How do you like to go up in a swing,                                                                                     Up in the air so blue?                                                                                                                     Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing                                                                                     Ever a child can do!

from “The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember pouring over my hardback copy of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses,  memorizing “The Swing” so I could recite it when I was walking to school or swinging in Harmon Park. In fourth grade, I wrote and illustrated my first book of poetry. And around my family’s supper table, poetry was served up nightly.

I grew up in a sanctuary of poetry. My father, a poet and teacher of poetry, claimed that everyone has a poem in his hidden head. It was his life’s mission to tease those poems out of budding poets’ hidden heads.

Doug H. was a hulking, second-year high school senior. When my dad visited his school for a poetry residency, his teacher took him aside to prepare him for Doug. He won’t do anything, she said, but if you leave him alone, he will just sit quietly in the back. True to form, Doug’s sullen shape cast a foreboding silhouette in the corner of the classroom. He was a presence.

As students bent over their desks, writing themselves out of their hidden heads, Doug alternately looked on and slept. On the final day of the residency, my dad asked students to think of a person who had made a mark on their lives, a person whose life and work deeply mattered to them. Then, he instructed, think of that one object that most represents that person. For my father, it would be his duck decoys, he said, and for my father-in-law, his tackle box. Write about that object. 

In a cinematic moment made for Lifetime television, Doug raised his head from the desk, searched his pocket for a pencil, removed a single sheet of notebook paper, and began to write. My dad recalls that he walked about the room watching students write, but he stayed clear of Doug, not wanting to spook him. At the end of the session, students passed their poems to the front, and my dad quickly read through them, selecting a few to be read aloud.

When my dad came to Doug’s poem, “Grandpa,” he understood, once more, the power of the hidden head.

Grandpa

He was six foot three                                                                                                              with old age                                                                                                                          carved on his face.            

He usually sat                                                                                                                                in a rocker                                                                                                                                       whittling a stick                                                                                                                               and humming                                                                                                                                 a certain song.

He was rocking                                                                                                                                 one day                                                                                                                until he rocked                                                                                                                                 no more.

Eyes and mouth                                                                                                                                I shut,                                                                                                                                         stick and knife                                                                                                   on the floor.                         

Doug H.

As my dad read Doug’s poem aloud, anonymously, a pall fell upon the room until one student exclaimed, Who wrote that? As was my dad’s practice, he let the poet claim his own work–or not. From the corner of the room, Doug said, I did. Although no one in the room spoke, it was evident that something sacred had happened, something that all would remember as an authentic testament to the power of poetry.

This would be a great story for the sanctuary of poetry if it ended right there. But it does not. Several years later when my dad was traveling through that town en route to another residency, he stopped at a local gas station. Just as he was about to fill his car, he heard a voice: Hey, do you remember me? It was a grown-up Doug, now working at the local gas station. I do, my dad said. Doug smiled, patted his back pocket and announced, I’ve got my poem with me still. Right here. 

In the sanctuary of poetry, we all would do well to carry our best poems–or someone’s best poem–in our pockets. Daily. For the words of these poems, the poems that come dearly from the hidden head, are the words of life, the words of beauty and truth, the words of pain and wisdom. They are the words that anchor us to all that matters.

In the introduction to the anthology, Few Shape Absence Into Memorable Air, my dad writes: A very few of these poems occurred as gifts. More, like diamonds, were given worth by force. All are crystallizations of solitudes now past. 

In the sanctuary of poetry, there are those rare poems that burst from the hidden head as gifts. Almost perfect in their imagery and prosody. On that day in that Nebraska classroom, Doug’s poem was a genuine gift–to the sanctuary of poetry, but most importantly, to him.

But most, as my dad writes, take their worth by force. In reading through my dad’s notebooks, I am profoundly moved by the force through which his poetry was crafted. Sometimes a line is changed, sometimes a single word. Sometimes a stanza is removed, sometimes a single line retained. Yet in the end, the poem, the crystallization of solitudes now past, remains. What has been taken by force for the writer becomes a gift for the reader.

If I were to carry a single poem in my pocket, I would find it unbearingly difficult to choose a single Don Welch poem. In the sanctuary of poetry, however, it is also permissible to carry poems in the pockets of our hearts and souls. And these pockets are deep enough to house as many poems as we want to store there.

I do know the first poem I will place into my heart’s pocket, though. Taken by force through countless revisions, this poem is one that has certainly won the Doug-stamp-of-approval.

LINES FOR MY FATHER

I love you, old man, in our time.                                                                                         The shotgun cradled in your arm,                                                                                       the marbled wood,                                                                                                                    the varnished sky.

The milo’s cut.                                                                                                                          The fence holds leaves.                                                                                                          The thicket has its quail                                                                                                        and  final green.

We walk.                                                                                                                                       We clot in time.                                                                                                The fence sings birdless                                                                                                            in the wind.

Don Welch

I’m  fool for a good story. Years ago when I drove five hours for meetings at Buena Vista University and then five hours back on the same day, I survived the hours in the car by listening to books on tape. As much as I wanted to get out of the car and fall into my own bed at home, if the story was good–and much to my family’s dismay–I would often sit in the driveway or circle the block to hear the end. Yes, I am a fool for a good story.

Good is clearly in the eye of the reader, though. You might enter into a story–much like you board a cruise ship–for sheer escape. Only a few pages in, and you are comfortably stretched out on your deck chair, a cold beverage with complimentary paper umbrella by your side. For the remains of the cruise, you leave the mundane, the local, and the inevitable behind you. When the cruise ends, reluctantly, you return to your life–your real life–but momentarily happier for living in a fictional world with neat and easy resolutions.

Cruise ship stories flourish in airports, waiting rooms, and break rooms. Easy in, easy out. I have bought many of these page-turners in my life and found them good for the times and in the circumstances I read them.

But the good stories, the stories that I return to time after time, are not cruise ship adventures. These stories, like naval destroyers, shove their keels through ice and waves, wholly committed to their routes. They do not invite lounging or escaping, but rather pull their readers–sometimes violently–towards their resolutions. And there is nothing neat or easy about these resolutions.

Southern gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor, writes good stories. O’Connor once received a letter from a reader who complained that one of her stories had left a bad taste in her mouth. To which O’Connor replied, “You weren’t supposed to eat it.” Touche. Still, there is something deeply and personally unnerving about a Flannery O’Connor story. She draws you in and lulls you into empathizing with a character you believe is moral and good, a character you believe is much like you. Until, like the destroyer, she pushes through to the character’s core, which is not moral and not good. She strips you of your pretenses and leaves you humbly begging for mercy. These are good stories. The best stories.

At the end of one of her most widely anthologized stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor ends with a poignant scene in which the Misfit, a criminal and murderer, confronts the Grandmother, a nice Christian lady. The Misfit and his men have come upon the family’s car by the side of the road and have systematically killed the Grandmother’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. Only the Grandmother remains, begging for her life.

O’Connor helps us to see the Grandmother’s weak claim to Christianity and her tenuous faith. Even the Misfit sees through her religious veneer and reminds her that she has nothing to fear if she really believes what she says she does. Moments before he shoots her, the Grandmother finally falls to her knees, reaches out to touch the Misfit, and cries, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” Here, she sees what she has been unable and unwilling to see her entire life: the Misfit, too, is a child of God.

After shooting her, the Misfit turns to his partner in crime, Bobby Lee, and says, She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. Now this is a line to end a good story, a line to live by! Wouldn’t we all be good people if there was somebody there to shoot us every minute of our lives? I have carried this line with me for years, using it as a litmus test before committing myself to crucial words and deeds. If a gun was to my head, what would I say? What would I do? 

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is, O’Connor wrote. In the sanctuary of good stories, readers lose themselves to words and find themselves in transformative meaning.

O’Connor understood that the type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose]. There are few writers today who would ever consciously link reality with mystery.  And yet this is precisely what makes O’Connor’s stories good: she looks, unblinkingly, into the face of reality with all of its ugliness, evil, and despair, while holding fast to, and offering up the mystery of grace and goodness.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose]. In the sanctuary of a good O’Connor story, readers will find its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass. This realm will neither transport him to the deck chair or soothe him with neat endings. In truth, this realm will ask a reader for much but will also deliver much in return.

Stories of all kinds have sustained me through my life as a student, teacher, and reader. The  really good stories, however, have surprised me with insights into myself and my world that I could never have imagined. I would be lying if I told you that these surprises were generally pleasant ones; most have rocked me to my very core, revealing darkness and decay.

But when, in the sanctuary of a good story,  I find myself confronted with such “surprises”,  I hold fast to the words of Flannery O’Connor: The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. 

Complement: a thing that completes or brings to perfection

As my father was teaching in a classroom or writing in his office on the campus of the University of Nebraska Kearney, three blocks away in my family home, my mother, his complement, was faithfully, humbly holding down the fort. Literally. With a teaching husband, five children, and a backyard full of homing pigeons, our fort desperately needed holding down.

My mother has always been my father’s first, best reader. Even in the early years, when she knew little about poetry, she read, she listened, and she encouraged. Through time, she became an accomplished and critical reader whose discerning eye and ear rivaled those with formal credentials. As I was reading through a notebook of my dad’s unpublished poetry, I found–handwritten–Marcia at the bottom of many pages. These were the poems that passed the test. The keepers, according to my father’s complement.

Whereas my father’s words sustained me throughout my adolescence, my mother’s physical presence sustained me. Before I left for school, when I returned from school or school activities, at bedtime when others were sleeping and I could never find sleep, my mother was there. When I competed in high school track, my mother was one of few hometown spectators in the stands of outstate Nebraska tracks. Braving all sorts of inclement weather, my mother would wear garbage bags to protect herself and the whole team’s stash of Hersey bars, crackers, and cookies. A green plastic visor kept rain from her eyes as she cheered us on and, later when the bus would return us to Kearney, she would rub the cold from our bones.

In the sanctuary of complements, there is the one to complete you and bring you to perfection. The one may live primarily in the foreground or in the background. It’s the coupling, the sublime matching of one soul to another that, in the end, matters.

For every “great” idea that my dad had–making snow ice cream and using yellow food coloring to make it more festive (really, dad???), doctoring up his homemade fudge with a variety of added ingredients, like red hots (really, dad???), facilitating our pre-bedtime jumping from my sister’s twin bed to mine, jumping that resulted in breaking several slats from both beds (really, dad???)–my mother complemented him with even better ideas: why not use blue or red food coloring to make the snow ice cream NOT appear like you scooped the snow up from under the pigeon loft? (yes, mom!!!); have you considered using walnuts in your fudge instead of red hots (yes, mom!!!); and how about a great bedtime story in lieu of bed-jumping (probably a better idea, mom).

As my dad was meeting with and mentoring students, my mom was meeting with and mentoring neighbors, advocating for those less able and fortunate in our community, and opening her home to any and everyone who needed a home-cooked meal and a temporary refuge from the cares of the world. My son, Quinn, and his UNK football friends still rave about my mom’s spreads and my dad’s football talk. In the sanctuary of complements, you really do get the best of both worlds.

Just last night as I was lying in bed, an image of my dad (circa 1975) came to me. He entered my English 100 class, having dressed himself and escaped from home before my mom could give him the “look over.” Imagine this: my dad decked out in maroon polyester flared pants (well, it was the 70s), a red, button-down shirt (he claimed that it, too, was maroon and therefore, “matched”), and the piece de resistance? An olive green cardigan sweater. A friend and fellow classmate turned to me and gasped, “Has your mom seen him?” After class, I ran back to my dorm room to make the emergency call to my mom who, over lunch, remade my father and sent him back to class looking more like himself and less like a color-challenged Mr. Rogers. This is why we all need a complement. To look us over, check us out, remake what needs remade, and send us happily and completely on our way.

So here’s to complements! May you ever rejoice in your perfect pairing, your yin to another’s yang, your foreground to another’s background, your red hots to another’s walnuts!

And here’s to my mother, Marcia Welch. In the sanctuary of complements–and in the spirit of the Olympic Games–she is the gold medalist, indeed.

For my father and mentor                                                                                                       Don Welch 1932-2016

SWIFTS

Is it true we enter heaven                                                                                           through chimneys

no longer resting on stub tails    our beaks                                                         in bricks’ cracks

Is this what it is to go solely                                                                                 As wing

to be loved by the sky

Tell me   wise ones   how many flits                                                                           add up to glee

in an air territorial   one                                                                                      that’s driven out jays

and if spirit’s not iridescent      with what                                                                    does light play

Don Welch

To go solely as wing, to be loved by the sky, gleefully and sweetly released into the sanctuary of spirit and light. That is precisely how my father left this earth.

Years ago, in a song whose title I no longer remember, I was taken by the words beautiful agony. A paradox, indeed. And yet, as agonizing as the last days of a loved one’s life may be for those who cannot imagine a world without him or her, they may also be incredibly beautiful. For me, my family, and countless friends and colleagues, these days were beautiful, filled with reverence and great love for my father’s life and legacy.

In the sanctuary of sweet release, there is beauty in the going–as well as in the coming to those chimneys through which all swifts enter heaven. And if spirit’s not iridescent? I can hear my father’s voice, feel the very rhythms of his speech–rhythms that have long sustained and shaped me–as he answers, with what would light play? 

How immeasurably blessed all of us have been to play in the light of my father, your friend, colleague, and teacher.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of a restless bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

So writes American author, Sherwood Anderson, in his story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio. And aren’t all of our stories ultimately the stories of hands? Hands that enfold infant hands–small, powdery snails, curled into sleeping fists–hands that tuck rogue wisps of hair back into place, hands that clasp in prayer and applause, hands that tease life back into the lifeless, hands that find their rightful places in other hands, and hands, like Wing Biddlebaum’s, that beat the air into meaningful space.

Anderson continues by writing:  

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. 

Wing’s restless hands had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. But best of all–and tragically misunderstood by most–his hands encouraged, affirmed, cared for, and loved his students.

Having been dismissed from his teaching post, Wing lives in relative seclusion, willing his hands to quiet obscurity. Anderson ultimately leaves us with a final, powerful scene:

Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal, and setting up a folding cot by the screen door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light below the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary. 

Biddlebaum is much like John Updike’s Flick Webb, an ex-basketball- player-turned-gas-station-attendant, a man whose hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench. It makes no difference to the lug wrench though. Such exquisite, expressive hands fighting to survive in a world of strawberry-picking and tire-changing! Hands that may have been mistaken for those of a devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary and yet they were spurned, dismissed, bound by circumstances and misunderstanding.

In the sanctuary of hands, we would urge such fine hands from their greasy overall pockets, sing to them the words of affirmation, long forgotten, long silenced. We would watch them fly into the expression of their yearning.

And those hands that are not fine and nervous on the lug wrench, hands that become natural extensions of the tools they hold? In the sanctuary of hands, we celebrate them, too: hands that patiently bait hooks for children who cast recklessly into the wind, hands that darn socks and knead dough, hands that throw perfect spiral passes, hands that hammer, cut, and plane. The stories of such hands are also worth books in themselves.

When words fail us, hands seldom do. Instinctively, they move, their muscle-memory too strong, too resilient to remain pocketed.

I have watched the hands of the hospice workers who have visited my father in the last days. Daily, these hands have sustained us. All of us. They have taken vitals, bathed, bandaged, cleaned, and held our grieving hands until they could stop shaking. It is clearly the job of poets to write about these hands. For they are the hands of the devotees moving assuredly through decade after decade of our rosaries.

My dad’s homing pigeon loft

Growing up in Kearney, Nebraska with a boatload of homing pigeons in lovingly maintained backyard lofts, home has always held such a uniquely ornithological bent. For my family and me, home has always involved pigeons.

And the fact that these pigeons have such a keen homing sense–some flying 500 miles from Texas to Kearney in a single day–makes our family home a place to which birds, children, their children, and friends return time and again. Our collective homing instinct for 611 West 27th Street is undeniably strong.

My siblings and I delighted our elementary classes with annual pigeon visits. Armed with a small canvas crate and a pigeon, we would lead our classmates to the playground, where we would release the pigeon amidst our teachers’ and friends’ cheers. The pigeon, bearing a class message in a small capsule attached to its leg, would fly several blocks to my family home. And then my dad would retrieve the message from the pigeon’s leg, so we could take it back to class the next day. Positive proof of the bird’s homing instinct. In one local newspaper photo, I was captured releasing a pigeon for my fourth grade class: Shannon Welch releases a homing pigeon (see blur) on the playground of Park Elementary School. 

Blue bars, grizzles, checks–all names for different kinds of homing pigeons, names found quickly within the pages of the national Racing Pigeon Digest, names that laced through dinner table talk, and names that became an integral part of our family vernacular.

Blue bar                     Photographer: George De La Nuez

In the sanctuary of homing, birds and people give into their heart instincts and move purposefully towards home. Through plains’ wind and rain, in spite of the compulsion to water and rest, we all drive on. My mom and I were just talking about my 13 hour drives from Wisconsin to Kearney. Stopping once for a bathroom break and with a trusty supply of peanut M & Ms on the passenger seat beside me, I drove on. Like my father’s pigeons, I had eyes for only one thing: home.

Homing pigeons take to the air to mark the start of Idaho’s annual Festival of Flight.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GREG KRELLER, IDAHO PRESS-TRIBUNE/AP

In Robert Frost’s narrative poem, “The Death of the Hired Man, ” Mary, the female protagonist, says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In the sanctuary of homing, we have to go there. I beg to differ with Thomas Wolfe who wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. Not only can you go home again, for many (most?) of us, you must go home again. And when you do, they “have to take you in.” This is where you belong–through biology, through adoption, through spirit.

Homing is bone-bred. Miles from the places we call home, our bones quiver, pulsing like an anatomical GPS, urging us surely forward.

In G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands, a medley of fables, poetry, and original drawings, he writes:

It was his home now. But it could not be his home until he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son. 

In the sanctuary of homing, we are all prodigals. Having gone from and returned, we earn the right to announce, I’m home. And for those of us who are truly blessed–pigeons or people–the right to hear these homing words: Well done, my good and faithful servant.

For most of my life, praise seemed like such an other-worldly, churchy thing. Praise lived alongside liturgies and homilies and sacraments. To offer praise seemed more a prescriptive act than an natural one.

But as my faith matured–thanks to incredible mentors and writers–I came to see praise as the  most natural expression of gratitude, of honor and affirmation. My children kid me mercilessly about not waving when I pass them on the highway. What are you doing? Why don’t you ever see us? To which I respond, I’m singing. Sorry, but I can’t sing and wave at the same time. 

Honestly, I’ve had some of my greatest praise moments, alone in the car, singing loudly–and mostly on pitch. Likewise, I’ve had moments that are indelibly etched in my praise memory when I’ve been holding sleeping babies in the middle of the night, looking at the stars in a clear, winter sky, and walking alone.

Several years ago, I co-wrote a song, “Sanctuary of Praise,” for our church praise team. This song, in so many ways, has become a theme song for my life. Here are a few stanzas:

I see God in the smallest things                                                                     in my ordinary days                                                                                 Folding clothes and making beds                                                                     will be my act of praise

As I watch my children sleep                                                                             in the quiet of the dawn                                                                                     Jesus folds us in His arms                                                                                 where we belong

And oh, my Father has come home with me                                                   I’ve invited Him here to stay                                                                           and in this ordinary place                                                                               we’ve made a sanctuary of praise.

In my sanctuary of praise, folding clothes and making beds, making Playdoh animals with my grandchildren, and tooling up the Des Moines River with my husband at the helm of his jon boat are authentic acts of praise.

Just the other night, my father was telling me of a recurrent image he has had since adolescence: Jesus, arms stretched wide open, standing in a field surrounded by workers–gritty, earthy, lost and helpless humans. This, he explained, is a picture of the pre-church Jesus, the Savior who dares to love the unlovable, who dares to live among the dirty and the hopeless. This is the Savior whose sanctuary moves with him into leper colonies, desert places, solitary mountain tops, gutters and back alleys, taverns and soup kitchens, refugee camps and prisons. And this is the Savior whose sanctuary is omnipresent and yet transcendent, earthly and yet holy.

Evangelist Billy Graham writes:

The highest form of worship is the worship of unselfish Christian service. The greatest form of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and helpless.

Billy Graham, like my father, understands that the most sacred music in the sanctuary of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and the helpless. 

Those who enter the sanctuary of praise may sacrifice, serve, and seek. They might sing mightily or sit quietly awaiting that still small voice. Some may perform simple acts in simple settings, for all praise is worthy praise.

So if you see me driving down the highway, the window open, my left arm dangling in the summer air, most likely I will be singing my praise, lustily, lost in the moment.

My great grandmother’s postage-stamp quilt (bottom) in my granddaughter’s bedroom

In contrast to the sanctuary of ingenuity, we may also take refuge in the sanctuary of everyday use. This is a sanctuary of pragmatism and utility, of ordinary things and days.

When I was teaching college and high school literature courses, I relished teaching Alice Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use.” I remember sitting in my community college office, reading this story for the first time. Wholly oblivious to the fact that there were other colleagues and students around me, I literally shouted, “Amen!” as I reached the end. This story deserves a hearty “Amen”–and more.

Set in the 1960s, Walker’s protagonist is a black mother of two adult daughters, Maggie–who lives at home with her mama–and Dee–who has left for the city and a better life. Early in the story, she describes her protagonist:

In real life, I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather.

Walker’s plot centers on a visit from Dee, who returns to the family home with her boyfriend. Dee, who has renamed herself Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo to honor her new identity, is immediately smitten with the milk churn in her family home. She announces that she will use the top of it as a “centerpiece for her alcove table” and she will think of “something artistic to do with the dasher.” As she moves through the house, however, she finds something even more desirable than the old milk churn: two old family quilts, a Lonestar pattern and a Walk Around the Mountain pattern. Both are made from pieces of her grandma and grandpa’s clothing, as well as from her great grandfather’s Civil War uniform.

When her mother offers newer, machine-stitched quilts that will “hold up better” and reveals that she has promised these quilts to Dee’s younger sister, Dee/Wangero cries, “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

To which, her mother responds: “God knows I been saving ’em up long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!”

In the end, the mother snatches the quilts from Dee and places them in Maggie’s lap. She chooses everyday use over decoration, leaving her eldest daughter quiltless and clueless.

Last fall at a church auction, my husband and I bid on, and ultimately bought, an old metal Case tractor–a collector’s item still in the original box–for an amount I will not disclose. (It was for a good cause!) The next morning when we went to pick up our granddaughter for church, Paul presented our grandson with the tractor. Before anyone could say a thing, Paul had removed it from the box and was on the floor, tractor in hand, beckoning Griffin to play.

In the sanctuary of everyday use, pricey collectible tractors are loosed from their precious boxes and, as toy tractors will, take their places among their Dollar Store contemporaries. They are pulled and pushed through sand and dirt, they are forgotten and left in the rain, they are used, and they are loved. Best of all, they are not heralded to be anything more than they were intended to be.

Great grandmother’s china will leave the china hutch in this sanctuary. And though there be chips and cracks, though the painted roses may fade and the cup handles broken, ordinary families will eat their dinners from this china. And their everyday use, like comfort food, will be deeply satisfying.

My great grandmother’s postage-stamp quilt hangs from a small wooden ladder in my granddaughter’s room. But it has been–and undoubtedly will be–used. Its worn edges and faded pastels give testament to a century of use. And if Gracyn uses it to make a tent, to host a picnic for her dolls, or to curl under with a good book, so be it. In the sanctuary of everyday use, this is expected. And applauded.

Painted on stockings during WWII

The scene: two weeks before Christmas, 1988, lunch time

The players: Megan, age 6, Collyn, age 4, and Marinne, age 3 (and me, their mom)

Megan: Mom, you gotta see this! Look what Collyn made!    

Me (standing at the sink, washing dishes): Just a minute .  .  . (this was my stock phrase to buy time)      

Megan: You better hurry before she eats it–            

Me (turning towards the counter where the girls were eating their baloney and cheese sandwiches): I’m coming!

Collyn: (proudly displaying a blue plastic plate with a nativity scene created from white bread, baloney, and processed cheese) Look, I chewed out the whole scene with my teeth!                    

Megan: You can see the little baloney Jesus in the bread manger. And the cheese wisemen can stand up by themselves!  

Marinne: I like it!  

Me (incredulous): Wow.

Collyn: Can we keep it?        

Megan: She means can we spray it with that clear stuff that makes it last. You  know, so we can keep it and put it out at Christmas every year  

Me: We’ll see .  .  . (my other stock phrase to buy time) 

In the sanctuary of ingenuity, a nativity scene chewed lovingly from white bread, baloney and sliced cheese is less a wonder than a challenge. You have the makings of a sandwich that you don’t want to eat: what can you make with it? how can you transform it before our very eyes?

Sometimes ingenuity comes at a moment just like this. You are comfortably sitting in your home (or wherever), and the opportunity for ingenuity arises. So you take it because you want to and because you can. And from these moments, you discover new and more efficient ways to cut your watermelon, to tie a silk scarf, to braid your daughter’s hair, to substitute an ingredient in a recipe you desperately want to make–but for which you lack one crucial ingredient, to decorate a room on a dime, to jimmy-rig a riding lawn mower so it will run again, etc.

But just as often, ingenuity is born from need. Sometimes desperate need. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Lovers of the Poor,” she writes of the volunteers from the Ladies Betterment League who make their scheduled visits to Chicago’s poor. Having romanticized their mission work and the recipients of their largesse, these volunteers are ultimately appalled at the sights, sounds, and smells they find in the projects:

They have never seen such a make-do-ness as                                                             Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”                                                                   Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich                                                               Rugs of the morning (tattered, the bespattered. . .)                                                     Readies to spread clean rugs for the afternoon.                                                             Here is a scene for you. 

To be ingenious is to make do in the face of poverty and want, to roll out newspaper rugs for your guests. Depression era survivors used their ingenuity to find countless uses for those ordinary things we unthinkingly throw in the garbage: left-over pieces of aluminum foil, plastic butter tubs and Cool Whip containers, scraps of fabric and automobile parts. During WII, ingenious females drew fine lines up the back of their bare legs to simulate the hosiery that was neither available or affordable. In lean times, all clamor to enter the sanctuary of ingenuity.

  Consider the world’s foremost online sanctuary of ingenuity: Pinterest. Enter this sanctuary and be sorely amazed! You can learn how to become a real-life MacGyver who, armed with a box of paper clips, can save the world–or at least make some cool jewelry. You can make perfect pancakes with a squeeze bottle, organize a drawer of cords with toilet paper tubes, remove a stripped screw with a rubber band, rub deodorant stains out of your clothes using old pantyhose, and unclog a drain with Alka Seltzer and white vinegar. With a little help from your Pinterest friends, your make-do-ness will guarantee you a spot in the ingenuity hall of fame.

For in the sanctuary of ingenuity, a paper clip is never just a paper clip, a cereal box never just a cereal box. That is the beauty of ingenuity: something’s destiny is never bound by its original form or function.

If we can look at a paper clip or a baloney and cheese sandwich with new eyes, why not a struggling student, an aging neighbor, a despairing man, woman, or child? Why not a person–any person? Maybe I will create a Pinterest site for those who want to enter this sanctuary of ingenuity and be just as amazed at the ways in which we can transform our perceptions of those around us.

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. John 16:33

When I hear the word assurance, in most cases today, it is being used in the context of financial, political, or educational assurances. In the sanctuary of assurances, however, blessed is always the context for assurance. Assurance has less to do with the world and much more to do with that which has overcome the world.

For there will be worldly troubles: ordinary and extraordinary troubles, inevitable and unexpected troubles. But just as assuredly as trouble blackens your life, so may peace and comfort lighten and overcome it.

For years, I have taught W. H. Auden’s poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” based–in large part–on Pieter Breughel’s painting, The Fall of Icarus. This is a stunning painting of a sparkling ocean, a luxury liner, a ploughman on a fertile hillside, and–last but not least–Icarus, the boy who dared to fly too close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his feathered wings together.

I remember searching the painting for the boy. Surely, he was the protagonist; surely, Breughel would highlight his fall and subsequent death in the sea. After scanning the painting for minutes, I remember actually gasping aloud when I discovered two small white legs in the bottom left corner of the painting. This, as poet William Carlos Williams later wrote in his poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” was “Icarus drowning.”

This was Icarus drowning? These were the remnants of the boy who once flew gloriously towards the sun, his father in tow? This was the end of a life? Two insignificant legs relegated to the bottom corner of a masterpiece?

As I have grown and matured in my faith, I have often thought of Auden and Breughel, of William Carlos Williams and all those who may have no assurance but the assurance that suffering has a “human position”, that it inevitably occurs when others are immersed in living, uninterested in and unaware of the fact that another’s life was being ravaged.

Musee des Beaux Arts                                                                                                                 W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,                                                                               the Old Masters; how well, they understood                                                                         Its human position; how it takes place                                                                             While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;       How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting                                           For the miraculous birth, there must always be                                                      Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating                                          On a pond at the edge of the wood:                                                                                  They never forgot                                                                                                                     That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course                                                     Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot                                                                                     Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse                   Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.                                                                                   In  Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns                                         Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may                                                   Have the splash, the forsaken cry,                                                                                             But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone                                              As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green                                     Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen                                       Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,                                                                 had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

At this point in my life, I would like to take Auden, Brueghel, and Williams out for coffee. Then, captive in my presence, I would like to say to them: About suffering, you are wrong. There is an assurance, a blessed assurance, that one’s suffering does not define him or her. Nor does it define the world in which we live. 

I remember having to pack my car up to leave my family’s home in Nebraska to return to my life in Wisconsin or Iowa. The night before I would leave was always filled with dreadful anticipation of the moment the following morning when, my car packed and several goodbyes later, I would round the corner and no longer be able to see my home. With assurance, however, I came to dread less, for I knew that my parents would stand outside my home and wave until I was completely out of sight. This assurance carried me to new homes in other states.

As I sit at the bedside of my father, surrounded by my siblings and my mother, I take solace in the blessed assurance of God’s abiding love and comfort. And I take solace in the blessed assurance of the hospice workers and volunteers, of friends who appear with just the right supplies, just the right words, and arms to wrap you in.

And as I watch my parents greet those who have come to see my father, to hold his hand and to tell him how much his work, his very life has meant to them, I am constantly in awe of the assurance they give to each visitor. They blessedly assure each worker, volunteer, and friend that they matter, that they are appreciated and respected. In the sanctuary of this blessed assurance, we momentarily overcome the troubles of this world: cancer, grief, and loss.

We find sanctuary in the assurance of Jesus’s words: Take heart! I have overcome the world.