Saturday after Ash Wednesday

Once again, as promised and as part of my Lenten discipline, I'm posting a small portion of my life's story that I hope to publish later this year. Here's an excerpt from the Introduction:

When I began working on An Emptyful Chair, my expectations as to what might be accomplished were quite modest. They still are. Having kept books of jottings, journal entries, scattered notes, photographs, and assorted papers in any number of boxes, file drawers, and notebooks, I assumed I could piece things together in some kind of narrative, a wee memoire of sorts. Little did I know how difficult that would be. To help gather up memories and recollect things, I’ve spent hours and sometimes days fingering my way though old scribblings, notes, and diary entries that I hoped would provide some groundings and assistance. Scattered piles of calendars, old archived manuscripts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and coffee-stained scratchings have more than once seemed too disorganized to manage. Much was thrown into the waste can. Some saved.

My awareness of the difficulties eventually became acute when I read what Wendell Berry, Kentucky’s poet laureate, said as he described the shocking truth about what we think we remember as we look back on our lives:

We know almost nothing of our history as it was actually lived. We know little of the lives even of our parents. We have forgotten almost everything that has happened to ourselves. The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Berkely, CA: Counterpoint, 2005), 54.

Well ware that Berry describes my own not-knowings, I can only promise to you that I’ve now scratched out and gathered up things as best I can despite dis-rememberings extensive as they may be.

Friday after Ash Wednesday: Something from Chapter 1

As promised and part of my Lenten discipline, here's one more excerpt from the book I'm writing for my children. This little piece is from Chapter 1:

On the second floor of our house, the parsonage, in York, Pennsylvania, were the bedrooms where in one of them all three of us boys slept in one bed. I remember one episode that to this day gives me a mild sense of memorable terror. It happened a few days before Christmas during the last year of World War II. It was dark outside, and we boys had been put to bed. Apparently, Gordon, Art (or “Butch” as we knew him for years) and I were misbehaving in bed, making a lot of unnecessary noise instead of falling quietly off to sleep. To the left of the bed, the room’s single window opened up to a long second-story porch leading to a door in my parents’ bedroom. As we were cutting up and jumping around, we heard a tap on the window. The blind being down, I slipped off the bed, raised the blind, and stood in abject horror as Santa Claus stood in full red and white regalia, his beard flapping, waving his righteous and angry finger at me, his eyes piercing mine with a look of disgust. I screamed. All of screamed as we rushed out the bedroom, raising one hell of a bellow, rushing down the hall yelling for mom! From the inside of her bedroom, she told us to wait; it would a minute or two before she could appear. After what seemed like far too many minutes, dressed in her nightgown, she came out, innocently wondering what was the matter. We told her about the apocalyptic vision. It was then that she explained that bad little boys sometimes are visited by Santa Claus, and that we’d better learn to be better if we expected anything for Christmas. Lesson learned. Mom walked us back to our bedroom, we climbed back into bed, pulled up the covers, and were good and mostly silent for days. It was years later that mom explained the incident. Dressing from the waist up in the parish’s Santa Claus party costume, she was herself the finger-wagging apparition who scared the hell out of us.

Who would have thought that the lovely lady on the sofa could wag such a scary finger behind a white beard?  

The Fourth Commandment (as Lutherans count them) tells us that we should honor our mothers and fathers.  With this posting I wish to honor my mother whose imaginative discipline that Advent night long ago taught me a lesson. And hopefully helped me develop something of a conscience.

On Thursday after Ash Wednesday: A preview of my soon-to -be published book

As I promised yesterday on Ash Wednesday, here's a wee bit from the book I'm writing for my children. It's an excerpt from Chapter 1 that lets you in on the wonder of my baptism as a baby:

Ever since I can remember, I've always thought, “I have always been a Christian” ever since God took me by holy baptism into his family, the Church, the Body of Christ. O yes, I had to learn how to live as a Christian, what sort of manners we Christians observe, how we love one another and other people, how we worship our adopting Father, Son, and Spirit, but all of that came “naturally” and spiritually as the Holy Spirit of God led me on my journey and cultivated my growing faith and trust in the mercy of God. My wonderful mother, dad, and and an obstetrician, gave me a first birth on October 21, 1937, in Pennsylvania's Harrisburg Polyclinic Hospital. And then a forty days later I was adopted by God into his family and presented to the Body of Christ, the Church. God took me into his trifold Name, lifted me to the cross of Christ and, as St. Paul says, “immersed me into the death and resurrection of Christ” (Romans 6). How wonderful always to know that. Like any child adopted into a good family, I was delighted at being a Christian. I learned to pray, clean my room, read Scriptures, do my homework, ride a bike, manage a newspaper route in the sixth grade, and let Jesus meet me Sunday after Sunday in Holy Communion. I learned what forgiveness, grace, and mercy is all about--beginning in infancy.

What a life God has given me! I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you, mom and dad, for bringing me to the baptismal font. Thank you, Church, for welcoming me into your blessed family. And thank You, Most Holy Trinity, for baptizing me into your Name, the best name I ever got and will always have: Christian.

In the picture below my mother, Helen, holds me in her arms as she gets us ready to let God hold me in his arms at Holy Baptism.

My Lenten Discipline

It’s been quite a while since I’vd posted anything here, and you deserve the following explanation.  Since January 5 I’ve been pouring myself into writing a book for my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Tentatively titled An Emptyful Chair: GrandDad’s Contemplative Path to God, the book has been in the making for well over twenty years. It’s my prayer that I may at last complete the manuscript sometime during this Lent, hopefully before Easter so that I can send it off to a publisher. This means that my Lenten discipline will now involve lots of writing, editing, and proofreading.

But writing is not a stand-alone discipline.  Co-joined at the pen’s dib and at the ink well, there will need to be a good bit of daily solitude, good sleep at night, letter writing and lots of phone calls for fact checking.

I hope to include lots of photographs, several in each chapter.  Here’s one for Chapter 2, a boyhood pix of my brothers Arthur and Gordon with me wearing a cap:

You can help me.  I ask that you pray for me so that each morning, during the quietest time of day, when I pour myself a cup of coffee and settle into the crafting of sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters, I have your spiritual support.  Much has already been written, but so much more needs rewriting, lots of special attention given to style, and a generous impulse to delete all that is self-serving, innocuous, and banal.  As things progress, I’ll do my best to share some of my scriblings and sentences, giving you some idea as what the book may look like. Pray that the Spirit of God will be my dear muse as together—you, the blessed and Holy Trinity, and me—can do some creative composing for my children and whomever else may wish to read what Granddad writes about the contemplative life.