Abundant Lives: Come, Thou Fount (Part 1)

Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; 

streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. 

Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. 

Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, mount of thy redeeming love. 

I began singingly almost facetiously, wondering if we were ever going to find the water we had driven so far to see. Technically, it was a mountain spring, not a “fount” that had inspired our trip, but as Rachel, Keith and I wandered through a graveyard in the Tennessee mountains, a hymn seemed the most appropriate mode for deciding which way to go next.  

One week earlier, my friends and I had attended a reading by the poet Jeff Daniel Marion at our college’s Appalachian Center.  First-semester freshmen, we were eager to attend any campus event, and our English Professor, Dr. Ernest Lee, had arranged the reading.   Mr. Marion shared several selections from his most recent book, Ebbing and Flowing Springs, and spoke about the actual Ebbing and Flowing Spring, near Rogersville, Tennessee, which had inspired the title poem.  I had loved poetry since I learned to read, but in all my adolescent sighing over “Tintern Abbey,” it had never occurred to me that poems could be connected to, or rooted in, actual places. I had always valued poems because they took me away from the uninteresting landscape of Terre Haute, Indiana, but here was a poet who drew his words from the land around him.  Rachel and Keith seemed struck by this, as well, and we decided that at our first chance, we would drive to Ebbing and Flowing Spring ourselves. 

We set out on a dark and misty day in late November, headed towards Rogersville, but we soon learned that poets, whatever their other verbal skills, cannot be counted upon for precise driving instructions.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed the drive; I was still very new to Tennessee and was fascinated by the winding roads, the twang of the voices at the gas station, and the way my companions, one from further east in the state, and one from the mountains of North Carolina, responded to the landscape.  As we drove further and further from our college town, whose foothills still seemed Alpine to me, Keith and Rachel would say, “Now we’re coming near the real mountains. Now I feel safe again.” 

  By the time we reached the gravel road and clearing where we were supposed to find the spring, twilight had passed into proper night.  The area was encircled in trees, but in the darkness we could not tell how large the clearing was. We peered through the windows of an old church, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones surrounding it, but we saw no sign of the spring house. For a time we stood apart, silently, each hearing the sound of rushing water, but unsure of its direction or source.  When a light rain began to fall, we linked arms and I began humming “Come Thou Fount.”  To my surprise, voices on either side of me began to sing along, each harmonizing with my melody.  

Aside from a few peers in my tiny home church, I had rarely met people my own age who knew hymns, yet here were two other teenagers who not only joined, but enriched, the songs that were most precious to me. All my ideas about what it meant to know a place or a person shifted: I was standing in the dark, on an unfamiliar mountain, with people I had known hardly three months, and yet I knew I was home. 

That night is my emblem for the home I found in college, a home I treasure not from nostalgia, but for the life it trained me to love, a life that challenges the isolation and petty ambitions of mainstream adulthood. In coming entries, I will write more about how my time at Carson-Newman challenged and deepened my understanding of home, relationships, community, and church. Tonight, however, I am content to dwell in this memory, and to invite you to join me there. 

We never did find the spring that night, but I think we might have stumbled upon the Fount.

Making it Home: To Be Still

I often feel that I'm spending my days building a life, a home, and waiting for others to come join me.  This song, by Alela Diane, is the song I play when I feel this way. I open the window wide, sing along, and hope all the friends and strangers outside can hear.  

Have you been wearing holes in your boots out there?

Have you been kicking bones in the desert sand?

There's a wolf inside the cave and another in the clouds.

I've seen them chewing on, on the shadows in your eyes.

And it's here at home I wait for your wanders to be still.

Oh it's here at home I wait for your wanders to be still.

from "To Be Still" by Alela Diana

Life Undivided: Walking Home

What do these things have in common?

• a man sitting in the grass, playing his guitar and singing to a seven or eight children
• a sign reading “Warning: High Drug Trafficking Area. Do Not Loiter”
• fragments of all kinds: pieces of vinyl albums, newspapers, and once, a gun
• a pony
• magnolia, crepe myrtle, live oak, and pecan trees
• men and women gathering pecans into plastic grocery bags
• goats 

Answer: Each item appears on my “Seen While Walking to Church in Waco” list. 

During my first two years in Texas, I lived about a mile and a half from my church, and during those years, I only drove to Sunday worship four or five times. Every other Sunday, I walked.  While this record may seem quirky or counter-cultural, for me it was intuitive.  Growing up, my family lived barely three blocks from our church, and in college, I attended the church that was across the street from my dorm room.  I did not own a car until I moved to Texas for graduate school, and so while I could have driven to any number of churches, I first visited congregations within walking distance (I had several good choices; this is Texas, after all). My trek to Calvary Baptist was longer than either my childhood or college walks, but I came to treasure those Sunday mornings.  Though very thankful for a reliable car, I have never enjoyed driving, and Sunday became a day I could rest from the rush and worry of controlling an automobile (or automobeast, as I used to call them). 

My view of Colcord Avenue on a typical Sunday morning. The blue is the underside of my parasol--a necessity for walking on a summer day in Texas. 

I mention these walks, and the strange list they helped me compile, because as I continue to ruminate on what makes a place home, I have realized that home is a place I walk. For most of my life, it has also been a place from whence I walk to church. When I moved to my current apartment, I was much closer to campus, the river, the city park, and many other good things, but I could no longer continue my Sunday ambles (Rising at five am to walk across town doesn’t make me feel very reverent). Losing those walks, however, made me realize how important they were to making this city home.

The benefits of walking through the this city for so long makes that curious inventory precious to me. Week after week, I walked the same route: from Maple Avenue to Colcord, from Colcord through a little web of back streets that brought me to the church building. From a car, this route is hardly lovely: a few blocks of stately houses soon gives way to shabbier buildings, unkempt yards, overgrown lots, and at least one intersection with a bad reputation. There are few reasons to linger if you are simply passing from one side of town to another. 

By walking, however, I had the time to see and know this place.  The broken things I saw, whether weapons or windows, frightened me, but gave me prayers for my neighborhood. The trees and the people and the goats became familiar and beautiful.  Eventually, the women on their porches or the guys working on their cars would say hello, asking me, “You goin’ to church?”

I never did learn the story behind the pony. 

Walking used to be my primary mode of transportation--not only to church, but to school, the grocery store, or any other place I needed to be. In college, my church was on a hill, and I would let myself wander for miles in any direction, knowing I could find my way back once I caught sight of the steeple. Both in Indiana and Tennessee, I often walked to the places where I worked, studied, and shopped. While dating both my high school and college boyfriends, we spent most of our time together rambling through neighborhoods around our houses.  These walks always lasted for hours, and even now I somehow expect to see those bright boys whenever I return to one of those Indiana streets. 

But there is something particularly beautiful about walking from house to church, knowing that with every step I am treading both to and from home.  I used to joke that living alone took all the fun out of being an introvert, but my Sunday walks invariably restored the joy of solitude, blessing me with the tension between walking alone and worshipping together.

Perhaps I can put this all another way: home is a place I reach with weary feet, a place I rest and realize that my hair smells like a February wind. Home is a place I leave in order to arrive. Home is a place I am content in solitude and in community. Home is a place I know what is ugly and notice what is beautiful. 

Home is a place it takes a long time to reach, a place I can see and name long before I arrive.  

Christmas Storytime 3.1: "The Little Match Girl"

For my entire life, home has been a place where stories are read, invented, and shared.  When I was a child, my parents read or told stories to me nearly every night. In college, as I began to write my honors thesis on literary fairy tales, my friends said, “Well, if you’re going to be reading fairy tales all year, you should read them to us.” I agreed, and for most of my senior year, an assortment of friends would gather in my room, and I would read to them from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, The Chronicles of Narnia, and much more.  In graduate school, my academic and professional study of stories proceeded with greater rigor than ever, but I missed having people to sit in a room with me and share stories.  During my Christmas vacation two years ago, I recorded a few of my favorite Christmas stories for friends who were far away. I continued these recordings last year, and this year I am very happy to introduce Christmas Storytime Volume 3 on my blog this year.  The reading is unpracticed, and I can boast of no video editing skills, but I hope the “homespun” quality of this video makes you feel  as though you have joined me in my parents’ living room for a story before bedtime. Tonight’s story is “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen. Enjoy, and watch for more installments in the coming weeks.