Complicated

Papers were nailed to the church door on Sunday as we entered. Curious about why, I pointed them out, and Ann remembered that Sunday was Reformation Sunday, a day when we celebrate Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and the beginning of the Protestant Church.

Stories of Martin Luther’s challenges to the Roman Catholic Church, particularly about the practice of indulgences, are familiar to me. Martin Luther’s story has always been one of how ordinary people could have relationships with God without the intervention of a priest. It has been the story of a man who challenged the church’s sale of indulgences, challenging a practice that encouraged people to pay so that they could go to heaven. In my life, his story has been the story of a man who stood up for common people. Fittingly, two lay people gave the sermon about his story.

The second speaker, Kay Verelius, surprised me with parts of Martin Luther’s story that I had never heard. For one thing, he introduced hymns to the church service, though the meter was different in his day. Additionally, later in his life, Martin Luther was an activist against Jews. The website Christianity Today, among many other sites, reports that Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) where he wrote, “Set fire to their synagogues or schools.” He continued that Jewish houses should “be razed and destroyed,” and Jewish “prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, [should] be taken from them.” In addition, “their rabbis [should] be forbidden to teach on pain of loss of life and limb.” Still, this wasn’t enough.

Luther also urged that “safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews,” and that “all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them.” What Jews could do was to have “a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade” put into their hands so “young, strong Jews and Jewesses” could “earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.” According to Kay, his words contributed significantly to the German anti-Semitism that led to persecution of Jews during World War II. Kay said nearly every writer of Third Reich referenced and quoted Martin Luther’s works.

Kay also quoted Pastor Bernard Howard: “It seems to me Martin Luther is a man we should honor but not celebrate…. Luther is both hero and anti-hero, both liberator and oppressor.” Pastor Howard said that we should “honor” Martin Luther for all of his contributions, but not lift that honor to the level of celebration.

I’ve been thinking about that. What does it mean to honor a person? Knowing artin Lunter’s anti-Semitism, do I honor Martin Luther?

Martin Luther was a complicated man. Like most of us, he was created “half to rise and half tofall.” Can I honor the man, knowing both his great gifts and his great failings?

The question goes so far beyond Martin Luther. It’s again evidence of the partial histories our schools and church’s tell, hiding the darkness of those whom the powers would have as our heroes. Learning about Martin Luther reminds me of learning about Christopher Columbus’s destructiveness and about the Japanese internment in the U.S. during World War II. I didn’t learn about the darker side of these stories in school, perhaps because they undermine a myth of goodness and power that undergirds the American myth of virtue, and perhaps my church didn’t teach me about Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism for the same reason. This gives me pause.

Like humans, perhaps our institutions are created half to rise and half to fall. Our nation, our schools, and our churches, are a complicated mix of good and bad.

Thinking about this history and Howard’s comments, I wonder who I honor and what that means. I’m not sure I know what Howard means by “honor,” but I don’t honor the man, Martin Luther; I do honor some of his deeds.

As I think about this, I remember my niece Isabella, a debater in high school, who told me that she liked to argue the harder side of a debate but that she would never argue against immigrants or gay people. Because I know everyone has a dark side, I want to think about what, for me, is outside the bounds of honor.

Anti-Semitism is. So is racism. And so is macho-ism. Interestingly, I don’t think homophobia is for me. Maybe that’s because I grew up with it and with so many people I loved who were homophobic. 

I’ll have to think some more about this. I'd love for you to help me.

Lovely, Dark and Deep

At my bi-annual eye appointment with my eye surgeon last week, Dr. C tested my eye movements. As usual, my left eye wouldn’t move left, and I whined, "I work on the every day!" 

The doctor said to me and the intern in the room: “Yep. Once that sixth nerve is dead, it doesn’t do anything.”

I’m part dead. I write a lot about how alive I am and how happy I am about it, and that's true, but it’s also true that I’m part dead, just not all the way. I think about this partial death when I consider that I need to sleep fifteen hours a day. If I were fully alive, I’d be doing things I love to do (other than sleeping) with more of my day. There’d be more time. Of course, time was the issue before my tumors, too. In fact, I remember one of the poems I wrote when I was in high school:

Too much to do,

Too little time:

The complaint of

a day, a year, a life.

I must have been 15 or 16 years old when I wrote that, but already I was fatigued by all I was trying to do and be: such an anxious child (with an undiagnosed thyroid disease, blood disorder, and brain tumor).

I grew into an anxious adult who slept a lot and whose conditions were gradually diagnosed. Now at the end of the day, I count the number of hours I slept that day: fifteen. This number of hours makes me think of the call to life in Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening":

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep

Each time I count those hours, I re-hear something I heard someone say once, a sentiment I’ve heard and thought often: “There will be plenty of time for sleep once I’m dead.”

Am I wasting my life with all this sleep? Or is all this sleep making my life more whole?

These questions whirl, and it’s breathing and art that settle me down. Last week, my friends Pam and Allyson played a house concert that people from our church had purchased at an auction. I love the joy of their music, the sweetness as Allyson looks at Pam to keep in sync, the loveliness of their harmonies. These harmonies make me feel the world is in tune. Even when the song is hard, the harmonies make something beautiful of the pain. Just listen to one of the songs they sang, “No Hard Feelings” by The Avitt Brothers 

 When my body won't hold me anymore 

And it finally lets me free
Will I be ready?
When my feet won't walk another mile
And my lips give their last kiss goodbye
Will my hands be steady?

When I lay down my fears
My hopes and my doubts
The rings on my fingers
And the keys to my house
With no hard feelings

When the sun hangs low in the west
And the light in my chest
Won't be kept held at bay any longer
When the jealousy fades away
And it's ash and dust for cash and lust
And it's just hallelujah
And love in thoughts and love in the words
Love in the songs they sing in the church
And no hard feelings

Lord knows they haven't done
Much good for anyone
Kept me afraid and cold
With so much to have and hold

Mmh
When my body won't hold me anymore
And it finally lets me free
Where will I go?
Will the trade winds take me south
Through Georgia grain or tropical rain
Or snow from the heavens?

Will I join with the ocean blue
Or run into the savior true
And shake hands laughing
And walk through the night
Straight to the light
Holding the love I've known in my life
And no hard feelings

Lord knows they haven't done
Much good for anyone
Kept me afraid and cold
With so much to have and hold
Under the curving sky
I'm finally learning why
It matters for me and you
To say it and mean it too
For life and its loveliness
And all of its ugliness
Good as it's been to me
I have no enemies
I have no enemies
I have no enemies
I have no enemies

Yep. I think my life is like that, too. Even when the song is hard, the harmonies make something beautiful of the pain.

Reinventing my life, again

Late to my first writing class, I looked around the table at my fellow students. I was not supposed to be a student: I was supposed to be a teacher, and had been until brain tumors and their treatments induced my disabilities and ended my teaching career.

“What do I do now?” I ask myself. Which is another way of asking, “Who am I now?”

Maybe I’m a writer, so I’m in this class, preparing to finish the memoir that I started seven years ago, with my first brain tumor.

This memoir recounts my story of moving from refusal (not denial) to the decision to reinvent myself (not acceptance). 

“How did I refuse to acknowledge the possibility that something might be really wrong?” you may wonder. I didn’t return my doctor’s increasingly urgent phone calls each day for a week after the CAT scan of my brain. “No news is good news,” some part of me thought. The memoir is about moving from refusing to hear the news to deciding it was time to change my life—or to recognize my life had changed without my input.

An inevitable sequel to that story is in what way to change my life. I haven’t lived that part of the story yet. Right now, I’m living the part where I’m trying to figure out the change.

A couple of months after leaving my education career, I went to the School of Social Work so that I could immediately become a new person. It wasn’t a bad idea. I wanted to become a one-on-one therapist for people with life-changing health conditions, something I had needed and not been able to find. It turned out I can’t do the licensing for being a therapist because the hours required for licensing don’t fit with my fatigue.

So five years and one degree later, I’m trying to figure out how and where to do work that’s meaningful to me and to people who have experienced trauma and health issues (including aging and dementia).

During my unconventional practicum, I led a weekly poetry reading group for elders in an assisted living home. I also led poetry reading and writing with another group of elders with Early Stage Memory Loss (ESML).

Now, in this search for my next adventure, I sometimes lead a writing group for young adults who are homeless. I’m also working with a local woman who is active in the Alzheimer’s community to develop poetry as an element of the Arts for Alzheimer’s program. Next month I’ll begin leading a weekly Heritage Writing class for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered people over 50. In December I’ll begin working with a group that does poetry writing in the state’s psychiatric hospital for children. I am raising a puppy.

And I want to finish my darn memoir and weasel my way into Seattle’s reputed writing community.

I guess my next adventure has begun. The search is the adventure. In our first writing class, we responded to three prompts. The second prompt, Write about a time when you didn’t know what to do made me realize that’s my current situation and made me think of one of the first times I didn’t know what to do. So I wrote…

When my dad called me at college, I answered the phone, and he was surprised to hear my voice. (I almost never answered the phone even though this was in the days before caller ID and anyone could have been calling.)

I let the phone ring a few times before answering in order to steady my voice. As soon as I answered, my father asked, “Is something wrong?”

I hesitated but then came out with the truth. “Mack and I had a fight.” (His real name has been changed in order to protect his innocence.)

“What did you fight about?”

I had waded in, so I went on, “He wants to get married, and I don’t.”

Dad cleared his throat and spoke in his most stentorian professorial voice, “Well you know, Mary, sometimes in a relationship you have to make compromises.”

I gasped, perhaps for the first time in my life clear that my father was wrong. “Compromise! Not about marriage!”

I had been waffling about this relationship’s trajectory for years and would waffle several years more. I didn’t know why I couldn’t commit to what seemed like the relationship I had always dreamed of.

Mack was cute, sweet, funny, and bright. He was smart and would head to Harvard Law School and The Harvard Law Review the next year. He came from a fortune 500 family with parents who were gracious and humble about all their money. Like I was, he was politically liberal. He was devoted to me.

Why couldn’t I say yes?

After all, marrying Mack was part of my life’s plan. As a freckle-faced, auburn-haired tomboy growing up on a suburban cul-de-sac in North Carolina, my parents and I had an unspoken plan: I would be a good student and a decent athlete; for college, I would go to my father’s alma mater; I would become a doctor or a lawyer; and I would marry a well-pedigreed doctor or lawyer.

My husband and I would raise our 2.5 children on a suburban cul-de-sac, and these children would be honorable Southern Baptists, like their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. The children would love our golden retriever. They would be good students and decent athletes. They would attend colleges of their choice. They would be doctors and lawyers and would marry doctors and lawyers: our future showed an infinite line of Southern Baptist doctors and lawyers, children and golden retrievers.

But my life wasn’t going according to plan, and it was my fault. Mack and I would eventually part and marry other spouses. He would have 2.5 children and a golden retriever. My husband and I would divorce, and I would marry a woman. Good golly. Who saw that coming?

My partner Ann and I didn’t make plans that required us to stay together but agreed about how to live each day. We would be as honest with one another as we were with ourselves. Rather than make plans to stay together forever, we made agreements: We would not share wardrobes, like many lesbians we knew. We would maintain individual bank accounts and relationships with friends. Eventually, we would work in different places. We would go to the hospital when she struggled to breathe. We joined a church, bought a house, and saved for retirement; however, much has not gone according to plan—or expectations.

We have confronted so many surprises in our 23 years together. Some have been delightful, some terrifying, some both. As I was coming out, the superintendent of our school district harassed me: not a good surprise, but not terrifying. Ann and I joined a church that honors us as a couple, and with other church members, we traveled to meet our sister community in rural El Salvador: delightful. Ann had a close encounter with a lioness when we were on safari in Tanzania (terrifying), and we hiked to “the roof of the world” in Lalibella, Ethiopia (delightful). Ann learned the Buteyko Method and conquered her asthma. We hiked in the Grand Canyon, slept under stars and bats, and rafted the Colorado River’s turgid waters. I had two brain tumors, neurosurgery, and radiation. Then three eye surgeries. I learned to walk again. I left my 27-year career in education.

Our list of surprises goes on: none of them expected, even as expectations were changing. Now we’re raising a puppy, another delight that’s a gift of Ann’s asthma cure and my unemployment.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me is how darn happy, even joyful, I am as my life goes not according to plan. I never could have imagined, nor planned for, such joy.

So who am I now? A searcher. A reinventor. A joyful one.

That’s what my memoir is about: the surprise that living a life not according to plan has been both terrifying and delightful, and ultimately joyful.

Good golly. Who saw that coming?

Ring the bells that still can ring

I am not such a terrible puppy-educator after all! Two days ago and again yesterday, our puppy Dosey swiped at the bells hanging from the door handle, and my partner Ann let her out of the house and into the back yard. I've been trying to teach her to do this off and on for weeks, and the day before I just couldn't figure out how to make the leap from the sound of the bells to the opportunity to go outside, but in her rest time, she figured it out. 

I would have done well to get a puppy when I was teaching high school, so I could have applied all that I'm learning to the classroom of human teenagers. In the 17 years I taught high school students, they often mused on the fact that as kindergarten children they were required to take naps even though they didn't want to, and now as teenagers they wanted to nap and were not allowed to. At the time, I laughed and said they had a good point, but I didn't think much more about it. As I think on it now, napping may be a part of our educational system that is missing, along with adequate and varied physical activity, art of all kinds, and healthy foods. 

As a high school Language Arts teacher, I didn't think this way, but now I think of the ways of living that have become gifts to me now that I'm disabled: slowing down, napping daily, writing to discover myself, eating well, and exercising in ways that are not competitive but are fun for me. These are not the habits I learned or taught in schools. 

I taught about diligence and intellectual focus. I required students to be awake, and I organized my classes to keep students busy and learning. Even reflection required diligence: students often wrote reflections on their work, processes, and learning.  Sometimes, I evaluated their self-reflections using a rubric that detailed what I thought they should reflect on. 

I don't think Dosey would have done especially well in my classes, even if she could read and write. I don't think my system would have acknowledged the way that she learns during reflection time and learns from from other puppies in her agility classes. 

I wonder what grade she might give me as her student (because she is clearly training me more effectively than I am training her.) Somehow I suspect her rubric would come from a spirit of grace and forgiveness rather than the task master's idea of excellence. 

This is not the first time that it has occurred to me that my ideas of excellence may not be universal or even desirable. When I was in my twenties, after my second year of teaching, I went with Amigos de las Americas  as a "health volunteer" (building latrines and distributing tooth brushes) to a pueblo in the foothills of the Michoacan jungle in Mexico. I remember digging a latrine in the summer heat one afternoon while able-bodied young men watched. I knew they thought I was a sucker, and I felt like one. After all, I was doing work that they could do.

My best experiences that summer were with the relationships that developed. (I fondly remember Señora Alisa Lopez and her cooking lessons: one cup of lard for beans; two cups of lard for refried beans. She also attempted to teach me to cook tortillas, but the group of women and girls assembled laughed good-heartedly at my lumpy, dumpy tortillas and my dainty fingers, too sensitive to turn the hot tortillas over as they cooked on the fire.)

I also remember the teenage girl across the path who lived in a home of sticks with her parents and brothers. (Their family was considered poor even in this poor town.) She showed me how to wash my clothes using a washboard, and when it was clear that I didn't know how, she asked, "Does your mother wash your clothes?"

"No," I explained. "My mother lives a long way away. She would have to take an airplane to my house." This puzzled her. Why, then, did I not know how to wash my clothes? I explained that in my home, we used a washing machine.

Her brown eyes got big then. "Oh! You're rich!"

"No," I said. "Everyone in America uses a machine." Of course, I was wrong on both counts. Everyone in America does not use a machine, and I was--and am--rich. This awareness required some reflection (like Dosey and her bells.)

At summer's end, the fifteen of us who had been scattered through the Michoacan jungle came together to reflect. Each of us was expected to share. I quoted one of my favorite songs: "Slow down. You move too fast. You've got to make the morning last, just, kickin' down the cobblestones. Lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy."  I had learned that summer that getting a lot done was a cultural value, not a universal one. 

After that summer, however, I returned to my culture and to my hurrying way of life, until twenty years later, my first brain tumor taught me the same lesson again. (As I think Annie Dillard said in An American Childhood, I suspect that rather than learning new lessons, I am learning the same lesson over and over....but I can't find this quotation on the innerwebs and An American Childhood on my Kindle hasn't been indexed, so maybe I'm mistaken about the authorship. Too bad. It's one of my favorite quotations from her.)

Maybe I learned this lesson of slowing down from my brain tumor, and maybe I learned it from a classmate who quoted me back to myself: "Anything that slows me down is a gift."

In this new life after brain tumors, I am learning differently, and in this life with disabilities (and in this country that feels so dark right now), I take hope as I sing along with Leonard Cohen: 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)

That's how the light gets in.

As I sat with Dosey on my lap and listened to multiple versions of Cohen's song, I reflected on these words, and I read his own explanation of the lyrics: 

That is the background of the whole record, I mean if you have to come up with a philosophical ground, that is “Ring the bells that still can ring.” It’s no excuse… the dismal situation.. and the future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your job and your love. “Ring the bells that still can ring”: they’re few and far between but you can find them. “Forget your perfect offering”, that is the hang-up, that you’re gonna work this thing out. Because we confuse this idea and we’ve forgotten the central myth of our culture which is the expulsion from the garden of Eden. This situation does not admit of solution or perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect. And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together, physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.
– from Diamonds in the Line 

And I read about the metaphor's origin: 

The line "a crack in everything" seems to come from a book by Jack Kornfield on Buddhism. The story is that a young man who had lost his leg came to a Buddhist monastary thing, and he was extremely angry at life, and always drew these pictures of cracked vases and damaged thing, because he felt damaged. Over time, he found inner peace, and changed his outllook, but still drew broken vases. His master asked him one day: "Why do you still draw a crack in the vases you draw, are you not whole?" And he replied
"Yes, and so are the vases. The crack is how the light gets in" 

I suppose the industrial people, the investors, and the customers might say that a cracked vase doesn't hold water, but they would be talking about utility rather than poetry, and my life is more poetry than utility. I'm coming to like it that way.