A word’s worth revisited

Let it be known that at this time of year I have a particular fancy for the leather armchair by my light and bright corner window, where I can curl up and read, to the waft of slow food simmering on the stove. Before I emerge, I thought I might end this year by sharing the titles of some of the many wonderful books I have read during the past year:

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Boyhood
Margaret Atwood, The Cat’s Eye
Doris Lessing, The Diary of Jane Somers (A Good Neighbor)
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Joan Didion, Year Of Magical Thinking
Willa Cather, Death comes for the Archbishop
Mary Gordon, Final Payments
Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved
Gail Godwin, The Good Husband
Anita Shreve, Body Surfing
Doris Lessing, The Grandmothers

Like most people in the western world, perhaps, I have been focusing my attention this past week on the “small” world of family, friends, neighbors, and my natural networks. I realize that I am able to do this only to the extent that everything around me in the “big” world of politics, institutions, and markets is working smoothly. I am able to do this to the extent that I have a choice.

According to the Swedish sociologist Hans Zetterberg (ref. SvD 29/12), people separate their small and big worlds from one another these days because the values of the two don’t mix. Sharing, caring, generosity and emotions are reserved for the small world. Competitiveness, calculating, strategic thinking, and even heartlessness drive the big world.

How long can the human being survive the dichotomy of conflicting states? Some will tell you to make sure there’s a breadwinner in your household, eat your bread, and keep your mouth shut (about how it got there?) while you're eating. Some still save sugar, old newspapers, and books to burn if the going gets rough. How long can the human being survive without being able to integrate the small and the big world, life and death, in common cultural values, in creativity and art? I see children of the schism trying to bridge the gap by flying back and forth across and between continents, propelled by gallons and gallons of jet fuel, leaving behind little more than a vapor trail and a hole in the ozone layer. I see others escaping to the virtual underground, falling to the depths of the chasm where the sun never shines, or to religious fundamentalism. Personal insecurities may be stifled for a generation or two, but to what end?

The murder of Benazir Bhutto abruptly alters my focus. I am reminded of the precariousness of democracy, of the freedom of choice itself.

Still practicing

Yesterday I promised I wouldn't let you down. I said I would not forget to open the fourth door of this year's Advent calendar on the 24th. I left you with a message on the phone.

Then, the next day I opened:

a book. It said that the young lad would be baptized in the country of his birth. At the stipulated hour, I too was to go to a chapel in the city that would soon be his new home. There I was to read the baptismal liturgy and light a candle. He was to know that he would be welcome wherever he went.

Over the years, we have shared countless moments of discovery. Like all those late evenings, when he entered - as I re-entered - the giant closet full of myths and fairy tales. Then we thanked God for the day and all the people who made our lives worth living, and I recited the Our Father before we said good night. A lively lovely child, seldom keen on sleep, he saved the best surprises for Our Father. That’s apparently when he felt free to interrupt, and either entertain by singing all ten verses of a song he had learned that day at the Day Care Center, or with questions like, “Who was your father?” or “Why are there so many religions in the world?” In those days, not being able to think quickly could be punished by having to spend a sleepless night with an over, or perhaps under, stimulated young one. In response to the latter question, I recall answering:

"You know, that people live in so many different places on this Earth…in warm and in cold countries, near the ocean, in deserts, and in the mountains. Some are black, and some are white, and some are mixed…but wherever they live, and whatever they look like, they all ask the same kinds of questions, like: Where did I come from before I was born? Where will I go when I die? What is the meaning of my life? And even if these questions are the same all over the Earth, the answers are different depending upon where you grow up. That’s why there are so many different religions. In our family, we have been raised in the Christian tradition and so it is natural for us to look to the life of Christ, his disciples, and all the saints to answer these questions.”
"Humf", said the young child, and fell immediately asleep. Another Silent Night. I sighed over the baptismal pyre.

Today, many years later, the same question probably wouldn’t work up the same sweat. The cross is no longer a yoke but, but a symbol with open arms that I can choose t embrace, or not. And day after day, year after year, my inner music box returns as my guide, to practicing presence wherever I am.

My Advent Calendar*

For the director of music: Psalm 4
What if we could see all the days of our life at once, like opening all the doors of an Advent calendar on the 1st of December? Perhaps you haven’t been able to handle all the excitement, couldn’t wait, and have already opened all the doors?

Today is the day before the night before Christmas and so there should be at least one door left to open. Just one more day before Donald Duck (Sweden) and Santa Claus (USA) make their grand entrance through the boob tube or the chimney.**

In the meantime, throughout Advent, something is already going on, she’s on her way, expecting. It’s a dark (Sweden), but hopeful, joyful time of year, especially if we are prepared to wait. This is time to learn the virtues of patience, of living from day to day, and the value of rhythm in a sense we don't usually think of. It’s a time to rekindle hope and expectation, a sense of family and community. This is also a time to prepare for surprises…for creativity and the unknown. Advent – which means the coming and arrival of something momentous – is meant to teach us that time in itself is holy.

At this point in my own life, I’ve certainly opened a good number of doors. Let me take this opportunity to share with you what was behind a few of those doors. Though these are four images from my own personal calendar of life, I have chosen them because I am sure that they say something about a life and time we already share.

Let me begin with my early childhood, when my expectations of life were perhaps at their height. Behind one of those doors was a:

Music box in the crèche under our Christmas tree. Ever since I can remember, I can recall lying down under the tree and winding up the music box hidden in the manger, and listening to the delicate tinkling melody of ‘Silent Night’. Nothing could stir the spirit of Christmas in our household the way that magic music box could.
Later in life, perhaps in one of my teenage years, I remember that the box had been wound up, but that I could hardly hear the music. For a brief moment I felt a surge of adrenalin, thinking that I had suddenly become deaf. I threw myself onto the floor, beside my sister, and propped my head in my hands as close to the manger as we could get. There we could clearly hear the melody. We noted how it had become worn, quieter, though not silent, over the years. We were growing up.

Several years later, there was a door that opened onto a:

Starry sky This time I was lying on my back, in a sleeping bag, on a mossy patch in the Wasatch mountains. For some reason the Silent Night melody came to mind. As I hummed it to myself, it occurred to me that many children of the world are born in the calm and quiet of the night, under these same constellations. While the actual melody in the music box had weakened, its meaning had somehow intensified, deepened, perhaps matured within me.

Let’s see, some 20 years later, I awoke to the sound of a:

Telephone ringing I think every time we answer the phone it’s kind of like opening a door to an Advent Calendar, at least it was then, because then you never knew who might be calling. In this case it was some close friends of mine, who were calling from abroad to tell me that they had just received a young child. After several years of trying to adopt, they happened to visit a children’s home where a nun had met them at the door and said "This morning, during my prayers, I was told that a beautiful little boy was to go to the first willing couple who passed through this door today. Are you willing?” My friends were elated, and confirmed “YES” they were willing. Later they called to ask me if I could be his godmother, by default...because they simply couldn’t think of anyone else. I too said ‘YES’. It was one of the best decisions in my life, mind you.

…to be continued. I promise to open the 4th door tomorrow, on Christmas Eve.

*translation of a devotional I held for a Salvation Army youth choir in Stockholm, Sweden, on 1 December 2003. **editing 2007.

Advent Psalm 3

For Jeduthun, the director of music. To the tune of “Praise and Judgment”

While her mother is deeply troubled by the fragility of the human life she carries within, she herself has become that fragile life. In the silence of the night, a mother can no longer suppress her anguish, and so Logos takes its dwelling within her and us, and the dignity of human nature is restored.

Doctors say she has a sharp pen (as opposed to a 'sharp tongue', which pleases her), a way with words, as though they come easily. What do we know?
But when deep calls to deep, at night, this song is with me, and I wonder: what does the unborn child hope for?

...to be con't.

“Each man’s life is but a breath” (Ps 39)

Advent psalm 2

For the director of music

The fact that I could control the feeling and the sounds of my own breathing was my initial solace. In the wake of sudden deafness, I had decided to focus on feeling the 'sounds' that I could make and control, and breathing was a given starter. Song became the first expression of that focus since it generated more overtones, more resonant vibration, than speech.
What a comfort to find myself re-membering beautiful old sounds and melodies. How consoling to both hear and literally feel the words, the pitch, the timbre, rhythm and beat of familiar sounds as I repeated them. And so I sang over and over, listening and feeling ever so alive. I could feel the weight of each word as it resounded throughout my body, especially in the cavities of my chest and head. Many a song embraced me as though I were in my own womb. Familiar vibrations from within gently rocked me while faint sounds around and about carried me off to somewhere I'd never been before. Joy came to heart and mind, when suddenly I was filled with the hope of an unborn child.
...to be con't.

For the director of music

Advent psalm 1

When I suddenly became unilaterally deaf a few years ago, I realized what a sensitive algorithm our brains have developed to make use of signals from our inner ears, a kind of built-in GPS that helps us to position ourselves in space. Since the algorithm requires the data signals from two positions, i.e.two ears, I was suddenly not just deaf in one ear but also unable to calculate my position. Suddenly, without a functioning GPS and no other system in place, I was disoriented, confused, dizzy. Where was I, did I exist at all?

I was soon to discover that sound is something to which my entire body – not just the cilia of my inner ear – reacts. In stillness, silence and solitude, my body was now making me keenly aware of my heartbeat, my breathing and the tiniest tremors of my muscles and bones. As I ventured out of doors, I sometimes had to lean against a wall to steady myself in relationship to what appeared to be a bouncing sidewalk, as opposed to my own rebounding body. The catastrophe in my inner ear had affected my balance too. But even with a brick wall to support me, I was unable to defend myself against the relentless drone of city emissions or flee from all the invisible detonations. The human body has apparently evolved to react instinctively to explosive sounds, with a surge of adrenalin to propel its flight away from any potential source of danger. Plenty of adrenalin, but to what avail? Without a sense of direction, I could do nothing but succumb.
I could literally feel my body jerk and twitch to the sound of a car door slamming shut. And like a blotting paper against spilled ink, I apparently had no choice but to absorb the ultrasounds of passing traffic. I was forced to reverberate to the asynchronic pulse of pistons firing from behind a stop light. I had no choice but to confront all the palpable waves being generated when hard rubber grips the asphalt, and breathe in all the fits and starts of exhaustion.

Throughout my torso and limbs I suddenly felt what I could no longer hear. To protect myself from all the sudden intrusions, the violence and confusion of so many new signals, I knew I would have to limit my focus. I was reminded of the way blinders manage to calm a farm horse in city traffic, by curtailing side vision. Perhaps I needed a leather flap on my ears, a pilot's cap, to cut out unwanted feelings. I tried all sorts of earplugs, and was occasionally relieved, though I knew I needed more to refine my inner focus.

And so I began by focusing on the omniscient 'sounds' of my own life, those generated by my own living body, by my own nervous system. I was forced to spend hours on end in stillness and silence. I had to begin by becoming aware of the difference between all the vibrations, movements, rhythms and pulses within myself, from those generated by the world around me.

As my brain continued in vain to call for signals from my poisoned inner ear, I ‘heard’ the hiss of a snake coiled in my cochlea, ever ready to strike again. On days when I had been exposed to a lot of ambient sound, this viper seemed to become envious and hissed with a pitch that rose like a whistling tea kettle until it managed to pierce some indefinite barrier. Having managed to break through something it proceeded to gurgle and cluck, like a radiator that needed to be aired or a contented baby, depending upon how I felt. I think I have learned to interpret this viper's behavior quite well over the past few years, and though its autonomous life remains at odds with mine, I have also learned to live with it.
If my heartbeat, my pulse, and the growling and bubbling of my gastrointestinal tract are other involuntary 'sounds' of my life, then the vibrations associated with my breathing are not. The fact that I could control the feeling and 'sound' of my own breathing was my first solace after the catastrophe. I decided to focus on feeling the 'sounds' that I could make and control. I was going to let the sounds of my own body, the uncontrollable and controllable, tell me something first. Then if I could come to terms with the focus of my new inner ear, perhaps I could share my 'insights' with others.
...to be con't.