Locating—and Loving—My Circle of Influence

My daughter Charlotte just got back from camp a couple of weeks ago. It was her first summer in leadership training, and she came home bragging about all the work she had done. In addition to washing dishes nightly and serving the other campers their food, she was part of a work group that hauled and split logs, scraped the rust off of outdoor furniture, collected trash, and spent fifty hours doing community service which amounted to clearing out a vacant lot full of probably toxic junk and weeds so overgrown they had to use machetes to get through them. She came home with blisters and scrapes and bug bites and bruises and an enthusiasm for hard work that was entirely new to me. "I want to find some more community service to do!" she planned out loud, as she hummed the camp theme song for this summer, which was something about being consumed.

This glow, this enthusiasm for hard week, lasted just long enough for me to manipulate her into cleaning her room to welcome her friend from Atlanta, who spent last week with us. By the time the friend left, so had Charlotte's sweet desire to serve, and now she's back to her old teenage self. Her shoes are piling up inside the front door, her room cannot be discussed in this public place, and her freshly washed clothes waiting to be hung up to dry are starting to smell moldy.

Just the familiar story of the camp high that goes away when you've been home a few days, I'm sure you're thinking if you've ever been to church camp. (I haven't, but the youth leaders always talk about this phenomenon at the chapel to which we parents are invited when my girls go to camp.) Today it occurred to me that there's another problem at issue here, though. Not the problem they warned about in the camp chapel in an effort to fix it, but rather one that church camps—and, frequently, churches themselves—cause in the first place. Namely, the mistaken belief—common to all sort of missionaries, religious and secular—that service to others is primarily to be accomplished by going out of one's sphere of influence, rather than deeper into it. Evangelism and service to one’s community are thus appropriately called, in current church lingo as well as the social services communications of the secular community, “outreach.”

My family and I have recently been visiting churches with youth groups—our old one had none—looking for a spiritual home with more appeal for our daughters. The kids in these youth groups plan expensive mission trips to Mexico and Uganda and return with glowing reports of how they painted a community center somewhere or helped pour a church foundation. But not one kid has approached either of our girls at church and said, “Hey, you want to hang with us?” As far as I can tell, none of the adults leading these youths has told them that it is just this sort of inreach—to the lonely and churchless and needy and damned within their community—that is likeliest to reach the goals they are purporting to set in doing mission work in the first place.

Yes, I am aware of the Great Commission. And that even in the Old Testament God was forever telling his chosen people to "go out" somewhere. And that Jesus told us, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple.” But Jesus, we know, was being hyperbolic here to emphasize his own importance over fidelities we are probably already honoring. He didn’t mean we were to hate those around us any more than he meant we were to hate life by committing suicide on his behalf.

I'm ranting, I know—and I was going to give that up, I think I reported in a recent post. But this isn’t just about my daughters. And it isn’t just about the missionary kids—frequently among the neediest of my students at the Christian university where I work—who were raised in boarding schools instead of at home with their missionary parents. The business of outreach—of mission work and social justice and volunteerism—is becoming increasingly a topic in the news and, correspondingly, for me as well.

Here’s the thing. Although I have a longstanding love for other cultures, I believe our first mission work—our first calling—should be to address the needs within our communities. Not the aliens in some other place—They aren’t even aliens there!—but the aliens in our midst. Not orphans in Russia or China, but our kids’ friends—maybe even our own kids—that come home from school to empty houses and microwave Hot Pockets for dinner. Not even the widows at church—though they are certainly worthy—so much as the widows God has selected for our very particular notice—my mother-in-law, in my case. Over those close to us we have more influence than we have over recipients of our charity that we see for the space of a morning or a week or even a year and certainly more influence than we have over someone we never meet at all but who simply receives a portion of the check we sent to some organization we hope is trustworthy.

My particular widow, at 85, increasingly needs help with daily activities like shopping, driving places, visiting doctors, but she’d never accept help from anyone but one of her own family. Although Mamaw—as we all call her—is undoubtedly lonely and her days are long, she locks herself in her house and longs only for the company of Charlotte and Lulu or Kris or me. She hangs on every sentence that drops from my mouth, listens to me read my essays aloud, and tells me only complimentary things. She’s conveniently located—just a quarter of a mile from my house—and it doesn’t cost me a thing besides time and patience to assist her. She’s also the recipient of my notice likeliest to appreciate and remember it. She is the widow I should find easiest to love.

But in other ways she is the hardest to love. She calls me perpetually, stays on the phone longer than I want her to, repeats herself, can’t hear and won’t get a hearing aide, and generally gets on my nerves. She needs more and more, the older she gets. I have no doubt about my call to mission work in her regard. She is definitely the one God intended me to think about when he told me to look after widows.

Some of my more socially just friends—with whom I like to argue on this topic—tell me, Yes, but why not do both? Love your widow and widows at large! Your aliens—like the international students in my classes and the Vietnamese checker in the grocery store—and those in other countries. Your orphans—those kids who have never eaten squash before and blithely throw trash out my car window when I take them somewhere—and the child prostitutes of Thailand and the Walking Boys of Sudan (who are now men) and and and. You see the problem. It’s overwhelming how much good work there is to do out there. And the time and effort you spend on one area of service, necessarily takes time and effort away from another. This is an aspect of charity I have never heard discussed in church.

The poor will always be with us, Jesus said. And the widows, he might have added. And the aliens. And the orphans. The best we can do is focus in on, as he did, the needy ones we encounter in our daily lives. Love them. Touch them. Minister to them. And above all, get to where you enjoy them—instead of viewing them as a hated chore that slips further and further down the to-do list and then, thankfully, off the page and past your notice entirely.

Dickens’ appalling character in Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her many children in her devotion to the “natives” in Africa, and, similarly, the Suffragette Mrs. Banks, who ignores her children in the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins (in P. L. Travers’ novel she is a much more sympathetically rendered feminist who does not return to her childrearing duties at the end of the book) demonstrate well the kind of faulty prioritization I am objecting to here.

And the mispriorization of love that I, unfortunately, too often end up emulating. Even as I type these words, the neglected waif Lulu stands behind my chair, trying wistfully to get my attention. I have been working, she says, all day. Now it’s her turn.

So, with that, I will end this weird little mission work of ranting that I am doing here and make dinner or ferry the girls down to their Mamaw’s house or do whatever it is that she’s wanting. And then, in the spirit of inreach, I will go hang Charlotte’s damp clothes before the mildew sets and I have to wash them all over again.

Faith Envy

I have finally begun—for the third time—Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I am l-o-v-i-n-g it. I don’t know why I had so much trouble getting into it the first two times. Must not have been ready for it.

I am having a curious reaction to the book: I am beset with a bizarre faith envy. I keep comparing my faith to the main character’s faith, which I suspect mirrors Marilynne Robinson’s. I wish I were more like the two of them as a believer. More relaxed in my faith. Less squinchy-eyed about everything. And, above all, more just plain kind.

Both Reverend Ames and Robinson, I fear, would disapprove of me as a Christian, especially with my long-held view—which I’m starting to question, the book is so convincing—that spiritual development only occurs through struggle. On page 24 of the paperback, the Reverend reflects, “It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled.”

That’s me, I keep thinking. Worrying. But he’s talking about people who get all bent out of faith by reading Feuerbach, whom Ames characterizes as an atheist. (Feuerbach called himself a theist, but he pretty much believed we make God up to address our needs.) The Feuerbachs of the world are not what unsettles my faith. Rather, it’s a struggle with myself, mostly, and with what it appears to me the Bible is calling me to be and do. I struggle with God, in fact. Maybe that’s an okay way to struggle. Jacob did it and won a blessing. Not that Jacob is someone I want to emulate. I'm probably not alone in finding him one of the least likeable God-followers in the Bible. Right up there with Lot.

Robinson’s writing just undoes me. So clean and simple. So many surprises in such plain, straightforward sentences. It’s like getting a beat up package in the mail, wrapped in grocery bags turned inside out, and opening it to find a delicate treasure from far far away, from some person you’ve forgotten, a porcelain bowl so thin you can see light through it. You think, how did it ever survive? The story of Ames trekking out to Kansas during the drought to find the grandfather’s grave. Man. I read it aloud to Kris at the breakfast table yesterday. So real. So horrible. So funny. Or when they baptize the kittens. I keep wishing I had written it, not her. Or, as Jim Whitehead used to say, “I wish I had written that book, and she had written a better one.”

Apropos packages containing delicate bowls. In one of my moves in my traveling years, I sent a bowl I couldn’t part with to a friend in Boston to store with some of my other things. It was pale slick green on the inside and matt brown, almost black on the outside. About the size of a cantaloupe, but more oval, wide at the mouth with a very small footprint—like the bottom of a drip in midair. Just the perfect bowl. Very old. Made by someone with a very light hand: thin enough, as I say, to see light through it, even though it was glazed dark on the outside. I sent it hurry-scurry, in the midst of buying a plane ticket and paying bills and packing, so I didn’t have much time or energy to devote to it, and all my tools—scissors, tape, etc.—were all packed away. Somehow, I got it in a box, with squashed up bags stuffed around it and to the post office, and years later I went to my friend’s house to get my things, and there it was on top of my trunk in the half-darkness and damp of her cellar, this old beat up box tied up with string the way we used to do. The box looked hardly bigger than the bowl in my memory, and I expected to find just shards when I opened it. I opened it carefully, nonetheless, and, miraculously, it was not in the least damaged. I held it up to the light bulb dangling above me to see the light through it, and at that moment I slipped or tripped on wet, uneven concrete, and the bowl dropped. Exploded into tiny black and green shards. I can still feel that moment in my stomach when I think about it—of loss so nearly coincident with such a surprising and delightful recovery of what was precious to me. Ach.

I ordered Anita Brookner’s The Next Big Thing through Interlibrary Loan, so that’ll be next.

I wish I could touch your faces and bless you all, like Ames with those kittens.

Editing, the Rant, a Question, and a Proposal

By working like a crazywoman and making myself unavailable to my bored daughter (Charlotte went off to a class on the Enlightenment at Duke and left Lulu alone and feckless) and a crank to my patient husband, I got the food memoir edited exactly on my deadline. When I sent it in, I immediately got back one of those automated email replies that my editor would be out of town until 9 July. I would have had, in other words, another week and a half, had I known.

I'm glad, though. It's done. I can—and need to—work on other things. And I like the work I did: Minus the 16,000 words I cut—and the resultant rearranging I had to do to cut so much—the book is a more successful narrative, as a whole, more integrally a book.

It seems to me that ought be a metaphor for something: that cutting about a tenth of the book's length improved it so much. Like cleaning house, I suppose. Or losing weight. Or weeding. All of which has been going on in my life of late. I haven't lost 10% of my weight yet, but I'm past halfway--thanks to my new habit of running (i.e. jogging) 3 miles every other day. And Kris has cleaned out the garage and the two studies. It is interesting to consider how invigorating loss can be.

In the editing process, I learned that I don't like diatribes and that I am given to them. It is something I can now be alert to, like clichés. It's funny to learn this now, so late in my teaching career. And also to learn it right after having read an interesting book—Lad Tobin's Reading Student Writing—in which the author recommends the "rant" as a legitimate form. I had been thinking I would assign a rant the next time I taught English 1. But then I read aloud a chapter from the food memoir to Lulu—she was sick, so she wanted me to read to her—and found myself getting bored not two paragraphs into it, even before Lulu said anything. Rants, I would argue, are never interesting. As essayist Rebecca Solnit writes in "Locked Horns," "Everyone's encountered bad divorces, noise-obsessed neighbors, monomaniacs who let a grievance take over their lives to the exclusion of everything else, a sort of psychological starvation." A rant is an indulgence in just this sort of monomania, resulting, I would argue, in not only psychological but intellectual starvation—i.e., boredom. One becomes, that is, a bore. And, now that I think of it, students of writing, if they have anything to say at all, don't have to be taught how to rant. Ranting comes naturally to the best of us. So I won't be teaching it.

Tobin's book is worth reading, though. It represents what he refers to as a hybrid of academic and personal writing on the subject of teaching writing—or, well, on one aspect of teaching writing: how to think about and value (but not evaluate, mind you) student writing. It's not a terrifically practical book on teaching writing. In fact, more than anthing else, it is a defense of the hybrid writing he practices. Such a defense is warranted in our field, perhaps, but he sounds defensive in making it, which is unfortunate. I've been getting away with a hybrid of academic writing and personal writing since I was an undergraduate and have been promoting it in the classroom for coming up on thirty years (shudder). I kind of wished, as I read, that he would just do it and get on with it, rather than expend so much effort and, well, ranting on how it's a worthwhile way of writing.

Anyway, currently in the garden: every sort of squash, cucumbers, green beans, peppers, and unripe tomatoes. Now to think about Jesus's parables.

(This post feels more like a typical blog than usual, to me: formless, solipsistic, wandering. I don't think I like it. Verzeiht!)

Oh. One last thing. Two matters of usage interested me in revising my book: One is the question of whether or not to capitalize the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon (as here), and the other is whether or not the pronounced s of a possessive following an s should be included, as in "Jesus's parables." Both usages—which I was taught and which I, on occasion, also mention in class—seem to be in flux, at the moment. What are your thoughts? Although both rules are still found in usage manuals, Kris, a stickler for correct usage, disputes and never even heard of the sentence capitalization following a colon rule, and every source I find on apostrophe usage, even those that promote the phonologically determined rule I was taught, seems to make an exception for Jesus's. It's all esoteric, as my publisher will have its own rules that will be the final word, but it interests me nonetheless.

One last last thing. I'm about to read another Anita Brookner novel, The Next Big Thing, as soon as I can get it through special order at Barnes & Noble or through interlibrary loan. I also have Marilyn Robinson's Gilead on my bedside table and want to reread Housekeeping—one of my favorite books ever—soon. Anyone want to join me by reading concurrently and exchanging thoughts?

Deadlines, Editing, the Flood, Being Edited, and Finding Rest

Wow, I just noticed it's been a month and a half since my last entry! I'm very busy these days—writing, writing, writing—and barely have time to think interesting thoughts about anything I'm not already writing about, much less write them down. However, since I originally decided that the theme of this blog would be struggle, I have decided to offer here a rundown on the writing projects I've been working on and the struggles involved in each one:

1. Revising and cutting (hopefully) fifty pages from Starting from Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook, a food memoir, due out in January. My revision deadline is 30 June, and I'm only on page 146. Cutting my writing is the hardest work I do. Usually—when I'm shortening an essay for a conference, for example—I have my husband Kris do the cutting for me. He has a good ear and is merciless and makes big Xs through whole pages. Then we don't speak for days until I recover from the meanness of it. And later I almost always like the resulting essay better for the cuts. Right now, though, Kris is busy with his clients' tax return extensions and all the handyman jobs around the house that he couldn't get done during tax season, so I'm on my own. The mss. started out at 371 pages and I'm down to 338, so I keep thinking I'm doing sort of okay, but most of the pages I've managed to cut are from a chapter that should have been cut from the mss. before I ever got it. Oh well.
   
2. My book on Genesis, which was supposed to involve daily Bible reading. By "supposed to" I mean pursuant to a deal I made with God at the outset of the project that I would read the Bible daily if he would inspire me. The revision deadline for Starting from Scratch has gotten in my way, though. I do keep revisiting where I am in Genesis regularly, if not daily, and I have moved on past Noah, which was a very difficult chapter for me to write. Aside from Noah and his family, God destroyed everyone in the whole world, as well as all those animals! It depressed me so much to think about it—as well as challenged everything I had previously been discovering about God in my reading and writing this time through Genesis—that I could hardly write for awhile. But I've moved on to Babel and am back to loving this book. The Bible, I mean, not my own babblings about it.
   
3. A monthly blog for the online manifestation of Today's Christian Woman. You can read my first monthly offering at: http://blog.todayschristianwoman.com/walkwithme/2007/06/as_your_garden_grows.html. Blogs, I find, are hard to write, as I've already mentioned in this blog more than once and as I'm sure you've already noticed. I like to write long, for one thing, and and for the TCW blog I'm limited to 700 words. (The entry you're reading is twice that.) Also, it's hard to find a subject that others will find interesting enough to want to respond to. I'm not very polemical in my writing but instead pretty speculative, and obviously in-process in my views, which makes it difficult for a reader to write a rebuttal or even much of an agreement. And, above all, I find it tricky, in a blog, to strike the right tone. I keep thinking, "Who gives a rip what I think? Why am I writing about these private little incompletely thought out matters in this public place?" I am like those students I had when I taught seventh grade that scrubbed out and deleted way more words than they ever submitted for a grade. I called them erasers. Their papers looked like terrycloth by the time they were done writing.
   
   Anyway, that's one struggle with the TCW post. The other struggle is that, although the people at TCW approached me for a blog—and more recently a feature article in the actual print issue coming out later in the year (see below for details)—I worry that they may not want to embrace who I am as a writer. For the blog post currently displayed, in the final editing someone changed my sentence "Those first fruits are precious treasures you share only with your lover, your children, your spouse" to "Those first fruits are precious treasures you share only with your spouse, your children, your dearest friends." It's a minor change, really. I suppose the impulse was—as a student in a class in which I read a draft of the essay aloud predicted it would be—to eliminate the possibility that the word "lover" might be misunderstood by a conservative audience to refer to an extramarital affair or other illicit relationship. My own impulse in using the word "lover" to begin with was to include in my intended audience someone who wasn't married and had no kids but might have a boyfriend. But I hate the word "boyfriend." It sounds so dippy. And I think "lover" is just about perfect as a word to signify one who loves and who, in the sort of relationship most of us are looking for before marriage, is loved back. No one took the matter up with me before they changed the wording—as I'm coming to expect in this new world of publishing. I have gotten used to editors shortening and in other ways "improving" my writing all the time, and I don't usually take it any more personally than I do my husband's enthusiastic axing of whole pages of my essays. (That is, it takes me about a week to recover and to love—in the Christian sense, of course—my editors once again.) What I really struggle with, though, is being edited for ideological reasons. When, not only as a writer but as a believer, I am silenced. I think we Christians tend to do too much of that: silence the voices of those who say what we don't expect or want to hear.
   
   It especially bothers me to think that my Christian audience has to be pandered to in this way. In my experience at a Christian university where many of my students and fellow faculty and staff are quite conservative, I have found that Christians are able to operate way further outside of the box than many—Christians and non-Christians alike—give them credit for. And, as we all do when we move outside the box even for a moment, they profit from it. Seeing things a new way is always instructive, even if we don't end up adopting the new way. And, the further outside the box we are able to venture and the more frequently we undertake to do it, the more our credibility among non-Christians grows—which is surely good for the spreading of God's message.
   
   Mind you, I like all the people I have so far met through this assignment at TCW. They are smart and competent and kind-hearted. And good editing, as I say, requires a certain mercilessness. And it is, as I have already said, a minor change. By next week I will be over it. And I may even like the revision better than my original wording by that time. But my struggle with this matter does raise some important (and more polemical than my usual) issues for us to consider as believers.
   
4. A faculty workshop presentation coming up in August on rest in the context of work. Not doing much yet, but did meet with a copresenter to discuss what we might want to talk about. And the topic does seem relevant to this blog, with its talk of deadlines and work and not being able to find time to blog. Rest, it seems to me, is relevant to every topic.
   
5. The TCW article I mentioned above, which is to be about Jesus as a storyteller. I'm really excited about this and have allowed myself to get a little bit started, although I don't really have time right now to work on it and I need to reread and think about the parables before I do. The deadline is 10 July.

So, my current struggles are deadlines—what a dreadful word!—and editing and being edited and getting back to daily Bible reading and, with so many projects going at once, finding rest. Welcome to the world of writing for a living.