Thankful: An Ordinarily Absurd Thursday

When I walk out of my office on Thursday afternoons, I usually see something like this: 

This photo is actually a smaller-than-usual meeting of the Thursday Club, a group of students and faculty who meet each week to share poetry we have written or discovered.

Thursday Club is, like many things that happen at a small liberal-arts college, unnecessary. Superfluous. Frivolous.  Financially unprofitable.

Some might see meetings such as this as decadent, or, more charitably, as a luxury enjoyed by privileged people who aren't burdened with more important work to do. That "more important work" could be anything from wage earning to evangelism to feeding the hungry. Such an attitude, however, would miss the point of Thursday Club, and of the countless other absurdly beautiful things that happen at a place such as this.

Because of course we are burdened--with deadlines, with family sorrows, with global anxieties. We have work to do--academic, professional, domestic, missional. We have bills and tests, dependents and superiors, vocations and commissions.

And yet, we remind each other that the study of truth, beauty, and goodness is, in the final sense, not decadent at all. Reading a poem in the cool November air and the bright November sun, we learn to believe the consolation the archangel Michael gives Adam when announcing mankind's exile from Paradise. In Book 11 of Milton's Paradise Lost, Michael assures Adam that

"...this pre-eminence [in Eden] thou hast lost, brought down
To dwell on even ground now with thy sons:
Yet doubt not but in valley and in plain
God is, as here, and will be found alike
Present, and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love..."

I am thankful to work and live in a place where, on an ordinary Thursday, my friend Steve reads an ancient poem--the Old English "Dream of the Rood"--while his student Will plays an Anglo-Saxon lyre they built together. It might seem absurd--it might seem a scandal--but it is very good, and I give thanks for it today.

To the Ones Who Demanded Stories

Dear Friends,

When people challenge me to explain the value of literature, I have a number of cogent defenses on hand. It is in my professional interest, after all, to demonstrate that reading, writing, and discussing stories are worthwhile pursuits. I fit my arguments to my audience, waxing philosophical with some, and offering "practical" evidence to others. No matter what shape my defense takes, however, I see your faces as I talk. I still remember the night Rachel and Keith sat down on either side of me and said, "If you're going to be studying fairy tales for your honors thesis, you really ought to share some of them with us." Thus began Story Time, one of the happiest traditions of my very happy college days. Each night, I would read you a story -- at first just to Keith and Rachel, but soon Jeremy and Eric became regulars, too, and many nights Hannah, Mark, Shannon, Brittany, and others would drop by.

Photo made at PhotoFunia.com

Just as my earliest encounters with literature came while snuggled against my mama or daddy's side, our college readings reminded me that good stories can bind listeners together through laughter, hope, curiosity, and consolation.

None of you were English majors. In fact, the most faithful listeners were students of chemistry or biology. You never asked me to explain why I was studying literature, why it was important or profitable. Rather, you showed that I was spending my time well simply by demanding, again and again, for a tale before bedtime. Perhaps you enjoyed the break from organic chemistry or anatomy, maybe you liked the fantastic elements in the tales I would choose, or perhaps you, like I, looked forward to the ritual of gathering with friends each night.

As I learned that I had something of value to share with you, I began to think about what I might gain from your disciplines. When Rachel began to work on her own honors thesis, cataloging wildflowers in the east Tennessee hills, I would tag along, learning to recognize Dutchman's Breeches, Quaker Ladies, and bloodroot.  No plenary address on interdisciplinary research has ever inspired me as much as those hikes.

Since college, the demands for stories have come in different forms.  Lauren writes each Christmas to make sure I'm going to record a story or two for the silent nights of that holy time. Annie Laurie would ask for a story as she practiced walking, and we would spend a morning striving against her cerebral palsy with tales of pirate queens. This morning, four-year-old Andrew called to thank me for some books I sent him. "Read them to me, " he said. "Now you must come home."

I'm trying, sweet boy. With every story I share, whether at a bedside, on the road, or in a classroom, I'm trying to bring us home.

Love,

Bethany

P.S.  The proximity of college is a thing of the past, but there are still so many stories I want to share. Tonight, I hope you will take a few minutes to enjoy this one: a story called "The Lute Player" about a woman who takes a dangerous journey to bring someone she loves home again. You can download "The Lute Player" by clicking here.

A letter to someone who took me seriously

Dear Tiffany,
    I have never forgotten the words you gave me, but until today I had forgotten your name. It would be lost, except that I kept a startlingly detailed diary when I was in middle school. Most of what I recorded now seems painfully trivial, but your name was worth saving.

I never knew you well. You were a college student from another campus, and we met because my parents were taking their students to same tri-state conference your group was attending. I was thirteen, shy and self-conscious. You had quirky clothes and a ready laugh.

The conference was the sort I had attended all my life: a weekend-long retreat and revival for college students, featuring topical break-out sessions and daily worship services. I spent my childhood reading and playing through these conferences. The sessions didn't really interest me, and I was also terrified of people (and most other things). By the time we met, I was quite adept at entertaining myself and staying out of the way, and I spent most of that weekend doing homework in my parents' hotel room.

The only session I attended was the closing worship service on Sunday morning. I'm sure I paid at least moderate attention to the sermon, and I probably sang along with whatever praise choruses were popular in 1997. All I really remember from that morning, however, is you. The preacher had asked for all of the campus ministers to stand and receive prayers for their ministries. My parents stood, but I remained seated, edging away to make room for the students who were gathering and laying hands upon my mother and father. I intended to pray, too, but you interrupted me, walking right past my parents and sitting down next to me. "May I pray for you?" you asked. Bewildered, but too shy to refuse, I nodded.

This is what I recorded in my messy, eighth-grade cursive:

As [Tiffany] was praying, I nearly cried, I had never heard anyone pray so specifically for me. She said that my being here at ISU is no accident, and she prayed that God would give me strength to question tradition and seek the Lord. She prayed like she truly cared." 

You thanked God for making me my parents' daughter, and for giving me a role in their ministry to college students. You challenged me not to surrender to conventional roles for girls in life or in ministry. You asked God to fill me with love and to show me what work I was meant to do among college students. You showed that me that I did not need to wait--for college, for adulthood, for a more outgoing personality--before doing something with eternal value.

Looking back, it would be easy for me to say that your prayer helped prepare me for my career as a college professor. Like my parents, I have chosen to work in higher education because I want to help build God's kingdom on university campuses. And yet, when you prayed for me fifteen years ago, you didn't mention the future. You interceded in the present tense, and that was what really shocked me. I had never considered that there was already some good work (other than homework) that I could do, much less work among the college men and women I adored.

You hardly knew me, Tiffany, but you took me far more seriously than I took myself, and you radiated with a love for God's kingdom that I could hardly fathom.
 
The change was slow but real. In the years that followed I remained shy, but I grew discontent with my self-imposed forms of isolation. By the time I reached high school, your prayer had ruined me for youth groups. For the rest of my teen years, I had no patience for camp games or dating advice or "girls just want to have fun"-themed Bible studies; I craved mentorship and holy adventures and substance. Instead of playing the perpetual kid sister, I began to ask what it meant to befriend college students. Instead of assuming that all college kids were half rock-star, half-superhero, I started to watch the ways they grew or floundered into adulthood. I listened to the things that excited them, troubled them, challenged them, changed them.

The next time I went to a conference with my parents and their students, I left the hotel room. Thank you for pushing me out of that door.

Ever yours,

Bethany

Home Sweet Homecoming

October 20. The window panes are cold. My fingers trace ridges and valleys across the dark glass, trying to remember the architecture of the mountains we saw yesterday. Tired and peaceful, I think that tonight could almost be a college night. After a long day on campus, we lingered over a late supper, and now I am working at the computer late at night, a marked-up manuscript on the desk beside me. Lauren and Charlie are just across the hall; Emily and Kevin could hear me if I called their names. Tomorrow we'll meet Eric at First Baptist for church, and Jeremy might join us for lunch afterward.

It could almost be home. The familiarity of this night, this place, is bewildering and consoling all at once because tonight is not, after all, a college night. We are all nearer twenty-eight than eighteen, and instead of a dorm, Kevin and Emily's house is our gathering place. Sharing a meal with these friends is no longer a common joy, but a rare event--it has been years since we were gathered around one table, and it may be years before it happens again. This is not home, but homecoming.

My dear friends Dave and Mandy live here in our college town, and on one wall of their living room, they have painted the words "Home is..." in large letters.  They and their friends have written other words and phrases to complete this sentence all around the wall, and Saturday was my turn. I contributed a curious line from George MacDonald's Lilith.  "Home," I wrote, "is ever so far away in the palm of your hand."

This is the paradox of homecoming. We return to a place and a time that was home, traveling across memory, miles, or both, but we know we have not come to stay.

 Walking in the shadows of familiar buildings on Saturday, I began to catalog all the friends I would need to see walking to the cafeteria, or perhaps headed towards the dorms, before I would feel that I had really come home. This was not mere nostalgia; I don't wish I were eighteen or twenty-two again, and I would not come home, even to my beloved college, to meet my friends unchanged. I want a more-than-Facebook vision of the people they have become, with real voices telling stories about work and ideas and families. I want hugs and handshakes and looking-in-the-eye. I imagined all these friends gathered around Kevin and Emily's dining room table, but even as I indulged in my fantasies of reunion, I could not ignore the distances that were keeping us apart.  For some of the friends who once made Carson-Newman home, finances, jobs, and miles prevented their pilgrimage to the east Tennessee foothills. And there are other kinds of distances that, I knew, would have followed even my dearest friends back to our alma mater.  We might gather, but there would be subjects tactfully avoided at dinner, questions left unasked as we recounted the recent news. Home, I often think, is ever so far away. 

I was prepared for these distances, braced against awkward conversations and tentative reunions. I had resigned myself to any number of tepid "remember whens?"  Instead, I spent all weekend overwhelmed to see the ways in which the virtues that first drew me to Carson-Newman had grown in the lives of my teachers and friends. As a high-school senior, I had my choice of full scholarships to several colleges and universities.  I chose Carson-Newman because everyone I met there invited me, in one way or another, to become the sort of person I longed to be. I was a shy, neurotic, self-absorbed teenager, and by the time I finished high school I was very nearly sick of myself. When I visited Carson-Newman, I met young men and women who were brilliant without pretension, kind without condescension, fun without stupidity. Their confidence, kindness, and service attracted me more than any number of brand-new residence halls or manicured flowerbeds. Returning as an alumna, I realized how remarkable and rare these virtues are. I came home, after all, to friends who plan October picnics of pumpkin stew and ginger tea; who wash up the supper dishes without being asked; who spend their days teaching high school students to love reading or math; who go out of their way to include others in a conversation; who stand up for their convictions about the environment; who train dancers; who raise children to love truth, beauty, and goodness. I came home to the faculty who inspired me to be a professor--wise, compassionate men and women who greet their students with eager questions and hugs after half a decade.

All weekend I found myself wanting to hold on to everyone I met, literally to wrap my fingers around their wrists and to touch their faces. I want to be among these people, I thought. I want to live my life with their courage, grace, and kindness. I felt the same rush of hope and longing that led me to this school. This, I realized, is the reason for homecomings: not to retire from daily strife, not to escape into nostalgia, but to witness and remember what it takes to establish a home. It takes Emily's curiosity. Shannon's enthusiasm. Kevin's steadiness. Jeremy's thoughtfulness. Eric's fidelity. Lauren and Charlie's merry kindness. Dave and Mandy's creativity and convictions. Mari's courage. Mark's lovingkindness. Keith's wit. Rachel's compassion.

 As a student, I always cried at the end of each semester, and my flight back to Texas could have been one of those bittersweet journeys from one home to another. My heart was heavy as a thousand miles unfolded between me and Carson-Newman, but some of that heaviness came from the weight of gratitude. The home I have made in Texas owes so much to what I learned in college. I have no idea where my next home will be, but I will be proud if it, like Carson-Newman, is a place where people become more than they knew they could be. When we find such places, we do not always have the privilege of staying for long, but somehow, our true homes have a way of following us. Through faith, hope, and love, through friendship and imagination and determination, you may be startled to discover that home is in the palm of your hand.
   

Eric, me, Lauren, Charlie, and Kevin. Home sweet homecoming, indeed.

With Emily, fall 2005

With Emily, fall 2011

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.