Category Archives: inspiration

Creation care, inspiration, Mental and behavioral health and recovery, Teachings of Jesus

Presence and Love Dancing by the Dead-Ash Fire

4 Comments

Dancing by the fire image“The Affair,” a flawed yet riveting Showtime series, weaves over five seasons a web of sin and sorrow, of poor choices and consequences. One character’s inability across decades to stop harming loved ones and himself is horrifying.

Yet as Noah ages and life holds him sometimes brutally accountable, his heart opens. Noah tells a traumatized Joanie, whom amid tangled choices he once believed his daughter, of epigeneticist Eddie’s theory. Eddie believes trauma can reshape how our genes are expressed, meaning trauma can be biologically passed down. So if your ancestors lost a child you might feel effects without directly experiencing it.

But Noah also tells Joanie, “If trauma and pain can echo through generations, then so can love. If abandonment can ripple across time, then so can presence.”

Ever since that episode, the hope that not only the bad but also the good can ripple down has haunted and inspired me. I think I see it again in Steven Petrow’s Washington Post column (March 7, 2021) on “How you will be remembered depends on how you live today. So, too, does your happiness as you get older.” Petrow begins with poignant examples of what his parents’ tombstones say. His dad’s describes, “Journalist and Professor”; his mom’s testifies, “Beloved by all.”

Petrow explains that his father’s identity was so wrapped up in résumé-building that he had a terrible time adjusting to the loss of his professional perks as he aged. But his mom, though quite professionally accomplished herself, made the transition to “eulogy virtues,” the gifts to life and loved ones that linger even after death.

Petrow also reports his own temptation to live “more like my dad, with much of my energy focused on earning more, beefing up my résumé looking to achieve greater success.” Then he attends to Arthur C. Brooks. “‘After 70,’ Brooks wrote in an essay, ‘some people stay steady in happiness [while] others get happier until death. Others—men in particular—see their happiness plummet.'” And Petrow connects this with his quest to shift “from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues.”

It strikes me that résumé virtues can help pass on trauma and abandonment. In “The Affair,” Noah’s passion to be a best-selling author catalyzes considerable damage. Eulogy virtues may be more likely to pass on presence and love.

This matters to me because Petrow and I must be nearly the same age, and I’m in the thick of wrestling with résumé versus eulogy priorities. My heart is on the eulogy side. But I still miss parts (not all!) of the days my life revolved more than now around professional commitments and weighing this or that decision with potential to change lives for good or ill.

Now sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of being back having too many meetings all the time and even navigating the anger of a colleague who was angry because I couldn’t schedule the appointments he thought I owed him quickly and often enough. That phase seemed soul-damaging while I was in it and often was. Yet in the dreams there is a frisson to being endlessly busy and in demand that can haunt me when I awake to its absence.

So though I’ve long aimed not to live like Petrow’s dad, I resonate with his late-life pain. And I’m glad Petrow ends with love for a father whose happiness declined because of lost résumé status but who even so had fostered eulogy values:

Soon after he died, and more than 15 years after he retired, his colleagues and students profusely acknowledged his résumé virtues—but their tributes also eulogized his humanity, noting he had been “a wonderful mentor and advocate,” and not least of all, “an amazing man with a kind heart.”

Petrow concludes, “I wish my dad had been able to hear that.”

I won’t be able to hear what’s said at my funeral, but Petrow helps me continue the move from résumé to eulogy activities. This seems to me particularly urgent now in a country and world unraveling as politicizing everything destroys us; climate extremes tear at bodies, souls, and power grids; a pandemic rips up customs that once spelled home. These are such large forces the temptation is to see the résumé builders—the powerful people—as our main hope now.

But what if that ceaseless restless quest for more better best is not only a solution to but also a cause of what needs healing? What if for those of us who attend to the teachings of Jesus, Petrow is updating give up your life to find it, take up your cross and follow me, for what good will it do you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?

What if urgently called for today are eulogy values? What if that means a vital need is to  pass on—even in tiny ways—presence and love, soul-pursuing rather than world-chasing, to echo Jesus? In this eulogy-centric stage I draw some comfort from that.

And I dare I hope I’m participating in that process even through treating ash trees and with dead-ash fires:

As nights no longer get cold enough to kill emerald ash borers, billions of ash trees are dying. At our house we treated one majestic ash. It was already borer-riddled but the tree guy said just maybe not too late. Last spring luxuriant new leaves crowned the tree. One limited yet glorious miracle. Let that ash tree live long enough for someone to bring a leafing branch from it to my funeral.

But we had to pay $10,000 to take down other dying giants before they fell on our house. Then this: A year ago Joan and I went abroad. A daughter, her husband, and a six-month-old granddaughter joined us. By the time we flew back into panicked Newark airport crowds, our pre-COVID-19 customs were gone and have yet to return. Since Newark we’ve lived in a bubble in which we routinely see only the loved ones who flew back with us that fateful day.

Fridays they stay over into Saturday. Recently I realized our granddaughter really likes rituals, including helping me set up fires in our basement woodstove. Now before Friday bedtime I ask if she wants to go to the basement. Wriggling with joy, she makes me leap to head off her going down the steps herself.

We start the fire. With dead ash wood. Yet from this death springs life: She delights, the flames turning her face golden. She points to the TV. Not good. Except. She’s learned you can play music on TV. So we go to a music channel that’s not too wild but has mellow beats. She starts to dance. And it becomes clear that, like her mother who so loves dancing she’s taken lessons, she gets the beat. She jigs back and forth. She raises both index fingers to point, grinning hugely at dance partners, while she twirls.

I think of my family history. Trauma going back centuries, including depression, anxiety, suicide, and yes, abandonment. On Joan’s side the baby girl who lost her dad at 10 months, its own abandonment. The trauma ripples down and is for us and billions reactivated by COVID-19 wounds.

Then I wonder if also rippling down the generations will be that little girl dancing by the dead-ash fire, experiencing even amid Covid isolations presence and love and giving it back to us. And I dare hope such eulogy practices will linger even longer than the résumé activities now fading.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Parts of this column were first prepared for a February 28, 2021, sermon at Salford Mennonite Church.

gratitude, inspiration, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Winter Color, by Julia Baker Swann

Leave a comment

I hear a slow summer wind in this sponged carpet of russet needles
under my feet. Smoldering burnt orange around silver tree roots and evergreen.

Husks of tall blonde meadow grasses sway in the barely-breeze.
Skeleton seeds wait, gold even without light.

Rocks splattered with the creep of fungus and lichen. White, yellow,
and neon.
In the warm pockets around each stone’s breath, bright clover tests growth.

When inside my home the clouds are a heavy drape.
I crave the sun-spill across the floor.

When I go out the moss grey sky is a complex churn.
I would need violet, black, and even a dab of rose to paint these layers.

The subtle hues ask me to quiet. To clothe myself
in terracotta and winter-berry, silver-tone, tawny down,

deer-skin, dusted pine, honey-sap and moth-wing white.
To chant these muted colors like a bold prayer,

treasuring the particular sounds.

—Julia Baker Swann is completing an MA in Theopoetics and Writing at Bethany Theological Seminary and is poetry editor at Geez Magazine. She is author of The Moon Is Always Whole, her first poetry collection (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2020).

Awe and wonder, Creation, Grief and loss, hope, inspiration, Poetry

To the Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star, by Kathryn Winograd

6 Comments

So little you know, wild-winged
and unshaken beneath a dog star,
half-grazing the pines, the bare winter
aspen I stand in the dark wash of
waiting for the tip of a yellow moon.
In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars
circled a pond bull-dozed
by my father, a raft of cattail
where the red-wings spun their nests
above the scrim of caught water.
Tonight, in this near dark, so close
my hand could circle it,
Sirius hovers above the red
factory lights of Pueblo
and the Sangre de Cristo blue-
washed in this hour.
I am cold in this wind,
in this spine of the Milky Way,
these blue white stars named
for a bear or a lyre or a woman
weeping her dead into a river.
I think I was still half-sleeping
in a field of grass, in a haze
of stars, in a far and nameless
country you care nothing
about, burying and unburying
those I love. Such quiet,
the mining trucks to the north
stalled and the little generator
of a shed where no one lives
in winter shut down.
And then, your wings, almost
against the moon. Why
must I always be alone,
searching for something beautiful?

—Kathryn Winograd, a poet and essayist, divides her time between Littleton, Colorado, and a “pie in the sky” cabin her husband and she dreamed of for twenty years before stumbling across forty acres of high meadow ranch land near Phantom Canyon. She is the author of six books, including her most recent collection of essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received the Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her first collection, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, was a finalist in the Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards.  Her poetry collection, Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. She currently teaches for Regis University’s Mile High MFA. She wrote “To Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star” during the first months of the pandemic.

Faith, hope, inspiration

Sourdough from East Coast to West and Even Zarephath

2 Comments

It should be emphasized upfront: the primary motivation was neither self-improvement nor altruistic baking for loved ones. It was fear of shortages.

Along with family, I was out of the country when COVID-19 began its wildfire stage. We returned to grocery shelves mostly still normal except for whole corridors emptied of toilet paper. But just days later half-empty shelves became the norm.

Flour started to vanish. Especially wheat flour, my favorite for bread. And yeast. My alarm rose. Amid such big fears as socioeconomic collapse, loved ones getting sick, or I myself being infected post-heart surgery,  I was beginning to experience my day-to-day pandemic concern: fear of shortages.

What if I couldn’t have bread? Especially wheat bread? The antidote became clear after several days of researching the flour/yeast supply challenges: sourdough starter! You can grow sourdough starter from flour and water. Eventually it feeds its way into creating its own sour-tasting yeast mix.

That didn’t solve flour shortages. I’ve not figured out how to fix these by, say, growing and grinding my own grains, but only by watching for sources of the occasional five pounds here or there. I try to accept that as anxiety producing as the erratic supply is, the situation is dramatically less problematic than billions of people have long navigated every day.

So far the flour has not run out. More amazingly, the yeast keeps growing as the starter thrives on. I experience a bit more fully now the power of the Old Testament story of the widow of Zarephath, who has “nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”

But the prophet Elijah, confronting barren land after God has stopped rain, is out of food. God promises the widow will feed him. Elijah tells her to keep implementing her plan but first to make a little cake for him and then one for herself and her son, because “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” And so it happens (1 Kings 17: 8-16). It may not have been sourdough but it sure reminds me of it.

I‘ll never forget the surge, so intense I discovered the blood pressure I regularly measure had soared, when on the seventh day of feeding my sourdough starter doubled and more. And when dropped in water to test its potency, it practically leaped out, so energized it was.

My family is bewildered. This is not the Michael they know. He’s made it all the way to Medicare without even hinting at the urge someday to bake bread. Now he feeds his starters, Paulette (who eats unbleached flour) and Buddy (who eats wheat flour plus unbleached white) whenever they become exhausted.  In an effort to experience more hints of the Zarephath miracle, he also does not throw out starter discard (a byproduct of feeding the starter) but offers it to waffles and English muffins.

Lo, the recipients of this version of flour and oil are enthusiastic. They plead for an inexhaustible supply. I do my best to provide.

And recently I discovered the joy of providing not just the baked goods but spreading their source across the country. As so many of us have experienced worldwide, COVID-19 had inflicted trauma on West Coast children, grandchildren, and grandparents. Joan and I had previously relied on juggling vacations but often also work travels to include stop-offs in the West. But now such options to bridge the gap between East and West Coasts were blocked. We risked soon going for a year without visiting grandchildren growing up as fast as spring corn stalks. Various risk factors made flying seem unwise. Finally we settled on doing what we could with masks and careful stops to drive and meet halfway across the country.

What balm for traumatized souls. Older grandchildren Kadyn and Maya, eight and four, never before having experienced sourdough baking, each took delighted turns helping to mix and knead. Then my daughter Kristy had an inspired request: Could she take some starter back West? Carefully the feeding and dividing was done, and a starter child born from starter that had by now thrived across some 10 states headed forth across more states and miles.

A week or so later, as we mourned the renewed chasm of 3,000 miles between households came photos from Kristy: bread and muffins made from that sourdough.

When Maya who had helped make bread with me realized her mom was using a version of PawPaw’s starter, she was thrilled.

Through sourdough I’m nurtured—to my surprise given just trying to fix anxiety—in ways that help me grasp why so many new bakers have turned flour and yeast scarce. Sourdough doesn’t fix pandemic nightmares and deaths. But it can feel like healing balm on the wounds.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Awe and wonder, gratitude, inspiration

Surrender’s Blessings

4 Comments

Though we’d just met when hospital orderlies called us each from waiting room to preop,  she and I agreed: We didn’t want to go. Trained by a culture that prioritizes control over surrender, I asked my orderly, “What if I don’t go?” My new friend concurred: “We’re going on strike.”

Yet off we went to surrender our markers of control: wallets , rings, watches, glasses, clothes. Control was reduced to fumbling with a hospital gown to preserve dignity–barely.

Control had worked during the 40 years cardiologists reported, “Maybe someday you’ll need your aortic valve replaced, but probably not until your 60s, and maybe never.” Now an echocardiogram had shifted “maybe” to consulting a surgeon.

Still I pursued control. I doubled exercise, enhanced nutrition, lost more weight. Maybe I could still strengthen my heart enough to  skip surgery. I felt ever better; a painful challenge if forced into surgery would be relinquishing pre-surgery well-being.

Then another echocardiogram. The valve was leaking badly, its shrinking surface area raising pressures that would eventually destroy my heart. Mortality odds were soaring; maintaining control by resisting surgery would do me in. Any vestige of control now meant choosing surrender.

I grieved this into the final hours. Still, due less to strength of character than to bleak alternatives and a hospital system that sucked me into its inexorable protocols, surrender I did.

I most strongly felt the surrender as not just forced but ultimately embraced after tearful goodbyes to spouse, daughters, siblings gave way to the anesthesiology fellow pushing my stretcher with wheels as balky as some shopping carts down lonely halls. I apologized for her having to explain “He had a lot of good-byes” when an operating room phone call asked why we were late. Gently she told me, “It was moving to see the love.” It’s time to yield to care like this, I thought.

Such kindness was underscored as we reached the operating room, an efficient team inserted IVs, lines, whatnots, and that syringe slowly pushing in to take consciousness. All team members used my name and gave their names. They honored me as person with feelings and fears.

What a gift when offered to one on the cusp of being chilled 10 degrees below normal, chest sawed open, heart stopped, blood and breath circulated by machine, the symbolic and in many ways literal seat of being to be held in a surgeon’s hands as aorta is clamped off,  diseased valve removed, new valve sewed in. Would a clot break loose? Warmth ever return? Heart restart?

Then puzzling light and shadows. I remembered the man born blind reporting, after Jesus healed him, seeing men like trees walking. Through ICU windows I was glimpsing midday sun on hospital buildings.

Though pain and recovery lay ahead, I had awakened to so many gifts: discovering that the feared breathing tube had already been removed, that my incision had been minimally invasive, that I was . . . alive! My mind seemed still mine. The stuffed narwhal my granddaughter had given me, matching her own so we could together be comforted, was tucked in beside me. Love filled the room—first as compassionate staff cared for me, then as loved ones arrived.

Many of the effects of surrender in this context were so intense as to be almost mystical beyond words, but truth-telling does require reporting that not all was peaches and cream. After catheter was first removed a combination of anesthesia aftereffects and my reaction to lost privacy completely froze my bladder. This continued for so many hours that if I had not surrendered to some, shall we say, very direct interventions, what I had always anxiously assured my spouse could happen on too long a plane flight would have happened: something would have burst.

But let me ask you, if you had trouble managing some of your affairs in public and you were told somebody always had to be with you, what would  you do?

Or suppose you at last negotiated that you would be allowed to try by yourself so long as you stayed near the call button. By now even the most rules-affirming staff–who were, after all, just trying to obey the rules to keep the patient safe–realized creative alternatives must be sought. Then suppose every time you started to unfreeze you could hear your heart monitor, wi-fi carrying it out to main hall and nurses’ station for all to enjoy with you, beeping and cavorting with every move while you waited for someone to race in and code  you. What would you do?

Well, what I did was this: I yielded to catheterization whenever the freezing had gone on too long to remain unaddressed. And I turned to my post-partum daughters, who had in total delivered six babies and had learned, I now began to grasp in fuller ways by far than before, what it means to give up all privacy and bodily control. Minute by minute and hour by hour–thank you dear children–they coached me through.

Frozen body functions remained, however, far outweighed by learning like never before the power of being cared for in body and spirit. One nurse, sensing the exhaustion Joan and I were feeling due not only to recovery intensities but also constant night interruptions and noises, proactively conceptualized the entire night so she could structure it to give us the longest periods of unbroken sleep.

Another night, Eun-Hui and Bryna needed to take extra care of the endless array of wires and tubes attached to me and into me, into my chest, arms, carotid artery, and even, I was intimidated to learn, the very core of my heart. There at 3:00 a.m. they stood on either side of me, Eun-Hui supervising as each took turns checking bandages, adding ointments, in a few wonderful cases taking this or that out for good.

Off to my left,  an utterly worn-out alien slept on a fold-out chair. It was my poor spouse, ears muffled in noise-canceling headphones, each eye looking like a magnified fly’s eye under a black mask. A nurse herself who had once cared for people in my situation, knew the dangers, and had endured months of worry long before the traumas of supporting me through surgery, now she could rest into the gift of other nurses taking over. She particularly deserved that after the first night, when with no place in to stretch out while I was in intensive care she had slept sitting straight up except with head bent onto my bed.

So now on both sides of me for over half an hour Eun-Hui and Bryna painstakingly worked. Carefully, gently, skillfully, they created what came to seem to me a holy time, a period of understanding as well or better than I ever had in worship the healing effects of the laying on of hands. When they were done, Eun-Hui asked how I was doing then as they turned to leave of all things thanked me, adding with a smile, “You were a very patient patient.”

I realize, with sorrow, that millions who deserve it don’t get such care, including as overseen in this case by a surgeon whose colleagues kept volunteering that I was in world-class hands. I realize as well, after starting to see the enormity of the claims my bills are making on Medicare, that anyone who thinks the challenge of health-care costs is solved simply with hard work and personal responsibility has not tried having a heart valve replaced in the U.S. health system.

So I am profoundly thankful as I remember those hospital days, just three but with effects that shaped not only my body but also my spirit for the rest of however many days I still have. I feel grief for a culture that shapes me and us to learn so  much more about control than surrender. And I feel sheer gratitude at having been invited to learn that surrender offers not only curses but also mystic blessings.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

God, grace, inspiration, love of God

Hemmed in by God’s Love, a guest post by Jen Kindbom

Leave a comment

Caffeine is a mixed blessing for me. It gives me the laser-beam focus especially handy in creative endeavors (such as writing these words) or monotonous tasks (such as grading hundreds of papers). Not only that, it almost instantly relieves those headaches that a couple of Aleve, a nap, and a big glass of water just won’t touch.

But caffeine also makes me jittery, shaky, and paranoid. For example, I distinctly recall sewing in my attic and fearing acutely that at any minute I would be arrested and hauled off to prison–for what offense, I do not know. How to express my relief when I realized it was no accidental crime haunting my conscience, just the frozen mocha. . . .

Then I think of Psalm 139, which I’ve studied with my first-year character ed classes for the past six years or so. Psalm 139 conveys the depth of God’s love for God’s people on a very personal level. We see God’s hand upon each of us at our very core. We see God’s knowledge of each of our thoughts before we’re aware of them, and—one of my favorite images, particularly as one who sews—we see God’s love hemming each of us in. There’s no escaping a good hem.

I find it particularly comforting that the message of this psalm is not one of conditions. The words do not say “You perceive my thoughts from afar and abandon me when they’re too much.” The words do not say “You love me unless my thoughts are off the deep end irrational, or too fast for me to keep up with.” The words do not say “You hem me in until I’m afraid and I can’t quite pin down why.”

No.

They say “You hem me in, behind and before.”

When children are overwhelmed by questions that seem too big or even too irrational, loving and thoughtful adults at their best respond kindly to them. So it is with God, so we see in the psalm. What if it rains inside? What if the house blows away? What if there’s a bee in the field?

Imagine these are your thoughts, as they have certainly at times been mine. Imagine God putting tender hands on each side of your face, kissing your forehead, and then taking your hand and walking with you, listening as we talk it out, answering your questions in ways that acknowledge that to you, the fear is real and also that you are safe. In that moment—as in every moment—God hems you in. God hems me in, behind and before.

The psalmist prays for God to search me and us, to know our anxious thoughts, caffeine-induced or otherwise. He prays for God to let us know of any offensive way within me and you—not to condemn us or to add a brick to the wall between us and God but because God knows the possibility of an unhurried mind. And God desires that for each of us: thoughts and a mind at peace in the hem that is God’s love.

—Jen Kindbom, an Ohio-based writer, teacher, and designer, is author of Cadabra (DreamSeeker Books, 2015)  (2015) and the chapbook A Note on the Door (2011). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and other journals and anthologies. Jen is interested in lifting the veil of poetry for her students, and pursues ways to integrate poetry and creative writing into her high school English classes.

God, inspiration

Brightly Beams the Mercy

Leave a comment

When I was growing up in Mexico, son of missionaries who saw Jesus as light to share with those they believed lost, I listened for endless hours as around and around on the Wollensak turned the tapes on which Roy, Stateside supporter, had recorded countless gospel songs.

Amid culture-shock-related traumas, those songs saved my life. When little else brought comfort, those tapes assured I was tenderly watched over as the storm passed by, hope whispered, I walked in the garden or talked in the fields, or rested, with the Lord my shepherd, beside the still waters of peace.

The day would come when many of the lyrics, more passionate about saving inner souls than bodies lost to injustices shattering communities, would trouble me. When HIV-AIDS struck so hard in one context that funerals for those lost to it became a weekly ritual, a worship service enveloped in gospel lyrics sung as if souls sailed serenely on while bodies shipwrecked in storms of oppression and rejection unsettled me.

Yet I recall loved ones for whom gospel song metaphors motivated  soul salvation and inviting compassion for human sisters and brothers drowning in life’s daily wreckages.

I wonder what such loved ones, mostly gone, would make of today’s Christians who love old or new gospel songs but now mesh saving the lost with policy cruelties. If you’re not the right kind of good Christian American, whatever must be done to you to keep me safe just must be done.

Even this doesn’t entirely shock: I’ve never made sense of a loved one who so nurtured my love of gospel songs that to hear her favorite ones stirs tears. Lovingly she’d minister to prisoners’ souls. And passionately she’d preach, this Mennonite follower of the Jesus whose love for enemies she did embrace, that their bodies should be executed.

I don’t know how to navigate such complexities as cruelty becomes an ever more popular go-to across political and theological viewpoints. But recently I stumbled across a gospel song that encouraged continuing to seek light. “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by P. P. Bliss, was supposedly inspired by evangelist D. L. Moody’s story of a ship that wrecked in a terrible storm. The captain could see the lighthouse, but with lower lights meant to reveal harbor channel hazards extinguished, disaster still ensued.

Though my boyhood self had loved that song, when the algorithms of Spotify threw out almost miraculously a version by The Lower Lights band, I heard it afresh.

For Bliss, the lighthouse beams God’s mercy. But humans also must “trim your feeble lamps,” those lower lights along the shore for which the “eager eyes” of sailors fainting in the angry billows “are watching, longing.”

Yes, the focus remains on spirits and sins. Yet in The Lower Lights version I also seemed to hear the metaphor spreading to bodies and communities the tendernesses, the compassions, the divine mercies we humans are to share as well as experience. I could imagine trimming harbor lights not just to beam out our own visions but also to illumine safe harbor for each other. It seemed fitting, then, to learn that many Lower Lights band members have connections with a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that some who love P. P. Bliss would reject.

How do we get theologies just right? I still don’t know. But I yearn with soul and body for faith expressions reaching beyond cruelty to blend harbor lights with Mercy brightly beaming.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

beauty in blemishes, inspiration, popular culture, Teachings of Jesus

Oatmeal

10 Comments

Oatmeal. When I was a child I liked cooked oatmeal. Then when I grew up, to echo the Apostle Paul, I put away childish things. Every now and then my spouse Joan, an oatmeal fan, would urge me to consider the possibility that Paul wasn’t speaking in 1 Corinthians 13 of putting away oatmeal. I resisted.

Then the cholesterol test. Not terrible but high-ish, I still think probably, as I told my doctor, due to weeks on the road and too much rich eating. Still the test unsettled me.

I watched Joan cook oatmeal. Hmm. Worth trying? Even as a grownup should I take the advice we give children, try it you’ll like it? Yes.

Wow. Steel-cut oatmeal. With raisins. Some brown sugar. Milk. Wow. I had let glitz and glamor and shiny-object foods overwhelm an humble wonder. Now I find it hard to get through the night while awaiting another oatmeal breakfast.

Then next I was going to criticize the focus on beautiful everything Instagram offers. Along with millions of us, I’ve been unsettled by ways social media appears to be distorting our lives. I’ve barely explored Instagram, but I do know you don’t post photos to Instagram without running into filter options that allow automatically making a picture look better than it is. This struck me as a metaphor for how our sensation-loving culture pursues image over reality.

And oatmeal seemed to me to symbolize the antidote. You can’t get much more basic than oatmeal. It is what it is: a beige-ish concoction whose texture vaguely reminds me of old paint going lumpy. We need to live more beige-ish, lumpy lives of not chasing the latest latest shiny shiny. This is the Jesus way.

But then I used what was once the latest shiny but now feels more like a water supply company though with more worldwide networked power for good or ill—Google. To make sure Google agreed with my view of oatmeal’s humble role I looked up . . . “oatmeal on Instagram.” The very first articles that came up had titles like these: “Oatmeal Has So Much Instagram Clout Right Now” and “Sorry, cereal! Oatmeal is the Instagram-worthy breakfast of choice right now.”

Just minutes from being eaten as soon as this crazy (and unfiltered) photographing is done: real oatmeal cooling quickly in a non-artisanal bowl from a mass retailer whose wares a real Instagram influencer would be too embarrassed to use.

I was stunned. When I started this post, I thought I was a pioneer, with oatmeal as prism for exploring society possibly a stroke of inspiration from above. I thought oatmeal would be of no interest to the way-cool people, like the ones I read about this morning, who can make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by being Instagram “influencers” paid to oh-so-authentically feature products we all ignore if pushed on us through oh-so-inauthentic ads.

Yet instead of being counter-cultural, instead of being faithful to Jesus against seductions of the day, I am just one more schlub who missed the tiny sidetrail of Jesus’ narrow way and with the zillions of us am on the broad path that leads to destruction.

Actually I’ve seen no evidence that oatmeal leads to destruction except if you eat too much and put on it precisely what I like to put it on it. Oatmeal really is good for you. It really does help lower cholesterol and more.

Now what? The only thing I know to do is let oatmeal lead the way. I am as ordinary as I thought oatmeal was. Sometimes even the broad way has its merits. And maybe it’s okay for the beige-ish lumpy things to have their occasional day.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column. He emphasizes that the photos in this post are of a real, authentic bowl of oatmeal prepared for an actual breakfast rather than to influence Instagram fans.

 

 

inspiration

Two High-Fives! Say Yay!

Leave a comment

Sometimes it takes someone who is two (“and a half,”  she stresses), to lead the way.

For some 40 years, starting in our twenties weeks after arrival of first daughter, our family has spent some summer retreat time in Maine. There we learned at least temporarily to give up TV,  to read and read, to talk and talk, to walk the beach from sunrise to sunset and into moonrise. We savored the clear cool days we called “Maine days,” ocean so frigid you were brave to dip toes in, nights requiring at least sweatshirts. Sometimes we’d start a fire.

Now no fire for ages. Fewer sweatshirt times. And ever more days of people swarming not only up to water’s edge but way in, the rare head of the hardy soul now become almost too many for lifeguards to count.

Then this year: forecasters had warned the jetstream would sweep tropical air up the East Coast for weeks. They were too right. Clouds that looked like they started in the Caribbean (as they often had) in humid air to match scudded on winds blowing atypically from the southeast. But oh! In Maine there would be Maine days.

With just the right twist of breeze and sunshine there was an occasional Maine minute or hour. But days? No. Especially not nights. Historically Maine summer nights have often fallen into 50s, even 40s. So air conditioners are rare. This year fans blowing gales across sweating bodies were no match for nights often stuck in humid 70s.

Possibly we were experiencing effects of dramatic shifts becoming evident in Maine as the Gulf of Maine warms 99 percent faster than the global ocean and Maine’s summers are now trending two months longer than in 1982 (around when we started our Maine pilgrimages).

Meanwhile the usual sweltering news blew in from everywhere, not least Washington, D.C.

In the middle of wondering how we cope with and find hope as jet streams, ocean streams, and sociopolitical  streams send distress signals, we were monitoring our granddaughter at the beach as she sent that body aged precisely 2.5 years down to the waves but not quite in. She flirted. She flirted some more. Finally: toe touched wave.

She raced back, hand high. “High Five, PawPaw! High Five, Grandma!” She liked our responses.

Back to the waves. Inches deeper. Race back. High Five. High Five. TWO High Fives!

Again. A whole foot or two in. Back. More High Fives and Two  High Fives than the world has ever known.

“Now say Yay, PawPaw! Say Yay, Grandma! Say yay again. And again say yay. And again. Again!” Then with a stern cut-it-out wave of both hands across chest: “No more Yay.” Start over.

The day and the news still sweltered.  Yet hope had breezed in.

After Maine, Joan went back to consulting with organizations striving to provide behavioral health care amid economic, political, and cultural heat waves. Often resources for health-care versions of air conditioners are inadequate. Now what?

Joan tells the story of a young woman, 2.5 years old, who teaches us how to say High Five and Two High Fives and Yay. Together she and the organizations look for the path. And often enough, toward the end of the day as spirits sag and hope flags, someone will point out that this is going well, that holds promise. Someone else initiates a call-and-response High Five! And Yay! Things perk up.

Sometimes even our ability to draw nurture from Scripture seems compromised as every study or sermon or text going this direction is challenged from another direction. But one Scripture seems right now to shout out its treasures as, to paraphrase Isaiah 11:6, amid the warring animals and people “a little child shall lead them” in offering the yays and high fives.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column written in consultation with Joan K. King

inspiration

Off to See the Wizard

8 Comments

Enroute to an annual extended family gathering in rural New York and to glimpse a quest for the wizard though we didn’t yet know it, we listened to a nationally broadcast funeral service. We digested an update from friends confronting the prospect that one of them might be gone in the coming year. As we left the warmth of the reunion, we wondered whether next time the circle would be unbroken.

After those hours with portents of death mixed with hints of new life, we headed home. Knowing what vulnerable souls need, Joan said, “Now: I want you to be ready to stop if we see an ice cream place.”

Okay. So we turn the corner in small-town New York. There it is: an ice cream place of nearly legendary size and style. It looks like the prototype for any of the best ice cream stands in the world.

We stop. We use the restrooms. We order our ice cream. I ask for small. It comes with one medium-sized scoop. Just right. Our server interrupts herself as she’s handing it over: “Oh, you ordered small. That’s another scoop.” Off she goes to return with the small: a tower of ice cream on a sugar cone.

I take it to the table. I eat fast. Ice cream starts melting and running. Disaster looms. I go back to ask if I might also have a cup and spoon.

I return to the table. The woman at the next table with her partner laughs and says, “Oh, I should have done that!” We chat  as we savor our cones, trading this and that detail of where we’re headed.

Joan and I settle back into our own conversation while admiring a deep red-maroon tricycle motorcycle parked not too far from their table. Eventually they get up. Now we see that they’re in motorcycle garb. Plenty of leather in jackets and leggings.

We’re surprised. I think we would be on the old side for motorcycling. They, based on skin and hair and wrinkles even more leathery and white and plentiful than ours, appear to be a decade or two older.

She chuckles at our surprise. “We have to live this life while we have it,” she assures us. “We’re in our late 70s. This life’s all we have. Or at least if there’s more we don’t know what it is.”

He hadn’t had much to say up to that point. Now he comes past our table to throw some trash in the basket. He gives us what seems a sly, cheerful look. In an accent that sounds vaguely British we hear “We’re off to see the wizard.”

Back to the cycle he goes. They putter around doing whatever it is you do to get ready to start the engine and head off. We watch with admiration, awe, and maybe a hint of envy. We’re old enough that we’re paying attention to models of aging. We like this model. We tell each other to learn from it.

Abruptly she pulls away from the cycle while he tugs at this and that. She heads back to our table. She leans in. In a near-whisper she reports, “He’s starting to experience Alzheimer’s. We’re out on the motorcycle today for the first time in a long time. He’s been afraid to ride. He’s been afraid he’s forgetting how to do it.

“I told him the only way we’ll keep riding is if we keep doing it. So I ordered him, ‘We’re getting on that motorcycle, and if you won’t do it then you’ll have to ride in back and be my b–ch.'”

Back she goes while he keeps working at remembering what does what and how to start the motor. He thinks the battery’s dead but, she points out, the lights are on.

We feel caught between rooting them on and not wanting to intrude on what seems a sacred and private moment. Eventually we go back to the restroom again to give them space and hope when we get back they’ll be edging out and we can give them a thumbs-up.

They’re gone. We feel pangs as we think how much lies ahead for them. How happy we are that they have managed to pull back onto the highway. What a privilege it has been to glimpse, there with the magic of ice cream, these two modeling for us how to navigate portents of death and still head off to see the wizard.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review