Goldenrod
  
 Goldenrod takes the fields
 who wave their happy hands
 like parade queens.
 It’s all in the wrist, they say.
 A turn to the east
 and back to the west,
 a maized rhythm made certain
 by the metronome of wind.
  
 In late September, 
 I feel all my honeyed years 
 bend in the breeze--this way, 
 then that.
  
 For a moment, I slow--
 my ragged breath a sharp reminder
 of age.
 But in the next, I walk as a school girl,
 open and golden,
 the day, a gift to be unwrapped. 
 Present then past,
 this way, then that.
  
 It’s all in the wrist, 
 I say to the flaxen fields before me
 and wave my honeyed years 
 for all they’re worth. 

“Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.” Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur

Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French-American soldier who later became a farmer, first recorded the term Indian summer in his 1778 Letters From an American Farmer. We continue to use the term to describe unseasonably warm, summer-like weather that precedes the frost of winter. A short interval of smoke and mildness. For me, sometimes this interval is as good as it gets.

As I was walking the rural roads of southern Iowa last week, I noticed the recent roadside mowing. The county crews had been out for one last job, and as I walked, I plowed through thick piles of grass clippings. I couldn’t help but mourn summer’s roadside bounty: wild chicory, trefoil, Queen Anne’s Lace, tiger lilies, foxtails. Until today, when I came out of mourning and rejoiced. Summer wasn’t giving up. Summer was still showing up. God bless Indian Summer.

 
Last Mowing
  
 After the last mowing,
 the grasses shorn nearly to the earth along Mink Road,
 the wild chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace bloom quickly.
 Their slender stems hold blue violet heads and bridal bonnets
 on doll-sized versions of their summer selves.
 At three or four inches, they are no less lovely
 than they were in late June.  
 In the early days of September,
 they refuse to give in, refuse to welcome the autumn
 that is sure to come.
  
 I walk with my head lowered.
 I can’t get enough of these tiny soldiers
 who muscle through grass clippings and roadside waste.
 These are September’s heroes who have forgotten their place,
 who insist on singing even as the cottonwoods and maples
 drop their leaves.
  
 Today is not a good day to die, they say.
 Today, the world is not enough without us.
 Today, we sing. 

Sometimes, my book worlds collide, and the collision is more splendid than I could ever have imagined. Recently I bought two books: Lost Words, the only coffee table book I’ll ever own, and The Overstory, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestseller. Lost Words, written by Robert Macfarlane and exquisitely illustrated by Jacki Morris , celebrates—and mourns—the passing of 20 words from the natural world: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker, dandelion, fern, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, magpie, newt, otter, raven, starling, weasel, willow, and wren. Macfarlane calls his book a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words, words that he most fears are disappearing from the language of children.

After I could open the book without being wholly consumed by the illustrations, I began to seriously consider the words that Macfarlane identifies as lost. I recall holding the book in my hands, paging from word to word, and thinking No way! Acorn??? Dandelion??? Heron??? Willow??? Living in rural Iowa, these are some of the coolest words I know and use. I have read lists of words that we are losing or have lost, words such as gallivant, kerfluffle, and hootenanny. And I admit that I could lose these words and sleep soundly. But ivy and wren? I would fight for these words, and if they succumbed to those who put them to early deaths, I would write their eulogies and lay flowers on their graves.

Conker, however, made me pause. I scrutinized the illustration of what resembled a buckeye-type nut with a prickly casing. I read the accompanying poem for clues. In the end, I googled it and discovered that conker is the seed of the horse chestnut tree (not to be confused with the sweet chestnut tree which supplies edible nuts). I admit that I have never used the word conker nor heard anyone else use it. And sadly, I admit that I rarely–if ever–use the word chestnut unless I am singing along with Nat King Cole: Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your toes. . .

The Overstory, written by Richard Powers, contains interlocking stories of 12 people who learn to truly see and value trees as ecologically and spiritually indispensable. Most of the characters become activists of some sort, and like Powers himself revealed in a Guardian profile, all find their place in a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans. The opening story centers on the American chestnut tree and the blight that destroyed the 4 billion trees that grew in the eastern U.S. At the turn of the 20th century, the American chestnut was destroyed within 40 years. Today, there is one surviving giant (recently discovered in Maine) that is 115 feet tall, the tallest known tree in North America. The tree is not technically extinct; the species has survived by sending up sprouts from stumps, but these sprouts eventually succumb to the blight, die, and return to the ground.

The American chestnut was distinctive not only for its height but for its value. Its wood was strong and rot-resistant, perfect for log cabins, posts, poles, flooring, and railroad ties. The nuts fed birds, wild animals, hogs, cattle, and people. Some have called the American chestnut the perfect tree. Until Cryphonectria parasitica, a parasitic fungus native to South East Asia, was accidentally introduced to North America. The American Chestnut Foundation claims that this blight was the greatest ecological disaster to strike the world’s forests in all of history.

So when my books worlds collided, there in the dust lay the coupling of Macfarlane’s conker and Powers’ fictional account of a lone surviving American chestnut tree (in Iowa no less). Sadly, conker may go the way of the American chestnut tree: something we remember–for a time–and seasonally celebrate in song. Both are essentially lost, and this loss may be more costly than we can imagine. This, of course, is Powers’ admonition in The Overstory. In a New York Times review of this novel, novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes that this novel intends to tell us that in fact we’re not much more than a sneeze to a bristlecone pine and that the contest for the world’s forests is every bit as important as the struggles between people.

As I walked the other morning, I speculated about the loss of words–and trees–that are an integral part of my life. If we lose the word acorn, will the oak tree be far behind? And what about willow, such a lovely word and even lovelier tree? What would my world be without oak and willow trees? Quite simply, it would be less. Less lovely and less alive.

I concede that some words should gracefully fade into that place where dying words go. Giglet, a merry, light-hearted girl, disappeared from our language (and I, for one, am eternally grateful). As did scurryfunge, a quick tidying of your house between the time you see your neighbor and the time she knocks on the door (I mean who really bothers to quickly tidy up?) Giglet and scurryfunge have left our lexicon–thankfully–and there have been few, if any, mourners.

But consider these 15 words that are used most often today:

Email
Internet
Google
YouTube
Website
Twitter
Texted
iPhone
iPad

I’d hate to think that Twitter edges out kingfisher or that YouTube replaces heather. Our language and our lives are so much richer when the words that name our flora and fauna are living, just as their species are.

Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books that writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live. Powers moved from Palo Alto, California to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where he could live deep in the woods. Today, he admits that walking a trail has become as important to me as writing. And Powers’ new life in the woods is, no doubt, rich with growing things and the language to talk about it.

At the end of Macfarlane’s poem, “Conker”, he writes:

  Realize this (said the Cabinet-maker, the King and
  the Engineer together), conker cannot be made,
  however you ask it, whatever word or tool you use,
  regardless of decree. Only one thing can conjure
  conker--and that thing is tree. 

And so it is with acorns and buckeyes, with so many things we use and lose. Only one thing can conjure them: trees.  

 Flameleaf Sumac
 
 The county crews have poisoned the sumac.
 Around each utility pole, it makes a last stand:
 an army of scarlet fury
 amidst the season’s last green.
 The roadside is ablaze with autumn
 come too soon.
 Summer’s arteries have burst, 
 spilling its life-blood through the land.
  
 I drive to town 
 and cannot keep my eyes on the road.
 To my right and left, carmine and crimson,
 garnet and currant fill the ditches.
 There is such beauty in this dying.
 If you roll down your windows, 
 you can hear the song of sumac,
 a bright, expectant elegy that soars across the fields. 
  
 Here among the sumac, 
 I would like to make my last stand:
 a fiery finish glorious enough
 to stop traffic.
   

 Photo Shoot
 
 Your pink tulle skirt catches
 in the late summer grass
 and for a moment,
 the prairie holds you captive.
 As if a sleeping seed awakened,
 sliding, shooting upward, breaking
 the earth’s skin and standing tall,
 one honey-haired blossom
 among the wild chicory and blue stem.
  
 Your mother moves towards you 
 pressing her eye to the camera.
 Surely she sees what I do—
 your childhood untethering here,
 each gossamer piece catching the breeze
 and escaping, petal by petal,
 into this sacristy of late July.
  
 I long to frame this legacy of loveliness:
 a mother’s soft eyes,
 a daughter’s well-kept heart, 
 both eager to unfurl themselves into time
 forever backlit by a golden and forgiving sun.
  
 But even as I try to hold the moment,
 I see the light casting long shadows from the tree line,
 burnishing pink to mauve.
 And so I vow to celebrate the evening,
 the hour in which you bloomed so brightly
 that I could not mourn the child 
 you were. 

We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A wave of otherness crashed into me when the children of Bambur, Nigeria shouted baturi as my fellow mission workers and I entered their village. In the local language of Hausa, baturi translates as white man. Some children were fascinated and clamored to touch my pale skin. Some were wary and peered at me from behind trees and the dependable skirts of their mothers. Others fled, terrified at the intrusion of such an otherness.

I stood transfixed at the scene before me. I wanted to shout, But wait! I am one of you! See, I have two arms, two legs, a heart that beats just like yours! And yet, even in the throes of my deep and genuine longing to connect, I was painfully aware of the fact that, intentions aside, I was the other. I was a stranger with skin too white, eyes too blue, and a belly much too well-fed.

Author and pastor Jamie Arpin-Ricci write:

It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality. 

In the weeks I spent in Nigeria, my colleagues and I found ourselves sometimes humored and sometimes aghast at what we saw and experienced. We may not have spoken the words, but our quizzical expressions and nervous chuckles barely contained the question we were dying to ask each other: Is this normal? We discovered what appeared to be hundreds of locusts floating in a plastic pail of water, locusts we were told that were intended to be eaten. Normal? We learned that the woman who cooked for us was the only working member in a family of six adults. Normal? We encountered many young girls who carried their infant brothers or sisters on their backs for entire days. Normal? As much as I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t regard my new Nigerian friends as other, my bias was fueled, as Arpin-Ricci suggests, by my assumptions about my own normality. Consciously and unconsciously, I was looking at this new world through a view-finder with an American normal default setting. And if I wanted to see the Nigerians of Jalingo, Bambur, and Jos, this clearly required the other setting.

We live with a multicultural worldview that has spawned new university courses and specialties, solicited literature from around the world to remove the white bias from prevailing anthologies, insisted on inclusion as the answer to all classrooms, neighborhoods, and institutions, and repopulated the former white casts of television series and movies. All this (and more) as a means of eradicating otherness once and for all.

This worldview has also charged that we identify and appreciate those languages, traditions, and customs that make otherness unique. Enter almost any classroom during February (Black History month), and you will find students celebrating the lives and works of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other influential men and women of color. Two months later, you may find American students decorating their classrooms with balloons, flowers and streamers to commemorate Cinco de Mayo. And what mother–or father–hasn’t prepared some customary food or constructed a traditional costume as a part of a their children’s school project featuring another country?

Like many, I often struggle to successfully live this paradox: I should see no otherness/ I should see and value others’ uniqueness. It’s ironic that our well-intentioned desires to acknowledge and celebrate others’ uniqueness are also declarations of otherness. In rural Nigeria, it’s not uncommon for toddlers to live in orphanages until they can responsibly care for themselves and their younger siblings. This is unique yet so far from the normal we know. How do we keep a precious tension between uniqueness and otherness, so that they compliment each other and live easily in a world that is more either/or than both/and?

For lest we believe that the homogeneous nature of our lives will shield us from the problem of otherness, we should remember that it has so many forms. Consider the words of writer Donald Hall:

[O]ver the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying–in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way–but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

The problem of otherness is never defined by race alone. We can be alien and other if we are older, younger, richer, poorer, more educated, less educated, urban or rural. Change the setting on the view- finder, and anyone who can’t be seen within the comfortable range of normal is other. Through my grandson’s eyes, there is something increasingly other about my refusal to do a cartwheel and my barely stifled gasps as he drives me around the yard on the four-wheeler. I’m fast becoming an extraterrestrial other who lives in the distant galaxy called OLD.

I can remember hearing my younger brother sing along with the cast of Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong. . . In truth, we are taught to distinguish what is different. This is standard stuff for kindergarteners who spend countless hours bent over worksheets that direct them to circle what is different in a group of shapes, animals, numbers, things. Identifying same and different is a discrete skill we teach early and well.

In third grade, my son, who is black, had a best friend, a pale, ginger-freckled boy. When his friend’s mother asked how she would recognize Quinn at the choral concert, he replied: Oh, you’ll know him when you see him. He’s got really black hair. He may not have identified Quinn’s skin color as other, but he did identify a trait that distinguished his friend from the group and made him different. One of these things is not like the other.

In truth, there are no quick, easy solutions to the problem of otherness. It is our nature to make distinctions, to discern what is similar and what is different. Likewise, it is our nature to belong, to join a tribe of those like us. And herein lies the heart of the problem: the limits of our human natures. Holocaust victim and writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this all too well:

However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open our behavior, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.

In Galations 5:14, we read: For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In spite of our natures–or perhaps because of them–we are called to love our neighbors in all their otherness. Bonhoeffer knows that the only real conduit between one soul and another is Christ. In the end, all our programs and initiatives, all our best intentions and efforts will fall woefully short. And this is both bad news and good news. Our political and social systems may be destined to flounder, perhaps even to fail, but Christ offers a better way.

Others, like poet Mary Oliver, find a conduit from soul to soul and soul to world by willing entering the mystery and beauty of otherness:

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Like all humans before us, we will continue to struggle with the problem of otherness. We will create new programs, institute new, more inclusive language, and mandate new rules and laws as solutions. Still, I take heart that there are, indeed, better ways. But these ways require surrender to a love and a mystery that take us far beyond the limits of our own natures. In a culture where surrender is most often a sign of weakness and defeat, those who live and promote a better way will undoubtedly be cast as others.

It’s a great art to saunter! Henry David Thoreau

In the early mornings, I walk along a rural road near our house. At times, I’ve embarked upon my walks as exercise, tried to pick up the pace and power walk my way to a healthy elevated heart-rate. As the sun rose, I pumped my arms and moved with purpose. A conqueror of the road, each step an accomplishment in its own right. But on most days, I’ve failed. I’m not a power walker. I’m a saunterer.

To know that I’m in good company–perhaps the greatest company–gives me courage and inspiration. I imagine myself learning the great art of sauntering from the likes of Thoreau, my father, and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who writes:

Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.

This is it exactly: to walk yourself into a state of well-being, into your best thoughts. Like the great saunterers before me, and those that will inevitably come after me, I’ve learned that there is a mysterious and undeniable connection between my feet and my brain. Interestingly enough, executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly studied ants and discovered that when it comes to walking, most of the ant’s thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It’s distributed. It’s in its legs. I’ve long thought that my thinking and decision-making may be as much in my legs as in my brain. For as I’ve walked, as I’ve heard and felt the rhythm of my feet on gravel, I’ve come to simply be. And during these times of simple being, words, images, and sometimes complete thoughts have washed over and through me. These are gifts of immeasurable worth, mysteries of great sauntering.

Father of Virginia Woolf, English author and mountaineer Leslie Stephen writes:

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

As a saunterer, I like the idea of turning my intellect out to play for a season. Too often, I feel constricted by an intellect at work. I long to play, long to throw syllogisms and every analytical compulsion to the wind. Loosed then, I could walk and send my intellect into the fields that have been overtaken by sunflowers. Here, amidst thousands of bright blooms, one can do some serious playing.

Naturalist John Muir saw the holiness of sauntering. He writes:

I don’t like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not ‘hike!’ Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre’, ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.

Mountains or plains, forests or fields, we ought to saunter through them reverently. Sauntering is walking on holy ground. A single thrush, a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, a copse of willows–all sing the abiding songs of creation. Each morning, I pilgrimage To the Holy Land and count my blessings as the road unfolds before me.

Backpacker and writer Colin Fletcher is best known for his book The Complete Walker. In it, he writes:

Frankly, I fail to see how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains can be judged less real than spending six months working eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains.

I confess that I have often regarded my morning walks with the prospect of productivity. After I walk, I say to myself, I will accomplish something: clean the house, write a poem, something, anything. Foolishly, I have regarded walking as a warm-up, a preamble to something productive. But Fletcher’s words humble me, for the walk itself is no less valuable or worthy of my time than writing about it later. The walk is the thing, the only thing. Sauntering for its own sake is golden.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility. Poet Gary Snyder celebrates the balance of heartiness and soul, spirit and humility that great saunterers may experience. My hair unwashed, my eyes rimmed with yesterday’s mascara, I often put my most humble self on the road each morning. Stripped of most pretenses, I walk and sweat. Unadorned and alone, I saunter unabashedly into the day. I like to think that this sauntering self is my best self and that early morning meditations are my best prayers.

Thoreau understood the great art of sauntering and claimed to have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is of taking walks,–who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.

Some mornings, I feel as though his eyes are upon me, the master saunterer looking fondly down on his fledgling. I plan to be a saunterer worthy of Thoreau’s classification of genius. And if I begin to power walk or plan my week, I’ll slow to a saunter, humbled and inspired by all those who walk for its own glorious sake.

 Seasons of Clover 

 Along the Soap Creek bottoms,
 wild clover covers the earth like a violet duvet,
 here for a season, gone tomorrow.
 These are saffron days
 when even in the hollows,
 light teases the shadows, unraveling
 the dark edges of night. 
  
 That this will pass,
 that these days will not last
 is like a descant that lilts above
 the song of seasons. 
  
 Like tangerine dreams which take flight
 and later come to rest, still and spent,
 in dark heaps along the creek bed.
  
 Like happiness, 
 that pink-cheeked child who, for a season,
 dances with rosehipped abandon
 until she returns, ashen, to earth.
  
 Like love
which crowns the buckthorn
and lays hands upon the brambles.
Like love whose filaments--
slight as cottonwood seeds--
rise until we can see them
no more. 
 

“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Every time I read this line from the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” I want to shout: Can I get an amen? Not just because The Misfit pegs the grandmother in this story so accurately, but because O’Connor pegs all of us so accurately. Wouldn’t we all be better women and men if there was someone holding a gun to our heads every minute of every day?

Unlike most of her contemporaries, O’Connor wrote through a pointedly Christian lens. In The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, she wrote:

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. 

For O’Connor, then, a good woman or a good man was solidly in the eye of the only beholder who matters: Christ. Many of her characters lived in little universes of their own choosing until some act of violence, like a real or metaphoric gun to the head, brought them before a mirror where they stood, stripped of their pretensions, alone and sorely in need of grace. O’Connor’s work centers on the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. The problem, however, is one with which she was all too familiar:

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

O’Connor was painfully aware that her audience was largely comprised of people who think God is dead. She knew that this audience put little stock either in grace or the devil. For this audience, her stories were examples of the modern pessimism and violence which characterized much of 20th century literature.

If O’Connor’s works were to be taught as she intended, from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, many literature teachers would undoubtedly be fired–or suspended until they could promise to avoid this perspective in favor of a more psychological one. For these teachers, her characters are not sinners in need of grace but rather victims in need of psychiatry. For them, a good man or woman should be defined by the prevailing social and cultural mores.

I thought about O’Connor as I finished Ian McEwan’s novel, Enduring Love. The story opens dramatically with a young boy inside a hot air balloon which has become untethered. His grandfather clings to the one of the ropes, running and pulling, desperate to bring his grandson to safety. Upon hearing the child’s cries, the novel’s protagonist, Joe Rose, and several other men rush to help the grandfather. They grab the dangling ropes and do their best to hang on to the balloon as the wind threatens to carry it and the child away. When they can no longer hold onto the ropes, Joe and the others–except one man–release their grips, as the wind lifts the balloon from the field. They watch in horror as this man is carried into the air and, finally unable to hold on any longer, falls to his death. The boy is later rescued when the balloon descends miles from the field. After the tragedy, Joe Rose and Jed Parry, one of the others who came to the boy’s assistance, share a few moments of grief.

The novel centers on the relationship between Joe and Jed, one that begins with Jed’s insistence that Joe pray with him before they leave the field. Jed becomes increasingly persistent–calling, writing, and stalking Joe in an attempt to help him see that God loves Joe, just as he loves him. As Jed’s attempts to communicate with Joe escalate, Joe becomes convinced that Jed suffers from de Clerambault’s syndrome, a delusional disorder in which one believes another to be infatuated with him or her. Jed’s infatuation unfolds over the course of the novel. As it does, McEwan appears to lay the groundwork to ultimately reveal that it is Joe—not Jed—who is truly paranoid, that he becomes obsessed with Jed, just as Jed is obsessed with him.

At the end of the novel when he is finally institutionalized after admitting that he did try to kill Joe, that he held his wife at knife point, and then threatened to slit his own throat unless Joe forgave him, Jed stays true to his love for God, his undying love for Joe, and his desire that Joe come to God. Many reviewers turned up their noses at this ending, claiming that it seriously weakened the novel. Better to omit this scene altogether, to continue pulling readers into Joe’s paranoia, to conclude the story as a psychological tale. But to end it with Jed’s unfailing passion for God and for Joe’s soul? As a literary work of the 21st century, this simply would not do.

Jed’s character is much like those of Flannery O’Connor—those characters who appear fanatical, characters whom you want to cast off as crazy or ignorant until she brings their convictions to light, and you realize that you’ve smugly empathized with the wrong character(s) all along. O’Connor ultimately uses violence to shock both her characters and readers into an awareness of her protagonists’ desperate need for grace. McEwan uses violence, too, as he brings Jed and Joe together in a final traumatic scene. Here, I could see that in spite of his delusions about Joe’s love for him, Jed does not suffer from any delusions regarding sin and grace. He clearly sees the real hole in Joe’s heart and understands that only God can fill it. The reviewers haven’t shared my insights, however, finding both Jed and Joe to be psychological victims of their circumstances and of an indifferent, if not hostile, world. In their eyes, neither character constitutes a good man.

But have the critics gotten it wrong with Enduring Love? If O’Connor were alive today, I truly believe that she would say yes. Yes, they got it all wrong. With a single violent and traumatic event, McEwan sets the stage for the possibility of Joe’s conversion. O’Connor would see Joe as an atheist blinded by his devotion to science. She would see Jed as an unlikely but willing disciple who yearns to bring a fellow sinner before God, to open his eyes to the limits of his intellectualism. And when Jed threatens to kill himself and begs Joe to forgive him, she would see this as the pivotal moment of the novel. Gun to the head or knife to the throat, violence can shatter our false sense of control. And humbled then, we can choose to turn to God or to turn away.

O’Connor would understand that it would be more modern to accept Joe as an educated, intelligent man who succumbs to paranoia after a tragic event and encounter with a delusional man than it would be to consider him as a sinner in need of redemption. She would understand that many may argue that the Jed Parrys of the world should be institutionalized. They would be sorely mistaken, though, for Jed emerges as the novel’s true protagonist and as the only good man.

Perhaps good men and women are hard to find because, like Joe and many of O’Connor’s characters, we refuse to see them. And because we do seem to stumble blindly through our lives, often unaware that we cannot see, we may need a proverbial gun to the head. O’Connor wrote:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

We may need writers who shout and draw large and startling figures to bring us to our senses–and to our knees. We need these writers to help us see the good men and women in our midst. They are often easier to find than we believe.

It didn’t surprise me that McEwan’s critics panned the ending of his novel. They don’t have eyes to see Jed as anything but another crazy fanatic. They were disappointed in the novel’s ending because Joe’s paranoia was finally validated as real and not imagined. Sadly, they would have preferred that this paranoia remained imagined, reducing Jed’s presence (and faith) to figments of Joe’s traumatized mind.

Just last week in a commercial advertising a current reality television program, a young man questioned a young woman’s chastity. In the sound bite, he announced his conviction that the marriage bed should be pure. Indignant, she rose from her chair, pointed her well-manicured finger into his face, and claimed that indeed she had had sexual relations and that Jesus still loves me. In the next frame, we see the young man being packed into a waiting car and driven away as the young woman smirks in disgust. It won’t surprise me that many will see the young woman as good and the young man as misguided, at best, and bad, at worst. Many will not regard the young woman as O’Connor might: one who sets up a little universe of her own choosing and who gleefully pronounces a little immoralistic message.

It struck me that I might write Ian McEwan as Flannery O’Connor’s proxy and encourage him to keep up the good fight. But a good fight, like a good man or woman, is clearly in the eye of the beholder. For O’Connor and for me, that beholder is Jesus. I’m not really sure who McEwan’s beholder may be, but I can hope that Jed Parry’s unfailing faith was more than a just fictional account of a delusional man. I can hope that, in McEwan’s heart, Jed Parry is a good man.

 Prayer for the Fawns
  
 From a distance, I see a dark shape
 at the edge of the road.
 A dog, no doubt,
 hit by one of the trucks that takes this corner too fast,
 trucks that carve smooth ribbons of clay into the new gravel
 that the county lays each summer.
  
 Upon nearing, however, I see a smattering of white spots
 on a dew-slicked back.
 And legs, curled tightly as if womb sleeping,
 cocooned in liquid time.
  
 Even in death, there is something expectant here.
 As if these legs would unfurl at any moment, 
 their gleeful joints and sinews stretching,
 their bones so perfectly knit together 
 finding purpose. 
  
 Even in death, these ears fold perfectly
 into soft crescents at the crown.
 I long to run my hand over them 
 the way a mother smooths a child’s hair which spreads  
 like a silk fan across her pillow at night.
 And I long to see the timber—just yards away—
 reach its oaken arms to snatch this life 
 from death.
  
 This is my prayer for the fawns,
 for all that would begin.