for Judy

I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor. Do you know your next-door neighbor?  –Mother Teresa

In the last half of my life, I’ve often heard people lament the fact that they don’t really know their neighbors any more. The folks who move into our neighborhoods may live next to us, they say, but that’s about the extent of it. We know very little about their lives except for the types of cars they drive and the number of FedEx deliveries they average a week. For many, neighborhoods are now defined more by geographical proximity than by relationships.

I’m blessed to live close to neighbors with whom I have genuine relationships. I know that I’m one of the lucky ones and understand that this is no small thing. I could answer Mother Teresa honestly: yes, I know my next-door neighbors.

Over the twenty years that I’ve lived here in rural Iowa, my friendship with my neighbor Judy grew. In the early years, our conversations were held in the yard, often with Judy seated atop her John Deere mower. She’d see me walking down the lane towards the mailbox, kill the engine, and we’d catch up on family and life events. She asked about my work at school, about each of my children, and about my family in Nebraska. She asked the kinds of questions that always made me feel truly understood and appreciated. I came away from our conversations feeling as though all was right with the world–or at least all was right in our little corner of the world on 114th Lane.

When I began to write blog posts, Judy quickly became one of my most devoted readers, responding to each piece mere minutes after I’d posted it. I can’t begin to measure my gratitude for her unfailing readership. As I was sitting in my little writing cabin drafting a new post, I’d imagine how she’d soon be sitting in her brown recliner reading my words, sharing a sacred literary connection with me, her neighbor and friend.

In his book, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Works of Fred Rogers, Maxwell King writes:

In everything he wrote, in all the programming he produced, in the life of caring, kindness, and modesty that he led, he set a very clear example. His legacy lives in the concept of a caring neighborhood where people watch out for one another, no matter where they come from or what they look like.

Recently, Judy died. I’ve had days to grieve her passing and to think about the rich legacy she leaves. Certainly, a vital part of this legacy is that she, like Fred Rogers, created a caring neighborhood where people watch out for one another. When the entire world was cloistering during the height of Covid, I lived in a small, protected neighborhood where I could pedal my boat on the pond, watch the birds from my porch, and talk with Judy and my other neighbors across their yards. For months, our world was small and intimate, founded–in large part–upon Judy’s loving care.

Another part of Judy’s legacy is that she leaves behind her son, Kevin, who has lived with and cared for her the past years. He, too, has become an integral part of our neighborhood, a part of a family who looks out for one another. Like his mom, Kevin often stops to talk from the seat of his mower, a neighborhood tradition that will undoubtedly live on.

Author Rabbi Harold Kushner writes:

The happiest people I know are people who don’t even think about being happy. They just think about being good neighbors, good people. And then happiness sort of sneaks in the back window while they are busy doing good.

Such simple advice: just think about being good neighbors, good people. And yet, it goes without saying that if all–even most–of us would follow it, the world would be a considerably better and happier place. As Kushner advocates, happiness will sneak in the back window as you live neighborly lives.

And who is our neighbor? We claim those who live near us as neighbors, but when an expert of the law asked Jesus this question, Jesus responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Being a good neighbor stretches far beyond the geographical and relational boundaries of traditional neighborhoods. A good neighbor, Jesus exhorts, shows mercy to those in need, even–and especially–those whom we don’t know and may not necessarily care to know. Clearly, the world would be a bettter, happier place if we walked humbly and showed mercy to all the Samaritans in our lives.

I will miss Judy. Neighbor, friend and mentor, she is the kind of woman I’d like to be when I grow up. Our neighborhood has been blessed by her presence; we will continue to be blessed by her legacy.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. –Toni Morrison

I could hear the four-wheeler rumbling up the drive before I could see it. But I didn’t have to see it to know that my grandson would be flying up the lane, a serious wake of gravel behind him, the whole summer day before him. He pulled up to the porch with inches to spare, dismounted, and flung open the door.

I’ll take you for a ride around the pond, Grandma. He was bare-chested and wearing two different kinds of socks. And so I threw the remaining inches of my coffee down the sink, rinsed my cup, and followed him out the front door. As I swung my leg over the seat and settled in behind him, I remembered how beetles had ravaged the elm trees that surrounded the pond and how a forest of stumps now hid in the knee-high weeds there. I could see it all then: the front wheel catching a stump, the air-born assault, the crash. I tightened my grip around his waist and wondered whether or not it would just be better to close my eyes for the duration of the ride.

I’d seen him take corners, learning into the air as if it could hold him, as if he could bend gravity to his will. Yes, better not to see what’s coming, I thought. Better to hold my breath. Better to send up a silent prayer before we leave the lane. When wild honeysuckle wafted across our path, I knew we were leaving the road and would momentarily descend to the grass around the pond. This was it, I thought. This could be the beginning of the end.

Yet as we rounded the northeast corner of the pond, we slowed considerably. I opened my eyes to see Griffin searching the ground with laser intensity, his eyes working to uncover each hidden stump. And then he was moving among the stumps with skill and certainty, with love.

We’re not going to wreck, Grandma. I know what I’m doing. His back glistened with sweat, and I felt myself exhaling, my arms loosening to my sides, and my face turning to the sun as he drove the remainder of the way around the pond. When he pulled up in front of his house, he turned to me and smiled. Good ride? he asked. Great ride, I said.

For most of us, there are moments when we realize that we’re just along for the ride. We’re no longer piloting our own ships. We’re no longer large and in charge. We’ve become passengers and hold supporting roles. Age, change, and circumstances have intervened, and we become those taken care of instead of those who care for. What a bittersweet transition this often is. We remember days when the very people upon whom we now depend were those we diapered and fed, clothed and cheered. We remember the responsibilities we shouldered and the expectations we met.

My four-wheeler ride wasn’t the first time my grandson had assumed a caretaker role. Last spring during a particularly stormy evening when the power went off, I called my daugher to see if I could bring them a couple of LED lanterns, a 50-yard trip from door to door. In the background, I could hear my grandson insisting that I not come, telling his mother that she’s old and we need her to survive this. Sweet–and funny, to be sure–but words that gave me pause. The fact that he recognized I was old and that he feared for my survival made me feel at once precious and vulnerable, as though I could truly blow away in the storm. Outwardly, I chuckled. Inwardly, I sighed.

I still bandage his skinned knees and wrap him in dry towels when he gets out of the pool. I still know things that occasionally amaze him and stock good snacks. In short, I’m still captain of the ship–for a time. In the end, however, all of it–the care-taking and the being taken care of–is truly a great ride.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
― Anatole France

For weeks I’d worked on a short story that I finally–with some reluctance–submitted to an online journal. A day later (a miraculously fast response from any journal, online or otherwise), I received my rejection letter. But let me back up a bit. I’d physically worked on the story for weeks; that is, I put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. It had been birthed and percolating, however, for two years. So technically, this story was years in the making.

That I received a rejection letter was no surprise. I’d never submitted fiction for publication, though I often thought about it late at night when sleep eluded me. Writers expect rejection. It comes with the territory of creating something you float out into the sea of public approval. What surprised me was the quick, but sure, response that washed over me as I read the words of rejection. That’s o.k. It was a good ride while it lasted. Actually, it was a great ride, for hours would go by as I wordsmithed and pondered the next paragraph. Hours that retirement has afforded me during which I could lose myself in the writing process.

American psychologist Carl Rogers writes that [t]he good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination. The older I get, the more I like the idea that the good life is a process, a direction towards which we live and move and have our being. Like many things, writing is a process that urges one in a direction, often with no particular destination in mind. American poet Robert Frost understood this well, for he insisted [n]o surpise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. I also like the idea that in simply beginning and pointing myself in some direction, I’m in the good company of the likes of Robert Frost.

For years, my grandchildren and I have made elaborate plans for holiday gatherings. To this end, we’ve become Dollar Store junkies, oohing and aahing over the current season’s wares. Should we get the 4th of July banner AND the streamers? What about those headbands with glittery stars and stripes? And we have to have both dinner and dessert plates that match the red, white, and blue napkins and table ware. Days before the event, we can visualize it. It will be glorious–and unabashedly overdone. As you can imagine, the results could best be described as lovingly tacky. But no matter. It wasn’t the actual product but the process that gave us so much joy. As Gracyn and Griffin grow older (and their holiday tastes grow more refined–and expensive), we’ll undoubtedly make fewer trips to the Dollar Store. But I hope they’ll remember, as I remember, the unadulterated joy of the process, the planning and imagining and shopping.

In his autobiographical travel book, Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon contends that [t]he nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis. This is another remarkable thing about process: its resistance to stasis. If you’re in process, you’re moving. And through movement, change is not only possible but probable. When I consider the process of parenting, I can both smile and grimace at my own wild ride. One thing is certain: you can’t stand still, for each day marches forward and lays its spoils at your feet. An hour after I’ve shared sweet moments reading Curious George Flies a Kite, my daughter is screaming from her bed (having frightened both her sisters) that the plant in her room looks like a giant alligator, and she’s too afraid to sleep. Just when I thought I had this parenting thing down, that parents who complained about their children’s bedtimes were deluded–and cleary ineffective–I’ve been duly humbled. And the occasions during which I would be humbled stretched out endlessly before me, ultimately provoking more significant change than I could’ve ever imagined. The process of change through humility continues as I parent adult children. This, as Least Heat Moon contends, is the nature of process. We may resist change, but it can rock our boats in magnificent ways.

I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process. These are the words of American inventor Thomas Edison. We really don’t like failure, and more times than not, we rationalize it away, ignore it and bury it. In schools today, we pull out all the stops to prevent anyone from failing; we go to elaborate lengths to graduate and promote all (or nearly all). Failure is not an option, as teachers are repeatedly warned, and students are repeatedly assured. It’s all about the product, the final state of being as a matriculated individual. A 2000-step process? Well, that would just be silly and unnecessarily cruel. Still, these words should give us serious pause. When our brightest minds acknowledge failure is not the end but a important part of an even more important process, we should take note. The processes through which most valuable discoveries are made are often long, arduous, and without clear ends in sight. They make take 2,000 steps or 2 million. Failure is simply a gateway to the next discovery if the process is to continue.

Sitting in my cabin the other day, I was watching the birds in the wild honeysuckle bush near the edge of the timber when, without warning or real consideration, I found myself thinking: What if no one ever read a word I wrote? What if I got up everyday to face an empty sheet of paper or blank computer screen? What if I really never finished anything, if the process just continued until I took my last breath? The answer came in on the breeze as the fragrance of honeysuckle wafted through the window: No matter. The path is beautiful, and I really don’t need to know where it leads.

If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Mother Teresa

As I liberally apply sunscreen in preparation for a session of weeding and mulching, it’s hard to remember that just a few days ago, I was one of many who mourned the delay of spring. It was a long winter, many lamented, a season that seemed to have no end in sight, a cold, dark season that stubbornly held on and on. I was one of those lamenters, zipping my jacket (I refused to wear a winter coat in April regardless of the temperature!) and turning the heat up in my car. I was one who’d increasingly begun to regard the months since Christmas as a dark night of the soul, a noche oscura that St. John of the Cross described as a forlorn feeling that God has abandoned you. I could only muster a sigh of resignation as I woke to yet another dreary day and heard the furnace kick on.

Several years ago, I recall reading about Mother Teresa and was stunned to discover that the woman who’d dedicated her life to the poor and sick, the disciple who’d literally lived as Jesus’s hands and feet through the slums of Calcutta, this saint of all saints, suffered the dark night of the soul for most of her life. In 2007, Come Be My Light, a collection of her private correspondence and personal writings revealed that–with the exception of one short period–she’d suffered from an intense feeling of God’s absence. How could this be, I thought. How could a woman who so completely and devotedly dedicated her life to God have lived for decades without feeling his presence? After all, I reasoned, Mother Teresa is the gold standard of Christian witness, the saintly role model. And yet, the more I read about her life, the more I understood that, like her namesake St. Thérèse de Lisieux (the Little Flower) who decried that God hides, is wrapped in darkness, Mother Teresa sorely felt God’s abandonment.

In her personal writing and correspondence, we can hear her sorrow:

The place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me.

I want—and there is no One to answer—no One one Whom I can cling; no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone.

Before I used to get such help and consolation from spiritual direction—from the time the work has started—nothing.

To feel a blankness in your soul, a darkness so deep and so profound that God can’t be found, can’t be heard or felt, is perhaps as apt a definition of the dark night of the soul as we’ll ever get. The scandal–yes, scandal!–that her posthumous writings caused is telling, I think, of our unwillingness to acknowledge and accept these feelings of spiritual abandonment. Atheist and longtime critic Christopher Hitchens argued that her personal revelations testified to the fact that Mother Teresa was simply a confused old lady who’d lost her belief in God, a sad woman who served others only as a part of an effort to still the misery within. Hitchens also contended that attributing the title of dark night of the soul to her feelings of abandonment was the Catholic Church’s perverse piece of marketing that sought to spin despair as faith. 

A perverse piece of marketing by the Catholic Church? Really? So many others have written about the authenticity and power of this dark night. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung warned of the danger of the descent into the dark night of the soul, of the risk of taking the sunset way because it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods, Yet like so many others who’ve lived and written about this dark night, Jung acknowledged that every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles. American writer, Joseph Campbell, wrote about the universal functions of mythology and is best known for his work with the Hero’s Journey, which also illuminates this pattern of desent and ascent, suffering and return with enlightenment. We know this pattern and these truths; we’ve lived them in one way or another, though many of us have hidden our feelings of abandonment, ashamed that revealing them would also reveal our spiritual weakness. We often fear that our critics will call us out as hypocrites: See, even the believers despair. What good, then, is their faith? In spite of our fear and our pride, though, when the night seems endless and the emptiness eternal, we can’t help but cry out, bereft and alone.

I’ve read about spiritual seekers who cloister or leave for the wilderness, so that they might claim and suffer through their dark nights of the soul. Most of us, however, experience our darks nights in the midst of our ordinary lives and suffer through them in ordinary places. In his book, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul, Tim Farrington writes:

You don’t need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don’t even have to be pursuing any particular “spiritual” path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one’s head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God’s darkness will take.

Farrington understands what Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung insisted: the dark night of the soul is a universal experience that manifests itself in very particular ways. Each dark night experience is the same–and uniquely different. It might be argued that we should find solace in a community of fellow dark night sojourners. And while it may be true that some do, many, I fear, don’t.

There are those who can’t find solace in community because they’re wrestling with aspects of their faith that they don’t yet understand and may not know how to express. The solitude of their suffering, then, may be necessary–and ultimately beneficial. Their dark night may be a period of reckoning, of looking into the wormholes of their souls where the truth of their spiritual ailments has taken root. American writer and devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, understood this well:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . .

O’Connor has given us characters who, in wrestling with their faith, uncover things about their souls that are hideous, emotionally disturbing, and downright repulsive. Some wrestle their way to redemption, while others are consumed by the fight. When a reader wrote her and complained that her book had left a bad taste in her mouth, O’Connor promptly responded: You weren’t supposed to eat it. In her novels, short stories, and personal writing, O’Connor fearlessly confronts those, including herself, whose dark nights are brutally and necessarily ugly and difficult.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Dutch priest, professor and writer, Henri Nouwen testifies to the necessary role that loneliness often plays in the dark night of the soul. Even as he lived and worked in community at L’Arche Daybreak Community, a home for disabled people, he confessed to loneliness, a feeling of separation from others and from God. He writes:

In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That’s a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.

We find it relatively easy to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to the isolation of lingering winter. In confessing this, we may find absolution in a community of others who’ve also struggled to keep the faith during the long, cold months. Truthfully, we find it much harder to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to spiritual matters that have little–if anything–to do with the weather. These feelings are the unmentionables, those you uncover and probe only in the privacy of your own thoughts.

It’s significant to note that after decades of darkness, Mother Teresa began to regard her feelings of abandonment differently than the dark night of the soul described by John of the Cross and experienced by Thérèse de Lisieux. Her dark night, she came to understand, was a necessary part of her vocation. In experiencing her own inner poverty and by sharing the suffering of those she served, she ultimately came to believe that she was sharing the suffering of Christ himself. In recalling the oath she’d made in 1942, a pledge to never deny God anything he’d ask of her, she finally accepted that this meant deferring to feelings of God’s abandonment. I think her deference was, ironically, an ascent from darkness.

Mother Teresa continues to serve as a powerful example of one who lives and works as though God is present, even when he might seem so far away. She was light, in spite of her own spiritual darkness, and sought to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Our own dark night of the soul may be quick and temporary or long and permanent. It may be redemptive or aspiring-to-be-redemptive. It may be necessary or seemingly unnecessary. Regardless, it is human, perhaps one of the most universal human experiences. As such, it shouldn’t be scandalized but accepted and valued.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. –W. H. Auden

It’s the oldest and briefest literary art form, claims James Geary, the editor of the compendium Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. According to Geary, the aphorism must be brief and definitive, as well as personal and philosophical. And, he explains, it must have a twist which can be either a linguistic twist or a psychological twist or even a twist in logic that somehow flips the reader into a totally unexpected place.

In an age of tweets and sound bites, perhaps it’s the aphorism’s pithiness that is most attractive, that keeps it relevant. If I had to make a sound wager, I’d bet that most of my former students remember little about American Transcendental writer Henry David Thoreau except that he went to the woods and left us with a classic aphorism or two:

–I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

—If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

—A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

The same could be said of Transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson:

—Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

—To be great is to be misunderstood.

—Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Here are words which, over a century later, grace posters and coffee mugs, t-shirts and greeting cards. Aphorisms like these have lasting power, and generations after they’ve been written, individuals insist that surely they must have been written for them and for such a time as this.

Perhaps the greatest power of the aphorism is the author’s assertiveness which, as poet W. H. Auden insists, stems from a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. When one writes with such forceful brevity, with such personal and philosophical certainty, we listen. There are too many babblers in the world, individuals who use a universe of words and say nothing. They’ve exhausted us, sucked the very life from us and left us thirsting for a good aphorism. And if the aphorism is not only brief and authoritarian but witty, leaving us with some kind of psychological, linguistic, or logical twist, all the better. For these are words worth knowing and repeating, words that will make us, too, sound wiser than we are.

In his New Yorker article “The Art of Aphorism,” Adam Gopnik quotes English philosopher John Stuart Mill who claimed that [a]lmost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it. Gophnik elaborates:

We don’t absorb aphorisms as esoteric wisdom; we test them against our own experience. The empirical test of the aphorism takes the form first of laughter and then of longevity, and its confidential tone makes it candid, not cynical. Aphorisms live because they contain human truth, as Mill saw, and reach across barriers of class and era.

I think that Gopnik’s insight into the human truth embedded in good aphorisms is particularly apt. What’s better than a brief, pithy assertion about human nature? Reading such an aphorism is akin to a 30-second doctor’s visit during which a definitive diagnosis is delivered and cure prescribed. Eleanor Roosevelt offered just such an aphorism when she wrote: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The diagnosis: you’re feeling inferior, struggling to see your own worth. And the cure: just stop consenting to feel that way. There it is, short and sweet. Ten words and a few precious seconds later, and you’re on your way to improved self-esteem.

Or consider this aphorism from William Shakespeare: A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. Short, definitive, personal, philosphical, and with a twist? Check. Insight into human nature? Check. As one might expect, Shakespeare, the aphorist, rocks. Likewise Benjamin Franklin (Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late), George Bernard Shaw (Youth is wasted on the young), Albert Einstein (The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education), and Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tis better to have loved and lost/ than never to have loved at all). The list of famous aphorisms–unlike the form itself–is pratically endless.

Although I love my father’s poetry, like many, I’ve found particular solace and wisdom in his aphorisms:

—Love is what gives legacy a face.

—Anyone who is inclined to wonder edges toward the profound.

—Notice how a child’s cup offered to the heavens simply fills itself up.

—There is no more heroic charge than “Begin again.”

In writing about the art of aphorisms, Adam Gopnik concludes that [w]here big books remind us of how hard the work of understanding can be, aphorisms remind us of how little we have to know to get the point. He understands the real virtue of a good aphorism: that it takes us quickly and easily to the point, for which there is no pre-requisite knowledge or context necessary. To offer the best gift in a nutshell is, indeed, a testament to the gift-giver. Thank goodness there are so many such gift-givers and gifts to be had.

Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?

These are the words that brought an American audience to its feet in 1942 during a speech given in Chicago rallying U.S. support for a second front in Europe. These are the words delivered by a Russian lieutenant, a famous sniper credited with 309 official kills. These are the words spoken by a Ukranian woman known as “Lady Death,” Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

In June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarrosa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Lyudmila, a history student at Kiev University, enlisted immediately at the recruiting office in Odessa, Ukraine. Even while she was completing her studies, she earned a marksman certificate and sharpshooter badge which she believed prepared her for a unique role in the upcoming defense of her homeland. Unlike most of the female recruits, she would not be funneled into the medical corps; she would contend for a position as a sniper in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division.

Even her laurels as a crack shot, however, didn’t earn her an actual rifle in the beginning. She was sent into battle with a single grenade until an injured comrade gave her his Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. The rest is history. In a matter of months, she perfected her skills, tallying kill after kill, earning her the title “Lady Death.” A year later when she visited the U.S. with the intent of rallying much-needed support for a second front in Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a special friend, worried about her likeability. Here was a woman who had killed 309 Nazis, claiming [t]he only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey. Would Americans find her a heroine, sympathizing with her intense desire to defend her homeland? Or would they find her a monster, picking off one soldier after another in cool, measured kill shots?

I’d never heard of Lyudmila Pavlichenko until I read Kate Quinn’s work of historical fiction, The Diamond Eye, a novel that invites us to know Lady Death both as woman and sniper. Quinn confesses to take some artistic liberties but sticks close to historical record for the most part. She argues that because Lyudmila’s personal account of her life and military career is so objectively written–the facts without much embellishment or introspection–she wanted more. And so, in her book, we meet Lyudmila the woman who lives and loves–and just happens to be one of the world’s most famous snipers.

As I read Quinn’s novel, I couldn’t help but think of those Ukranians who are desperately defending their country today. Just as Lyudmila Pavlichenko regarded the Nazis as beasts of prey intent on killing her fellow countrymen and taking her homeland, I suspect that there are many Ukranians now who face each day intent on killing those who aim to destroy their people and country. Like Eleanor Roosevelt who was concerned about the likeability of a woman dressed in drab olive with a sniper tally of 309, there may be some today who privately balk at images of ordinary Ukranian citizens, armed and taking defensive positions in their cities. They may think: Would I take up arms? Would I see the Russian soldiers who invade my city as beasts of prey? Would I defend by taking the offensive, protecting my home and my family by hunting Russian prey?

There are those like French writer Alexandre Dumas who claim that [t]here are no creatures that walk the earth, not even those animals we have labelled cowards, which will not show courage when required to defend themselves [The Vicomte de Bragelonne]. I’d like to think that I could show the courage of Lyudmila Pavlichenko and today’s Ukranians if I were required to defend myself, my family and home. As loathe as I am to take up arms–because I understand that holding a weapon means I must be prepared to use it–I’d like to think that I could if enemies were storming my home or homeland. I’d like to think that when faced with evil, I would not only defend those people and places but the ideas and principles I love.

Napoleon Bonaparte would have smirked at Eleanor Roosevelt’s concern for Lady Death’s likeability. He argued that [w]hen defending itself against another country, a nation never lacks men, but too often, soldiers. Bonaparte understood that even nations under attack would find themselves with more men and women who considered soldiering with real weapons for others–not for themselves. Soldiering is often an ugly business, and at times, those engaged in this ugly business may be regarded as unlikeable. Still, it’s hard to imagine a world without those defenders who even now are digging into the Ukranian countryside, holing up in factories and homes, taking positions in burnt-out tanks and bombed-out buildings.

In Lady Death’s longest sniper battle, she lay motionless for 3 days, camoflauged in Ukranian snow and brush, as she surveilled her Nazi sniper enemy. Ugly, cold business, indeed. It’s probably no suprise, then, that Lyudmila battled alcoholism and suffered from PTSD for much of her life. Defending one’s homeland may be necessary and noble, but it’s also extremely costly. I can only imagine the costs that Ukranian defenders are now paying and will continue to pay long after the battles are over.

The Viet Nam draft ended when I was senior in high school. Although I knew that I had no chance of being drafted as a female, I remember how often I imagined what I would do if I were drafted like so many young men my age were. I watched every Viet Nam movie, television series, and documentary I could, living vicariously through the soldiers portrayed in each, reliving battles in my dreams. I asked myself tough questions. Would I enlist? Wait to be drafted? Conscientiously object? Flee for Canada? All my musings, however, often came down to one imaginary, watershed moment in which a Viet Cong soldier rushed from the thick jungle cover straight at my platoon, ready and eager to kill. I was armed, the threat was real, and I pulled the trigger before he could fire a shot. In this imaginary moment, I acted instinctively and killed a man. For years, this moment haunted me. It schooled me with its clarity: kill or be killed.

In truth, defensive measures often become offensive actions. Lyudmila Pavelichenko understood this at the tender, but seasoned, age of 24. She understood that to protect her country, her fellow soldiers, her family and friends, she must spend hours with her eye pressed to her rifle scope. She must make the necessary calculations of distance and wind, as she lay on her belly in the snow or brush. She must clear her mind and still her breathing until she could finally take the shot. Just a single shot, but a single shot over and over again.

During one of her American speaking engagements, a reporter commented on the dowdiness of her uniform that made her look fat. She responded directly:

I wear my uniform with honor. . . . It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have yet to learn what it means to defend the people and places we love most. Blessedly, we haven’t had to defend America from foreign invaders for almost a century. But others have, and others are now living through seasons of defense. At the very least, we must not hide behind our own indifference and relative safety. At best, we must truly see that there but for the grace of God, go we.

Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.
― Rachel Held Evans,  Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

As I consider all I’ve written about over the years, in one way or another, I’ve written about resurrection, about that archetypal journey into and out of the bowels of death, about rising from the ashes, about claiming the cross. Last week as it snowed (again!), I looked out upon the hyacinth and jonquils that were just about to bloom, having waited in death only to rise again each April. And I lamented their arrival in snow, conceding that they’d probably freeze, their beautiful blooms never to see the April sky. But I was wrong, just as I’ve been wrong before. They’re tough little flowers whose resurrection continues to amaze me. Today, they flaunt their colors and fly the banner of new life, as they stand in sharp contrast to the gray world that has yet to catch up with them.

Gardeners don’t worry about death, as Christian columnist and author Rachel Held Evans writes. For they understand the truth of the crocus, the tulip and peony, the strawberry and pear, the cucumber and tomato and onion. They know the resurrection power of plants and rest in its assurance through the long, dark winter. Each seed waits in death for its birth in soil and light; each perennial suffers the darkness for its eventual rebirth in the spring. Gardeners don’t mourn death; they accept and celebrate its vital role in new life.

I admit that each spring I get particularly excited when I see the first green points of my hostas break ground. Like little cathedrals, they raise their spires from the earth into the sun. And the violets that dot the grass each spring–don’t get me started about the violets! The plants and flowers, the trees that begin to leaf out, they’re all remarkable reminders of the sanctuary we find in resurrection.

As impressive as this natural sanctuary is, it is but a physical testament to what we experience as resurrection people. Most of us can testify to experiences with death that result–figuratively speaking, that is–in new life. We can cite times when we mourn the loss of jobs, relationships, roles, or circumstances. We grow to love and count on them, perhaps even to define ourselves and our lives through them. And when we grieve their loss, this is often no less profound than if we’d lost a loved one to death. Still, even as we grieve, we begin to feel something happening–sometimes slowly, imperceptibly, but surely. Then one day, we wake to see how something new is rising from the ash heap: a new job, relationship, role, or circumstance. And it is different but good.

Many of us can testify, too, to times in our lives when we set out to purposely destroy a damaging part of ourselves. In these times, we become painfully aware that we must die to self. I continue to try to kill that self-conscious part of me that often shames me into submission, inhibiting me from actively participating in the world. It’s a ritual sacrifice I make, daily. If there is to be new and abundant life, I understand that this part of me must die. In the book of John (12:24), Jesus reminds us:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

In a few, short days, it will be Easter. Even those who aren’t Christian and don’t accept the power of Christ’s resurrection generally understand its claim. They can often see this power reflected in lives that seemed lost but now are found, lives broken and sometimes destroyed but now mended and made whole. Often these lives are startingly new and extraordinarily different. In his book Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, Christian pastor and author Rob Bell argues that [i]t is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.

For Christians, Easter is everything. In his classic work, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Easter is everything because Christ never intended to leave us open to claiming him to be a great moral teacher. But we have–and we do. Interestingly, most don’t claim him to be a liar or lunatic, but they do position him solidly as an ethical role model for the ages. As such, they strip him of real resurrection power and place him among other great men and women who’ve changed the world.

To believers, Easter is everthing because there was–and is–real resurrection power in the knowledge that Jesus died, rose, and later ascended in heaven. As the Son of God, his resurrection is the resurrection, the means through which lives are saved, and heaven comes to earth. In his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, theologian and author, N. T. Wright claims:

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.

For believers, Easter is everything because it charges us to genuinely live the Lord’s Prayer, to colonize earth with the life of heaven. The power of resurrection lies gloriously in this.

Gracyn, photo by her mother

How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?    Dr. Seuss            

In a couple weeks, my granddaughter, Gracyn, will officially become a teenager. As only Dr. Seuss can so perfectly put it: the time has flewn–and, I suppose it goes without saying, much too soon.

It’s been years since I spent hours on my knees as we played with her Dora the Explorer doll house or imagined lavish mermaid tales as she took “recreational” baths. And though my knees are older and I don’t get up as quickly or gracefully, I’d gladly spend the hours on my knees again just to relive some of the most intimate moments we’ve shared over the years. I’d haul out all the slime-making ingredients and equipment, decorate my home with lovingly crafted homemade holiday decorations, plan special “welcome home”parties for Aunt Megan, buy live Easter bunnies (which reproduced, literally, like rabbits) and assume care of them, and carefully buckle April (a life-sized baby doll that people often mistook for a real baby) into my car for town trips. I’d do it all again, for I know that it’s gotten late too soon.

I’d go back to the antique store where she’d hidden the Cabbage Patch doll she desperately wanted so well that it took me 20 minutes of serious looking before I spied a corner of its ruffled dress peeking out from behind a row of assorted toys. She’d talked about it for days, the days leading up to her brother’s birth. She should have it, I thought, as I recalled–decades earlier–queuing in a Target parking lot before dawn with other faithful (crazy?) mothers who’d waited for hours to get one of the Cabbage Patch dolls from the new shipment rumored to arrive. The 20 minutes spent strolling around the antique store in air-conditioned comfort was nothing when I remembered my frozen feet and layers of clothing. Yes, she should have a baby to care for as her mother would soon bring home a new baby brother to care for, I reasoned. And so, each day we visited the hospital, her own baby lovingly diapered and dressed for the day, her four-year-old hand in mine as we navigated the elevator to the maternity floor.

I’d go back to the crowded school gymnasium where she stood with her third-grade classmates during an event in which they’d dressed up as famous figures and had prepared to tell visitors all about them. Nervously, she stood there in blonde ringlets, patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and a blue baby doll dress. “I’m Shirley Temple, Grandma,” she proudly announced and then rattled off the biographical facts she’d memorized. She was spectacular, if I do say so. Yet I struggled to stay in the moment, for I could feel how time pressed in and on, how the days of ringlets and Mary Janes would pass all too soon.

I’d go back to the many, many times when she wore her heart gloriously, painfully on her sleeve. Before the impending teenage years of cool indifference, there have been years of tearful goodbyes when she’d already begun to grieve the temporary loss of family and friends. There have been years when she lived vicariously through movie characters whose suffering she felt deeply. I worried (and continue to worry) about protecting her heart from all those people and things that would trample it. Because I would keep this heart just as it is, keep time and the world at bay.

In her novel, Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult writes:

Whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half—before and after—with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

For most parents and grandparents, there is a certain before and after as their children and grandchildren pass from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from adulthood to old age. And as Picoult writes, we often experience loss as a tight bubble in the middle. Even when we know that such passage is inevitable and, in the long run, good, we may still have moments when we double over at the full awareness of this loss. The day that we donated the Dora doll house to Goodwill was one of those days. I bagged up all the plastic figures, the house and furniture and drove it 10 miles to the donation site. For years, it had occupied the shelf in our dining-room-turned-toy-room. For years, we’d added to our doll family as we found new figures we just had to have. For years, we’d created a family history for these figures, one rich with births and marriages, vacations and holidays. For years, the plastic horse-drawn carriage had made trips around the room, and the family van (with the horn that really honked and the missing door) had been packed with the chosen few. These were the before years, and at times, remembering them can be like a gut punch.

I have no doubts that there will be glorious after years during which, God willing, I’ll witness Gracyn’s passage into adulthood–and perhaps into motherhood. And as I watch this transformation, I’m sure that I’ll once again think: How did it get so late so soon?

Atrium, Biltmore Mansion, Asheville, NC

To be genteel is to be polite, refined, or respectable, often in an affected or ostentatious way. We may like to think that a pretentious display of superiority and wealth is a remnant of bygone eras and best left to old-monied folks like the Astors and the Du Ponts or new-monied folks like the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers who jewelled 5th Avenue in New York City with glorious mansions and elegant soirées during the Gilded Age. We may like to believe that such a show of excess is repulsive, a flamboyant snub to all those who would never grace their marbled halls. And yet, many of us consumed the award-winning PBS Masterpiece series, Dowton Abbey and are currently binging the second season of Netflix’s Bridgerton, as well as impatiently waiting for the next episode of HBO’s The Gilded Age and PBS Masterpiece’s Sanditon. In truth, we appear to be fascinated with gentility. We can’t get enough of the satin gowns and kid gloves, the chaperoned strolls in manicured gardens. Ostentatious as this world may be, there’s something about the manners and the extravagance that we tune in for, season after season.

The world of the Gilded Age genteel was a world in which valets and ladies’ maids were essential. No self-respecting men or women would have been expected to dress themselves. Given the quantity and fit of their clothing items, it would have been largely impossible. Corsets and bustles, buttons upon buttons, gloves that were literally made to fit like a second skin–all of these required an able-bodied valet or ladies’ maid, an individual with nimble fingers and some serious upper body strength. We marvel at the ladies’ maids who dutifully brushed (100 strokes at least) the unpinned hair of their ladies, who unlaced and unbuttoned their extravagant gowns, who removed their satin slippers and–finger by finger–their custom-made gloves. Dressing and undressing were productions not to be rushed or taken lightly. Today, we can pull on a pair of elastic waist sweat pants and slip a t-shirt over our head with one hand. All in a matter of seconds and without fuss. None of us can probably imagine our dressing or undressing ever being seriously considered for a television audience’s delight.

Nor can we imagine our meals, our conversations with friends, our social gatherings as being of much interest to a larger audience. We’ve taken informal to a new and much-relaxed level. When I was working, I recall our high school dress code actually specifying–no joke–that pajamas and slippers were not appropriate school attire. We also had to clarify how much skin could show through jeans that were so ripped that it was a wonder they maintained any structure at all. Perhaps there is something in us that longs for structure–if not in our own clothing and manners, then in those we can read about and view.

Perhaps, in spite of the social levelling that has occurred in the last century, we’re closet gentility. That is, maybe there are those of us who imagine ourselves appearing, behaving, and speaking finely. Maybe we imagine sipping tea poured from a sterling silver tea service into bone china cups instead of slurping it from a Starbucks to-go cup. Maybe we can see ourselves carefully weighing our words and politely listening in conversation rather than dashing off a text message or Instagram post. Maybe, just maybe, we can imagine a nicer, gentler version of ourselves.

Clearly, there was a tarnished underside to the Gilded Age. This was an age in which there were many corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians whose greed exploited the working class. These robber barons and financiers often held more power than politicians during this time. And this was a period of tenements and sweat shops, 12-hour working days and increasing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Viewers see little of this in the television series and films that profile the genteel because this, of course, brings us perilously too close to the ugliness of the real world–then and now.

There are those, then, who would argue that this gentility is really nothing but an emperor-with-no-clothes, a puffed-up, polished version of the lives of a favored few. And this is largely true. Still, I think it’s the lovelier aspects of the age we long for: the manners of regency courtship, the magnificent architecture and craftsmanship of the family estates, the teas and balls and coronations. We yearn for subtle grace, even if it’s only an imaginary veneer which lies over a cold, brash world.

In reading Denise Kiernan’s The Last Castle, a saga of the Vanderbilt family and the buidling of Biltmore Estate, I learned that in 1926, Thomas Beer nicknamed the 1890s as the Mauve Decade. While attempting to find an artificial way to make quinine, William Henry Perkins inadvertently discovered an aniline dye which resulted in mauve, a color so popular that it became a signature hue for an entire decade. Mauve is not quite plum, not quite rose, a rich yet muted color perfectly suited for the clothing and homes of the genteel.

I thought a lot about this and began wondering what color would best describe the current decade. I could think of many suitable colors, but none of them possesed the subtle, understated gentility of mauve. As a matter of fact, when I looked at my grandchildren’s big box of Crayola crayons, I found colors with names like laser lemon and electric lime. These don’t seem like colors with manners but rather colors with attitude which scream their presence. We have a considerable presence of such attitude today. It manifests itself in all sorts of unrefined ways (like an Academy award winning actor slapping and cursing a comedic host on national television). And maybe this is the biggest reason we thirst for the best of gentility: we simply want a respite from all that is not genteel.

photo by Collyn Ware

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of.
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

Perhaps novelist Ian McEwan is right. Perhaps we love the medium of photography because it offers us the gift of frozen narrative, of an illusion of innocence. When our memories begin to fade, when our rotting, ripening world crushes in upon us with all its death and disease, when we find ourselves waking with more dread than hope, a single photograph can remind us of a time of permanence and immortality. It can return us to a snowy field at dusk, to a boy who spreads his arms to the world as if to say: Here I am. Right here in the center of everything where the future kneels before me, a bright, expectant promise. Right here where the moon is my subject, where the darkness, a futile foe, will ever cower at the edges of my life.

One of the greatest joys of my life is living vicariously through my grandson’s exuberant innocence. When he talks of riding bulls professionally on the rodeo circuit, I’m all in. When he speculates about the color of Bugatti he will buy when he gets his driver’s licence, I can see it. When he announces that these past few 50-degree days have been nice enough to fill the pool, I’m smelling the sunscreen and feeling the heat. When he asks if we should make a leprechaun trap again this year, I’m already considering the supplies we’ll need. Of course, these days will not last. At eight, he’s undoubtedly older than many who’ve already lost the innocence that continues to buoy him through his days. And I’m grateful for this innocence. For, as Pablo Picasso said, it takes a very long time to become young, and I find that I’m just coming into my own through him.

I realize that the life expectancy of innocence is often largely dependent upon circumstances. Poverty, instability, disease, violence and war can snuff out innocence before it really ever begins. For children in such circumstances, there may be no photographs that freeze a narrative worth preserving. There may be no photgraphs at all. Innocence may have briefly flickered, only to be extinguished by the loss of family, home, or country.

But I am one of the fortunate. As a Baby Boomer, I grew up after the Depression and World Wars and before 9/11 and Covid. I grew up in relative peace and prosperity, an era during which innocence could live a comfortable and long life. I was 14 when I discovered hypocrisy among my peers who’d cheated their way through our church’s confirmation class only to stand later among the confirmed as the congregation smiled and applauded. I remember feeling truly shocked, my innocence decidedly beginning to unravel. Still, I had a good run while it lasted. When my innocence truly gave way to a growing sense of worldliness, it happened naturally, gradually, and without calamity.

Today, it often seems as though we want to rush innocence’s demise. We want our children to enter kindergarten with several years of reading and math under their little belts. We want our middle school students to chart career paths and plan their adult lives. We want our high school students to graduate with both high school diplomas and two-year college degrees, so that they might potentially begin law or medical school at age 19. It goes without saying that innocence struggles to survive when the academic stakes and cultural expectations are so high so soon. In such an environment, it must necessarily die young.

As a high school English teacher, I taught dual-credit courses in composition, speech, and literature. In the beginning, I had 16 out of 112 students in my school. At the end of my career, nearly 2/3 of the senior class took dual-credit college courses. Although many of these students were ready enough academically, many weren’t ready socially and emotionally. Some admitted that they just wanted to enjoy their senior year: by participating in sports and other activities, by hanging out with friends they would soon leave behind when they left for college, and by resting in the comfort of a school and home environment they knew and trusted. Without saying as much, they were admitting that they weren’t really ready and didn’t relish the rigor of college courses. At that time, parents paid college tuition–fully or partially–for their students’ enrollment in these courses. Because of this, I felt it was my moral and professional duty to advise such students not to enroll in college courses while they were in high school. After all, I reasoned, they had the time and the opportunity to take these same courses during theirr freshman year at college. Years later, however, these courses became free (hence the increased enrollment), and these same arguments largely fell on deaf ears. Even if students weren’t mature enough or academically ready to handle college courses, parents and counselors argued that they should take them because they were free, because their peers were taking them, and because they’d be left behind if they didn’t.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that we would rush children and teens through childhood and innocence and fix their eyes more quickly on adulthood. It’s true that in centuries past, teens left school early (if they attended at all), married, and began adult lives at the age of 13 or 14. And it’s true that even as children, they were often expected to work at home if the family was to survive. But as a Boomer, I never knew this hardship; as Americans, we generally don’t know this hardship today. One might argue that, in light of the fact that people live much longer today, we should ask ourselves some tough questions: Why should we rush childhood and the innocence that should–for a time, at least–accompany it? What do really stand to gain in encouraging more young people to graduate and enter the workforce early? As we rush our youth to adulthood, are we prepared to give them more and more adult privileges and responsibilities?

In his novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes:

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

As insignificant as it may seem, I do remember how my world shifted when I realized my classmates had lied and cheated. And I remember a similar situation when one of my students discovered her peers had copied answers from her test paper. She came to me, crying. Can you believe it, Mrs. Vesely? They were my friends, and they used me! My student and I were both teens when the truths of life began to rear their painful heads. But what if we’d been children? And what if our 6 or 8-year-old worlds hadn’t just shifted but shattered? Would we have had the courage to face our futures, the heart to start at all? Would we have become painfully aware, as children, that we’d never become bull riders or figure skaters, that leprechaun traps and cookies for Santa were just the fictional figments of someone’s foolish imagination, that the world was never–not even once–ours for the taking? Would our innocence have died, as writer Joan Didion claims, when we were stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself?

Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves of how precious little time we spend as innocents and of the consequences of further reducing that time. It all might start with taping a single photograph to our refrigerators or bathroom mirrors. A photograph that freezes a narrative of what-might-be, a confidence in the world which appears to be, at that moment, ripe for the picking. A photograph of a boy or girl with arms flung wide in bright, expectant promise.