Start Squinting More- Chapter Three: The Longing Way Home

Friends,

You may not have wondered about it but I want to explain the long hiatus since I've written another chapter of our book, The Longing Way Home (TLWH). Actually, so far it hasn't been "our" book since I've received no questions or suggestions to ponder and/or include in it which is not exactly encouraging.

Never-the-less, I'll keep on keeping on even when there's an occasional lapse in the process. The most recent one happened when I signed on to write an article for another publication which took time and thought (and required more of both than I assumed it would) away from TLWH.

Another was a rupture in a waste pipe from a second floor bathroom that damaged the kitchen and basement powder and laundry rooms and the repairs are still underway in those rooms and there is dislocation everywhere.

Even so, I'm back and here we go again. Thanks for your patience and whatever comments you're moved to send which always mean much to me.
Blessings in abundance. Ted

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CHAPTER THREE - START SQUINTING MORE - THE LONGING WAY HOME

I keep remembering something novelist Leo Rosten said: "We see the world not as it is, but as we are." I find that statement persuasive, yet disconcerting, especially if we include that we see each other as part of the world we see as we are. Mostly we see each other hurriedly, superficially, partially, even a bit suspiciously as critics or rivals, often as someone to be won over,used or defended against rather than as human beings to be respected.

So we live almost constantly in relative degrees of tension, strife and anxiety in a world of "others" we readily criticize as flawed, even threatening, without acknowledging that we see them as we are. The problem is that the way we see them provokes them into seeing and responding to us that same way, too, and that causes all sorts of antagonism and acting out behavior by a majority of us.

But the insidious quirk is that we tend to see ourselves as the world sees us, that is, as others or society or culture see us. And there's the creep of the astigmatic view! The trouble is that we collude in seeing ourselves as the "world" sees us. That is, we start seeing ourselves as objects, as Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, pro this or anti that, consumers, upper, middle, lower class, poor, white, black, Latino, successes, failures, saved, damned, whatever, the list goes on ad nauseum.

Here are two somewhat extreme examples: if society, culture, marketers, advertisers, see women as sex objects, women begin to either see and act that way themselves or risk being seen as dull, unattractive loser, old maid types -- until at least some women don't! If society, culture, marketers, advertisers see men as insensitive, unemotional, aggressive, belligerent, men start to either see and act that way themselves or risk being seen as geeky, undesirable, impotent wimps --until at least some men don't. Keep those "until at least some don't" in mind as we move deeper into this chapter.

One consequence of seeing ourselves as others see us is that it cons us into adopting some variety of one or the other, or an unstable mix, of two deceptions:

The first deception is being drawn into and acting out the illusion that we're more that we really are, more virtuous, innocent, right, faithful, intelligent, liberated than we are. or could ever be, as imperfect, limited beings, and in that process earning graduate degrees in hypocrisy and emptiness;

The second deception is submitting to the view that we're less than we really are, not competent or smart or good or creative or lovable or whatever enough to matter much and thus spending much of our lives compensating and hiding and all the while being carriers of anger, self-pity and gloom. Both of those views muffle and/or misshape our longing and mangle how we see ourselves, others and the world.

How and why does such astigmatism happen? For clues, go back to Adam, Eve and the serpent in Eden. Remember, in the story God first created Adam from dust, then from Adam's rib, created Eve as his equal partner and put them in the garden to be together: capable, sentient, unashamed, wondrous and beautiful in their nakedness. God entrusted them to tend the garden and thus participate in creating it, i.e. to share in God's creating activity. Out of love, God gave them each other, their freedom, talents, purpose, responsibility, accountability … and, yes, longing, longing as a faint, mysterious clue to who they were, and whose. That was how they were to see themselves and it was enough.

The ugly snag is that isn't how they saw themselves. They didn't quite trust God, or even begin to sense the mysterious depth of the longing mixed in the breath of life God breathed into them. There was just one thing God told them not to do which was mess with the tree in the middle of the garden. That did it and off they went to the middle of the garden to check the tree out. From the first, they misconstrued their longing and attached it to the tree's forbidden fruit.

When along slithered the serpent, they were ripe for seduction. All the serpent had to do was recast their longing by persuading them to see themselves as able to be like God. All they had to do was to dump their charge to be tenders of the garden and eat the off-limit fruit of that suddenly irresistible tree. The only ones who could keep them from doing that were themselves and they weren't about to. They preferred the image of seeing themselves like God so they chucked their charge and chomped away on the fruit.

Only that didn't make them like God. Instead, it swamped them in anxiety and shame so they quickly covered their nakedness with fig leaves to try to hide themselves and pose as though they were no different from the other animals in the garden. They must have thought that would make them no more guilty for their action than animals who had no capacity for such guile.

When asked by God what they'd done, Adam and Eve came up with the first variation of fig leaves by blaming each other and the serpent, trying to somehow hide from God and from themselves. What they failed to see was that in essential ways they were really not like the other animals in the garden. Here's how they were different:

First, God continued to address them as the human beings He/She created however badly they'd acted.

Second, by laying out to them the consequences of their betrayal and sending them out of the Garden, God confirmed their responsibility and attendant accountability as human beings.

Third, God confirmed their continuing worth and the capacities he'd endowed them with by giving them difficult tasks to do in order to provide for themselves.

Fourth, and most importantly, God went with them, giving them clothes to replace their sticky fig leaves, a clear metaphor for covering their shame with mercy and grace!

But Adam and Eve were so blinded by anxiety and drained by shame, they missed all that and what it meant about who they were. I wonder, "What would be different about how they viewed themselves and God if they had just 'fessed up to they'd done and their accountability for their abuse of their freedom, and asked God to help them use their compromised but still ample freedom more responsibility and vigilantly in the future?" The answer doesn't matter for them but never-the-less is relevant to us. We'll stumble onto that later, so keep it in mind.

Why all this fuss about an old Bible story? At least two reasons. The first is because it's true even if not literal. It confronts us with real, crucial questions about life and ourselves. Here are a few which I hope you will think over and come up with your answers:

1. Hasn't Adam and Eve's story been repeated in every generation of human history?
2. In some variation, how much of it is part of your personal history?
3. How often are we tricked into seeing ourselves as like God if we'll just buy the views of society's hucksters and the mirage of promises of they make?
4. How often do we see ourselves as victims, blame others for whatever's wrong and excuse ourselves and, in the name of security and self-defense, advocate and act out that view of ourselves in nasty ways that actually harm us and those around us?
5. How often are we blinded by anxiety, drained by shame, driven to hide in pretense and hypocrisy from our longing and miss its faint signals of our real identity?
6. If we admit that we are not like God, does that make us the same as the other animals of creation with an excuse to live a "dog eat dog" existence?
7. However the millions of intersections and turns were negotiated to bring us from the "Big Bang" to where we are, like it or not, don't we have responsibility for each other and other creatures in the garden, that is, in creation itself?
8. Isn't it possible, even probable, that false ways of seeing ourselves end up keeping us from seeing that the essence of our difference from other animals is what our longing is about and who we are not only meant to be but really are in spite of our foibles and fallibilities, if we look hard enough and speak our "don't" to the way of seeing ourselves as the world does, with our collusion, which is superficially, partially, distortedly, defensively, destructively?

Okay, time's up. Probably my answers are obvious and support the point of this book. But just so you can be sure, here they are:

1. You betcha 2. Not in every detail 3. Causes my nightly acid reflux 4. 364 days a year, except July 4th. I'm patriotic after all 5. Only before and after breakfast. 6. Only occasionally at ball games 7. Earthling types, Yes, but not Klingon types 8. Absolutely but the question is too long and it's tough losing big bucks saying, "Don't."

If you got at least 6 right, we can move right along. If you got less than 6 right, we can also move right along. After all, this is about thinking and reflecting together about longing, not necessarily agreeing about things.

So, the second reason for the Adam and Eve fuss comes with a quote from theologian Reinold Niebuhr: "Evil is done ultimately not by evil men but by good men who do not know themselves." In Niebuhr's day, the term "men" referred to human beings so don't get hung up by his chauvinist terminology. And don't get distracted by arguing whether his assertion includes "all" evil. Even some is quite enough and to our point. Niebuhr is addressing the human condition in both its personal and social dimensions. Not to know one's self is to overlook and/or disregard essential truths about ourselves which warps how we see, think, feel and act and leads to destructive (evil) consequences for others as well as ourselves.

Here's how poet Robert Frost echoed Niebuhr's evocative insight: "Something we were withholding made us weak/ Until we found out that it was ourselves."(1) What is it we withhold if not honest, critical. penetrating, balanced self-knowledge? The truth is all of us are both participants in nature and time, and also have intimations of transcendence and the eternal. That is our consecrated and challenging place in creation. It is awesome to be human and, at the same time, it is exceedingly difficult to keep our balance as such. It always has been. We tend to keep trying to reach up to be like God or squirm down to indulge, then excuse, our lowest animalistic impulses. Either way we lose our balance and crash. Every one of us can describe the wreckage.

It is our mistaken view of ourselves that makes us weak in ways that are dangerous. We exaggerate our capacities and disguise or excuse our limitations and that makes us defensive, self-righteous, entitled, angry, manipulative. Those traits often lead to commit dozens of kinds of violence from lies, slurs and accusations to discrimination, exploitation and oppression to guns, bombs and missiles.

How do we "find out" it's ourselves that make us weak and dangerous? One way is to start squinting more often, squinting at the world, at others, at ourselves which means to look a little askance, obliquely, at an angle, off to the side, which isn't way and where we usually look at life or ourselves. Remember when I said earlier to keep those "until at least some don't" women and men in mind? Well, some people do squint is why they don't see themselves the way the "world" does. They see themselves more truly.

If I now quote Emily Dickinson to advance the point, it may seem I'm on some show-off poetry roll here except that it's often writers, artists and poets who show why squinting matters so much. That's what Dickinson does in her poem,, only she uses the word "slant" instead of squint but it means the same thing.

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise.

"As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanations kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind."(2) ***

*** Comments on poem:
* I think Dickinson uses the word "Circuit" to suggest circling truth to see it from differing, unusual angles, or see it "slant" -- which is what I mean by squinting which precedes telling.
** I interpret "Explanations kind" as telling truth, not lies, to children in simpler ways to ease their fears which truth can do when told compassionately and that applies to adults as well. See Jesus and parables.
*** As I said, I believe to "tell all the truth … slant" implies first seeing it that way which is necessarily "gradually," in order. first to integrate it and then to avoid blindness.

I believe squinting is the way to keep our balance as humans who teeter between two poles. One pole is being inescapably part of, but not completely bound by, the the complex, stunning processes of nature for which we're grateful while often falling for its baser seductions of self-indulgence, unbridled hunt for gratification and cruel preying on others.

The other pole of our teeter is truly being unlike other creatures of nature and having the extraordinary capacity to experience moments of transcendence, enlightenment, moral discernment and the realization of our responsibilities for all of life, while often succumbing to the delusion of the claim to posses Godlike knowledge, judgement, moral certitude, spiritual superiority and requiring the deference of others or their vilification.

All that teetering and tripping up makes maintaining our balance in life a tough but essential challenge. I hold that it requires squinting as often as possible, squinting to see gradually, through lifetime, our longing as a core truth of us, our primal, indelible link to our Creator no matter how numerous, various and frequent are the illusions to which we attach it by not squinting at ourselves.

One serious caution concerning Dickinson's plea to "Tell all the truth but tell it slant …" applies to the word "all." If and when anyone … anyone … claims to know or tell "all" the truth, starting running away as fast as you can, especially if it's "all the truth" from or about God, as in "straight from God's lips to theirs" about who's saved and who isn't, who's in and who's out, who's going to heaven and who to hell, what God absolutely wants us to do about what, when, where and to whom -- except love them as ourselves which includes far from all the answers to the "how" questions we're left to figure out. So the "all the truth" folks give spirituality, ethics, theology, religion, Christianity, churches, and especially God, a bad rep.

In fairness, the illusion of infallibility also plagues people who argue that "all the truth" resides in the "fact" that since there is no way to prove the existence of God by logic, reason, or scientific research, it proves the contrary or negative, namely that there is no God and ultimately everything, i.e. "all the truth" concerning the what and why and how of creation, human life, consciousness and experience, can and will result from logic and scientific experimentation and inquiry. The response to such supposedly infallible insistence about "all truth," is to ask, "Well, to begin with, what about a totally conclusive explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing?" Since there isn't one, that's always a stumper even to such narrow-vision rationalists who's intransigence gives reason as well as science, education, art, music, creativity and sacrificial love a bad rep.

Here, then, is the conundrum of our human existence: of the incredible number of what we human beings can do and know, "all" and "everything" are not among them; not about nature, not about human history in large sweep or small particulars, not the universe or every element of earth, not even about ourselves. Even when we squint at ourselves, or others, we can never see or know all or everything about us or them. As mortals, we simply cannot completely transcend the boundaries of time and space that necessarily define us. It is precisely those inescapable "limits" that make our longing such a gift, such a clue, faint as it is, to who and what we are. We cannot know/experience/see all or everything but we can know and see enough essential truth to dazzle us to live abundantly.

As mortals, seeing and "telling ... the truth slant", that is, squinting at ourselves from as many angles as we can, involves coming gradually to a glimmer of truth that dazzles. The word is "gradually" which emphasizes the finite limitations that apply to us as humans. It suggests that temples gradualness requires patience, trust, courage, humility and honesty. Our squinting is never finished because our longing is never over no matter how much we ignore, distort, misdirect it. That's why our longing is a primal link of mortals to the eternal, mysterious God who created us in whatever way it happened, and keeps happening with our participation because love gives freedom to the beloved while holding them accountable while not abandoning them.

So after all this pondering and floundering, where are we? Surprise, surprise: how about back to my after the fact (okay, story) question about Adam and Eve scratching in their fig leaves, stammering their excuses to God without a squint in mind? Now the question gets put to us, "now" meaning hourly, daily, constantly, even when ignored: "What could/would be different about how you/we see yourself/ourselves and God if you/we just fessed up to the messes you/we make of life and accept accountability for the abuse of your/our freedom, and asked God to help you/us to use your/our chronically shortsighted but still squint-able use of freedom more responsibility and vigilantly to make things better for you/us/others?

Here are some possible answers from which to choose yours:
a) No difference. b) It depends. c) Maybe a little to me, not much to others. d) Some. e) Who knows for sure? f) Worth a try. g) Why bother to find out, things are bad/good enough as is?
h) Can I do the "ask God" part without the "fess up, accept" part? i) Don't understand the question.

I'd say the only suspect answers are a) and g). I hesitate to rank the others but prefer f). But the point goes deeper and is more elusive. The point is about longing which eludes answers and has more to do with the certainty part of uncertainty. Okay, that's really oblique, slant, a squint eyed view of who we are. There is a certain sense of direction, or filtering process, about uncertainty which gives uncertainty a certain positive quality, a gradual truth dazzle about what isn't certain that we take as being so when it isn't, things we settle in with or for rather than going on in uncertainty with our longing for what we can't satisfy but which keeps summoning us and, one way or another, won't leave us alone.

There are many images that might partially fit the ambiguity of our longing and so of our view of ourselves. I think "home" intimates it best because home refers to where we come from and where we long to be or go, not necessarily our literal home but something at once more inclusive and elusive. When I was a kid, my mother did needle work and she made one that was framed and hung in the living room. It included words from Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave but not our hearts. The link may lengthen but it never parts." At least that's how I remember them and in significant measure the words are right and stretch past memory into imagination, intimation of something even more real than we consider reality to be. It has to do with those faint finger prints our Creator leaves on our souls, like a mother leaves on our hearts, prints that point to something present but beyond our grasp. Yes, it's a mystery, a holy mystery, the mystery of God, a truth that dazzles gradually and partially lest it blind us and turn God into some kind of celestial seeing eye dog.

One next to last word about longing and home for now. Home isn't Eden. We may fantasize about home that way but it isn't really some idyllic, comfortable, beautiful, innocent place or time we long for as if our history and identity doesn't matter at all. Remember, it wasn't Eden or God that changed because of Adam and Eve's distorted view of themselves and each other. It as their betrayal of who they really were. It was Adam and Eve themselves. That is still how it is for us, isn't it? In a sense, Eden went with them when they left the garden because Eden was creation but they couldn't see it that way. And God went with them as well, was with them as He/She was in Eden.

So actually "home" is who we really are, not a where, not a place we occupy, or ever can this side of eternity. So just like Adam and Eve and every generation since, our critical challenge is to squint as often as possible until we gradually see ourselves more fully, more truly. And that is also our most vexing problem. For most of us, in spite of using all our psychological, sociological, cultural lenses and making all our claims of being aware, insightful, honest about ourselves, we leave something out because we want to be sophisticated and smart in each others eyes. What we leave out is any sense of God, any admission of a longing too amorphous to be completely reasonable and definable. What we leave out is something primal about ourselves.

So I repeat what I've repeated through this whole chapter: we need to squint more often, much more often in following hints to being home in and with ourselves. And that would make a difference worth finding out about. It would throw some penetrating light on what it might mean to "love our neighbor as ourselves" as well as to "love our enemies." Go figure try to figure out and live out what that might mean, my friends.

Here now is my truly last, beautifully simple, profound insight about squinting to see ourselves as "home." It comes from Marilynne Robinson in her incredible novel, Gilead. Toward the end of the story she has the old pastor write these words in his journal: "There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. 'He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.

"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that also allows us to be brave --- that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and that to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing." (3)

To which I presume to add that longing is surely a form of prevenient grace and prevenient courage.

You may have labored to get to the end of this chapter which may be too dense, long and contorted to easily follow. You may also have sensed that I labored to write it as well. Let's hang in together with our longing anyway. And I hope and pray that these words of this old man I am will help you be in touch with your longing, squint to see and be your real self, and allow you to be useful and generous along with me.

(1) Robert Frost: "The Gift Outright" pg. 424, The Poetry of Robert Frost Holt Rinehart Winston 1962
(2) Emily Dickinson: Poem "1129" pg. 506, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Little Brown 1960
(3) Marilynne Robinson: Gilead pg. 245-46, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2004

Memoir Supplement - Chapter Two

I've always had a strain of melancholy running through my being. Not that I don't have fun, or laugh and joke, or like being with people and being socially active. It's just this note of sadness that tolls in the distant background, louder at times, haunting me. I don't know why or where it comes from exactly, just that it's there as part of who I am and has to be paid attention. Only once, when I was older, did circumstances flood to overwhelm and drag me down to nearly drown in it. But that comes later in the story. For now, I trace at least some of it to childhood experiences which may, or may not, be quite similar to those of most people.

My mother, Bess Mary, was born April 5, 1903, the fourth of seven children; three older brothers, one younger followed by two sisters. Her mother, Rose, married Jacob Pflug, who the family whispered was a Jew, though never that was never confirmed or spoken aloud and remained a family secret. When we visited he'd take me to his store where he sold John Deere farm implements and I'd walk around holding his hand, feeling happy and important.

Mom's family lived in a small farming community, Ohiowa, Nebraska, with maybe 1,000 or so inhabitants, , all of them on the same telephone line with a a particular ring for each phone to indicate an incoming call to which everyone listened in. Since people had to rapidly turn a little handle of the side of the big wooden-encased wall phone to ring up the town operator, that sound also signaled everyone of the so called party line to pick up the received to listen in, everyone was pretty tuned in to all the news and gossip of the day. That was the entertainment of that time, along with church services and socials.

My grandmother, and then as a young girl, my mother played the piano for the morning and evening worship services in the small, clapboard church which the whole family attended. as did my Grandfather Jacob though he sat in the back pew and never joined as did the others. And yet, my mother told me that when his brother had a "nervous breakdown," it was my grandfather gave him a home, took care of him and read the bible to him every night.

When I grew up, I was proud of having a Jewish ancestry but my memory of my Grandfather Jacob is shadowed by another time when we drove all night to visit mother's family and he was lying very still in a bed in a room off the wood stove kitchen. Everyone was quiet and kept wiping their eyes with their handkerchiefs. I was told he'd had a stroke, whatever that was. All I knew was that he was sick and silent, my mother was sad and worried, so I felt lost and cried, too.

That memory blends into another which must have been very shortly after. There was a fire in my grandparent's house and I watched it from the window of a house across the dirt alley leading to the barn. Following that is the image of my grandmother, Rose, standing off to the side of a gathering of people looking at her house and furniture and my mother telling me the bank was selling their house and everything because there was a big Depression and Granddad had died and Grandma had no money and no home now.

I didn't understand much of what she said except it was bad and I was very scared because my mom was squeezing me so hard and making strange noises as her tears ran down into my hair. I remembered the night not long before when the truck with the whirling red light took my mom to the hospital and I wondered if something like that was going to happen again that very day. I clung to my mom and sister, who was standing with us. I just knew I had to be very good so that my mom wouldn't leave me again. That didn't happen, but I knew it might someday, who knew for sure. I never forgot that terrifying feeling.

My father, Theodore William, Sr.,was born November 7, 1902, the oldest of four brothers. His mother, Alice Snyder, and his father, William, also lived in a small agricultural town named Waverly, Nebraska. My grandfather, with his father, ran what was called a dry goods store in town. The store sold groceries, buttons, pickles and flour from barrels, cloth for sewing, and other things people needed. I remember being fascinated by the story and the stories my dad told about how he, and his brothers in turn, worked in the store as they grew up. I also remember that railroad tracks divided the little town, most businesses being on one side, most houses on the other and listening to the plaintive whistle of trains going through and the rhythmic pump of the steam engine and being strangely stirred lying in bed as those haunting sounds floated though the night air and wondering where the train was going.

My Grandmother Alice was very special to me. My mother and father, and sister, Rosemary, left me with her when they drove to the Chicago World's Fair when I was just four years old. My grandparents still had a horse and buggy, as did lots of the people of Waverly and the surrounding farms. So the horse, Dan, was a great attraction to me as a little boy. The kindness of my grandmother was evident in tying Dan to a post near the back steps and letting me sit on him as I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. How did she know I'd remember that, and her, forever? She just did. It was grace personified.

So were the stories she told when putting me to bed. And a song she taught me I still sing to myself sometimes:

"Come, little leaves/Said the wind one day;/Come to the meadows/With me and play./Put on your dresses/Of red and gold;/For summer is past,/And the days grow cold.//Soon as the leaves/Heard the wind's loud call,/Down they came fluttering,/One and all./

Over the meadows/They danced and flew,/All singing the glad/Little songs they knew.//
Dancing and flying,/The leaves went along,/Til Winter called them/To end their sweet song./
Soon, fast asleep/In their earthy beds,/The snow lay a coverlet/O'er their heads.///

It was New Years Day after that summer, when my Grandmother Loder was killed in an car accident when returning home from visiting us in Clinton Iowa. The accident happened after the two memories I shared in Memoir One about my mother's fall and miscarriage and the profound sense of longing I had on Christmas night that year. My Grandfather Jacob's awful sickness and dying, my Grandmother Rose's having to sell her house and everything, my Grandmother Alice's death, all seems to strike out of the blue while everyone was doing what they had always been doing, just as had my mother's fall and miscarriage and being taken away, leaving us behind. Why had all that happened? What went wrong? Couldn't someone stopped it from happening. Couldn't I have? The world seemed increasingly scary to me.

I remember my Dad driving us all to the hospital where my Grandmother Alice and Grandfather William were. We arrived late at night. Everything was dark and quiet, even inside the hospital where we walked down a long hallway with doors on each side. My Grandmother was behind one of those doors. I have a vague memory of entering the room, standing at the foot of a bed, standing on tip toe to look over a board at the end of it, seeing only a white sheet pulled up to the top and nothing else, nothing moving. I heard my dad cry, my mom whispering to him and saw other figures like shadows around the bed. not understanding what it was all about except it was bad.

I remember gathering later at my Uncle Ed's house Lincoln, Nebraska, which was near Waverly later and seeing my Grandfather being helped into bed, his side tapped up where, I was told, his ribs were broken. I heard them talking, Uncle Ed, Uncle Doc, Uncle Dwight who was pounding his fist on the arm of his chair. Someone had gone through a stop light and caused the accident. Who was it? How could whoever it was do that? Why was my Uncle Dwight, who had been driving the car my grandparents were in, pounding on the chair? Where was my Grandmother Alice? Indeed, "Dancing and flying,/The leaves went along,/Til Winter called them/To end their sweet song.//Soon, fast asleep/In their earthy beds,/The snow lay a coverlet/O'er their heads./// It was like my Grandmother Alice's song, only not just leaves. but everything churned out of place

Or was it in place? What did it mean that not only leaves but people, grandmothers, go fast asleep in their earthly beds? It seemed a bottomless mystery though I then didn't have words to call it that, or identify the lost, lonely feelings I had. I was just 5 and a half. Now, more than seven decades later, the mystery is less frightening but just as real. Less frightening because it has to do with God, and as Isaiah reminds us, God says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (1)

So, there is always something unfinished about our mortal life for all of us, however fast we run, however busy we are, however hard we work, however much we have or don't have, however many good works we do. And those feeling of being lost and lonely? That strain of melancholy running through me and my awareness of the mystery of it all, even in seasons of joy and deep love? I realize they are the gates what open to longing, and the way home.

(1) Isaiah 55: 8-9 NRSV

Off To Somewhere - Chapter Two: The Longing Way Home

Friends,

Here's Chapter Two of The Longing Way Home. All the conditions listed with Chapter One are still in place. I hope we can keep this work going for the near future, anyway. You can help me immeasurably by letting me in on your thoughts, suggestions and questions. Or just by letting me know you're reading it as I write it. I consider it a joint effort since it explores what I think is a basic, primal human connection to God. Thanks and blessings. Ted

OFF TO SOMEWHERE - CHAPTER TWO: THE LONGING WAY HOME

The title of this books, The Longing Way Home is meant to suggest my conviction that all through our lives we are on the way somewhere even when we don't completely know quite where or even seriously think much about it beyond choosing a college, a marriage partner and a job or career. Usually we're a bit like Woody Allen who says about himself, "Wherever I am, I wish I was somewhere else."

Our somewhere else is usually not a geographical place so much as it is a higher rung we desire on the status ladder with various degrees of intensity and tend to label with variations on the theme "Our Way of Life." We're constantly urged by every well meaning group to take the readily accessible ways, including "education, hard work, ingratiation, connections and conformity," to get to that somewhere which supposedly anybody who is anybody is headed toward except ... "you know, those who aren't our kind." (And who exactly are they? Martians maybe?)

Still, life as we live it isn't as dependably structured or easily defined as that. As is life itself, our particular lives are an always unfolding, dynamic process, never a static, stable condition. However imperceptibly, that process conditions our thinking, our emotions, our behavior, our relationships, our self-definition and direction. Much of our process of going somewhere is so routine it's almost knee-jerk. and usually relatively short term but fairly repetitive. It involves the sort of logistical choices, plans, intentions and schedules we put together as we set out for the day, or a week, or whatever the next stage is in the drama of our life.

Our short term motives and objectives in that process are quite specific and relate to our work or a meeting, a shopping expedition, an appointment, schlepping kids around, standing in lines. going to social events, the various activities it takes to keep things going without very much reflection on the more crucial somewhere we're headed beyond the checklist in our head or date books. For the most part, any larger or over-arching or undergirding sense of where or what somewhere is gets mostly taken for granted, tucked away in that seldom opened file, "Way of Life," the direction toward which we assume everyone else is generally living, too, as well as how and why.

But the hard truth is that neglected examination of our way of life can slowly change that way until it becomes something different than we assume or profess it to be. Even as we implement our short term choices, plans and goals they continually change because of unexpected encounters, interruptions, conflicts, claims that alter our thinking and decisions however slightly or severely. Those alterations require adjustments in the how, what and why of our seeking as we proceed both in the present moment and in the immediate future.

Those adjustments, however, are usually only practical ones and are made with pretty much the same proximate goals or desires that drive us. Those sort of experiences are so familiar to us that we scarcely give them much thought. We come to deal with them reflexively rather than reflectively, that is, without considering the cumulative impact they have on the way we live or how they dull our consideration of the somewhere toward which, however subconsciously, we might have thought we were headed. In the haste and swamp of all kinds of information, much of it just huckerism, we can become numbed to ourselves as well as the people around us, reducing everyone to objects and just part of the landscape.

An example of what I'm referring to is from an experience which Annie Ernaux had in a subway car in Paris and reported in her haunting little book, Things Seen: "A voice sounds in the RER: 'I'm unemployed. I'm living ... with my wife and child, we have 25 francs to live on a day.' What follows is the story of ordinary poverty, repeated probably ten times an hour, in the same tone of voice. The man is selling Le Reverbere, a newspaper. The words express humility: 'I'm not asking a lot from you, just a bit of small change to help me.' He makes his way through the car. No one buys the newspaper. When it comes time to get out, the man shouts threateningly: 'Have a great day and a good weekend.' No one looks up. The irony of poor people does not count ..." *1 Then over time and almost unnoticed, no one counts. Numb's the word.

That scene could be in any city in the United States from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, Chicago to Phoenix. and smaller towns around the country. How often has something similar but slightly different, happened to you midpoint on your way to somewhere? Probably we don't keep track, or remember, or just lose count because those experiences simply become minor annoyances, like some little pile of trash on the sidewalk we have to walk around or a flecks of lint to brush off the shoulder of our ever distracted humanity. Numb's the word and slowly becomes our reality.

So little by little a great deal changes in and for us. The sad thing is that is exactly what we're numb to. In the process, the somewhere we assumed we were going toward moves a little further away and in a different direction while we unthinkingly keep changing our course in yet another direction a little at a time, just enough to add another mini-degree to the cumulative and debilitating change in the way of life we thought we were living even as we go on living it anyway, one way or another?

The irony is that our successes in living the process of "our way of life" can be might even more deceptive yet instructive than our assorted irritations and anesthetizing experiences with it. What our way of life successes or achievements reveal, sooner or later, is that none of them really satisfy or quiet the longing in us. Instead, they continually pose the unanswered, if not unanswerable, question, "What's enough?" which leads quickly to another, "Will more of it make any real difference?" The answer to the second question is, "No, almost never."

Let's take, for example, the exciting, pleasurable, delightful experience of sexual relations, one of the most desired and intimate experiences of our lives. It's often referred to as "making love" which it really is not! At best, sexual relations express love rather than making it. And Yes, they can also just be pleasurable, enjoyable activities on their own. But sadly, they can also disappointing and dehumanizing in using of others for our own ends or even be a brutal, criminal act of rape.

Still, the point is, when they are truly intimate and satisfying in the moment, few human experiences can put us more in touch with our longing than do our sexual experiences. However close, however sensual, however fulfilling, however wonderful they are, or just because they include those good qualities, sexual relations seem finally to leave us sensing that we've been brushed by something that tapped into a persistent but vague longing for something mysteriously deeper and more fulfilling but always just out of reach .

Of course, wanting more sexual experiences is programed into us as is hunger, sleep, survival. And yet, however many we have, no number of sexual experiences can truly quiet or satisfy our longing. Now, many "experts" assert that the reason is that the desire for sex is for the survival of the human race. That's true but it misses the point here. As I stated earlier, my point is that desire is not the same as longing. If we pay close attention to our longing we sense it isn't really for more of something, it's for something different, something beyond or deeper than any finite, limited experience can be.

What our finite experiences can do is either orient us in the direction our longing mysteriously summons us toward, or they can misdirect us to something less than that. That's the point of my using the example of our sexual experience. I think the same essential truth holds for other temporarily realized desires such as wealth, status, learning, stylish appearance, popularity, material possessions, honors, leadership positions, whatever is on your list or anyone else's.

An experience Annie Ernaux reports in her book gives a hint of how our finite experiences an nudge us in the direction our deepest longing calls us toward. She writes: "Today, for a few minutes, I tried to see all the people I ran into, all the strangers. It seemed to me that, as I observed these people in detail, their existence suddenly became very close to me, as if I were touching them. Were I to continue such an experiment, my vision of the world and of myself would turn out to be radically transformed. Perhaps I would disappear."

However much we talk about wanting our lives to be transformed, we aren't too

clear about what that means except perhaps being vaguely better, more peaceful, content, happy, less anxious or whatever. But what Ernaux suggests about her vision of the world and of herself being radically transformed is quite scary to most of us. What would that be like? What would it mean to "disappear"? Who wants to do that? Intentionally? Thanks, but no thanks. That cannot be in any way what my or anyone's longing could be about. If it is, I'll stick with temporary satisfactions.

Okay, we can leave it at that but with an uneasy feeling. Perhaps our uneasy feeling might be tempered if we gave some thought to what Ernaux might mean when she says: "Perhaps I would disappear" if she continued with her experiment of trying to see all the people she ran into on one day. Or at least, if we considered what I think it could mean to say that.

I think the "I" she mentions and means might disappear is not her "self" but rather her self-strangulating entrapment in her ego, her stupefying preoccupation with her own protective, isolating, little personal, private concerns. I think the "I" she refers to would disappear by expanding and deepening into more significant relationships with other human beings.

That is, I think it means her "I" would begin to disappear as an isolated, self-promoting, entitled me first "Way of Life" toward a who in hell knows somewhere. Maybe, her true self, like Lazarus, would reappear from the tomb of her disappeared "I' and become a person of love and in love. I think she would lose her "I" in order to find herself, as Jesus said was necessary, because we are essentially alive only in relationship with others and creation itself.

Now, you may be thinking I'm trying to make too much out of too little, that I'm trying to make a hearty stew from too few ingredients in my effort to examine the process of our "Way of Life." As result, it may seem I've concocted only a thin gruel of unwarranted conclusions concerning the nature of our persistent, mysterious experiences of longing.

Well, that's certainly possible. But it's only Chapter Two, after all, and we're still trying to figure things out together. Like all process, writing a book can hit snags or wander track which reminds me of a line in Edward Albee's quirky play, "The Zoo Story." Maybe you know it.

Jerry, a strange young man in his thirties encounters Peter, forty something man in a park near the zoo in New York City. The two get into somewhat disputatious conversational jousting. When Peter asks Jerry what he was doing before he came to the park to go to the zoo. Jerry answers, "I took the subway down to the Village so I could
 walk all the way up Fifth Avenue to the zoo. It's one of those 
things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very
 long distance out of his way to come back a short distance
 correctly."

In some way, trying to find the longing way home may involve variations of going a long way out of the way to come back a short distance correctly. To my knowledge, the subject, or experience, of longing is not one with many, if any, even sketchy road maps so this effort is not only an experiment, it's also an exploration. It's not always clear what the correct distance is, so to determine that requires what may seem is going out of the way to explore territory and connected issues which it turns out are really critical.

So I end this chapter with another hint about longing for you to ponder. It is another vignette from Annie Ernaux in Things Seen. It's a different version of the earlier one about the man begging in a subway car and no one pays any attention to him. This one is about a woman in a another subway car at Christmastime.

"The subway car is full. A woman's voice is raised, powerful. 'Act a little human.' Absolute silence. A terrible voice, that tells of her misfortune, accuses people of selfishness. their asses nice and warm, etc. No one looks at her or responds to her anger, because she is telling the truth.

"On the platform, she collides with people carrying bags of Christmas presents, hurls abuse at them, 'You'd be better off giving money to the unfortunate rather than buying all that crap.' Again the truth.

"But we do not give to do good, we give to be loved. Giving to a homeless person just to prevent him from dying altogether is an intolerable idea, and it would not make him love us anyway." *3

And that, I suppose, is another truth. So what hint is that about longing? Well, I think, contrary to the song version, longing may be a hint of what love's got to do with it, even if Ernaux is right in saying giving to a poor person would not make him or her love us anyway. But there's another possibility here, another pointer toward longing, which is that such giving might be a start at loving your self. A start. Didn't Jesus say we should love our neighbor as our self? Hmm.

*1 Things Seen: page 17 University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Ernaux, Annie

*2 Things Seen: page 13 University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Ernaux, Annie

*3 Things Seen: page 46 University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Ernaux, Annie

Memoir Supplement - Chapter One

Friends,

You probably know I am experimenting by writing my blog as a book entitled The Longing Way Home. That means each post will be one chapter of the book with a second post being part of a Memoir that accompanies the preceding post/chapter.

It also means that my Blog's Posts are long and, hopefully, challenging and helpful as well as thoughtful and spiritual. Any and all comments, questions and suggestions are welcome, indeed invited, and I will respond to them in the best and most direct way I am able. Thanks for hanging in with me and thinking as well as feeling about it. Faithfully, Ted Loder

MEMOIR Supplement = Chapter One

Childhood memories are usually fragmentary and sporadic rather than coherent narratives. They bear little clear meaning apart from their singular intensity. Only later, upon recall and refection, do those remembered incidents yield clues of their significance and their influence on your life.

My Dad was a salesman and manager for a large, Midwest wholesale grocery company called Nash Finch. It was during the Great Depression and my Dad was stalked by the terror of losing his job. Like sheet lightning in the prairie sky, his depression terror would flash through the family bullying us toward cover. That was a common experience because in those grim days, everyone who had a job was constantly worried about losing it. Migrant hobos in wrinkled, stained suits and frayed shirts often knocked on the backdoor asking for food in exchange for doing a chore. My kind hearted Mom would give them a small peanut butter sandwich.

Whenever Dad was transferred, we moved. It always happened just after Christmas near the first of the company’s fiscal year, which unfortunately came at the middle of the school year. That made those moves even harder for me. Leaving familiar surroundings and friends made me increasingly anxious as I was growing up. The challenge of going to different schools, finding new friends, making the sports teams, even as early as fifth or sixth grade, seemed overwhelming to me as we moved from Crawford, Nebraska, where I was born, to Clinton, Iowa, to Huron, South Dakota, then across town in Huron which meant changing schools, then to Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Finally, on my fourteenth birthday, June 10, 1944, after my Dad resigned from Nash Finch, we left Aberdeen, drove west to Milwaukie, Oregon, a town bordering Portland, where we moved into a rooming house and Dad joined his father in a small insurance agency. By then anxiety had become my constant companion, the worry that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d be rejected or have some awful thing happen to me. My sister, Rosemary, was four years older, talented, beautiful, socially gifted and effervescent, handled those moves much better than I did. She was definitely the life of the potluck party family dinner table, sharing what seemed to me every boring detail of her day’s events and conversations. I always ducked and loved her from afar.

Gradually, I slipped to the outskirts of the family. Clinton, Iowa was a rather short stop of about 18 months on the family’s journey. And yet, I now realize two memories from that time were of critical experiences in shaping my character. The first was when I was about to start kindergarten. What I remember is seeing my Mom sprawled on the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t move. She told me to get a chair to stand on so I could reach the phone on the wall to call my Dad for help. She told me how to make a call and gave me the numbers to dial one at a time though I was crying and unsure.

I must have succeeded because the next fragment of the memory is being very scared as I watched my Mom being put in a red and white truck with a whirling light on top and taken away. Later, my Dad told me Mom was okay and she’d be back home soon. He said she had lost a baby who would have been my little brother and the doctor had to take care of her for a few days. I didn’t understand much except Mom was okay and I wouldn’t have a brother.

I immediately began to miss him. For years I wonder if it was my fault he was lost, that I didn’t call for help the right way, or I should have helped my Mom more. I felt sad and bewildered about it and vaguely scared without knowing why. I kept wishing for a brother. As I got older the longing for a brother transposed into urgently wanting a best friend but never seeming to find one either because we moved too quickly, or I didn’t deserve one.

Sometimes, in family gatherings, I heard references to Mom having miscarriages. I dimly realized that meant she lost babies. Had Mom lost another baby brother before I was born? I was confused and anxious about what it was all about. Where was he? What did "lost" mean? I was only sure it had something to do with me, something frightening that in someway troubled me for much of my life. It made me long for something I couldn’t have, some good I could never achieve, some peace I could never find. Something unfathomable in me was slowly making its presence felt. It still is. It is primal longing.

The second of those early experiences was another kind of initiation into the mystery of longing but in a less traumatic way. This time I was a five-year-old kindergartener. It a memory of a time near nightfall on a Christmas day after the few quite practical presents had been opened and the festive casserole dinner eaten. My slightly frazzled family was sprawled about the small living room, my sister and I on the floor, everyone quietly reflective, or perhaps just tired. It was an unusually comfortable, pleasant gathering, one commonly associated with holidays.

But slowly, then more rapidly it all changed for me. Everything began to feel very weird, unfamiliar, and remote. In part it may have been because my Mom was still recuperating from losing a baby. Or it could have reflected the Clinton was still a largely unknown town to us. Perhaps it had something to do with it being 1935 with the cloud of the great depression clinging to everything like the pervasive scent of decay and anxiety. Probably those factors did influence that experience, but not consciously. When you’re a kid, whatever your circumstances are seem normal to you.

My feeling was tinged with something like disappointment, though not exactly that. It wasn’t that I hadn’t gotten something I wanted for Christmas since I really hadn’t wanted anything special and was glad for what I did get. It wasn’t because I was unhappy about something; I wasn’t. It wasn’t because I was angry about something or worried; I wasn’t. It was just that something was missing. I couldn’t say what was missing except that it felt very important and wasn’t more of what was already there. It was just … missing. Maybe it was the brother I didn’t have because of Mom’s fall but it wasn’t that focused. It was more that something of me, or in me, or about me, was missing but at that moment I had no notion of that either. I was five years old! I got inexplicably sad. I wondered what was wrong with me.

A few nights earlier we’d gone to see a nativity scene laid out on a large hillside of an estate or farm on the edge of town. There were figures of angels and wise men and shepherds with what I thought were real sheep and maybe they were. What seemed a large number of cars were parked nearby surrounded by people commenting appreciatively on the scene. I was delighted to be there and knew, from Sunday School, what the scene us supposedly represented but that the figures themselves weren’t real. It was all like make believe play about something from long ago and far away, something somewhere out of reach of that hillside and that night. I wished I could see that somewhere, the real thing I could only imagine. Where was that? What was that? Those questions were still with me that Christmas night in my feeling of something missing. If it was real as it felt, why couldn’t we go there, see that?

I realize now that what I was feeling that Christmas night was longing, nearly overwhelming longing. Those many years ago I wouldn’t or couldn’t have called it that. That night I only knew it made my eyes tear up, a lump come to my throat and a dim sense that whatever was missing would probably stay missing and I had no idea what it was.

It was only later that I could identify what I experienced that long ago Christmas night was longing and what was missing would indeed stay missing for me, for us. I can identify it as longing because I’ve had some form of that experience nearly every Christmas of my life. In fact, I’ve come to believe that an experience of longing is one of the sacred gifts of Christmas and is close to what the celebration of Jesus’ birth is about – the stirring of longing for our truest home and for what is missing in the partiality of life, however much we might pretend or wish it to be otherwise. It’s the keen awareness of living in exile.

Living in Exile - Chapter One: The Longing Way Home

Friends,

As I indicated in the first post of The Longing Way Home this is an experiment in writing a book as a Blog - at least for me. Beginning with this one, I propose to submit successive posts as chapters of the book. Following each post, I'll add a segment of a memoir to illustrate the personal ground from which the book and, as closely as possible, the preceding chapter emerged. I'll also do this as an attempt toward limiting the length of the chapter as well as shifting the tone and character of the writing.

I am not at all sure how this will go, or what degree of interest it will evoke from those who may access my blog and posts. For that reason, as well as for critical response, I invite you to raise questions or make comments as I/we proceed. It may be that this experiment will not work and I'll abandon it or continue it in some other way. Your responses will help me make that decision so I thank you for them in advance.

I must necessarily add that any and every part or portion of the written form and substance of The Longing Way Home, including this blog and all posts, is under copyright, 2010, and all rights reserved. No part can be reproduced in any manner except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews without prior written permission from the author.

That said, here we go.

LIVING IN EXILE - CHAPTER ONE: THE LONGING WAY HOME

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. Isaiah 55:8

Beginnings need a compass, an operative North Star. Otherwise what follows from them is often rather pointless meandering; interesting perhaps, or entertaining, even challenging or vaguely satisfying, but as a rule more than vaguely disappointing.

That observation applies to any subject. Even more crucially it applies to life itself. The difficulty is that life’s North Star, its point, its dogged meaning, usually takes time, perhaps a lot of it, to be discovered or discerned. It may take thirty or forty years, or longer. Or it may never happen. The point is there but we miss it, or mistake it, or dismiss it. And during those years, life can be experienced as a rootless wandering without a compelling point or with too many points that are more confusing than clarifying. These memoir-meditations are about life itself, including my own. They do have a point. Over the years, I’ve discovered and rediscovered it countless times. Since it’s a process that constantly involves me, I am constrained to disclose it at the outset. To do that, I have to start nearer the end than the beginning of my life.

My point is longing – yours, mine, everyone’s -- for I believe longing is a common human experience. Our longing is persistent. It is insistent. It is unquenchable. Although it takes many different forms, the longing itself is universal. It can be intense, it can fade but it never ends as long as we live. So I suggest that longing is our primal connection to God, and is the ground of faith. Longing is a basic way God relates to us more deeply than our belief systems, creeds, scriptures, practices, philosophies, institutional expressions of religion, or the rejection of any or all of these. I also suggest that longing is a gentle, quiet but trustworthy guide in our lives. Simon Weil, a Christian mystic, says, perfect attention is prayer. In that profoundly spiritual but unconventional sense, I believe paying close attention to our longing is essential to spiritual life, indeed to our very humanity.

These are huge, perhaps presumptuous assertions. I’ve arrived at them over the course of many years, nearly half of them as a minister, author, theologian, husband, father, grandfather, as well as a lifetime of being a mortal, seeking, struggling, flawed, awed, blest, grateful human being. These memoir-meditations are about how I’ve come to these assertions. I write them in the hope they will engage us in a dialogue together.

To begin with, longing is hard to define precisely even though it’s a prevalent, frequent experience. Often it’s assumed to be the same as having a dream, or passionate desire, or wanting, craving or wishing for something. While longing can be similar in some ways to those views, or a factor in them, it is not quite the same. To me, desire, wanting, wishing, dreaming have a more specific and limited quality to them. They are typically directed toward a particular person, object, status or goal, many, even most, of which can be reached or achieved and the desire or wanting can be satisfied at least temporarily, sometimes permanently.

In my experience, longing is much more elusive. Rather than relating to specific things, longing infuses our experience of nearly everything. It persists even after any specific desire, dream or wish is met. It lurks unabated at the edges of the glow or exhilaration or satisfaction of the most personal or intimate experiences or achievements or triumphs. It also remains unwavering through disappointments, disillusionments and defeats. That is, longing refers to an enduring condition that is unquenchable and yet is irresistible and unavoidable. That paradox is the abiding mystery of longing while constituting its spiritual quality and power.

Spiritual is a term that usually makes me uneasy. Too often it is used to refer to a new age types of personal, basically private self-improvement ventures which are accountable to no one or nothing other than the attitudes, preferences and objectives of the individual or his/her mentor. While that can be a quite accurate view it’s perhaps a too narrow one. I’ve come to occasionally use the term spiritual to designate a generic human impulse hardwired into each of us. It’s pre-religious and, as I said, does not necessarily find resonance and expression in religious communities, creeds and practices. I posit longing as that essential condition of spirituality that affects all of us whether personally acknowledged or not.

Therefore, our common spirituality makes longing relevant as a guide and teacher in life for everyone and is accessible both within and outside of any particular religion. Being a Christian and serving for 45 years as a minister, I contend that paying attention to the prompts of our longing is a critical factor in the continuous reformation and renewal of faithful persons as well as religious institutions and life itself, certainly of Christians and their churches. That’s a large piece of what I’ve learned in my life and why I’m beginning nearer the end than the beginning of my life. In truth, that contention is a deeply held belief and a major motivation for writing this book.

Home is a powerful new novel written by Marilynne Robinson as a companion work to her beautiful, almost devotional book, Gilead. It’s set in the same small prairie town of Gilead, Iowa. It deals with some of the same Gilead characters later in their lives, in particular retired, old Presbyterian minister, Reverend Robert Boughton and his two middle-aged children: Glory who has come back home to take care of her father after the breakup of her engagement to a duplicitous man; Jack, the rebellious, black sheep agnostic of the family who left and stayed incommunicado for twenty years and reappears at the family home one day without much explanation to anyone. The core of the novel is the dynamic between these three characters.

So Home explores the questions, “What is home?” and “What does it mean to come home?” In one of the most poignant lines comes toward the end of the book as Robinson sums of the experience of Glory and Jack this way: “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?” (1)

That question comes close to the heart of the human condition. It’s what longing is about. A sense of exile! No matter how comfortable or troublesome our place on earth may be, no matter how safe or threatened we may feel, no matter how much we know or don’t know, or have or don’t have, no matter how certain or shaky or absent our beliefs may be, our longing keeps whispering to us that somehow we are living our lives as exiles. Or as one reviewer summed it up, “Eden is exile, not Heaven.” (2) Put simply, living in exile is to be living away from our own home country.

There can be many explanations for our intuiting that condition – neurological, political, choice, war, being taken there among them. But the most existential reason is simply that as human beings, we are actually born into exile. However close to Eden, or the promised land, we may strive to be, even feel or think we are, we are still away from our real home, away from the country or kingdom to which we most fully belong but at best only partially belong now.

At strange times and in curious ways, we sense that partiality. It happens through the common, public arena of science as physicists try to pulverize atoms in the effort to discover and share with us the secrets of the origin of the universe, of matter and life, of where humans came from and are going. It happens in neuroscience which explores brain function to try to determine how or whether it conditions our relationship to reality or if it's the other way around. It happens in the social, political area as we go through the ritual of reciting our complaints and failings and argue over how deal with them in order to fashion a more perfect future. It happens in the intimate personal arena in those fleeting fragments, slivers of moments, glimmers of awareness, those occasions of either delight or defeat when we feel personally, however vaguely and briefly, that somehow we really are prodigals in a far country and a kind of homesickness stirs in us. That is a condition of mortality, of finitude. That is the refrain longing keeps humming to us in those times when we listen. That is why I maintain that longing is our primal connection to God. Reflecting on personal experience has led me to this conviction.

(1) Marilynne Robinson, Home (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 282

(2) James Wood The New Yorker, September 8, 2008 78

The Longing Way Home - Prologue

Friends,

For a long time I've been thinking of writing a book on longing as an essential link to God. I even began writing it about a year ago and for several reasons postponed continuing it. Recently it occurred to me to start writing the book again but this time as my Blog on which successive chapters would be presented as Posts. I'm writing now to tell you I'm going to give that idea a try. Before I begin, I want to suggest, or perhaps warn you, that this means my Posts won't be any shorter and possibly could be longer.

So if what you want are short Posts, my writing is probably not for you and you can log on to other posts more to your liking. It also means that my purpose in writing is to share ideas and experiences about what I consider to be critical life and faith issues about the meaning of life from a religious or theological view. That means it won't necessarily be boring or tedious but neither will it be a quick, easy read. However, my hope and intent is that each Post it will be worth the time and thought it takes to be helped, stimulated, even inspired and blessed by what I write.

If so, stay with it and respond any way you find appropriate. If it isn't, your likely response will be to shut me down but I'd be grateful if you'd let me know why. One additional note about this effort to write a book as a Blog is that I want to blend personal memoir with spiritual reflection. I'm not sure if, or how, that will work but the point is to make the book incorporate my life experiences into my reflections and thoughts. Any comments about that are welcome.

The title of this Post is the proposed title of the book. I've started each of my Posts with a prayer. The book's Prologue, this first Post, is such a prayer.

THE LONGING WAY HOME

A Prologue

O Holy One, Creator of all and everything,

when you first snapped unquenchable light,

scattering the glistening dust of it as far as forever,

white whirling scythes of galaxies cleaving the darkness,

O Lord you knew, didn’t you? Yes, you knew

that light would set us against our own darkness,

this insistent pelting, this dazzling inhaled air,

this silent pulsing energy would unleash longing’s urge

and pull our souls like sap, like slowly fermenting wine,

through cell, fin and claw, tail, thumb and tongue

until life became weeping, singing self-aware.

Of course, you knew that light would spin our longing,

would set creativity, imagining, climbing like vines

along the double-helix string of gene and promise;

that it would glisten our eyes with unflinching hope

and lump our throats at beauty we can scarcely bear;

that longing would be what life would wrap itself around

and by it we'd gradually discover wonder to be its truest guide.

Yes, at the genesis you knew, lest light be waste and life absent.

Longing is in us, rising red-warm as blood - you stirred it there.

It surges with wiser passion as day’s light slants and cools,

and gratitude turns insistent, longing to praise real as love.

Life’s autumn light is long and slow, as are the longings of age,

a slanting, not a blazing one, and so, clearer and more steady,

a gentler embrace for mind, heart, soul to more easily gather

to hear unspoken stories, hum unscored songs, see dim visions.

Longing leans to touch the thin veil 'tween known and unknown,

and sketches on the here what it senses of the “could be” there,

signals like the scent of a summer garden on a pitch-dark night.

The sin, if it be that, has always been failing to inhale, to attend,

to heed the undying light that agitates and complicates the dust,

that sigh-sings its secrets into the bud, tells its stories to the blood.

Now, out-back in autumn’s weary, browning yard the stubborn roses

make their last, determined witness to the whiff of beyond what is.

Mums, a weary, waning petaled congregation, lift their secret liturgy.

These scruffy yet mute sentinels still display the strange summons

of longing reaching toward the promise, even in the dimming light,

of a season yet to come, a greater beauty, a more glorious garden,

the sought of all seeking, author of its stories, composer of its songs,

the You who's call, like a mother's, ever lingers in the air to come home.

Amen.

Help Me Out Here!

PRAYER

O God of children and clowns, as well as martyrs and bishops, somehow you always seem to tumble a jester or two of light through the cracks of my proud defense and into the shadows of my sober piety.

Grant me, no, an enchantment of heart that, for a moment, the calliopes of your kingdom may entice my spirit, laughing, out of my sulky self-preoccupation into a childlike delight in the sounds and silences that hum of grace; so I may learn again that life is never quite as serious as I suppose, yet more precious than I dare take for granted even for a moment, that I may be released into the possibilities of the immediate ... and rejoice to travel light, knowing there is little I have of need except my brothers and sisters to love, you to trust, and your stars to follow home.

Excerpt from Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle Ted Loder

Friends,

Here's a short post at last.

A few days ago a friend of mine told me the story (by now you may have heard it but never mind) of a certain Horace Johnson who prayed all the time to win a million dollars in the lottery. He began praying for that in high school, continued all through college, then on into his marriage and working life, every day without fail. He prayed regularly through the scrimping years of his children's' childhood and adolescence, their needs, struggles, education, weddings and the arrival of his grandchildren.

One night as he was praying that after all this time, God, please would enable him to win the lottery, a light suddenly surrounded him and out of the light he heard a voice say, "Horace, help me out here. Buy a ticket!"

Okay, it's just a funny story. But is that all it is? Doesn't its point have at least a dozen applications? Whoever wrote the Letter of James in the Bible, put one of them this way: "What good, is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? ... If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food ... and yet you do now supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ... For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead."

Care for the poor? Health care for everyone? Create jobs for the unemployed? Assist senior citizens? Initiate a green economy? Turn back global warming? Reduce nuclear weapons? Invest more attention and funds in public education for everyone? Achieve full gender and racial equality? Nurture personal and world peace? Live the gospel? Believe, yes. Pray, certainly. But buy a ticket. Sign up. Pay up. Stand up. Join up. Help out here.

Enough for now. The key here is deciding how the point of the story applies to and for you!

Think about it. Ted