spirituality | dual personalities

August 18, 2016

“My comfort and salvation, Lord, shall surely come from Thee.”*

by chuckofish

Today on the Episcopal Church calendar we remember with a lesser feast the life of William Porcher Dubose (April 11, 1836 – August 18, 1918) .

Dubose served as a Confederate soldier and chaplain in Virginia and was captured and imprisoned at Fort Delaware. During Reconstruction he was an Episcopal minister in Abbeville and Winnsboro, S.C., and became a theologian at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee in 1871. Indeed, according to the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, he was “probably the most original and creative thinker the American Episcopal Church has ever produced…He was not widely traveled, and not widely known, until, at the age of 56, he published the first of several books on theology that made him respected, not only in his own country, but also in England and France.”

You can read more about him here. Read the comments section for a long-winded, back-and-forth argument about whether Dubose should be disqualified from the Calendar because of his Confederate ties and his “support” of the KKK during Reconstruction and on and on. Or don’t bother. Whatever.

Here is a quote from a letter written by Dubose to his first wife Annie toward the end of the Civil War where he admits his imperfections:

“I have just commenced today our reading of the Old Testament. I will have to skip all the intervening chapters and begin afresh at the lesson for the day. You must read by the lessons and also keep in mind during the week the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel. It will be sweet to know that we are reading and thinking together. My traveling etc. threw me a little off my balance and I am just recovering again. How is it that we will so often stray away from God when it is so sweet to be near Him and so full of discomfort and wretchedness to be far from Him? If our hope rested on our own faithfulness how miserable we’d be! But blessed be God, it rests upon His faithfulness and not ours. Is not God’s patience and forbearance a mystery! I am almost tempted sometimes to feel that it is useless to try Him again. I have been so often faithless to my most sacred vows. Then I feel I cannot live without Him and I always find Him more ready to receive me. Oh how I wish I could be more consistent and steadfast. The hymn beginning ‘Jesus my strength, my hope’ is a very sweet one to me.”

I have no doubt that God is patient with and forebears even self-righteous comment-writers of the 21st century.

*Jesus, my Strength, my Hope, Charles Wesley, 1742

5 Comments

August 15, 2016

In a gadda da vida, baby

by chuckofish

Weekends that follow a weekend when one of my daughters has visited are always a little sad. You know, she was here and we were doing that, and now she is not here. And it was a rainy weekend to boot!

But I am not one to sit in a slough of despond, so I got busy. Since Gary is coming back this week to paint the living room and paper the dining room, I had to put away all the dishes in my china cabinet and pack up various shelves full of dishes etc. And there were also a lot of very dusty books to move. Good grief what a job!

I suppose it is a good job to do every once in awhile (and should no doubt be done more frequently) in order to dust off the books and be reminded what we have!

I also got a new pair of Tom’s on sale which made me happy.

I read the second lesson in church, a good long one from Hebrews (11:29–12:2) about how we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, something I believe in strongly. The Gospel was from Luke (12:49–56) where Jesus is at his politically-incorrect best, calling everyone a hypocrite and saying he “came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Our lady priest reminded us that there is no room for compromise in the Gospel and that the sweet Jesus people like to imagine is a fiction. (I think Zooey had something to say about that to Franny.)

Our organist/choirmaster has been on vacation for several weeks and so the organist substitute was the lady who always reminds me of Helen Feesh on the Simpsons.

I mean seriously.

I left right after the service and got back to work taking down drapes (more dust) and such.

Over the weekend I read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, which my dual personality had recommended. Now I recommend it to you. Hard to put down.

In the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep I picked up a book by Eudora Welty and was reminded how really great she is.

It is our inward journey that leads us through time–forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction. (One Writer’s Beginnings)

Sigh. Now it is Monday and it’s back to the salt mines–have a good week!

8 Comments

August 12, 2016

10,000 Reasons

by chuckofish

The sun comes up
It’s a new day dawning
It’s time to sing Your song again
Whatever may pass
And whatever lies before me
Let me be singing
When the evening comes

As you know, I listen to Christian radio in the morning as I drive to work. (Stop rolling your eyes). It keeps me focused and positive, especially during this freakazoid election cycle.

Anyway, listening to Matt Redman’s song “10,00 Reasons,” based on Psalm 103, reminded me of how important it is to remember all the reasons to praise the Lord. It may not always seem like there are 10,000 (or even 10) reasons to praise the Lord, but there are.

You might want to make a list. Here is a start: 1. Frederick Buechner turned 90 in July!

2. You have a thousand books on your shelves at home to read.

3. You could barbeque tonight if you so desired.

4. There are still people in the world who make exquisite things like this.

5. GIFs like this make me laugh:

6. Good things are coming.

7. The geraniums are still going strong.

8. The Bible is online and you can look up scripture at will and in your choice of translation.

Over the weekend (another blessing) I’ll be working on my list. How about you?

Bless the Lord oh my soul
Oh my soul
Worship His Holy name
Sing like never before
Oh my soul
I’ll worship Your Holy name

Have a good weekend!

(The painting at the top is by Karen Mathison Schmidt via Pinterest.)

4 Comments

July 13, 2016

Walking out the gate

by chuckofish

Did you know that National Simplicity Day was observed yesterday (July 12th) in Thoreau’s honor? I did not know this.

However, there are so many of these “unofficial” holidays, one can hardly be expected to keep track of them all.

Poor Thoreau. I have no doubt that he would be totally non-plussed by his latter day popularity. I mean what would he think of everyone contemplating simplicity on a special day, and texting each other Thoreau memes on their iPhones? Oy.

I have to say, though, that I have given a lot of thought lately to this idea: “It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town… he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.” (Walden)

If an enemy took the town, I could do that. I have a lot of stuff, but it is just stuff. I would take great-great-great-grandmother Hannah Patten’s sampler (out of the frame and rolled up) with me.

For now, I’m dealing with a typical flyover summer…

…and trying to keep cool.

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July 4, 2016

Some prouder pageantry

by chuckofish

A toast to our brother, whose birthday we celebrate today! I’m sure he will be celebrating Thoreau-style.

The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural Sabbath, and we fancied that the morning was the evening of a celestial day. The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.

Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon. Character always secures for itself this advantage, and is thus distinct and unrelated to near or trivial objects, whether things or persons.

–from “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” by Henry David Thoreau

3 Comments

June 15, 2016

A practical mystic

by chuckofish

Today in the Episcopal Church it is the feast day of Evelyn Underhill (6 December 1875 – 15 June 1941). She was a poet and novelist, you will recall, as well as a pacifist and a mystic. She was prominent in the Anglican Church as a lay leader of spiritual retreats, a spiritual director for hundreds of individuals, guest speaker, radio lecturer, and proponent of contemplative prayer.

“Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception—this “ordinary contemplation,” as the specialists call it—is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers of the great musician.”

―Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism

Underhill taught that the life of contemplative prayer is not just for a saintly few, monks and nuns and such, but can be the life of any Christian who is willing to undertake it.

Good to remember when life gets complicated and busy. “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” (Matt. 6:6)

Here’s to Evelyn Underhill!

O God, Origin, Sustainer, and End of all creatures: Grant that thy Church, taught by thy servant Evelyn Underhill, guarded evermore by thy power, and guided by thy Spirit into the light of truth, may continually offer to thee all glory and thanksgiving, and attain with thy saints to the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast promised us by our Savior Jesus Christ; who with thee and the same Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

–Collect for the day

And, yes, I do think that Underhill icon is awkward.

2 Comments

May 16, 2016

“O Lord, how manifold are your works!” *

by chuckofish

Happy Pentecost! How was your weekend?

We went to the last lacrosse game of the season on Friday after work and enjoyed sitting outside on a beautiful day, watching the game and the people around us. We never talked to the boy but the OM took a few pictures of him across the field with his giant lens.

On Saturday I went to several estate sales, including one in the lovely home of the brother of a former president of the U.S. His wife died a few months ago and I suppose he is down-sizing–you know, the kids took what they wanted and they were getting rid of the rest. The house was lovely and unpretentious, full of familiar things (books and LPs and monogrammed towels) and comfortable in an old school, slightly shabby way–just my style. They even had one of these–our family totem:

(I didn’t buy his, because I have already given one to each of my children.) I did buy an old child’s chair, which had been chewed by a family dog, and a BCP.

A good morning’s outing to be sure.

I finished Nightwoods by Charles Frazier and I highly recommend it. Good characters, tightly paced–well done. I am now reading Hope Leslie written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick in 1827, encouraged by daughter #2 who has read all of Sedgwick’s oeuvre for her dissertation. I am pleasantly surprised to report that Sedgwick is a regular Jane Austen, writing with a wry humor about “early times in Massachusetts.” Indeed the action takes place in the early seventeenth century and explores the “tumultuous relations between Puritans and Pequots.” I love this scene, described in a letter, where the fourteen-year old son pokes fun at an Anglican newcomer during a storm:

But Dame Grafton was beside herself. At one moment she fancied we should be the prey of the wild beast, and at the next, that she heard the alarm yell of the savages. Everell brought her, her prayer-book, and affecting a well-beseeming gravity, he begged her to look out the prayer for distressed women, in imminent danger of being scalped by North American Indians. The poor lady, distracted with terror, seized the book, and turned over leaf after leaf. Everell meanwhile affecting to aid her search. In vain I shook my head, reprovingly, at the boy–in vain I assured Mistress Grafton that I trusted we were in no danger; she was beyond the influence of reason; nothing allayed her fears, till chancing to catch a glance of Everell’s eye, she detected the lurking laughter, and rapping him soundly over the ears with her book, she left the room greatly enraged.

Now that is funny. “The prayer for distressed women, in imminent danger of being scalped by North American Indians.” I already like this Catherine Maria Sedgwick a lot.

The rest of the weekend was spent pleasantly puttering around, working in the yard, eating the donuts that my friend from Atlanta brought to me at work on Friday (he was in town for the air show)–note they are the “right” donuts–

and going to a garden party in support of the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis.

It was held at our friend’s 1867 house high up overlooking the mighty Mississippi…

There was even a bassett hunt.

Not bad for a stay-at-home introvert!

*Psalm 104

4 Comments

May 11, 2016

Mid-week meditation

by chuckofish

“[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis – only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.”

–Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, “The Unsettling of America”

The wood engraving is by Clare Leighton – Scything, 1935

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May 4, 2016

Mid-week pep talk

by chuckofish

Henry and William James, brothers, early 20th century

“Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn’t submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don’t want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what’s the matter with our self.”

–William James, (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910), American philosopher and psychologist

2 Comments

May 2, 2016

Stir up, O south, the boughs that bloom…”*

by chuckofish

…Till the beloved Master come…”

How was your weekend? Mine was quiet and restorative, but also a little sad, since I was thinking always of the weekend before when so many people were visiting. C’est la vie.

I finished E.L. Doctorow’s The March, which, again I say, is so good and wise and well-written.

I did a little yard work, but it was pretty wet and rainy. It is certainly looking lush in flyover land.

I watched a few movies: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which I finally got my hands on…

(This film recreates the famous raising of the flag on Iwo Jima scene, taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by photographer Joe Rosenthal. The three surviving flag raisers make a cameo appearance during this scene . Rene A. Gagnon, Ira H. Hayes and John H. Bradley are seen with John Wayne as he instructs them to hoist the flag (Wayne gives the folded flag to Gagnon). The flag used to recreate the incident is the actual flag that was raised on Mount Suribachi.)

and Learning to Drive (2014), a little film starring Ben Kingsley as a Sikh taxi driver/driving instructor and Patricia Clarkson as a book critic whose marriage is falling apart.

Both supplied an entertaining diversion, but were not super great, if you know what I mean. Sands of Iwo Jima features John Wayne saying “Saddle Up!” continuously, so it wins as far as I’m concerned.

I went to church and was a reader–my passage was from Revelation 21 by John, the Revelator, so that was fun. The first lesson was from the book of Acts where Paul goes to Philippi in Macedonia and goes down to the river to pray and meets Lydia. All this made me want to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) which I did.