In These Times

On March 20, 2020April 9, 2020 By ednafroeseIn Earth, family, friendship, hope, spirituality2 Comments

Stones and Flowers was never intended to respond to current issues or political events. It was to be a thoughtful reflection on personal experiences—a space to find beauty and commonality, maybe even joy.

But these times are unusual. Unless people have lived in other countries where epidemics have come and gone (remember Ebola?), hardly anyone younger than I will remember what it’s like to be afraid of a seemingly unstoppable new illness with disastrous consequences.

And my memories of the 1950s polio epidemic are vague, just a mental snapshot or two: my small 6-year-old self standing on the upper rungs of a long ladder propped against the house, trying to peer into the upstairs bedroom where my beloved big sister is in isolation. Who put the ladder up or why, I can’t imagine. What remains in my memory is my childish fear that I wouldn’t ever see my sister again.

But I did. Both my big sister and my big brother contracted polio, yet survived without any long-lasting effects. Not everyone in our small town and surrounding farms was as fortunate.

Perhaps that’s why I felt an uprush of gratitude every time I took our children for their vaccinations. It seemed like such a privilege to know that they would not die or be damaged by whooping cough, polio, measles, etc.

Now again, we are being tested by a new disease. It’s not only a matter of frantic research to find a cure and a vaccine. Our challenge is also to live with compassion for others and to resist panic. Blind fear will accomplish nothing; kindness to a neighbour will make the day easier for someone.

Meanwhile, I shall claim this blog space in which to share some photos that bring me joy and remind me that the world is a beautiful place. All we need is to open our eyes and our heart that we may see and rejoice.

There is no theme today, no pattern or order to the photos. Each of them, though, is somehow connected to someone I love.

Kelly’s Bathtub in William Switzer Provincial Park, near Hinton, Alberta

For a few days with family in Hinton at the end of February, just before all travel ceased and the world became a lonely place, I remain very grateful.

Pond on the grounds of Calvin College (now Calvin University), Grand Rapids, Michigan

Not a frequent traveler, I have treasured every occasion to attend academic conferences that has been granted to me. This one is particularly special, since it was shared with a dear friend.

Fresno, California. Taken from a hotel window at sunset

A Starbucks coffee shop, a stunning sky – what’s not to love?

The University of Saskatchewan is known for its lovely grounds and unified architecture. In my life, those grounds have been the place for getting to know my boyfriend, struggling through those angst-ridden young adult years when who I was was under major construction. As a young family, we cycled along its paths, explored the small zoo in the Biology Building, attended occasional concerts. And then I became an instructor and had the privilege of walking those paths for many years. The U of S is home.

While Saskatoon has been my residence for most of my life, Jasper remains a special place, where I first lived and worked away from home as a young adult, where we honeymooned, where we camped and hiked as a young family, where we, now as grandparents, continue to camp and hike with family.

Since all our children live in Alberta, we have learned to know the highways between Saskatoon and Edmonton, and between Saskatoon and Calgary. For a prairie born soul like me, the pageantry of sunset never loses its soothing magic.

Sunset over the Pacific Ocean on Wickinnish Beach, near Ucluelet on Vancouver Island.

And after we’d absorbed in almost total silence the ever-shifting light on the waves rolling into shore, until darkness gradually covered it all, we turned to leave and saw a full moon in the sky – a blue moon as it happens. It was August 30, 2012.

Our front yard has also given us beauty of all kinds. Black and white, actually mostly white, feels soul-cleansing. Snow offers inner quietness, the rest that comes before growth is possible.

Our backyard offers its own stunning details and colors.

My photo albums and digital folders are full of mountain pictures. I claim the Rocky Mountains as my spiritual home.

However, I am not blind to the loveliness of more exotic places. I offer one last photo, hoping that it may awaken dreams of days when travel is possible once again.

Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
Marilynne Robinson, in Gilead

Could We Please Make Some Anniversaries Unnecessary?

On March 7, 2020 By ednafroeseIn books, food, friendship, hope, identity, peace, political violenceLeave a comment

(begun December 6, 2019, completed just before International Women’s Day)

Today is the 30^th anniversary of the massacre at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. That first mass shooting in Canada (it remains the deadliest). Every year on December 6^th since then, there have been public remembrance services for the women who died that day and renewed calls for vigilance and for greater equality. Memorials have been set up in various cities across Canada.

photo of candles, two long-stemmed roses, and three teddy bears, arranged on church steps draped with a black cloth

Since then, mass shootings in North America have become more frequent and their targets more varied: children in schools, concert goers, Muslims, Jews, party-goers, journalists, women again. As if the fearful, the isolated, the helplessly angry know that education and music and diversity are agents of peace and freedom – or can be. Admittedly, artists and musicians can bring people together for nefarious purposes as well as for good ends. And partiers can dance for and with everyone, or band together to exclude.

One can pray for the death of enemies—and thus inevitably become more inclined to bring those prayers to fruition—or one can pray for strength and peace for all neighbours, regardless of skin color or ideology or accident of citizenship and inherited traditions.

still life photo of celtic cross, and two candles, on the base of draped white satin.

In the end, we can choose to smolder in our house of hatred or throw open windows and doors to let the heart embrace beauty however it is embodied. We can choose to embrace the dignity and worth of every human being or recast some humans as enemies. Those choices are, admittedly, strongly shaped by those we happen to be in relationship with, not to mention surrounding circumstances that influence what worldview we find most compatible and safe. Yet, surely, at some point, we can reach for sufficient maturity to reflect on how we might play the cards that have been given us.

still life with two different candles holders and a silver cross necklace.

What I fail to understand is how we as human beings dare to ascribe superiority and merit to those characteristics we can impossibly choose. Why should I as a woman be deemed unworthy of some privilege that men claim as a birthright? (For a detailed example of “birthright” privilege, read Price of Honour by Jan Goodwin)

I did not choose to be born as a woman any more than my brothers chose to be born as men. Neither I nor they are justified in levelling blame or in boasting about either bodily state. Nor did I earn my whiteness that I should have reason to be proud of it. Equally I should not accept reprimand for my pigmentation or lack thereof.

Now what I do with the current privilege (or disadvantage) of any of my birthrights is another matter. Part of acquiring wisdom and equanimity as we live through each day is learning how to differentiate between what we might be responsible for and what we’re not. Then follows the need for courage to act in ways that matter, according to values that have come to be recognized as universal—e.g. the preciousness of every human life, compassion, the right to have basic human needs met, etc.

More difficult is thinking through what others are responsible for. Our own circumstances we know and our own motives we can learn to understand if we take the time and effort. The circumstances and motives of others? Not so much. Let there be compassion and patience in abundance before we dare to judge.

A personal story: on December 6, 1989, the day that Marc Lepine entered the École Polytechnique and fatally shot 14 women, six of them in a mechanical engineering class, I was back in university, as a mature student. I no longer recall my reactions that day, or my reactions in the following year when the first anniversary of the shooting took place. Mostly I was preoccupied with trying to balance the demands of being a parent to teen-agers, a daughter to my elderly and increasingly ill parents, a wife to my husband, and a student in PhD studies.

In the midst of that stew of obligations, I met a fellow graduate student (J), likewise a mature student with many family demands, but from a very different cultural background and set of circumstances over which she had as little choice as I had over mine. She was Indigenous, and I had grown up in a milieu of unspoken and even unconscious prejudice, although during a few years on the board of MCC Saskatchewan, I had heard enough about the experiences of Indigenous peoples to provoke some serious re-thinking.

Nevertheless, I was still quite unprepared for J’s angry response to colonial attitudes in the literature we were reading, literature that I had grown up enjoying and even revering. I felt seared by J’s bitter resentment of white privilege and confused about our Canadian history.

Just what led to our choosing to have a long lunch together, I hardly know. Perhaps it was the need to function together in a small graduate seminar class, or maybe, through class discussion, we had glimpsed the possibility of common ground. I don’t recall who offered the invitation. As it turned out, that luncheon was an eye-opener for us both.

I listened to her talk about her father, a runner of real prowess, who earned an Olympic medal which he was not allowed to keep—how was it that the Indian agent felt empowered to confiscate it? That seems like such an act of gratuitous humiliation. I heard bits of J’s personal story that moved me deeply. How had she been able to become a conscientious mother and diligent, brilliant graduate student? I gained a new respect for her courage in overcoming disadvantages that I could only dimly comprehend. I felt sure that I could not have done the same.

On the other hand, J was startled to realize that my background had not been unbroken privilege. She had not known that Mennonites also revered the land, although differently than Indigenous peoples, or that our history included the Russian Revolutions, violent fragmentation of families, and desperate flight to different countries. As I talked of my parents’ regret over the loss of what they considered their homeland and their struggle to adjust to a different country and a different culture, she sympathized.

Did all misunderstandings disappear at once? No. Did I learn everything I needed to know in order to understand the lives of Indigenous peoples? Not even close. But I did learn to appreciate something of J’s viewpoint in subsequent classes and could hear her contributions without bristling inwardly. I have since followed her scholarly contributions with interest.

Reflecting on that experience, now decades ago, as long ago as the massacre at École Polytechnique, I wonder how long we need to keep memorializing that tragic event. Could we balance the retelling of that awful day by celebrating some event, some occasion in which diverse people had come together in peace and laughter?

Photo of dining-room table covered with an Iranian cloth of intricate weave, with a table centerpiece of three clay women in a circle with a lit candle in the centre. — The table covering is a gift from an Iranian friend.

I know, our calendars are already full, what with holidays from several religious traditions, special days such as International Women’s Day, Vimy Ridge Day, Groundhog Day, National Tartan Day, and whatever label we use to make sure that we get a long weekend in February.

Anniversaries are meaningful, whether personal (that first real kiss, the death of a family member) or national or even international. And I do not wish to denigrate them. Furthermore some horrors are so dehumanizing that we must remember them lest we repeat them. That had been the intent of Remembrance Day. What I fear is that we foster antipathy to perceived enemies or somehow, unwittingly I hope, glorify violence. Perhaps what I wish for is a continued, daily awareness that the most basic, efficacious response to violence is learning to see the Other as friend.

Let’s share tea and break bread (or muffins) together more often than we light candles.

photo of same table but with a cheerful blue tablecloth made in Bangledesh, the three women-centrepiece with lit candle, two tea cups and a plate with two muffins. — Table ready for two. Tableclcoth made in Bangladesh.

Of Pears and Memoirs

On February 20, 2020 By ednafroeseIn books, friendship, fruit, hope, identity, politics, spirituality3 Comments

still life photo of a book shelf with Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, a pear, a napkin, and reading glasses.

Anyone who has ever publicly confessed to enjoying books can anticipate the next question: “so what do you like to read?” The usual assumption is that, of course, we read stories, whether they be Westerns, mysteries, fantasy, historical fiction, literary novels, or romance. Some might add memoirs to the list since those also tell a story, a “true” story. Others, though, prefer poetry, history, philosophy, theology, or political and cultural analysis, without necessarily understanding that those genres, too, tell stories.

My reading life certainly began with what was called “story-books,” although I was taught, from the cradle on, to revere the Bible. Of course, what I heard from my Sunday School teachers was stories: the Creation, the Flood, the Exodus, Daniel in the lions’ den, Jesus healing sick children or walking on water. So stories it was, and I read whatever I could find.

Besides wanting to find out what would happen next, I delighted in the voice of the story-teller. From Thornton Burgess’ talking animal stories and the Black Stallion books to the teen Beany Malone series, it was the familiar characters that held my attention; they were like friends.

But I also grew to appreciate individual authors’ views of the world, mediated through a variety of characters. Even Thomas Hardy’s astonishingly bleak outlook on life compelled me to keep reading his novels. No surprise then, that I eventually found my way into a career of reading novels and talking about them. While I also taught drama, poetry, and essays, novels remained my chosen bedtime reading.

The sole exception was devotional reading. Childhood training had born its fruit, and I read books and books about what being a Christian meant. Thus my faith competed with story for my attention. Or did it? I don’t remember just when I understood that theology was also story, with God as the main character. As Frederick Buechner observed, the grand narrative of Christianity can be read as comedy, tragedy, or fairy tale, each genre lens yielding truth to live by.

Same book shelf but with more books, featuring Buechner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, a bowl of pears, and a napkin.

Actually, my reading choices were not as unchanging as I have so far implied. In both fiction and theology, I became impatient with predictability and easy answers. The pleasures of formulaic stories are limited, because they rely on superficial otherness (exotic settings, improbable plot lines), while reinforcing a simplistic distinction between goodness and badness through cardboard characters and too-easy happy endings. My tastes were evolving into a demand for greater scientific literacy and more mysticism in theology, and for honest engagement with human issues in fiction—for literature offers truth at a deeper level than facts do.

Just how much I had changed, I didn’t grasp until retirement removed the academic pressure to stay current in my field. I rejoiced that I now had the time, finally, to read as many novels as I wanted to, never mind the literary quality. Expecting to return to former habits of happy escapist reading, I was quite unprepared for what did happen.

I’ve read far fewer novels. Instead, I’ve bought poetry books for bedtime reading, and ignored my accumulated collection of novels in favour of reading magazines like The Atlantic, Harpers, Mother Jones. I’ve read more and more books on culture and religion and politics in Canada and the USA. That doesn’t mean that I’ve exchanged fiction for facts.

After all, “non-fiction” is something of a misnomer; there is always an author(s) who selects the facts to be discussed, who assumes a narrative voice for particular purposes, and who shapes that material into a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion. So it does, in the end, come down to story. I’m just choosing different ones more often than I used to.

Perhaps an analogy from literal tastes can be instructive. In late summer and autumn I delight in the bounty of food at Saskatoon’s farmers markets, particularly the offerings of Little Quill Orchard. Delicious as the peaches and apricots are, I wait also for early autumn’s varieties of apples, many available only for a mere two weeks. They’re not “keepers,” but oh, the taste of Sunrise apples is redolent with the mature warmth of the end of summer.

For most of my life, I ignored the similar bounty of pears. When I was a child, my palate had unequivocally rejected both flavour and texture. Fruit lover that I normally was, I could not abide pears. So I did not eat pears, did not buy pears, did not offer our children pears. Imagine my recent embarrassment then to discover, after my son persuaded me to try his pear gingerbread cake, that I liked it. Since I was then regularly baking scones for a small market, I tried pear cranberry scones – delicious! Pears now often appear in our fruit bowl, reminding me that tastes evolve; I should pay attention.

same book shelf, different books, a different bowl with more pears, and a different napkin

In the past three years, I’ve begun reading memoirs, a genre I once disliked almost on principle, thanks to propagandistic missionary stories urged on me when I wasn’t old enough to protest safely; I resented the pious pressure to be inspired. With a fine irony, I was eventually drawn in by stories of the opposite experience—the departure from an inherited faith. First it was Karen Armstrong’s exit from the convent, then other accounts of disillusionment and drastic changes in worldview. Yet these people still found life worth living and often became voices for change, their faith changed yet not diminished.

Many memoirs I read turned out to be personal accounts of what I had been reading about in non-fiction analysis. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, and Malcolm X’s autobiography increased my understanding of race relations in the USA, just after I had read A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes. And Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance gave me a more nuanced perspective on the parallels between working class people and people of color. All of the above made it harder to make superficial pronouncements about recent political developments in USA politics, and easier to show empathy to those whose views might once have offended me.

Books do come to hand when the reader is ready. In the ripeness of time, the despised can become the necessary and even the beautiful.

The Flingers and the Flung

On February 6, 2020 By ednafroeseIn family, identity, poetry, Sunrise, travelLeave a comment

On the dairy farm where I grew up, chores began early and never took a holiday.

photo of the barn on our farm, including one cow

There was play time for the children—we did not have a deprived, Dickensian existence—yet we did whatever work small hands and feet could manage. Thanks to the routine of morning chores and school, days always began early, with no weekend reprieve. Not until I left home could I relish the decadent pleasure of “sleeping in.”

Consequently, the difference between those of our family who vaulted out of bed, eager to begin the day, and those who had to be coaxed into consciousness was all too obvious. The boys rose early and willingly (which they have done consistently into their senior years). The girls? Not so much.

In that time and place where women knew their narrow roles—or were duly informed of them—this sex-correlated difference in body rhythms simply became further proof of feminine inferiority. Virtue belonged to early risers, and not much compassion was offered to my sister and me who, having no choice but to conform, coped by remaining as uncommunicative as possible for as long as possible.

Odd that I never registered then the contradictory fact that it was my mother who arose eagerly, talking before she even reached the kitchen, and it was my father who dutifully obeyed the alarm clock at 5:00 or 5:30 a.m., but worked in remote silence until the welcome breakfast, not served until 7:30 or 8:00 a.m.

Many decades later, after I had begun teaching English at the U of S, having meekly accepted the newcomer’s typical assignment of 8:30 a.m. classes, I discovered a poem by Margaret Avison that delighted my heart – “Meeting Together of Poles and Latitudes: The Prospect.” Although it was clear that the poem as a whole dealt with far greater complexities than the mere fact of getting out of bed in the morning, I was intrigued by her choice of that metaphor to explore profound attitudinal differences in the way that people respond to the demands of life and love.

Her deft summary of those “who fling off, toss head, / Taste the bitter morning, and have at it” and those who are “flung off, sit / Dazed awhile, gather concentration” made me smile in recognition. I wanted to share the poem immediately with a colleague who likewise functioned as the reluctantly flung, and who muttered frequently and bitterly about the “morning Nazis” who insisted on weighty academic meetings at 8 a.m.

By that time, however, I had adjusted to living both with and against my body’s natural rhythms. Years of tending to small children had taught me self-discipline and flexibility. Our three sons, each in turn, had been the sort of infant who woke early, and then, once having achieved the blessed ability to sleep through the night, went to bed early in order to rise even earlier and cheerier than ever. I was willing to trade the pleasure of sleeping later in the morning for the much greater pleasure of evening time for adults only!

One learns, in the process of growing up—and I insist that the growing up continues throughout adulthood—to accept necessary trade-offs and compromises. As the boys grew older, schedules changed, of course, but thanks to school hours, and my husband’s early departure for work, and then my own teaching schedule, I had no choice but to behave like a lark, not like the owl that I truly was.

Not that that turned me into a flinger. Emotionally, I remained, and still remain, a card-carrying member of the flung. Rare indeed are the mornings when I wake early with eagerness to begin the day. My family understood that, when necessary, I could transition into conversation, remind children to take their lunches and not forget the project they’d done the night before. At the beginning of vacation travel, I could arise at dawn if need be, finish packing, make a picnic lunch, gather bags and books, and make sure we departed promptly. An early beginning made the rest of the day more manageable, that I will readily admit.

photo of loaded car and makeshift trailer with bikes on top of the car — Departure for Kananaskis 1987

Nevertheless, I remain ambivalent about posited correlations, still insisted upon by some, between one’s circadian rhythm and one’s ability to be successful in life. Or to put it in less problematic wording—who would dare to define “success”?—one’s ability and willingness to contribute to the community in which one lives. Is progress and general well-being actually dependent solely on the busy flingers who “Thresh, knead, dam, weld, / Wave baton, force / Marches through squirming bogs” (Avison)?

I would insist that the flung have much to contribute, out of the very well of their “flungness.” Many a late-rising creative person has provided powerful pieces of music, many an artist has changed the way we think about our world, and dancers and actors and other performers have fed our souls.

No doubt, the board rooms of the nations, the wards of hospitals, and the streets of our cities have their share of the flung, who proffer their own tender perspectives. It may well be that the very effort of having to resist, in this world of “morning Nazis,” their natural inclinations to “Follow vapour-trails with shrivelling wonder, / Pilfer, mow, play jongleur / With mathematical signs” develops a kind of unsung endurance and sober second thoughts that are equally necessary for a balanced world.

Given Avison’s frequent preference, in other poems, for risk-takers (cf. “The Swimmer’s Moment”), I cannot decide just how to interpret the final stanza of “Meeting of the Poles,” in which the flingers and flung meet finally “at the Judgment Seat.” The sheer energy of the words she uses to describe the kind of love typical of flingers – in their “amorous thirst” and “thrust,” they “rock . . . like railroad engines” through “wrecked love,” yet remain “unslakeably loving” – implies awed admiration.

Meanwhile, the flung “love / As the stray dog on foreign hills / A bone-myth, atavistically, / Needing more faith, and fewer miles . . . .” The very words, when read aloud, have a languid dreaminess, a mood akin to that in the weary endings of most retellings of the legend of King Arthur. Which is often precisely the mood of the flung.

For now, I am bemused at the ironies life has offered me, in my journey through many forced morning risings. Strangely enough, now that retirement should presumably allow me to return to my owl ways, staying up late at night and sleeping late in the mornings, it seems that my body has completely adapted to early mornings. I am now content with a regular schedule that I would once have fiercely resisted. With chagrin, I have conceded to the flingers’ insistence that early morning hours are too precious to sleep through. Indeed, I have learned to love equally the deep blue shades of pre-dawn winter mornings, and the impossible blue-pink jubilation of summer mornings.

view from the dock of Watson Lake, with the rising sun coloring the lake and putting the lone fisherman into silhouette. — Watson Lake, Yukon, just after sunrise

Just don’t ask me for cheerful conversation two minutes after I have arisen. Early mornings are for meditative silence. Let the urgencies and worries of our mostly urban living wait until after breakfast.

But when they [the flingers and the flung] approach each other, / the place is an astonishment.
Margaret Avison

On the Privilege of Bearing Burdens

On January 16, 2020 By ednafroeseIn books, death, family, friendshipLeave a comment

(First written over two years ago, and now revisited in memory of my brother)

Such a triumvirate of memento mori that was, in the space of two months or less: first the announcement of the dreaded Diagnosis (two of them, in fact, one in my husband’s family and one in mine); then the request to serve as Power of Attorney and Personal Agent (albeit the requester was still in excellent health); and somewhere in between, a book fell off the shelf into my hands – The Good Funeral by Thomas Long, theologian, and Thomas Lynch, funeral director. Clearly, I needed to pay attention.

Given my age and my status as the youngest in my family, I was not surprised that I should be reminded so directly and repeatedly that none of us is immortal. (The deaths of a good friend and of a brother within the last six months have sharpened that reminder.) That comes with the territory of post-retirement years.

photo of lake with geese and a bare tree on the shore.

What did surprise was an abrupt reversal of one of my assumptions, thanks to The Good Funeral. The book has much wisdom to offer on all kinds of matters, particularly the North American evasion of all reminders of death and the strange banishment of the body from all public displays of grief, limited as those displays now are. That cultural analysis I had encountered before. But I had never seriously questioned the commonly used phrase “I don’t want to be a burden.” Indeed, I had said it myself, if not so bluntly.

An understandable sentiment, surely, an appropriate recognition of our dignity. Being a burden means becoming dependent on others who, presumably, have better things to do with their time than care for us. The agony of giving up a driver’s license, for example, lies in the coming horror of having to ask others for rides, to the grocery store, to church, to a friend’s home, unless public transit is readily available. And if physical mobility has become a challenge, then even public transit ceases to be an option. Any and all disabilities, including mental deterioration, can turn us into a “burden.”

How have we come to use such language? “Burden,” as a friend pointed out to me, “is such a negative word. It gathers in weight and awkwardness and struggle, all of it unwanted.” Human “burdens” claim time and emotional energy—to do errands, help with chores, listen, make appointments, assume legal responsibilities, change bed linen. There’s no assigned contract limit for such a commitment to bear the weight of another’s physical weaknesses and to hold in one’s mind and heart an immeasurable emotional heaviness. Patience is required, abundant patience, which is another way of saying that one’s own interests and choices must be set aside.

Being afraid of making such claims on others seems understandable, yet shouldn’t we think more carefully about the very nature of our relationships before insisting, instinctively, that we will not be a burden to anyone? What virulent strain of individualism has persuaded us that we can get through life without being a burden or without carrying a burden?

But then, I hadn’t even questioned the concept of burdensomeness until I read The Good Funeral. Thomas Lynch caught my attention with his musings about how the first human death might have been experienced: suppose the woman wakes up to find her partner unresponsive, cold – what is she to do?

In a warm climate, she will soon know that the unresponsive one must be removed or she will have to find another cave for herself. Whether she elects to leave the body to the animals and birds or to bury it or to push it off a cliff into the sea, she will have to accompany the body to its last resting place.

As Lynch imagines it, “maybe she enlists the assistance of others of her kind in the performance of these duties who do their part sensing that they may need exactly this kind of help in the future” (57, italics mine). From then on, Lynch argues, human beings are human precisely in their ritual responses to death, rituals in which people, in a community, care for the grieving ones and dispose of the body with due respect.

sunset on lake with interesting clouds and a jet streak

In his questioning of the concept of preplanning funerals—to avoid “being a burden to your family”—Lynch points out a simple fact I hadn’t thought about long enough: just as our children were once a burden to us in the sense of needing to be fed and carried and changed and trained, etc., so too will those children carry the weight of others as they grow older, first their own children and then their parents. That is the normal order of life and death (and I’m well aware that that order is sometimes upset, creating a particularly painful mourning).

Quite apart from this parent-child relationship, human beings thrive only in community and that entails taking on some burdens for others and becoming a burden to others. Of such is humanity. To pretend that we can manage our affairs so precisely that we never need the help of anyone whom we haven’t already paid for professional services is foolish, and deprives others of their turn to practice compassion, that most human of all qualities.

Isn’t it time that we simply accepted the weight of being a human being? Then perhaps we can carry that weight with all the dignity that becomes those who stand a little lower than the angels, who, we are told, know nothing of the glory of bearing burdens.

Does graciousness mean you want to help–or that you don’t and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particularly backstory.”
Leslie Jamison

Meditation on Peppernuts

On December 20, 2019December 9, 2020 By ednafroeseIn family, food, gifts, hope, spirituality, winterLeave a comment

It was time, definitely. There are those who begin their Christmas planning in July, their shopping in early October, and their baking in early November. Not I. Thanks to many years of teaching—and other reasons, of which more later—my family knew that Christmas didn’t begin in our house until exams were graded or urgency demanded it, whichever came first. The habit still lingers. But last week, as of this writing, it was time to begin baking.

Among my people, and in my immediate family, peppernuts are essential. Peppernuts (aka pfeffernüsse {German} or päpanät {Low German} or pebernodden {Danish}, etc.) are tiny, crisp, spicy – and addictive; eating only one is impossible. They’re wonderfully dunk-able in tea or coffee and perfect for keeping small children occupied in church.

photo of teapot, mug, oranges and bowl of peppernuts — Peppernuts and oranges and tea – all you need for Christmas entertaining, according to Doris Longacre, editor of *More with Less Cookbook*

Making peppernuts is both labor-intensive and child-friendly. The dough itself is simple enough; its special character derives from added spices, which are variously decreed by traditional family recipes. It’s once the dough is mixed that children can be invited to roll the soft dough into thin snakes—hey, it’s like playing with playdough! After being solidly frozen, the dough-snakes are thinly sliced, and each small round placed on cookie sheets. More fun for children. Then wait for the smell of warm spices all through the house.

No longer having any young children around to conscript for help, I began alone, braced for inevitable memories. First, though, the pleasure of the work. Oh, I’ve heard about efforts (probably by men) to adapt a sausage machine into a dough slicer so that the work could be done more quickly. As if work is, by definition, onerous. But if I offer up the tactile pleasures of cookie dough to the god of efficiency, to what shall I give that “redeemed” time? To other work that I might likewise construe as onerous?

photo of recipe book, baking pan, snakes of dough, and the bowl with dough. — I’m still using the recipe I got from my mother-in-law almost 50 years ago, but now I’ve made it gluten- and egg-free. It still works.

On the contrary, I would rather enter the task and make it beautiful, something of which I had already learned when I happened across Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindful distinction between “washing the dishes to get them done” and “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” I’m not a complete Luddite; arthritic hands make me glad for a hand mixer, although I still miss the satisfaction of creaming butter using a wooden spoon. I’m just grateful that I can still roll out the dough, make even slices, and line them up on the cookie sheet, precisely the right distance apart.

Then there’s the bits of raw cookie dough from the ends of snakes (I say fie on those who would rob me of that delight with talk of unsafe food practices), a taste of many Christmases past. And, yes, here come the memories, all of them, like a series of snapshots, from “tolerable—even warm and fuzzy” to “unbearable.”

Am I really the only one who anticipates Christmas with dread and joy? The season is so hyped, so elongated (it begins already with the snuffing out of Hallowe’en jack-o-lanterns and even appears, in places, in July), so stuffed with stories of plentitude and sentimentality that it raises anticipation to ridiculous levels, and provokes in me a curmudgeonly wish that Christmas be outlawed.

Then those who dwell purposefully within the sacred narrative could celebrate in secret, pondering what it means that divinity has been embodied in fallible humanity, while the rest of the population could find some other pretext for an orgy of buying more stuff and putting up more decorations. The advertising-fuelled expectations of Martha Stewart-style fabulous dinners and parties could then be held separate from the spiritual longing for redemption from pointlessness and violence and heartache.

Sure, the carols—or rather the Christmas-themed songs—do sometimes acknowledge that someone might not come home for Christmas, or that money might be too scarce for gift-giving. That’s but a token gesture for those whose families are too dysfunctional to gather over a turkey (if there is one) without some kind of bad ending. Or for those who mourn losses too painful to celebrate anything. And I don’t even want to imagine what this season of jolly commercial goodwill means in the midst of a war zone or in refugee camps or in slums.

It’s not popular to speak of such stories at Christmastime. Try changing the conversation to world conflicts or poverty when someone in a store asks yet again, “Are you ready for Christmas?” Always I want to retort, “What do you mean by ready? Who is ever ready for the drastic upending that it would take to bring about ‘peace and good will to all’?” Indeed, what would we do if glory did reveal itself to our harried minds?

Even as I take the first pan of peppernuts out of the oven, browned to perfection, I know that railing about Christmas demands will not solve either the vexing problems of the world or more particular family stresses. Nevertheless, I will make peppernuts—every year—and share them, with the family, with friends. I will make other favorite cookies, and, if it’s my turn to host, will cook the turkey and all the other dishes that surround it on the carefully set table with its lit candles.

a table set with good china, wine glasses, candles and decorations — Not our usual family setting, which is definitely more than four – this was, as I recall, a meeting of friends.

We will also bring such gifts as the family has agreed upon, whether it be an in-house exchange or a charitable donation on behalf of the family. There will be pleasure in the doing and the making and the buying, if I choose to be mindful and to acknowledge the sources of my anxiety over all of the above. Familiar rituals give birth also to good memories. Neither ritual nor memories of whatever sort should be ignored.

From the very first Christmas I can remember—during which I watched it all from my sick bed—to other Christmases, including one in which funeral flowers became the living-room decorations and no cookies at all were baked, I can choose to welcome the beautiful even as I learn to accept the reality of messy human experiences. Just as we revel in the diamonds of hoarfrost in the midst of bitter cold, finding warmth where possible, and giving thanks.

It’s all of a piece, isn’t it? Memories and fresh peppernuts.

photo of teapot, napkin, full coffee mug, and bowl of peppernuts.

The Audacity of Hope

On December 1, 2019 By ednafroeseIn books, family, hope, spiritualityLeave a comment

“Signs and wonders are always doubted, and perhaps they are meant to be. In the absence of certainty, faith is more than mere opinion; it is hope.”

(Mary Doria Russell in Children of God)

Hope is, by definition, tenuous. It is not certainty, not even probability. It is a clinging to the barely possible, in the face of more likely, undesirable possibilities. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson insisted, “That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune—without the words, / And never stops at all.” Hope is illogical and necessary, in equal measure. “Faith, hope, and love,” declared St. Paul, are the bedrock of theology. Also of sociology and psychology.

Also of stories. Whether the stories are fiction or history or memoir or true in some other sense, we listen with longing for wisdom and for a resolution that will satisfy. For this reason, modern fiction and drama often frustrates because of its seeming hopelessness, its bleak endings. I would argue, though, that hope is visible in the stoic courage of those who endure suffering without seeing an end. The little thing with feathers still “sings sweetest in the gale.”

One of literature’s frequent symbols of hope is the birth of a child. One tiny being suggests possibilities where none existed before. At the most elemental level, a baby means that the parents are fertile—the clan will not die out, there will be another harvest, the tribe can thrive under better leadership. Ancient myths are replete with miraculous stories of birth. Anything is then possible; all things are possible.

Yet nothing is guaranteed. The hope-full Advent story includes swords and later on, a cross. Even a cursory survey of literature offers sufficient examples of what T.S. Eliot calls the “hope for the wrong thing” (East Coker). When hope forgets humility and love turns into demand, the promised little one can only disappoint.

In Howard’s End, E.M. Forster’s classic British novel on social class, a rich capitalist family, a cultured, artistic, intelligent family, and a struggling low-class family with little in common encounter one another through tentative friendships, and brief romances, only to fall into misunderstandings and antagonism. It all seems hopeless, until an illegitimate son is conceived out of a brief passion between the lower class young man and the younger daughter of the cultural elite. Despite that intimation of hope, though, the poor baby seems the child of an artificial marrying of intellectual concepts, not actual people.

Similarly, in two Canadian novels, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese and Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House, literally illegitimate children are made to embody hope for resolution of age-old conflicts. In Wild Geese, the conflict is between a pioneer patriarch’s cold, selfish drive to possess and control both property and family, and his daughter’s earthy vitality, sensuality, and rebellious drive for freedom. It is a gender-driven conflict that pits materialism against nature itself, and nature, through the now-pregnant daughter, wins, if one can overlook the swashbuckling, impulsive father of the child who may or may not be able to provide adequately for his new partner and child.

In As For Me and My House, set in the 1930s, the situation is even bleaker. The narrator/protagonist and her husband, who have moved through several dustbowl towns, giving inadequate ministerial care to survivors of repeated crop failures, are both failed artists: he’s a painter and she’s a pianist. Neither had sufficient courage to match their artistic ambition and instead stumbled into a marriage and a half-sham performance as preacher and preacher’s wife. Everything around them and in them is infertile; they have no child (to the acute disappointment of them both) and their gardens die. The baby at the end is born of a brief liaison between the minister and a young parishioner (who conveniently dies in childbirth). The minister’s wife, who knows of the affair, insists that they adopt the baby and then move away into the big city to begin a new life with a new career. Such an adoption and such a marriage have but a snowball’s chance in hell of thriving, but there is no doubt that Ross is using an ancient symbol of hope, possibly ironically.

Indeed, the hope seems the hope for the wrong thing. The poor babies are asked to bring peace to ancient oppositions and to do so without an adequate foundation of love.

Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God, also offer us babies as carriers of hope, but the tone is different. These novels are speculative fiction, located on earth and on Rakhat, a distant planet with two sentient species. The Jesuits’ first exploratory mission ends in seeming disaster, both for the planet and for the protagonist, whose faith, once close to sainthood, is utterly destroyed. Two babies play a crucial role. The first is born among refugees from an inter-species war of survival. The only human child on Rakhat, Isaac is fatherless and autistic; his mother, Sophia, sees no hope for this strange child among alien species. Yet he is gifted and creates an unearthly, uniquely beautiful piece of music based on the DNA sequences of humans, Runa, and Jana’ata. All three species recognize, in Isaac’s music, an example of God’s grace made manifest in the midst of on-going tragedy. Audacious as it may seem, hope remains.

Back on earth again, at the end of the second novel, the weary ex-priest has gone, on the Day of the Dead, to weep alone at the tomb of the woman he had once hoped to marry. He has, he thinks, lost everyone he has ever loved. A young woman with a baby approaches, addressing him as “Padre.” He looks in amazement at her features, startlingly familiar, and sees a daughter he did not know he had begotten just before he was forcibly taken back to Rakhat. In submission to this new manifestation of grace, he opens his damaged arms to receive little Tommaso, his grandchild. Not all doubt has been resolved—it never will be—but love has become possible again. Nothing else is asked of this little one, just love.

I end with a personal story. When I finally became pregnant with our oldest child, my parents had probably given up hope that we would ever give them grandchildren. At the time, my mother had entered another long period of depression. Even the brief return home of my older brother from Africa failed to rouse her from inner pain. My pregnancy was merely another cause for anxious fretting.

Yet among my family treasures is a photo of my mother holding our son for the first time. Her smile recalls the beauty of her youth, when she was full of hope for the future. Our baby brought her back out of the darkness, admittedly not for very long. Life rarely works that simply. Yet those few months of newfound joy were a gift, and still are.

As T. S. Eliot warned, hope can be the “hope of the wrong thing,” just as love can be “the love of the wrong thing.” Even our worthiest expectations can be hubristic wishful thinking, just as Jesus’ birth, in an occupied country to an oppressed people, raised hopes of immediate political deliverance that were later nailed to the cross. This is not to say that we should not hope, for without hope, life—and love—cannot be sustained,

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (T.S. Eliot)

Originally published in Prairie Messenger, December 13, 2017.

Mind Your Questions

On November 13, 2019November 13, 2019 By ednafroeseIn family, hope, identity1 Comment

“It’s all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.” (Charles de Lint)

So it happened yet again, at a biannual extended family gathering. Whether this story is mine to tell or belongs to someone else who granted me permission to tell it is not germane to the matter at hand. Let’s just call him Adam—or Eve. Your choice.

Adam had retired since the last family gathering and wasn’t much of a hand at letter-writing, or Facebook posts. Inevitably, then, The Question came, in this case from a hearty, well-meaning cousin. “Hey, Adam. I hear you’re retired now. Are you keepin’ busy?”
Dutifully, Adam began giving an account of himself, including volunteer work at the Children’s Hospital and the local soup kitchen, the home projects that had been postponed for years, the church committee work he now had time for, and the university course he was taking for his own pleasure. At which point, the cousin expressed astonishment: “What the . . . .? Aren’t you supposed to be retired?”

There you have it in two breaths—the hopelessly contradictory assumptions we have about retirement. On the one hand, since people are valued for the work they do and the pay they get for it, not being busy is the ultimate form of uselessness. Heaven forbid that we should have time to be, to reflect, to live quietly in the moment simply because it’s been given and is precious.

Pike Lake, near Saskatoon, SK, on a quiet fall afternoon, when just to be alive is enough.

On the other hand, our equally common assumption about work is that it is a sentence to be served, a debt to society that once paid should be rewarded by endless days of leisure and pleasure. Thus, the only approved ways of managing retirement, to judge by most advertising and by the ubiquitous “keepin’ busy?” are extended travel and perpetual golfing.

What both questions pointedly ignore is that Adam—or Eve—is not accountable to every Tom, Dick, and Sherry who chooses to probe Adam or Eve’s use of time. For twenty or forty or even fifty years, Eve has obediently filled out time sheets, turned in regular reports, endured yearly evaluations, completed projects, explained to her parents that she was indeed doing what they had taught her to do, met her family’s needs, and served society. For thirty years and many more, Adam has wondered when he could finally call his soul his own (which, realistically, he can’t ever do, since we all have our being in the communities and roles that make us who we are). Yet now, when he no longer owes his soul to the company store, for the sake of civility, he has to give account of himself to every Shaun, Vicki, and Harry? Doesn’t that verge on being rude and unjust?

Oh, many retirees over ever so many decades have genially gone along with the joke and made up facetious replies on the fly: “Oh, I keep busy watching the paint grow old on the walls.” “Hey, the grandkids keep me busier than I ever was. I don’t know how I found time to work.” “Man, I’m working my way through the beers (or novels!) that have been waitin’ for me.” And so on. The socially adept will find their way through this conversational minefield as they have found their way through countless other necessary meetings and greetings. It will not do to make too much of the usual awkwardness of finding something to say to someone one doesn’t know well but would still like to acknowledge.

My sympathies are extended, though, to the Eves and Adams who are introverts, those private people who treasure their newly acquired space in which to seek the inner quietness that has always beckoned them, who want to give their time to carefully chosen projects that were never meant to be loudly public. For them, the nosiness of “keepin’ busy?” is an intrusion on privacy, and the often trivializing responses to an honest account given in good faith feel humiliating. Maybe we could craft some gentle rebukes that can convey the gist of “none of your damn business” without spoiling the friendly tone of the conversation. I’ve heard someone say, “Well, I don’t have any days in which I stare at the wall and wonder to do next.” Or also, “I am content. Is that what you wanted to know?” My favorite response is “I’m doing nothing of socially redeeming value.” Which deftly signals both that the question has encroached on personal territory and that our assumptions about work require more thought.

While it seems a useful service to humanity to provoke some mocking laughter at our thoughtless and sometimes foolish assumptions about other people’s work or not work, it is surely more important to practice the social niceties as peacefully as possible. Some irritations are not worth risking unease for someone else, who was actually well-intentioned.

Nevertheless, I’m still looking for some gracious responses that will stamp out the “keepin’ busy?” questions and invite my interlocutors into a space where doing and being can dance together in harmony.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver

Originally published in Prairie Messenger October 19, 2016

After the Choices

On November 1, 2019 By ednafroeseIn Earth, friendship, hope, politics, writing2 Comments

The election is over now. We’ve had time to think about our choices and balance them against the ones we might have made. We’ve heard the “victory” speeches, such as they were. Within days, we also heard a few mea culpas, not enough, mind you. How is it that after such an important exercise of democracy (ideally a thoughtful, rational, and informed process), everyone – politicians, pollsters, media people, coffee row pundits – can so readily agree that the campaign was short on vision and way too long on insults and trivialities? Was that not obvious early enough to have changed course?

But it is not the post-mortem I want to focus on, although it has its place; in fact, I hope that its conclusions will definitely affect what comes hereafter. A minority government, as historians and students of current politics tell us, is a forced opportunity to learn cooperation and diplomacy out of which can come important legislation. However, nothing will get done if the shouting and the animosity don’t stop.

A distant shot of the Parliaments that includes more trees and river and sky than buildings.

I have not worked out yet whether I’m hopeful about federal-provincial cooperation or not. I do know that we need reasonable unity and focus in the 43rd Parliament, not more partisan jockeying for attention. We have pressing issues to attend to, and to have individual premiers threatening to take their marbles and go play elsewhere is not helpful.

Before the election, I suggested that we institute some poetry reading retreats for our political candidates, encourage them to get to know one another, away from the spotlights and under the influence of holy wisdom of poetry. Now I’m going to suggest some additional rituals, ones that call on our narrative imagination in different ways.

For the politicians, I recommend a private ritual of writing eulogies. (No, I’m not implying dark deeds of revenge and violent seizures of power!) I have noticed in the past that when a former or even sitting Member of Parliament dies, the eulogies spoken and written are warm and gracious, devoid of partisanship and rancor. Suddenly the enemy from across the aisle has been transformed into a statesperson of great stature and goodness. To our amazement, we hear far more than we knew before about this individual’s genuine contributions and honest efforts to create a better world.

So what if, after the election, each politician took time for a solitary, quiet retreat in which to compose a eulogy for that political opponent who had served most often as his or her punching bag in the recent campaign? That could be a first step in defusing the often pointless quarrels that have been magnified past reason in order to motivate voters. Such an exercise will not be easy.

If necessary, the composition of eulogies for opponents could be preceded by the writing of their own eulogies. What would each newly elected or re-elected parliamentarian want to have said about herself or himself? What goal, which once motivated the politician to enter the public square in the first place, would he or she like to see as a crucial point in the eulogy? Honesty and self-awareness would be required for this ritual, but I can’t imagine two qualities that I would like to see more of in our representatives, apart from, of course, a thorough knowledge of the home constituency and the constitution.

For the rest of us, I will make a different recommendation—although personal eulogy writing wouldn’t hurt us either. What I suggest will require some detective work, and considerable attentive listening. Here it is, with all its echoes of clichéd advice from previous centuries: look for stories of positive change and circulate those instead of the latest rant. Tell the Rick Mercer types to take a hike.

For example, it was a friend, with first-hand experience, who told me about a little-known goal of Saskatchewan’s former premier Brad Wall, who had decided early in his political life that he wanted to make his province the best possible place for people with disabilities. Many of us, including me, became very angry over several cuts in his last budget, such as the shutting down of our provincial bus service (STC), yet we failed to notice that funding for disability services had remained steady and even increased.

While the attention given to one group of vulnerable people does not cancel out the pain of another vulnerable group—social ledger sheets cannot be so balanced—it does remind me that premiers, like the rest of us, are not always consistent. Internal trade-offs seem an inevitable part of the job description.

The story also reminded me that we cannot possibly know all of the details, or understand the complicated processes of getting some programs through and cancelling others. Even in the age of social media when nothing seems private any more, the general public is not always aware of essentially good motives and acts of personal integrity. We should not forget the humanity of all political actors.

On a more local level, I recently heard encouraging stories of initiatives in Saskatoon that seek to ameliorate the difficult living conditions of our most at-risk residents. Whether a particular helpful measure is conceived and brought into reality by city council or by creative and determined individuals makes little difference to those who receive a hot meal (Friendship Inn asks no questions but simply serves the meal) or a place to sleep in security (The Lighthouse). We need to hear these stories.

So let’s not forget the second portion of this ritual of finding positive stories: pass them on. Admittedly, I have no right to give advice regarding social media, since I do not use them (with the exception of personal email and this blog!). Perhaps there are already a myriad of feel-good stories that are circulating, some of which are even factual.

What I have in mind, though, is the act of pointing out good initiatives in direct conversation with others, as well as passing on pertinent links to specific individuals. Admittedly, it is hard to stay cool in the middle of a heated conversation and then to retell, tactfully, some facts or stories about the object of the rant. Yet without such deliberate tamping down of anger, how shall we proceed toward the cooperation that we all say we’d like to see in our governments?

Long may our narrative imaginations flourish!

“[Marcus Aurelius] argued that the [narrative imagination] contributes to undoing retributive anger. He means that when we are able to imagine why someone has come to act in a way that might generally provoke an angry response, we will be less inclined to demonize the person, to think of him or her as purely evil and alien.
Martha Nussbaum

A photo of a solitary path through the woods.

Rituals of Choice

On October 19, 2019October 30, 2019 By ednafroeseIn hope, identity, poetry, politics2 Comments

It’s almost over now, that ritual dance of words at the heart of Canadian democracy. Except that it has seemed less like dancing and more like frenetic, vindictive stomping fuelled by fear. I refuse to take sides here; we need all sides, in continual conversation, if we are to find workable compromises. Human beings are much too diverse in their gifts and their dreams to be co-opted by one voice only. A subsequent drift toward an enforced single vision is all too likely, as history has demonstrated more than once.

And therein lies the trouble with this recent combative chorus of political voices, each of which claimed that the other voices were wrong: the volume was unmistakable, the vision largely absent. I was listening for someone, somewhere, to move beyond specific promises to a discussion of what we might be and become as a nation. Does anyone these days vote according to what might be best for our country, instead of what might bring dollars to our personal wallets?

A long time ago, long before elections, before imaginations could even conceive of democracy, when large empires became larger by swallowing up smaller, tribal nations, a certain prophet in Judah believed that systems could and would change: “Every man will sit under his own vine / and under his own fig tree, / and no one will make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). This was not quite as individualistic as we might see it these days, since the peace that would make such an idyllic scene possible was to be established on the premise that swords would be beaten into plowshares and that disputes would be settled communally—among people as well as among people groups. True, the writer assumed that that could happen only in a theocracy, but he was gracious enough—or realistic enough—to acknowledge that other peoples might choose to “walk in the name of their gods.”

The world has since known other conceptions of the common good, drawn other blueprints for a good society, attempted various economic arrangements that were supposed to deliver happiness to the many. We have learned a veritable vocabulary of politics—and the word “politics” refers essentially to the process of allocating resources among and to groups of people; that is, who gets what, when, and how is a political matter, no matter what organization deals out the resources. Politics should therefore not be a dirty word. It is always and everywhere present as we try to work out how we should live together peaceably.

Along the way, human beings have moved from smaller, tribal societies held together by family loyalties and rituals of gift-giving, to more complex societies that gradually adopted principles of ownership. We have experimented with capitalism, communism, socialism, dictatorships (supposedly benevolent and otherwise), monarchies both absolute and limited, democracies of greater and lesser integrity.

This is not the place, nor am I qualified, to weigh out pros and cons.

Instead, I would rather turn to poetry.

I am sure that we should all read more poetry, from which the whispers of holiness have never been eradicated.
Sara Maitland

In “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” William Stafford begins provocatively,

If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Various parades of current ideologies all invite us to follow something, some god. Stafford argues that our choices among those possibilities will be made blindly if we do not get to know one another. In other words, we cannot realize our potential, our calling, alone. His plural pronouns are not an accident.

Indeed, if we do not maintain our “fragile sequences,” the moral dikes we have built to hold violence and selfishness and atavistic tendencies at bay may break and allow all the “horrible errors of childhood” to “storm out to play.” That, it seems, we have seen in spades recently, on the internet, on the national scene, on political stages. There has been “shouting” aplenty, until the individual voice of reason can scarcely be heard at all.

Stafford’s poem is ambiguous with its images of patterns and lines and elephants on the way to a circus. Leaders and followers proceed, sometimes on the way to the right destination, sometimes not. One isn’t sure whether it is a good idea to break the line for an individual choice or when one should maintain the “fragile sequence.”

This isn’t an easy world, by any means, but Stafford does seem to call on his readers (since we are to read this ritual to one another, discernment clearly does not occur in solitude) to “know what occurs” and to be willing to name such facts aloud, “lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.” Such thoughtfulness is unlikely if the conversation has devolved into mindless shouting of slogans.

I have been haunted by Stafford’s final stanza for many years:

For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

After rereading those strange and wonderful lines yet again, I wonder if it might be a good idea to interrupt the campaigning and the pointless debates, in which ideas have given way to shouted “zingers,” with some poetry reading retreats.

Let’s gather candidates in each constituency, including the party leaders (each in his or her riding) in a comfortable room with soft lighting, good coffee, real food, no cameras or microphones for quiet discussion. A neutral moderator could choose the poem(s) and begin the conversation. Let there be thoughtful silences, real attention to language, good listening, respectful body language. Let there be no purpose in the gathering but to undo the problem of “if you don’t know the kind of person I am /. . . we may follow the wrong god home and miss our star.”

I could pay attention to a campaign with clear signals, spoken quietly by “awake people.”

Meanwhile, the voting booths await our yeses and our nos.

photo of bridge over a dark chasm in the woods.