Creativity and Cats

In the writing workshops I so love to attend, we often discuss the terms "creative nonfiction" and "memoir."  Generally speaking, as only a bunch of word-nerds could, we make quite a case for interpreting our memories through our imaginations.  This post is like that.  It didn't happen exactly like this, but in some important ways, this story is true.  Here's to memory, creativity, and whoopie cats.  And here's to Hardin County, with its beauty and its blemishes.

Riding alone was one of the joys of my adolescence, an escape from the hell of high school.  I rode Mo, a big, black, smooth-gaited, classy gelding with an old soul.  The land over Whoopie Cat Mountain, so named because legend had it that there were wildcats there (bobcats, Daddy always said, though others claimed to have seen pumas), offered sanctuary, peace, God.  It was also a great place to gallop long and hard, once you got up the hill, reason enough for me to make regular rides there.

On that crispy fall day in 1974, though, the trail offered a spicy side order with my solitude.

Mo stumbled back, maintaining eye contact with the snarling whoopie cat.  Aware of a million sensations—my quick intake of air, the horse's fear, the November leaves and pine needles rustling under our feet, the several miles separating us from the nearest people—I reached out to steady him.  The horse tossed his head and snorted, showing the whites of his eyes, as I instinctively grabbed the rein close to his head and swung up.  We crashed through the woods, adrenalin-fueled, oblivious to the spider webs, low-flung limbs, cockleburs, and still-potent poison ivy, heading for the pasture beyond.  I let Mo rest and graze until we both cooled off, then we headed toward a significantly wider trail with more visibility and little likelihood of a wildcat.

The rain started up, of course—it may never rain in southern California, but it sure does in southern Illinois—and we made for the sweet darkness of that old barn, the one with the hand-hewn feed troughs that as a child I pictured baby Jesus in.  When the rain slowed down, we took off again, this time toward civilization.

Crossing back over the meadow, I could hear it getting closer.  Mo stopped in his tracks, not even finishing his stride, ears pricked forward, head high.  I looked around frantically—could it be the same cat, here, in the field??  Then I saw her, an enormous doe, almost head to head with my 15 hand horse, so close I thought I heard her breathing.

Looking at my 17 year old self through the multifocal lens of memory, I question the whole holding-his-gaze thing, but I know for sure I saw a bobcat that day, and it definitely panicked my horse and me.  And while I might not have really heard the doe breathe, I remember the liquid beauty of her eyes—she was that close.

Another world
is not only possible, she's
on her way. Many of us won't
be here to greet her, but
on a quiet day,
if you listen carefully, you
can hear her breathing.
(Arundhati Roy)

Mother's Day Musing

My mother was a beautiful woman, slender and strong and tall, especially in the 1930s and 40s, when women tended to be shorter than we are today.  She was also highly intelligent, well read, and sophisticated.  She attended Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, an elite private university, until the Depression forced her family into bankruptcy.  At Ursinus she studied languages (French and Latin), doing light housekeeping for a professor and his wife in exchange for room and board.  She was an excellent student, always.  My dad finished a Master's degree and taught high school English; he was certainly no slouch intellectually.  But it was our mother who insisted on high intellectual standards.  I remember when I was in 2nd grade, I volunteered to do a report on somebody famous, Lincoln maybe.  One of my classmates had done one, and the teacher seemed mightily impressed.  I wanted some of that praise, too, so I decided to do what he had done.  I got home all excited, pulled out the appropriate Book of Knowledge from the shelf, and started copying verbatim what was there.  When Mother asked me what I was doing, I explained the situation, and she sat down with me to help.  So far, so good.  But then she told me to put away the paper, told me that you can't copy a report from somebody else's work, and made me read the segment carefully.  Then she took away the Book of Knowledge and told me to put into my own words what I had read!  I was all kinds of aggravated—that wasn't what I wanted to do, I just wanted some easy praise at school!  I learned forcefully the meaning of "plagiarism," and as a university writing instructor, I have wished all second graders received the lesson I did that day.  Mother's response to my taking the easy way out was typical.  She was always encouraging, not irritable about it, but she simply insisted that we develop rigorous intellectual standards for ourselves.

Mother used big words all the time.  I remember that so clearly about her—she wasn't like my friends' moms.  Her elevated vocabulary was completely natural to her, like her proud carriage and grace.  She was a humble, self-deprecating, shy woman, so there was never a feeling that she thought she was "all that" as the kids say now.  She simply loved words and shared that love with us all.  She read to us, classic works like Tom Sawyer, A Christmas Carol, and The Secret Garden, stopping as necessary to explain nuances and big words to my little sister and me (to the irritation of the older kids, who were exasperated with our ignorance).

Daddy always credited Mother with getting him through his college days, and to his death, he remained somewhat bemused and surprised that God had blessed him with this beautiful, sophisticated, classy woman to share his life with.  My dad was a wonderful character in his own right, but this is a Mother's Day tribute, and he really did feel grateful and a little unworthy of my mother with her well-connected family and cultivated mind.

My mother was the youngest of three; her brother and sister as well as all their progeny were Ivy League educated.  Only Mother was still dependent when the Depression crept into her insulated and privileged world.  Her father, an inventor and public servant, had worked with Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was Governor of New York.  Among the items auctioned with the family’s other treasures was an armchair that had been in the Governor’s Mansion, a gift from FDR.

My mother went from student to working girl with her characteristic grace, landing a good job in downtown Philadelphia.  In 1942, she met a sailor assigned to Philadelphia to outfit a new warship—my dad, a country boy from southern Illinois who had dropped out of school at 14 in order to help support his family.  Their backgrounds could not have been more different.   Her family warned her that “nothing good could come out of Little Egypt,” but my mother was as captivated by Daddy’s simple goodness as he was by her sophistication.  He was always a little in awe of Mother’s intellect and education, and she was drawn to his authentic integrity.

By the time Daddy retired from the Navy in 1956, he had completed a G.E.D. and was therefore eligible for the new G.I. Bill.  He and his East Coast bride moved to dinky little Carterville, Illinois, near Daddy’s roots but far from Mother’s, and he enrolled in college.  Mother helped him with his classes, managed the finances and kids, and time marched on.

I don’t remember Mother’s Day as a big deal, really.  We never went out to eat or anything.  Sometimes we gave cards and gifts made at school or church, but Hallmark and Madison Avenue didn’t hold much sway in rural southern Illinois.  I mostly remember warm weather and the smell of late spring.  My mother was not a gardener, but every Mother's Day we wore flowers to church.  Red roses for us kids, signifying that our mother was living, and white peonies for Mother and Daddy, signifying that their mothers had passed on.  Now this was in southern Illinois, where the roses bloom around Mother's Day, and we had a lovely bush with small blooms.  We'd sing loudly, "Mother, Mother, Mother, pin a rose on me!"  I never did know where that came from, but we sang it every year on Mother's Day, and cut little red roses to wear on our church clothes.  Mother and Daddy, however, weren't quite so lucky in their floral apparel.  We had some peony bushes out front, a couple of which had white flowers, so they'd scrounge around and try to find a small-ish blossom to wear.  Well, peonies even at their very best are big, showy, gaudy divas of the flower world, and they bloom before the roses do, so they were always well past their prime by Mother's Day, brownish, shedding petals, attracting ants.  It never occurred to any of us to look further than the peony bushes for a white flower, though, so Mother and Daddy would search for the least-sad looking, smallest blooms they could find, and thus clad in our flowers we'd head to the Rosiclare United Methodist Church, six miles away.  By the time we got to church, the roses were droopy and the peonies had shed their few shriveled petals.  I have no idea why we persisted with this silly ritual every year, but we did.  In a way, it does shine a light into Mother's character.  For all her aristocratic upbringing, she had a lighthearted approach to life, embracing the moments, relishing God's world in all its funny little foibles.

Happy Mother’s Day, Vera Mildred Hay Bishop.

Suffering: A Refraction

We are human; therefore, we will suffer.  Like Job, we want to know why.  How can a loving, sovereign God allow the pointless pain evident in every level of every society?  We rejoice at the miracle of life, seeing in our unconditional love for our children the reflection of God’s love for us.  Logically, then, we feel betrayed when we suffer.  God is silent, an adjective.  We want a verb.

We want action, and we want explanation.  Why must the innocent suffer alongside the guilty?  Why isn’t the suffering distributed fairly?  Why must we suffer at all, if a loving, sovereign God is in charge?  Our answers, like Job’s, are nebulous at best, deleterious at worst.  Perhaps ”Why?” is not the right question, although our human logic demands to know.  Perhaps we would do better to ask not why, but rather how.  How are we to absorb and survive the pain that inevitably accompanies our human condition?  God’s answer to Job is, basically, “I am who I am.”  God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, simply reaffirming his creative power.  A chastened, humbled Job reconciles with God, but he never understands his suffering; Job needs God—as we do—regardless of the suffering.

Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s short but powerful Lament for a Son[1] addresses the difficulty of reconciling the death of his 25 year old son with his faith in a loving and all-powerful deity.   Wolterstorff describes the loneliness of grief (“grief isolates”, 56), inextricably juxtaposed against the need for quiet company on the “mourner’s bench” (34).   Not “Why do we suffer?”  Rather, “How do we survive this horror?”

In another short but pithy book, Stanley Hauerwas’ Naming the Silences[2], Hauerwas notes in the preface (after quoting Wolterstorff on the frontispiece) that his purpose is not to explain suffering but rather to explore why the question of suffering is so important to us; indeed, Hauerwas’ point is to question the question:  “I cannot promise readers consolation, but only as honest an account as I can give of why we cannot afford to give ourselves explanations for evil when what is required is a community capable of absorbing our grief.”  The explanations fail, always; we need look no further than Job to see that.  Yet Job retained his faith, and reconciled to his God.  How, not why.  We suffer.  We survive.  We depend on one another.  And on God.

            Hauerwas closely examines suffering as a theme in Peter DeVries’ novel, The Blood of the Lamb[3] through the feelings, experiences, and faith challenges of the novel’s main character, Don Wanderhope, as he faces his young daughter’s losing battle with leukemia.  Hauerwas focuses much of his discussion on the tension between medicine as a healing art and medicine as a means to delay death while sustaining suffering (“the art of prolonging disease… in order to postpone grief” [qtd.  21]), thus tackling our near-lunatic faith in the power of medical knowledge and technology.[4]  We look for miracles, and we’re happy to credit God for working through medical technology.  Anything to avoid the inevitable pain, and the inevitably painful questions.  We want a verb.

            Hauerwas makes no attempt to explain Wanderhope’s suffering; he merely describes it, in an almost detached, clinical tone.  He also (thank heavens!) makes no attempt to place the suffering within a larger context as a means by which the dead girl’s father becomes better or stronger or more aware of life’s fleeting joys:  “[DeVries] does not say…that Wanderhope through Carol’s suffering has learned to see the beauty in the olive drab of the hawthorn in autumn…sensing as he does the dishonesty in those who would have a child like Carol suffer and die from leukemia so that a father like Wanderhope could learn to see the particular beauty of the everyday” (33).

            According to Hauerwas’ interpretation of DeVries’ novel, our only hope exists in seeing the pointless suffering of a Carol Wanderhope against the backdrop of Christ’s suffering; i.e., there is comfort in shared suffering.[5]  Thus we can know that we aren’t abandoned; Jesus, “fully man and fully God,” knew the “silence” of suffering.  For all the prayers, all the medical voodoo, all the frantic, desperate pleading, Carol Wanderhope dies; she suffers, and her grieving father suffers.  We suffer.  We survive.  We depend on one another.  And somehow, God is at the center of it, silent.  An adjective.

            Hauerwas devotes the middle section of this book to defining and ultimately countering the traditional concept of theodicy as the study of God’s relation to evil.  In a detailed footnote on Job, Hauerwas quotes an article entitled “God and the Silencing of Job”:

The book of Job displays the cost of …silencing the voice of the sufferer….  Job shows the theodicists’ place is in the company of comforters….  [Job’s] comforters are ‘academics’ in the worst sense of the term, ineffective observers of the terrors of human suffering….  The book of Job makes no coherent claims….  As part of the Jewish and Christian religious canons, it reveals that no way of speaking of God and suffering will do.  (Tilley, qtd. 45-46)[6].

            Hauerwas has now ruled out both medicine and theodicy as adequate means to confront the problem of pointless suffering in an ordered world controlled by a benevolent, omnipotent God.  For all his questioning, all his pain, all his arguing with God and man, Job receives no solid answers about suffering, although he reconciles with God.  Job, a man, asks, “Why, God?  I hurt!”  God answers, typically cryptic, “Can you make a hippopotamus?”  Say what?  In the end, Job needs God—as we do.  We suffer.  We survive.  We depend on one another.  And on God.

Moving along in the biblical canon, Hauerwas points out the obvious:  Early Christians suffered.  They were persecuted relentlessly—harassed, oppressed, tortured, executed.  The mother of a young martyr was no less devastated in ancient Rome than her modern counterpart in rural Indiana.  Yet suffering doesn’t seem to be an issue:  “Apparently, it never occurred to the early Christians to question their belief in God or even God’s goodness because they were unjustly suffering….  Suffering was not a metaphysical problem needing a solution but a practical challenge requiring a response” (51).  And a couple of pages later:  “[H]istorically speaking, Christians have not had a ‘solution’ to the problem of evil.  Rather, they have had a community of care that has made it possible for them to absorb the destructive terror of evil that constantly threatens to destroy all human relations” (53).  We suffer.  We survive.  We depend on one another.

            Hauerwas explains the impact of various historical thought-movements, especially the Enlightenment, on modern Christian views.  Because Christianity is now a “civilizational religion oriented to provide the ethos necessary to sustain an empire,” we modern Christians tend to try unsuccessfully to rationalize evil as somehow part of God’s plan which we aren’t yet capable of comprehending:  “The way things are…is the way things were meant to be for any right-thinking person, converted or not” (55)[7].

            So exactly what are we to do with the problem of suffering?  I’m not sure.  Hauerwas laps at the edges, giving us much to ponder without attempting to answer the unanswerable:

Obviously, suffering, seemingly unnecessary and pointless suffering, grips our lives in a manner that rightly leaves us numb.  My point is not to deny the reality of suffering—in particular, suffering that bears the mark of evil (that is, suffering which seems ‘caused’ by a power for no reason)—but rather to suggest that there is no such thing as suffering that challenges belief in the existence of God as such.” (68)

            Thus, Hauerwas returns us to his starting point:  We need a new question.  I certainly don’t know what the “right” question is, and Hauerwas refuses to give a pat answer.  But he is clear that asking why we suffer is useless, perhaps even ludicrous, when we look honestly at the God who became a man—the God who is the Suffering Servant, the Crucified Christ, the Paschal Lamb; the man who cried out in lonely anguish, spiritually and physically parched, spiritually and physically suffocated, quoting the desperate plea of an earlier “man after God’s own heart.”  That God—that man—suffered.

If it helps, I can cry out in angry, frustrated prayers, as Job did, as David did, as Jesus did.  If it helps, I can analyze the suffering, taking comfort that Jesus knows my human pain.  If it helps, I can recite Romans 8:28 like a mantra.  If it helps, I can sit on the mourner’s bench and hope someone warm and quiet will sit beside me, shielding me for a minute from my pain.

            Maybe in the end—as in the beginning—that is Hauerwas’ point.

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing, Eyes–

I wonder if It weighs like Mine–

Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long–

Or did it just begin–

I could not tell the Date of Mine–

It feels so old a pain–

I wonder if it hurts to live–

And if They have to try–

And whether–could They choose between–

It would not be–to die–

I note that Some–gone patient long–

At length, renew their smile–

An imitation of a Light

That has so little Oil.

I wonder if when Years have piled–

Some Thousands–on the Harm–

That hurt them early–such a lapse

Could give them any Balm–

Or would they go on aching still

Through Centuries of Nerve–

Enlightened to a larger Pain–

In Contrast with the Love–

The Grieved–are many–I am told–

There is the various Cause–

Death–is but one–and comes but once–

And only nails the eyes–

There’s Grief of Want–and Grief of Cold–

A sort they call “Despair”--

There’s Banishment from native Eyes–

In sight of Native Air–

And though I may not guess the kind–

Correctly–yet to me

A piercing Comfort it affords

In passing Calvary–

To note the fashions–of the Cross–

And how they’re mostly worn–

Still fascinated to presume

That Some–are like My Own–

(Emily Dickinson)

[1] Wolterstorff, Nicholas.  Lament for a Son.  Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdman’s, 1987.

[2] Hauerwas, Stanley.  Naming the Silences:  God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering.  Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1990.

[3] Devries, Peter.  The Blood of the Lamb.  Boston:  Little, Brown, 1961.

[4] Accurate depiction, seems to me:  Superdocs, with their white labcoat capes flying behind them as they flit hither and yon dispensing miracles.

[5] See Emily Dickinson, “I Measure Every Grief I Meet.”

[6] Tilley, Terry.  "God and The Silencing of Job." Modern Theology 5 (Apr. 1989), 257-270.

[7] I would argue that a sort of autocratic Christianity undulates into world politics and global policy, without including Jesus—Christian-centric without being Christ-centered.  Hence the need for a book such as this one and a branch of theology such as theodicy.