April 22-24: Something I Have Never Forgotten, Wrapped in Darkness, King Kong

Merton experiences a spiritual revelation . . . 

When I went back to Havana, I found out something else, too, and something vastly more important. It was something that made me realize, all of a sudden, not merely intellectually, but experimentally, the real uselessness of what I had been half deliberately looking for: the visions in the ceiba trees. And this experience opened another door, not a way to a kind of writing but a way into a world infinitely new, a world that was out of this world of ours entirely and which transcended it infinitely, and which was not a world, but which was God Himself. 

I was in the Church of St. Francis at Havana. It was a Sunday. I had been to Communion at some other church, I think at El Cristo, and now I had come here to hear another Mass. The building was crowded. Up in front, before the altar, there were rows and rows of children, crowded together. I forget whether they were First Communicants or not: but they were children around that age. I was far in the back of the church, but I could see the heads of all those children. 

It came time for the Consecration. The priest raised the Host, then he raised the chalice. When he put the chalice down on the altar, suddenly a Friar in his brown robe and white cord stood up in front of the children, and all at once the voices of the children burst out: 

“Creo en Diós...” 

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth...” 

The Creed. But that cry, “Creo en Dios!” It was loud, and bright, and sudden and glad and triumphant; it was a good big shout, that came from all those Cuban children, a joyous affirmation of faith. 

Then, as sudden as the shout and as definite, and a thousand times more bright, there formed in my mind an awareness, an understanding, a realization of what had just taken place on the altar, at the Consecration: a realization of God made present by the words of Consecration in a way that made Him belong to me. 

But what a thing it was, this awareness: it was so intangible, and yet it struck me like a thunderclap. It was a light that was so bright that it had no relation to any visible light and so profound and so intimate that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience. 

And yet the thing that struck me most of all was that this light was in a certain sense “ordinary”—it was a light (and this most of all was what took my breath away) that was offered to all, to everybody, and there was nothing fancy or strange about it. It was the light of faith deepened and reduced to an extreme and sudden obviousness. 

It was as if I had been suddenly illuminated by being blinded by the manifestation of God’s presence.

The reason why this light was blinding and neutralizing was that there was and could be simply nothing in it of sense or imagination. When I call it a light that is a metaphor which I am using, long after the fact. But at the moment, another overwhelming thing about this awareness was that it disarmed all images, all metaphors, and cut through the whole skein of species and phantasms with which we naturally do our thinking. It ignored all sense experience in order to strike directly at the heart of truth, as if a sudden and immediate contact had been established between my intellect and the Truth Who was now physically really and substantially before me on the altar. But this contact was not something speculative and abstract: it was concrete and experimental and belonged to the order of knowledge, yes, but more still to the order of love. 

Another thing about it was that this light was something far above and beyond the level of any desire or any appetite I had ever yet been aware of. It was purified of all emotion and cleansed of everything that savored of sensible yearnings. It was love as clean and direct as vision: and it flew straight to the possession of the Truth it loved. 

And the first articulate thought that came to my mind was: 

“Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven, Heaven!” 

It lasted only a moment: but it left a breathless joy and a clean peace and happiness that stayed for hours and it was something I have never forgotten. 

Merton experiences an epiphany here.  A vision of God's presence in the world--a light that is both completely ordinary and completely transcendent.  It's available to everybody.  I suppose all you have to do is open yourself to it, the way Merton does at this moment he's describing.

Most people aren't that open to this experience.  I know I'm not.  Most days, I keep my head down, blinders on, focused on myself and my problems.  That pretty much describes the human condition.  Instead of seeing the light, I see the dark.  

Merton, himself, admits that this divine vision he experiences is fleeting.  He simply can't sustain it.  I suppose it's like striking a match.  The flame springs up, blue and brilliant, then settles down, gutters for a minute or so, and disappears into smoke.  And what Merton is left with is an intense physical memory of God.  But it sustains him for a long time.,

Tonight, I'm sort of wrapped in darkness.  Like a blanket around my shoulders.  Just like Merton can't shake the light of God's grace from his eyes, I can't quite shrug off these shadows.  Instead, I'm sitting here trying to make friends with them.

That probably sounds crazy.  I mean, who wants to invite darkness to take a seat on the couch next to you?  Really, though, that is the only way I know how to overcome these feelings.  By living with them, talking with them, trying to understand them.  Sort of like what Hemingway wrote:  "Write the best story you can and write it as straight as you can."

You don't need to ornament the dark.  Ascribe all kinds of big words to it.  Darkness is simply the absence of light.  And it's also what comes before sunrise.  My darkness comes from a kind of aloneness.  Being surrounded by people, yet unable to talk about the big hairy ape that's stalking my thoughts.  (Yes, that's a King Kong allusion.  Stick with me.)  There are things in life that are difficult to put words to.  Because if you put words to them, it makes them real, and, if they're real, then you have to deal with them.  And who wants to deal with a 40-foot tall gorilla?

You just have to wait out the darkness.  Stay in the cave until the sun shows up, however long that takes.  Get used to the monkey.  Maybe find out it's not all that frightening.  Tame it.  Maybe take a trip to the Empire State Building with it.  Visit the Statue of Liberty.  Take in a Broadway show.  Maybe Hamilton.  

Sometimes the things that frighten us the most turn out to be angels instead of monsters.  Or maybe God, putting you to the Job test.

Saint Marty is sitting in his dark living room, ready for anything--Job or Kong or angel or God.

April 11: Chains Struck, Easter Vigil, Light and Hope

Young Merton has a little Easter moment . . .

Father had gone to Paris to be best man at the wedding of one of his friends from the old days in New Zealand.  Capt. John Chrystal had made himself a career in the British army and was an officer in the hussars.  Later on he became Governor of a prison:  but he was not as dreary as that might imply.  After the wedding, the Captain and his wife went off on their honeymoon, and the mother of the new Mrs. Chrystal came down to St., Antonin with Father.  

Mrs. Stratton was an impressive kind of a person.  She was a musician, and a singer, but I forgot whether she had been on the stage:  in any case, she was not a very theatrical character, rather the opposite, although she had a certain amount of dash about her.

She was not what you would call elderly, by any means, and besides she was a woman of great vitality and strength of character, with rich intelligence and talent, and strong and precise ideas about things.  Her convictions commanded respect, as did her many talents, and above all her overwhelming personal dignity.  You felt that she ought to have been called Lady Stratton, or the Countess of something.

At first I was secretly resentful of the great influence she at once began to exercise over our lives, and thought she was bossing our affairs too much, but even I was able to realize that her views and advice and guidance were very valuable things.  But so strong was her influence that I think it was due to her more than to anyone else that we gave up the idea of living permanently in St. Antonin.

The house was almost finished and ready for occupation, and it was a beautiful little house too, simple and solid.  It looked good to live in, with that one big room with the medieval window and a huge medieval fireplace.  Father had even managed to procure a winding stone stair and it was by that that you went up to the bedroom.  The garden around the house, where Father had done much work, would have been fine.

On the other hand, Father was travelling too much for the house to be really useful.  In the winter of 1927 he was some months at Marseilles and the rest of the time at Cette, another Mediterranean port.  Soon he would have to go to England, for by this time he was ready for another exhibition.  All this time I was at the Lycee, becoming more and more hard-boiled in my precocity, and getting accustomed to the idea of growing up as a Frenchman.

Then Father went to London for the exhibition.

It was the spring of 1928.  The school year would soon be over.  I was not thinking much about the future.  All I knew was that Father would be back from England in a few days.

It was a bright, sunny morning in May when he arrived at the Lycee, and the first thing he told me was to get my things packed:  we were going to England.

I looked around me like a man that has had chains struck from his hands.  How the light sang on the brick walls of the prison whose gates had just burst open before me, sprung by some invisible and beneficent power:  my escape from the Lycee was, I believe, providential.

Merton is set free from his chains.  The doors of his prison are flung open, and the light shines down upon him.  If you don't recognize the parallels in this passage to Acts 16:  25-26, where Saint Paul and Silas are set free from their prison and chains by an earthquake, then you probably weren't paying attention in Sunday school or didn't attend Sunday school at all.

It's an apt passage for tonight.  It is Holy Saturday.  In a usual year, at this time of the night (it is about 10:30 p.m. right now), I would be in a choir loft, playing the pipe organ and singing the Easter Vigil Mass at my church.  It's one of my favorite Masses of the entire Church calendar, full of all the bells and whistles of Catholic pageantry.  Candles and Gregorian chant, bells and "glorias," and, of course, clouds of incense.  And, just for fun, there are also baptisms and confirmations.  It's quite the show.

This year, however, my church is dark and empty.  No candles flickering in the pews.  No priest in Easter white intoning, "Rejoice, heavenly powers!  Sing, choirs of angels!"  Nope.  This Holy Saturday is more tomb than resurrection.

Of course, Christians all over the world are celebrating Easter in some way tomorrow.  Pope Francis has been holding solemn services all week in a vacant Saint Peter's Square.  Tonight, he celebrated the Easter Vigil in a nearly empty Saint Peter's Basilica.  For some reason, the images of Pope Francis sitting alone in a dark, rainy night have stuck with me.  A symbol of how isolating and terrifying this pandemic is.

Of course, Easter will come tomorrow.  There are five baskets, filled with chocolate, sitting on my kitchen table right now.  This morning, as I was heading to church to practice some music for tomorrow (I am playing for a virtual Easter Sunday service), I passed the Easter Bunny, standing at an intersection of the highway, waving at cars.  I honked and waved back.  Nothing is going to stop Easter.

There is power in the message of Easter for everyone (Christian, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever) this year:  we will rise from the ashes of this disaster.  There will be light and hope in the world again.  Resurrection is on its way.

Covid-19 is teaching the world some hard lessons.  It's sort of knocked us all on our complacent asses.  We have taken the gifts of this world for granted for a very long time.  Now, we can't.  When we're done sheltering in place.  When we can go grocery shopping without fearing for our lives.  When coming home from work isn't like returning home from war.  When all this is said and done, I hope the Easter we experience is one of renewed appreciation for the graces of living in this spinning universe.  That we see and treat every human being for what they really are:  reflections of the Higher Power (Yahweh/God/Buddha/Jesus Christ/Allah) in our lives.

That will truly be an Easter to rejoice.

Saint Marty wishes you all a joyous Easter Vigil!  He is rising . . .

September 17: Mock-Orange Hedge, Leprosy, Maple Leaves

It is mid-September now; I can see in the fading light the jagged holes in the leaves of the mock-orange hedge outside my study window.  The more closely I look, the more I doubt that there is a single whole unblemished leaf left on the bush.  I go out again and examine the leaves one by one, first of the mock-orange outside my study, then of the cherry tree in the yard.  In the blue light I see scratched and peeled stems, leaves that are half-eaten, rusted, blighted, blistered, mined, snipped, smutted, putted, puffed, sawed, bored, and rucked.  Where have I been all summer while the world has been eaten?

Mid-September is upon Tinker Creek.  Dillard notices things that she hasn't notice before, like the fact that something has chewed up the leaves of the mock-orange hedge outside her window.  That's the way of the world, of course.  Eat and be eaten.  Blight and be blighted.

Outside my living room window is a beautiful maple tree.  It shades the side of the house all summer long.  In the fall, when its leaves start turning mustard and tangerine, the tree also gets what I have come to call a case of leprosy.  On the skin of the leaves, black and brown spots appear.  Dime-sized and nickel-sized.  These blemishes mar what would be a Norman Rockwell-esque autumn scene.

The tree isn't dying, as far as I can tell.  In the spring, new leaves appear, green and full and healthy-looking.  All summer long, those leaves waves and whisper in the warm winds.  If you can't tell, it's one of my favorite trees in my yard.  Come early October, despite its annual case of small pox, the maple can still be breathtakingly beautiful with its flaming colors.

But, as Dillard says, the world is an imperfect place.  Beauty and blight on the same leaf.  That's why Jesus tells parables like the prodigal son, who pisses away his inheritance and then goes crawling back for his father's forgiveness.  Humans understand (you will excuse my language) how inherently fucked-up we are.  Jealous.  Greedy.  Profligate.  Jesus wanted us to know that nothing is unfixable.  Mistakes can be made right.  Blight can be turned into beauty again come springtime.

I thing God has to be infinitely patient.  I mean, humans slaughtered His only son, and He didn't rain down fire and lava on our asses.  Nope.  Instead, He waited three days, and then He brought His son back.  To save us.  To make things right.  To forgive.  To make the sick, yellow maple leaves green again.

Saint Marty thinks that's pretty cool.

July 9: Expectations, Martin Espada, "Why I Went to College"

I don't have much time before I head off to church this evening.  Saturday night in the choir loft, sitting at the pipe organ.  Some Saturdays, I wish I could just take off my shoes and socks, stretch out on the couch, and forget about the world.  But I don't.

I am, if nothing, a responsible person.  I don't shirk work, ever.  People depend upon me on Saturday nights, and I don't like to disappoint, especially when it comes to church and God.

Martin Espada has a great little poem about living up to his father's expectations.

Saint Marty's trying to live up to his Father's expectations.

Why I went to College

by:  Martin Espada

If you don't,
my father said,
you better learn
to eat soup
through a straw,
'cause I'm gonna
break your jaw

I try not to piss off God

July 31: Something Beautiful, George Burns, A Frank Fairy Tale, Sharon Olds, "The Struggle"

On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life.  Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky above the rooftops.  A sky shimmery with the possibilities of death; light exaggerated, the heavens peeled back--a swirling haze of nebulae and comets--in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey.  He would have seen a few pale stars, maybe a planet or two, Jupiter or Venus. Remembering his Catholic schoolboy's mythology he might have imagined Apollo and his chariot, somewhere "out there."  And he would have seen the moon and its sad expression and imagined in its pocked luminous surface the faces of his mother and father and sister . . . The moon?  Was it out that night?  Ives tried to remember.

Ives is trying to picture his son's last moments of life, on the sidewalk, bleeding, struggling for breath, staring up at the starry night.  He imagines that Robert saw something beautiful and comforting--meteors and stars and planets, clouds of cosmic gases, a Greek god.  Above all, Ives wants to believe that Robert wasn't alone, that, in the bright face of the moon, he saw his family smiling down on him.

As a Christian, I believe that death is an entry into something better.  That's what I've been taught my whole life.  When I was younger, I really liked the image of God as George Burns, smoking cigars and telling jokes.  Vaudeville.  I imagined God performing in the Catskills.  "Did you hear the one about the snake and the naked woman?" He would say.

Something better.  That's what Heaven is supposed to be.  The other day, one of my best friends said this about my sister:  "She's only 54.  She's not ready to die yet."  I guess my friend is right.  My sister had the same Catholic upbringing I had.  The Virgin Mary and the manger and Jesus and all.  Every night when I was a kid, my family would get down on its knees and pray the rosary.  Clouds and angels and harp music.  We all believed in God's goodness and mercy.

My sister isn't ready to be measured for her wings just yet.  Even in her diminished state, she's been pretty adamant about that.  The doctors have asked her if she wants to be kept alive by any means possible, and my sister has answered very clearly, "Yes."  So George Burns is going to have to wait for a little bit, if my sister has her way.

I saw a picture of my sister this evening.  She was sitting on the side of her hospital bed, a nurse kneeling in front of her, in case she should fall.  I haven't seen my sister out of bed for over six or seven months.  She's thin, having lost close to 120 pounds over the last half year.  She looked pretty exhausted to me.  When my sister goes to the bathroom, there's blood in her stool.  That's to be expected with the chemo.  She's probably going to need a transfusion.

She's weak but determined to stick around.

Once upon a time, a little angel named Frank was put in charge of sweeping Heaven every night.  Frank had to clean up after all the archangels and cherubim and seraphim.  After choir practices, he spent hours putting away sheet music and musical instruments.  Frank never got a day off.

The day Jesus was born, Frank dusted all the stars.  He polished the angel harps and trumpets.  He counted all the halos.  Fluffed all the wings.  Frank made sure that first Christmas was perfect.

After all the shepherd and star and magi crap was done, Frank sat down to rest a little.

But God, who looked a little like George Burns, said, "Nice work, Frank.  I like this Christmas stuff.  We should do this every year."

Frank looked at God and said, "I don't think it'll catch on.  But let me tell You about a little thing I cooked up called an iPhone."

Moral of the story:  Heaven is just an app away.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

The Struggle

by:  Sharon Olds

When the minister would come into the hospital room
my father would try to sit up, he would cry out
Up!  Up! for us to raise his bed-head, then
silently he would wrestle himself
up, sweating, he would end up
leaning on the pillows, panting, a man, erect.
The minister would kiss him, they would pray, then chat,
he would hold his eyes open unblinking,
rigid adherent to the protocol of the living,
he would sit for the whole visit, and then,
the minute the man was out the door, cry
out Down!  Down! and we would lower him
down, and he would pass out.
Later the doctor wold pay a call and as
soon as my father saw that white coat
he would start to labor up, desperate
to honor the coat, at a glimpse of it he would
start to stir like a dog who could not
not obey.  He would lurch, pause,
then thrust up slowly, and unevenly, like a
camel, a half-born animal--the way,
they say, his soul will pull itself up
out of his dead body and wobblingly
walk.  And then, one day, he tried,
his brain ordered his body to heave up,
the sweat rose in his pores but he was not
moving, he cast up his eyes as the minister
leaned to kiss him, he lay and stared, it was
nothing like the nights he had lain on the couch passed
out, nothing.  Now he was alive,
awake, the raw boy of his heart stood
up each time a grown man
entered his death room.

God bless you all!

March 20: Charlotte Managed, In My Book Bag, "hold still"

Wilbur admired the way Charlotte managed...

Charlotte the spider is a survivor.  She doesn't depend on Lurvy to bring her food.  She doesn't scrounge through the garbage for scraps of moldy bread or rancid meat.  No.  Charlotte manages for herself.  Builds her own home.  Traps her own dinner.  In the end, she even chooses her own end, giving her last ounce of energy to save her best friend's life.

In my book bag tonight is hold still, Terry Godbey's newest poetry collection.  These poems are a testament to anger and humor, despair and joy.  They are psalms of survival.  Breast cancer.  Childhood.  Motherhood.  Hurricanes.  Godbey's insights are razor-sharp, cutting open the reader's heart and pumping it full of music and hope.

Early in the book, Godbey includes this epistle of misery:

Ice Train

It rumbles and groans and quivers
our nerves, halting under its burden
of suicide notes, biopsy results,

missives saying they are sorry
but we did not qualify, did not win,
were not approved.  Whose court summons

is that?  Whose pink slip, eviction,
letter from prison?  For years, we dawdle
on Good Luck Mountain, drink martinis,

sign the loan notes, fuss
with our hair and fold towels,
believing the ice train will skip us.  Until

it grumbles and stinks and strains
into town, stalls the blood in our veins,
delivers a new anniversary,

breaks it to us we were cheated
out of severance, love is gone,
the test was positive.

It's a hard, gut-punching poem, each word a clenched fist.  The ice train is coming 'round the bend, and it's loaded with lost health, lost jobs, and lost love.  No one is safe, Godbey proclaims.  We all have a ticket on this frozen locomotive.

Yet, in the middle of this desolation, there is laughter.  Out of this maelstrom come moments of holiness.  Godbey mines her dark material for veins of light:

God

When I was little
most nights I prayed,
elbows on the windowsill,
watching the sky for a sign.
Cold Canadian night
crept in through the cracks,
stars shivered
and he was out there somewhere,
listening,
scribbling a reply
in the Milky Way.
I pressed my moon face
against the panes
and watched snowflakes
land in his white gloved hands.

An image of a universe flooded with cold beauty and innocent trust.  Everything's going to be all right.  It's written in the very fabric of the cosmos.

That's the brilliance of hold still.   In the middle of a long winter of heartbreak and ruin, her poems push through the impossibly frozen ground, unfolding petal by petal, syllable by syllable, into the promise of spring.

Terry Godbey's hold still teaches Saint Marty not only how to survive, but also to sing and dance and love.

A poetic survival guide

June 20: Sometimes I Can Be an Asshole

I know it's hard to believe, but sometimes I can be a not very nice person.  I can be catty, mean, and bitchy.  Basically, I'm Simon Cowell without the millions of dollars or talent shows to broadcast my meanness on.

I did something mean today that I'm not very proud of, and now I have to do something I find very difficult:  apologize.  That's why I try to be nice all the time, because saying "I'm sorry" is very difficult for me.  I'm thinking a card and some chocolate.  That would work for me.  In the card, I'm going to have to really suck socks, as a friend of mine says.

I wonder about the best way to apologize.  I mean, imagine if Judas got to apologize to Jesus, or Amanda Bynes got to apologize to, well, everybody.  A simple, heartfelt, "I'm sorry" doesn't seem to cut it.  Nowadays, an apology must somehow be more expressive, more thoughtful.  Flowers are nice.  Chocolate?  Money?  A trip to Vegas?

I know what I could do that would be really tough for me.  I could write a poem of apology.  That would be pretty humbling, and it might be what I have to do.  God put that idea in my head, and I know it's going to fester there like an infected cut.

Fine, I'll write a poem.  Now I have to come up with a title.

How about "Saint Marty's Sorry for Being an Asshole"?

I gotta be better than this guy, don't I?

March 2: Morrow's Mother, Spiritual, "The Book of Genesis Illustrated," New Cartoon

I have her a good look.  She didn't look like any dope to me.  She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard she was the mother of.  But you can't always tell--with somebody's mother, I mean.  Mothers are all slightly insane.  The thing is, though, I liked old Morrow's mother.  She was all right.  "Would you care for a cigarette?" I asked her.

Holden comes on to practically every woman he meets in Catcher, young and old.  Mrs. Morrow is the mother of one of his Pencey classmates.  I read an interesting article online about Holden.  The authors claim that Holden is on a spiritual quest.  Despite all his claims to "sexiness," the article says, Holden really is looking for the true Mother and Father (the Blessed Virgin and God).  It's an interesting take on Salinger's book, and Holden does spend a good deal of time talking about church and religion in its pages.  I'm not completely sold on Mrs. Morrow being a stand-in for Christ's mother, but it certainly transforms Holden's crisis.

However, spiritual texts sometimes come from the most unexpected sources.  Holden is an atheist, yet he seems to be drawn to Catholicism.  R. Crumb, the underground comic illustrator from the 1960s, was drawn to the Bible.  He spent five years of his life researching and illustrating the Book of Genesis.  The result, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, is astounding.  Crumb writes in his introduction,

Every other comic book version of the Bible that I've seen contains passages of completely made-up narrative and dialogue, in an attempt to streamline and "modernize" the old Scriptures, and still, these various comic book Bibles all claim to adhere to the belief that the Bible is "the word of God," or "inspired by God," whereas I, ironically, do not believe the Bible is "the word of God."  I believe it is the words of men.  It is, nonetheless, a powerful text with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.

Yet, in reading Crumb's visual interpretation of Genesis, he is able to bring these words of God (or man, if you agree with the artist) to life in ways that few other versions of the Bible have done.  The illustrations are not pretty.  Crumb does not shy away from the seedier elements.  He is at his best showing all the human failings in Genesis, violent and sexual and heartbreaking.  Perhaps, in a way, Crumb is on a spiritual quest with The Book of Genesis Illustrated, looking for the divine in the depravity of humankind.  The illustration of God entrusting Adam and Eve with the Garden of Eden captures both the innocence and sensuality of the moment:

 

God looks benevolent and frightening.  Adam and Eve look child-like and sexual.  The world is full of life and wonder, but there is a  mountain in the distance, perhaps hinting at some distant hardship.  If the words Crumb illustrates are divinely written or inspired, these illustrations are windows into that writing and inspiration.

Like Salinger, R. Crumb may have, unintentionally, created something spiritual or sacred.

Saint Marty wishes he'd had Crumb's book as a kid.  He might have paid more attention in his religion classes.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 5: A Friend and Anne Lamott

I have a friend whom I recently introduced to the writer Anne Lamott.  When I say "introduced," I mean that I bought Erin a copy of Lamott's book Traveling Mercies.  It was my friend's birthday, and we were having a small celebration at work.  I wanted to get her something special.  I thought about it for a few days, and I couldn't come up with any idea.  Then, one morning, as I was getting ready for work, I remembered Anne Lamott.

Lamott is an essayist/novelist/teacher.  She lives in California and is probably most famous for her books on spirituality.  Now, when I say spirituality, I'm not talking Billy Graham here.  Lamott came to Christianity the hard way, through alcoholism, drug addiction, and abortions.  She is candid, honest, and unvarnished when she speaks of her journey to Christ, and that's what I love about her.  She has struggled, and, in writing about her struggles, she lets her readers know that struggle is OK.  It's normal.  It's part of being alive.

I don't know why Anne Lamott popped into my head, but I knew my friend would fall in love with her writing, the way I did a few years ago.  I was right.  This morning, I loaned Erin two more books by Lamott.  She just friended Lamott on Facebook.  I could make some sort of disparaging comment about my friend's obsession, but, if I did Facebook, I probably would friend Anne Lamott, as well.  I did advise Erin not to use the words "stalk" or "obsessed" in any communication she sends to Lamott.

Anne Lamott has allowed my friend and me to speak about Jesus and church and being a part of a worshipping community.  It has deepened our friendship, and it's putting Erin more in touch with her spiritual side.

I think it was a God thing, me giving Traveling Mercies to her.  It was one of those moments where God steps in, rolls up His sleeves, and says, "Let Me help you here."

Saint Marty is thankful for God, for Anne Lamott, for his friend.

Getting a little grace from Anne

December 21: You'll Get Your Wings



Heaven according to Capra

 "Clarence, you do a good job with George Bailey and you'll get your wings."

At the beginning of It's A Wonderful Life, we are privy to a conversation between God, an angel named Joseph, and another angel name Clarence.  God and Joseph are speaking about George Bailey, who is about to commit suicide.  God is going to send an angel down to Earth to help George.  Clarence is an angel, second class.  He's been passed up for his wings for close to 300 years.  According to Clarence, the other angels are beginning to talk about him.  The angels and God take the forms of celestial balls of light.  Clarence asks God if he will finally get his wings if he performs well on his assignment.  God's reply is the above quote.

I realize my last couple of posts have been a bit depressing, so I decided to write about some good news I got this afternoon.  I checked my university e-mail around 2:30 p.m., and my classroom evaluations were in my inbox.  I opened the documents with more than a little apprehension.

You see, this past semester was the first time I ever taught Mythology, and I think I really didn't do the greatest of jobs.  I prepared for class, knew the material, read extra sources, and delivered the lectures.  However, I wasn't really confident in my abilities or my knowledge.  I felt like Clarence when the other angels whisper behind his back.

The evaluations, however, were glowing.  I didn't have a single negative comment or score from anybody.  And I'm stunned.  My evaluations for Mythology were actually better than my evaluations for Good Books (and I did a great job with that class this past semester).  I felt truly validated.  Someone actually does think I'm worth more than a pile of donkey dung.  Now I know I shouldn't base my self-worth on the opinion's of others.  That just leads to therapy.

But today, because of those evalutions, Saint Marty earned his wings.