Step of faith

Some time ago I was sitting in a church sanctuary almost Shaker in its simplicity, with elegant lines and proportions, understated decorations, a lofty ceiling and big glass windows opening to a lush, green swath of woods; the church was hosting an art show at the time, so beautiful things were hanging on all the walls and my daughter's choir filled the space with music to exalt the soul. Sitting in that pew surrounded by my family and by so much beauty, I thought, If I could worship in this kind of environment every Sunday, I would be a happier person. 

But of course that's ridiculous. Even if I lived close enough to attend that church, it wouldn't host an art show every Sunday, nor would my daughter's choir perform there more than once a year. And besides, I never experienced their usual mode of worship, heard a sermon, or fellowshiped with the congregants. The church appealed on an aesthetic level, but when it comes to matters of the spirit, beauty isn't everything.

If I could design the ideal church, I would start with that simple but elegant design and develop a liturgy that would appeal to the whole person--heart, soul, mind, and body. But even if I included all the things I love about a worship service (great music, thought-provoking sermons, meaningful liturgy) and left out the things that leave me cold (lackluster singing, music blasting so loudly it hurts my eardrums, gaudy stained glass), I still couldn't guarantee that the church would attract the one thing that makes a church a church: the community of people who care about each other. My ideal of elegant simplicity would leave others cold--I mean, lots of people like stained glass! The thought-provoking sermon that sparks new insight in my mind might strike others as too heady or uninspiring. And the music that soothes my soul may not appeal to someone whose musical tastes start and end with Elvis.

So if the perfect church does not exist, I'll have to put up with the imperfect church--and the imperfect church will have to put up with me. But that can be a problem too. Like many pastor's wives, I tend to get buttonholed as an appendage. I am the pastor's wife: that's all anyone seems to want to know about me, and when I reveal other aspects of my being, I am met with befuddled looks or dismissive comments, like the time I told a parishioner that I teach writing and literature and he said "Why would anyone need to learn that these days?" 

So last week when I heard the poet Christian Wiman talk about his struggles with faith and art (on the podcast No Small Endeavor, which I highly recommend), it resonated deeply, especially this passage:

I do feel like faith is the most important thing in my life, but I've never found a form that is satisfying to me, or in which, to put it more bluntly, more sharply, a form in which I don't feel that my own experience is being violated.

And so that's a constant wrestle for me because I'm desperate for some community in which to believe. And at various times in my life I've had that, and I do believe in it very much. And I respect the institution of the church. I respect my students who are going into these jobs. Many of my students are becoming ministers, and there's something heroic in that at this particular cultural moment.

But for myself, I have always felt outside of the institution, and I don't consider myself a Catholic or a Protestant. I do consider myself a Christian, but I'm pretty frustrated with the ways that we try to tame God, and try to contain God in ways that make the experience palatable, gentle, socially sort of lubricating.

....

I mean, I've been to so many different churches and always something happens that, that I just disagree with so profoundly or often there's a mismatch between the urgency with which I feel in my own interior communion with, and wrestling with God, and the banality of the spaces in which this is supposedly being expressed.

And so, I'm often bored out of my skull at church, you know, and if I'm not bored, I'm often I just disagree so profoundly with what's being said. And I also feel that most churches don't allow for a space for how wild God could be, you know? I mean, Annie Dillard has that famous paragraph about saying that people should be wearing crash helmets in church, and, you know, lashing themselves to the pews.

I think this is a typical problem with an artist, because if you feel, you know, most of my sense of faith comes from my experience of art. I mean that is an intense engagement with God and with reality and then to step into somewhere where you're just sort of having coffee hour.

The notion of trying to tame God into a palatable form--I feel that deeply. The feeling that I have to put big parts of myself into a box before I enter into the sanctuary--been there, done that. The banal spaces and small-minded ideas squelching the wild unpredictability of spiritual experience--it's a problem.

Which is one reason why yesterday I attended a service at a church where I was pretty sure I wouldn't know anyone and therefore no one would know me or judge me or treat me like an appendage. I wanted to have a spiritual experience unencumbered by anyone else's expectations, and you know what? I did. It wasn't the perfect church--the ceiling was low, the altar cloths were faded, and I didn't entirely understand the liturgy--but I had an experience of the wildness of God and I left feeling refreshed and happy. Which, right now, is probably enough.

An appointment with autumn

Last week when one of the Powers That Be tried to schedule a meeting with me for this morning, I begged off by saying "I have an appointment that will keep me off campus all morning." I did not feel the need to mention that my appointment was with a great blue heron.

Of course at the time I had no idea that I'd be meeting with a heron this morning. I did have an appointment--in Athens at a car dealership to get a new rear window on my car so I can start using my rear-window defogger. I've owned that car for just over a year, but early last fall I started seeing news reports about people whose rear windows shattered as soon as they turned on the rear-window defogger, so I decided to avoid using the defogger and wait for a recall notice, which arrived in due course over the summer. First I had trouble scheduling an appointment and then I had to reschedule because of a conflict and I was determined to get that window replaced before the mornings get any frostier, regardless of the needs of the PTBs.

So I've had the car appointment on my schedule for weeks but just this week the gorgeous fall foliage inspired me to add a stop to my Athens itinerary. I left in the dark and arrived at the shallow upper end of Strouds Run Lake in the soft early-morning light, which made the world look like a watercolor painting, and right in front of the parking area stood a great blue heron.

I saw ducks, too, and a few geese and sandpipers and even a lone red-winged blackbird that should have left for a warm winter home already, and I saw the rising sun paint the sky pink and the leaves yellow, orange, and red. For a while there were no sounds beyond the ducks' quiet squawks and the wind rustling through the leaves, so I stood there and drank in the beauty without a thought for what I might be missing on campus.

I'll pay for it, of course--I'll have to scramble to get through all those annotated bibliographies and deal with whatever complications arise from my dereliction of duty, but I came home with a new rear window with functioning defogger, a host of photos, and a sense of calm that can only come from looking away, if only temporarily, from the daily grind. 

I don't know how long I watched that heron before it finally flew off into the distance. My spirit took flight with the bird, but my body sighed and drove away toward duty.

  

The impending Bibliopocalypse

A dozen times this morning I wanted to stop and take a photo--of colorful leaves reflected in the river, pink stripes in the sky highlighting red and orange trees, light filtering through leaves so golden they seem to glow from within. I keep telling myself I have enough photos of fall leaves but I'd better enjoy them while I can because soon I'll be immersed in a task that will keep me tied to my computer screen for hours on end.

I refer, of course, to the Bibliopocalypse. I have gone on record confessing that I hate annotated bibliographies. They're a pain to teach and a pain to grade and they inspire a host of complaints among students. So much can go wrong: not enough sources, the wrong kinds of sources, inadequate summaries, absent evaluations, every type of format error known to the MLA handbook, and I have to keep an eye open for every possible problem. First I count the listings and determine whether they're in alphabetical order, and then I go through them with a fine-toothed comb, marking problems and offering suggestions. Then there's the rubric, the grade, the comments--a total slog, but if I assign such an onerous task, my feedback had better reflect some serious effort.

If everyone hates annotated bibliographies, why not just ditch the assignment? Because gathering, summarizing, evaluating, and citing an array of sources is a valuable stage in a large research project. In first-year composition courses I might require students to turn in individual source evaluations over the course of a week or two, but for the English majors in my capstone class, they've already submitted a research proposal so now they have to show that they've put in the legwork to locate appropriate sources. If they do a thorough job summarizing and evaluating those sources, they'll be way ahead of the game when they write their drafts next week. And then we'll be off to the races with presentations, revisions, and final papers. There's no turning back now--the rest of the semester is just one big assignment after another.

So I have only 24 hours before the Bibliopocalypse, and I intend to enjoy them. Look at those leaves! But the time I have a minute to spare to look outside again, they'll all be on the ground. 

 

 

The mail must go--somewhere

What I learned this morning when I called our local post office to complain about a missing package:

Thanks to staffing problems, the USPS no longer employs a regular delivery driver for our rural route. Instead, they rely on temporary drivers borrowed from other post offices.

Temporary drivers can't be expected to be familiar with our route, so when they see our mailbox sitting across the street right next to our neighbor's mailbox, they may not be certain which house the mailbox serves.

Our house isn't even visible from the mailbox, so if they deliver our mail to the house nearest our mailbox, they'll get it wrong every time.

Therefore, if the Amazon package-tracking software says our package was delivered "On or near the front porch," it doesn't necessarily mean our front porch.

The temporary delivery driver promises to retrieve the misplaced package and deliver it properly today.

What does our local post office do when they can't find anyone to serve our rural route? Well, the postmaster kindly informed me that often he has to deliver mail along our route after the post office has closed for the day--and if he has to serve other rural routes as well, he may be out past midnight getting the mail delivered. This explains why our mail, which used to arrive reliably by 1 p.m., now often gets delivered long after we've gone to bed.

After this short conversation, I have developed a new appreciation for our local postmaster...but I wish the USPS would find a way to compensate rural delivery people so we could go back to having a postal carrier we know and trust instead of some temp who can't find our house. Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night can stop the mail, but staffing problems can certainly slow it down.

The future awaits, but not very patiently

The future is calling! It's so demanding--just today it wants me to produce a schedule for a January teaching workshop, a list of classes I'd like to teach next year, a plan to help an advisee complete his graduation requirements before May, a final book order for a new class I'm teaching in the spring (and maybe some thoughts toward a syllabus?), and an essay question for Wednesday's exam.

The exam question is easiest: I don't like the essay question I used for this material last time I taught the class, so last Friday I put my students into small groups and asked them to discuss concepts appearing in the readings and write sample essay questions. All the sample questions circled around a tight little cluster of interesting concepts, so I'll knead and twist all the questions together until they form a coherent and compelling prompt.

Other demands from the future won't be solved so simply. Some require me to look to the past: When was the last time we offered a teaching workshop on this particular topic and how many participants did it attract? What classes have I offered for the past few years and how many students enrolled? How has the College previously responded to the particular type of glitch messing up my advisee's schedule? What book did I intend to order when I initially proposed this new class seven years ago, and is it still relevant today? (The future doesn't really care why I am only now able to teach a class that was approved seven years ago, but that's a tale for another time.)

The most complicated demand from the future deals with my teaching schedule for the next academic year, because I have to look forward and backward and even sideways to balance what I want, what my English majors need, what we've offered recently, and what our limited department can reasonably be expected to do without being permitted to replace lost positions. 

I need to fill out my schedule for Fall 2025, Spring 2026, and Fall 2026 (so I can retire in December 2026, hurrah!). I have a list of classes I'd like to teach, but I wonder whether our English majors would benefit by my branching out a bit. Our expert on pre-Civil-War American Literature has not been replaced and probably will not be replaced for quite some time, so this year our English majors are getting no exposure to American literature before the Civil War except the little bit of it we covered in my African American Lit class early in the semester. How long are we expected to continue with no early American literature classes? How will that affect our majors' future prospects? Should I offer to teach the early American Lit survey even though I've never done it before? Should I develop an upper-level course on an early American author (Melville!)? If I teach a class or two outside my area of expertise, which of my regular classes should I sacrifice? 

That's too much to think about right now, but the future is standing outside my office door tapping its foot and demanding some answers. I'm tempted to close the door in its face so I can focus on today's issues--like lunch. Surely the future can wait until after I've eaten? 

Random bullets of bright spots in a bleak week

• Sure, the temperature was hovering just above freezing this morning, but we still have big fluffy yellow sunflowers standing tall outside my building, bright spots in fall days that vary between bright and bleak.

• In my usual parking lot the other day I noticed that every car was either gray or black except my red car and my department chair's blue one. My department does its part to bring a little color to campus, but we can't be expected to carry the ball for everyone.
  

• Our volleyball and football teams are still undefeated, a feat they've never before accomplished in my 24 years here. At some point they'll meet Mount Union, but I prefer not to think about that right now. Besides, maybe this is the year someone will prove that Mount Union is just as fallible as the rest of us.

• And so, apparently, are the Yankees. It is a joy to have my Cleveland Guardians playing October baseball, but they've been struggling against the Yankees, which makes last night's walk-off win so much more exhilarating. I keep playing this video of David Fry's game-winning home run. Makes me happy every time.

• Speaking of struggling, a prof from another college told me about an attempt to cut costs and improve efficiency on her campus: they eliminated all the photocopiers on campus except for one and put one person in charge of doing all the photocopying so that faculty have to send their copy orders to the Copier Czar to be printed out. But what happens when the Copier Czar wants to go on vacation? Faculty received an email telling them no photocopying for two weeks, so plan ahead!

I guess I'm happy that no one has tried to do that here--but I'd better keep the idea under wraps lest someone get inspired. So don't tell anyone, okay? I like my photocopier right where it is.

Combustible

 As I stare at my sandwich, I keep thinking about Jack London's story "To Build a Fire." This poor guy trudging through the Alaskan wilderness in fifty-below weather is going to die if he can't start a fire, but he's dropped his last matches and he can't pick them up with his gloves on-- but if he takes off his gloves, his fingers will freeze and then how will he build a fire? 

I wish I could build a fire in my office, but instead I'm wondering whether I should try to eat my peanut-butter sandwich with my gloves on--and risk getting glove fuzz on my sandwich or peanut butter on my gloves--or take off my gloves to eat so that my fingers get so cold I can't type?

Turn on the space heater and risk blowing the circuit breaker? Leave the space heater off to ensure sufficient electricity to do my work? Every option has its down side.

The bigger question is why I keep having this kind of dilemma. I mean, anyone who knows how to read a weather forecast could have foretold that we would need heat in the building this morning, but no heat is to be found. I've been trying to work with my gloves and coat on and a big shawl wrapped around my shoulders, but hunching under the shawl gives me a sore neck and back while shivering against the cold upsets my stomach and gives me a headache.

Worst of all is the anger. Trying to work in this kind of cold produces a constant simmering anger that threatens to burst out at any moment, so that I'm afraid to interact with students or write emails lest I lash out. If only the anger could produce enough heat to allow me to take off my gloves! But no--the anger just makes me want to cancel classes and go home, or else take early retirement and leave my freezing office behind for good.

Right now, though, I need to figure out how to eat my lunch. I guess I'm thankful that I'm not trudging through the Alaskan wilderness in fifty-below temperatures, but if I don't get this anger under control, I may just spontaneously combust.