Carmen’s Chatter

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit. —Salman Rushdie

Ever since my first class with Dr. Wilson Hall, a beginner’s German class in which he would explore rabbit trails of thought into the hidden histories of words and their roots, I have been passionate about etymologies. I was nineteen then. So that’s been at least ten years.

Or thirty.

Some people might think I love etymologies because I’m a nerd. I am a nerd, and proudly so, but that’s not why I’m enamored with etymologies. Other people might think I love etymologies because I’m “supposed to,” as an English major and English teacher, but that’s also not the reason.

Some people may be wondering altogether why I’m studying bees, beetles, flies, grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, and crickets. But that’s entomology, and if we knew that word’s etymology, we’d never confuse these two words, ever.

I first turned to etymologies because I had such a hard time remembering new words. That was when I thought new and unusual long words were SAT-bound nemeses with the personalities of gray hospital surgical rooms and the elusive qualities of greased pigs. Let me just say that a new vocabulary word was not a comforting presence in my brain. Any long word resisted analysis then, like an interminable headache.

Back in high school, I didn’t look up new words, unless a teacher forced me to for a (boring!) vocabulary test. Instead, I gleaned their meanings from their contexts within whatever book I was reading, and I read tons. New words were like very low speed bumps, slowing me down a tad but not much. I just whizzed through all kinds of books—novels, non-fiction, essays, science tomes, textbooks, all found in the paperback exchange carrell in our local library.

But in college my freshman year, many of my teachers required their students to look up words that we didn’t know (in poems, in plays, in essays, in textbooks) and memorize their definitions, for tests of all kinds. It seemed that my teachers were requiring me to digest the lexicons for several disciplines at once: history, English, psychology, religion, biology, and math—such is a freshman year at a liberal arts college.

All of a sudden, looking up countless new words became a major impediment to my reading speed in college as each new word became a half-a-foot-high speed hump.

There were so many unintelligible-to-me new words that I couldn’t keep them all straight in my mind, even though I wrote their definitions down in a notebook. It was like alphabet soup, lots of letters, no meanings.

But while taking Dr. Hall’s German class, I saw that he knew the histories of words, he broke words open every day to share their goodness with us, and I realized as I began to look up these etymologies of words myself that knowing a word’s history invariably cut down on my confusion when learning and retaining new vocabulary.

Yes, this practice cut down on much of my confusion with new vocabulary. Feeling like a fish out of water in Biology 1010, I met entomology. It scared me. Entomology had no mental handle on it until I looked it up in my red Merriam-Webster’s and found in those wonderful lexical brackets (i.e., ["where an etymology lives"]) the information that started helping new words stick to my mind like flies to flypaper or raw tongues to frozen flagpoles.

But something else happened along the way. The practical exercise became a mystical one. Take the rather intimidating word entomology. Sure, we all learned in fourth grade that the suffix -logy means “the study of [something],” but what about the rest of that long word?

Look up entomology and discover with me that this word was coined from the Greek entomon for “insect” and -logy for “study of.” But if we look deeper, we learn that entomos means “having a notch or cut (at the waist),” from en- for “in” and temnein “to cut.”

The amazing polymath Aristotle supposedly used “entomos” to refer to insects in the fourth century B.C., in reference to the segmented division of their bodies. Btw, check out insect, an “(animal) with a notched or divided body,” literally “cut into,” from the Latin insectare “for to cut into, to cut up,” from in- for “into” and secare for “to cut.”

Now, that’s awesome, especially when you realize that section also has that root secare in it for “to cut.” As seen here, we cut oranges into sections.

So, breaking a word open to reveal its etymological mysteries is not unlike breaking open a loaf of bread into the mystery of community around the supper table or of communion in church. Breaking bread together, we realize that we are a small, welcomed, loved, and essential part of a much larger, loving whole. In a not dissimilar fashion, a broken word can reveal to the linguistic seeker the mysteries of cognates (words with common ancestors) and the wonders of words with shared etymologies.

Three decades ago, I became enthusiastic about etymologies, and every day they teach me something and keep me young because there is no way anyone can ever learn all there is to know about words. They are an unending source of joy.

Take the etymology of enthusiasm: “possessed or divinely inspired by God within,” from the en- for “within,” combined with the theos for “God.” That nugget of information is kind of like a Snyder’s Hot Buffalo Wing pretzel piece. Once you’ve had one, the rest of those tangy pieces summon you back.

Therefore, one of my longest-running, favorite hobbies is gathering etymologies. This hobby is very low impact. It costs nothing. You can do it ANYWHERE. And the possibilities are endless! Also, what you collect takes up no space in the physical world, so there are no knick-knacks to dust and to clutter up the house.

Also, collecting etymologies, I am always thrilled and fascinated and kept interested by making fortunate discoveries by accident.

For example, another of my favorite etymologies is the one for serendipity. We all know that “serendipity” means “[t]he faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.” The independent orphan (well, her father is always at sea) Pippi Longstocking is always making wonderful, serendipitous discoveries. I guess if you live with a horse and a monkey, such things happen routinely, so to speak.

But what is the etymology of serendipity? It comes from the pen of the English author Horace Walpole:

In one of [Walpole's] 3,000 or more letters, on which his literary reputation rests, and specifically in a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Perhaps the word itself came to him by serendipity. Walpole formed the world on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of a “silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip; as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

So, I would say that I am ENTHUSIASTIC about the SERENDIPITOUS pleasures of collecting etymologies.

This blog is going to be very, very short and very, very simple.

I love flowers. I always have.

Seeing a flower is like speed-dialing 6 on my Samsung Mythic—that’s my bff, Beth. (1 is voicemail. 2 is my daughter. 3 is home. 4 is Sean’s cell. 5 is Sean at work. 6 is for the bff.)

And just as no matter what is going on, a flower always makes me feel good inside, the same with Beth. Sometimes we stop in the middle of laughing, like tonight, and go, “What was so funny?” I call Beth to tell her of the minor, sometimes major mid-life catastrophes that happen to me quite regularly, and as I am telling her, somehow these events morph into funny stories.

Georgia O’Keefe tied the two together once, flowers and friends:

Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven’t time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.

If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I’ll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

Flowers. To be thankful for a flower, to be thankful for a friend is to tend the softest, strongest petals of my self.

A thousand trucks hauling full loads would need several years to clear away the wreckage left by the 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince and sent shock waves from there throughout Haiti six months ago, on January 12, 2010. But not even 300 trucks are removing it at this moment.

As we’ve heard, 230,000 people died, and also more than 1.5 million people were made homeless by the earthquake. Officially, they are called “displaced people,” but even when they have been forced from their homes by the earthquake and can conceivably go back one day, displaced is still a government term for “homeless.” Over one million people are homeless.

Those are large numbers, and yet each large number is really one person times two-hundred-and-thirty thousand and one person times one-and-a-half million. Lumping tragic deaths into statistics that we can hold in our minds never much works for our hearts. It would take each of us a long time simply to count to 230,000 and even longer to count to 1,500,000, and what if each was a soul with a unique heartbeat. How long then?

Help has poured into the country of Haiti from loving people all over the world, devastated to sit in their easy chairs and watch the awful scenes in color on their television sets. So they got up and gave, or they got up and went to help. Or they got up and got the word out so others could add to their financial or material contributions.

Even so, only 28,000 homeless Haitians have been settled, if you can call it that, into temporary housing. Over one million Haitians are crammed into tents, praying to hold on to their sanity, each other, their health, their safety, and their few belongings, as the rains beat down. Rain has no spigot. It drums down on tents, promising malaria and typhoid. Its irrefutable, metallic wetness must taste like desperation to the Haitians huddling beneath dripping tents.

And six months in a news cycle is an oblivion. We search our crammed freezers for that excellent coffee someone gave us some months ago and are slightly frustrated when we can’t find it easily. Then we finally find it and are very happy to drink that very tasty coffee. We worry if our cars need a wash and some detailed cleaning work. We take our cars into car washes and do the detailed cleaning work, with a toothbrush. We focus on what we can purge from our homes and give to Goodwill, while new bought stuff keeps pouring in.

Can we even say where Haiti is? I know a fifth-grader could. To get to Haiti, all we have to do is go to Florida first. Drive past the lovely, round, and awkward-looking balletic manatees (that I so love), beyond Key West Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang-style, into the Straits of Florida, and cross over to Havana. Then follow the length of Cuba southeast, and once in Guatánamo (or Juaco), cross over to La Plateforme, and we’re there, in northern Haiti. To the west is Jamaica, to the east is the Dominican Republic, and to its east is, yes, Puerto Rico: Haiti.

From Miami, Port Au Prince is only a two-hour flight away, or 681 miles, which is about 1,097 kilometers.

And yet, Haiti is a world away from us. We could say a universe away.

And this is one of those times where, conversely, we turn to numbers to help us quantify concepts that are too large and too amorphous otherwise, always aware that these numbers, too, are pointing us to our brothers and sisters and their opportunities or lack of opportunities in this world.

In the “Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers, Human Development and Mobility,” which can be read online, we see the truth of America’s blessings in unflinching numbers. This helpful report describes for us a population’s life expectancy at birth (as an indicator of its health and longevity), its adult literacy rate and gross enrollment ratios of students in primary school through the university level (as an indicator of the country’s educational strengths and general knowledge), and the population’s standard of living (as an indicator of personal wealth or poverty). In other words, how long do Haitians live, how many go to school and for how long and how much do they learn while there, and what is their purchasing power?

If we look at the tables at the back of this Human Development Report, starting at page 143 and going on for many, many pages, we can see that those of us who live in America and can hunt for gifts of coffee in our over-full freezers are very fortunate indeed. On page 167, which is Table G, we see our affluence and its multiple benefits in the number thirteen. Out of the 182 countries ranked, the United States comes in at a very solid thirteen.

Now click over a few pages. Haiti is ranked 149 out of 182. That’s on page 169 of Table G.

Those numbers are astonishing, when we consider them concretely. America ranks in the top 7%, and Haiti falls into the bottom 18%. In other words, America is in the uppermost live-long-and-prosper-in-a-well-educated-manner category, with its under-10% ranking, while Haiti is in the bottommost category, with its over-80% ranking.

Put another way, we Americans enjoy a Human Development Index (HDI) number of 0.956, while Haitians have an HDI about half that, at 0.532. We live longer, we have more educational opportunities, and we have more power as consumers.

Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want” (Mark 14:7). It sounds like an assumption. Christ assumes we will be out there loving those less fortunate than we are, wherever and whenever we meet them. It is a holy and practical assumption made by God, the way we assume that any worthwhile house has a sturdy foundation.

So what am I going to do with my abundance?

Here are several Very Important Summer Activities (or VISAs) that do not require a VISA.

1) Admire the clouds.

Slam open a dictionary or click on etymonline.com to look up the etymology of cloud, if you want, but it’s not a prerequisite for cloud-watching. Clouds are huge white boulders in the sky, like Stone Mountains tossed up in the blue heavens, but coconut-white—no, more like the snowy white Dufourspitze or the Dom in the Swiss Alps, except airborne; yes, I’m talking about cumulonimbus clouds on a nice sunny day.

Whoa, in Old English, the word for a “mass of rock” is clud, and some poet over 700 years ago looked up into the skies and thought, That cloud looks like a clud. Yes, clouds are awesome, rock-like masses floating in the sky, morphing before our very eyes into rabbits and houses and All Terrain Tactical Enforcers (AT-TE’s) from Star Wars Clone Wars.

Clouds turn me to stone, out of awe. Seeing one, I think, That cloud is way bigger even than those boulders I can touch at Rock City, and even that not-too-too-gigantic Rock-City scale of massiveness strikes me with the silence of nature’s ineffable aliveness and beauty.

I feel about clouds the way Ralph Waldo Emerson felt about stars. He said, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”

During the last, recent drought, I keenly missed clouds. Here’s why, I think. (I’m going to substitute “clouds” for Emerson’s “stars” below, with my apologies to Ralph.)

The [clouds] awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

2) Enjoy getting into an old truck and taking a drive. I love our old Ford F-150 truck. I like that it is not new and that it has the solid body and blocky shape of a truck. It is what it is. And it smells especially good in summer, perhaps because the heat really brings out the fragrances of motor oil, transported wood (with errant and aromatic wood shavings still buried somewhere in the carpet), hot plastic, red dirt lost from work boots and old gardening shoes, the faintly scorched smell of the owner’s manual’s paper pages after bouts in extreme and punishing Georgia heat, a faint note of the public pool’s chlorine, and something else I haven’t been able to figure out.

So, when in summer I climb (and I mean climb) into our truck, I find it essential to drink in that truck smell, inhaling it deeply as I put on my seat belt. Then I crank her up and go to . . . Kroger or . . . my office or . . . Walgreens or . . . Wal-Mart or . . . the landfill. Sitting up so high in that delicious air makes me supremely happy.

3) Drive down Horseleg Creek Road in the brightest sunshine with Fleetwood Mac turned up. This is great to do on my way to the landfill in the truck. It is the corollary to the olfactory activity (I mean aromatherapeutic activity) mentioned in 2).

4) Wear a hat. However, it is also important to wear a hat in winter. Hats add pizzazz to any season. My favorite hat to wear in summer is a handsewn light-blue, washed-denim newsboy cap. In winter, I like tams and cloche hats. It’s always worth the hat hair.

5) Drive past an outdoor temperature display to find out how hot it is (as if you didn’t know already, with sweat trickling down your nose because the car’s air conditioner has not yet kicked in). And then decide whether or not you agree with the temperature posted there. Today, en route to Kroger, I went past a bank to see what the temperature was; the sign read “102.” I decided that that was probably pretty right, if only a few more degrees were added for those standing in the sun without a hat and with no breeze blowing.

One line of poetry sums up my feelings for the uniquely penetrating heat of a Southern summer. It was written by Jorie Graham, who read at UC Berkeley in 1996, when we were living across the way in Mountain View. Graham had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field. She was dressed in black, rail-thin slacks and a flowing, black, long-sleeved shirt. I had read her award-winning book of poetry, and my husband kindly took off from work and drove me (and our beautiful new baby) across the Bay-area lunchtime traffic so I could hear Graham read from it. (I had also read another of her books, and the line below is one of the few that I did understand; and I am one of those willing to struggle with the obliquely and deeply communicative beauty of the most excellent poetry. I did not, however, understand then and still don’t understand now her poems with blanks in them.)

In her poem “Tennessee June,” Graham opens with a wonderful statement about the fierce temps of a Southern summer, and I always think of this line when I’m digging holes in the dry dirt of summer, under a punishing sun (or even when I’m just walking to the mailbox): “This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything and loves the flaw.”

6) Eat a corn dog slathered in ketchup and mustard.

7) Drink a very cold, very creamy chocolate shake.

8 ) Buy a fresh, succulent pineapple, cut it up, and eat its juicy sweetness.

9) Slide down the long, winding orange slide at the Northside Swim Center’s pool.

10) Play Mousetrap with someone under ten.

11) Go for a walk at dusk or right before dusk, when the heat has noticeably left the stage, and the lengthening shadows and subtle breezes make for a perfect walk, especially with all of the cicadas and lightning bugs coming out and making their symphony of sound and light.

12) Read a good detective novel or two.

13) Enjoy cleaning house and sorting through clothes and shoes and scarfs you never wear and things you and your family never use, and also go through stuff that’s broken or obsolete and of no use to anyone; then take these things to Goodwill or to the landfill (see number 3). It has made me happy to do this “house-cleaning” this summer when I’m able to do it because gradually I’m simplifying my life. I’m helping our house be more reflective of how my family and I really live. Also, taking care of my house because I want to makes my soul feel good, as if I’m also caring for me. Plus, really, who needs three opened and almost full bottles of rubbing alcohol. I didn’t know we had any since they were scattered on different shelves in our bathroom, so I kept going out and buying more when we needed rubbing alcohol. Oops. Going through our stuff helps me see what we have and where it is.

14) Finish lists wherever you want, at 14) even.

1) NOT tuck my new Samsung Mythic under my arm while I stand in Walgreen’s clutching three different after-sun lotions for my daughter at 11:45 at night because . . . the nice black gel case on it that slips off so easily will slip off so easily when I forget to remind myself that my Samsung Mythic is under my arm as I reach out to open my purse and pull out my wallet, releasing the phone so gently that I am able to watch it freefall and bluntly collide with the floor, as the gel case on it slips off so easily and rolls across to the shampoo side of the aisle.

2) NOT be a cheapskate and keep using my old phone as it dies in stages, more specifically, as its speaker starts fading on me over a period of many months, followed by an additional month or two of long, unpredictable stretches of its cutting out on me because . . . a) the gradual fading of the speaker will first worry me for weeks as I think my hearing is going and b) the long, unpredictable stretches of the speaker’s cutting out on me will make all of my calls arduous and interminable because I have to bat the phone against my hand to make the speaker wire (I’m guessing here) reconnect so that I can hear the caller and because I have to make so many call-backs when the speaker goes out for minutes.

3) NOT drop my phone on the ground/floor/etc. so often because doing so can likely make a speaker wire (or other stuck-down things) come loose, hindering my phone’s ability to connect me with the world. Please see 1) and 2).

4) NOT believe the GPS when it contradicts commonsense. If I need to be heading north on I-85, I will not take I-85 south just because the lady in my GPS said so.

5) NOT run backwards up any hills (even though a friend told me it would stretch muscles in my legs that would not be stretched while running WITH MY HEAD FORWARD SO I COULD SEE WHERE I WAS GOING) because I prefer not to go to the ER if I can avoid it.

6) NOT carefully place a hot Coke can in the freezer, even though it is a boiling summer day—when the metal in seat belts burns and chocolate bars melt during the thirty-second walk from Kroger’s exterior doors to my Honda Accord—because . . . in the dark of night when people are meant to be sleeping I might hear an explosion and raise my head groggily off the pillow to ask, Was that a car backfiring? Was that a gunshot? Then I might sleep again and wake in the morning and go about the usual day, and several nights later before I go to bed I might open the freezer door to find a Coke can someone has shot straight through, all jagged edges of metal, while all of its contents are spattered in my freezer like frozen brown rain.

7) NOT place anything on the top of my car before I climb in and drive somewhere because . . . a) that’s a good way to learn how to wonder as one speeds down a four-lane highway: Whose newspaper is flapping against my back window? before its gray bulk separates into thin sheets and litters the road behind me, and b) it’s a good way to learn what forgetfulness means when one sees a blue purse (Whose blue purse?) fall onto the back window also and flop onto the road behind me; and, finally, c) it’s an unforgettable way to learn how fast I can stop, park, run back up the highway’s edge, and dash across three lanes to get my purse, if not the newspaper, before running back.

NOT ever forget to send those I most love flowers.

9) NOT forget that I’m loved and by whom.

10) NOT not-remind-myself-on-a-regular-basis of how delicious and how creamy and how totally cold McDonald’s chocolate shakes can be.

Milk.
Apple juice.
Coffee.
Waffles on weekends.
A yellow bouquet of flowers in my kitchen.
Bare feet on hardwood floors.
The scent of citrus and cilantro candles.
Green leaves out my kitchen windows.
Watermelon-colored crepe myrtles in my front yard.
Anything green and growing.
The smell of old books in the British Library and in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Star Wars: Clone Wars episodes.
AE’s Radio K playlists.
Salads at Panera.
Chocolate-covered peanut-butter-flavored granola bars.
Staying at home.
Going on trips.
Being in crowds.
Being alone.
Being with my family.
Blue jeans.
Ironing.
Pruning bushes.
Bees.
Dirt.
The Grand Canyon.
Lunch with a friend.
Greeting cards.
Spicy Korean bean paste soup, Doenjang Jjigae.
Law and Order.
Sarah McLachlan.
Listening to the radio.
Walks.
Looking out windows.

Actually, this column is NOT about s’mores, and I’m not going to apologize about that because who would read a column titled “Grammar”? Well, likely Danielle Buckley would, but still.

Anyway, grammar is as delicious to me as s’mores, and as messy and as community-nourishing (pun intended).

For some reason everyone has now forgotten, grammar has become a punitive class. I mean that ever since Robert Lowth published a very stern and omniscient grammar book in 1762, grammar teachers (and their obedient students) have been following its dictates blindly.

Already, this column will be making grammar-minders nervous and furious (future progressive tense used to indicate irony). Their minds are sharpening arguments: “But rules are important!” “I learned when I was in Mrs. Periwinkle’s grammar class in 19-aught-8 that you can NEVER split an infinitive!” “Only an uncivilized person ends sentences with prepositions!”

Well. Rules are important, but communication is more important. Who says we can’t split infinitives? Who decreed that we can’t end sentences with prepositions? If doing so helps us communicate better, why can’t we split those infinitives and find prepositions to end sentences with?

Is “being correct” the same as communicating?

Isn’t communicating that glorious process that hungers for, yes, both talking and listening? And also, shouldn’t a grammar class invite students to question why there are so many curious, seemingly illogical “rules” in English? And isn’t it easier to teach a rule as don’t-question-it-it’s-a-grammar-law than to explore a linguistic conundrum with students? (For example, why is the plural of “ox” not “oxes”? One “fox” turns into two “foxes,” while “one “ox” turns into two “oxen”?)

Jesus is always saying that love does not ride the back of legalism; love soars on the wings of mercy. Yes, there are certain guidelines to help us learn how to be merciful, and we can read about them in the Bible and ponder them in our souls. We don’t pray and struggle to become merciful so that we can show someone else how “right” we are. Similarly, we don’t study grammar in order to “correct” (with a certain imperious tone) others’ grammar.

Why do we study grammar then?

That reminds me. I love learning new things about my husband, Sean. We’ve been married twenty years now, and yet there is always something new about him that I don’t know, never knew. And I don’t watch Sean and study him because I want to learn how to win arguments against him, the way some study grammar in order to be “right.” (What’s that about?) I study my husband so that we can be more intimate, can communicate better, yes, can commune with each other, till death do us part.

Such a long view of grammar makes that rule—”DON’T SPLIT INFINITIVES”—look just plain silly. If splitting an infinitive makes the sentence sound better and makes the sense of that sentence clearer, why split that “to go”? Or, as Captain Kirk says at the beginning of Star Trek episodes:

Space . . . the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

To boldly go. “To boldly go,” not “to go boldly”—one of these phrases obviously sounds bolder, and it ain’t the one without the split infinitive.

One of the early grammar-book-writers’ hangups was that they wanted English grammar to reach the state of “perfection” that they saw in Latin grammar. In Latin an infinitive is one word; you can’t ever split it. So that “law” was applied (in a really willy-nilly fashion) to English grammar.

Also, shouldn’t sense and sound determine where those tiny, innocuous, important, and gluey parts of speech called prepositions reside in a sentence? And don’t you love choosing deliberately to use the coordinating conjunction “and” to start a sentence? Writers of the English language have found this initial “and” useful since, well, Alfred burned his cakes (and before). That would be way before 1000 A.D.

Winston Churchill is said to have rejected the grammar rule that requires us not to end sentences with prepositions, reportedly saying, “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

University of Georgia professor John Algeo puts it best in his Origins and Development of the English Language:

All these supposed “errors” [split infinitives, prepositions skulking at the ends of sentences, the singular "their," etc.] have been committed time and again by eminent writers and speakers, so that one wonders how those who condemn them know that they are bad. . . . [T]here are standards of usage, but . . . standards must be based on the usage of speakers and writers of generally acknowledged excellence—quite a different thing from a subservience to the mandates of badly informed “authorities” who are guided by their own prejudices. . . . To talk about “correctness” implies that there is some abstract, absolute standard by which words and grammar can be judged; something is either “correct” or “incorrect”—and that’s all there is to that. But the facts of language are not so clean-cut. (Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2009, 6th edition, p. 12)

Look at Jane Austen’s writing. She is a master. Yet she uses “they” (also “their,” “them,” and “themselves”) to refer to a singular antecedent. Mrs. Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice, “But everybody is to judge for themselves, and the Lucases are a very good sort of girls, I assure you. It is a pity they are not handsome!”

Rules can be taught without anyone’s having to ask, “Why do we do that this way?” while teaching and studying grammar as an art is much, much more difficult and infinitely more rewarding. If we become intimate with grammar, we learn to love words and to communicate better, which makes us happier human beings.

There are countless determined and caring teachers in all educational settings who approach the joy of grammar from the point-of-view that learning about this subject will help their students grow as communicators.

I wish the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage: The complete guide to problems of confused or disputed usage were as popular as, say, Lady Gaga. Every time I crack that book open I go gaga over the treasures and mysteries it contains.

Look up “ain’t” in it sometime and see what a curious and convoluted history this small but controversial word has had through the ages. Sometimes it has been considered standard English and at other times it has been kept outside the circle of linguistic warmth and usage. It gets the cold shoulder today but is often used purposefully and emphatically by speakers and writers of English. (Or is “purposely” called for there instead of “purposefully”? We could look up this nuance of meaning in that glorious usage dictionary.)

I wish all speakers of English would embrace grammar, not as a do-or-don’t subject, but as the gateway to the limitless mess and unlimited joy of communicating with each other. I don’t wear a stern grammar collar because I hope students will want to take Advanced Grammar so that we can learn together about the wonders of the English language.

And then there is that eye-opening book by Martin Joos: The Five Clocks. Joos shows the importance of audience and how it influences speakers and writers. To a wedding, I wear formal clothes, while to a picnic, I wear shorts. Clothes run the gamut from formal to informal, while language has different registers, too.

If an author is submitting a piece to The New York Times, he or she will use the best, liveliest, most interesting, and most standard English possible.

But, standing in front of one hundred cross-legged and squirming first, second, and third graders at a local elementary school, talking about writing, I never think to say something as formal as this sure-to-turn-their-ears-off statement: “Today I’m going to talk about the language with which we all speak and write.”

Remember what Professor John Keating (played by Robin Williams) says in Dead Poets Society? Remember this exchange from the movie?

John Keating: Language was developed for one endeavor, and that is—Mr. Anderson? Come on, are you a man or an amoeba? *Pause.* Mr. Perry?
Neil: To communicate.
John Keating: No! To woo women!

When the “rules” of grammar become “guidelines” for better communication, we are getting somewhere.

No grammar is perfect, anyway, but we labor (teach and study) under the assumption that grammar can be perfect. John Algeo often said in Advanced Grammar class: “All grammars leak.” He also liked to say that studying the grammar of the English language was a little like making tiger soup: “First, you must catch the tiger.”

Language is spoken by human beings. Human beings are notoriously (and wonderfully) changeable. Therefore, language is always changing.

All students of the history of the English language are well aware that these grammar “rules” (”guidelines”) change with the passing of time (and with the passing of speakers). “It don’t” was once considered standard English, used by the most educated speakers in merry old EnglandAlso, and the earliest (Old) English used no punctuation marks to speak of.

I wish to make a plea that we teach (and learn) grammar while embracing its joy, its mysteries, its fun, its leaks, its mess, and its deliciousness, never forgetting that we study grammar in order to learn to talk with (not at) each other and to enjoy learning to love each other better.

If we can link loving, delving into grammar’s intricacies, and eating s’mores, who wouldn’t want to enroll in a grammar course?

We could call the class: Graham-mar.

Several of my rye friends have pointed out to me lately that my last two blogs have had to do with food (I use that term loosely), more particularly with Spam and Hormel chili. One even asked was I hungry when I wrote them? So, for these astute friends, I set myself the task of writing about the first healthy food that came to my mind—lettuce. And I made up a poem for them, too:

Lettuce is good,
Lettuce is sweet.
Lettuce is something good to eat!

Well, of course, that set me to thinking about the word lettuce and wondering what its etymology is.

And, wonder of wonders, I discovered that lettuce is related to galaxy and lactose and lactation. Whoa. The common root to all four of these words is lac for “milk.” Whoa. So lettuce is used for lettuce because of the neat allusion to the milky juice of the lettuce plant.

One pearipatetic summer when my husband and I drove to the West coast and back on different routes, staying at every national park we could find, we stopped our old clunker at midnight on a lovely and endlessly unwinding road in Montana and got out and stood in the middle of the dark, deserted road and starred (I mean stared), gobsmacked, up at the immense night sky and looked—until our necks hurt—at the river of light flowing from several thousand of the two to four billion stars of the Milky Way Galaxy. To everyone who’s encountered the Milky Way unencumbered by our man-made lights, it’s easy and wonderful to see how galaxy got its nomenclature and that “Milky Way Galaxy” is a joyfully redundant phrase.

Lactose and lactation are obvious since the root “milk” (lac) is appearent, but when I looked up lactose I learned that it is what makes milk “sweet” (please see poem above) because lactose is “a disaccharide sugar that is present in milk and yields glucose and galactose upon hydrolysis.” (Being addicted to looking up words in Webster’s does have deeply delicious benefits.)

So, this blog is written in praise of the milky sap flowing from the stems of freshly cut lettuce, and it’s written in praise of the sparkling, milky beauty of the Milky Way Galaxy. And it’s written in praise of etymologies and pearonomasia, which, unfortunately, both of my children have known for some time now means “puns.”

Lettuce eat more lettuce and praise more wonders and cucumbers found down here beneath the Milky Way.

Selah.

Torn from some unidentifiable magazine, this 2″x2″ Hormel Chili coupon surprised me when it dropped just now from the book I pulled out of a shelf in my bright yellow kitchen nook.

I learned recently something you probably already know, as I am usually the last to know anything in any category having to do with houses, decorating, furniture, or clothes. A kitchen nook is not the same thing as a “keeping room.” A good friend of mine just bought a gorgeous house in East Rome; she showed my family and me the exterior, and then my son and I went back (at her suggestion) to “tour” the interior during the Estate Sale there recently—that’s when I saw her lovely “keeping room” with a black marble fireplace. Wisegeek’s definition suggests to me that a keeping room is where Paul Revere would have likely slept before dashing out to raise the alarm in the chilliness of a Boston April in 1775.

But I digress.

I knew from the sepia tint of this originally white Hormel Chili coupon that it was aged, and I was intrigued by its lodging as a bookmark in a slender book of poetry by Pablo Neruda. So I looked for an expiration date and read in a mustard-colored rectangular box between “40¢” and “40¢”: “MANUFACTURER COUPON / EXPIRES 4/30/93.”

My husband asked me later when he found the coupon on the island in our kitchen: “What were we doing in 1993?” I couldn’t remember geographical specifics immediately (What city? What jobs? What university?). It was the third year of our marriage, before children, and all I know for sure is that we were loving each other.

Then I remembered he was slogging his way through a very demanding MBA at The University of Texas at Austin while I worked my fingers to the marrow at a Medicaid insurance company. Remembering all that, I knew for certain that we were living then in a very small apartment and eating more-than-are-recommended quick meals such as Hormel Chili and Tuna-Fish Helper.

That’s why I found the coupon so intriguing. It’s so friable and dated and small. I love it for being so impermanent. Its top and right edges are straight, untouched by scissors or hands (showing that this coupon must’ve been at the top right of some magazine page), while its left and bottom edges show where I was too lazy or too tired to get up and find the scissors, choosing instead to use my human hands to carefully but not exactly neatly tear it out of the magazine. I also thought to myself: With not uncommon absent-mindedness, I’ve found this coupon-bookmark in a book seventeen years too late.

Then there is the coupon’s expired but still energetic offer of money-off to entice me to make a purchase that I obviously hankered to make when I was thirty-two. But that’s as old news as a nearly extinct font now. I mean that the offer is so old that when I wanted to type the cent sign into this blog’s title, I found that not only is that currency symbol no longer found on a computer keyboard but also that it was never there.

I have since quietly accepted that a cent sign is something I remember only from typewriter days. Things cost too much these days for a cent symbol to require a spot on a computer’s QWERTY. Once upon a time, 1/100th of a dollar (from the Latin centum for “hundred”) was a very prized copper penny. I spent several minutes searching the Internet until I found a “¢” I could use here.

But I wheeze like a crone as I watch cent signs, typewriters, pennies, and Hormel Chili coupons slip from my short-as-the-lifecycle-of-grass grasp.

The point of this winding, long-winded blog is that lately I have been profoundly thankful on a daily (secondly) basis for my husband and children and for old friends and new, who put up with, gently point out, kindly ignore, and even sometimes enjoy (by which I mean “make fun of”) my predilection for a long-winded, digressive, absent-minded, long-worded, and (see earlier blog, please) directionally challenged way of living. With many of them, I even feel comfortable enough to be my very quiet self.

I’ve always been thankful for those who love me and who let me love them, but recently I have been especially down-on-my-knees-and-singing-of-heart about them and the joy and laughter we share every wonderfully routine day and even in the middle of what looks like disaster, sometimes. The kindness of others is the often-overlooked oxygen in which we live out our days, and when we have skyfulls of it, we sometimes even forget that we’re breathing such graced air.

The other point of this winding, long-winded blog with its expired, useless 40¢ coupon (a symbol to an English major of a world sometimes bent on profit-making and on rushing beautiful essentials like cooking-and-eating together) is that that ancient, yellowing coupon fell out of a book of Pablo Neruda’s eternal poetry. The poem is “Tu Risa,” and I had Hormel-Chili-marked this page, where the poem goes like this:

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

. . .

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

I don’t know why I was so stopped in my sandals by a Hormel Chili coupon sandwiched between pages of love poems. Maybe it was the fleeting nature of the chili coupon versus (or “verses”) that which endures through a grueling MBA degree together, through living in the most cramped apartment in Austin, and through desperately trying to learn how to earn the rent for that cramped apartment by answering the phone and quickly giving medical providers the correct complex ICD-9 codes, all for $14,000 a year (that’s including countless hours of overtime a week).

The comparison is kind of like a swimming pool versus the ocean or a robot versus a squirming baby or a stock portfolio versus a genuine hug from a close friend or a plastic tulip versus one rooted in the ground with its shining pink petals wet with dew.

Madeleine L’Engle quotes the American poet Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) when she writes in Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage:

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.

I would also add (because I still love junk food):

And Hormel Chili that I scooped up with a dented fork as we ate together was more than Hormel Chili.

In Korea, spam or seupaem is special. It goes well with rice. You can buy it in gift sets and take it as a welcomed present to someone’s house when you’re their dinner guest. (Fruit is also very welcome.) And, believe it or not, there also exists in this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction world, Spam-flavored macadamia nuts, sold by Hamakua Plantations. Spam is so popular in so many forms that a few years ago, the seven billionth can of Spam was sold. 7,000,000,000 is a rather large number. That’s a lot of Spam.

But there’s another kind of spam just as unpopular as the other, capitalized kind is popular with many. It’s not the “canned meat made largely from pork.” Answers.com says about this other spam: “Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.”

Whenever I check on my blog, I read and approve worthwhile, real comments; then I check the myriad junk comments as “spam,” navigate over to my wonderful spam-holding area, and click on “bulk delete.” These pretend (poorly) to be written by caring people. Then you hear the clunky English and see the commercial websites sending them AT you and go *Groan.*

What I want to know is why all spam comments are written either so see-throughly or so feebly? Reading them for fakery, my head goes *Whoa!* and *Pop!* Here are a few:

From Skinny Womens Jeans, I was told that one of my blogs rocked: “Wow, nice post. I just now clicked a link to your blog and I am already a fan.”

Some computer or someone is ignoring aspiring to the well-crafted comment. I would’ve preferred: “Wow, nice post! I clicked a link to your blog just now and am already a fan!” It needs some exclamation points in order to rev up the tone, and, really, the whole sentence needs a little revising, as above.

Million abstauben said about another blog: “Simply want to say your article is awesome. The clearness in your post is simply striking and i can take for granted you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with succeeding post. Thanks a million and please keep up the good work.”

I’m not touching that one. It’s just too obvious. It belabors the points. It hammers them. It’s like a mental lead balloon. It churns out heavy-handed syntax like poured concrete. It’s wordy. *Groan.*

Health-juice.net is apparently a lover of Susan Boyle and said this about another blog: “I have seen the performance of Susan Boyle and it is never short of excellent. Definitely one of the best voices out there.”

Why not this? “I’ve seen Susan Boyle perform, and she’s always excellent! She’s got one the most amazing voices I’ve ever heard!” At least it sounds like a person wrote it. (Or maybe one did, but was in a hurry.) Such wording as I suggest above would throw me off longer, until I saw the Health-juice.net address.

Liquid-vitamin.org is, on the other hand, a keen fan of Britney Spears: “I have watched almost every concert of Britney Spears. She is truly a goddess of the pop music industry. I wish that she gets more success.”

I’m not even sure I ever wrote a blog in which I mentioned Britney Spears. Maybe I did. Anyway, this style would be better: “I’ve attended nearly every concert of Britney Spears. She’s the queen of pop music. I wish her all the best.”

But still, who or what devised this comment? Britney Spears is not at the top of the pop music industry, and the use of gets is strange. Also, aren’t all of those sentences just plain illogical? Who could’ve watched nearly every concert Britney Spears has given? *Blech.* And I much prefer Sheryl Crow or Enya or Carly Simon or Tracy Chapman or Sarah Mclachlan, but I’m sure teens would argue for Stefani Germanotta, named best international female solo artist, best international breakthrough act, and best international album (The Fame) at the Brit Awards 2010, in London. Yes, Stefani Germanotta is now known world-wide as Lady Gaga, wearer of interesting contraptions and setter of exotic fashion. And success? I wish Britney Spears good health. But “more” success? She’s already sold a billion albums (well, maybe 100 million, and no kidding). I wish her success in her personal life, and I mean it.

Both kinds of S/spam are canned. One tastes like pork; the other just smells fishy.

Like gnats at a pool party in south Georgia, spam is here to stay. I’ll just keep on swatting, and next time, I’ll try to keep my mouth closed.

Today I had lunch with my very good friend Gary Davis. Gary is the Postmaster at Shorter College. He is just past thirty in spirit and just past seventy in actual birthdays. Gary is one of my very best friends. We go to lunch. I bring my usual twenty-dollar bill. I call ahead: “Gary,” I say. “Can you go to lunch today, and can I treat you?” “Yes,” he says in his wonderful Southern accent, “I’d love to go, and, no, you can’t treat me.”

I take my twenty anyway. Once in the post office, I show him my twenty. Gary says, “I have too many lunches on my pre-paid card. You have to help me use them up.”

This scenario is kind of like the ever-repeating plot in that great movie, Groundhog Day. I have not yet succeeded in the last several years in paying for Gary’s lunch, but I keep trying.

We mostly laugh through lunch. I cannot report what we discuss. It is top secret. By that I mean that it is too funny, and sometimes funny doesn’t translate well onto the written page.

I will say this. You’d have to be there.

Gary is also an Anglophile. So today I was telling him how my son, John, who’s nine, loves the Jeeves and Wooster video series. Of course, my husband and I think this makes our son a genius because there is no indicator of intelligence better than the sophistication of a person’s humor. I mean. If you read James Joyce’s Ulysses and don’t get that it’s funny, well, the reader has totally missed the point.

Anyway, I was telling Gary how when I was studying for a year on a Fulbright that I was walking home one day from University College London when I ran into Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, filming Jeeves and Wooster. Whoa. I got them both to sign an envelope I had in my back pocket, a letter from my major professor, John Algeo, and I carefully put that prized letter somewhere that I have been unable to this day to find again. *Sigh.*

I didn’t know Hugh Laurie would go on to be the famous House.

Encounters like that happened all the time on the Fulbright. One day I was about to enter a zebra crossing when I remembered to look the OTHER way and saw a motorcade of important-looking black cars swishing by, and in the second car was Princess Diana. Whoa. Her blond hair went by in a glimpse, but it was way cool.

Another day, I was high up in the very forbiddingly Communist-looking, white and towering Senate House Library, where the books were even stacked on the floor (they had run out of space, apparently), and I was toiling away in my usual spot, head down over a notepad, taking notes for my dissertation. When all of a sudden a commotion flew up from the streets. People at tables near me threw open the windows and stuck out their heads, and I, being only human, went to the window at my table and flung it open and stuck out my head, too.

There was a colossal traffic jam below us there in downtown London, black taxis, cars of all sorts, even a few lorries, all going nowhere. That was not usual. People got out of their vehicles. They paced. They talked. They gesticulated. What was going on?

Finally, the news floated up to my Senate House window: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had retired. Seriously. The news caused a traffic jam that I saw with my own two eyes.

Another thing I would not have believed if I hadn’t seen it took place in Westminster Abbey. It was Commonwealth Day, and one of the perks of being a Fulbright Scholar at the University of London was that they gave you free tickets to amazing events. For example, you got invited to Parliament and into the House of Commons and got to see where all of the debates take place and even to rub the copper bright toe of the Churchill statue.

This day, we were invited to Westminster Abbey to participate in Commonwealth Day, which included watching Queen Elizabeth process in her full royal regalia and glittering crown down that glorious aisle.

(My husband and I had chanced to actually meet the Queen and Prince Philip when they came to London House, where my husband and I were living at the time, so I already knew I was fascinated by her; she made Sean and me feel as if she’d met no one else that day. I curtsied to her, as I’d been taught to do. She talked with us for ever such a long five minutes. I adored her. I can’t say the same for her husband, but I won’t write down why, though I do have examples which I will tell you if you buy me a cup of strong coffee with milk.)

Anyway, I was in the moment, totally absorbed in watching the Queen process down that aisle when all of a sudden a child, maybe eight, stepped in front of the Queen by a few yards, innocent camera in hand, and the entire audience gasped inaudibly. Really, that can be done. There can be such a thing as a collective inaudible gasp. I have seen it that one time.

Next, I saw a teacher plunge out of her seat towards the child, arm outstretched, mouth agape, and then the Queen did ever such a majestic gesture. She stopped processing. She stopped and just stood there in her august, sparkling royal raiments, and she raised her right hand. I saw this now. She raised her right hand towards the teacher, to say, “Stop.” Then, without saying a word the entire time, she motioned for the child to take her picture.

The child, being a child, thought that only right, and so she did. Then the Queen began processing again.

Whoa.

My buddy Gary said, “I wonder where that child is now, and what that picture looks like.”

So do I.

So the moral of this story is this. Everyone needs a very good friend like Gary Davis to have lunch with. I feel fortunate to hear his stories of his Coast Guard days, and his jokes are life-enhancing. Also, because Gary is one of the most kind-hearted people I have ever met, I learn much from him about loving others. I can’t say what, either, because he wouldn’t want his other good deeds to see the light of day, but he does tell me; rather, he mentions to me, and I gather in what he says and put them all together.

Gary Davis is one amazing person. That’s what life is all about. Meeting the Queen is a great thing and seeing her stop a Commonwealth Day procession so that a child can take her picture is another awesome thing, but having lunch with my friend Gary is the best thing of all.

Thanks, Gary.

All the way from South Korea via the wonders of the Internet, Danielle Buckley Park, with her usual enthusiasm, has let me kindly know that she expects me to write regular blogs; therefore, I try to. She anticipates; therefore, I type.

Danielle Buckley Park is a graduate of Shorter who went on to earn an MFA in England at Exeter University. I always say that Danielle has a biological need to learn. You can imagine she was a joy to be in class with! All of her teachers at Shorter said that.

So, Danielle anticipates (regular blogs from her old, irregularly-inclined-to-blog teacher); therefore, I type this blog. This statement reminds me of “I think; therefore, I am,” an axiom that for all its celebrity philosophically has never thrilled me personally, perhaps because I usually think too much. By “thinking,” I mean “analyzing” and “worrying.” A very close friend has as much as said that, but gently.

I asked my friend Beth recently, “Do you often worry about lots of things?”

“Yes. It drives me crazy.”

“Do you think you analyze and worry as much as I do?”

“Um, no, I don’t think so.” She laughs.

“I didn’t think so. I hoped not.”

I put much of my attention towards prayer, especially through the ancient practice of lectio divina, steeping meditatively in a verse from the Bible, so why hasn’t “I pray constantly; therefore, I am happy” replaced “I worry a lot; therefore, I stress out constantly.”

Perhaps because I don’t pray constantly. I know many think that’s just a half-hearted verse in 1 Thessalonians, but I took it seriously years ago when I first read it in college, and it’s been my profoundest soul-searching ever since.

I still have so much to learn about surrender, who is the loving heart of the universe, whom I know as a Person, Christ. I have always been a very slow learner, hard of hearing, blind of eye, stumbling of heart, even with those I love most.

When I was younger, before we knew what dyslexia was, I was also the kid who confused any “c” with any “s” and any “d” with any “b.” So I just felt stupid but tried harder at reading. The hours I put into learning how to read well were phenomenal. I have never felt “smart,” but I did eventually learn to read smoothly, with just the rarest “c” seen as an “s.” This overall less-than-speedy-quickness makes me thankful that God has given me an extra helping of stubborn diligence.

But diligence must be mixed with surrender in wise portions. That’s one reason I am thankful to be able to teach. This work shows me over and over that listening is more important than thinking. Isn’t “listening” another word for “surrendering”? And isn’t “listening” synonymous with “praying”?

I love the phrase “holy listening.” I’ll never forget the very holy-listening, Ph.D.’d nun who first explained “holy listening” to me at the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University, but, still, the “holy” before the “listening” almost seems redundant.

Isn’t genuine heart-felt listening always holy?

By “listening,” I mean that as a college professor I try very hard to know my audience, because every year the students get younger than I am! Well, I mean I grow older than they are and feel further removed from the ways of their minds and the concerns of their hearts. It’s astonishing how quickly this happens from season to season.

This gap-producing process is inexorable and always threatens my ability to hear my eighteen- to twenty-something- students, for each middle-aged year seems to deposit a thick, crusty layer of metaphorical wax on my interior ears.

I want to clean these out. How? I want very much to ask myself throughout every day: Am I listening to my students? Who are they? What are they anticipating from me? What are their likes, dislikes, worries, joys, and favorite colors? Where are they from? Where do they live? What are their fears? Who are their friends? What are their hopes for the class? What are their strengths? What are areas where they want to improve but worry they might fail? How can I best encourage them? What are their future plans?

I also ask myself: Where can I be mature but vulnerable in allowing them to see that I, too, worry about failing and do often fail, that I worry about revising and do often have to revise my writing and talks, that I worry often about just getting dressed in the morning but am happy to announce to them that my teenage daughter has taken over as my sartorial consultant, changing my wardrobe’s spectrum of light black clothing and dark black clothing to a wide rainbow of colors and a sudden dearth of denim.

Listening to my students takes me out of my well-worn groove in many ways. I could stretch out and relax comfortably in that mental hammock forever, growing boring around my edges and spilling out deafening yellow ear wax in amounts that would keep Shrek busy making candles.

Well, so, Danielle, thanks for being there and for always asking hard questions I can or cannot answer well. Thanks to all students who show up and trust me to partner with them in learning. I know learning is often scary.

Jesus is always saying, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear!” He knows that no matter how kind the teacher, real learning is always an upheaval of the best but still unnerving sort. When, for example, Christ said, “Love your enemies,” many who heard him said, “What! You’ve got to be kidding!” That statement causes an upheaval in me everytime I read it or say it to myself.

Thanks to every awesome student for making getting up in the morning the most wonderful blessing! Thanks for teaching me that listening and praying and learning and growing and loving are one activity, really!

First, I have a confession to make. I enjoyed my break from Facebook more than I had anticipated. In fact, I thought about disconnecting my Facebook account and ignoring my blog for the rest of my life.

The pathbreaker Marshall McLuhan said that we should analyze our relationship with technology. He talked about how it “amputates” a part of us, even as it extends our “selves.” I think fasts from Facebook and from technology are, at least for me, necessary regularly; otherwise, I get too caught up in thinking that I am Facebook. I get too caught up in thinking that my words are who I am, and I forget the Silence that is God’s first language, as John of the Cross famously said.

I have had much time with Silence over the Lenten season. I need much more. And I will keep rearranging my life to get it now. I had forgotten how much I crave time with Silence. Silence is more than golden. This Silence is loving, listening, healing, and ultimate acceptance. This Silence is even playful. It opens up new vulnerabilities in us. It makes me willing to be uncertain. It takes my tightly clinched fists and massages them open.

What is it I hold on to so unflinchingly? My need to be right, my need to self-justify, my need to get things done, my need to do well, my need to be good and to do good, my need to be liked, my need to look good, my need to please others.

I have to in some mature way die to all of these “needs.” Some of my dear friends posted this devotional from Following Christ on their web pages recently, and their highlighting it for themselves highlighted it for me, too:

We must learn from the disciples’ doubt. What we perceive as death is often the stillness before the eruption of new life. We must realize that waiting on God is always fruitful. It teaches us not to be fearful. Christ’s bitter experience in the tomb thaws our hearts and gives us the courage to love. (From page 164 of Following Christ)

My wise thirty-plus-year friend, Beth Moore Ragusin, says that we must ask Christ to free us from our “Chicken Little Syndrome.” I guess that is CLS. It would be transformative for me, the fearful disciple, to go from suffering from CLS, meaning “Chicken Little Syndrome,” to CLS, meaning “Christ-Loving Sinner.”

You might say, “But you do love Christ, Carmen.” But if there is anywhere in my heart where I hold on to my esteem of my self over loving and forgiving others and helping those in need, my love for Christ is so weak. All of the wise ancient writers I study mention that perfect humility is a self-forgetting kind of love. I crave that above all. I have for a long time now.

I think that the craving comes long before the experience. I am a slow learner. I always must envision or desire what I need long before I even start on the path towards it. But Christ is patient with me. By “patient,” I intend the etymology of the word to dominate: “long-suffering.” To be “patient” with someone, we literally “suffer” with them.

To be a patient means to realize that you are “suffering.” Jesus is always saying that only the sick need a doctor. Only those who are ill need healing. Only those who are afflicted need help.

We must be patient with each other, the way Christ is patient with us. We must be patient with each other because each of us is Christ’s patient. Each of us is suffering in some way from the human condition. Each of us is trapped by sin.

When I get really quiet before the Lord, when I listen to my heart, when I go past the surface worry, past the to-do lists, past the ego concerns, past the deeper worry, past the process of forgiveness, past the healing balm of Christ’s reassurances to me as a sinner, there remains in the hidden spaces of my own darkness my hearing the hardness of my heart.

These places of calcification undermine love and paralyze my arms every time I refuse to embrace them in the Silence, before Christ. Life is so short. During Lent, my prayer became, “Father, teach me gentleness. Teach me love. Help me let go of everything hard in me.”

The late fourth-, early fifth-century Desert Father John Cassian gives me hope. His words, like his sandals, have genuine grit in them:

Every day, grab the gospel plow, which is the constant reflection on our Lord’s Cross. Don’t let go. Use this divine tool to break up, turn over, and soften the ground of your heart. It is the only way we can rid ourselves of the deadly beasts lurking in our hearts’ most hidden lairs.

May the Lord bless you and me as we walk side-by-side, risking all to become as brave as that lowly Carpenter in loving.

The Christian season of Lent starts this Wednesday. That’s February 17th, Ash Wednesday, and Lent culminates on Easter Sunday, April 4th.

During this holy season, I’m going to eschew as much of the Internet as possible. That means, Goodbye, Facebook, and Goodbye, reading the newspapers each morning online.

I wonder if I can do it.

However, because I love my students and because I firmly believe that no student should write me an e-mail that isn’t answered within twelve hours or less, I will obviously be on my Shorter College e-mail, which also lets me know if someone messages me on Facebook, which I guess is kind of a sideways glance at Facebook, not to mention that my cell catches other ambient information from Facebook and relays it to me. But, still, that slows my use of the Internet to a trickle.

Instead of dancing with the Internet daily, I’m going to hunker down in the quiet of Lent. I am going to embrace the darkness of faith. I am going to listen to the silence of Christ, which is so eloquent. I am going to confess my sins and my weaknesses and all the petty, shallow, clay-footed stuff in my divine soul. I am going to admit my fears. I am going to admit my hurts. I am going to ask Jesus to let me become more intimate with him, above all others. I am going to request transfusions of God’s agape love. I am going to say to God, Transform me. And I am going to pray that doing this will help me love my husband, my children, my friends, and my enemies better, more, intensely well.

I wrote a book recently about this kind of spiritual hunkering down. I figure I should take some of my own medicine.

My BFF, Beth, tells me how much she loves this book—Following Christ: A Lenten Reader to Stretch Your Soul—and how much it meant to her to read it (she’s quick, wise, brilliant, and very supportive). While Beth’s kind words always mean more than I can say, I also know that writing a book and knowing God’s peace aren’t necessarily synonymous.

I wish they were. Writing a book is hard, the way knowing God’s peace, for me at least, is hard. I get in the way of it, you see.

Also, the terrain of my soul is only known by God, and I must turn to Christ for healing this season. This Lent, I am going to take my complaints out of my articulated, visible life and sing to God only instead: Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen. Nobody knows, but Jesus. I mean I will give God the grief of my soul.

I have friends who are very, very tolerant of my flaws and very, very loving as friends, and when I get very, very quiet within, I can easily see how very, very patient they are with me, and encouraging. This kind of human agape love always enables me to take the next step, to risk the next vulnerability, to open the next weakness of mine up to God. I am grateful for my friends.

If you’re staying on the Internet during Lent and if you’re interested, Paraclete Press has released Following Christ as an e-mail subscription, starting tomorrow (Monday, February 15th), and you can find out about that here at the Paraclete Press website.

If you want to read an excerpt of Following Christ, you can find that here, also at the Paraclete Press website.

I will also be hunkering down in 1 Corinthians 13, which seems especially appropriate today. When my husband, Sean, and I were married, my sister Anita read 1 Corinthians 13 at our wedding. I am going to make it my lectio divina passage for Lent, meditating on, memorizing, and daily remembering those sublime and challenging words:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

“And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones.” —Isaiah 58:11

Back in 1983 a door in then West Germany forever opened for me, exclaiming, “Schön! Schön! Schön das Du da bist!” (“Wonderful! Wonderful! How wonderful you’re here!”) I began to think it had a beautiful recording on its hinges. But, no, behind that door was a woman with a beautiful bun of neat white hair and a greeting as tall as she was physically short, and her welcome was always sincere. It was, in fact, indefatigible. No matter how many times I turned up, a lost waif, on her doorstep, she took me in. She must have literally translated that verse about being hospitable to strangers because you might be entertaining angels unawares. I could have told her I was no angel, and saved her much trouble.

Meet my German grandmother. The woman who gave my soul a transfusion of Christ’s love when I most needed it. When I applied for a Rotary Club International Graduate Scholarship, the wife of the Dean at Shorter College, Mrs. Margaret Whitworth, told me should I make it to Heidelberg, I should look up their friend, Frau Sophie Buschbeck, whom they knew because in the 1940’s the Whitworth’s church had sent shoes and rations to German refugees, and Dean Charles Whitworth and his wife had “adopted” Sophie and her eight children. Frau Buschbeck had written them back often, thanking them. Over the years the families had also visited, traveling great distances to see each other.

I listened to this spiel the way you do when you’re twenty-two and know everything. Yeah, yeah, whatever. When I was accidentally assigned to Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg by what I would later consider an act of God (and was, literally, the need to more equally distribute the Rotary stipend students)—I didn’t care that this famed Sophie Buschbeck was there in Heidelberg, too. I would soon graduate from college, and I was going to take Germany by storm.

Except I didn’t. I arrived—ja wohl!—and promptly lost control over everything. Or more precisely, I continued losing control. It was a downward-spiraling sort of thing. I didn’t even pass Heidelberg University’s (very stringent) entrance exam the first time I took it. I had actually failed a test. It was a sobering experience. Also, I seemed to be totally unable to cope with life in general.

To make matters worse, my application papers had been lost, so the local Rotary Club in Heidelberg didn’t know I was coming; and I had no place to stay. More homesick than I ever thought possible, I found myself standing (a rather forlorn-looking twenty-something in jeans) in a public phone booth in Boppard, Germany, along the Rhein River. I realized then with a pang of irony that I’d gotten what I wanted—total independence—and quickly wished instead for a friend.

So I poured handfuls of strange round coins called Deutsche Mark into a pay phone. I pulled out an unremarkable-looking piece of crumpled paper, read the ten digits, and pressed the buttons for null-sechs-zwei-zwei-eins-vier-fünf-sieben-fünf-neun or (06221) 45759. This was Frau Buschbeck’s number. Twenty-seven years later, I have it memorized. But when that number was given to me by Mrs. Whitworth at a lunch at her house some months before I left for Germany, I’d scrawled it down, stuffed it in my wallet, and given it no further thought whatsoever. It was unimportant.

A crisp old voice answered, “Halo?” as if it weren’t expecting a phone call. The voice was loud, the way white-haired people speak when their hearing is not at full strength. Halfway through my explanation of who I was (in hesitant German), Frau Sophie Buschbeck realized who I must be and, sight unseen, broke my stuttering with a grand welcome. That’s when I first heard her sing out in German, “When you arrive in Heidelberg, if you’re not too weary, would you come to the Schlossfest concert with my family and me?” That was for September 23, 1983, and I instantly said, “Ja-ja.” I knew enough German to realize I had just been invited to go to a concert at the famous Heidelberg castle (Schloss); it turned out to be a classical music concert that was as magical in its beauty as was the castle, and Frau Buschbeck’s family welcomed me into their fold.

And that’s how a wonderful friendship began between a seventy-nine-year-young World-War-II-survivor and a twenty-two-year-old neurotic American student. It was as if there weren’t six decades between our ages. And, although Frau Sophie Buschbeck died in 1992, the absence of her life, as Sylvia Plath says, grows beside me like a tree (“For a Fatherless Son”). I have decided hers is a fruit tree, and I’ll tell you why.

Frau Buschbeck always kept her fruit bowl conspicuous and ate oranges and apples and pears daily, like candy (well, it seemed to me). To her they must have been like edible gold, a celebration of plenty. And she loved the smell of apples. She enjoyed reminding me that the poet Schiller kept apples in a bowl beside him when he wrote because he found the sweet aroma inspirational. Later I would learn why she valued fruit so much. To me, an apple was an apple, something easily found at Kroger.

Frau Buschbeck also took it on herself to feed me once a week, on Fridays, always roast chicken (something she would not have ordinarily cooked in her German kitchen) because, she said, it was good for my health and was also something I would like for its being very “American.” I can’t say I was thrilled at first with what I saw as “enforced lunches” weekly. I perversely preferred to be left alone with my solitary books and a feast of crackers and peanut butter (the latter not a local German supermarket item and only secured through a friend who had connections with a nearby Army base store). But when Frau Buschbeck invited, you didn’t dream of answering, “I’m not coming.” You went, you were thankful, you ate, and you washed dishes afterwards.

I also became fond of Frau Buschbeck’s crunchy Bratkartoffeln, those thinly sliced, golden brown pan-fried potatoes that I eventually fell in love with. Also, in Frau Buschbeck’s small apartment I ate gallons of the best sauerkraut, nothing like that put-your-teeth-on-edge sharply vinegary stuff you buy in stores in America. Sophie Buschbeck made sauerkraut with whatever she had at hand, and it was sometimes sour, sometimes sweet, and sometimes both at the same time; it was always delicious, and it was never the same way twice.

Frau Buschbeck even arranged for homeless me to sleep in the attic of her apartment house (and what a view it had of Heidelberg sparkling at night, as seen through the tiny dormer window!), until a kind university administrator, Frau Treue Pfundt, helped me get a dorm room in Neuenheimerfeld 684, Stock 1, Zimmer 20-I. So what it was roach-infested. I had a home, and a sweet German roommate, Gundi nee Schuster Hiller (whom I write and send gifts to to this day and who every Christmas sends me a card and a calendar with Bible verses in German on it).

My dorm room was only a few minutes’ bike ride from Frau Buschbeck’s home at 28/30 Mozartstrasse, and that address is all you really need to know. Her life was all about music. She played the piano, and often enjoyed four-handed compositions with her eldest daughter, while a teenaged granddaughter played the recorder and an eight-year-old grandson the violin.

I saw Frau Buschbeck almost every day, and we always went for a walk; and we always read from the little blue Losungen (literally Solutions, also Devotionals book). On cold winter nights, she wrapped a wool shawl around her shoulders and had me sit next to her and read the Bible to her, in German, of course, in that old, hard-to-read Gothic type that at first I found almost impossible to decipher and therefore most annoying.

I was at a low point in my life spiritually. Problems in my family meant that I was sick of soul. The Bible and its very familiar verses were having a hard time touching my weary, bitter heart. I didn’t know that this darkness was despair. But God through Frau Sophie Buschbeck found his way back into my heart because the conscientious student I always have been was determined to learn to speak German well, to understand spoken German, and to read it with ease, too; therefore, I didn’t mind reading the Bible aloud to her because it was an opportunity for me to better my German.

How ironic that the thing I most ran from was given back to me when I least wanted it and when I could least receive it. That was a true gift from God. All the old, battered religious concepts that my soul was burnt out on became utterly new in a different language with a new, wise, kind, Christ-focused friend. Watching Frau Buschbeck daily and praying with her regularly, I learned that true prayer is ordinary, that it can be as common as breathing.

Praise of God was at the core of our friendship. We always sang. We sang during devotional times, we sang grace before the ubiquitous hot lunches, we sang grace before the cold suppers of sliced dark bread and thinly sliced ham and cheeses and pickles, and, yes, we sang good Lutheran hymns in church. Singing was obviously not the exclusive activity of church services in the world of Sophie Buschbeck. Singing was for daily use.

Sophie Buschbeck and I always spoke in German. She was sympathetic to my desire to learn her difficult native language, and so she patiently put her own desire to learn English on the backburner. Later, at the end of my stay, I found in an English book she loved to read a list of English vocabulary words that she had been working on while I was there. There on the back of a recycled envelope she had written a list of English vocabulary words and their definitions, all in English, in an old-person’s shaky, light-fountain-pen-blue-ink handwriting. That shamed me, for I realized as my heart constricted, how much she had shown me God’s love, helping me learn German, instead of insisting that I teach her English.

We did everything together, and anything I did with her was exciting. Even the simple act of mailing a letter in the public mailbox at the corner was, with Frau Sophie Buschbeck, an amazing experience. She always put her hand through my bent elbow, the better to dash across the street in an admirable (by then, after a birthday) octogenarian jaywalk. We must have made an unusual sight, a wrinkled, white-haired German woman with a slightly bent 5’1” frame, her arm threaded through that of a young, brown Cuban a good six inches taller.

We walked everywhere briskly, and along the way to the mailbox, Frau Buschbeck would point out with great excitement the ordinary bright red berries sparkling in the bushes lining the sidewalk. She christened these “Schmucke” (“jewels”). Her arm through mine as ever, she pointed at them through my elbow, looking out from under her blue velveteen hat, and then she’d exclaim, “Look at those jewels!” I’d never have noticed them otherwise. Once at the public mailbox, she’d sail the letters into it with a sunny, “I hope this Post makes them happy.” Sophie Buschbeck did everything con brio.

We also went to art exhibits and plays and concerts. She would hide away in her purse without my knowing it a little bar of delicious, rich German chocolate for us to split at intermission. We went shopping for groceries. We traveled together. We even visited a nursing home and shut-ins, always taking them fresh flowers or fruit.

Years after Frau Sophie Buschbeck’s death, I read Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” and felt I had found her serendipitously in his poem. Rilke is remembering his much-missed, special friend, Paula, and he believes he can commune with her spirit if he goes on a pilgrimage of sorts because her essence seems to inhabit every common thing, as Sophie Buschbeck’s did:

I will stand / for hours, talking with women in their doorways / and watching, while they call their children home. / I will see the way they wrap the land around them / in their ancient work in field and meadow. . . . / I will go to watch the animals, and let / something of their composure slowly glide / into my limbs; will see my own existence / deep in their eyes, which hold me for a while / and let me go, serenely, without judgment. / I will have the gardeners come to me and recite / many flowers, and in the small clay pots / of their melodious names I will bring back / some remnant of the hundred fragrances. / And fruits: I will buy fruits, and in their sweetness / . . . will live again.

I read this and felt he was describing my Sophie Buschbeck. The requiem ends with this line about his soul-friend, Paula: “Denn Das verstandest du: die vollen Früchte” (“For that is what you understood: ripe fruits”) (Stephen Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 74-75).

It was true, in every way that line can be. When Frau Sophie Buschbeck ate an orange, I was always reminded of the way a happy child eats one. Nothing but that orange exists in this whole wide world. All of a sudden, an orange seems to be a magical thing, a thing of mystic beauty. It becomes the epitomy of good. It becomes a link to God. When peeled, its rind gives off an oily perfume in slight, damp clouds. Then it drips sweet drops of juice. And its pulp on the tongue has a rough-smooth texture when suddenly noticed.

It is the song of the orange that Frau Sophie Buschbeck sang. This joy is how she approached me, how she loved me back to God, how she was a big part of my healing. It is how she saved my life. In her spiritually mature, God-attuned attention, my very immature, very damaging ways began to heal, and my soul itself began to ripen. She loved me with God’s agape love, and I began to be healed in the warm rays of what she kept on singing about daily—the true Son.

Therefore, I always thought Sophie Buschbeck was aptly named. She was wise, and of course her first name means just that. I don’t, however, mean she was pompous, the way I picture, say, the philosopher Bertrand Russell might have been. I mean she was not bitter, and she had every right to be, just like my first landlady in Boppard, who had made it through World War II with great hardship and told you about it every day, spitting vituperation in your food as she passed your steaming plate of boiled spinach. Bitterness is not a good condiment, I discovered in a tiny room on a dark lane I knew as Beyerhofgasse 15.

Sophie Buschbeck once told me that she had no pet because she had no time for one. Besides, she said with a short laugh, “The people I look after are my pets.” She meant that she cared for others with a daily regularity that was somewhat astonishing for me to see. Sophie Buschbeck was always having lonely people over or was visiting those who had no one else. There was a woman she and her daughters knew who had once been a concert pianist but who had had a total nervous breakdown for some unmentioned reason and could no longer perform in public. But she performed for Sophie Buschbeck and even for me the time I was invited along. This was something like a minor miracle, for before we left, Sophie Buschbeck said, “If she doesn’t want to perform with you there, it is not a big deal. She is a fragile, hurting person, and she must be loved in that. She is lonely, and we visit her in her loneliness, to comfort her in some small way.”

The week before Christmas, Sophie Buschbeck always cooked and gave a dinner for about six elderly friends of hers. That year, I was also invited. As I helped her prepare the food, I thanked her for inviting me and admitted, “It’s just me and your other lonely people tonight.” She chuckled. But it was true. We both knew it was.

The first weeks of our knowing each other began the old German way—I addressed Frau Sophie Buschbeck with the formal Sie for ‘you’ and not the friendly and informal Du. Sie is required when speaking to strangers and older people and is a form of high respect. Du is reserved for intimates or for someone your own age. But soon enough it seems I had passed some unspoken test, or perhaps she had also wearied of the decorum: “Please, you may use Du,” she offered in an almost apologetic tone. She added something that cracked my bitterly armored heart open, too: “And you should call me ‘Mutter Buschbeck,’ if you like.” Mutter Buschbeck, for “Mother Buschbeck”—she had made me family.

By then we had became constant walking partners and the best of friends. I felt I could tell her anything, but I was satisfied to tell her mostly of my life there in Germany, and the stories she told me as we crisscrossed the hills across from and above the famous Heidelberg castle along the Neckar River riveted me. Each week we walked the aptly named Philosopher’s Way, and she talked, as any widow might, of her husband, a Lutheran minister who had died only a few years before. Occasionally she told me how she missed him. Above all, they had been great friends, and this alone, with my family’s issues, was worlds of health to me. She told me many small stories about her day-to-day life with Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Buschbeck. These would later help me style my marriage.

Mother Buschbeck also spoke of fleeing from the Russian soldiers with her eight children. “I had heard the stories of what they do to girls.” She got each older child to hold the hand of a younger. “So many mothers lost children in the crush of boarding trains, never to see them again. Horrible. Just horrible.”

She described years of making jam from carrots. “You don’t know how terrible it is to have hungry children and you must tell them, ‘No, this bread can’t be eaten today. We must save it for tomorrow.’ Terrible.” She told me that her two oldest boys still became weary early at night, from not having enough to eat when young. Today her children are lawyers, doctors, pastors, a psychologist, and an engineer. They are all amazing, accomplished people. And they all have her generous spirit.

Only once did I hear the note of regret in her story: “For my twenty-fifth anniversary I wanted a piano, but instead I was overjoyed to get a letter from my husband.” This letter came during World War II, from Russia, and it was important because it told her that her husband, Fritz, was still alive. During the war, her pastor-husband, her Mann, spent five long years in a Russian prison camp. He was there for their twenty-fifth anniversary.

Their oldest daughter Elisabeth told me once that her father grew closer to God in his imprisonment:

During his time in prison, he came to love the Bible in a new way. Father said that that was because he had no commentaries, only the Bible. He came to rely on it and on God’s spirit more. He said he learned what the phrase ‘to wait on God’ means, what that verb harren in ‘harren auf Gott’ means. It means ‘to wait on God,’ and he said he learned that waiting then. He came to love the verses with the verb harren in them. He memorized them. He said them often to himself. He said they made him strong until he came home.

Later, when back in America, I looked these verses up:

Yet the LORD is waiting to show you his favor, yet he yearns to have pity on you; for the LORD is a God of justice. Happy are all who wait for him! (Isaiah 30.18)

Lead me in thy truth and teach me; thou art God my savior. For thee I have waited all the day long, for the coming of thy goodness, LORD. (Psalm 25.5)

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. (Lamentations 3.25-26)

Sophie Buschbeck’s life made my soul sit up and pay attention. Here was someone who’d had it harder than I and who had come through enriched and unembittered. I watched to see how she did it. I wanted to know how she waited on God and where she found her undeniable joy.

Mother Buschbeck’s number one secret seemed to be that she had not turned away from heartbreak. She had accepted it. She had embraced the hard reality of pain. As Rilke says in “The Tenth Elegy”:

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels. / Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart / fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful, / or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face / make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise / and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights / of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you, / inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself / in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain. (Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 205)

This, then, was the main lesson I had to learn. It had never occurred to me that pain was to be accepted. I thought that hurt was to be fought against, and even conquered. I thought anything less was failure. I had forgotten that the man on the cross tasted vinegar and cried out to God, asking why he had been forsaken. And this is God’s Son, turning to his Father in his utmost pain, as I had still to learn to do. As I have still to learn to keep on doing.

So, during the year 1983-84, one Rotary Club International Graduate Scholar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg studied much more than German Language and Literature and started learning not to “squander” her hours of pain.

“How many times have you driven to my house?” Beth asked, sounding quite serious.

I was safely at her home at the time and seated in front of her warm fireplace, where I had confessed my latest misdirection.

I started to answer, “Um—,” beginning to count up the times mentally, when I realized her faux-serious tone of voice had once again snuck one past me.

“You—”

“Now, I’m just teasing with you.”

I mean—what could I really say? I myself was marveling that a grown woman could get lost between Rome and Acworth.

Because I know Beth loves me, I never mind the ribbing.

Because also I do get lost easily, I mean, seriously.

To help me with this directional malady, my sweet husband, Sean, bought me a GPS for my forty-eighth birthday a year ago.

Did you know you can still get lost with a GPS? It’s possible. I can attest to that. That’s why I need one so badly and must learn to use it better.

So here’s why Beth was teasing me. I went to visit her not long ago, she lives in Acworth, Acworth is about thirty-seven miles from Rome, and I got lost in the middle of those. The last thing I remember her saying to me was, ever so gently, the way only a friend who’s known you (and your foibles) for thirty-two years can say, “You know your way here—it’s not hard—you just go 411 to 41. Right?” And when she heard my long, drawn-out silence stretch across the wireless line, she quickly added, “No worries. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

So although it should take me only about forty-five minutes to get to Beth’s house, I always give myself an hour because I don’t like to keep her waiting, and I never know when I’ll take a wrong turn. Once I’m sure I’ve made all the right turns and can relax, I’d rather drive really slowly, arriving just on time (the GPS helps with this changing “arrival time” calculation); if I get somewhere early because I have to leave so early to accommodate my possible wrong turns, I have also been known to sit for a few minutes in a nearby parking lot reading a book, until the agreed-on meeting time arrives. I hate being late, for any reason.

So. I plugged in my GPS. I plugged in Beth’s address. My GPS started talking to me. I started driving. All was well. I kept driving. My GPS kept talking to me. All was well. I kept driving. And then I thought that the lavendar, go-this-way road on the GPS was to the right, so I turned.

Then I heard those dreaded mechanical words, “Recalculating.” I sighed. I remembered what kind-hearted, gentle Sean has always said to me, “Don’t panic when you get lost. That’s when you get to see new places.”

Sigh.

So I kept driving. I saw a new bridge being built; it was amazing, really, just half a bridge towering above me as I rode underneath it, a tiny man in a hard-hat perched on top of it with surveying equipment, and I thought bravely as I was passing under it, Sean was right. I would not have seen that bridge if I hadn’t taken a wrong turn.

Then my GPS calmly said, “In .3 miles, turn right.” So I did that, wondering, Where am I? I was instructed to get on highway 61. I did so, thinking any minute I would be in Florida or somewhere like Czechoslovakia. But, lo and behold, in six miles, I was instructed to get back on 41. All was well. I had only taken a minor detour, and so I arrived at Beth’s house right on time. And it was a terrific visit.

But the point remains that I get lost easily.

I get lost easily when driving in a car, and I get lost easily when navigating my emotions, too. Just because no one else can quite see me getting lost emotionally doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen on a regular basis.

This reminds me of something Cynthia Bourgeault (I believe) once said at the Abbey in Conyers, when she was leading a conference on prayer there, and I was happily in attendance. She said that she’d just gotten a GPS and how wonderful it was for navigating new terrain and how we all also need to tune in to our “God Positioning Systems.”

So I’ve been thinking about my God Positioning System. This “GPS” includes the Bible and prayer and good friends who will direct me to the Bible’s wisdom and to prayer and to what one book I read recently called, “Christly virtues.” I loved that “Christly.”

So when I get lost in anger, I read, “A quick-tempered man does foolish things” (Proverbs 14:17), “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15:1), and “A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel” (Proverbs 15:18).

And when I get lost in wanting to manipulate something that I should turn over to God and let go, I read, “Folly delights a man who lacks judgment, but a man of understanding keeps a straight course” (Proverbs 15:21), and “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6).

And when I start to get lost in thinking I’m wise or something, I read, “Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones” (Proverbs 3:7-8).

And when I want to judge someone else, I read, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:1-5).

And when I think, Life’s not fair! I read, “Better to be lowly in spirit and among the oppressed than to share plunder with the proud” (Proverbs 16:19).

And when I want to lose my temper, I read, “Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32).

And the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the most piercing, relevant Proverbs to me has become this one: “When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise” (Proverbs 10:19).

As I told Beth over some loaded, cheesy potato soup that was as delicious as it was caloric, every morning I get up and think, What can I not say today? People who know me will doubt that, but it just proves that everyone is fighting some spiritual battle that perhaps seems to show little to no fruits . . . yet.

Now, to my best friend, Beth, I will say pretty much almost anything. Okay, I will indeed say anything to Beth. I mean anything. I feel that free in our friendship, and it’s a huge blessing, a very freeing experience. I also feel that freedom in my marriage, thankfully, but otherwise, in general I’m learning the value of limiting my words in all of my relationships, especially at work.

No one really needs to know all that I think. My jokes are not that funny. My points are not that helpful. And often the truth can be damaging in ways I had not foreseen. Keeping my mouth closed more often would be a huge step in the direction of wisdom. I’m sure.

So I’m trying not to get sidetracked by my emotions daily. I’m trying to stay on the course of love. But obviously I’m always getting lost in foolish human detours of the heart like pettiness, anger, resentment, judging, complaining, and so forth.

But I also always have my GPS with me and my loving friends, keeping me focused on God’s way, thankfully.

Those of you who know me and who know my awesome daughter know that I asked Kate could I post that blog, and she read it and approved of it. If she hadn’t liked it, it wouldn’t be up.

Also, I did come clean immediately after I picked her up that day from middle school. As we were riding home, I told her I’d enjoyed watching her, to which I got the requisite, “Oh, Mom, that’s so lame.”

And I replied, “Well, I don’t do that regularly, you know; but it was kind of like the middle-school version of sitting outside the fence at the pre-school playground and watching your three-year-old before you pick her up.”

That comment was met with a big *sigh*.

I am listening to Owl City. That is not unusual these days. I mean these months. Ever since my daughter, Kate, introduced me to Adam Young, I’ve been hooked by his poetic lyrics about love, by his puns, and by that gorgeous sound. It’s like the purest yearning on a CD. I have played Ocean Eyes over and over to the point of wearing out the speakers in my Honda Accord.

I am listening to Owl City while I watch a teenager at a local middle school. It is the very end of the day, and all after-school activities are over. It’s five o’clock. Teenagers are socializing in clumps waiting for their parents.

This teenaged girl is tall, with a mane of straightened, burnished golden brown hair, and the kind of legs that explain why God invented skinny jeans. I notice that her face is also beautiful and that she goes from person to person, hugging them. She is graceful, but also there is something heartachingly poignant about the way her elbows fly out to the sides as she runs towards a friend she’s known since elementary school, her arms open, ready to hug her.

I am not my own, for I have been made new.

This is my daughter, Kate, and she doesn’t know I am sitting in the parking lot, watching her. I may be excused this parental indiscretion, perhaps, because she texted me as I left college, “NO HURRY.” That translates as, “I want to visit with my friends after band and chorus practice.”

As I am driving the ten minutes to pick her up, I get a second text, “SLOW DOWN.”

Well, as there is only a certain amount of slowing down one can do on GA Loop 1 without being run over, I have arrived too early still. I am often told that I arrive too early, so—ever the attentive student—I know that this is one of those times. I can tell because as I drive in front of the high school, I look left across the parking lot to the middle school and see my daughter with a handful of her friends. Even at that distance, I can tell she is animated and having fun.

So I very discreetly pull into the parking lot, kill the lights, and sit quietly as a mouse, trying not to be embarrassing. I sometimes think as a middle-aged parent, If I pretend I’m not there, no one teenaged will see me. It’s kind of similar to the two-year-old’s trick—if I cover my eyes, I don’t exist.

I’m floating away, lost in a silent ballet. . . . silent ballet.

I watch my daughter run down the sidewalk in front of that sandy brick building with the curiously green tin roof, hugging all of her friends. She is smiling. I see her braces. She is laughing and happy. And I marvel again at how beautiful she is. I almost don’t breathe. I don’t want to spoil the moment, for either of us, because the distance between us is great (and I don’t mean just the physical space there the size of two asphalted lanes).

And I am right beside you. . . . Are you there? Are you there?

The rhythm is that she leaves her group to hug others and then rejoins her group, and she is talking and smiling in her chocolate brown North Face jacket. Then I get a third text, “You almost here? No rush.”

Now I am caught. I text back, “5 min.,” hoping God will forgive me this white lie, while I justify it by saying to myself that she’s not ready for me to pick her up yet, that she’s having too much fun, which is true, but I know I texted that response also because I myself want five more minutes of seeing my daughter without me in her life.

Introduce me, and I get the unsmiling teenager more than smiling and argumentation more than laughter.

Late nights and early parades, still photos and noisy arcades, my darling, we’re both on the wing.

She is beautiful, and as I watch her running down that sidewalk, my heart filled with love, I wish she could know this sky-large love and know that I always want the best for her. How does that train go off the rails? I suppose it is age appropriate, for both of us, she as a teenager and I as a (gulp) peri-menopausal woman.

When did we both get so old? How did the sparsely-haired, chubby-legged baby who once fit on my lap grow into this other creature, this other being, this gorgeous, independent teenager?

You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies, lit up the world as I fell asleep, ‘cause they’d fill the open air, and leave teardrops everywhere. . . .

How did that cholicky baby who cried for three months straight become this articulate teen who can write essays like a gifted college student and out-argue any adult in her vicinity? And why does my world seem to be speeding up by the day? Why do I feel that she is running as hard as she can in the direction marked, “NOT MOM. NOT DAD.”

I’d like to make myself believe, that planet Earth turns slowly. . . .

More teenagers are picked up. Cars block my view of my daughter. I duck once behind the steering wheel as my daughter runs down the sidewalk to hug another friend. Well, I pretend to be picking up something off of the floor on the passenger’s side, but I keep my eyes on her. I can’t not. I keep thinking how so much of being a parent is letting go and then letting go again.

I get another text, “Almost here?”

I answer, “Here.”

I don’t answer, “I’m in the parking lot. Come across,” because I know that will embarrass her and also that she’d have to carry that heavy book bag and purse and flute that much further. So I put the car in reverse, back out, then drive through the parking lot, circle by the high school again, and pick my daughter up at the middle school, as if I am just arriving.

As I drive by the high school (where my daughter will be next year already), Adam Young is still singing, “I’m weird ‘cause I hate goodbyes. I got misty eyes as they said farewell.”

I just keep on letting go. I mean that I keep on praying that God will give me the wisdom and the strength to let go.

Because my dreams are bursting at the seams.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. —Jesus, Matthew 5:3, Sermon on the Mount

Failure is not a fun topic. The word comes from an Old French word faillir, for “to be lacking, miss, not succeed.” At least in our Western culture, “being lacking, missing something, and not succeeding” are not cool.

A lot of money is cool. A silver Mercedes is cool. A summer home is cool. A successful business is cool.

And why not? But the love of success to the exclusion of remaining open to learning is like the love of money to the exclusion of all else—both can limit my soul.

Fortunately, I’ve never had to worry about a lot of money or a lot of success, but I have had to worry about perfectionism, which on the surface looks like the opposite of failure, but is to my mind (or has become to my mind) synonymous with “being lacking, missing, not succeeding”; for how can a person learn if he or she does not feel free to ever make a mistake?

That surely shows a lack of awareness, a missing the point of being alive, and a failing.

I used to be a perfectionist, and in some ways, once a perfectionist, always a perfectionist. You could say I am a recovering perfectionist then. But I have at least unmasked perfectionism for the ongoing failure of learning that it is.

I wish when I had been a teenager that someone had told me what the etymology of perfect is (not that it probably would have helped my stubborn self that much, but still).

Perfect comes from the Latin prefix per- for “thoroughly” and facere for “to make or do.” So literally perfect means “to do [something] thoroughly.” It does not mean to not make a mistake.

To do something perfectly means to do it over and over until you get it right or to do it over and over until you get it at least more nearly close to excellent than if you had done it only twice.

I know from watching my mother sew that to sew thoroughly requires much concentration and—even with her talent and experience—much ripping out of seams and re-sewing. So to do anything thoroughly is a revisionary process.

Perfect, then, means doing something often because you want to do it well. It does not mean doing something right the first time, necessarily, or even the second or third time, or even, I would dare say, the 1,000th time.

I am so conscientious (I prefer that word to “OCD”) that I have no trouble with this concept when it comes to writing. I always love to say that “writing is revising” and that “good writing isn’t written—it’s rewritten.”

But I say that with a gut-felt appreciation of its being true in my life as a writer. I have to revise countlessly. Once an elementary school student asked me, “How many times do you revise a book?”

I said, “As many times as I kiss my children in a year’s time.” In other words, too many times to count.

I can handle the psychic pain of writing and its necessary revising. It can be stressful and is always hard, but it has its deep inner rewards; and also writing is just me struggling with my self.

Where I have trouble with “doing things thoroughly” is more often in relationships, if you know what I mean. Pain often makes it hard for me to patiently redo what I must redo if I am going to love those I love.

So I’ve had to accept lately that failure to communicate or to get along helps me identify where I need to grow up, especially in my relationships with those I love most. By “grow up,” I mean places in my soul where I need to “redo” my love for my self so that I can love those I love better.

I always love those I love, but sometimes I show it well and other times I totally blow it.

A dear friend sent me something recently about the refining (redoing) process of our souls that reminded me of a passage from the fourth-century Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina. Gregory was the younger brother of Bishop Basil of Caesarea and Macrina the Younger. Here’s what Gregory said about how his sister, Macrina, had handled hardships of soul:

As gold is heated in many furnaces, one after another, so that any impurity not separated out in the first furnace can be separated out in the second, and so on, until all remaining impurities are removed in the final smelting, I watched my younger sister, the nun Macrina, as her soul was refined by grief. She knew many earthly losses until her heart became absolutely pure. Like the best athletes, she persevered. She never let difficulties break her spirit. Macrina worked at her faith.

I would hope that I would work at my relationship with my soul and also at my relationships with the ones I love in this persevering way, until they are purified into something only quite joyful and loving and caring.

But often I am afraid that I forget, at least, that part of the process of smelting is that hot fire, and that’s how “being lacking, missing, not succeeding” feels to me often. It is uncomfortable and searing.

If I could only remember that what I call “failure” is part of the revisionary process of love, of doing anything thoroughly. And what is love but the most “thorough” act we can do.

I’m asking God to teach me how to just hang in there and accept it all, including the necessary heart-felt pain of the smelting.

A student in my upper-level medieval literature class e-mailed me her thoughts recently on what she calls “faith-resting.” She was following up on the class in which we discussed Psalm 46:10 and “resting” in Christ as an activity (or a non-activity, or both) on which medieval Christian authors are always focused. Because this student is one of those for whom writing is as natural as breathing and who also revises as naturally as she writes, I include a passage from her e-mail, rather than summarizing it:

I was thinking about the concept of “resting” that we had talked about in [class] yesterday, and then I read your “Resumes and Rest” blog on the same topic. One image kept popping up in my head, and I thought I’d share it with you because I thought you’d appreciate it.

My senior year of high school, I had a Sunday School teacher who taught me what he called the “faith-rest” concept. “Faith-rest” happens when believers are content, confident, and peaceful (or “resting”) in their faith. To illustrate it, he would always describe this scenario: you and Jesus are sitting in a little boat in the sea. Somewhere far in the distance is a beautiful green island, and you want to get to the island. The way the boat is facing, Jesus can see the island, but you have to turn all the way around to see it. If you face forward, all you can see is him. Jesus is steering the boat, and you’re rowing. All it would take for you to reach the island is for you to row and Jesus to steer. But you’re not sure that you want to row. You want to steer because you think you know where you’re going. So, you drop the oars and take up steering, and Jesus quietly lets you. You try rowing and steering together, but you end up paddling in circles. Once you’ve tried thousands of ways to steer and row at the same time, or perhaps do neither, you realize that you need to let Jesus steer, and you humbly row, keeping your eyes fixed on him. This is “faith-rest.” You row, and he steers.

This image of me rowing and Jesus steering always comes to mind when I think about resting. Sitting in a boat with Jesus, talking, laughing, and rowing slowly and steadily seems like the most peaceful, restful thing in the world to me. I like how simple the concept is.

If you knew this student, this passage would mean even more to you because she is mature, funny, diligent, brilliant, and personable. She is the kind of student one could picture studying at Harvard for graduate school.

So now I have a new image to hang my soul’s hat on—I just need to keep on rowing on a daily basis.

Selah.