J Daniel Hess’ Blog

I’ve not seen the likes in my years. The executive and legislative branches of our government, at national and state level, appear to be unable / uninterested / unmotivated / unchallenged to do a combination of three things:

1. Reduce our  debts which, according to analysts from all sides of the political and economic spectrum, are too large to sustain.

2. Encourage and support businesses and services that can put people back to work.

3. Foster the common weal that provides security, health services, education opportunity, environmental protection and hardship assistance to its citizens.

This, I say, in a moment
—  when economic disparity emphasizes the chasm between the super-rich 1% and the rest of us
—  when many politicians belong to the 1% and/or are preserved in their positions by people of the 1%
—  when Republicans have wedded into one inflexible union three ideologies:  economic conservatism, social conservatism and religious conservatism
—  when Republicans have fielded so inadequate a crew of candidates for the next presidential election
—  when Democrats have wedded into one inflexible union three ideologies: economic liberalism, social liberalism and religious liberalism
—   when Democrats go in all directions, with few of the leaders able to understand the consequences of an out-of-control budget
— when citizens fight the paying of taxes
— when the rest of us, like me, sit at home and wring their hands in helpless frustration.

I’ve not seen the likes.

Jim Taylor who occasionally responds to my blog came to town today for heart surgery. The surgeon reports that surgery went well. His wife, Kitty, will spend the night here with us.  It’s a grateful time for us all.

This morning FedEx delivered to my door a large box. In the box was a handwritten letter:

Mr. Hess

I want to thank you for letting us know about your experience with the Car Talk Vehicle Donation Program. I’m sorry that things did not work out as well as anticipated. I know that we can’t turn back time and make things better for you. However, with your feedback, we are able to review our processes and make things better for future donors. Please enjoy the enclosed goodies — our way of saying thanks for your help. (signed) Car Talk VDP

Inside the box

a Car Talk 2012 Daily Calendar
a Car Talk coffee mug
a CD “Born not to run,” a collection of “disrespectful car songs”
and two Car Talk parking permits.

I tip my hat the the Car Talk Car Donation Program. Indeed I had a disappointing experience with this particular car donation. WFYI will receive only a fraction of what I had hoped they would get. (No need now to specify the issues.) I called to express my dismay. The next day the head of the company phoned. He was a polite listener. He didn’t explain things away. He even said that CDP would relinquish to WFYI its own commission. I considered him genuine and courteous and understanding.

The package and the letter in particular raise my regard for the program. Mistakes happen. Some of them can’t be changed. But a company that is open to customer feedback and in fact uses customer feedback is to be complimented. Thanks, Car Talk Car Donation Program.

At Chickies Rock by the Susquehanna, with Daddy and big brother (early 1940s)

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a big brother, not George Orwell’s Big Brother of 1984, but the big brother who began being big brother on December 5, 1937. And I shall always have a big brother.

The only reason he isn’t towering over me in the picture is that I’m on a higher rock. Indeed he towered over me already in 1940.  Ditto as teenagers. Then adults.  And now.

He is only 23 months older than I and was only two school grades ahead of me, but in all things, especially looking into a mirror, he was my big brother. Carrying feed bags, pitching hay bales, playing basketball, catching pigeons, shooting buns, attracting girl friends — he was big brother.

It’s impossible for me to imagine my older brother as smaller or lesser than I.  Not possible. He is tall and talented, high but not haughty.

When I arrived at 50 years of age, he had already been there. Same with 60. And 70 and 74. I shall never catch up. I’m not in the least bitter.* He’s bigger and ahead of me and that’s the way it should be.

Happy Birthday, Merv.

* Actually, he got only ONE traffic ticket in his entire life. I’m a bit bitter about that.

How altogether good it is to be a member of a small writer’s group. Despite bad weather, four of us met this morning.

Last week I shared with you my poem-in-process. Here is what I presented today. Curiously it fit nicely into a discussion of what members’ children were doing in college.

Pastures

She said we need pastures
for old horses. Preachers,
she meant, pulpit prone,
tethered to tenure, sure
of chapter and verse.

We chuckled, picturing that pasture
of former steeds and stallions,
broken, bent, old teeth
chewing at fence lines,
swishing flies from other faces.

Years have passed. She is long gone.
Sure enough, young Ph.D.s replaced us.
Their work is footnoted, not ours.
Post modern kids have tweeted us
to the corner of the back forty.

Again we chuckle, we emeriti,
hardly believing where we are.
Into coffee shops we totter,
talk not tweet, shaping tall tales
into memoirs. We’re pastured nags.

The high point of our breakfast meeting was a reading of Rod’s new blog. If you can find time this weekend, please see two entries “Sitting with Pain, Sitting with Life” and “Once a Warrior.”  (www.ptsdandcombat.com)  Rod is a psychiatrist (with a law degree) who spends at least one day a week counseling at the local vet’s hospital.

Also today we considered the term elegance as it relates to divinity.

What this small group has contributed to my life is well beyond my words to define it.

Grandson Jordan, now apprenticing with Chris, Laura and Ted at Indy Violins, will likely complete his first violin tomorrow.

By this time Jordan knows the lexicon, the history and the idiosyncracies of violins, including the fact that a good violin vibrates to sound waves nearby. He says he won’t sell this one, but he is now working on his third violin. Meanwhile he is practicing for a concert with the new and exciting Side by Side on March 7.

I was stymied. The crossword clue was “truth.”  The answer had five letters.

Other intersecting words led me to the puzzling answer:  S-O-O-T-H.

Dictionary.com is just one of many helpful sources for such a time. Indeed, the synonyms of sooth include truth, reality and fact. Sooth is an old term, but still used by Shakespeare. “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.” Joseph Addison is credited with saying “Women were formed to temper Mankind, and sooth them into Tenderness and Compassion; not to set an Edge upon their Minds …”

The term sooth belongs way back beyond 900. Both Middle English and Old English used the word soth, with a long-o sound. It may be considered a wide-spread term, having cognates with Old Saxon soth, Old Norse sannr, Gothic sunjis, and Sanskrit sat and sant.

I shall not try to resurrect the term. I shall not insist on sooth or consequences, the sooth being, that I would be laughed out of town.

The past two days this blog visited the topic of meditation. We considered the recommendation to go deep into the layers of memory to get a fuller sense of the mystery of our selves.

The writer in me then says, tell us what you find … in writing. I have encouraged many people to write their stories. Occasionally I am invited into the process as consultant, editor, reader. Personal writing — be it memoir, personal essay,  autobiographical vignette, or, using current lingo, creative non-fiction — is in my opinion among the most powerful of genres.

The current Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing includes a printed version of a speech I gave two years ago at the Mennonite Arts Weekend in Cincinnati. While I have written a memoir and a considerable amount of creative non-fiction, I used the occasion to speak of the problematic of the memoir. If you are interested, take a look.   www.mennonitewriting.org. I welcome your response.

PS I drove into town at dusk today. The city lights delighted my camera.

Yesterday this blog included an entry from Jane Bishop Halteman. You may wish to read it prior to reading this response from me.

You are invited to correspond with her:  janie46@aol.com

You can find her in Facebook:  Jane Bishop Halteman

Jane quotes Meinrad Craighead: “To recognize that mystery (of life), we must go down deep into ourselves, into that place where the walls of our being are layered with our own memories.”

The walls of our being are described to be like the strata deep in the earth. I delight in seeing strata when it outcrops through erosion or when for reasons of our industry it is exposed. One such dramatic outcrop is on Interstate 68 in Maryland, not so very far west from its beginning in Hancock. I could spend hours studying the rock levels, but for our safety we aren’t allowed to stop along the road. Below is a photo of another impressive wall, this one in Canyon de Chelle near Chinle, Arizona. It’s worth a summer of gazing.

In the poetic image, our being is a wall consisting of layers of memories. Down deep you may find a prominent layer that represents such and such a year. Ah, and there is the rewarding memory of that particular relationship. And yes, the fond memory of the work done well. What a blessing when the wall’s layers are beautiful to behold.

However each of us, on digging down deep, encounters layers we forgot about or try not to remember. Some of the layers were thrust upon us. Some represent our own failures. Just as we can’t undo history, we can’t erase the layers from the wall. We are the wall.

What Jane has done in revisiting a painful layer having to do with her own relationship to two deaths (she is making a memorial to two individuals) exemplifies a kind of stewardship of memories. Perhaps when that memorial is finally dedicated, we can say more about it as a means for encouraging all of us to deal creatively and responsibly with our memories, that is, to “wrestle with the angels” who attend to the mysteries of our lives.

May I reveal a personal stratum? Actually, it is two strata, very deep down. They touch, sometimes twist around each other, sometimes seem to pull far apart. The two strata:  grace and judgment.

I grew up witnessing, even as a very young child, many expressions of measureless grace. At the same time, in the same location, sometimes from the same people I experienced judgment and felt the crush of guilt. Much later in my life, I came to an opinion that grace is Mennonite community at its best and judgment/guilt is Mennonite community at its worst.

Grace and judgment shaped me in my earliest years. The two followed me through youth and into adulthood. They are part of the wall, part of the mystery of me.

The spiritual writers whom Jane identifies do not pretend that we can excavate away the strata that we don’t like. Instead, they call for our coming to wisdom and understanding and peace through the spiritual disciplines of meditation, prayer and godly living.

As for my continuing encounter with grace and judgment, I find inspiration from my own president, Barack Obama who said, “But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.”

It’s fun and wonderfully inspiring to reconnect with friends of years past. One such reconnection has made possible an energizing correspondence with Jane (Bishop) Halteman, a mother, journalist and spiritual mentor. Recently she and her husband Jim moved from the western suburbs of Chicago to South Bend. She knows the literature of spiritual memoir and finds opportunities to practice and teach spiritual disciples. I asked her to write a guest blog. I’m pleased to share the following with you.

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I find something very alluring about spiritual memoir.  Having read Kathleen Norris, Anne Lamott, Henri Nouwen, Teresa of Avila, and a host of others, I’ve long dreamed of writing faith journey stories–my own, others’, maybe my own where it intersects with others’.

My present interest in spiritual story-telling, I assume, is informed by my college journalism degree and subsequent newspaper and public relations work.  Along side of those experiences co-exists my much more recent foray into spiritual direction studies and walking beside folks as they journey through life.

Not long ago my discovery of Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s website kindled my interest in spiritual memoir in a new way.  She defines spiritual memoir as a genre in which one writes about life “with particular attention paid to the mysteries of that life. It uses the material of the past and present to ask (questions like) what is the source of my existence? What makes me tick? What gives me breath, or hope, or inspiration? Invariably, spiritual memoir places one’s life in relationship to something greater…”

Artist Meinrad Craighead, known for her images of God as the Great Mother, adds these compelling words to the discussion of spiritual memoir:  “To recognize that mystery (of life), we must go down deep into ourselves, into that place where the walls of our being are layered with our own memories.”

Three qualities make spiritual memoir unique, according to Jarrett Andrew.  “First, the writer of spiritual memoir works to uncover, probe, and honor what is sacred within his or her own life story.”

Second, “the writing itself becomes a means for spiritual growth. Often the writer stumbles on this strange occurrence mid-draft, suddenly discovering that writing can be an avenue for prayer, or a means of wrestling with angels, or a form of contemplation.”

Third, “the writer works to tell his or her story in such a way that the experience of the sacred is made available to the reader.”

Jarrett Andrew adds this nugget to the lure of writing spiritual memoir:  “We each have a wealth of memories to draw from; we each have the capacity to revisit a memory until it’s fleshed out with details; and every memory has an emotional stake (why else do we remember?) that points beyond the details to some truth about what it means to be human.  The self isn’t just any tool; it’s our best tool.”

My personal challenge for the new year is to begin the journey toward unearthing memories that date back almost 50 years–devastating memories of youthful losses that I hope to rechannel in redemptive ways by planning a memorial at my high school to celebrate the lives of some 10 young people who died while still in school or very soon after graduation.  One was my boyfriend in 1962…another was my brother 12 years later.  In keeping their stories alive (both in writing and via other memorial activities), I hope to help bring closure in my own life and the lives of families and friends close to those who died too soon.

Dan Hess’s college classes inspired me to write; interestingly enough, stumbling across his blog in January 2011 led to reconnecting with him and ultimately to his suggestion to plan a memorial.  I am grateful beyond measure on both counts.

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This is Dan again. I shall ask Jane whether I may share her e-mail address with you.  Thanks, Jane.