Rerun

Because I have been sick at home all week (save Wednesday, when I attended a funeral), I have not been inclined to write. Suffice it to say that I have not been my best.

While rather nonchalantly reviewing a few of my older posts, I landed on "Oscar Wilde, Seinfeld, And Peace That Eludes." I decided that I liked it. I hope you don't mind if I rerun it here.

Several weeks back I noted in the local paper that a group of concerned citizens was hoping to erect a "peace pole" in the local park. In the article, at least one person was quoted expressing some bemusement at the idea, unsure what the pole would actually represent. Well, the essay that follows speaks to that bemusement and uncertainty rather well, I think.

OSCAR WILDE, SEINFELD, AND PEACE THAT ELUDES

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to you all, at least to each of you American readers out there.

I had a truly outstanding conversation the other night, as my wife and I were driving homeward. It was about getting to know people, whether we really ever want to know a person, what he or she really thinks, what he or she really believes. My wife suggested that we don't, for true understanding and intimacy are too difficult, carrying with them responsibilities and obligations. She even suggested that we are afraid to really know another person because then we are forced to choose whether we really like, love, or at least respect that person. It is easy to be superficial, we agreed, because the surface is always safe. Are we not after all afraid of drowning below the fine line between sky and sea?

I am often amazed how thin the line is between civility and incivility. Propriety, mores, etiquette; these are often a cheap veneer concealing real animosity, even, sadly, real hatred. I have attended symposia that give lip service to community and understanding and peace, only to discover that such lip service means getting a fat lip should one question the agenda that drives toward said peace. What is peace, anyway, but a veneer, even an abstraction?

Two Friday nights ago, I attended a concert and poetry reading on the human cost of war. It was a peace vigil, of sorts, complete with a chamber choir that managed to achieve the supernal glory of angels. That the event took place in a Unitarian church full of people that would disagree with me on nearly everything hardly mattered: I thanked the performers and the conductor (a man who had injured me greatly) with all my heart. They achieved something wonderful; and I made my peace with a man who once wounded me deeply.

But in that event I heard two things about peace, two poetic images: One was of a soldier who suggested that each fighter on the battlefied instead should be home cuddling with a loved one beneath silk sheets; the other was a soldier's contemplation of the songs of birds on the edge of the battlefield. Odd that both images, in fact, all images of peace such as these, should bother me. Why? Because they are vapid and untrue. For surely not all men can cuddle beneath silk sheets, since such sheets are the privilege of the wealthy. Besides, not only does some poor sap need to make those sheets, not all men can be coddled, for someone needs to do the coddling. The image of the sheets in fact might be the very sort of image that causes wars, wars between those who have, and those who don't; between the coddled and the coddler; between master and slave. Indeed, I know metaphor, and the metaphor of silk bedding fails to evoke the proper sense of real peace, simply because it neglects the facts of life.

The second image, that of the bucolic and pastoral; of the plangent peel of bells, the lambent light of moon, or the swaying softness of long grasses in the wind; these and many images like them are invoked to elicit a peaceful heart. Look! There is no war in poppy fields, no struggle in winter's solace, no fighting on the edges of heather downs and sylvan streams. Look at the deer, the rabbit, the undulating flight of the pileated across the sun-stained sky!

Alas, any person with a smattering of knowledge knows that there is no peace in a meadow; there is no ease of life for the bird or bloom in the grasses. A deer is rife with stress; even its cousin, the moose, may have in its hocks the leeching mandibles of ten thousand ticks. The struggle of life, of prey and predator, of host and parasite, of disease and cold and wet and heat, that plays out in every single square inch of this planet gives no room for the romanticization of peace. An eagle on a branch is not a symbol of peace, nor is the owl hooting in the night wind. They are looking for victims, and are trying not to be victims themselves. Whatever one might say about the earth, peace is not one of its fundamental qualities. There is not a cell or fleck of soil that is not at war with something.

What then is peace but an abstraction of the mind? Why reify, why make concrete what is forever abstract? Why do we see peace in a calm sea, when we know that the ocean's surface conceals a violent surge of fin and fang?

***

You might recall a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry has a transformation, a sort of born-again experience. He is the new Jerry, the good Jerry. At one point, the new Jerry and George, his best friend, sit down for a heart-to-heart, with Jerry urging George to open up, to be vulnerable with his feelings. Later, when the camera returns to the scene, we find George on the edge of grateful tears and Jerry on the far edge of the couch, a look of horror on his face. He stands up, backs away, and says "Well, good luck with all that." In a moment of honest confession, Jerry gets to know his friend as he truly is, and he rejects him, put off by the enormity of the responsibility of intimacy: George's struggles would weigh him down, and Jerry is scared straight back into superficiality.

Oscar Wilde, a man imprisoned for his homosexuality and one of my emerging literary heroes (though not for that reason), wrote from Reading Gaol (where he served his sentence) that the "supreme vice is shallowness." Is he right? I think he might be. For we humans are shallow about what peace is, what it looks like, where it's found. We are shallow even about love, what it means, what it requires: sacrifice, grace, understanding, the carrying of burdens and the confronting of sin and its consequences, and the confronting of the sinful machinations erected to conceal human brokenness and guilt. It is easier if there is no sin, no guilt, no deep dark unknown beneath the veneer of our daily lives. It is easier for us if a loved one who ignores our warnings crashes to the ground and bounces up, like so many little children do, and declares "I'm alright!" It is easier particularly when we know that our loved one is not alright at all.

Someday, somewhere, I will learn how to live below the surfaces I polish daily.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Waning Towards Waxing

I must take a brief break from my hiatus to bid you all well. Have a wonderful New Year's celebration. I pray that this coming year is the best year of your life. May life vastly exceed your wildest expectations.

And may there be everywhere more joy, peace, and love, and less striving for the meaningless, the vain, the empty. May this approaching year be the Year of Grace, of Kindness, of the Willing Spirit, of the Open Hand.

Blessings all!

BG

A Shot To The Heart

I may be mistaken, though it is not really the sort of thing that makes me care much for accuracy anyway. But I believe suicide has come close to my household in each of the past four Decembers. And then there was the accidental suicide two years ago on Thanksgiving.

I have written about last December's suicide in three Contratimes' essays, "When The Phone Rings Late At Night," "In Memoriam," and, "Staggering Still." That story remains a difficult one for me; there has not been even a few hours in which I have not thought of my college friend, M.

Yesterday, I attended the funeral service for a local friend, another man named M. This man was not a close friend; he was just a friend and a good guy, someone I liked, someone who laughed with me when we bumped into each other at the store, or when we discussed our various hikes or experiences in the wild. We had met when I was 14 and he 20, some 31 years ago. We had more than a few things in common that had to do with the outdoors, but there were others: I had been friends with his ex-wife, and friends with some of his friends; his sister is one of my neighbors. And we had gone to the same high school though he, 6 years my senior, graduated with my sister (now deceased) when I was in junior high.

On Tuesday, M.'s elderly mother died at a nearby nursing home. She had been a loving and lovely woman, mother, grandmother. She had cared for her five children in some of life's most difficult circumstances. And she was adored by all. But her death struck her one son particularly hard: by the end of the day M. would also be dead, his body found in his mother's empty house a couple of miles from where his mom had died, mere hours separating their times of death.

Last year, I grieved a man who died in Colorado. The year before I grieved for Timmy, an old schoolmate, whose alcoholism the two of us often battled together, with me praying for him with all due fervor. He even spent Christmas week seeking sobriety in my house one year, with me and my family making room for him, trying to deny him his love of big bottles of rum. And the year before Timmy died, I grieved my cousin Tom, who hung himself in a bathtub in some Florida apartment while visiting friends. Tom had recently come to New Hampshire to rekindle relations with my mother; the two were thrilled to renew acquaintances after too many years of sorrows and great distance; my mother giddy that someone on her side of the family would want to get close in her waning years. Little did she know how cruelly Tom's heart was tormented. And then there was little, sweet Roland, a learning disabled boy and my nephew's best friend, who accidently drank himself to death during Thanksgiving week two (or was it three?) years ago.

But yesterday's sorrow was not really mine. M. and I were just close enough to like each other, to share those kinds of moments when you wonder aloud why you aren't closer friends. But the tragedy of his death will reach deep, very deep, into the hearts of those he left behind: siblings, nephews, nieces, childhood pals. I cannot know their grief; I cannot really carry it. I can only know my own sorrow at not being able to help those who so carefully conceal their need for help. I can only know my own anger and sorrow in the wake of deaths that have struck closer to my heart than M.'s did yesterday, or today, or even tomorrow. I can only know the emptiness I feel, hiking in the same great woods M. hiked, wandering about in silence, outside in the cold distance, hearing a single report to the heart.

In the autumn of 1978, during the first half of my senior year in high school, I would sit next to a quiet boy named Russell Holt. We were in Contemporary Issues together; he was bright as a star, a stand-out cross-country runner, a kid with long and somewhat greasy hair; he was gentle as a lamb. How could I have ever known that one particular morning would be our last together in our seats in Room 115B? How could I know that he would put a shotgun in his mouth when he got off the late bus that day, having just finished cross-country practice with Mr. Ladue? How could I know that every vestige of memory of me - and all his more popular classmates - would be splashed all over the walls of his family's kitchen wall?

Russell Holt's death shook me to the core, and it all called me toward Christ. My conversion began with a desire to be open to all the horrors and sorrows of the human heart; I did not want to be blind to whatever it was I hadn't seen in Russell Holt as his leg jiggled alongside mine in Contemporary Issues. I wanted to see, to be present: I wanted to believe that there was hope, redemption, joy, and a peace that could heal. That could comfort and console. And I wanted, in accepting Christianity, to embrace a love that could see beyond the end of my own self-absorption; I wanted to notice the forgotten, the forsaken, the overlooked; I wanted Russell Holt to know that I cared, that I was glad that he was alive.

Now, nearly 30 years later, I know that I still can't see even beyond the end of my nose. In fact, it is getting harder to see at all. How I wish this were not so! How my heart breaks over all the noise I've allowed to drown out so many calls for help -- even the one call for help -- I may have heard had I just quieted my mind and my soul. And yet (!), I know how fearful it can be to hear such cries, to be open to the scream: griefs and sorrows can overwhelm us, can reveal to us our weaknesses, often weakening our ability to keep the flame of our good intent burning at all. We often flee such sorrows because we believe they will indeed consume us; will indeed suck the life and marrow out of our own being, leaving us too weak to live our own dreams or to love our own sons and daughters. My heart wants to be bold but not too bold; I want to hear, but not too much: I want to fight fires, but only the safe fires; I want to climb mountains, but only the lower ones; I want to sow love, but only when it is lovely.

The heart is a difficult place to find one's hope, one's joy. It is a hard place to find a foothold. Perhaps that is why I am so eager to fill my day with distractions and sundry trivialities: books, bargains, baseball, beer, and the other banalities of the day. I am afraid to really be what I am called to be; I am afraid of what is true about the nature of even my own need: that I cannot avoid the fact that I am a person very much in need of grace, forgiveness, redemption, and a hope that is not some cheap illusion.

The Physician did not come to heal the healthy, but the sick. And He does not heal the wallet, or the ego; He does not heal with accolades and honors, with awards and Christmas bonuses, with publishing deals or tax write-offs or hot babes or hot sex or cold beer in fast cars or Botox or breast implants or a new kitchen or a well-lauded poem or an iconoclastic rock song or a five-star meal or a bigger church or a bulging credit line or a new gun or a better wife. His healing begins with a broken God nailed to a cross.

The next step is for me to let go of the hammer, to let fall the nails.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Come Unto Me, All Ye Who Are Heavy Laden (with explosives), And I Will Give You Rest

They are neighbors. They pass each other on the street; they breath the same dusty air. And yet … and yet.

This morning, a large crowd -- men and boys searching for work -- gathers together to fight despair, anxieties subsiding a bit in such company. There is strength in numbers, target strength.

Suddenly, a wave of optimism, some cheering, some shouts of incredulity. Hope. "Follow me, I'll hire you!" The group moves this way, then that. Men press forward to get a chance at something. They gather round a minivan, a truck. Some get in.

"Yes! Yes! I have work for you! I will hire you. Come, come closer."

In a sadistic suicide flash, 60 people are dead. Over 200 are wounded. Shiites, the poorest, lay bleeding in a Baghdad street, their ears deafened by the sound of more bad news. All in a day's work.

These are the people we all hope to help in a very different way than the man with the van full of lies. Sadly, near yet another crater in the ground, day laborers will indeed gather for work, their compensation coming in bits of flesh. They pray for peace with their neighbor and yet only find a piece of their neighbor.

It is, really, a job that cannot possibly be done in a day.

(Today, prayers for lost sons, husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, daughters, and hope.)

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Baghdad, Suicide bomber, Peace, Day laborers, Iraq

Preservation And Defense

Not long ago, two old farmers - a brother and sister - moved out of their family farmhouse: the last two surviving members of the Welch family had stayed at home as long as they could. They were each nearly a century old when they died a few miles down the road, beneath the flourescent light buzzing over a nursing home deathbed. But before they left this life, they bequeathed their farmhouse, and all of the surrounding land, to a conservation group: the old siblings did not want their legacy to fall into enemy hands.

Adjacent to the Welch's homestead, just east of the old rooming house, stood a clutch of barns. Inside one barn could be found the initials, carved into pine or painted in stove black, of every farmhand that passed through the farm dating back to 1865. It was clear that not a few workers took jobs at the farm several years in a row; others would be off to fight in some great war, never to return. There were chains and old scythes hanging in rusted silence; there were old tins on the wall; a set of old oars stood in a corner, crossed. It was a hall for the silent past, but a past that was not so silent if one but listened.

After the old couple died, I would walk the forsaken farm, taking pictures here and there. The photo above was taken along the northern wall of the old house, just off the ell. I could not help but take the photograph -- with the old lamp and bulb, the paper-wasps' nest tucked beneath the shade, the flecked paint, a lonely window and the ghostly imprint of old shutters -- all calling me to remember. But what seems silent is not at all; and what seems old is still rather new: the tap of hands on a window flung open, the smell of fresh paint on a horsehair brush, the piquant air of harvest. I hear children nearby, the shouts of farmhands heading to town with a wagon-load of milk; or the muted thud of boots beneath a dim lamp during heavy snows.

The conservation group which inherited the land, in response to fears and anxieties and sundry other modern maladies, decided that the best thing for the preservation of the old regime was for the new to vanguish the past. So the fire department was called. The volunteer fire corps practiced in the light of burning barns. They rescued smoke and soot. They aimed their hoses only after all memories had disappeared in the heat of a spark fanned bright by legal arson. Later, a bulldozer would level the old farmhouse. Soil was pushed here and there beneath the row of singed catalpa trees; a little monument was erected to remind stray visitors of the monuments that were burned and buried.

Occasionally I return to the old Welch farm. Nothing much remains, of course, but a few flecks of paint, a shard of glass, an ember pressed into soot. And the wasps nearby.

Peace.

Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

In Whom Do We Trust?

Some of us are afraid to leave the barn. We fear we may be led astray, or that some fox will rend us to pieces. Beware, of course, of the wolf dressed in shepherd's clothing. Beware, of course, of the fox and coyote just outside the fence, sniffing for a way in. There is indeed a warm barn; but don't forget that you have a warm coat. And there is a fence, a sheepdog keeping watch, and a real shepherd but one prayer away.

You may be a sheep, but you are never a sheep alone.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Interceding On Our Behalf, With Groanings Too Deep To Be Uttered

There is a horse-and-buggy, and strange folks with black cloth and black hats, and some with beards, and a child running with flowers toward a deep blue dream. From some cold grey pasture (it was green this morning), with dirt on his boots and mud-caked cheeks, a man steps forward and, taking off his hat, bows before a weeping mother and father. He stands erect, though a little bent, and looks into their eyes, eyes filled with flowers and children and blue and dirt and the teary flash of a gun. He says, “We will forgive your son.”

A dog passes by, sniffing for a little girl whose last words of the schoolday were, “Please, shoot me first.” Mothers and fathers -- and several small girls -- collapse at such lessons.

But these strange images all look the same to us: black-and-white on a horse-and-buggy, a triangle flashing warnings. We barely slow down, unless we have friends visiting from faraway. That movie with Harrison Ford was as real as this: we are witnesses to the futility of innocence. And we drive home, thinking we got the picture.

The full moon falls from the sky with nary a word. But the internet and TV are all a-chatter. The world would do well to drape itself in black for a while, seeing in the dark fabric the brilliant tearing flash of forgiveness that cuts its way through an Amish field not far from Paradise. Forgiveness bearing glad tidings, once twitching with doubt on the tip of a trigger. The big, sad bang which started it all.

"Pray for me," he said†. We pray, irrespective of the time, or whether it's too late. And now Amish families gather coins and cans, raising funds, not for the victims, but for the murderer's own family, left shattered beyond imagination. The rest of us are just confounded by such grace.

Peace everywhere, if for just one minute.

[†"He asked the children to pray for him, and that's kind of interesting because he said he hated God," Rhoads said. "He must have recognized the faith in them, God in them." -- ABC News]

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

amish, murder, forgiveness, grace

Oscar Wilde, Seinfeld, And Peace That Eludes

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to you all, at least to each of you American readers out there.

I had a truly outstanding conversation the other night, as my wife and I were driving homeward. It was about getting to know people, whether we really ever want to know a person, what he or she really thinks, what he or she really believes. My wife suggested that we don't, for true understanding and intimacy are too difficult, carrying with them responsibilities and obligations. She even suggested that we are afraid to really know another person because then we are forced to choose whether we really like, love, or at least respect that person. It is easy to be superficial, we agreed, because the surface is always safe. Are we not after all afraid of drowning below the fine line between sky and sea?

I am often amazed how thin the line is between civility and incivility. Propriety, mores, etiquette; these are often a cheap veneer concealing real animosity, even, sadly, real hatred. I have attended symposia that give lip service to community and understanding and peace, only to discover that such lip service means getting a fat lip should one question the agenda that drives toward said peace. What is peace, anyway, but a veneer, even an abstraction?

Two Friday nights ago, I attended a concert and poetry reading on the human cost of war. It was a peace vigil, of sorts, complete with a chamber choir that managed to achieve the supernal glory of angels. That the event took place in a Unitarian church full of people that would disagree with me on nearly everything hardly mattered: I thanked the performers and the conductor (a man who had injured me greatly) with all my heart. They achieved something wonderful; and I made my peace with a man who once wounded me deeply.

But in that event I heard two things about peace, two poetic images: One was of a soldier who suggested that each fighter on the battlefied instead should be home cuddling with a loved one beneath silk sheets; the other was a soldier's contemplation of the songs of birds on the edge of the battlefield. Odd that both images, in fact, all images of peace such as these, should bother me. Why? Because they are vapid and untrue. For surely not all men can cuddle beneath silk sheets, since such sheets are the privilege of the wealthy. Besides, not only does some poor sap need to make those sheets, not all men can be coddled, for someone needs to do the coddling. The image of the sheets in fact might be the very sort of image that causes wars, wars between those who have, and those who don't; between the coddled and the coddler; between master and slave. Indeed, I know metaphor, and the metaphor of silk bedding fails to evoke the proper sense of real peace, simply because it neglects the facts of life.

The second image, that of the bucolic and pastoral; of the plangent peel of bells, the lambent light of moon, or the swaying softness of long grasses in the wind; these and many images like them are invoked to elicit a peaceful heart. Look! There is no war in poppy fields, no struggle in winter's solace, no fighting on the edges of heather downs and sylvan streams. Look at the deer, the rabbit, the undulating flight of the pileated across the sun-stained sky!

Alas, any person with a smattering of knowledge knows that there is no peace in a meadow; there is no ease of life for the bird or bloom in the grasses. A deer is rife with stress; even its cousin, the moose, may have in its hocks the leeching mandibles of ten thousand ticks. The struggle of life, of prey and predator, of host and parasite, of disease and cold and wet and heat, that plays out in every single square inch of this planet gives no room for the romanticization of peace. An eagle on a branch is not a symbol of peace, nor is the owl hooting in the night wind. They are looking for victims, and are trying not to be victims themselves. Whatever one might say about the earth, peace is not one of its fundamental qualities. There is not a cell or fleck of soil that is not at war with something.

What then is peace but an abstraction of the mind? Why reify, why make concrete what is forever abstract? Why do we see peace in a calm sea, when we know that the ocean's surface conceals a violent surge of fin and fang?

***

You might recall a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry has a transformation, a sort of born-again experience. He is the new Jerry, the good Jerry. At one point, the new Jerry and George, his best friend, sit down for a heart-to-heart, with Jerry urging George to open up, to be vulnerable with his feelings. Later, when the camera returns to the scene, we find George on the edge of grateful tears and Jerry on the far edge of the couch, a look of horror on his face. He stands up, backs away, and says "Well, good luck with all that." In a moment of honest confession, Jerry gets to know his friend as he truly is, and he rejects him, put off by the enormity of the responsibility of intimacy: George's struggles would weigh him down, and Jerry is scared straight back into superficiality.

Oscar Wilde, a man imprisoned for his homosexuality and one of my emerging literary heroes (though not for that reason), wrote from Reading Gaol (where he served his sentence) that the "supreme vice is shallowness." Is he right? I think he might be. For we humans are shallow about what peace is, what it looks like, where it's found. We are shallow even about love, what it means, what it requires: sacrifice, grace, understanding, the carrying of burdens and the confronting of sin and its consequences, and the confronting of the sinful machinations erected to conceal human brokenness and guilt. It is easier if there is no sin, no guilt, no deep dark unknown beneath the veneer of our daily lives. It is easier for us if a loved one who ignores our warnings crashes to the ground and bounces up, like so many little children do, and declares "I'm alright!" It is easier particularly when we know that our loved one is not alright at all.

Someday, somewhere, I will learn how to live below the surfaces I polish daily.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.