Dear John ~ 12 February 2018

Dear John, 

It’s been a while since I’ve written. You’ve been to Italy and back. I haven’t gone globetrotting since my last letter, but we did get to Memphis during Christmas. That’s a lot like Italy, right? I appreciated the pictures you shared and the way the place moved you. My folks took my sister and me on a trip to Israel when I was in high school. They maneuvered the trip so that we had two or three days in Rome on the way back. I remember five things: the drivers were batshit crazy; my parents bought me what I know was a pricy rugby shirt from what seemed to a 15-year-old Texas boy to be a very chic Benetton shop; St. Peter’s Basilica is like entering an alternative world (which, I understand now, is kind of the point); their pizza had peas on it. The fifth thing was my dad at his finest. We happened to be in Rome on Thanksgiving Day, after a week and a half of foreign food, and dad dreamed up a wild adventure including a mad hatter taxi ride (see comment about the drivers) across the city to this three-story McDonalds where we ate Big Macs, chicken nuggets and fries as we remembered the Pilgrims and their meal with the Wampanoag tribe. 

Anyway, I’d like to go back. I’d pass on the Big Macs, but I’d stand as long as they’d let me there in the center of St. Peter’s and bask in the brilliance, the mystery. Of course, I’d have Miska with me which means we’d get out of the big city as soon as possible and head to the countryside, walking the hills and the vineyards and the little villages where we’d enjoy breads and cheeses and olives and vino. 

I just finished Shaffer and Barrow’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society; I loved it. I found myself saying, “This may be the best epistolary novel I’ve ever read,” which feels magnanimous of me since I wrote one. After I made this magnanimous remark to myself, however, I realized I’d never actually read an epistolary novel other than the one I’ve written. That feels like a mistake, perhaps something I should have mentioned to my editor. 

Anyway, the English poet and essayist Charles Lamb has an intriguing prominence in the story, and there’s this point where we hear about a quarrel between Wordsworth and Lamb, who were friends. Wordsworth scolded Lamb for his failure to adore nature. Lamb, refusing to give an inch, answered with a defense of how enraptured he was with the common physical elements of his life. “The rooms where I was born,” Lamb wrote, “the furniture which has been before my eyes all of my life, a book case which has followed me about like a faithful dog wherever I have moved–old chairs, old streets, squares where I have sunned myself, my old school–have I not enough, without your Mountains?”

Now, you know me enough to know that I’m with Wordsworth on the necessity of mountains, but there’s something about Lamb and his fascination and delight with these physical pieces and places right in front of him, the most common and plain portions of our life, that moves me. There really is wonder everywhere.

So we’ll be marked with ashes on Wednesday, and we’ll enter Lent’s bright sadness. Miska wrote something beautiful today, and she included in it lines from St. Teresa of Avila that I’d never heard before:

God is always there, if you feel wounded. He kneels
over this earth like
a divine medic,
and His love thaws
the holy in
us.

I think this is what I’m hopeful for in these Lenten days, for the divine medic to come and tend to my heart, for Divine love to thaw the holy in me.

Your Friend,
Winn

Dear John ~ 6 September 2017

Dear John,

On Monday, I had every intention of getting a letter of to you, but you beat me to it. What kept me from writing my dear ol’ friend in Colorado? The City of Charlottesville, that’s what. We got a letter in the mail from one of our street inspectors giving us 10 days to trim back a long row of runaway Rose of Sharons that have been spreading themselves too generously out over our little lane. They were running wild, I’ll admit. And they were causing a problem on our narrow lane, skinny as it is. Even without the forest intruding onto the asphalt, two go karts would have to suck in their tummies to squeeze past each other without scraping paint. Did you know that in England, lots of the little avenues are referred to as a “close”? Like instead of Mulberry St., it’s Mulberry Close? Those Brits say what they mean; everything on those streets is in close, for sure.

Anyway, I had planned to trim the Rose of Sharons in a month or so when legitimate Fall weather hits, as I’m told that then I can prune away without fear of butchering them into oblivion. However, the inspector man said they had to go, butcher or no butcher. He obviously has little concern for our horticultural dilemma. I’d planned for the job to take an hour. Six hours later, I dragged my weary self into the house and called it a day.

You know, though, how Charlottesville has been syphoning off so much of my energy in so many other ways lately. Our dear, broken town has been splayed across the news, and it’s not going away–last night CNN had a link to a livestream of our town’s City Council meeting–can you believe that? In the middle of Hurricanes and DACA breakdown and North Korea shooting nuclear missiles, there sits our town council with a lead-in from Wolf Blitzer. John, I tell you, on August 12th, I experienced the most vile and vicious ways we degrade ourselves and others. I know racism and antisemitism is still very much with us, but I’ve never seen it bare its fangs– so brazen, without any twinge of conscience. And then, later, I stood between two groups of people spewing the most evil, dehumanizing words at one another. I will never forget that. Never. And though I would never want three people to die to be able to get to this point, I am grateful that now our wounds, festering so long, are in the open, that we simply cannot ignore them. I hope that now we can embrace serious national repentance. I hope that we can truly become brothers and sisters, that we can make communities where everyone truly belongs.

You talked about the In-Between. I feel that all the time. I feel it, for instance, in trying to navigate how to live well in a time where we cycle from one crisis to the next, rarely without any moment to catch our breath or think deeply, certainly no time to think clearly. One downside (of many) to the 24-hour news cycle and firehose-style social media is that we are tempted to believe we can have (or should have) our finger and our mind on every issue, every crisis, every worthy concern. But we can’t. Only God can do that. If we think that we have no responsibility to engage the sorrows and injustices of our world, we need God to expand our heart. However, if we think that we are responsible to confront every sorrow and injustice of our world, we need God to chasten our bloated (and destructive) delusions.

Of course, for many of us, our overblown sense of responsibility comes from the shame blasted out from those who like to sound like God, only with a heap of self-righteousness poured on top. A long time ago, I gave up giving someone else that level of authority in my life. I’ve got my hands full trying to follow Jesus’ voice; I can’t tune in to the million-voice siren call on Facebook too.

All this reminds me of Ignatius who often signed off his letters with this inspiring jolt: Go set the world aflame! That’ll get the blood flowing, won’t it? We do need more people striking their match. However, Ignatius also regularly insisted on our need to foster a Holy Indifference. This Holy Indifference was Ignatius’ way of describing an abiding trust in God that keeps us from getting swept away in the emotions and demands of those things (and often good things) that simply take over more energy than they should. It’s not a call to apathy, not by any means. However, it is, as one writer put it,”peaceful acceptance, realistic expectations, and careful consideration.” If we have indifference but no flame, we’ll waste our life. And if we have the flame but no indifference, we’ll just burn, burn til there’s nothing playful or hopeful or curious left in us at all. 

I know saying goodbye to the kids was hard. I wish Miska and I could have walked over to check in on you and Mer after the farewells. I see those days coming toward us over the horizon. I’m going to be a blubbering dad when it’s our turn. But before then, Miska and I are celebrating our 20th. And we’re doing it in style. We’re heading to Ireland on Sunday to do a walking tour of the Kerry Way, just the bags over our shoulder, the mist on our heads, the green clover under our feet. We’ll walk from village to village. I can’t wait. I plan to practice a little Holy Indifference on the trail. 

Your Friend,

Winn

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