Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Memento Mori

                                                          PERSONAL HISTORY

                                     MEMENTO MORI

                                   "The port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

                                                                            - Henry James

Preface

It is nearly thirty years since I wrote a book about my parents and the extraordinarily different families and personal histories from which they came [A Love in Shadow, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978].  I had made a conscious decision at that time to tell their stories as truthfully as I could, and to venture as modestly as possible into the realm of autobiography.

One of the book’s more perspicacious reviewers, Geoffrey Wolff, recognized the fault line in that choice. In revealing little of my own experience, my memories of my own childhood with (and without) my parents, I revealed less of them. This brief essay, then, is an experiment in remediation, a rebalancing of a chapter of my personal book. I write now, as I did then, particularly for my children, that they may know better a part of their own histories.

Each of those children, now adults, two with children of their own, have asked me for memories of my parents, particularly of the grandfather they never knew, around whose legacy an ominous and beguiling cloud still lingers. So much of that memory is gone, casualty of time and trauma. What remains is part of my truth, my story, even as I have inevitably reshaped it through the years, even as it has become difficult to separate the real memories from the stories of others, from the photographs into which I have poured so much of my hunger. For those reasons and others of which I speak here, he must always be the father I barely knew. My children only knew him through the fragments of my telling, and have wondered about his shadowed gifts to me, and through me, to themselves. I did not write or speak much of my loss of him when they were young.

My parents met on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign train in the autumn of 1932, and immediately fell in love. Both were married to others at the time, though separated from their spouses. On that train they were not successful in hiding their liaison from the press corps of which my father was a member.  Had the story of their affair broken, it is just conceivable that the campaign, and perhaps the course of history, would have taken a lurch. Or so, much later, I liked to imagine.

[continued]

Sabbath 2 - Reflections on a Parable

The following reflections and retelling - reimagining - of a familiar story are drawn from one of a series of talks shared in the winter and spring of 2007 with staff and patients at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital, retreat center and learning community in Vikersund, Norway.

I discovered Modum Bad in 2005, and returned for a second extended time as a consultant in February 2007. Of course I've learned more than I've taught. My first impressions of Modum Bad, gathered after a first leisurely visit in 2005, are gathered in an informal essay on Modum Bad's website. I am revising and extending that essay for publication later in 2007, Modum Bad's 50th anniversary year -  in fact,  its 150th anniversary year, as it began as a healing spa in 1857. Modum Bad means The Baths at Modum, gathered around St. Olavs Kilde, St. Olav's Spring. My own retelling of Jesus's parable owes a great deal to the translation and commentary of Stephen Mitchell in his Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2001).

The story I retell here is the last and longest of three parables of Jesus recounted in Luke's gospel. The thread they share is that of losing and finding and rejoicing in the renewal or life-redeeming experience. It is a tale of critical turning in life's journey. The theme of turning – a cycle of loss, of tender, halting discovery, and of redemption – is a central one in the history of the human psyche and soul, in the generations that gave us birth, in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth.

[continued]

                                                                            

Rummaging in the attic (I)

I've been spending time in the attic before the weather gets too cold, rummaging through old files I've carried around through too many moves. I'm not a pack rat who deliberately collects things. I have little patience for filing, so when I do get around to it, what is filed tends to stay filed; I have as little interest in getting rid of those boxes as I did filling them in the first place. Also, moving is traumatic enough without having to make decisions about what goes and what doesn't.

But this month, sitting on the floor in the dim light and the dry, quiet air of disuse and time past that attics everywhere seem to possess, I began to feel something like the old adventure and intrigue of archival research. However likely it was that most of this stuff will become (already was) trash, there is something of my history here, and therefore the history of those I love. With patience, perhaps, a treasure or a painful artifact of years gone may work its way into time present with unpredictable consequences. Who knows? There may be gifts buried here that if freely given and received will renew themselves and create new life.

So I have begun to find, thanks to a first priming experience. I brought a box home, among several that had been stored in a friend's barn, and found it on top of the pile. My friend had alerted me to the fact that it contained something unusual, a special copy of a book written by my father.

John Boettiger wrote one book in the course of his 50 years. It was called Jake Lingle, or Chicago on the Spot, and was published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1931. In those years, the 1920s and early 1930s, my father was a general assignment reporter for The Chicago Tribune, then as now Chicago's morning daily paper. For ten years he had known Jake Lingle, The Tribune's senior reporter who had long covered the city's criminal underworld.  Lingle  had long known people on both sides of the law, as well as those--like himself--who plied the shadow world between the two.

John Boettiger, reporter for The Chicago Tribune, at the time he covered the Lingle case

So when Jake Lingle was shot in the back of the head at close range on June 9, 1930 while walking in the Loop on his way to the racetrack, it was assumed that the murder was a gangland execution, and my father was assigned by The Tribune's notorious boss, Col. Robert McCormick, to cover the case. Arriving at the crime scene only minutes after Lingle's death, he spent the next 11 months almost as close to the investigation--and the subsequent trial and conviction of Lingle's killer--as the police themselves. He was on hand, crouched silently in the neighboring apartment, when the suspect was surprised and apprehended outside his door in the Lake Crest Drive Apartment Hotel on  December 21, 1930.

So readers of The Chicago Tribune were treated to a succession of first-hand accounts of an absorbing homicide case, for as my father put it in the foreword of the resulting book, "Never, before the murder of Lingle, had the murderer in a Chicago gang killing been caught and punished."

I read Jake Lingle when I was a boy, and several times since. My father's prolonged absences from the family when I was very young, and his death by suicide when I was 11, precipitated a long search for the man he was, and the book was for a long time one of the few tangible artifacts I had--the kind of artifact that lent itself to the romance I wanted to construct. When I was not much older than he was when he wrote that book, I wrote one of my own, using all the resources I could find to make sense of the lives, families, generations and times from which I had emerged.

But the particular copy of Jake Lingle I held in my hands yesterday in the attic was indeed a special one. I had thought it a major discovery when I was writing 30 years ago, but it had since slipped from memory. Putnam's had mailed my father several early copies at publication time, and he sent one of them to his parents, who had retired from Chicago to San Diego. I don't know how my father got that copy back--likely from his family after his parents' deaths--but it was passed on to me, his only child. Tucked in among its pages is an envelope dated October 10, 1931, postmarked San Diego, addressed to Mr. John Boettiger, Oakdale Ave., Glencoe, Ill. It contained two long letters, one from his father Adam, the other from his mother Dora, responding to the gift of their son's book.

There is no other surviving correspondence between my father and his parents. Those two letters, full of pride and pleasure, written to the 31-year-old reporter and author whom they both still called "my baby boy," offer but one small window on his meaning for them, small and ambiguous hints in their language, their references and asides to inevitably more complex relationships. They are no less precious for that.

The same could be said of the lines written in my father's hand on the book's fly leaf, lines I thought about often in earlier years, and feel again as I re-type them here:

To my beloved Mother and Dad
whom I could never repay in a million years
for the love and the will to live
and to learn and to write
which they gave to me.

From their ever devoted and grateful son

John.

Jerome: Life and Language

St. Jerome is best known as a fourth century translator of the Bible from its original languages into Latin, then becoming the language of the Church. He was the personal secretary of Pope Damasus, who commissioned the young priest in 382 to undertake the task of translation. Jerome was an excellent choice, as he had mastered not only Greek, which had been the common language of the Western world, but also Hebrew and Aramaic, the first being the original language of the Bible, the second the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples in the Holy Land.

Jerome spent over twenty years at his task. He not only went to ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible, but actively--and at some cost to his reputation among his fellow churchmen, including Augustine--sought out help from Jewish teachers as well. He was sensitive to matters of idiom: sense for sense rather than word for word. And he was a gifted interpreter of the texts.

While he was still at work translating, his patron Damasus died in 384, and after a short time in Antioch, Jerome settled in Bethlehem. Among the most learned Christians of his day, he became widely known as the greatest scholar of the early Church. He said: “Love the holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you. Love wisdom, and she will keep you safe.” Jerome died in Bethlehem at the age of 80 in the year 420.

Albrecht Dürer's famous 16th century engraving of Jerome at work in his study is the inspiration for a poem by the contemporary translator and poet Stephen Mitchell. A Jew having experience in a Christian school while a boy, Mitchell is well known for his translation of The Book of Job, The Book of Psalms, and for his own rendering of The Gospel According to Jesus, as well as for his translation of the poetry and prose of Ranier Maria Rilke, and a version of the Tao Te Ching. Erik Erikson said of Mitchell's translation of Job, "The thoughtful reading of this astonishing translation has been for me a rare experience combining poetry and enlightenment."

It is no wonder, then, that Mitchell was attracted to the scholar and translator of the early Church, and came to meditate so deeply and memorably upon Dürer's engraving.

The poem is especially moving in the intimacy, the love with which the poet addresses Jerome, and in its portrayal of Jerome's experience of the life of the Spirit--the Kingdom of God--"an innermost truth"--as one with the flesh, the sacred realities of everyday life. Tat twam asi. That art thou.

sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying

____________

JEROME

In Dürer’s engraving
You sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language—to take
those boulder-like nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time—
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
You are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.

- Stephen Mitchell


Literally, yes, "the word becomes flesh," the sacred language comes alive, bursts from the text into life.  "Flesh" is descriptive of more than human being, of mule and leaf-mold and sunlight, of all the earth.

If Jerome was the man evoked by Stephen Mitchell, and heard his words, I can imagine him at such a moment taking up his quill pen and writing his own poem in response, something in the spirit of these lines by Robinson Jeffers:


..... I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great lfe of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the
     changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain... and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit;
    and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind
    also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...

_______________________

"I was mankind also, a moving lichen on the cheek of the round stone..." That is as lovely an image of homo sapiens as I know--as lovely and as necessary to absorb into our hearts, that we might renew ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy.

I am indebted to Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., for his account of Jerome's life in the Church and the character of his translations, and to Joanna Macy's book, Coming Back to Life, for the gift of Robinson Jeffers' poem embodying earth consciousness. It is an excerpt from "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford University Press, 1988).

_______________________________

A Brief Reflection on T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


Every day as I climb the stairs to our second floor I pass those lines framed on the wall. More often than not, used as I am to them, they register obliquely, with little consciousness. But I always know they are there. Less often, but sometimes, I stop and say them again, as prayer, breviary. The calligraphy in which they were written is sun- and time-faded now. The words and their plea will outlast us all.

They are the last eleven lines of T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday." Less widely celebrated and anthologized than his earlier and later work--especially "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and, incomparably, "The Four Quartets"--"Ash Wednesday" is a poem of midlife, both chronologically and spiritually. It was completed when the poet was 42 years old, three years after he was confirmed in the Church of England: his first major poem after that formal turning.

And "Ash Wednesday"—like and unlike its great successor “The Four Quartets”—is a poem of spiritual turning, purgatorial and penitential, as is the day, the changing season, the cyclical movement of its meditation: life, death, and rebirth. Turning (which I'll discuss elsewhere in Reckonings) is explicit in the poet's language, in the poem's structure, its circling, moving refrain.

It is liminal time, between time, dream time.

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking…

The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

….....


Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

The absence of hope is not foregone, but turns from loss, mourning, mimetic hunger for worldly things, turns slowly, with many a backward, suffering slip—is one "between birth and dying" or "between dying and birth" or both?—to sitting still, silent, listening, waiting for new life.

The poem begins,

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

The poem is full of repetition, cadence, circularity in its journey like that of Dante as he rises through the circles of Inferno and Purgatory. Near the end of the poem there is, of course, no resolution, no final synthesis. There is prayer. It is still

….the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Always dialogue, even in solitude. The yew-trees: aged, ageless, often planted in churchyards, associated with loss, grief and strength, an ancient symbol of the tree of life.

__________________________________

Living and Dying: Jane Kenyon

I wrote recently that I'd sidetracked myself while planning to write a short piece on Jane Kenyon.  Sidetracking in my experience is more often a good thing than a source only of distraction: I like to think that the sideways skittle of crabs is the product of eons of natural selection. They got the hang of it before the rest of us did. In the instance at hand, the day before yesterday, I wrote about companionship and solitude, and included a Kenyon poem that memorably expressed her love of peonies.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

There is a world of difference between this experience and, say, looking admiringly during a stroll in one's garden--or even more, not looking, or looking but not seeing. Mr. Ramsey, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is vaguely aware of color in some periphery of his vision but he neither looks nor sees while walking with Mrs. Ramsey in her summer garden. In Kenyon's poem the experience is one of genuine intimacy, bending close, searching "as a woman searches a loved one's face." It is a kind of consciousness, an identity, a dimension of relationship that Mrs. Ramsey has--with her children and other people, as well as with the natural world. One can't imagine Mr. Ramsey, who has eight children and is devotedly dependent upon his wife, searching a loved one's face, except to determine if it can be turned to his own needs.

It is too much to identify this quality of consciousness with life and its absence with death-in-life. But not a great deal too much, for it is a quality of consciousness that is critical to nourishing life. It's absence does not necessarily destroy, abuse or deplete life, but without it life lacks, I'm convinced, a crucial depth of perception, of imagination, that has profound consequences for our capacities to care for ourselves, each other, the earth around us, and other people and creatures whose well-being depends on our capacity and will to attend to them.

In that context I want today to circle back on the writing of Jane Kenyon.

Companionship

One of the pleasures of keeping a journal like this is the fairly frequent experience of a certain kind of felicitous serendipity. (Jung would have called it synchronicity.) I set out this morning to find some old notes about the life and work of the poet Jane Kenyon, having in mind stimulus to a new piece of writing about her gifts. I couldn't find those notes, but instead ran across a journal entry I wrote over three years ago while on a solo kayaking expedition in the Canadian wilderness. Despite its largely waterborne character, I called that journey a walkabout, because it seemed to share with that Australian aboriginal practice a sense of going where one is moved to go, without preconceived itinerary or pace or even conscious direction.

In the days of that trip I frequently returned in my journal thoughts to discoveries I was making, or that my travels were reawakening, about the character of walkabout. In one of them, devoted to solitude and companionship, I found myself returning to an earlier reading of a poem by Jane Kenyon. That I could have written those lines today was both reassuring and humbling--the latter because it brought to mind how few original thoughts I appear to have had in a lifetime, the former because those few seem, on the whole, to suffice. Their marination over the years has revealed dimension I'd earlier neglected, and sustained an experience of adventure. That marination continues as I circle back now upon the core themes I am slowly unpacking in these new Reckonings.

Here is what I wrote very early in that time of discovery, on Thursday, August 28, 2003, from the village of Bartlett, New Hampshire:

Walkabout as Companionship

When I first began to learn about the tradition and meaning of walkabout, I understood it as a solitary experience. I imagined a single person, laying down his ordinary, accustomed, everyday rounds to follow a mysterious calling; walking into some wilderness with no other guide than inspiration, care and alertness would provide.

There is truth in that image, especially if “wilderness” is regarded as a wide array of inner and outer territory that is unaccustomed and unpredictable. But it is the singularity about which I’ve come to have second thoughts, and the romantic notion of abandoning the everyday elements of our lives. Yes, walkabout entails the giving of oneself, the release of a self-imposed order that has gradually, over time, dug a narrow confining channel within which I’d grown used to living. And it’s already brought more sustained experience of solitude than I’ve ever known before.

But I’m coming to understand again (in my heart and bones, not just in my head) that solitude and aloneness are not the same, that walkabout, like authentic and wholehearted living under any circumstances, is essentially relational. I walk, to borrow Thoreau’s now hackneyed phrase, to a different drummer, more slowly, over less familiar terrain—but it is the character and quality of my consciousness, my open invitation to linger, the following of tracks I have not laid down, nor even anticipated, that make the difference. Like Thoreau during the time he recounted in Walden, I can return to my own Concord, to friendships and meals and gardens I have tended, and remain on walkabout.

More and more I’m realizing that walkabout is of its nature companionable. When I think of our own culture’s Songlines, I keep hearing the embracing, wonderfully extravagant voice of Walt Whitman, and of contemporary voices who sing of the compelling, astonishing intimacy of everyday.

A good friend, reading of my ventures, perhaps noting how deeply I was moved by the film, “Winged Migration,” sent me a poem of Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Speaking in another vein of such companionship in “the family of things,” I hear Stanley Kunitz talking with Bill Moyers about his and others’ life and work: “The echo that mocks us comes from the Stone Age caves. The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things of this world. So we must try again, for the work is never finished. I don’t think it’s absurd to believe that the chain of being, our indelible genetic code, holds memories of the ancient world that are passed down from generation to generation. Heraclitus speaks of ‘mortals and immortals living in their death, dying into each other’s lives.’”

Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon, who lived with the excruciating, immobilizing isolation of depression her whole life, knew as deeply as anyone the redemptive walkabout in her own garden, especially with her beloved peonies:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

_____________________________________________

Friends for Life

I know a little more than the barest sketch of the circumstances of my birth. My mother and I--and surely my father, waiting anxiously a few rooms away--were in Swedish Hospital, in Seattle, Washington. I emerged at 12:43 PM on Thursday, March 30th, 1939. The experience of those primal hours during which I moved from my mother's womb through her birth canal and into the bright lights of a wider world, is a living part of my body's legacy and has its place among the determinants of the person I became. It has a persuasive claim to being the most formative event of my life, as for us all, and remains forever, I assume, beyond my conscious memory.

Whoever else kept my mother company during those hours--her family doctor Richard  O'Shea, attending nurses--I've always been glad to know that my mother's mother, the only grandmother I ever knew, was there, and held her daughter's hand. I have a photograph of my grandmother holding me aloft not long thereafter. Both of us appear happy to be together, to begin what was to be another twenty-three years of one of the most nourishing relationships of my life. (I can't lay my hands on that photo at the moment, but I found a contemporaneous one in which my mother joined the two of us.)

Why the evocation of this memory these many years later? I have been reading and thinking about a short and important essay by Daniel Goleman that appeared in The New York Times two days ago (October 10th). He called it "Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing." I'll reprint it below, for it has important connections, I think, with themes that lie at the heart of Reckonings, themes that I'll call the determinants and consequences of kinship.

Goleman's essay describes a phenomenon he calls "emotional contagion"--"the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another," to experience rapport--evidence for which has emerged from the discovery of a class of brain cells called "mirror neurons."  The emergent field of social neuroscience, Goleman reports, is demonstrating the physiological -- cardiovascular and neuronal -- paths by which two persons, two psychobiologies, as it were, coordinate and merge. An example reminded me of that long ago event of a mother and a daughter holding hands as I was being born, and even suggested something of why the memory continues to give me pleasure:

"A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."

It is a new way of thinking about old subjects literally at the heart of our lives and our relationships with the rest of the world: love, happiness, alienation, neglect, illness and healing, wholeheartedness and broken-heartedness.

_____________________________________

Forgiveness

This brief note is an extension of my longer series of reflections on the theme of turning in human development and in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the end of the third of those notes, devoted in part to Stephen Mitchell's refreshingly unorthodox reading of Jesus's parable of the prodigal son, I started to think about forgiveness, especially in a Christian context. I want here simply to extend those thoughts. Later I expect to write more about forgiveness in different circumstances and traditions.

Reading what Jesus is said to have said about forgiveness, I sometimes found myself puzzled that he sounded like he was describing a bargain, or weighing with one of those scales held by the statuesque and blind figure of justice.

“If you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” “If you don’t judge, you will not be judged; if you don’t condemn you will not be condemned; if you forgive, you will be forgiven.” Why did that language distress me?

Because I’m afraid I’m going to lose in the forgiveness sweepstakes, and end up judged, condemned and unforgiven. Because I secretly decided longer ago than I can remember that it was irredeemably my fault, and therefore unforgivable. Because I wanted, sometimes, to feel good about trespassing, holding that weasely wretch to his debt, judging the fool who tried to climb Mt. Washington in winter in sneakers, and endangered not only his own life but others too; condemning a murderer without compunction to the death he inflicted on others; retaliating in kind for an unimaginably grievous wrong.

I’ll never forget the moment of ringing clarity with which Stephen Mitchell, unbeknownst to him, found me figuratively in the bushes—deep in that hedge surrounded by a moldy, wet igloo of abandoned paper—and set me gently back on my path. What he wrote wasn’t entirely welcome—in fact, there are days when I have wished his words away. It’s irritating that one can’t do that with insight that is so palpably true. Here’s are his words:

“Jesus doesn’t mean that if you do condemn, God will condemn you; or that if you don’t forgive, God won’t forgive you. He is pointing to a spiritual fact: when we condemn it’s like sticky fly paper, but worse: we create a world of condemnation for ourselves, and we attract the condemnation of others; when we cling to an offense, we are clinging to precisely what separates us from our own fulfillment. Letting go means not only releasing the person who has wronged us, but releasing ourselves. A place opens up inside us where that person is always welcome, and where we can always meet her again, face to face. In these sayings of Jesus, God is a mirror reflecting back to us our own state of being or moving in the world. We receive exactly as we give. The more open hearted  we are, the more we can experience the whole universe as God’s grace. Forgiveness is essentially openness of heart.”

The last lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” are below. May they serve as a kind of concluding benediction to this collection of thoughts on turning. I asked a calligrapher friend many years ago to write them on parchment. They've greeted me on the wall of the steps I tread daily ever since.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Turning III: Turning and Following

Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.

When I was eleven years old I had a paper route, a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.

The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.

In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.

I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.

But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before Satan snuck in to my heart and revealed to me the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak with impunity. Everybody else who tried would be instantly fried to a crisp.

I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.

It’s been a long time—fifty-six years, in fact—since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, for disbelief, for interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.
Now that I think of it, fifty-six years isn’t very long. (It may seem longer to some of you than to others.) I can talk more, and more articulately, about my confusion now than I could then. My grammar is both better and worse. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m as often as not inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.

When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.

There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.

“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]