway to the second floor, not really sure where I was going, but my instinct for books was unerring. A simple doorway awaited. I always expected more fanfare entering a library, trumpets sounding perhaps, and a majestic unfolding like the gates of Heaven. The modest room beyond was pretentious only in its high ceiling and its view to an adjoining space twice its size endlessly rowed with card catalogues. This was before computerization finally found the Society.

I eagerly filled out the form to apply for a library card. Yes, I was a resident of Wisconsin, yes, yes, yes, I was everything they needed me to be to get a gloriously free library card and turn me loose into those hallowed stacks. And so I was off through another unpretentious entry into a world of books reeking of history, dust, old leather and countless lives of those who had gone before.

They were not hard to find, only up one level, dusty and neglected, and yet I thought I’d found the grail of books. They were old as the grail, or so it seemed, because the paper was yellow and brittle and the bindings were loose with age. I had found an original Burrows Brothers edition a good one hundred years old. Only seven hundred and fifty were ever published. How was it that just anyone – and that is all that I was, just anyone – could come and handle these precious works? I know now that even reprinted editions of this seventy-three volume set sell for thousands of dollars.

For several years thereafter I trundled volumes back home over three hundred miles north, photocopied them, and shipped them carefully packed back to Madison. I wanted them in any form, even photocopied and fastened together in cheap business folders. I hated the idea that I was handling them, flattening them a little, loosening them of flecks of paper and binding no matter how hard I tried to be careful. They would not last forever. But I wanted them.

The Jesuit Relations were, and still are, a curious obsession, I know. I think it all began when I somehow discovered that Allouez Bay on the shore of Superior, Wisconsin, was named for a Jesuit priest, Claude Allouez, who had come to this country over three hundred years earlier. Although four-lane highways now connect Superior with the rest of the world and thousand foot ore carriers navigate Saint Louis Bay, this is still rugged country. It seemed astonishing to me that white men had come here long before the Declaration of Independence had been signed in Philadelphia, even more astonishing that some of them had been priests. They must have been extraordinary people.

My initial sally to the public library led me to a novel by Brian Moore entitled Black Robe. I read it eagerly but not so eagerly as the introductory pages where Moore acknowledged his reliance upon The Jesuits in Seventeenth Century North America by Francis Parkman and Parkman’s reliance in turn upon the Jesuit Relations. I had no idea then what the Relations were much less where to find them, but during another pilgrimage to Madison, scouring shelves at The University Book Store, I found a Library of America edition of Francis Parkman, which included The Jesuits in Seventeenth Century North America. I could scarcely believe my good fortune.

Although I had never before heard of Francis Parkman, I not only discovered him to be one of the pre-eminent American historians, I found him to be a writer of astonishing ability. Few historians share his gift for infusing history with all the drama and suspense of the greatest novels. His seven-volume work on France and England in the New World has often been compared to Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Parkman’s repeated references to the Relations only whetted my appetite for the real thing. Thereafter I located a volume of excerpts from the Relations in the local public library, but it was not enough. My search continued. It was some time later that I located that copy of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, edited and translated by another remarkable historian, Reuben Gold Thwaites, at the State Historical Society. My laborious copying of the volumes, of which I’d reproduced about half, ended with the happy discovery of an Adobe Digital Edition at Quintin Publications. The Relations can also be found online at Creighton University and the Library and Archives Canada.

None of this quite explains my fascination with, and reverence for, these remarkable books…or should I say for the writing that came to be the substance of them. If I find it amazing that priests came to North America during the seventeenth century, traveling a thousand miles inland to the very shores I see every day, I find it even more extraordinary that they had transported pens, paper and ink to scratch out the daily martyrdom that was to be their lot in a dangerous and forbidding land.

They were literate, educated men who gave up comfortable lives back home in France for the cause of saving the souls of “savages” under the most difficult of conditions. Aside from the innate suspicions and even open hostility from those they would save, there was the initial barrier of language. Most acquired a facility with the Algonquin and Huron languages that were to be their primary tools of conversion. Beyond the barrier of language, the resistance of native belief systems to Christianity was even more daunting. All this was to be carried out under some of the harshest, most deplorable living conditions imaginable. Time, space and the opportunity to write were in extremely limited supply. Rueben Gold Thwaites described it in the Historical Introduction to his seventy-three volume translation this way:

“Many of the Relations were written in Indian camps, amid a chaos of distractions. Insects innumerable tormented the journalists, they were immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation, overcome by fatigue and lack of proper sustenance, often suffering from wounds and disease, maltreated in a hundred ways by hosts who, at times, might more properly be called jailers ; and not seldom had savage superstition risen to such a height, that to be seen making a memorandum was certain to arouse the ferocious enmity of the band. It is not surprising that the composition of these journals of the Jesuits is sometimes crude ; the wonder is, that they could be written at all…. We gain from his pages a vivid picture of life in the primeval forest, as he lived it; we seem to see him upon his long canoe journeys, squatted amidst his dusky fellows, working his passage at the paddles, and carrying cargoes upon the portage trail; we see him the butt and scorn of the savage camp, sometimes deserted in the heart of the wilderness, and obliged to wait for another flotilla, or to make his way alone as best he can. Arrived at last, at his journey’s end, we often find him vainly seeking for shelter in the squalid huts of the natives, with every man’s hand against him, but his own heart open to them all.”

The Indians regarded the very act of writing as some kind of black magic, and their suspicions of the priests’ motives often placed their lives in danger, especially when epidemics of small pox took many lives for which the priests were sometimes held responsible.

You don’t necessarily have to buy into the Jesuit missionaries’ austere Catholic belief system to appreciate the depth of their faith, courage, discipline and dedication to duty. Some of them were tortured and martyred. More will be said of them in future posts to The Silent Life. The writing of the Relations was one of those duties with which they were officially charged, and most certainly a good part of their purpose was to raise money for their cause. Yet, if they are not always completely objective in observation, few serious doubts have been raised about their accuracy.

Since few of us have the time or inclination to read a full seventy-three volume set of writings, a great deal of which is matter-of-fact reportage, two other books can be commended to you. The Jesuit Relations And Allied Documents: Travels And Explorations Of The Jesuit Missionaries In North America 1610-1791, edited by Edna Kenton, with a forward by Mr. Thwaites, is probably the most detailed and complete. A shorter, more selective volume of excerpts is The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) by Alan Greer.

If a visual sampling is all you require of this subject, Black Robe was made into an excellent movie of the same name.

Be Kinder Than Necessary

This is the story of how I almost got arrested one night after we stopped for gas on our way home from work.

I am not a criminal. I’ve had only one speeding ticket in the past quarter century. In fact, long ago, I prosecuted assorted lawbreakers for five and a half years and still occupy a position in the community where an arrest would…well, it just isn’t an option. I don’t court trouble.

My wife and I usually carpool when we can, even if our hours don’t exactly coincide. Gas and vehicles are just too expensive. This night on our way out of town, gas prices, remarkably, were fluxing down a nickel. I passed the station where I ordinarily would have stopped, because I didn’t see the sign in time. Of the other three stations on the way home, I was sure that the Holiday had not lowered prices yet, knowing them to be slow like that. Even more so, the Mobil in Poplar. So when I saw that Citgo had lowered their prices, we pulled in. I didn’t usually stop there, because not only was Citgo a Venezuelan outfit, there was no pay-at-the-pump. I’m normally not patient enough to pay inside. This night was no exception.

I have a little pillow hanging from the doorknob in my office that says: Lord, grant me patience…and please hurry. Patience is not one of my virtues, I admit it. But I am not alone here. Have you noticed how people drive lately? Or how they conduct themselves in stores, restaurants and other public places? Impatience may well have replaced baseball or reality TV as our favorite national pastime.

I’m a forest dweller, or so I see myself. We have eighty-five acres of woodland, few neighbors and the quiet is usually disturbed only by the birds. I don’t like going out into the world anymore with its traffic, crowds and frenetic pace. It’s hard for me to believe how mindlessly people pilot thousands of pounds of metal at fatal speeds. Please Lord, I often pray, just let me make it home safely…and soon. This night, as usual, I just couldn’t wait to make it home to the peaceful confines of our woods.

I put $38.00 worth of gas into our tank. For some reason, I like to stop on a zero or two, if possible. There was only one other car at a pump, and the driver was already in the store. The clerk sat in the window, watching me walk up to the door…I thought. When I came to the counter with my MasterCard, she got up and mumbled something. OK, my hearing isn’t what it should be either, but communication is also a major failing not just of Americans but all humanity[1]. I said “what,” and she mumbled something with a three in it, and then I clearly said “thirty-eight dollars” just to make sure we were on the same page. She ran my card and gave me the slip. I almost signed it without looking, but then I noticed it was only for twenty-one dollars and some odds cents. I sighed deeply, impatiently. “I said thirty-eight dollars.” I certainly was not being the customer of the year, I know.

My obvious disgust set her off. I didn’t have to be rude, she said, it was just a mistake, yada, yada…yada. She said she’d asked me what pump I’d used (right out her window) and I supposedly said I’d used another one and so on. I could not believe anyone would talk to a customer like this under any circumstances, much less these.

“Excuse me!” I said in a way any boss might before firing an employee on the spot.

That’s when she said she was going to call the police. The police? Was she kidding? Was this woman off her meds or something? Although I couldn’t believe my ears, I could believe her finger punching the buttons and her talking to the police and saying she had a “rude” customer. I had all I could do to control my building fury. If a squad had pulled up just then and the officer saw how angry I was, it would have validated whatever twisted story blubbered from this woman’s mouth. I was starting to dwell on how fat, homely and obviously slow she was above the neck. Not only that, but she was starting to cry. She was still talking, but I was too upset by then to remember what she said.

A woman came up to the counter behind me, and then the man who’d actually pumped the twenty-one dollars of gas. I gritted my teeth and said to the clerk, “would you just charge me the money.”

The rest is fuzzy. I had to get out my card again, and she said I was wrong about having signed the first authorization; and I was and I said “this is what I get for being honest,” and she insisted again that I had been rude. My next thought was that I could just drive this poor, weeping woman into the ground with a few sledge-hammer blows from my tongue but what would that accomplish? She was already a mess. She continued to prattle, and finally I could resist no longer. “You don’t have to be rude,” I said. Would nothing wake her up? She processed both payments and said through her tears that I would not be welcome in that place again. I said “no problem,” and shoved the slips toward her, thinking of a lot more things I could have said. I walked out without a word, somehow quelling a seismic event. I heard the woman behind me tell the clerk she needed to learn how to deal with the public. I knew this woman to be a cashier at a local supermarket. It was amazing how small a city of twenty-eight thousand people can sometimes be, but it was small consolation.

“Is she crying?” my wife asked as I got in the car. “I saw her go to the phone twice. I was wondering what was going on.” I was almost speechless. How could paying for gas have gone so wrong?

Life is constantly catching me with my guard down. I never seem to be ready for the suddenness or ferocity of life’s tests. A friend and businessman later told me this woman should have been fired. Clearly, she was not fit to deal with the slightest dissatisfaction. Still, somehow, I did not feel cleansed. Throwing blame on to others was too easy. Things happen for a reason, and somehow I did not believe my innocent victimhood was it. There was a lesson to be learned. The plain truth of it was that the incident hadn’t happened because this woman was crazy or just having a bad day, it had happened because I had been unkind.

As I reflected on this further, thoughts of calling the manager subsided. I suspected this woman probably needed this job. I had no idea how life’s bruising might have made her so fragile. I thought of something someone had emailed me once, a short little story about how a couple of boaters had come upon a flathead catfish with a basketball stuck in it mouth. The poor creature was exhausted from trying to dive. Eventually, the man’s wife was able to puncture the ball so it could be freed. The story ended with this message: “Be kinder than necessary. 'Cause everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”

I was fortunate to locate it at Big Fish Tackle.

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[1] The subject of a future post at The Night Country.

Set Adrift on a Literary Sea

Our little creek was overflowing its banks this morning. I guessed about a thousand gallons of coffee colored water gurgled by every minute. Not long ago much of it had been snow, even as recently as yesterday when I’d awakened to another nightly dusting. May snow was not unheard of in northern Wisconsin, but neither was it common. This had been the winter that refused to die. Snow had clung to the lower, shadier places in our yard until only a week ago.

Somewhere through the forest came the sound of a grouse drumming. The birds chirred while a woodpecker gunned away on a hollow tree. I paused to listen to the sounds for a while. With my eyes closed, it actually seemed like spring.

The dog and I made the quarter mile trek back through the woods to the house, stepping over a lot of downed wood and standing water. I let the cat out for the hundred-yard walk to our mailbox. Two days mail, two daily papers. The pets wandered out into the sunshine of our neighbor’s yard, the sixteen-year old Golden Retriever and the year old buff tabby right behind. It made me feel good to think they were there because I was there and would be following me right home again.

I was surprised to find two books in the mailbox, one I had not expected to arrive yet, and the other, from The Library of America, I had not expected at all. I’d forgotten to exercise my negative option, and most of the books in the pipeline were ones I did not want, all except a Philip Roth volume. I’d visit my account online later to see what they’d sent and make sure I didn’t get anything else I didn’t want. How had it come to this? Retrieving books from a mailbox. How had it come to books at all?

In fact, it had come upon me suddenly and without warning.

I’d never been much of a reader as a young man. My interest in literature had extended no further than Ian Fleming and Edgar Rice Burroughs, although they had left indelible memories upon my boyhood. I was a decent student, not outstanding. I’d grown adept at maximizing my grades while minimizing my effort. They were good enough to get me into the University of Wisconsin – Madison long before admission standards got ridiculously high. Since I was born and raised in Madison, I’d never dreamed of going anywhere else. My Badger pedigree still runs deep.

I’d eased my way through two and a half years of college without any significant course corrections, so to speak. I had planned to get my accounting degree and go right on to law school. I swallowed my education like so much castor oil…with similar results. Since I worked part-time at a woman’s clothing store downtown, I frequently stopped at the Madison Public Library. It was not only on-route and a convenient place to study; it was a nice escape from the chaos of campus. I checked out very few books, but sometimes I drifted through the stacks. I had a good idea by then how large the world was physically, but I was only beginning to understand the enormity of the world of information, literature and ideas. It was not the sheer number of books that had been written, it was the inexhaustibility of things to be written about.

I was content for a while just browsing, absorbing what could be absorbed from titles and book jackets. Then I started opening a book here and there, scanning a few pages looking for clues to what the author was trying to say. It wasn’t long before I was doing that frequently.

Before long, I could point to dozens of books I actually wanted to read. Then one day the light came and seared my soul. I stood there amid the stacks stunned and incoherent, realizing for the first time just what had happened. My friends and I had always spoken of our schooling with the deepest cynicism, of the rank stupidity of everything taught that was remotely institutional. Now, suddenly, I knew learning was not what I despised. It was just school and the enforced direction of my learning. In that moment, my life changed forever.

I checked out a couple of books that had caught my eye, and they were a revelation to me. So as not to tarry, I will speak of them another day.

I realized that after eight years of myopic ignorance, accounting and tax law were not the fields for me. I was adrift and frightened. I couldn’t remember what it was like to be without direction. It was very late in the game to be taking down my sails. I thought about teaching English, but teaching jobs back then were “a dime a dozen” according to my mother, and in English courses I’d always felt like a stranger in a strange land. It meant more school. I thought about going back to school to get my Phy. Ed. degree, so I could become a basketball coach, which was something I had an absolute passion for. That meant a lot more school, and I’d never even lettered in basketball in high school. Few things could have been more impractical.

What about Library Science? I wondered. That too meant a lot more school, but it was something I knew I would love. It also seemed a far more realistic choice than the other two. I just couldn’t quite set the right tack, I’m still not sure why. Maybe the wind wasn’t right. I grabbed a degree in Real Estate and Urban Land Economics with only one extra summer session and applied to the Wisconsin Law School, simply because I’d planned to go to law school for almost as long as I’d planned to be an accountant. Wisconsin was the only place I applied again, and I got in…provisionally. Since the admissions committee apparently didn’t want to make the hard decisions, they selected about seventy or eighty students to go through a “summer session” of Contracts and Civil Procedure, two full four-credit courses. Only there was to be no credit awarded.[1] Some of us, simply, would be admitted and some would not.

I got in, and that was that. If nothing else, I was not a quitter. There weren’t going to be any course adjustments after that. I settled comfortably into the law. That summer one of our professors had taken us up to the faculty law library. It was a seminal moment. As we stood there amid rows and rows of Supreme Court and American Law Reports, he said, “this is where the lawyer’s real work is done.” Reading cases was far easier and more interesting than most of the stuff I’d read as an undergraduate, and I liked sitting in the middle of the law library, surrounded by walls of books. The schooling eventually wore me down, but the books that got me through it.

Away from the books, the practice of law has its rougher side. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled upon the fantasy of owning a bookstore. That way I wouldn’t have to strap on the sword of an advocate and leave my paginated friends behind. After I left for the north country, I returned to Madison four to six times a year; and for years, it was a tradition of sorts for me and my family to make a pilgrimage to the University Bookstore on State Street. During law school, I’d applied for a job there, but they apparently weren’t interested in hiring law students unsuccessful enough not to be clerking somewhere. Had they done so, I might still be there. Still, I nursed my fantasy, knowing how irresponsible that would have been, having a family to support, in a locale where Walden Books had already left a dying mall.

With the advent of online marketing, not to mention online browsing, searching and reading, even the University Bookstore moved most of its inventory out to the Hilldale Shopping Mall where there is more traffic. We go there occasionally, but anything resembling a tradition has long since died.

I miss it in the same way I miss many irretrievable things of the past. The State Street store is still there, selling mostly things like clothing and art supplies, and we still huddle up once in a while in the close confines of that side room where they still have books. Sometimes we meander down the street to Paul’s looking for bargains. I have become the inadvertent enemy of such places. I almost want to buy something, so such places will continue to be.

Living in the woods, I have become an implacable online shopper. I have not gone unwillingly. I am not a prisoner of the wilderness. When it comes to books, I have embraced computers and the internet like Shakespeare embraced Anne Hathaway. Even at work, the confines of the law library have turned into a computer screen with Westlaw, and with that has come the capacity to access enormous amounts of information very quickly. Legal research has become more like a video game; one I’m always up to play. Then, sometimes, I go to places like Amazon just to browse, to flip the electronic pages not unlike the days in the Madison Public Library. Sometimes I just need to placate my curiosity. Sometimes, there is a book that I just have to have. Sometimes I don’t know there is a book I have to have until I see it there.

But in the end, as much as I love my own little library full of books I will never sell, it’s not the paper and the binding and the ink. In the end, it is the words. It is the words and the ideas that go with them. When I dreamed of opening a bookstore, that is what I really wanted to sell. If I cannot share something of my own as eloquent as Loren Eiseley or John Burroughs or Thomas Merton, the next best thing is to acquaint others with those books and writers that I love. To share something wise or beautiful, even if not of my own creation.

In her book A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson reflects upon the time she owned her own small bookstore. When she was advised that every customer should be treated as a potential sale, she prayed for guidance: “I prayed and received these words: ‘Your store is a church.’ Church, esoterically, means the gathering of souls. It’s not an outer plane but rather an inner plane phenomenon. People don’t come into your place of business so that you can get anything. They’re sent so that you can give them love.”

Or at least something they might enjoy reading. So if there’s a book or a writer mentioned here that you’ve come to enjoy, please let me know. It’s worth more than money.

The dog followed me back down the tree-shrouded driveway, with the cat sometimes pausing to hide behind, only to suddenly charge us like the fearsome predator he wanted to be. I discarded the envelopes like a Poker hand and ripped open the book I’d sent for, Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa, a popular and readable classic on semantics, just one more subject of which I’d been blissfully ignorant for over half a century. The realization had come over me on a walk the week before, the trouble with words, the difficulty of meaning, the agony of trying to say exactly what we want to say. But that is a subject for another time. I can’t wait.

I didn’t want to open the book from the Library of America until I knew what it was, because most likely I would be sending it back. I checked my account online. American Earth, Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. That sounded like an ambitious book. It was supposed to have excerpts by Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson, John Muir, John Burroughs, Loren Eiseley and others, enough familiar names that I ripped the box open without a second thought. It is indeed an ambitious whopper of a book, over a thousand pages long not including two sections of photographs.^[2] It will be years before I get through it all.

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[1] True future lawyers that we were, we sued the school and were awarded credit for the courses, since we’d needed better than passing grades to be admitted anyway.

[2] I have over fifty volumes from the Library of America. I love what they do. I don’t get a dime for plugging them, but that’s not what this site is about.

Things Worse Than Fire

When I rose from bed this morning, the house was empty. It was no surprise that no one was home. My wife had left for Texas to help move her 87-year old mother into a nursing home. Our son and daughter were away at college. The house had been empty before, but this time it seemed different. It was not as if my wife was shopping and the kids were visiting friends nearby. This time they were all really gone. They had all gone out into a world that seemed to be getting more dangerous every day. We now lived in a world where students could be shot in their classrooms or at the mall, where they might disappear without a clue. Weather.com said the National Weather Service had issued tornado watches for Texas. Did that include Lubbock? No, thankfully, not this time. My wife had grown up with a healthy respect for and fear of tornadoes; and we’d seen enough blow-downs around our house to teach me that Mother Nature was not to be trifled with. This morning there was only cold rain.

Our daughter had called a couple of nights ago just to talk. She didn’t call much anymore, and she was never on Messenger like when she was a freshman. She had a tremendous amount of things to do, papers, finals, projects, a part time job, observation at the athletic training room, cumulative finals. She was also supposed to be preparing for her trip to Beijing for the Olympics, for which she had volunteered to assist at a half dozen events. We talked about the arrangements to get her visa. The thought of her going to Beijing terrified me. Two hundred and fifty miles away was one thing, half way across the world another. She was feeling overwhelmed by all of this, and all I could do was listen. There was nothing I could do except tell her to use the credit card whenever she needed it.

About nine o’clock in the morning my cell phone went off. I grimaced. I had an idea who it was, and why he was calling. It was our son calling to say that he wasn’t being allowed to register for his fall classes, because he hadn’t paid his registration deposit. Registration for him had been relegated to the very last day, and we’d both spent over an hour on the phone and online the night before hunting for useful courses that were not already full. It had been a frustrating, even heartbreaking search. He had reminded me again to pay his registration deposit online, and I did, but the web site said to allow two business days for the payment to post.

It meant just what I feared it would mean. Yes, he had mentioned it to me the week before, but I barely remembered. Because courses were still filling up, he left in the middle of his first morning class in an attempt to register as soon as possible. Now I had contributed to his registration miseries, although he was too kind to say so. I’d take care of it, I said, but my first thought, for him to pay in cash, was a non-starter since he didn’t have the one hundred dollars. Another failure of mine. I phoned what UW-Eau Claire calls the Cashier’s Office, but since online bank transfers were handled by a third party, nothing could be expedited. He’d have to wait until after four o’clock. I complained bitterly to the poor woman, but, again, there was nothing I could do.

Another class filled up. Nothing I could do.

To make matters worse, I’d actually prayed for things to go right for him this day. So often, it seemed, prayers were the only assistance I could offer my far-flung family, and of late I’d become quite good at offering those that only seemed to make matters worse. How unfair, it seemed, that this time I myself had helped in their undoing. Pure faith would tell me no true prayer is unheard, even if not answered in the way we wish. Faith would tell me that everything works out for the best, even when it seems that prayers are going unanswered. But in times of trial, my faith always tended to waiver.

Outside the library windows, drizzle fell from the gray sky. The trees shuddered in a cold wind. The residents of my bookshelves, my ever-present companions, had turned to paper, cloth and ink. Even though my family was just a call away, I still felt powerless to help or protect them. I was not ready yet to surrender them up to His Care, to recognize my own essential impotence. This in the face of the overwhelming realization that we all must, sooner or later, surrender those we love.

Love is the most courageous of human acts, because love places us at risk for loss and excruciating pain. This morning, I was not feeling at all courageous. To the extent that we invest ourselves in the lives of others, we risk that portion of ourselves being ripped from us without anesthetic of any kind. In the course of my occupation, I have frequently seen parents who have invested little or even nothing in the lives of those they have brought into this world. I have long been unable to understand. Perhaps understanding begins when we consider whether everyone is able to endure the pain of attachment.

Is this really what hell is? I wondered. Or some inkling of what hell might be? Separation? Isolation? Alienation and emptiness? I had begun my education in Catholic schools where they taught that hell was a place of fire. I remembered a nun once emulating the appearance of some saint who placed his hand on a desk to show with the mark of the burn, just how hot hell was. For emphasis, she placed her hand on a student’s desk, but it didn’t burn.

T.S. Elliot once wrote:

Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.[i]

Since then I’d come to believe that T.S. Elliot had come much closer to getting it right. There were far worse things than fire. Hell was not just pain, hell was living death. These words of Emily Dickinson still haunt me:

My life closed twice before its close -
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven.
And all we need of hell.[ii]

Since Emily’s “third event” required “Immortality” to unveil it, she apparently meant her physical death, but in the mean time she endured two deaths of a less literal but equally traumatic and painful kind. We can only speculate what those events may have been, but it would certainly appear that they involved a “parting” of some kind. I envision that they referred to the parting of a loved one, either through death or otherwise. She admitted to knowing nothing of heaven except that which might be revealed to those who depart. As for hell, if it was something different from or worse than the deaths she had already endured through life’s partings, she felt we had no need to know. Perhaps she also meant that there were limits upon which human souls could be called upon to suffer. The message I choose to take with me from the last stanzas is that although parting with a loved one might seem like hell itself, it is not hell. Hell might be inconceivably worse.

In his Introduction to Christianity Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

“In truth – one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone – the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness…. Death is absolute loneliness. But loneliness into which love can longer advance is – hell.”[iii]

All is not gloom, however, for he goes on to elucidate the next tenet of the Apostle’s Creed, that Jesus Christ descended into hell, into the absolute depths of our loneliness and abandonment and overcame it. He reasons that life can indeed exist there, because love can overcome death. His message is that Christ can rescue us from hell.

Hell is not an empty house. Hell is not a distance between us and those we love. Even love with all its terrors and loss cannot approximate what hell really is. By comparison, hell is something infinitely, unimaginably worse. By comparison, love is a joy. In hell we are not only nothing, but our nothingness is all we know. In love, we are something, even when we are alone, even when it causes pain. In love, we are at least alive. In hell, we live only to know death.

Later in the afternoon, my son was on Messenger while he was enrolling online. Apparently the registration deposit had posted. I thanked the Lord for small favors. He ended up taking German, even though he’d taken two years of Spanish in high school. He’d almost flunked it his last semester, which had given me great graduation anxiety. I’d taken German for two years in high school, and after tasting Spanish as an adult, a quite beautiful and resonant language, I thought German was easier. Since he had to have language credits, maybe it was for the best. We both scoured the online catalogue for one last course, but all the courses I found, he couldn’t use. He finally enrolled in a jazz history course just to fill his schedule. He’d given up the trumpet in the eighth grade, but who knew what discoveries were yet to be made out there? He was young, and he still had plenty of room to grow. His day hadn’t gone as well as he had wanted, but he had gotten through it. And so had I.

I was grateful at least that we had the phones and the internet upon which to share our days. We might not always be so close. I would have to prepare myself for that.

He signed off to take a shower before going to a track meet. A high school friend of his was running for the other school. It was Friday night. He needed a break and so did I. I hoped he would rest well.

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[i] From: The Cocktail Party, act 1, sc. 3 (1950).

[ii] The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1732, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., 1961.

[iii] Introduction to Christianity, trans. J.R. Foster, Rev. 2^nd Ed., 2004.

The Spring Thaw 5K

The Spring Thaw 5K

It was Parent’s Weekend for student athletic trainers at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. This was our daughter Alicia’s first year in the program. She’d emailed me a registration for the first annual Spring Thaw 5K, which was to be the focus of their fund raising. Of course my wife and I were happy to register and make the four-hour drive, even though we weren’t runners, at least not anymore. Five kilometers is barely three miles, nothing more than I occasionally walked on my lunch hours last fall before the snow flew. An hour’s stroll through the Schmeeckle Reserve. I hadn’t been walking since then, and I’d really been looking forward to this. I also needed to stifle my body’s constant pleading for movement. Standing up, I didn’t much like the obstructed view I had of my trusty Reeboks. Something had to be done.

When we arrived at the track where the racers were assembling, the clouds were starting to thin after a day of rain. Race numbers hung from bodies of different shapes, sizes and ages. Lithe young men strutted and stretched. Children ran and tumbled in the wet grass. Older men and women, some older than we were, laughed and joked. An elderly woman with a number and a cane held the hand of her young grandson. We weren't the only ones who had donned racing jeans for the occasion. We saw our daughter crossing the infield with two of her friends. She waved discreetly.

We had thoughtfully pinned the numbers on the backs of our windbreakers, and a couple about our age asked where we’d gotten them. We said they were in the green bags handed out at registration. They looked at each other and laughed, having left their bags in the car. Like it mattered. Some of us joked that we planned to start in the back so as not to be trampled by those actually running the race. Then our daughter came to tell us our numbers were supposed to be pinned on the front. That figured. I’d already pinned and re-pinned it twice to the back of my windbreaker; and so it came out to the front of the gray UW-SP T-shirt Alicia had given me for Christmas, right under “Dawgs”, and the windbreaker quickly came off amid a glint of real sunshine.

They herded about one hundred and eighty of us out onto the middle of Reserve Street and we did indeed edge our way toward the rear. Back at the La Quinta I’d pulled an old Ace bandage over my knee. Was it tighter than it used to be? I didn’t usually wear it for a walk, but the knee had gotten looser over time, and I wasn’t taking any chances. There was too much golf to be played.

A sharp crack pierced the air and like bison we began to move. In seconds young men of steel were loping across Maria Drive a good block ahead of us and disappearing into the Schmeeckle Reserve. I am no power walker, but normally I needed to slow my pace to walk with my wife. I expected we’d come in well over an hour. But this morning her competitive nature had suddenly kicked in, and now it was I who struggled to keep up with her long, determined strides. This would not be one of our usual strolls through the Chequamegon Forest.

A woman and her young son of maybe seven worked their way around us. She was overweight. Although there were others still farther behind, I wasn’t sure I liked being passed by this pair. The kid was talking and singing nonsense constantly. I tried not to let it bother me, yet it seemed to silence the rich, whistling calls of cardinals, which I had been enjoying, never hearing these birds back home. Yada yada, hummedy-humm. This kid was in love with the sound of his own voice, but I was not. We were in the woods now, the kind of place in which I was accustomed to only the sounds of nature. Letting this kid disturb my peace of mind was to ignore the advice of countless sages from Lao Tzu to Eckhart Tolle, the timeless counsels of acceptance and non-resistance to what is. They were right, of course, but being right wasn’t always being real. The kid stopped to tie his shoe, and we went by, leaving the noise behind for the moment.

The forest was clad in grays and browns, except for the green of a few stands of white pine. The ground lay hidden beneath a carpet of twigs and old brown leaves, mostly the sharp-edged leavings of white oak. On our property back home, we had a few lonely red oak but not nearly enough to suit me. Their acorns were few and vulnerable compared to the helicoptered multitudes shed by the maples. Instead of majestic white pine, we had humble balsam. Our forest floor was also littered with fallen aspen, which most people our way called popple, and tangles of brush. Breaking trail was not easy work.

Our path in Schmeeckle was wide and firm yet puddled enough we had to watch our step. Shit! I said aloud, then looked about for anyone within earshot. My war against four-letter words had been going about as well as the war on terrorism. I’d forgotten my pedometer.

Then I wondered, what was so important about that pedometer anyway? Would I not be walking the same number of steps whether I had it or not? Why did I need to number them? Did it matter that I may have taken more steps in one day and less in another? If I set some kind of a world walking record, would it really make the world a better place?

We humans were always numbering and measuring and timing. We were always comparing ourselves or seeking our limits. Out in northern California a man had been surfing every day for thirty-two years. He’d broken the Guinness world record long ago. Even though he’d stopped the official count almost four years ago, he still went every day. What for? (See "Dale Webster's Endless Summer" at SI.com). Somewhere far ahead of us lungs labored and muscles strained to propel one body across a finish line ahead of others. Wasn’t the competitive part of this race simply an exercise in our estrangement from one another? A way of distinguishing the swift from the slow, the strong from the weak? So even when our enemies were not in hot pursuit, we knew just who should be culled from the herd and whose genes should carry on.

Thomas Merton once compared the human race to a body of broken bones. He likened the reuniting of mankind to the pain of resetting these bones.[i] Separation was the easy path on which to run. We crossed Michigan Avenue where a couple of the students in orange vests were directing traffic. Alicia said she would be directing traffic, but I was glad she wasn’t one of those chosen to herd metal here.

Of course winning and losing weren't important, but the truth ran even deeper than that. I’d had a vision of myself waiting at the finish line, waving the remaining few stragglers on by so I could finish last. But even that would have been a way of distinguishing myself, of setting myself apart from the rest. A hollow victory for anyone I let pass. Sooner or later someone would have asked that I go ahead, and in the spirit of healing broken bones, I would have had no choice. I wanted to be a healer.

The boy’s chattering voice was coming closer: they were gaining on us again. We could have let them pass. I should have been what-is'ing the hell out of this. But suddenly I didn’t want to lose to an overweight mother and a seven-year old, not voluntarily. I wasn’t ready to be culled, not just yet. Sometimes the urge to preserve our fragile sense of individuality was overwhelming. Besides, beating this pair would be no great sin.

The sound of our shoes grinding limestone quickened. Yes, those were oak leaves on the forest floor, but I was missing so much of the natural beauty. We’d have to come back again someday when we could actually pause to enjoy it. Somewhere close ahead a shrill honking broke from the trees. We looked about but saw nothing. The path gave way to cedar boarding. An old woman in a chair sat in the way of a wrong turn. Gray hair fell about her shoulders. She smiled as we turned and passed out over a bog. The honking came again and we saw a pair of cranes floating over the reeds, gaining altitude. The boards thumped hollow beneath our feet, and still that high voice babbled close behind. The walking had bothered my knee at first, but it had begun to feel better. My whole body was feeling better.

In low places along the way we often had to step carefully off the path and around standing water, lest it fill our shoes. Black mud speckled their whiteness. Then we came to a place where the water and mud could not be easily stepped around, so we followed a mother and daughter through the brush on a torturous search for the driest route. They were two of the people we had joked with before the race about starting in the rear. I think they took the only reasonable path that did not require a complete detour. They’d been far ahead of us, but now we’d caught them. They too had pounds to shed. I thought they might be tiring. Had obesity become an American way of life? I wondered. Had I become part of it?

Another of the students, a well-hewn redheaded kid, rolled past us on a mountain bike. Mud striped the back of his T-shirt. Later that day he would be patching electrodes to my back, which would relieve the pain and stiffness. We all laughed as we came to a pool of water and mud around which there was no good way. “My advice,” he said as he rolled right through the middle on his bike, “is to just go right through it.” The mother tiptoed through it right behind him, but the daughter, to her mud-sucking sorrow, tried to find a better way. My wife and I took the wiser path, and my shoes shipped remarkably little water.

As the path ambled through drier terrain, mother and daughter once again put distance between us. If they were tired, they were not as tired as we were. We could have kept up, but that truly was not the reason we had come. And there was a yawning silence behind us. Where had they all gone, the babbling boy, his mother and the others? There was no one left to push us, no one to whom we did not wish to lose.

We rounded Lake Joanis where geese were paddling and ducks went tail-up feeding off the bottom. There was dampness in my shoes, but once again I felt grateful the still-gray sky was sparing us. Another twist in the trail and there sat Alicia, guarding against another wrong turn. Next to her on the bench sat a small satchel of first aid supplies, wrapping tape and such. She smiled to see us. The kid was blooming right before our eyes. “Go left when you get to the sidewalk,” she said. “OK,” we said. Another hundred feet or so and we were back on Michigan Avenue.

The sudden shock of pavement awoke the pain in my knee. Three point one miles would be plenty this day. As we walked down Maria Drive I told my wife some of the top runners had probably finished well under twenty minutes. We passed some of those who had already finished, two blocks from the track. One of these men, a tall fellow of about thirty, turned out to be the overall winner, finishing somewhere in the eighteens.

Three students were stopping traffic on Maria for those ending the race. “What, you don’t carry us across?” I joked. Across the street, we walked the length of the track on the sidewalk along the fence. When we got to the entrance, all I could think of was voiding motel coffee in one of the green porta-potties. I ducked under the flagline and looked back to my wife walking up the track. Whoa, wait, I remembered, the course finished with a three-quarter lap around the track. I caught up with my wife on the comfortable, rubberized surface. My wife ventured it might have been made of waste tires. Made sense, I agreed. “We’re gearing up for the final kick,” I said to a couple of girls overseeing the finish.

As we hit the straightaway we saw the luminescent green numerals of the official clock marking time: 59:35, 59:36…. As our walks go, we had made excellent time. If we ran, we could make it. “Hey,” I said to my wife, “we could finish this in under an hour. Come on.”

59:40, 59:41….

“Go on,” she said.

I broke into a run. I didn’t need a full sprint, and I wasn’t about to blow a hammy, but it felt good. There was still plenty of kick left in the old legs. I might have looked like an old plow horse, but just then I felt all thoroughbred.

59:52, 59:53….

I guess I finished in about 59:54. There would be no number one in front of my time. But once again, wasn’t I really focusing on a meaningless measurement? Maybe, and yet when I had looked at my wife, she understood. Maybe the nobler thing for me would have been to say no, let’s finish together, but I am not so sure about that either. She might not have wanted me to. It was such a small victory, but even the smallest victory can be a selfish, self-aggrandizing thing; or it can be a humbling experience in which others are allowed to share. Sometimes it can be both. I think my finish was something she trusted we could share. Not just my victory but our victory…as it truly was.

Racers strolled about the grassy infield. The student and faculty organizers had provided us with Gatorade, bagel pieces and fruit at the finish, and we partook as the final participants wandered in. The mother and her chatterbox son arrived, although he was quiet now. I suspected they had stopped again somewhere, perhaps for disciplinary reasons. A victory can take many forms. A few minutes later came the old woman with her grandson, still stoking her cane. I guessed her age at about seventy, and she was not light either. Had comparisons held any more relevance, temporal or otherwise, our small victory paled next to hers. I hoped her young grandson would remember this walk with his grandma, would remember her victory long enough to share it with his grandson.

And so our race was over, and my feet and back were stiffening. That wouldn’t happen so readily the next time, I reasoned. But I was glad we had come, glad we had “raced.” I felt better knowing we lived in a world where old women with canes finished races and where a man can surf every day for almost a third of a century. I hoped they didn't mind if I shared a little in their accomplishments. We might not always know why we do what we do, but if it means something to someone, to anyone anywhere, that is reason enough.

As my wife collected our plates and empty Gatorade cups, my cell phone tinkled with a text from Alicia that she would be meeting us later for lunch. After that, she would give us a tour of the athletic training facilities. It was time to leave. In passing through the front gate, I sought for something St. Paul had written once, something about not running the race in vain or working to no purpose.[ii] Surely, he had not. Nor did any of us who ran or walked or swam or surfed or read or prayed in answer to that primal gathering call that would someday bring us all home again.

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[i] “A Body of Broken Bones,” New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, 1961.

[ii] “Do everything without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine like lights in the world, as you hold on to the word of life, so that my boast for the day of Christ may be that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. But, even if I am poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with all of you. In the same way you also should rejoice and share your joy with me.” 2 Philippians 14-18, trans New American Bible.