family relationships, justice

Popsicle Sticks That Heal

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Decades ago, discovery of a murmur alerted me that my heart will always require monitoring and more of it, plus potentially treatment, as I age. Recently while grandchildren raced hither and yon, seemingly oblivious to grown-up realities, some of us adults pondered the latest data, which was not awful but did fit the forecast trajectory.

The next morning Maya, age three, approached with a Popsicle stick. “PawPaw,” she announced, “this is to check you out.” Stick placed on back. “Lift your neck, PawPaw.” Stick under chin. “Now I check your heart, PawPaw.” Stick on chest.

“How is my heart?” I ask.

“It has problems, PawPaw.” Her brother, age six, agrees. “Yes, his heart is broken.”

“Can it be fixed?” I ask.

“Probably not,” he pronounces, with perhaps a tad less concern than I might have wished, given the verdict.

The stick comes back to the chest. “Let me check it again. Yes, PawPaw, your heart is broken,” Maya confirms with heightened confidence. Despite its gravity, there is something oddly healing in the care with which she offers her diagnosis. 

I was struck that from somewhere, almost just out of the air, these two had plucked awareness of factors they had seemed, if you watched them casually, oblivious to.

This reminded me of my own lingering images from when I was their ages. Though who knows how accurate my memories are, they do point to picking up all kinds of cues from the grownups even as they seemed to have little idea how carefully I was paying attention to their conversations for clues as to how life is put together.

I glean from all this several takeaways. One is that often children, whether consciously or perhaps at some barely aware yet meaningful level,  are likely dramatically more affected by their contexts than adults with our faded memories of those days sometimes realize. This means it matters tremendously to their and our well-being how we build and manage the settings that shape them.

Another is that children deserve for us to treat them more gently  than we often do now in our culture. Their entire beings are vulnerable, open, ever questing. They deserve shelter from the cruelties, crises, and sometimes catastrophes surrounding and even crashing down on them.

This makes me think that even as “helicopter parenting” is to be resisted, parents who seek to buffer children from cell phones, social media, the digital pixels ceaselessly streaming from endless channels to endless devices for decoding them know what they’re doing.

It also makes me think this: There is something primally wrong with concluding that instead of prioritizing treating all children tenderly, churches, communities, or entire countries can be justified in inflicting another round of trauma on them. It can’t be right to wash our hands of their needs by blaming adults in their lives for having the temerity to flee the broken hearts and communities that launched them in search of something better.

And it makes me think that Christians who believe God wants us to support those who lie, boast, mock, ridicule, pursue self-aggrandizement and personal wealth at the expense of their larger communities and nations have some reflecting to do. Can a God thought to favor those who so flagrantly live against God’s ways, who create for children and so many of us settings of endless turmoil and trouble, really be squared with the God visible through Jesus in Matthew 19? There Jesus orders adults trapped in their too-often cruel priorities not to deport but to learn from the children who use Popsicle sticks to pursue the healing the adults so often make impossible.

—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.

Doubt, Faith

The Death of Faith? Or Faith as the Backbone of Hope? a guest post by Peter Dula

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Thirty years ago, the great American poet, A. R. Ammons, gave a reading down the road at Washington and Lee University. Christian Wiman, now a poet but then W&L economics major, describes it like this: “Ten minutes into his reading he suddenly stopped and said, ‘You can’t possibly be enjoying this,’ then left the podium and sat back down in the front row.

No one knew what to do. Some people protested from the pews­–we were in a place that had pews­–that they were in fact enjoying it, though the voices lacked conviction and he didn’t budge. Finally the chair of the English Department cajoled the poor poet into continuing. Ammons mumbled on for another fifteen minutes before the cold mortification of the modern poetry reading, and the beer-lacquered bafflement of the press-ganged undergraduates, did him in. “‘Enough,” he muttered finally, and thudded his colossal body down beside his wife like the death of faith itself.” (pp. 5-6, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art)

I am a teacher of theology and philosophy, a reader of fiction and poetry. It has also been my dumb luck to have faked my way through over 8 years of chairing a Bible and Religion department. So when Wiman, one of the greatest contemporary theological interpreters of the word faith brings up its death in a context which runs together the humanities, university students, and a department chair all sitting in a church, I feel like someone has hacked into my mind. The mind of someone whose doubts about vocation, church, university and God, when they arise, as they sometimes do, usually arise together in a tangled mess (which I suppose suggests either a failure of compartmentalization or mild depression).

What can Wiman mean when he says that Ammons sat down like “the death of faith”? Was Ammons losing faith in poetry, asking himself, mid-reading, whether poetry still matters? Or in himself as a poet, worried that he was too cerebral to ever be as popular as, say, Frost. Or was he just losing faith in himself as a reader?

I confess I looked up Youtube videos of Ammons reading to see if we could simply blame this on his lack of personality. But while he is no Amiri Baraka, he didn’t seem to me any worse than your average great poet.

Or is it just that, like most of us on occasion, he has lost faith in those “beer-lacquered press ganged undergraduates.”? Nietzsche famously quit his university post because he found it absurd to demand philosophy of himself or his students at particular hours of the week. Philosophy, he insisted, cannot be scheduled, and hence can have no home in the university. Just so, maybe Ammons’ doubt is not about poetry but about whether the university constitutes a livable habitat for poetry.

But I am avoiding the point. If Wiman had described Ammons’ despair as the death of faith, period, then we might reasonably be invited to speculate, as I am, about faith in this or that. But he describes it as the death of faith itself. That last word is what stops me in my tracks because I think it must mean all of these things, the death of Ammons’ faith in poetry, himself, the students, the whole thing.

The eleventh chapter of Hebrews says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Substance is a philosophical term usually related to other philosophical terms like being, essence, and accident, terms, you may be thinking, that are all the justification needed for our culture’s marginalization of philosophy.

But if you can be patient for two more minutes, I am wondering, What kind of stance is a sub-stance, a standing from below, an under-stance?

Understanding is a puzzling word. Say that our chemistry faculty here at Eastern Mennonite University understand chemistry. Why does our language encourage us to picture chemistry as a weight that they must bear up under, or picture them as the tent poles to chemistry’s canvas? Is that related to the way that, for our students, they stand for, that is, represent, the discipline of chemistry, as if on a witness stand?

If I do not yet understand understanding it may not be possible for me to understand how faith understands hope, stands under hope: hope, say, that the humanities still matter, that my prayers get past the ceiling, that my lectures are not just bottles to the sea, that I will die before the small tuition-driven liberal arts college dies, that Mennonite Church USA is at least one member of the body of Christ. Faith is the sub-stance of hope means faith is the backbone of hope, the skeleton that gives shape to hope’s flabby flesh, keeps it from declaring “enough” and collapsing back into its chair with a thud.

Or is that not yet quite right? If you’ll let me chase this rabbit into one more thicket, is it rather about the way hope stands? As if faith names the correct posture of hope, not slouching, but also not quite upright? Not faith standing under hope but hope itself when it is, as it were, sitting?

A few days ago, weeks after Wiman’s Ammons story had left me so unsettled, I came back to the book. And it turns out that Ammons also came back. Two chapters later Wiman writes,

The day after Ammons gave his disastrous reading, he squeezed absurdly but cheerfully into a student desk and tried to convince ten un-awed undergraduates of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s greatness as a poet. . . . All I remembered of the hour was the poignant incongruity of that towering, ungainly, large-spirited man trying to convey with words and gestures the pinpoint specificity of a poem.

–Peter Dula is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture, Eastern Mennonite University, and author, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford, 2011). Before coming to EMU in 2006, he was the Mennonite Central Committee Iraq Program Coordinator. This post first appeared in a January 2019 newsletter reporting on Haverim, an EMU alumni groups supporting the Bible and Religion Department. He co-edited the Cascadia book Borders and Bridges.

human finitude

When We Need the Blind Spots

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In a prior post (“Seeing with an Injured Eye”) I told of pondering my blind spots after an eye injury created flashes and floaters my brain needed to learn how to filter out. As I wrote, it didn’t occur to me to ponder the reverse–what about if we couldn’t stop seeing everything in front of us?

That thought hit me when pondering eyesight factors, literal and symbolic, with a friend who had also just experienced a vitreous detachment. I had been focusing on the realization that if brains filter out symptoms of such eye damage, this means we see only in part, only what our brain lets through its filters.

But then I was reminded that this ability of the brain to filter is also nearly miraculous, a healing power indeed. Any of us who have permanent visual disturbances know how challenging they can be. I don’t fully know what some sufferers experience, but I do know that it was a blessed relief when my brain mostly did away with my conscious awareness of floaters and flashes. Until then, particularly as my eyes first adjusted to them, there were times I found them nearly unbearable as they blocked my easy access to the visual world, dancing ever more prominently across the landscape the more I tried to ignore them.

Once when as a young seminarian I presented a colloquium paper, a professor asked if I saw any value in ability to be in denial. Given that my paper highlighted the power of openness, I saw little in denial to appreciate.

Maybe his question was more important than I could acknowledge back then. Imagine being confronted endlessly with raw reality, unfiltered, unsimplified, its floaters and flashes insisting on being seen no matter how this overwhelmed us.

Imagine never being able to deny our mortality, our vulnerability to being hurt or worse, emotionally or even physically, at any given moment. Imagine never been able to forget, even for brief moments of respite, that the same is  true for our loved ones and our happiness hangs every second by a thread.

Imagine remembering with each breath and bite that the poisonous byproducts of what we make and eat and consume are everywhere. Imagine constant awareness that the judgments and criticisms of others we often luxuriate in are not a one-way street. A grandchild once told me, “PawPaw, you would not want to be inside my brain; it’s scary in there.” Imagine if we all were exposed all the time to each other’s “scary in there.”

Or imagine if we could look straight at God’s face. According to Exodus 33, when Moses pleads with God to “Show me your glory,” God speaks of allowing God’s goodness, name, graciousness, and mercy to be shown and proclaimed but not God’s face, “which you cannot see and live.” It’s not that God is insensitive to the human longing to see glory; God promises to hide Moses in the cleft of a rock under protection of the divine hand while passing by, “then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” Blind spots, then, are perhaps even God’s hand protecting us from seeing God’s face while allowing us, through the floaters and flashes, a glimpse of God’s back.

So I want to be regularly aware of how often my brain creates blind spots by editing out reality. I also want regularly to be grateful not to have to handle every moment of every day the unfiltered actualities whose glory could even kill me and us.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.

human finitude

Seeing with an Injured Eye

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Amid age-long arguments of philosophers, brain experts, and more about the extent to which we see the world as it is, by faith I commit to the reality of a world external to my perceptions. But slamming a bike lock into my eye also underscored for me that we see that world only in part, as if, to echo the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, through a mirror dimly.

By the day after the injury, my eye hurt and qualified nicely as a “black eye” even as nothing otherwise seemed amiss. That morning my wife Joan and I headed out on what seemed a routine jaunt to work together from the road. Until mid-afternoon at the Minneapolis airport. At the same time as we were temporarily trapped by ripple effects of a delayed flight, I suddenly realized that no, sun glare couldn’t account for the frequent flashes on my right no matter where I was, even in the restroom.

Suddenly it hit me: injured eye. I Googled: symptoms like mine could be no big deal–or could signal retinal tear and “medical emergency.” Should we risk breaking airport security and maybe lose another flight while hoping to figure out where in Minneapolis to try to get immediate care? It was getting late. A supportive Joan who works regularly with the Montana health care system phoned Kalispell, our ultimate destination, and got me an appointment for early next morning.

When at last we got on the plane, it seemed I was literally glimpsing the image shouted out by the man born blind after Jesus healed his sight (John 9): I saw people as trees walking. Floaters dangled over my vision and bright flashes radiated into them whenever I blinked.

Next morning the care was, thank God, superb, as was the news: I had experienced not a retinal tear but a vitreous detachment, which afflicts perhaps half of us over 60 when the vitreous at the back of the eye detaches from retina. There can be complications and follow-up is important, but treatment is often tincture of time.

That proved true for me, as several ophthalmology visits confirmed. Day by day the floaters and flashes faded. What startled me was this: the eye has mostly not repaired itself; this is not how the symptoms resolve. Rather, the brain learns to filter out the floaters and flashes.  I sense this when I’m particularly tired, in certain light conditions, or if I make a deliberate effort to focus on the symptoms. Then again I can sometimes see the floaters snaking across my vision or a flash firing.

This power of the brain to decide what I will and won’t see is quite striking. It has taught me that in fact I don’t reliably see what’s in front of me. Rather, I see what my brain’s endless synaptic communications across 100 billion neurons send into my conscious awareness.

It also turns out that all of us have a blind spot. A small part of our eye is blind at the point where optic nerve connects with brain. Our brain fills in the missing information.

If a brain can so effectively detour my and our consciousness around actual physical realities, then how much more must it make choices about what I will and won’t see as the endless welter of environmental, cultural, economic, and political stimuli flood in. And how regularly must my perspectives be based on simply not seeing even the countless floaters and flashes of life that do exist despite my being oblivious to them.

I wonder if the fact that we see only with injured or partly blind eyes is worth pondering as a few billion of us seem to be concluding that my job is mostly to proclaim and yours is mostly to submit to my amazingly perfect visions.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.

inspiration

Two High-Fives! Say Yay!

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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

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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

Creation care, Grief and loss

The Dog and More Too Soon Gone

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    As national flames flare over babies torn from immigrant parents, how public figures are treated in restaurants, some Christians viewing a president as God’s new Cyrus of Persia while others see a swamp turned into a septic field,  death arrives. A beloved dog in our extended family dies. He has exuberantly pursued some creature into too small a space.

Shock and grief for many, young and old, is intense. Such a minor loss compared to the national furies over tariffs, taxes, environmental regulations, Supreme Court nominees, and so much more. Is the grief proportionate to the event? Multiple reasons for thinking so flood in.

We humans are built for the local. We connect with the day-to-day realities, relationships built not only of large things but also such small wonders as feet feeling a dog’s body under the blankets; coffee made just right not only for its own sake but as a ritual of love; the infant’s first latching of eyes, then grinning, then vocalizing enroute to first words; the monarch flitting around Joan’s flower garden so little yet laced with the milkweed on which the monarch lays eggs; fireflies so thick in tree fringes you need no backlit Kindle to read by their light.

We feel the depths of loss through the ripping of ordinary patterns and habits; the absence of the bark which made hens scurry up their run into shelter; the emptiness under the covers; the inability to share with my mom the hot dogs she was still thrilling to in her last weeks.

We feel the loss through remembering that once there was milkweed all over and butterflies in their millions; now herbicides kill the milkweed (and apparently decimate honeybees) and this year only that one monarch, not the clusters once routine, has appeared. We feel the sorrow as habitat destruction, light pollution, and pesticides threaten the fireflies whose lanterns guided many of us through childhoods in pre-development nights so dark we couldn’t see hands in front of faces until our eyes adjusted to the glimmers from fireflies and the now often-lost Milky Way.

When children are taken from parents, I’m horrified. Yet my path to the horror and the conviction that no country can morally do this starts with those local loves. My awareness of what a tear we make in the fabric of God’s universe when we separate children from parents, monarchs and fireflies and honeybees from their food and wellbeing, people from sustenance and respect and dignity, comes precisely from this: experiencing how attuned dogs and people are to each other; how beautiful the details of a nature in balance are; how intricate is the dance of eye contact, brain development, sound, touch, and layers of being and relating so deep awe and mystery mingle.

If we lose the ability to be tender with dogs, to have their deaths break our hearts, to share coffee and nurture each other from conception to birth through life to the fading years when hot dogs still offer bliss, to feel loss as monarchs dwindle along with the times we can read by the light of endless fireflies or see the Milky Way, then I suspect we’ll truly have entered our culture’s death throes.

So there is much more to love than a dog and much more to grieve than his loss. But he is one more reminder of why on finishing creation God, throbbing with pride and love and delight, saw that it was good (Gen. 1). And having death take him fills me with all the more passion to care about the things that matter before death takes us all.

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

Chainsaw, Riding Mower, and Planet Earth

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During maybe the latest spring since we moved to our current home in 1993, I worked on my chainsaw then riding mower. I learned about expertise and limits. I wondered about connections with Planet Earth as some U.S. regions turned too cool while up where cold belonged it was too warm. I needed the chainsaw for trees that had fallen in high-wind, springtime “winter” storms. I needed the mower in case grass ever grew again.

As a boy I ruined many an item by taking it apart. I also learned that if you really attend to nuts and bolts and springs and doohickeys amid modest theoretical grasp of what does what, you can sometimes get an “I fixed it!” high.

So: The chainsaw engine won’t turn. I take spark plug out. Engine turns. Plug back in—freeze. Finally I get it: frozen by accumulated unburned oil from gas-oil mix. I drip in raw gas. Pull/flush, pull/flush. Thaw. Back together. Roar! Smoke! Fix-it high. Dead. Gas spurts out the bottom. What?!

Apart again. After 30 years, rotted gas line. Take even more things apart to attach new line. At last: Roar! Smoke!

Fizzle. What! Apart. Broken electrical wire. Solder. Back together. No roar. No smoke. Gas out the bottom. What!

Apart. Ensuring the gas line is permanently connected requires disassembling the (I think) carburetor. Now so many pieces I don’t remember what a chain saw looks like. Gas line attached. Where do those choke pieces go? Memories of where they belong have faded as badly as my 1981 Greek training.

You can tell my dear spouse wonders about priorities but with remarkable maturity forbears judgment. She knows her husband hates to let go of old things, especially now he’s becoming one, and how excited he’ll be if he fixes this old thing.

Another half day goes into turning 50-some pieces back into a chain saw. Roar! Smoke! Run out. Cut cut cut limbs. Huge I-fixed-it high.

Time to get the mower ready. Battery down. Charge. Engine turns. But won’t start. Confident after proving chain-saw expertise, I jump the battery. Roar! Smoke! Silence. Nothing nothing nothing. I’ve fried the electrical system. I will be the customer fix-it shops love: I’ll take it to my friend who fixes just about anything and plead, “Could you fix this thing I ‘fixed’?”

Pride shattered, I think about the strange weather that drew me into these triumphs and tribulations. I ponder how borderline my expertise is, how much I rely on trial and error and vague understandings of how things work. I think of some eight billion of us humans bringing this approach to an entire planet.

This makes me more alarmed about the relentless clues something is wrong Planet Earth appears to be giving us, amid word that the jetstream and Gulf Stream may be turning erratic. Yet countless ones of us whose expertise is no greater than mine with chainsaws or mowers are sure we know what’s happening.

Experts as good at their analyses as my shop friend is at his do confirm danger signals. They tell us that lifestyles like mine, in which even as I try to live lightly on the earth I use chainsaws and mowers and contribute to what is likely the environmental crime of western lawns, feed the vicious cycles. No matter where I’ve traveled this month, the yard-loving and world-destroying engines seem to be buzzing and roaring and whining like never before, as a too-wet spring yields to sizzling summer and we belch yet more poisoning fumes.  Whether or not we believe God gave us dominion over the earth (Gen. 1), we likely have the power to demolish it as our home.

My chainsaw-fixing self hopes people who disagree will accept this before we’re all dead. But then my mower-breaking self says hold on. Have some humility: none of us can fully grasp what’s happening or what to do. Take seriously the possibility that together we all figure this out or together we die. Maybe we can start by learning how to help our lawns be more often heaven and less frequently hell for wildlife.

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

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Mennonite poet, Poetry, Writing

A Writing Place, by Phyllis Miller Swartz

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I had been writing about place—the places of my childhood and the places in a historical fiction book—so when I read the invitation to the Poetics of Place writing retreat, I signed up.

Come to Jacob’s Creek, the invitation had said, in the beautiful Laurel Highlands. The conveners stressed that scheduled activities, according to the brochure, would be offered in the spirit of Ecclesiastes 4:6: “Better is one hand full of quietness than two hands full of toil and striving after the wind.”

But I came with some trepidation. I was a new writer, after all, and I would join a group that included authors of books published by Cascadia, often through its DreamSeeker Books imprint.

Come to relax, a post-registration e-mail told me, and bring ten photocopies of a piece of your work for critique.

Those two sentences, I thought, didn’t fit.

But they did, I found.

One evening we stood on a porch under the rain and heard the words from a poem by Mary Szybist savoring the world’s taste and acknowledging that in exchange for such gifts the poet “did nothing, not even wonder.”

The Poetics of Place conference became for me a call to wonder, to pay attention. There’s something holy about loving the place where you are, someone at the retreat said one evening, and something especially holy about loving a place others don’t love. So notice the signs of life that emerge from the decay of a place.  What are you witness to in the place you live?

Photograph by participant Joseph Gascho.

And I learned to pay attention, close attention, to words. In workshops with people who wrote—a pastor, a musician, a doctor, an editor, a professor, a retired volunteer—I saw how to notice what words are actually saying, as opposed to what was meant. I learned to hear the rhythm of words and to examine each word to find its reason to exist. And I found that to lay my work open for others to see and question and offer impressions and suggestions, is to ask for a gift.

At the retreat we, who loved words, immersed ourselves in them. We plucked words from our ordinary lives and set them on paper so we could see them more clearly. We mediated on God’s call to record words, tracing the biblical commands to write through the Old Testament narratives and the prophets, through the gospels and the epistles, and into Revelation. Even at meals, we played with words in our talk.

When I drove into the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center on the first day of the retreat, I parked my car and sat for a moment, feeling too timid to walk inside, to spend the weekend writing with people I didn’t know and who had written more than I had. But I left the retreat three days later, richer and glad I had come.

—Phyllis Miller Swartz taught school for over 30 years, from HeadStart to middle school, high school, college, and more after “graduating with the hippies from Antioch College.” She is author of Yoder School, a memoir to be released through the DreamSeeker Books imprint of Cascadia Publishing House as the inaugural title in the new DreamSeeker Memoir Series. Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Becca J. R. Lachman, and Anita Hooley Yoder developed the Poetics of Place retreat. They in turn invited participation of Michael A. King and Cascadia Publishing House/DreamSeeker Books, publisher of many of the retreat participants, including Swartz.

justice, suicide

As the Loneliness Surges: Beyond Lewis and Clark Maps

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There is a sculpture of Sacagawea, Lewis, and Clark on a bluff above the Missouri River in Great Falls, Montana. As they point west, one gazing through a telescope, they seem to dream beyond the setting sun.

They believe they’ll find a mirror of the eastern lands with which they’re familiar, proposes Tod Bolsinger in Canoeing the Mountains (InterVarsity Press, 2015). Drawing analogies pertinent to Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory as his subtitle summarizes (the type of territory I pondered in my “Hope as Church Unravels” series and a 2017 Eastern Mennonite Seminary Commencement address on “Weaving the New”), Bolsinger portrays them as expecting modest mountains. From gentle crests they’ll glide down a western-style Mississippi to the Pacific. This will delight Thomas Jefferson, who wants them to explore the Missouri River in search of a direct waterway “across this continent for the purposes of commerce.”

Instead of gliding, their expedition crashed into the staggering realities of Rocky Mountains. As Bolsinger puts it, they would have to

go off the map and into uncharted territory. They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission. . . . There were no experts, no maps, no “best practices” and no sure guides. . . .

Nevertheless, despite no direct waterway, reach the Pacific they ultimately did. The country burst across now-mapped wilderness.

Except people with their own maps already lived there. When the expedition arrived in 1805 in what is now Missoula, Montana, hospitable Salish Native Americans cared for the weary explorers. For decades after the Salish sought constructive relationships with the hordes to follow.

In Missoula, the Salish had a campground. That’s where the University of Montana now sits. Behind Grizzly Stadium rises a mountain marked with a huge initial M. Beside it flows the Clark Fork River, with downtown Missoula on the other side.

Though rebuilt since the first 1870s version, a few blocks downstream Higgins Bridge still connects the sides. On the university side is a plaque that tells of 1891. Amid promises broken then, before, and later, the U.S. government said it was time: The Salish must move to the Flathead Reservation.

The Clark Fork River viewed from Higgins Bridge

Today you can stand on the bank and watch cars whiz past where an age-10 Mary Ann Pierre Topseh Coombs and her Salish people, wearing their best ceremonial clothes, left home across Higgins Bridge while the white folk watched. There, “Women’s History Matters” reports,  “Mary Ann recalled that ‘everyone was in tears, even the men,’ and said the procession was like ‘a funeral march.’”

I learned about Mary Ann while my wife Joan, who consults with behavioral healthcare providers, was connecting with Salish and other Native American healthcare leaders in the Flathead Reservation. They wrestle with how to offer care—a 2018 version of the hospitality their people once provided Lewis and Clark—amid effects of yesterday’s traumas and today’s realities. They navigate the tragedies and triumphs detailed  in a moving New York Times Magazine story on the Arlee Warriors and how “on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, basketball is about much more than winning.”

As by the Clark Fork I imagined Mary Ann’s crossing, I felt haunted by the Lewis and Clark saga. Their courage is evident. So is the fact that in charting their world on top of Native American charts they imposed tragedy in which most of us participate, myself included as I love the land, likely first loved by Unami Native Americans, on which my home is built.

Does the shredding of familiar maps invite us to move beyond them, as Bolsinger urges, but to shift sources of inspiration? Bolsinger hints at this when he highlights contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition of Sacagawea, a Soshone Native American who joined the expedition with her French Canadian husband. Yet this remains a footnote to the larger affirmations of Lewis-and-Clark mapmaking.

What if when we encountered Lewis-and-Clark-like leadership we imagined the alternate maps—maybe like last-shall-be-first maps Jesus describes—lurking in such paths not taken as collaborating with instead of exploiting the hospitality of Mary Ann’s people?

As loneliness surges with the breakdown of both conservatism and liberalism in Western cultures, what if the inheritors of that forced march across the Higgins Bridge are blazing their own trail through not only their historical traumas but also the unraveling of the culture that took over their people? Is that what we see when suicide clusters force its young to “learn to ‘survive their past and their present’”? When the Arlee Warriors release a video on Facebook dedicating their basketball tournament to all who have lost a loved one to suicide?

When the Warriors win and, amid celebrations, Bear, a Salish grandfather who had long ago been beaten for speaking his native language goes on?

“We’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his face turning momentarily dark, his immense hands clenching. Then his hands released, and a great smile worked its way across his face. “We’re still here,” he said.

He walked inside, where mothers danced around the laughing boys, shoving them playfully down to the court. The world is never so hopeful as when the old honor the young.

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

 

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests