Midlife

I don't know what to make of it,
         or where to turn.
Depletion and disjointedness:
       the indexes of middle-age.

These too:
       The tired eyes.  The over-indulged belly.
The limitations felt and no longer trespassed:
       Weak knees, aching backs.
The first failings of the memory -
               a name
          that tumbles
               like a marble inside my mouth and fails
                      to fall out.
All proof the tide has turned,
         and will not go back.

All that is left is
     the denouement:
             The other side of possibility;
        foggy and confused;
                 the facing of sin
                      no longer as enemy to be vanquished,
        but the steady presence,
                      the partner sitting on the sofa across the room,
                           arms folded,
                      knowing and fully known;
                           and despite my protests,
               now part of me in ways I cannot know.

So infected, I come to see,
my struggles not will make me free.

Marked as I am, there is only
        the waiting now.
   No commodity can save me.
   No move to a nicer neighborhood.
   No putting my kids in the right schools.
   No resolutions.
   No new job.

No mortal help will walk into the room,
            only what might come by transfiguration,
    and grace,
          like celestial heralds under the cold, open sky.

Only the possibility of a greater power,
            lifting up within and beneath my bones,
                   of a story tied deep into the fabric of creation,
           Apocalypic tales
                   dancing in old men's heads
           Strange visions
                   of risings,
                   and glorious tellings
                   beyond all hope,
          that second life
          that will not wane
               nor tumble
                    nor be snuffed.
Only life,
        complete and full.

And How Do You Go Back?

From time to time, I turn to the novels of Wendell Berry.  It's habit of pleasure, but also of guidance - an opportunity to measure my life against a vision of America Mr. Berry presents that seems both entirely foreign to me and entirely attractive.  

Yesterday, I turned to Hannah Coulter.  The title itself is fairly misleading.  It has to do with a fictional girl turned woman in the made up small town of Port William, Kentucy in those years before and after World War II.  However, as Mr. Berry is like to say, the story is of all of one piece with a whole host of stories.  Hannah Coulter's story is inevitably tied to the Feltner family, the Catlett family and a dozen other families that make up the small town.  He cannot tell hers without touching a strand of an intricate and beautiful web that is moved in whole.

Those of you who have read Wendell Berry know his dominant theme in all of his stories is community:  both the strength of the fabric prevalent throughout America in small towns once upon a time and now as threadbare as quilts from a lost generation.  You know the strength of his novels are in his ability to make this world come alive, and his weakness as an author is when he idealizes this whole and tightly knit world too strongly, making it seem too much an Eden born again.  Surely, I can't help but argue, things were never that perfect, that whole, that seemingly good.  And if there was a time when communal life existed in such a way, it only increases my melancholy.

My dad tells me about his childhood in little Amboy, Indiana.  I get the sense from his memories there truly was a wholeness there.  Surely, if you were to visit Amboy today, you would see it as a dead town, an isolated desert, one of hundreds lying off some road in an Indiana county.  But it allowed my dad to have an identity through relationship, through family.  It allowed him to be the boy in the "Kendall & Son" service station.  It allowed him to play basketball with the neighbor boys under the park lights.  It held him within a fabric, and I know his heart is still drawn to those memories.

I understand, then, why Wendell Berry writes his Port William stories - resurrecting the older ways when home and economy were not enemies at war but faithful and necessary partners.  

We are so far, though, from that land of Port William imagined by Wendell Berry, about as far now as my dad is from the Amboy, Indiana of his youth.  

Yesterday, I made my way back up to my own hometown that I eventually left.  As I did, I stopped at a Dick's Sporting Goods store just south of the place I grew up, one of the large commercial centers built solely to house the products of a goods & services economy.  There was, of course, nothing communal or local or domestic about the place, and could just as easily have been found near our old apartment in Pasadena, California as it was near Zionsville.  Not ten miles from where I grew up, I entered a vacuous building filled with more goods and items any small town would ever need in its lifetime, and there I stood roaming through it feeling both vacant and alone.  When I finally found what I was looking for - gloves for my kids - and found my way back again to the check-out registers, I found fifteen or so perfect strangers, all of us alike in our motivations as consumers and yet completely unknown from one another.  I made eye contact accidentally with a woman, and then turned my gaze quickly downward, intuiting that I had broken some unspoken rule of this new world.  It is a world of technology, mechanization and accessibility, and it seems the strangest at those points when we are forced into some type of relational act:  the awkward waiting in line behind or beside someone, the point when the exchange has to take place between the employee and the customer.  It is no secret that plans are already being put into place to eliminate this last bit of humanity in the whole exchange.  We can already get pretty much anything we need or want without any real sort of community.  For some things we don't need any at all, and the only question is whether this is at all healthy or sustainable environmentally, let alone what God has decreed.

But, this is my problem:  I have no clue how to return to that world Mr. Berry paints for us.  It seems a reality too much squandered and abused.  It seems a way of life that has vanished, a native language dead without any ancestors.  I don't even know if it ever was a reality, and that increases my melancholy.

How do you build community when you are - after all - a child of this autonomous world?  How do you begin to forge a life of "membership" unto one another and unto the whole of a place?  What does that look like?  And will my wife and I truly be partners in our home and life together unless we truly share some common work?  

Finally, I am left to wonder what is worse.  To be held, even choked perhaps, by the closeness of the small town America of yesteryear, a place plagued by buried secrets and systems of inequality like the Jim Crow South of Wendell Berry novels?  Or, is it better to live and be so able to freely move in this new modern, global world that we must face these new enemies that are so clearly the ills of independence:  isolation, anxiety, fear?

Mr. Berry, of course, can't answer that question for us.  He suggests many times that Port William and little Amboy, Indiana, never will be the same.  And that if they do appear again, it will be when God's Kingdom itself comes in full, or - as he says - Port William descends out of the heavens as the new creation, and we are waiting for it like a bride awaits the bridegroom.  That, I suppose, is why I lean in that direction myself with faith and with hope.

Wes 

Early Fall

I remember when we painted these walls.  Going on four plus years now.  The room was littered with dry wall mud that had been carelessly splattered upon the old wooden floor boards.  The old trim around the windows was dark and archaic.  It seemed a relic from a distant era:  the time of horse-drawn carriages and grand oil paintings brought over from the old world.  

I really didn't want to spend my evenings painting this old house.  I was just getting settled in at the church, and after spending the days in town I wanted to be able to be home with my family.  The trouble was my family was living in the basement of my in-laws, a situation that was not sustainable for any of us.  And through some strange means of transference, it was made known to me that I would go in the evening to finish whatever needed to be done in order for my wife and two kids to move in with me come the spring time of 2009.  

I wore old Columbia hiking paints and thermal long-sleeve shirts as I worked, the bright lights of spotlights shining upon the walls.  To those passing by my nocturnal work, I surely must have seemed a deranged loner, or perhaps an eccentric artistic type.  I could care less what I looked like, though.  I worked in the audio isolation of my iPod, kept company by the great American voices rock and blues.  I fell in love with BB King during those nights, learning something of persistence and effort as I painstakingly first scrubbed the woodwork down with TSP, applied a primer coat of Killz and eventually went back with two coats of Graceful Willow.  Semi-gloss, of course, for the trim, and flat for the walls.

I'm ashamed to admit it now, but it was the first time in my life where I was truly having to work for something.  This house, whatever it was, would have to be made better by my work, my effort.  Some men seem born for such work, and embrace it wholly.  Not me.  From the first it seemed a burden, even a type of cursedness, as though God had relegated me to this new situation on account of my earlier failures and laziness.  But, I came to enjoy it and discovered in it some lessons about myself as well.

I learned, for one thing, the sense of honor a man can have in working for his family, I mean actually doing something practical and tangible that can house and benefit his spouse and children.  I remember many nights when the hours stretched on and on and my annoyance started to grow that I would focus on the quality of my work as a discipline of love.  I would paint the beautiful trim work with their hand-hewn accents and grooves with delicate care, and as I did so, I imagined doing my work with a chivalrous mind and devoted heart.  This hour I spent on the trim, I told myself, would be done for my wife, so that she could have and appreciate a bedroom that was carefully cut when it was painted.  Thankfully, I can look at the trim even now and see the care that was taken.  I am fairly surprised that I found calm enough within myself to do the job that well.

But, maybe more importantly, I learned that a man must work hard enough some times that he reaches a point of exhaustion and failure because that same exhaustion and failure can lead him beyond himself.  It was an unending task to paint this house, and even after I finished a room, it was clear that decades of use and deterioration were not going to be overcome by a few weeks of washing and painting.  No amount of effort would bring completion.  As I wrestled with the enormity of the task, I was driven to plead with God.  And I was humbled enough to ask for help from members of the church.  Sometimes help appeared even without my request, which always seemed like such obvious grace that I fought to hold back tears.

A friend of mine that I know speaks often of the value of work, how it gives a person self-confidence and worth.  Looking at the trim still shining from the lamp's light, I know he is right.  There is something of me in that work.  But, I'm aware enough to know that whatever improvements have been made to this home have come by more than just my American can-do attitude.  In the end, I was blessed with the awareness of family and community there to support me.  I can see it very tangibly in the bookshelves John Anderson masterfully built and installed in the corner of the room where I type.  And I can think of the folks who showed up when I had the sense to finally ask.  

Wes

The Elephant in the African Brush

With various stories floating around the last few weeks regarding President Obama's trip to South Africa, I've been reminiscing about our Wabash trip last fall.  I also discovered a poem I wrote on the plane ride back from South Africa.  I doubt much of it will translate, but hopefully the theme will come through.  I was inspired by the awesome experience of this elephant above appearing out of the brush in a wild game preserve.  This formidable animal came striding towards our open-top transport vehicle, stood in front of us a moment - just long enough to define our place.  Then the elephant moved on.  I was immediately struck by its silent determination and subtle yet profound strength.  It immediately became a symbol of the King and the Kingdom of God to me, something that would not be "denied or dismissed."  I was also impressed by the liquid sorrow of the elephant's eyes and the thousand-creased skin.  It's face seemed a representation of all the tragedy I had witnessed and heard of in the heart of South Africa.

The Bull Elephant in the African Brush

Out of the bush it strides,

     in mass and alone;

It twinges and stretches,

           its tusks turned and tilted,

           its almond eyes crying inside its

                 leather-patched, hardened hide.

The bull alerts itself and its predicament,

            fanning and fronting to its onward course,

    not to be deterred.

It strides past the seven-mile cesspool,

           walks its way through the saffron and dust

               of the stricken-street,

    Walks across the squalor and shambles,

        of zinc and tender dry

            sticks stacked as refuse and refuge,

    Across the further lands of Cape Town's mall,

      past the merriment and morbidity of the system

            the Xhosa serve,

      Of spinning wheel and

            hanging indulgence,

      of Waterfront and white.

It walks beyond the unspoken, unseen borders

      of every shantytown

          that mars and marks the African veld,

    Past the teeming tarnish,

The troubled and troubling

       Gehenna of Khayelitcha,

It sniffs the poisoned, polluted air -

      surveying, assessing.

      Wonders

         at its expanding and expansive tenement, baking

         in the valley beneath the dialectic

  of Stellenbosch,

    and soteriology, and sin,

Then turns its head

     towards its beckoning point,

     to its home-bound boundary

    Of which the whole creation waits and groans,

And strides again. 

Forward.

       Upward. 

       Onward.

It marches on past the tourists and the tribal troubadours,

    Past Zuma's cronies and capitalists,

    Past the Afrikaaners turned aristocrats.

    Past the twenty Rand trick,

         The sex-inducing blonde,

         The soul-worn umfundizi,

         The medicine man who stares out

              his Rustenburg shack

                  with his ailing eyes,

           Enchanting his inadequate summons of salve

     While his daughters' daughters wither and die.

It marches past the bishop holding his

    creamy, careful hands

     palm flat upon the screaming, scalding

       skin of another shanty girl -

     Riven and riddled by men and disease, raped by father

         and gold and market and

               the million greeds that yawn across the never closing market

           from corner to continent,

           from godless domains

               of powers and principalities

    Entrenched as postmodernism's modern gods.

Its eyes cry in silence - probing to the depths

    the degraded humiliation,

      the deplorable degrees of devastation,

And marches somehow onwards still. 

It pulses and pushes its Herculean

     Strength,

   not to be denied or dismissed,

     but persistent and proud.

So goes its will; its might,

    under the African sun and

     across the

         aching, ailing earth,

crying silently its

    Song,

Groaning for creation's renewal,

     which has been promised

        and foreseen.  

July

Anna is in the kitchen this lazy afternoon, and the sound of vegetables hissing in hot sesame oil just began.  She is dead-set on making an Asian dish she's had targeted for over a week now.  "Bound and determined" is how she described her intentions.

Through the open windows of our bedroom window, I can hear Wyatt and Elise running around the neighbor's yard, likely playing "guns" or "sneak game" with the two neighbor's grandchildren.  It has only been in the last few weeks that our kids have begun playing with the two boys when they come out to visit grandma and grandpa.  Anna and I have been grateful two new playmates have been found, especially as it affords us personal time.  It is no less satisfying for Wyatt and Elise, and they come home to dinner after an hour or so full of stories and flush faces.

We've celebrated our nation's independence largely with a relaxation in our individual scheduled activities.  Anna is done with swim lessons and practice, at least for this week anyhow.  The kids too are done with their weekday trips to the pool.  And, I have emerged from a week as a camp director for 32 Junior High kids down at Camp Pyoca in southern Indiana.  We were therefore more than grateful for two extra days off this week, and we've spent them mostly ordering our home as well as our rhythms in our home.  

I don't know how many times we've rearranged rooms and furniture in this old farmhouse, but it is up to at least a dozen times now as we try to find the perfect balance between our growing possessions and our finite space.  Ever the optimists, though, we feel we've finally found the best arrangement to date with the kids back in the room just off the living room.  We are also working to turn their old bedroom into a schoolroom for the coming year.  We don't know why we didn't try this layout earlier, but improvements only come by mistakes and many attempts.

Without the demands of coaching, church, and extracurricular activities for the kids, our days have been more stable, and we've been able to actually sit down to dinner several times in recent days.  We've also managed to get back to some good, although challenging rhythms of bed time routines.  Add that to our new "manner list" on the fridge, and we're slowly eeking out some order and normalcy in our home.  Well, as much order as one can expect for a family of four living in a century-old house with a huge dog, chickens, and eleven acres of lush, vibrant woods, lawn and garden.  Much of our efforts in this place go towards stemming the tide of chaos.  But, what else are our 30's supposed to look like?

Thankfully, our extended family chipped in on the Fourth of July, part of an agreement to band together once a month at one of our homes to check off old projects and tackle new ones.  Our list for the day included taking down a Locust tree near our garage, painting up some trim on the inside, and odds and ends that never got checked off my "honey-do" list.  Per usual, I decided to jump right into a job without applying much critical thinking, which nearly resulted in me dropping a fifty foot Locust tree on our house.  Thanks to Grandpa Joe, one Bobcat, and one steel cable the crisis was averted, and we ended the evening in good humor eating hamburgs, coconut cream cake, and watching modest fireworks exploding in the late day air.

Hopefully, the next couple weekends will give us the chance to get up and see my extended family.  It has been awhile since I've been able to see my mom & step-dad, my sister and her girls, as well as my step-mom and dad, and I'm excited to catch up with them.  It seems like these summer days are endless with darkness staying away until late in the evening, and yet the days themselves are just not numerous enough.

Wes