Many years ago, as the story has it, someone asked an Inuit folk artist about his method. He replied, “I carve the stone until I discover what is hiding there for me to find.” I write pretty much the same way. Something strikes me, but I don’t yet know why. I hold it in my soul, turn it over and around, carry it with me as I move through my day. Then, when it’s time, I begin to write, and as I do, the story’s meaning emerges piece by piece, layer by layer. By the time I finish, I begin to see why the story speaks to me. Like the Inuit artist, I learn what is hiding in the initial experience, waiting for me to discover it.
The time of my writing about theory and practice in my profession has probably waned. Now I am old and have the time and the taste for the kind of writing I did many years ago. Then, the focus of my work was religious awareness and practice in the fabric of daily family living as it is realistically lived. My theory was that everything is holy in some way. Absolutely everything! I wrote table graces around spilled milk, benedictions around family fracases, dedications of new school shoes and book bags, blessings of firsts and lasts anything.
And this is what I learned, the shape that emerged when I shared my words. I learned that very few readers used my rituals and liturgies as they appeared. What I heard most often was, “We didn’t use your suggestions, but they helped us to recognize and claim the importance and holiness of the rituals we already practice.” My ideas, born of the messiness of my own days, freed readers to acknowledge their own messy births and deaths, learnings and losses, regrets and reconciliations, their own sacred real lives.
As a writer and teacher, then, my discovery was both blessing and curse. I couldn’t get by with the easy answers or rosy pictures. I remember taking my elderly mother with me when I taught a course in parenting as part of the parish adult education program. One mother asked how to deal with her four-year-old’s volcanic temper tantrums. I was delivering a long dissertation on strategic interventions when my mother, rolling her eyes, interrupted from the back of the room: “You do know, she’s a four-year-old after all.” Once again I learned that I had to be real.
Now I’m old. I still love the sound of good words carefully carved. I think I still have something to say. The niche where I spent much of my professional life was the clinical formation of clergy and chaplains, and I am shy now when the community organizers, seminary professors and missionaries in my retirement community speak about areas where I feel very ignorant. While I have marched in my share of picket lines, I don’t begin to know the history of the labor movement in Los Angeles. I religiously sort cans and bottles, but I still can’t keep track of environmental legislation. I think of the old Sam Cooke song, “Don’t know much about geography…”
So I write about the things I’m sure of, the aches and pains of my aging human heart as well as the satisfaction and challenges that are part of being old. Today, I took advantage of our Covid-19 sequestration to clean closets. I boxed up the crochet books I bought whenever I felt flush for the day in my retirement when I would have time for handiwork. Now I have the time, but cannot hold a crochet hook. So as I wrap the package to send to a younger more able friend, I felt an ounce of regret but a pound of satisfaction at having completed one more piece of the process of letting go. Last year, I drove across country to hand onto a much younger bandmate my beloved sent of custom-made bagpipes which I have proudly played for 25 years. It was time. But (and) there is redemption in my story about that moment when it provides a connection with the heart of my congregation in the nursing home or assisted living facility. They listen and remember their own similar experiences with more acceptance, understanding that they are not alone. Like Jacob, in those moments of mutual recognition, we say, “Truly the Lord is in this place, although we did not know it.” (Genesis 28.16) We are not alone.