WINTER SOLSTICE
December 21
The sun had been hung like a brass circle over the fields of grass and snow. A long line of vehicles crawled over the road that Brother Martin had plowed with the garden tractor, a straight road, and flat, like the roads of all prairies and plains and steppes, and one that took people right to the gate of the monastery.
The cars and trucks were dark. Tanks and troop carriers had come the same way through snow and wheat 60 or 70 years before when I lived a different existence in a different century.
But these were not soldiers with guns and bombs and malevolent intent. These were musicians with cellos and violas and trumpets and timpani. These were women and men who wished to recreate and renew and replenish. Yet I could not ignore that they came in that long dark line, pulling the sky down with them. They were bringing more than music. They brought the long night. And of all the hours in the year and in a life, those which were most impenetrable.
The new abbot was very much in favour of my sister Zoya being declared a saint. He had flung open the doors of our chapel, with its perfect acoustics, for works that had been commissioned in her honour. The musicians were here to make official recordings of those works. They knew her brother was at the Trappist monastery. Whether they would recognize him as the one with his hood up and leaning on a snow shovel was another matter. In the hard red granite of the sun’s fall, as they drove towards our gates, drove implacably as fate or divine will, I prayed I would be missed and forgotten in the turbulence of rehearsals, miles of black cord, microphone stands and violins being tuned to perfection.
The Vatican had phoned. There were still some unanswered questions. Some gaps. Would I – Andrii, Brother Nahum – be available for the Holy Father’s personal emissary? Could the abbot place him at Archbishop Frederick’s disposal? They scarcely needed to ask. The new abbot would do whatever was necessary - and more. How opportune, how blessed, that the retinue from Rome would arrive during the celebration of the Holy Nativity, exactly when the recordings of the sacred music written for Zoya were to be done. The abbot saw God’s hand in all of it.
Dom Alexander, the abbot who had died, would have shielded me as much as he could from the prying and probing. The new one simply threw me to the wolves. He did not understand, nor would he support, my reluctance. I had taken a vow of obedience. It was up to me to get on with it.
The cars rolled past where I stood. I saw the faces of the musicians and the sound people and the producers, the long-haired women and sometimes long-haired men, the large black cases that held basses and harps and drums. I expect they thought I looked strange and medieval in my monastic garb, my hood peaked like a steeple. No stranger than God or life itself, I said to them without moving my lips.
The archbishop would come in the same way down the same road. His cars would also be dark. They had been the first time. Perhaps he would be in a foul mood because the devil’s advocate had picked apart his case for my sister’s canonization. Or perhaps he would have made peace with his disappointment and be as calm as a windless prairie. He might even be glad to see me, though that was doubtful. We had not left on the best of terms the summer before.
I walked away from exhaust fumes that rose like river mist in the ice of the evening air. Three, four, five stars had appeared overhead. The shovel was in my right hand and I pushed back my cowl with the left. I welcomed the sting of the night.
Come then, your grace, I whispered to the sky, to the last flash of light, to the white road streaked with the dark stripes of tires, I find I am surprisingly eager to see you, to talk of that other life I knew as a young man, that terrible life. Perhaps it will be a confession that releases me. Perhaps it will be a revelation and I will see what I have never seen before. Perhaps it will be a resurrection and I will live again. Perhaps it will permit me to lay my old bones on my bed one final time and die a good death. I have no idea. But I am not reluctant or obstinate or afraid. Come quickly, your grace. I will not be hard to find. I stand at the great gate of Kyiv.
The Sixth Hour
SEXT
1933 - 1939
Christmas Eve
Sokur, Cello Suite Number 1, Opus 97 (Zoya)
Tur, Sonata for cello and piano in D Minor, Opus 14
Litvin, Vocalise, song for voice and cello, Opus 32
(Angel of the Neva)
It was like a bad moment from a bad film, an old joke that has been played so many times people no longer laugh, but grow irritable. It was Hollywood B. And I the clown who was doing the comic routine no one wanted to pay good money to watch.
It was only this – I did not see him, I did not see anything, my head was in another place and in another time. The other clown, he hurtled down the corridor, a heap of evergreens and burgundy ribbons, headed for the chapel. I ran over him, coming in from the barn, intent on getting to the washroom and cleaning the dirt and straw off my hands. We went down. Brother Martin, fresh from plowing snow, his skin still bright from the cold. We said nothing, of course, but he shrugged, got up, clutched wreaths and boughs again, smiled quickly and flew on. I got to the sink and scrubbed. The soap smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg. Now came the sounds of a cello going through the scales. There were cello rehearsals and recordings going on all day and into the evening. I went to my room to change into a fresh habit.
“Brother Nahum.”
A tall black shadow was outside the door. I was getting into a clean white robe and black scapular, just pulling the scapular down over my head. I looked through the dark tunnel of the hood at the long shape. Then it slipped into my cell. White winter light fell on its face and hands.
Spikes of frost.
The face cut and cut again.
Hands folded. Blue veins.
Baldness. A rock pared by centuries of water in a cold river.
“A man ages, Brother Nahum.”
“I apologize for staring. Your grace.”
“Hair turns from grey to white. Skin cracks and peels. Faces take on lines and become maps.”
“In six months.”
“Much less.”
“I’m sorry, I was changing, I’ve been working in the barn.”
“I would like to stretch my legs. We just made it in from the airport.”
“Where is your assistant?”
“Vasari? He is with the others, getting our rooms organized. I told him I wanted to meet with you alone.”
“Let me get my boots back on.”
It was noon and the sun shone silver through white clouds. Small snow came down on our heads. I pulled on my Merton toque, as the brothers called it, and offered one to the archbishop. He took it and put it on. We trudged through drifts up a hill.
“Father Abbot has released you to me,” he said.
“I know.”
“How long has Dom Alexander been gone?”
“September.”
“What happened?”
“A brain aneurism. He was 49.”
“How are you with the new abbot?”
“He is restless.”
A cardinal went across our path like a blood streak. I had brought the archbishop to the cemetery and Dom Alexander. I had not thought about it. My brain and eyes and feet had taken me there. Someone had placed a rosary of holly and red berries about his cross. We settled ourselves on a bench near at hand, brushing away the snow with our hands.
“The last time we talked,” the archbishop reminded me, “you were going to speak about your arrival in Ukraine. Before I cut you off. The years were 1932 and 33. I read about the genocide. Worse than the Holocaust. What is the name you give it in Ukrainian? Some say seven million.”
“The Holodomor. Not seven million. Closer to ten. Village after village. Town after town. For hundreds of miles in every direction. It did not matter where we walked or where we drove. Women. Men. Children. Rotting. Whole regions without life, life of any kind, except grass growing through eye sockets. Whole families, whole generations murdered. East Ukraine was an open crypt.”
“In something like two years.”
I felt a pricking on my cheeks and the backs of my hands. Part of me wanted to hold back, but another part with more strength and determination wanted the words to break into the light of day with swiftness and fury.
“They blundered. They should never have let us travel into the villages. No one understood the extent of the starvation. The Kyiv officials who let us go into the countryside were shot. The soldiers in our truck were shot. Days later we were dropped off Moscow had people out looking for us. But we had moved on, going from village to village, town to town, looking for someone, anyone that was still alive. By the time they found us we had seen thousands of bodies. My sister Yuzunia’s boy Nykola had seen them. The little girl who survived the famine had seen them. Torn up by wolves. Pecked and gouged and ripped by ravens. When the thaw came there was a reek like sewers. The flies began to come. And their eggs. We returned to Kyiv. Lovely Kyiv. All summer the west wind brought the stench to our nostrils.”
“Why was nothing done?”
“By the rest of the world? When does the rest of the world ever care about anything that doesn’t affect their money or oil or pride? Some journalists tried to write about it. Muggeridge with The Guardian. He reported what the British Socialists did not want to hear. The blood is on their heads. And Shaw’s. He was given a tour by the Soviet government, a guided tour. For such a smart man, a man of letters, a playwright, he was incredibly stupid and naïve. He thought, or he convinced himself to think, that they showed him everything. Russia is wonderful, he tells the British press, there is no famine in Ukraine. H.G. Wells was no better. The great British writers. The great lovers of Russia. They can rot in hell with Duranty and The New York Times.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Duranty wrote dispatches from Russia saying the famine didn’t exist. The Times won a Pulitzer for printing Duranty’s reports. He admitted later he knew the famine was going on, he knew Stalin had targeted Ukrainians for extermination. He felt as many as ten million had been starved to death or killed outright. But The Times did not retract his stories and they did not return their Pulitzer. He wrote in 1932, they will tell you, he didn’t know anything about the famine. He knew about the famine all right. It had already started in 32. I will not read their paper. I would not pay a dime, not a penny for their yellow journalism. They are the American Pravda.”
“Russia has voted Stalin one of their greatest leaders. He is a very popular man.”
“He is Russian feces. Nothing more. And those Slavs and leftists that worship him are the same.”
I could not sit anymore. I stood up and began to pace among the graves. I went over my own tracks again and again until my boots found the earth and made the snow black.
“The Olympics were in Los Angeles in the summer of 32,” I said. “That was more interesting. And Hitler came to power in 33. The West wanted Russia on their side just in case. The Socialists in America and Britain did not want the Soviet Union to receive bad press. They challenged the reports. They never came to see for themselves.”
The archbishop was watching me. He spoke slowly and carefully. “We hardly hear of it. There are no movies. Few books.”
“We have no film directors. Hardly any writers. The Russian Communists say it never happened. The Canadian, the American, the British Communists all deny it occurred. Just as the Chinese Communists say Tiananmen Square never happened, or the Jew haters say The Holocaust never happened.” I stopped and looked away from him toward the white and grey sky of the east. “Stalin sent gangs, thugs. They ripped open the walls to find the seed my people needed to plant a crop to save themselves from death. They tore up wells to find the seed, smashed furniture, shot men and women they suspected of lying to them. They even shot the people that came to Kyiv and other cities looking for food. Oh, the restaurants had plenty of meat and bread and cabbage. But none for Ukrainians who believed in private ownership of the land. None for Ukrainians who would not join the collectives. None for those who cried for freedom while Britain and Canada and America slapped their hands over their ears. Crops, cattle, seed, everything was taken for the Soviets.”
I shouted, “Stalin!” Then I dropped my voice. “I hope he is boiling in the blood of the murdered. I hope he is screaming. I pray the hands of the dead come out of the blood like claws and tear his eyes out over and over again. No. Better. He should starve and starve and never die, never find food. Just feel the pain in his guts, just feel himself rotting away inside, dying for something to eat, even garbage, even pig droppings, but never finding anything, just starving and crying and pleading, and the pain wrenching out his stomach and liver and kidneys.”
“Brother Nahum.”
“What? I’m not loving my enemies? I must permit their evil, look the other way, never condemn their wickedness? Love is a not a valentine. It is a white hot fire. It does confront, it does resist. Not only for the sake of the victims. But for the sake of the ones doing the evil. We stop them from doing the works that send them to hell. What could be more loving than that?”
The words erupted into the air. I saw the shriveled and starved dead. I saw smoke, flames, burning trucks and tanks, burning men, collars with the hammer and sickle on them, caps with the red star, rings with the swastika engraved in silver, helmets with the skull and crossbones. My words, finally free, swooped over the carnage.
The archbishop did not look away from me. Even with my back to him I knew his eyes were fixed. “It could not have been pleasant for you or your family.”
“It was the axe that cut right through the root of our Communist tree.”
“I am surprised you did not return to Canada.”
“Ian wanted to. My sister, his wife, Yuzunia, she would not have it. They fought like beasts. She became more entrenched in her beliefs in order to fight back. God forgive her, she was just like the Ukrainian Communists we have in Canada. Anything for the Party. Deny the famine. Deny your own blood. The Party was more important than Yuzunia’s own people she came to save.”
The archbishop sat under an apple tree. One apple high up turned on its stem in a cool breeze. Its skin was brown and shrunken. I came back to sit beside him, my head lowered, my mind and stomach empty. I did not feel the cold of the winter.
The archbishop waited a moment as I sat staring at the snow and dirt on my boots. Then he spoke, looking straight ahead. “Do you still think your sister Zoya, who remained in Canada when you traveled to Ukraine – will you tell me prayed in hate, that she made this genocide happen? To spite you? To punish you for leaving her?”
I looked up in surprise. “You and I must have been arguing, your grace.”
“Oh, yes. We were arguing.”
Black letters moved about inside my head and formed words. “She could not do that, your grace. That was not Zoya. She did not have that kind of power. She did not have that kind of hate.”
“I see.” He was quiet for a long time. Then he looked at me. “I only have three days. There is some pressure. I want you to get right to Zoya’s arrival in Ukraine.”
“You will not understand what happened if I do not tell you about Kyiv first. And Vinnytsia. About what happened to myself and Yuzunia.”
“I am not interested in your other sister. I am not much interested in you.”
“Uncle Vasyl. Yuzinia’s husband Ian. Their son Nykola. The little girl. You will not understand Zoya, your grace. The devil’s advocate will pick you apart again.”
“He did not walk away unscathed.”
“You will not understand. And you will have to come back a third time.”
“I promise you I will not be back a third time, Brother Nahum.”
“You must let me tell you everything. I cannot help you if I cannot tell you everything I know.”
“Help me? Are you trying to help me?”
“To get at the truth. Yes.”
“But my truth is not your truth. I want Zoya canonized. You do not.”
“Make whatever interpretation out of it you want. There is only one truth.”
“Really?”
He looked out over the dozens of graves. There was a feeding station nearby and he watched the sparrows and nuthatches a moment. Several white birds I did not recognize, white as the snow around and above us, were at the station as well.
“I used to think there was such amity among the birds at winter feeders, Brother Nahum. Then twice in one season I found the bodies of sparrows killed by other birds’ beaks.”
I hunched my shoulders. The cold was finding its way into me now that my anger had subsided and my words had left.
He stood up. “You are chilled. Walking will warm your blood.”
I kept up with his long strides. Suddenly, without wanting to or even willing it, I smiled.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I keep thinking you are going to break out into Good King Wenceslas. My father used to sing it to me when we walked in the snow and cold together.”
He stopped and looked down at the monastery. The chapel towered over the other buildings with its steeple and bell. We could hear the strings of a cello working their way over the snow and fields to us.
“It looks like a French chateau. Normandy,” he said.
“I have not been.”
“What do you think of the music?”
“It disturbs the daily routine.”
“Old monk. The daily routine. The music is for Lent and Easter, did you know that?”
“No.”
“The recordings will be released at Easter. Odd, isn’t it, playing the music of Easter at Christmas?”
“It makes a point.”
“Does it? It disturbs your spiritual routine, but it makes a point?”
“I did not think I would be fond of the cello.”
“The cello is the brown and black sound of the earth.”
He began walking downhill towards the chapel. The snow was larger suddenly and coming down quickly.
“Your bones will harden in the wind and you will not be able to talk. If I recall correctly, your chapel has a small balcony. Let us sit there and talk quietly. Perhaps the cello will inspire you.”
We came down, black against white. Men and women were moving back and forth between the trailers they slept in and the buildings and there was a dark path of feet. The archbishop blew on his hands.
“Even I am feeling it. I never submitted my report on you to the Vatican, the one in which I castigated you.”
I did not answer. Our boots creaked as we walked.
“I must get Russia right. Every detail must be absolutely right. I know how you feel about all this. I read your reports. But you must go over it all again as if we were looking at history through an electron microscope.”
“What reports?”
“That you wrote for the other abbot. The one who died. Dom Alexander.”
I stopped. He turned his fissured face to me. Snow melted like rain against his skin.
“Dom Alexander would never have given those to you.”
“And he did not. Though I asked for them twice. It was your new Father Abbot. I requested them in October when I heard of Father Alexander’s death. Third time lucky.”
There was great heat in me, in my arms and face and throat. The archbishop nodded and smiled like a fine crack in a stone.
“The monk who is always ready to fight. The killing in Russia was not enough. I know I am going to have to bend and twist you to get everything out. And I will. What happens to your soul is of no concern to me, do you understand? There are millions of lives at stake. I will pull everything out and leave you a husk. I can do that. But I will not return to Rome again devoid of the facts. Every fact, monk. And the interpretation of those facts will be mine to render to the Holy Father.”
“I could write him my own report.”
“Which he would never receive. Do you think he opens his own mail?”
“I look at you and I think, this is a man of God, this is a Prince of the Church, this is a man entrusted with the gospel of Jesus Christ?”
“Yes. Well. I look at you and say, this is a Trappist monk, this is a man close to God, closer, perhaps, than anyone else, except a saint?”
The snow made a tapping sound as it hit his cassock and my robe.
“We have come to fight, haven’t we, Andrii? As Gabriel and Lucifer fight. As Michael and the Prince of Persia fight. Look at your scapular. It is as white as your robe now. Perhaps that means something.”
He resumed walking down the hill. I waited and then I started. I made sure I did not place my feet in his boot prints as I had done when I walked with my father.
“A girl,” he called back to me through the snowfall and silver sky. “There was that girl you mentioned. The one you discovered in the village.”
“Yes,” I grunted, head down.
“She lived? Zoya knew her? They talked?”
“Yes.”
We decided she must have been nine or ten when we found her that spring. So a year later we celebrated her birthday, which we placed at the 11th of May, and named her Zhanna Yeva. She could not remember what her parents had called her. The Soviet officials typed the names on a form and stated that she was 11 years old, a citizen of the USSR. There was a cake. And a dance. We insisted on Ukrainian dancers. The Soviets in Kyiv grumbled. Moscow did not like to encourage anything that smacked of Ukrainian heritage or nationalism.
You must understand that it was forbidden to speak in Ukrainian or have books or newspapers in the Ukrainian language. At home we would use Ukrainian, and I always kept some novels and stories and poems in a closet. Most of the time, however, we were forced to read and speak Russian. But we westerners who had come to help the Revolution were something of celebrities and they relented in the case of Zhanna’s party. The dancers leaped and whirled and the young girls tied bright blue and yellow ribbons in Zhanna’s hair. It had grown back thick and dark and the colours shimmered against it.
“The sky and the sun, uncle,” she said to me, spinning so the ribbons swirled.
“Just like you,” I said.
Kyiv was good for her. She put on weight, grew tall, her dark brown hair became as glossy as a racehorse’s mane. The Russians called her chornee krasataa, black beauty. Kyiv was good for all of us. But that summer of 33 the smell from the villages and farms had put my sister Yuzy and her husband Ian at each other’s throats from daybreak to dusk. Both doctors, they would return from their shifts at a hospital in Kyiv and start in on one another.
“Stalin’s stink,” he would growl into his vodka. “Shut the windows, Nykola.”
“It is not Stalin!” Yuzunia would shout. “It is not Stalin! The Ukrainian Communists did it! They did it without his orders! That is why they have been shot!”
“They were shot because they let us see it. And Stalin certainly gave the orders for that.”
“It was only a few villages. You know that. Only a few.”
“That is why we have to close the windows in the heat of summer so we sweat like pigs? That is why the rot is in our noses day after day, week after week?”
“Stalin has been good to us. How can you forget what he has done, what The Party has done? Look at the apartment. Look at the food. The jobs and money. He has done nothing to harm us.”
“Not yet. When it suits him he will decorate the steppes with our skulls and shinbones, just like he’s done with your people.”
“Stop talking! Stop talking like that in front of the children! Everything you say is nonsense. You drink too much. You have lost your mind.”
“My mind is all I have left. It is the one thing the Communists will never have again.”
“Why did you come here with us? Lenin forgive me, I married a fool.”
In 34 the smell was gone, the July air only held hay and wheat and barley. The crops were good. We never forgot, of course, but each year the whole thing sank a bit further out of sight. We had no idea at the time that the deaths were in the millions. Officials convinced Yuzunia that it was only a village here or there that had suffered. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had died. No more. Of course, she wanted to believe that. So did I and Uncle Vasyl. Ian never believed any of the Party line.
For many months, at the beginning, Nykola had a hard time, right through the winter, and this made Ian argue even more furiously that we should leave. There were terrible nights. Vasyl and I had the apartment next to theirs. We heard Nykola’s shrieks and Yuzunia’s voice trying to calm him down. Week after week. Wetting his bed. Unable to eat. Missing school.
“What will we do, Andrii?” Yuzy asked me one morning. She had not slept for two nights and her eyes were swollen, the skin under them black. She kept pulling her hair back and knotting it, then yanking out the knot and starting again.
“I don’t know.”
“Zoya would pray.”
“Yes.”
“I do not pray. I cannot pray. To thin air. To my imagination. Or suppose God is real? A monster who gives us a world of poverty, injustice and death.”
“Zhanna helps Nykola, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, yes. She strokes his hair like a sister. She reads him the poetry she has written. Oh, Andrii, I thought we had spared him the worst. He did not see all the bodies. Only a few. We couldn’t help it. How could we know?”
Nykola had seen more than a few bodies. Along one roadway we had been surprised by a fence of logs. We thought it meant the field belonged to a farmer who was unusually prosperous. But when we came up to the fence we discovered the logs were the emaciated bodies of women and children and men. Stacked five or six deep. Their mouths were full of worms.
“Perhaps a trip back to Canada might help,” I suggested. “If they would let us.”
Yuzy’s eyes flamed. “If they would let us? Of course they would let us. This is a free country. This is the cradle of a new civilization. But we are not gypsies. I brought my family to Russia to make a difference. We are not going to run back to the Capitalists just because we had a bad week.”
So nothing was done. Yuzunia hoped that, over time, the nightmares would disappear and the memories fade like ink. Nykola joined the Young Communists with Zhanna Yeva, they marched and learned the songs and were taught how to handle a rifle. I lectured at a college, Yuzy and Ian practiced medicine, Uncle Vasyl swept the streets and kept the lawns of Party officials green and the grounds of Soviet government buildings pristine.
“I came to the Soviet Union to make the world beautiful,” he grunted to me one evening when we were alone together, carving away at a large kolbassa and drinking warm beer. Our eyes met and he smiled slowly and shrugged.
I suppose it was Zhanna Yeva who brought about the greatest changes in Nykola, more than time, more than sweet air, more than the red Communist scarf at his throat. They held hands, were always going on walks along Kreshchatyk Street or spending hours at places on the west bank of the Dneiper, throwing stones in the river, reading each other their own stories, yes, Nykola was writing some small things then, Zhanna read her poems to him. When we were there Kreshchatyk was named after a Communist diplomat who had been murdered in Switzerland, so it was Vaclav Vorovsky Street. All the old buildings were almost perfect, they were being repaired from the damage caused by the civil war and the fighting after the Revolution – the Germans had occupied Kyiv, the Ukrainians, the Poles, then finally the Bolsheviks, back and forth, in and out. They ripped up the tramlines in 35, 36 and put in trolleybuses. A mess but the street retained its charm, certainly for the pair of them, they were what, 14 and 16, Zhanna Yeva the youngest, but to us she seemed the older of the two.
“Brother Nahum. I do not want every dot and tittle of your family’s life. I know Zoya did not come to Ukraine until 1939. Could we please move ahead to that date?”
We were sitting in the balcony of the chapel looking down upon a female cellist with hair that glowed like a blast furnace. They asked us not to talk when actual recording was going on, but that had not yet occurred. The room was warmer than usual and our clothing was drying rapidly from the snow. I listened to the cello line and nodded.
“You want me to hurry. Time is short. But the story is not short. If you want to understand 1939 you will have to hear me out on 1936 and 37 and 38.”
He made a sound that was something between an exasperated sigh and a moan of pain. “Surely Zoya wrote you letters.”
“The first letters we received from her arrived in 36. They are part of my story, I assure you. But don’t you have them in your briefcase? Isn’t Vasari holding on to them for some dramatic entrance when you give him the signal?”
The archbishop looked down at his palm. He slipped a smile onto his face and then removed it. “I tried to find them. I expect they were lost in the war.”
“Yes. Lost in the war. Like the rest of us.”
The cellist dug her bow against the strings. The rhythm was staggered, the melody as dark as a cave, the sound strong as rock. The archbishop listened and then lifted one of his hands.
“Please proceed. I don’t care what years you talk about so long as you bring Zoya into your tales by Christmas morning.”
“Do you intend to sit up with me all night, your grace?”
“If that is what it takes. Though I have not stayed up for an entire Christmas Eve since I was eight and wanted a train set. I did not get the train set. I am worried that I might stay up all night listening to you and not get Zoya either.”
I waited as the cellist worked her way up and into a crescendo. When her notes began to fall to earth again I said, “Perhaps this Christmas you will not be disappointed.”
There was a runner. Always going down Kreshchatyk Street, Vaclav Vorovsky Street, training for the Olympic marathon. I first noticed him in 35, dodging around the workmen heaving the tram tracks up with huge iron bars. He was certain Moscow would send him to Berlin. Of course, Moscow did not send anyone to Berlin in 36. But he had convinced himself that Stalin would send a team – runners, hurdlers, swimmers, rowers. So he ran. His name was Sasha. He was good, I thought, fast, steady, never missing a step, never losing that quality of rhythm that is so important to a distance runner.
A number of times he stopped by our apartment block and asked for water from Uncle Vasyl during the summer of 35. Vasyl would be hosing the grass or flowerbeds. Sasha always seemed to get his timing right with Uncle Vasyl. How did he do that? Vasyl had many lawns and flowerbeds to take care of. But Sasha knew when to come down our street, knew when Vasyl would be there, as if Vasyl were some kind of clock an athlete could set his pace by. Of course they talked a bit, then Sasha would continue running again.
The Berlin Olympics opened on August 1st the next summer. Up until the last day Sasha was optimistic that Party officials would ask him to join a group of Olympians representing the best the USSR had to offer. Once he knew the games had opened he realized Moscow had no intention of honouring the fascist Olympics with their presence. I recall standing with Vasyl when Sasha came running up that afternoon.
“Well, they are not sending me,” he told us as he slurped water from the hose.
“They are not sending anybody, comrade,” Vasyl responded.
“We could have kicked their Nazi cans. Why can’t Stalin see that? Is he blind?”
“Be careful what you say,” Vasyl hissed. “Everyone listens to everything.”
“We would have crushed them.”
“In 1940,” Vasyl tried to calm him, “you will be just as fast, probably faster.”
“In 1940? Do we know where the games will be held in 1940?”
“They have already voted on it. In Tokyo, in Japan. Moscow will certainly send a team there and no doubt you will be on it. Keep training.”
“But we had a war with Japan once, didn’t we? So Stalin will use that as an excuse not to send us there either.”
“That was many years ago,” I said, “and there was no Soviet Union then, it was the time of the czars, 1904, 5. Stalin will want the Soviet Union to show the world its strength by 1940, show everyone the superiority of Soviet athletes. Keep running. You will do well in 1940.”
He smiled, he had two gold teeth, then he put the hose back in Vasyl’s hands and began to run again. All that summer he kept it up, right through the duration of the games in Berlin and on into September. It seemed to me he ran even harder now, and faster, and I would see him running in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. I did not even know how he was employed. When it snowed, he ran, and when the cold took us by the throat, he ran. Then in November two things happened.
First, Sasha came up to Vasyl while he was shoveling snow on our street and asked for a glass of hot tea. So Vasyl brought him up to our apartment and heated water in the samovar. I was not at home, Vasyl told me what happened. Sasha put a great deal of sugar in his tea and sipped it slowly. Then he asked Vasyl if he knew about Stalin’s purges. Vasyl shrugged and said nothing.
Of course, we knew that Stalin had been executing Party officials all over the USSR, but especially in Ukraine, for several years. Vasyl had cleaned up the blood from back street shootings on more than one occasion, Nykola and Zhanna Yeva had seen bodies floating in the Dnieper, everyone talked about it in whispers, many feared they would be shot on a whim from Moscow. To tell you the truth, we thought the fears were exaggerated, and we did not believe they would do anything to harm us because we were revolutionaries from Canada.
“Do not pretend,” Sasha said between drinks from his glass. “You think you are safe because you are from North America. But you have misjudged Stalin’s paranoia. American Communists have been shot and sent to the camps in the north. You know the Gulag? Hundreds of Americans have been sent there. Most of them are already dead. Did you think Father Joseph would forget his Canadians, forget they also could be subversives sent from Capitalist countries to undermine his leadership?”
Vasyl told me he could not keep the shock or fear from his face. He expected that after having told him all this, Sasha would now go to the window and give a signal to someone on the street below and the NKVD, the state police, would break down our door. Sasha saw Vasyl’s eyes and the tightening of the skin over his cheekbones and shook his head.
“No, my friend, I am not here on an errand of murder for the NKVD, God curse them. I have come to warn you and to give you this package.” He handed Vasyl a thick brown envelope. “Everything is correct. Trust me. Get your family on the train and get them out of Kyiv. I have arranged for you to assist in the revitalization of Ukraine. Thousands of people, millions, are being sent to set up collectives on the land owned by those the famine destroyed. The two doctors, Ian and Yuzunia, will be, of course, invaluable. So will the one who teaches at the college, Andrii. The children will be asked to organize Communist Youth brigades. It is all in there. It is official, there is no forgery. We in the government know who you are and where you are going. Get out tomorrow. Take what you can and do not linger here. Any day a directive could come from Moscow and tell us to purge the Canadians in Kyiv. You are going to Vinnytsia. Do your best. Remain loyal to Stalin. Promote Communism. But try not to be so zealous you wind up in glowing reports sent to the Kremlin. Father Joseph will remember you then, and if he remembers you too often, one day you will be dead.”
Vasyl told me Sasha put down the empty glass of tea. There was sugar in the bottom. Then he went to the door and looked back at Vasyl. “Thank you for telling me to run. Perhaps one day I will run for a free country.” Then he quoted Pushkin: “One day Russia will wake up from its sleep and on the ruins of tyranny our names will be inscribed.” Vasyl watched from the apartment window as Sasha raced through the falling snow and into the dark. No one came to the door although Vasyl waited for the pounding of fists and rifle stocks.
************ ************ ************ ************
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Highway to God
The last couple of new books I shared with you included the sequel to the novel Zo and a love story about the early years of flying (1917-1919). Now I'm working my way through another manuscript and have just about hit 40,000 words so it's time to share.
When books and book ideas are taken by your agent to various publishing houses what is called the "proposal package" is the first thing that is put into an editor's hands. It includes marketing ideas, a chapter by chapter outline of the book, a summary of the whole story, a list of the main characters, etc., etc. It also includes the initial three chapters and basically if those three chapters don't cut it with an editor, there's no contract, no sale, and no published book.
So let's have some fun. Let's pretend you - any of you who are reading this blog - are the editors at various publishing firms. We'll let you read three chapters of the new book and then you can decide if you want to read the whole manuscript with a possible view to a contract.
However, I won't give you all three chapters at once like in the real world (after all, this is a blog). I'll let you have them one week apart. Starting with chapter 1 tonight, March 2nd.
I never use a book's actual title prior to publication. Lots of titles change between submission and publication. I make one up for blogging purposes. (The actual title the sequel to Zo is being published under this month, for example, is The White Birds of Morning, which none of you ever knew before and which I only knew a few weeks ago.)
So for this story-in-progress let's call it Highway to God or just highway. You'll see why it's a decent blogging title once you read the chapters through (hey, you might even get it after a few pages of the first chapter).
The story's something different. You'll see what I mean. I hope there's something in the first chapter for you. Who knows? God knows.
Highway to God
Chapter 1
“Michal.”
“Mmm.”
“Michal!”
“What?”
“Wake up. Come on. Wake up. It’s my birthday.”
Michal opened her blue eyes and stared at her younger sister. “It’s still dark out, Mischief. I can hardly see your face.”
She watched the slender body in the white nightgown flit to the window that faced east.
“No, I can just see some silver,” Mischief said. “The sun’s coming up.”
Michal propped herself on an elbow. “The only silver I see is from the stars. They’re still out.”
“Not much longer.” Mischief ran back and jumped on Michal’s bed. “I’m 16 finally – holy, sweet 16, can you believe it?”
Michal smiled. “It is rather hard to believe. Considering you act as if you’re nine or ten.” She reached out a hand. “Come here.” She kissed her sister on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Mischief.”
“Brush out my hair?” She gave Michal a brush and untwisted her long braid while she sat facing the window and the dawn. “I was outside already, you know.”
Michal sat up and began to run her hand over the young woman’s hair, looking for knots and tangles. “Really? Doing what?”
“Oh, you know, talking to Sprinkles, hunting down Kitkat. Old Brownie guarded me the whole time, don’t worry.” Sprinkles was a horse born the same year as Mischief, Kitkat a cat almost as old as the horse, Old Brownie a dark brown bloodhound that doted on everyone in the family and who was at least ten.
“I’m not worried. We live in Marietta, Pennsylvania, not Pittsburgh.”
“I used the door, you know.”
“Ah, and papa said you could?”
“Sure. He gave me the talk last week.”
“The Rumspringa talk?”
“Ja.”
Their ground floor bedroom had two doors. One led directly outside. Another opened into the hallway and kitchen and the rest of the house. Mischief had not been permitted to use the outside door until she was of age. To use it would have been considered “sneaking around” and trying to “get away with something.” She would have been punished. But now she was 16 and she could use the outside door without any fear of discipline. Michal had been going in and out of it for more than two years.
“So tell me about the Rumspringa talk,” prodded Michal as she began to use the brush on her sister’s long dark hair.
“Why? You’ve had it.”
“I want to know if anything’s changed in two years.”
“I don’t think so. Papa said I can do whatever I like. Even leave Marietta if I want. When I am ready to be baptized and truly become Amish then it all changes. Then I am making the big commitment to God and to the people. Mama and papa hope I will do that, he said. But first I must “get everything out of my system” and be sure that when I take my baptism vows I really mean them.”
“Your hair seems thicker and darker every week. It shines like a raven’s wing.”
“Oh, you used to say crow’s wing.”
“Not since you were twelve. Have you been using egg on it or something?”
“So what if I have? Nick says it’s like black gold.”
Michal stopped brushing until Mischief turned her face toward her. “Really? Nick said that?” Michal asked.
Mischief narrowed her eyes. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
“I did not think St. Nick had poetry in him. Just carburetors and camshafts.”
Mischief tossed her hair. “Men who ride bikes are winged warriors, he told me. So why shouldn’t he have a poem or two in him?”
Michal put a hand over her mouth so that she would not laugh out loud. Mischief glared at her. “What is it?”
“Come on. Winged warriors? Did he read that in one of those motorcycle magazines that is always rolled up in his back pocket? American Rider or Hot Bike?”
Mischief tossed her hair again so that a great part of it hit Michal in the face. “What would you know about it?”
“Sometimes I see Milwaukee with one.”
“Milwaukee?” Now it was Mischief’s turn to suppress a laugh. “What would he know about bikes?”
“Why, you know he has one of his own.”
“He has some scooter made in China. Get real, Michal.”
Michal frowned. “Get real? He has a motorbike, Mischief, a Honda Rebel, and it is not made in China.”
“Oh, 250cc, excuse me, look out, Thunder Road. Nick’s Harley is a 1979 1000cc Ironhead.”
Michal gave Mischief’s hair a hard yank with the brush.
“Ow!”
“You have been spending too much time among the English,” Michal growled.
“So what? It’s Rumspringa now. I can see Nick as much as I want. Papa said it is all right for me to date now.”
“Yes. I’m sure he had Nick in his mind when he told you that.”
“Oh, I apologize, it has to be a good Amish boy.” She turned around and grabbed the brush from Michal. Then she gave her a sharp smile. “Not for me. Not when it’s finally Rumspringa.”
Mischief bounced off the bed and went to the window. It was full of golden light. “Here it comes. I am truly of age now.”
“Maybe not. Didn’t mother say last week you came out at seven in the evening?”
Mischief laughed. “No one counts their birthdays that way. I’m official.” She continued to look through the glass and began to hum, “You’re all ribbons and curls, oooh, what a girl, eyes that sparkle and shine, you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful, and you’re mine.” Then she turned back to face her older sister, the sharp smile still on her lips. “You have been Rumspringa for two years now. What about you? Are you satisfied with life among the plain people? Do you want to be Amish forever?”
Michal nodded. “Yes, I think so, yes.”
“Then why haven’t you taken your baptism vows?”
Michal hesitated. “Well – I’m not ready yet.”
“Why not? You’re 18, almost 19, why haven’t you made up your mind? Why won’t you make the commitment?”
“I’m still praying about it.”
“Oh, praying.” Mischief began to brush her hair herself. “You and Milwaukee are always praying, aren’t you? And not getting anywhere with each other or your Amish vows.”
“Milwaukee and I are only friends, good friends.”
“Really? And you’ve never kissed this good friend?”
“Not Milwaukee, no.”
“But you’ve kissed Silas Stoltzfus. I caught you, remember?”
Michal flipped her hand in the air. “Don’t bring that up. I was younger than you are now. It was just my foolish period.”
Mischief widened her eyes. “Your foolish period? What about David and Samuel and Elijah? They were all last year. And Saul Miller was only, what, four months ago?”
“So I’ve been foolish a long time. That’s why I’m not ready for baptism.”
“You kiss them all, but you won’t kiss Milwaukee? That sounds to me like you are serious about him.”
“I am not.”
Mischief came and knelt on Michal’s bed. “Do you drink?”
“Not so much.”
“Smoke?”
“Not so much.”
“But you’ve gone to parties in Lancaster City and Philadelphia.”
Michal shook her head. “Really that stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
“What does matter?”
“Oh – family, God, our church – you.”
“You mean now that you’ve finished sowing your wild oats it matters.”
“What wild oats?”
Mischief got up and paced the room, running her hands back through her thick, shining hair that was gleaming like dark water in the sunlight filling the room. “In and out through the door, two in the morning, three in the morning. Milwaukee’s scooter putt-putting away. Or Saul’s truck. All of you sowing your wild oats. Did you think I really was asleep all those times? Eyes closed? Head on the pillow?” She grinned. “It’s my turn now.”
Michal sighed. “You make such a big thing out of it. I hardly did anything. The boys hardly did anything.”
“Yes, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? That’s why you’re not ready for baptism yet – you still haven’t gotten it out of your system. Well, I’m getting it out of mine. Then there’ll be lots of room for God and baking bread in an oven heated by wood and doing laundry with a scrub board. Yes, maybe I will want to be plain again, who knows? But, right now, I’ve been plain long enough.”
She came and stood over Michal with her hands on her hips. “Speaking of God, why didn’t you go anywhere?”
Michal frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s more to life than Shoofly pie and Lancaster County and William Penn Pennyslvania. Didn’t God make a big, beautiful world? That’s what the preachers always tell us, ja? But how many of them go out there to see it?”
“Mischief, Pennsylvania is beautiful, Marietta is beautiful, all the rolling green hills and the Susquehanna River – ”
“Sure, sure, but what about Montana? What about Seattle? What about California and San Francisco and Los Angeles? Haven’t you ever wanted to see those places? Look.”
She got on her knees and tugged a wooden box out from under her bed. Opening the lid she brought out dozens of postcards bright with photographic images. She began to hand them up to Michal one at a time.
“The Grand Canyon – isn’t that so amazing? And Carlsbad Caverns. And Glacier National Park. Here’s the Painted Desert. And an arroyo carved out by water in Arizona – doesn’t that look like something from the Bible?”
“You should not have photographs.”
“Why not? We’re both in Rumspringa, aren’t we? Do you see me bowing down and worshipping them? What do you think of this?”
She placed a photograph of a pure white beach in Michal’s hands. The water that lapped against the sand was a shimmering turquoise as clear as freshly washed glass.
“What do you think?” she asked again.
“It’s very pleasant,” replied Michal.
Mischief snorted. “Is that all you can say? Thank our God, sister. It’s a miracle, a blessing. Don’t you want to reach out and just touch the sand? Think how nice it would be to skinny dip in water like emeralds.”
“Mischief!”
“Oh, sister, no men around of course.” Her sharp smile returned for a moment, then quickly was replaced by a look of sheer innocence that Michal could see was not contrived. “I like the boys and I like the attention they give me. I like Nick’s Ironhead. But do you know what I really want to do? I would trade all the parties and bottles of beer and cigarettes and kisses for an open road and an open sky – I want to see God’s world, I want to see mountains and oceans and the huge redwoods. I want to have a palm tree fan me while tropical air blows overhead as soft as silk.” Suddenly she stopped and looked worried. “What time is it?”
They both glanced at the windup clock on the small table that stood between their beds. It was five after six.
“Quickly, get dressed,” said Mischief, swinging her arms at Michal as if she were shooing cattle. “Let’s get outside as soon as we can.”
Michal climbed out of bed. “What’s the big hurry?”
“I don’t want to waste a minute.”
As Michal tied her hair back in a bun and put on a long blue dress with a black apron Mischief pulled on a pair of tight faded jeans and a short tee shirt she took from a corner of the closet. She left her hair loose. Then she dabbed perfume on her wrists and throat. When Michal turned from placing her prayer covering on her head Mischief was fastening her final earring. A black belt with silver studs was around her waist and a jean jacket draped over her shoulders. She used a black leather bag for her purse.
Michal could not keep the shock from her face. “What are you doing?”
“I’m 16, dear sister, and this is my Rumspringa. I’ve seen you in jeans and tees plenty of times.”
“But not right here, right in the house, mother and father and your little brothers – ”
“They won’t see a thing. I don’t have time to change in the restroom at Roy’s gas station like you always do.”
“What do you mean mother won’t see you? Soon she’ll be looking for us and asking for our help with breakfast.”
“Come. Come outside.”
They used the special door and stepped into grass soaked in a thick, silvery May dew. Michal wore her sturdy black Amish shoes while Mischief had put on a pair of Nike runners. Immediately Old Brownie spotted them and came trotting over, his tail wagging. Both sisters rubbed his long ears and spoke sweetly into the big, dark, sad eyes. Faintly there was the roar of a jet and Mischief straightened and looked up into the blue sky. White contrails had appeared far overhead like perfectly straight painted lines.
“You see?” she smiled. “From Philadelphia to where? Denver? Mexico? Hawaii? Japan? I want to fly, Michal.”
“The Amish can fly.”
“I don’t mean as a passenger. I want to hold the wheel. I want to steer the plane.” She glanced at her sister. “You know the English girls can drive at my age. As soon as they are 16 they can drive their own car.”
“I know that.”
“Imagine. The freedom. The highway in front of you like a magic carpet. I could go anywhere. With a plane and a car I could go to Paris or London or Madrid. I could go all the way to Australia and see kangaroos and crocs.” She took her sister’s hand. “Don’t you want to do exciting things like that? Don’t you want to see God’s big world? You can’t tell me you don’t feel bottled up here like some sort of museum exhibit from the 19th century for tourists to come and gape at.”
“Really, I feel fine,” Michal protested.
“Then take your baptism vows and stay put. What’s stopping you from becoming a fully committed Amish woman and remaining here until they plant you in the ground permanently like a crop of tobacco? Wear your prayer covering and be a draw for the tourist dollars, sister – do you know how much Pennsylvania made on the quaint Amish people last year from people driving by and flying in to photograph us? Eat our pies? Buy our handmade wooden furniture and our hand stitched quilts? Nick told me. You’d be surprised.”
“I honestly don’t care.”
“The Amish are big business. It wouldn’t pay to have us up and fade away. They need good strong Amish women to stick around and make sure there’s plenty of babies.”
Michal could feel herself losing her temper. “The Amish are not fading away. Our numbers are growing here in Pennsylvania and in Ohio and Indiana. Now there are even Amish communities in Missouri and Minnesota and Iowa. And not just from large families. There are more converts now.”
“Good. They can take my place. Then I won’t have to feel guilty if the Amish cease to exist because I hit the open road.” She put her hands in her pockets. “Face it. You’re no more content here than I am.”
“I am happy enough. We have a wonderful family.”
Mischief nodded. “Yes, we do, a wonderful family. But it’s not enough, is it?”
Michal felt the heat in her face. “Of course it’s enough. More than enough.”
“Then make it stick. Spring Communion is in a few weeks, isn’t it? Say you want to be Amish till you die. You and Milwaukee both. Get the baptism. Then you can have an Amish wedding and people will give you grandfather clocks and butter churns for gifts.”
Michal felt as if a rock had formed inside her and was sinking down, taking whatever good spirits she had woken to into a dark murk with it. Mischief saw the look on her face and regretted she had said so much. She put her arms around Michal’s neck. They were the same height with the same shining black hair and the same striking blue eyes.
“Look at us. God had given us this rare match of blue eyes and black hair. How can any man resist us? Nick says he gets completely lost in my eyes. They are so blue he forgets any sense of direction and loses his way.”
“He said that?” A small smile played over Michal’s lips.
“Close enough. I’m only adding a bit.”
“Your winged warrior.”
“Yes. More than you know.” Then, arms still around her sister, she said in a low voice as if the whole Amish community was listening in, “Come with me.”
Michal made a face. “Come with you where?”
“Everywhere else. The world outside Marietta and the Amish faith. The highway. The back roads. America. Come explore America with me. Find another God with me, a bigger God than the Amish God.”
“From the back of a Harley?”
“Or the front. Girls can drive Harleys too.”
“What about Nick?”
“Oh.” She laughed quietly. “Nick is a condiment. There are spicier things to season life with. Like a Michal. Come with me and I’ll ditch Nick and we can be the Rolling Thunder Sisterhood.”
Michal was genuinely surprised. “Ditch your winged warrior? I thought you loved him.”
Mischief grinned. “Love? Love? When did I ever say anything about love?” Then she grew serious and whispered, “You and I have been together 16 years today, everywhere together. I know all your thoughts and feelings and you know mine. You are not happy here, Michal. You are not sure becoming Amish is the right step. So come with me. You and I have never been apart. Come with me and we will discover what it is we want together. Maybe it’s this place and this life. But maybe it’s not.” She hugged Michal. “You will never be content to take your vows until you leave and truly make your own decision to return. You must have figured that out by now. You have to get out. Like Peter and James had to walk away from their fishing nets, yes? Or Paul had to leave his home in Tarsus. Or Jesus himself had to leave Nazareth.” She kissed Michal on the cheek. “Or Ruth had to leave her country and all she was familiar with and follow Naomi. You are restless, sister. You have to get away if you ever want to put down roots here someday. Get away and find out what you want and what God wants. Let me be your Naomi. And you can follow me and be my Ruth.”
Michal felt a surge in her heart and her eyes gleamed briefly. “Who will be our Boaz?”
Mischief smiled and hugged her sister again. “Boaz will have to find us. God will have to send him and he will have to find us wherever we are.”
There was a rumble from the road that ran past their house and it grew louder and louder. Mischief gave her sister a final kiss. “Hey, think about it. Gotta go.”
Nick thundered into the yard on his black and silver Harley Ironhead. He had a long braid of dark red hair, a red beard he kept trimmed to his jawline, and an earring. He wore dark brown leather pants and biker chaps and skullcap. Mischief’s father, a tall and lean man, stepped out of the barn. She spotted him.
“Papa!” She ran over and threw her arms around him.
“What is this?” he asked quietly.
“Nick is taking me into Philly for my birthday.”
“But – your mother has a cake for you – we have gifts – ”
Mischief bit her lower lip. “I know. I’m sorry. We can do that tomorrow. Nick and I have been planning this trip for weeks. He got time off from the garage.”
Her father nodded and could not keep himself from smiling. “So this is my girl who jumps into rivers and onto the back of the stallion we keep in stud, hey? Feet first into her Rumspringa.”
“That’s her.” She grinned. “I love you, papa. Have a good, good day, please.” She kissed him on the cheek.
“Sure, sure, I will think back on my own Rumspringa when I got sick smoking a cigar. Leave those alone, hey?”
“I will.”
“Here is your mother.”
A tall woman with broad shoulders stood on the porch. Mischief gave her father a final tight squeeze with her arms and ran across the yard and up the steps to the porch.
“Ma!” Again the strong hug. Mischief was two inches taller.
“Can’t you at least stay and have breakfast with us?” her mother complained, hugging her daughter back. “It is your birthday, my little one.”
“I’m sorry, ma, we have to get into Philadelphia and it’s the only day Nick could get off this week. I’ll be back tonight. We can have the cake tomorrow. But you can give the boys a piece each from me today, okay?”
Mischief could see her mother wanted to be cross. But she could not resist her youngest daughter’s energy and enthusiasm, something Mischief had always possessed and which the mother had never been able to scold her for. “All right. Get into your Rumspringa and get it over with. Just don’t spend as much time there as your sister.”
“I won’t.” She gave her mother the sharp smile. “Papa said he got sick from cigars.”
The mother laughed and kissed Mischief on the top of her head. “Ja, among other things.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I got sick on plum Schnaps and pizza. Really, I was crazy. But never as crazy as you. Your father is the only man who has ever seen me with my hair down and for that he had to wait until our wedding night.”
Mischief smiled at the tone of disapproval that had crept into her mother’s voice. “Yes, I know, ma, a woman’s crowning glory is her hair. Well, mine is still my crowning glory whether all the men in the world see it or not.”
“Okay, you go, that Nick will scare the horses and wake the boys.”
“Oh, the boys are already up.” She stepped back from her mother and waved energetically at two faces pressed against a window on the second floor. They smiled and waved back.
“Have some of my birthday cake!” she shouted up at them. “Tell me tomorrow if it’s any good!”
“Hush, my girl,” laughed her mother. “The neighbors will think there’s a fire. Oh, one minute you are almost 30 and the next not yet 12, isn’t it so?”
“I guess.”
Her mother ran a hand down her daughter’s cheek. “In all this do not forget your family loves you and is here for you, all right? And do not forget the love of God. Or the grace of Christ.”
“I won’t. Thanks, ma. See you.” A final hug and kiss and she was down the steps to Nick and the Ironhead. He got a hug too. Smiling, he handed her a brown jacket like his that he’d pulled from a saddlebag. She put it on and zipped it up. Then he handed her a helmet. He himself did not wear one. Slipping it over her head she got on behind him.
Michal walked up to them. “Take care, Nick,” she said.
He gave Michal a thumbs up. “Sure I will. Don’t worry about your baby sister. This is her first grownup day.”
“Oh, yes?” Michal raised a hand in a wave. “Go easy, Mischief. Okay?”
Mischief lifted the visor of her silver helmet and her blue eyes gleamed like sky. “No worries, big sister. I will avoid Schnaps and cigars for sure. See you tonight. Or tomorrow. Whichever comes first.” Then she grew serious and her eyes darkened like evening. “Remember what we talked about. Think it over, okay?”
“Yes, I will. And I shall pray about it too.”
“Sure, pray about it. Get God involved. Why not?” Then the blue lightened again as if the sun had come out in her eyes. “I’m 16. You can’t call me Mischief anymore, you know. I’m a woman now. Next time we see each other you have to use my Christian name.”
“Even if you still are a handful?’
“Even if. Bye.”
“We good to go?” Nick asked her.
“Yeah.” She dropped her visor.
Nick walked the bike forward and then throttled up. The Harley’s roar shook the air. The Ironhead rumbled down the lane to the main road. Mischief waved her hand a final time then wrapped her arms around Nick and leaned her head against him. Her sister and parents waved in response. On the back of their jackets Michal could see an eagle with spread wings and the words LIVE TO RIDE, RIDE TO LIVE. Then the Harley was on the asphalt and speeding east into the sun, the engine changing pitch as Nick switched gears.
“Christ go with you, Tabitha Troyer,” Michal whispered.
When books and book ideas are taken by your agent to various publishing houses what is called the "proposal package" is the first thing that is put into an editor's hands. It includes marketing ideas, a chapter by chapter outline of the book, a summary of the whole story, a list of the main characters, etc., etc. It also includes the initial three chapters and basically if those three chapters don't cut it with an editor, there's no contract, no sale, and no published book.
So let's have some fun. Let's pretend you - any of you who are reading this blog - are the editors at various publishing firms. We'll let you read three chapters of the new book and then you can decide if you want to read the whole manuscript with a possible view to a contract.
However, I won't give you all three chapters at once like in the real world (after all, this is a blog). I'll let you have them one week apart. Starting with chapter 1 tonight, March 2nd.
I never use a book's actual title prior to publication. Lots of titles change between submission and publication. I make one up for blogging purposes. (The actual title the sequel to Zo is being published under this month, for example, is The White Birds of Morning, which none of you ever knew before and which I only knew a few weeks ago.)
So for this story-in-progress let's call it Highway to God or just highway. You'll see why it's a decent blogging title once you read the chapters through (hey, you might even get it after a few pages of the first chapter).
The story's something different. You'll see what I mean. I hope there's something in the first chapter for you. Who knows? God knows.
Highway to God
Chapter 1
“Michal.”
“Mmm.”
“Michal!”
“What?”
“Wake up. Come on. Wake up. It’s my birthday.”
Michal opened her blue eyes and stared at her younger sister. “It’s still dark out, Mischief. I can hardly see your face.”
She watched the slender body in the white nightgown flit to the window that faced east.
“No, I can just see some silver,” Mischief said. “The sun’s coming up.”
Michal propped herself on an elbow. “The only silver I see is from the stars. They’re still out.”
“Not much longer.” Mischief ran back and jumped on Michal’s bed. “I’m 16 finally – holy, sweet 16, can you believe it?”
Michal smiled. “It is rather hard to believe. Considering you act as if you’re nine or ten.” She reached out a hand. “Come here.” She kissed her sister on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Mischief.”
“Brush out my hair?” She gave Michal a brush and untwisted her long braid while she sat facing the window and the dawn. “I was outside already, you know.”
Michal sat up and began to run her hand over the young woman’s hair, looking for knots and tangles. “Really? Doing what?”
“Oh, you know, talking to Sprinkles, hunting down Kitkat. Old Brownie guarded me the whole time, don’t worry.” Sprinkles was a horse born the same year as Mischief, Kitkat a cat almost as old as the horse, Old Brownie a dark brown bloodhound that doted on everyone in the family and who was at least ten.
“I’m not worried. We live in Marietta, Pennsylvania, not Pittsburgh.”
“I used the door, you know.”
“Ah, and papa said you could?”
“Sure. He gave me the talk last week.”
“The Rumspringa talk?”
“Ja.”
Their ground floor bedroom had two doors. One led directly outside. Another opened into the hallway and kitchen and the rest of the house. Mischief had not been permitted to use the outside door until she was of age. To use it would have been considered “sneaking around” and trying to “get away with something.” She would have been punished. But now she was 16 and she could use the outside door without any fear of discipline. Michal had been going in and out of it for more than two years.
“So tell me about the Rumspringa talk,” prodded Michal as she began to use the brush on her sister’s long dark hair.
“Why? You’ve had it.”
“I want to know if anything’s changed in two years.”
“I don’t think so. Papa said I can do whatever I like. Even leave Marietta if I want. When I am ready to be baptized and truly become Amish then it all changes. Then I am making the big commitment to God and to the people. Mama and papa hope I will do that, he said. But first I must “get everything out of my system” and be sure that when I take my baptism vows I really mean them.”
“Your hair seems thicker and darker every week. It shines like a raven’s wing.”
“Oh, you used to say crow’s wing.”
“Not since you were twelve. Have you been using egg on it or something?”
“So what if I have? Nick says it’s like black gold.”
Michal stopped brushing until Mischief turned her face toward her. “Really? Nick said that?” Michal asked.
Mischief narrowed her eyes. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
“I did not think St. Nick had poetry in him. Just carburetors and camshafts.”
Mischief tossed her hair. “Men who ride bikes are winged warriors, he told me. So why shouldn’t he have a poem or two in him?”
Michal put a hand over her mouth so that she would not laugh out loud. Mischief glared at her. “What is it?”
“Come on. Winged warriors? Did he read that in one of those motorcycle magazines that is always rolled up in his back pocket? American Rider or Hot Bike?”
Mischief tossed her hair again so that a great part of it hit Michal in the face. “What would you know about it?”
“Sometimes I see Milwaukee with one.”
“Milwaukee?” Now it was Mischief’s turn to suppress a laugh. “What would he know about bikes?”
“Why, you know he has one of his own.”
“He has some scooter made in China. Get real, Michal.”
Michal frowned. “Get real? He has a motorbike, Mischief, a Honda Rebel, and it is not made in China.”
“Oh, 250cc, excuse me, look out, Thunder Road. Nick’s Harley is a 1979 1000cc Ironhead.”
Michal gave Mischief’s hair a hard yank with the brush.
“Ow!”
“You have been spending too much time among the English,” Michal growled.
“So what? It’s Rumspringa now. I can see Nick as much as I want. Papa said it is all right for me to date now.”
“Yes. I’m sure he had Nick in his mind when he told you that.”
“Oh, I apologize, it has to be a good Amish boy.” She turned around and grabbed the brush from Michal. Then she gave her a sharp smile. “Not for me. Not when it’s finally Rumspringa.”
Mischief bounced off the bed and went to the window. It was full of golden light. “Here it comes. I am truly of age now.”
“Maybe not. Didn’t mother say last week you came out at seven in the evening?”
Mischief laughed. “No one counts their birthdays that way. I’m official.” She continued to look through the glass and began to hum, “You’re all ribbons and curls, oooh, what a girl, eyes that sparkle and shine, you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful, and you’re mine.” Then she turned back to face her older sister, the sharp smile still on her lips. “You have been Rumspringa for two years now. What about you? Are you satisfied with life among the plain people? Do you want to be Amish forever?”
Michal nodded. “Yes, I think so, yes.”
“Then why haven’t you taken your baptism vows?”
Michal hesitated. “Well – I’m not ready yet.”
“Why not? You’re 18, almost 19, why haven’t you made up your mind? Why won’t you make the commitment?”
“I’m still praying about it.”
“Oh, praying.” Mischief began to brush her hair herself. “You and Milwaukee are always praying, aren’t you? And not getting anywhere with each other or your Amish vows.”
“Milwaukee and I are only friends, good friends.”
“Really? And you’ve never kissed this good friend?”
“Not Milwaukee, no.”
“But you’ve kissed Silas Stoltzfus. I caught you, remember?”
Michal flipped her hand in the air. “Don’t bring that up. I was younger than you are now. It was just my foolish period.”
Mischief widened her eyes. “Your foolish period? What about David and Samuel and Elijah? They were all last year. And Saul Miller was only, what, four months ago?”
“So I’ve been foolish a long time. That’s why I’m not ready for baptism.”
“You kiss them all, but you won’t kiss Milwaukee? That sounds to me like you are serious about him.”
“I am not.”
Mischief came and knelt on Michal’s bed. “Do you drink?”
“Not so much.”
“Smoke?”
“Not so much.”
“But you’ve gone to parties in Lancaster City and Philadelphia.”
Michal shook her head. “Really that stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
“What does matter?”
“Oh – family, God, our church – you.”
“You mean now that you’ve finished sowing your wild oats it matters.”
“What wild oats?”
Mischief got up and paced the room, running her hands back through her thick, shining hair that was gleaming like dark water in the sunlight filling the room. “In and out through the door, two in the morning, three in the morning. Milwaukee’s scooter putt-putting away. Or Saul’s truck. All of you sowing your wild oats. Did you think I really was asleep all those times? Eyes closed? Head on the pillow?” She grinned. “It’s my turn now.”
Michal sighed. “You make such a big thing out of it. I hardly did anything. The boys hardly did anything.”
“Yes, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? That’s why you’re not ready for baptism yet – you still haven’t gotten it out of your system. Well, I’m getting it out of mine. Then there’ll be lots of room for God and baking bread in an oven heated by wood and doing laundry with a scrub board. Yes, maybe I will want to be plain again, who knows? But, right now, I’ve been plain long enough.”
She came and stood over Michal with her hands on her hips. “Speaking of God, why didn’t you go anywhere?”
Michal frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s more to life than Shoofly pie and Lancaster County and William Penn Pennyslvania. Didn’t God make a big, beautiful world? That’s what the preachers always tell us, ja? But how many of them go out there to see it?”
“Mischief, Pennsylvania is beautiful, Marietta is beautiful, all the rolling green hills and the Susquehanna River – ”
“Sure, sure, but what about Montana? What about Seattle? What about California and San Francisco and Los Angeles? Haven’t you ever wanted to see those places? Look.”
She got on her knees and tugged a wooden box out from under her bed. Opening the lid she brought out dozens of postcards bright with photographic images. She began to hand them up to Michal one at a time.
“The Grand Canyon – isn’t that so amazing? And Carlsbad Caverns. And Glacier National Park. Here’s the Painted Desert. And an arroyo carved out by water in Arizona – doesn’t that look like something from the Bible?”
“You should not have photographs.”
“Why not? We’re both in Rumspringa, aren’t we? Do you see me bowing down and worshipping them? What do you think of this?”
She placed a photograph of a pure white beach in Michal’s hands. The water that lapped against the sand was a shimmering turquoise as clear as freshly washed glass.
“What do you think?” she asked again.
“It’s very pleasant,” replied Michal.
Mischief snorted. “Is that all you can say? Thank our God, sister. It’s a miracle, a blessing. Don’t you want to reach out and just touch the sand? Think how nice it would be to skinny dip in water like emeralds.”
“Mischief!”
“Oh, sister, no men around of course.” Her sharp smile returned for a moment, then quickly was replaced by a look of sheer innocence that Michal could see was not contrived. “I like the boys and I like the attention they give me. I like Nick’s Ironhead. But do you know what I really want to do? I would trade all the parties and bottles of beer and cigarettes and kisses for an open road and an open sky – I want to see God’s world, I want to see mountains and oceans and the huge redwoods. I want to have a palm tree fan me while tropical air blows overhead as soft as silk.” Suddenly she stopped and looked worried. “What time is it?”
They both glanced at the windup clock on the small table that stood between their beds. It was five after six.
“Quickly, get dressed,” said Mischief, swinging her arms at Michal as if she were shooing cattle. “Let’s get outside as soon as we can.”
Michal climbed out of bed. “What’s the big hurry?”
“I don’t want to waste a minute.”
As Michal tied her hair back in a bun and put on a long blue dress with a black apron Mischief pulled on a pair of tight faded jeans and a short tee shirt she took from a corner of the closet. She left her hair loose. Then she dabbed perfume on her wrists and throat. When Michal turned from placing her prayer covering on her head Mischief was fastening her final earring. A black belt with silver studs was around her waist and a jean jacket draped over her shoulders. She used a black leather bag for her purse.
Michal could not keep the shock from her face. “What are you doing?”
“I’m 16, dear sister, and this is my Rumspringa. I’ve seen you in jeans and tees plenty of times.”
“But not right here, right in the house, mother and father and your little brothers – ”
“They won’t see a thing. I don’t have time to change in the restroom at Roy’s gas station like you always do.”
“What do you mean mother won’t see you? Soon she’ll be looking for us and asking for our help with breakfast.”
“Come. Come outside.”
They used the special door and stepped into grass soaked in a thick, silvery May dew. Michal wore her sturdy black Amish shoes while Mischief had put on a pair of Nike runners. Immediately Old Brownie spotted them and came trotting over, his tail wagging. Both sisters rubbed his long ears and spoke sweetly into the big, dark, sad eyes. Faintly there was the roar of a jet and Mischief straightened and looked up into the blue sky. White contrails had appeared far overhead like perfectly straight painted lines.
“You see?” she smiled. “From Philadelphia to where? Denver? Mexico? Hawaii? Japan? I want to fly, Michal.”
“The Amish can fly.”
“I don’t mean as a passenger. I want to hold the wheel. I want to steer the plane.” She glanced at her sister. “You know the English girls can drive at my age. As soon as they are 16 they can drive their own car.”
“I know that.”
“Imagine. The freedom. The highway in front of you like a magic carpet. I could go anywhere. With a plane and a car I could go to Paris or London or Madrid. I could go all the way to Australia and see kangaroos and crocs.” She took her sister’s hand. “Don’t you want to do exciting things like that? Don’t you want to see God’s big world? You can’t tell me you don’t feel bottled up here like some sort of museum exhibit from the 19th century for tourists to come and gape at.”
“Really, I feel fine,” Michal protested.
“Then take your baptism vows and stay put. What’s stopping you from becoming a fully committed Amish woman and remaining here until they plant you in the ground permanently like a crop of tobacco? Wear your prayer covering and be a draw for the tourist dollars, sister – do you know how much Pennsylvania made on the quaint Amish people last year from people driving by and flying in to photograph us? Eat our pies? Buy our handmade wooden furniture and our hand stitched quilts? Nick told me. You’d be surprised.”
“I honestly don’t care.”
“The Amish are big business. It wouldn’t pay to have us up and fade away. They need good strong Amish women to stick around and make sure there’s plenty of babies.”
Michal could feel herself losing her temper. “The Amish are not fading away. Our numbers are growing here in Pennsylvania and in Ohio and Indiana. Now there are even Amish communities in Missouri and Minnesota and Iowa. And not just from large families. There are more converts now.”
“Good. They can take my place. Then I won’t have to feel guilty if the Amish cease to exist because I hit the open road.” She put her hands in her pockets. “Face it. You’re no more content here than I am.”
“I am happy enough. We have a wonderful family.”
Mischief nodded. “Yes, we do, a wonderful family. But it’s not enough, is it?”
Michal felt the heat in her face. “Of course it’s enough. More than enough.”
“Then make it stick. Spring Communion is in a few weeks, isn’t it? Say you want to be Amish till you die. You and Milwaukee both. Get the baptism. Then you can have an Amish wedding and people will give you grandfather clocks and butter churns for gifts.”
Michal felt as if a rock had formed inside her and was sinking down, taking whatever good spirits she had woken to into a dark murk with it. Mischief saw the look on her face and regretted she had said so much. She put her arms around Michal’s neck. They were the same height with the same shining black hair and the same striking blue eyes.
“Look at us. God had given us this rare match of blue eyes and black hair. How can any man resist us? Nick says he gets completely lost in my eyes. They are so blue he forgets any sense of direction and loses his way.”
“He said that?” A small smile played over Michal’s lips.
“Close enough. I’m only adding a bit.”
“Your winged warrior.”
“Yes. More than you know.” Then, arms still around her sister, she said in a low voice as if the whole Amish community was listening in, “Come with me.”
Michal made a face. “Come with you where?”
“Everywhere else. The world outside Marietta and the Amish faith. The highway. The back roads. America. Come explore America with me. Find another God with me, a bigger God than the Amish God.”
“From the back of a Harley?”
“Or the front. Girls can drive Harleys too.”
“What about Nick?”
“Oh.” She laughed quietly. “Nick is a condiment. There are spicier things to season life with. Like a Michal. Come with me and I’ll ditch Nick and we can be the Rolling Thunder Sisterhood.”
Michal was genuinely surprised. “Ditch your winged warrior? I thought you loved him.”
Mischief grinned. “Love? Love? When did I ever say anything about love?” Then she grew serious and whispered, “You and I have been together 16 years today, everywhere together. I know all your thoughts and feelings and you know mine. You are not happy here, Michal. You are not sure becoming Amish is the right step. So come with me. You and I have never been apart. Come with me and we will discover what it is we want together. Maybe it’s this place and this life. But maybe it’s not.” She hugged Michal. “You will never be content to take your vows until you leave and truly make your own decision to return. You must have figured that out by now. You have to get out. Like Peter and James had to walk away from their fishing nets, yes? Or Paul had to leave his home in Tarsus. Or Jesus himself had to leave Nazareth.” She kissed Michal on the cheek. “Or Ruth had to leave her country and all she was familiar with and follow Naomi. You are restless, sister. You have to get away if you ever want to put down roots here someday. Get away and find out what you want and what God wants. Let me be your Naomi. And you can follow me and be my Ruth.”
Michal felt a surge in her heart and her eyes gleamed briefly. “Who will be our Boaz?”
Mischief smiled and hugged her sister again. “Boaz will have to find us. God will have to send him and he will have to find us wherever we are.”
There was a rumble from the road that ran past their house and it grew louder and louder. Mischief gave her sister a final kiss. “Hey, think about it. Gotta go.”
Nick thundered into the yard on his black and silver Harley Ironhead. He had a long braid of dark red hair, a red beard he kept trimmed to his jawline, and an earring. He wore dark brown leather pants and biker chaps and skullcap. Mischief’s father, a tall and lean man, stepped out of the barn. She spotted him.
“Papa!” She ran over and threw her arms around him.
“What is this?” he asked quietly.
“Nick is taking me into Philly for my birthday.”
“But – your mother has a cake for you – we have gifts – ”
Mischief bit her lower lip. “I know. I’m sorry. We can do that tomorrow. Nick and I have been planning this trip for weeks. He got time off from the garage.”
Her father nodded and could not keep himself from smiling. “So this is my girl who jumps into rivers and onto the back of the stallion we keep in stud, hey? Feet first into her Rumspringa.”
“That’s her.” She grinned. “I love you, papa. Have a good, good day, please.” She kissed him on the cheek.
“Sure, sure, I will think back on my own Rumspringa when I got sick smoking a cigar. Leave those alone, hey?”
“I will.”
“Here is your mother.”
A tall woman with broad shoulders stood on the porch. Mischief gave her father a final tight squeeze with her arms and ran across the yard and up the steps to the porch.
“Ma!” Again the strong hug. Mischief was two inches taller.
“Can’t you at least stay and have breakfast with us?” her mother complained, hugging her daughter back. “It is your birthday, my little one.”
“I’m sorry, ma, we have to get into Philadelphia and it’s the only day Nick could get off this week. I’ll be back tonight. We can have the cake tomorrow. But you can give the boys a piece each from me today, okay?”
Mischief could see her mother wanted to be cross. But she could not resist her youngest daughter’s energy and enthusiasm, something Mischief had always possessed and which the mother had never been able to scold her for. “All right. Get into your Rumspringa and get it over with. Just don’t spend as much time there as your sister.”
“I won’t.” She gave her mother the sharp smile. “Papa said he got sick from cigars.”
The mother laughed and kissed Mischief on the top of her head. “Ja, among other things.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I got sick on plum Schnaps and pizza. Really, I was crazy. But never as crazy as you. Your father is the only man who has ever seen me with my hair down and for that he had to wait until our wedding night.”
Mischief smiled at the tone of disapproval that had crept into her mother’s voice. “Yes, I know, ma, a woman’s crowning glory is her hair. Well, mine is still my crowning glory whether all the men in the world see it or not.”
“Okay, you go, that Nick will scare the horses and wake the boys.”
“Oh, the boys are already up.” She stepped back from her mother and waved energetically at two faces pressed against a window on the second floor. They smiled and waved back.
“Have some of my birthday cake!” she shouted up at them. “Tell me tomorrow if it’s any good!”
“Hush, my girl,” laughed her mother. “The neighbors will think there’s a fire. Oh, one minute you are almost 30 and the next not yet 12, isn’t it so?”
“I guess.”
Her mother ran a hand down her daughter’s cheek. “In all this do not forget your family loves you and is here for you, all right? And do not forget the love of God. Or the grace of Christ.”
“I won’t. Thanks, ma. See you.” A final hug and kiss and she was down the steps to Nick and the Ironhead. He got a hug too. Smiling, he handed her a brown jacket like his that he’d pulled from a saddlebag. She put it on and zipped it up. Then he handed her a helmet. He himself did not wear one. Slipping it over her head she got on behind him.
Michal walked up to them. “Take care, Nick,” she said.
He gave Michal a thumbs up. “Sure I will. Don’t worry about your baby sister. This is her first grownup day.”
“Oh, yes?” Michal raised a hand in a wave. “Go easy, Mischief. Okay?”
Mischief lifted the visor of her silver helmet and her blue eyes gleamed like sky. “No worries, big sister. I will avoid Schnaps and cigars for sure. See you tonight. Or tomorrow. Whichever comes first.” Then she grew serious and her eyes darkened like evening. “Remember what we talked about. Think it over, okay?”
“Yes, I will. And I shall pray about it too.”
“Sure, pray about it. Get God involved. Why not?” Then the blue lightened again as if the sun had come out in her eyes. “I’m 16. You can’t call me Mischief anymore, you know. I’m a woman now. Next time we see each other you have to use my Christian name.”
“Even if you still are a handful?’
“Even if. Bye.”
“We good to go?” Nick asked her.
“Yeah.” She dropped her visor.
Nick walked the bike forward and then throttled up. The Harley’s roar shook the air. The Ironhead rumbled down the lane to the main road. Mischief waved her hand a final time then wrapped her arms around Nick and leaned her head against him. Her sister and parents waved in response. On the back of their jackets Michal could see an eagle with spread wings and the words LIVE TO RIDE, RIDE TO LIVE. Then the Harley was on the asphalt and speeding east into the sun, the engine changing pitch as Nick switched gears.
“Christ go with you, Tabitha Troyer,” Michal whispered.
Monday, February 28, 2011
my friend connie cavanaugh
Blog Interview for Following God One Yes at a Time
Connie Cavanaugh’s latest book, Following God One Yes at a Time, has just been released by Harvest House Publishers. This book tells you how -- one simple, immediate, possible yes at a time – to do what Jesus commanded when He said, “Follow Me.” This is “following God for dummies”; it is a simple way for ordinary Christians to follow Christ through the maze of our complicated lives.
Q: You begin by saying “God has a dream for every believer.” Could you explain that?
God does have a dream for every believer. In fact He has many overlapping, interlocking dreams for us: some big, some small; some lifelong, some seasonal; some manageable, some seemingly impossible. When His dream looks like a mountain we can’t climb, because we lack faith in ourselves and in Him, we think:
∑ This dream is too big; I don’t have what it takes.
∑ The process looks so complicated; I don’t even know where to start.
∑ The finish line is so far away; I don’t think I can go the distance.
∑ I’ve tried before and dropped out; I must be all out of chances.
∑ Is this God speaking or my own wishful thinking?
∑ People like me don’t get to do these things; I’m not worthy of this.
Q: Are these the barriers you refer to in the book’s subtitle Overcoming the Six Barriers that hold you back?
Yes, the biggest barriers to following God are internal, not external. It’s not situations, circumstances, tragedies, crises or even physical limitations but it’s things like fear, guilt, pride, shame, comparison, and doubt that hold us back from pursuing the dreams God has for us. Following God one yes at a time is about how God breaks down His impossible dream into manageable steps and once we begin to follow Him in faith, because He loves us, He sends us proofs that we’re on the right track.
Q: God sends us “proofs” when we follow Him? What do you mean by that?
Even though we talk about a God who is alive and personal, all Christians occasionally feel like He is remote and invisible. Once God gets us to say yes to His dream and begin following Him, He knows that we’re going to be battling doubts and fears so He sends us proofs that we heard Him correctly and we’re on the right track. These proofs are little assurances that we pick up in a number of ways – through our daily Bible reading or hear in a sermon or through music or circumstance or pretty much anything that God chooses to use. He’s not limited in the ways He communicates with us. These “proofs” are His way of encouraging us not to lose heart but to keep following.
Q: Where can people find this book?
You can buy Following God One Yes at a Time at most Christian booksellers and online bookstores. If your local bookstore does not carry it, they can order it for you.
Connie Cavanaugh’s latest book, Following God One Yes at a Time, has just been released by Harvest House Publishers. This book tells you how -- one simple, immediate, possible yes at a time – to do what Jesus commanded when He said, “Follow Me.” This is “following God for dummies”; it is a simple way for ordinary Christians to follow Christ through the maze of our complicated lives.
Q: You begin by saying “God has a dream for every believer.” Could you explain that?
God does have a dream for every believer. In fact He has many overlapping, interlocking dreams for us: some big, some small; some lifelong, some seasonal; some manageable, some seemingly impossible. When His dream looks like a mountain we can’t climb, because we lack faith in ourselves and in Him, we think:
∑ This dream is too big; I don’t have what it takes.
∑ The process looks so complicated; I don’t even know where to start.
∑ The finish line is so far away; I don’t think I can go the distance.
∑ I’ve tried before and dropped out; I must be all out of chances.
∑ Is this God speaking or my own wishful thinking?
∑ People like me don’t get to do these things; I’m not worthy of this.
Q: Are these the barriers you refer to in the book’s subtitle Overcoming the Six Barriers that hold you back?
Yes, the biggest barriers to following God are internal, not external. It’s not situations, circumstances, tragedies, crises or even physical limitations but it’s things like fear, guilt, pride, shame, comparison, and doubt that hold us back from pursuing the dreams God has for us. Following God one yes at a time is about how God breaks down His impossible dream into manageable steps and once we begin to follow Him in faith, because He loves us, He sends us proofs that we’re on the right track.
Q: God sends us “proofs” when we follow Him? What do you mean by that?
Even though we talk about a God who is alive and personal, all Christians occasionally feel like He is remote and invisible. Once God gets us to say yes to His dream and begin following Him, He knows that we’re going to be battling doubts and fears so He sends us proofs that we heard Him correctly and we’re on the right track. These proofs are little assurances that we pick up in a number of ways – through our daily Bible reading or hear in a sermon or through music or circumstance or pretty much anything that God chooses to use. He’s not limited in the ways He communicates with us. These “proofs” are His way of encouraging us not to lose heart but to keep following.
Q: Where can people find this book?
You can buy Following God One Yes at a Time at most Christian booksellers and online bookstores. If your local bookstore does not carry it, they can order it for you.
Monday, February 21, 2011
holy quotes 12/chesterton
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, British writer and follower of Christ
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, British writer and follower of Christ
Friday, February 18, 2011
sticking
The other day I blogged about how important focus and finishing projects were, not only to writers, but all of us. Let me add today a third critical ingredient - sticking to it or perseverance.
I am not exaggerating when I say I've met many fine writers who were beginners just like I was many years ago. We shared stories, shared writing classes and writers groups, shared dreams of getting published and interacting with a reading audience.
Few of them are writing or publishing today, decades later.
Why not? Were their stories no good? Actually, a number of them had fine story ideas. Were their writing skills poor? Quite the opposite, most of them had exceptional writing skills and exceptional talent. Were they unable to stay on task and get stories and books finished? No, they completed their projects, they got their stories down on paper with beginnings, middles, and ends.
So what happened?
They gave up.
They got tired of submitting manuscripts that were rejected, weary of looking for literary agents to represent them, exhausted hoping some editor, some place, somewhere would recognize they could write well and give them a break.
Finally, one day, they packed it in and rarely, if ever, wrote creatively again.
Am I am where I am as a writer today because I was more talented or skilled or creative than them? No. Many of them had extraordinary writing abilities. Perhaps more doors opened for me more quickly? Not at all - I have had just as many disappointments and rejected manuscripts and failed promises from publishing houses as anyone else, maybe more, because I knocked on so many doors hoping for a breakthrough. Perhaps I had more blessings from God than they did in the area of writing? Well, I have had my blessings all right, I thank God, but I have been handed plenty of struggles too, at least four or five for every open door and every solid publishing opportunity. Nothing has come easy, nothing was handed to me - nothing. I fought and prayed and struggled for every inch of my publishing history.
The difference between me and the others is I never gave up. Call it stubborn, call it tenacious, or call me obstinate and crazy and thick-skinned, I simply put my head down and plowed ahead. No, I wasn't always cheerful and I wasn't always positive something good would happen and I wasn't always sure God was in it, but I kept going anyway.
Very, very few things have happened quickly in my writing or in my life or in my Christian faith. Most things that have been good things have happened because I kept, somehow, believing, and I kept, somehow, forging ahead.
Don't quit the important things, don't let go of the things you were called to, don't stop because a thousand doors have shut you out.
Stick. Persevere. Keep praying, keep hoping, keep trying. If you can't do it with a glad heart do it anyway, do it because you believe in what you're doing. Never mind looking for fancy feelings or fancy words to encourage you or exceptional signs from God that will give you a boost. Sometimes God intervenes in big ways to keep you motivated - more on that in another blog - but most of the time you have to move forward on faith, and if you can't do that, you won't move forward at all.
There is love and grace for you if you drop out. And there is love and grace for you if you persevere. And there is love and grace for you if you succeed. Regardless of what occurs or what you do, there will be a tomorrow and other opportunities of various kinds, other ways and means of living your life out wonderfully and gloriously on this earth.
But if you want certain things to happen, if they matter to you enough, you have to stick. And if you write because writing and publishing matter to you enough and you want to have your stories and books in print, you have to stick. And if you want to see the hand of God in your life more clearly and obviously, you have to stick.
Kierkegaard called it "a long obedience in the same direction".
In this quick and easy world of so-called overnight success and instant gratification and no-effort attainments and accomplishments this long obedience to God, and the things of God and the things God puts it in you to do and be, is the one thing that is still most worthwhile and the one thing that can grant you the most satisfaction, depth, understanding, richness, and life.
Keep a good grip on it.
I am not exaggerating when I say I've met many fine writers who were beginners just like I was many years ago. We shared stories, shared writing classes and writers groups, shared dreams of getting published and interacting with a reading audience.
Few of them are writing or publishing today, decades later.
Why not? Were their stories no good? Actually, a number of them had fine story ideas. Were their writing skills poor? Quite the opposite, most of them had exceptional writing skills and exceptional talent. Were they unable to stay on task and get stories and books finished? No, they completed their projects, they got their stories down on paper with beginnings, middles, and ends.
So what happened?
They gave up.
They got tired of submitting manuscripts that were rejected, weary of looking for literary agents to represent them, exhausted hoping some editor, some place, somewhere would recognize they could write well and give them a break.
Finally, one day, they packed it in and rarely, if ever, wrote creatively again.
Am I am where I am as a writer today because I was more talented or skilled or creative than them? No. Many of them had extraordinary writing abilities. Perhaps more doors opened for me more quickly? Not at all - I have had just as many disappointments and rejected manuscripts and failed promises from publishing houses as anyone else, maybe more, because I knocked on so many doors hoping for a breakthrough. Perhaps I had more blessings from God than they did in the area of writing? Well, I have had my blessings all right, I thank God, but I have been handed plenty of struggles too, at least four or five for every open door and every solid publishing opportunity. Nothing has come easy, nothing was handed to me - nothing. I fought and prayed and struggled for every inch of my publishing history.
The difference between me and the others is I never gave up. Call it stubborn, call it tenacious, or call me obstinate and crazy and thick-skinned, I simply put my head down and plowed ahead. No, I wasn't always cheerful and I wasn't always positive something good would happen and I wasn't always sure God was in it, but I kept going anyway.
Very, very few things have happened quickly in my writing or in my life or in my Christian faith. Most things that have been good things have happened because I kept, somehow, believing, and I kept, somehow, forging ahead.
Don't quit the important things, don't let go of the things you were called to, don't stop because a thousand doors have shut you out.
Stick. Persevere. Keep praying, keep hoping, keep trying. If you can't do it with a glad heart do it anyway, do it because you believe in what you're doing. Never mind looking for fancy feelings or fancy words to encourage you or exceptional signs from God that will give you a boost. Sometimes God intervenes in big ways to keep you motivated - more on that in another blog - but most of the time you have to move forward on faith, and if you can't do that, you won't move forward at all.
There is love and grace for you if you drop out. And there is love and grace for you if you persevere. And there is love and grace for you if you succeed. Regardless of what occurs or what you do, there will be a tomorrow and other opportunities of various kinds, other ways and means of living your life out wonderfully and gloriously on this earth.
But if you want certain things to happen, if they matter to you enough, you have to stick. And if you write because writing and publishing matter to you enough and you want to have your stories and books in print, you have to stick. And if you want to see the hand of God in your life more clearly and obviously, you have to stick.
Kierkegaard called it "a long obedience in the same direction".
In this quick and easy world of so-called overnight success and instant gratification and no-effort attainments and accomplishments this long obedience to God, and the things of God and the things God puts it in you to do and be, is the one thing that is still most worthwhile and the one thing that can grant you the most satisfaction, depth, understanding, richness, and life.
Keep a good grip on it.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
holy quotes 11
“Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the darkness fall."
“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
“It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish.”
“I do not love the bright sword for it's sharpness, nor the arrow for it's swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
“He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.”
"I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge.”
JRR Tolkien, follower of Christ, Oxford don, writer (1892-1973)
“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
“It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish.”
“I do not love the bright sword for it's sharpness, nor the arrow for it's swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
“He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.”
"I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge.”
JRR Tolkien, follower of Christ, Oxford don, writer (1892-1973)
Saturday, February 12, 2011
holy quotes 10
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never tasted victory or defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (1858-1919)
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (1858-1919)
billy graham's prayer
Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen
Friday, February 11, 2011
finishing the things that matter
Whenever I speak to writers' groups I always mention a couple of things: 1) focus and 2) completion. Although I was in theater for quite a while I can't recall so much loss of focus as seems to occur with writers - after all, the show must go on and you have to be ready for the opening curtain, like it or not. A writer without a deadline can be, well, an Amish buggy without a horse, a Harley without an engine, a vintage Stearman biplane without a prop. Sure, some do okay without a date for completion, but others simply meander through their words and imagination until their drive to get a book written peters out. Or is lost in a maze of distractions from bill payments to family crises to social networking.
When you decide to have a writing day you'd better have it. If you go out beforehand to run errands you're doomed. You run into people, this happens, that happens, so that by the time you sit at your desk to create you find most of your writing energy has dissipated and all your good intentions to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard have gone with the wind (to use a literary allusion).
A friend mentioned that Stephen King, the writer of horror fiction, once expressed something of the same frustration with writers' abilities to find new and extraordinary ways to keep themselves from facing blank paper (or computer screens). Especially once they began to wax eloquent about inspiration and the mysteries of the creative process and how they could not be nailed down to a schedule like other pedestrian pursuits - which usually meant they would not get anything done because God had not divinely breathed a story into them. Enough, he cried. Writing is a job like anything else. Put in your eight hours at the desk, ignore phone calls and distractions outside of nuclear detonations and pandemics (and ignore them too because there's nothing you can do about those things anyway).
Yes, writing is work, not a beach on Maui. It really can be a hard job pulling good ideas and plots and characters out of yourself hour after hour. Quit pretending the divine hasn't spoken. Plenty will happen once you start working and the juices start to flow. Not much will happen until then. Get to work.
The focus happens because you will to not do anything else until you've put in four to six to eight hours or more at your writing. When you take it seriously as a real job, real work, and yes, really important. Until then, the slightest thing can take you away from the task at hand. But if you permitted yourself the same loss of focus and concentration at another job you'd be fired or, if you were flying a 75 million dollar F-35 fighter jet, probably lose your life.
Yes, creation is wonderful and beautiful and holy and mysterious and all that. It is also, like the birth of a child, a great deal of pain and blood and struggle. It's that struggle the writer often shies away from - it can go right to their core and exhaust them. But there's no other way to do it well.
Focus and completion. Every writer has great ideas that never make it into print simply because the work ethic and discipline isn't there to write the ideas and stories down. Writing is seen, perhaps, by themselves and their friends as a hobby, a luxury, a recreation, but not work like office work or management or building bridges or teaching high school students. It's something you do after the important things are done. But this is the wrong attitude. Writing and art and story and creation are critical to our culture and to the planet. Stories, our own stories and the ones we take into us from books, TV, and film, are what drive us. Without a vision the people perish. Writing and stories are not excess baggage or optional or froth. They are a big deal, a huge deal, and it takes hard work to produce them. And guess what? They are just as important or more important than anything else in heaven or earth.
So, if you write, get to it. Enough of having half-finished books clutter your computer desktop, little Word icons that promise much but, when double clicked, offer nothing but chapters that were never completed. Finish something! I don't care if it's 10 pages or 5 pages or a hundred pages - finish something! If creators lived the rest of their lives the way they often fritter time and energy away at writing projects that never get completed they wouldn't have a life. If writing - or painting or acting or dance - or prayer or reading or cultivating relationships - or cleaning a home or preparing a meal or raising a child - if it matters to you enough then treat it as something that matters to you enough. Concentrate. Screen out anything but the most necessary distractions. Put your best into it. Put your all into it. Make up your mind you're not going to be messing around with the same ideas or dreams a year from now. You will write the story by March 15th. You will phone that person to have a serious coffee. You will type the letter to an estranged friend. You will spend the night or morning in prayer on April 7th. You will bring your child to the park on Monday. Take seriously the things that seriously matter. Make plans. Deadlines. And follow through. Once you do this it gives you an enormous feeling of satisfaction and progress. There is nothing like bringing plans to fruition and completion.
So many writers are clogged up with things that never got done, stories that never got told, books in their head that never got past the halfway mark - or 10% mark. It ends up jamming their thoughts and energies and depleting them - just as it would in the rest of their lives if nothing ever got done or completed. But get a few writing projects in print, get a few stories created and finished, and you are talking about a different person. Completion makes them stronger for the next writing task and the process of completing a story makes them a better writer for the next story a well.
Which is true about the rest of life as well. The person who dreams about prayer and what it might accomplish in their souls and the souls of others, but who never dedicates time to doing it, never feels stronger or learns to pray in a way they know is real. The person who dreams about taking the special trip to Italy, but who never focuses on putting the money and time aside will never go, the experience will always remain something in their head, but never anything they can touch.
I'm talking to writers, but obviously to myself and to all of us. We're all creators, aren't we, in different ways? Or we can be. What's necessary is to realize how significant creation is. Once we do that, once we take it as seriously as anything else, and deliberately put the time and effort into it, things happen, ideas take on physical and spiritual shape, dreams morph into the tangible. It's not that hard really.
On the other hand, creation really is hard. Story writing really is hard. But it changes worlds. So get intense and get on with it.
It's quite a life when you bring things full circle.
When you decide to have a writing day you'd better have it. If you go out beforehand to run errands you're doomed. You run into people, this happens, that happens, so that by the time you sit at your desk to create you find most of your writing energy has dissipated and all your good intentions to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard have gone with the wind (to use a literary allusion).
A friend mentioned that Stephen King, the writer of horror fiction, once expressed something of the same frustration with writers' abilities to find new and extraordinary ways to keep themselves from facing blank paper (or computer screens). Especially once they began to wax eloquent about inspiration and the mysteries of the creative process and how they could not be nailed down to a schedule like other pedestrian pursuits - which usually meant they would not get anything done because God had not divinely breathed a story into them. Enough, he cried. Writing is a job like anything else. Put in your eight hours at the desk, ignore phone calls and distractions outside of nuclear detonations and pandemics (and ignore them too because there's nothing you can do about those things anyway).
Yes, writing is work, not a beach on Maui. It really can be a hard job pulling good ideas and plots and characters out of yourself hour after hour. Quit pretending the divine hasn't spoken. Plenty will happen once you start working and the juices start to flow. Not much will happen until then. Get to work.
The focus happens because you will to not do anything else until you've put in four to six to eight hours or more at your writing. When you take it seriously as a real job, real work, and yes, really important. Until then, the slightest thing can take you away from the task at hand. But if you permitted yourself the same loss of focus and concentration at another job you'd be fired or, if you were flying a 75 million dollar F-35 fighter jet, probably lose your life.
Yes, creation is wonderful and beautiful and holy and mysterious and all that. It is also, like the birth of a child, a great deal of pain and blood and struggle. It's that struggle the writer often shies away from - it can go right to their core and exhaust them. But there's no other way to do it well.
Focus and completion. Every writer has great ideas that never make it into print simply because the work ethic and discipline isn't there to write the ideas and stories down. Writing is seen, perhaps, by themselves and their friends as a hobby, a luxury, a recreation, but not work like office work or management or building bridges or teaching high school students. It's something you do after the important things are done. But this is the wrong attitude. Writing and art and story and creation are critical to our culture and to the planet. Stories, our own stories and the ones we take into us from books, TV, and film, are what drive us. Without a vision the people perish. Writing and stories are not excess baggage or optional or froth. They are a big deal, a huge deal, and it takes hard work to produce them. And guess what? They are just as important or more important than anything else in heaven or earth.
So, if you write, get to it. Enough of having half-finished books clutter your computer desktop, little Word icons that promise much but, when double clicked, offer nothing but chapters that were never completed. Finish something! I don't care if it's 10 pages or 5 pages or a hundred pages - finish something! If creators lived the rest of their lives the way they often fritter time and energy away at writing projects that never get completed they wouldn't have a life. If writing - or painting or acting or dance - or prayer or reading or cultivating relationships - or cleaning a home or preparing a meal or raising a child - if it matters to you enough then treat it as something that matters to you enough. Concentrate. Screen out anything but the most necessary distractions. Put your best into it. Put your all into it. Make up your mind you're not going to be messing around with the same ideas or dreams a year from now. You will write the story by March 15th. You will phone that person to have a serious coffee. You will type the letter to an estranged friend. You will spend the night or morning in prayer on April 7th. You will bring your child to the park on Monday. Take seriously the things that seriously matter. Make plans. Deadlines. And follow through. Once you do this it gives you an enormous feeling of satisfaction and progress. There is nothing like bringing plans to fruition and completion.
So many writers are clogged up with things that never got done, stories that never got told, books in their head that never got past the halfway mark - or 10% mark. It ends up jamming their thoughts and energies and depleting them - just as it would in the rest of their lives if nothing ever got done or completed. But get a few writing projects in print, get a few stories created and finished, and you are talking about a different person. Completion makes them stronger for the next writing task and the process of completing a story makes them a better writer for the next story a well.
Which is true about the rest of life as well. The person who dreams about prayer and what it might accomplish in their souls and the souls of others, but who never dedicates time to doing it, never feels stronger or learns to pray in a way they know is real. The person who dreams about taking the special trip to Italy, but who never focuses on putting the money and time aside will never go, the experience will always remain something in their head, but never anything they can touch.
I'm talking to writers, but obviously to myself and to all of us. We're all creators, aren't we, in different ways? Or we can be. What's necessary is to realize how significant creation is. Once we do that, once we take it as seriously as anything else, and deliberately put the time and effort into it, things happen, ideas take on physical and spiritual shape, dreams morph into the tangible. It's not that hard really.
On the other hand, creation really is hard. Story writing really is hard. But it changes worlds. So get intense and get on with it.
It's quite a life when you bring things full circle.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
brother lawrence's prayer
This is the prayer attributed to Brother Lawrence, a Christian monastic who labored in the kitchen of a medieval monastery - you can imagine what that looked like a thousand years ago! He seeks to have a relationship with God not relegated to "holy" times or "quiet" times or "church" times, but all the time, through all the thicks and thins, all of a day's ups and downs, times when you feel spiritual and times when you don't. May it encourage you today to have a relationship with Christ that knows no boundaries or time limits or special frames of mind.
Lord of all pots and pans and things,
since I've no time to be a great saint
by doing lovely things,
or watching late with Thee,
or dreaming in the dawnlight,
or storming heaven's gates,
make me a saint by getting meals,
and washing up the plates.
Warm all the kitchen with Thy Love,
and light it with Thy peace;
forgive me all my worrying,
and make my grumbling cease.
Thou who didst love to give men food,
in room, or by the sea,
accept the service that I do,
I do it unto Thee.
Amen
Lord of all pots and pans and things,
since I've no time to be a great saint
by doing lovely things,
or watching late with Thee,
or dreaming in the dawnlight,
or storming heaven's gates,
make me a saint by getting meals,
and washing up the plates.
Warm all the kitchen with Thy Love,
and light it with Thy peace;
forgive me all my worrying,
and make my grumbling cease.
Thou who didst love to give men food,
in room, or by the sea,
accept the service that I do,
I do it unto Thee.
Amen
the woodcutter (for barbara)
THE WOODCUTTER
The woodshed could hold eleven cords of split and stacked wood and it was empty. Aaron scarcely noticed it as he strode, propelled by fury, into the retreat centre. It was not an impressive shed. He glimpsed a sagging roof and some crooked beams. The retreat center, on the other hand, was solid and sure, boards and brick and stone and large windows that brought mountains and light and sky indoors. Aaron stormed through the front entrance.
The retreat director sat in a chair bigger than he was, eyes obscured by glasses spattered with sunlight. Aaron thought he looked like a ferret but opened up to him anyway. He ranted and raved about his church which had fired him, his elders that had abused him, his wife and children who had left him, his friends who had ignored him, his God who had abandoned him. The director said nothing. Once, in the middle of the tirade, he opened a drawer in his desk and, without taking his eyes off Aaron, plucked a Scotch mint from a bag and popped it into his mouth. After about sixty-five minutes, Aaron stopped, hands and face burning, hunting for a better word, a stronger phrase, an accusation more fierce.
“Have you ever chopped wood?” the director asked.
They gave Aaron a maul, an ax, a chainsaw. And eleven cords of wood in fifteen foot lengths. Simmering with adrenaline, he told the director he would saw the wood in one day and have the lot of it split within a week. He put in two hours before dark that first afternoon. It was early December. The sun set before five. The snow and grass were blistered with small, angry woodchips. They flew from him in swarms. But at five it was too dark to work, even for a man who was reckless. There was a great deal more to saw.
During supper he sat at a long wooden table with three staff members and another pastor named Skiff, who asked Aaron how long he would be at the retreat centre.
“One or two weeks,” replied Aaron, jabbing at his grilled chicken. “Just enough time to get my head together and make plans to take another church. How about you?”
Skiff shrugged. “Another month maybe.”
“Then what? Do you have another church lined up?”
“Oh, no. I’ve pastored twenty years and that’s enough for me. I’ll go into business. Insurance.”
“But. What about your call?”
Skiff smiled and shook his head.
After an hour of communal prayer and Scripture reading the next morning, Aaron assaulted the woodpile with the chainsaw once more, chips snarling up from his fists. After lunch was free time.
“Read. Think. Hike. We can talk. You can work on the wood again tomorrow morning,” the director suggested.
“No,” cut in Aaron. “I have to finish the wood. I only have a couple of weeks.”
Stars sprinkled the backs of his hands when he was done. They were calling him for supper, ringing a steel bar. He set down the chainsaw. He had trouble flexing his fingers and his hands shook. The smell of gasoline rose from his skin and his clothing. Tomorrow, he thought, it is just the logs and the ax. My bone and muscle and will against years and years, centuries of wood. Myself against the Maker of Trees.
The maul was heavy, almost three times the weight of the ax, and his first blows the next morning glanced off the logs erratically. But he was determined to use the maul on the larger logs so he kept at it until his swinging became more sure. As the solid hits grew in number and the logs split with cracks like gunfire, a peace settled over him.
It did not last. With the rhythmic work an iron door in his mind swung open and faces burst upon his imagination, conversations, rooms, pulpits, meetings, angry sentences, words of fire, memory after memory scraping him, cutting around and around so that he struck at the logs with a sudden explosion of rage, blasting through stout rounds with a single heft of the maul. The first day of chopping ended with a snowfall that seemed to scald his forehead and cheeks. He came to the table swollen with pain.
“How goes the battle?” asked Skiff.
“I must have been out of my mind to say I’d ever go back,” spat Aaron. “Whipped like Jesus. Crucified like Jesus. By your friends. By Christians.”
He sat at the window in his room, his light out. The snow had stopped and torn-up clouds hurried over and under a half-moon. The mountain range had taken on a pristine whiteness and the moon was strong enough to give it a sharp, full, three-dimensional effect, almost as if the peaks were pulsing and throbbing, rising and floating, reminding Aaron of the luminous blacklight posters of the Sixties.
“You create so much beauty out there,” Aaron prayed. “Why can’t you do it with the human heart?”
The more rhythmically he swung the maul, the more the memories boiled up from the stew of wound and bleeding and betrayal. He tried to concentrate on how his blows landed. He learned to look for the faint crack in the top of the log and strike that squarely. The best feeling he could produce in himself came when a log split cleanly and fell away neatly from the cutting stump. The satisfaction of that hummed through his blood and his bones and even his mind paused to swallow it in, as if it were a morsel of lush scenery.
But not every log split cleanly. Sometimes his blows were off-center. Sometimes the maul blade sank into the round with a thud and apparently effected no change whatsoever. Sometimes he had to pull and pull and pry the maul loose. He learned to be wary of the logs lumpy with knots. He could strike and strike at some of these and get nowhere. Wedges would be used but frequently the wedges got stuck and it cost him more energy to drive the wedges out or through. He would pant and sweat even though it was fifteen below. The moments came when he wanted to quit. But he couldn’t leave wedges in logs or blades embedded in thick, wet wood. He thought of the retreat director sucking his white Scotch mints. I’ll be finished in a week, he’d told him. Yet he had to complete this before he left. Grunting, he yanked or beat the maul out of the knot-twisted logs.
“Some of you are hardly worth it!” he shouted.
It was important to finish each log, no matter what. It was a great victory to finally split the hardest ones in two. But there were clearly some which sapped all Aaron’s strength and still remained truculent. Not many. A few. It was hard to take, but Aaron learned to recognize these logs after a few blows and would toss them aside and never approach them again. They took too much and rewarded him with very little. When stacking came, they would go into the shed whole. A long, slow burn for somebody one winter’s night two years ahead. Someone holding the broken windows of faith in hands and shirt pockets, the fragments pricking and stabbing. Maybe a whole log would help. But to burn well, it would need a split piece too, dried by mountain wind. Maybe in the flame the hurting man, the dying woman would find God once more. Aaron had already burned other people’s anger and pain in the wood they’d left behind. He hadn’t seen much of God yet but at least his flesh had been warmed. Who were the others who had cut the wood two or three years before? Had that been a dry winter or an especially cold and snowfull one? He imagined them battling the woodpile in blizzards, cheeks and ears whitening from frostbite. Now he burned their efforts. In the month of December, the burning of this split wood in his room was the only act that seemed holy to him, a sacrifice that mattered to God, the souls of others an incense drifting up to him. Who would burn his struggles, send flames over his spirit, toss the wood he cut out of his heart into the stove and then pull out a novel, or maybe even a Bible to read? Who would his wood heal?
The woodshed took on enormous proportions when he set up his first stack of split wood. The stack cringed there, dwarfish and inconsequential - it blew down Christmas Day when a chinook gushed through the mountain passes. There was a day of rain and snow and then a high pressure system slashed out of the Arctic, so that Aaron woke to a glistening marrow-red sunrise of forty below.
It took him an hour to restack the wood, which at least had been under cover and was dry. The rest, heaped about the woodshed, split or whole, was frozen together. He whacked at it with the back end of the maul head to loosen it up, his gloves ripping as he jerked the wood from its ice cradles. When the day ended his fingers were bleeding. This went on all through January. Freezing rain, followed by ice, followed by snow, followed by subzero cold. He broke the maul handle trying to force a log from a mass of wood all iced over. He had to use the smaller ax to split. The wood broke apart quickly because it was so cold. But what the maul had done in one blow took the ax three.
“I’ll need a few more weeks yet,” Aaron told the retreat director.
The director sat, hands folded in his thin lap, and nodded, sucking at a Scotch mint.
“I thought you’d be at your new church by now,” smiled Skiff at the supper table.
“It’s taking longer to do the wood,” shrugged Aaron. “Snow. Ice. I need more time.”
“What does it matter? Let someone else do it.”
Other people came and went, on weekend retreats or day retreats. Pastors. Church members. No one Aaron knew. Some would laugh too much for him. Some would hover over fires and tables and shoulders like grey storms. Some were just taking a break. Some were hanging on for dear life. A few talked with Aaron. Sam was leaving the pastorate to go into accounting. John was returning to the military. Ben had had enough and was driving a taxi. Krystal was going into management with a big oil firm. Jerry sat with Aaron at the huge fireplace in the main lodge. The room was dark and the light flashed and flashed on their faces and bodies.
“What can I do?” The man stared into a sparking log. “I used to imagine Jesus huddled over fires like this with James and Matthew and Philip. What if they’d stopped? The heart killings came to them. But they rose from the dead. What if they’d put out the fire in the dark and gone home?”
Aaron clawed and chopped at the wood to free it from ice and snow. Then, his gloved hands slippery and shining, he would balance the logs on the stump and swing, silver spraying his face as the wood broke. Exhausted, he would end a day with an hour or two of stacking. When darkness poured over the mountains and over his eyes, the shed still looked large and empty. Eleven cords of wood. How much did he have cut and stacked now? Two or three, if he was lucky?
The days came when he didn’t want to do it anymore. He’d had enough. The adrenaline had been scorched from his body weeks ago. Now he felt tired. Alone. But it was the sort of tired that does not let you rest. And he knew if he did not go to the woodpile he would not be able to seize the bone weariness that would give him sleep. He forced himself into the rich royal blue of sky and the clear cold that traced the pattern of his spine. Chop. Cut. He had thought he would dream of the wood but he never did. His dreams were full of color and movement. No memories. No anger. No axes. No woodchips. Awake, he sat at the stove in his room and watched the stars fall gently. Wood from other tortured souls burned.
Weight melted from his body. His hair fell over his ears. Dirt worked under his skin and nails, water blisters broke and his palms thickened and yellowed. There was no one to care whether or not he grew a beard, so he let it come. Glancing into a mirror, he allowed himself a lopsided smile - he was perfect for a series of sermons on the Old Testament prophets.
February was a mercy. Yes, that was the only word that meant something. Dry and warm, chinook after chinook pulling golden fire over the foothills and forests. The wood loosened in the heat. He no longer had to break it out of its rock face of ice. Crack. Crack. The rounds split neatly, long grain exposed like a fine stone crystal. Scent rose through his being. He would chew the pale splinters for the flavour, sensing he was feeding on years as well as on minerals, on fresh resin in old trees nurtured by wind and frost and fast glittering meltwater.
He grew wearier. Sometime after Valentine’s Day he was sure the shed was half-full. But it had taken him so long to get there he despaired of ever finishing the job. Well, other things had never been finished in his life. The wood could be left too. He could walk away and be a free man anytime he liked. He’d done enough. His wife had written him a letter. What was he thinking, she wanted to know. Should they continue the separation? Should they divorce? His denomination sent a curt typewritten letter - If he divorced he could no longer serve with them as a pastor. Would he like some counseling? His pension stood at forty thousand dollars.
“Everything in me is tired,” he told Skiff. “But if I don’t chop, I can’t sleep.”
“I’ve been praying for you.”
“Thanks, Skiff.”
“It’s the terror that has to go, Aaron. I pray God will melt the ice that locks you in.”
The ax flew, a shining head painted red. At five o’clock it was still light. At six the sun remained well above the horizon. March blustered over his head - snow flurries, some rain, some cold, but more light, more warmth, slowly, the earth turning, the sun drawing near, spring advancing like a green-speared army of deep intent.
Aaron pulled an old Bible down from the bookshelf above his woodstove. How long since he had read King James? It was like delving into Hamlet or Macbeth. He chiseled away at the Psalms and the gospel of Luke. He lay back on his bed, someone’s wood work burning, the light snapping jaws on the ceiling, or no, was it David leaping in front of the ark?
“God,” he would breathe in the dark, “Oh God, Oh Father.”
Skiff met him at breakfast. “Some of us are doing a prayer walk each day to get ready for Easter. Would you like to join us?”
Aaron shook his head. “It’s good of you. But Easter is where the trees and the fallen wood are. I have to be there.”
Another stack went up, skimming the ceiling. Perhaps it was possible. The ax plunged into smaller logs now. Shorn, pieces dropped left and right from the stump. Carefully, he would build up the wood walls within the shed, as if erecting a stone wall without mortar. He had learned how to shore up the ends by laying the wood in alternate patterns. Wood stacked in December and January took on the color of honey. Greener wood was dark and stained. Round and split, small and large, knotted and smooth, clean split or ragged, the wood rose up from the ground, filling the shed.
He was no longer tired. Perhaps it could be done. If he stuck it out. He stood back frequently to look at the woodshed and its swelling substance. There is a beauty to this, how the wood fits together, he thought. Yet surely it was random. But how the symmetry then, the wholeness, the completeness? Out of January and the killing winter dark, how this?
April. He took Easter communion at the shed, sitting amidst the tall wood as if in a cathedral. He chewed the bread carefully. Drained the ceramic cup. Took a splinter of fresh birch and placed it between his teeth. Jesus and wood. Carpentry and killing. Tables, chairs, and crosses. Wood fire and light in all darkness.
Forgive me, he wrote his wife and children.
Forgive us, she responded.
Yes, yes, he penned in the light of another’s cross.
Let us love one another, he wrote the church. Even if I never preach to you again. Let us love one another.
Yes, responded the church.
May I have another chance? he wrote the denomination. May I be as one who serves? May I try to live the evangel somewhere? May I learn to shepherd and lay down my life for the sheep? May I try again to be like Jesus and not hide the wounds?
But the denomination did not respond.
“The wood is praise,” Aaron told Skiff.
They sat on a bench drenched in mountains and crystal clear sunlight. Skiff smiled, gnawing on an O Henry bar.
“Perhaps it’s time to go out then,” Skiff said.
Aaron shook his head. “I must complete it.”
“Let another take on that joy.”
“It won’t mean anything to them, just to cap off my work. Let them have their own vocation. Then it will mean something.”
“A cathedral was not built in one lifetime. Not by one man.”
“Some of this is second growth forest. Others planted it. Others cut it and drove the logs here. But it’s my task to split and build. All of it. This is what I give to God. It is all of my days. Years from now, at night, in terror, cold and alone, a man or a woman will carry the wood to their room and they will pray by its light, cry by its flame, hear God in the cracking of the poplar and birch, hope again after a week, a month, a hundred nights. It is what I have to give them. I can never know them. But we are going to Jerusalem together.”
Skiff nodded. “I ought not keep you from your worship any longer then.”
“Are you still going into insurance?”
“Sure. Insurance against evil. I’m staying with the Lord, Aaron. His walking. His campfires. His parables. His cross. And the resurrection of the dead - I’ve always wanted to find out how that fish tasted he grilled on the beach. When the morning finally comes, I’ll be with him for breakfast.”
And you could say the ax sang to God in the flash of its swing. That Aaron praised God as the wood rose to heaven. That he would not stop until it had been done and every log, every stick had found its niche in the house of God he fashioned within the eleven cord shed. That it sounded so crazy to him to think and act this way over a pile of wood. And it was so crazy. It must have been Jesus smearing dark mud and God’s spit over his eyes, fully blinding him and telling him to wash off the blindness in the pool of Siloam.
Mare’s tails shot out crimson, snapping with the coming of the light. Aaron stood looking at the cords of wood, reluctant to leave, having replaced a final piece of maple which had fallen with several dozen others during the night. The ax was propped against the stump. For another, he thought. Then he turned to go into the main lodge and the retreat director was behind him.
“That’s all,” said Aaron. “I can leave this morning. I’m meeting my wife for coffee in town.”
The director nodded. Blood light glistened over his glasses as the sun slipped up the mountain slopes. A warm wind puffed out his plaid shirt from his scarecrow frame.
Aaron looked back at the shed. “It has to be like the wood, doesn’t it? Bit by bit, cutting, stacking, ice, snow, another stack, another stack, some days ready to fly like a swallow, others just wanting to fall to your death. The splinters dig into your skin, the cold, the doubt rips at your mind. You try to pray, you try to worship, and you add another piece, and nothing is happening, you look and you look for God, and surely nothing can be happening. Jesus presses on to Golgotha. Paul presses on to Rome. Somehow we learn that God is most true when the dark is most real. All I did was swing an ax. I became a free man. Just one day after stacking another piece of a thousand pieces. I became the cathedral. It’s your whole life and maybe you’ll recognize it. Maybe another generation will see the cathedral.”
Now it was morning. The director had his hands in his pockets. But one arm reached up and around Aaron’s shoulders and a surprising strength pressed Aaron into the director’s skin and bone and life and the scent of garlic and earth, for the director worked in the greenhouse during the winter and in the garden during the summer. And there was the scent of Scotch mint. The director propelled Aaron toward the lodge as a cloud moved and the morning star, not yet obscured by the common day, lit up like a match head over the white mountains.
“Come and have breakfast,” the director said.
The woodshed could hold eleven cords of split and stacked wood and it was empty. Aaron scarcely noticed it as he strode, propelled by fury, into the retreat centre. It was not an impressive shed. He glimpsed a sagging roof and some crooked beams. The retreat center, on the other hand, was solid and sure, boards and brick and stone and large windows that brought mountains and light and sky indoors. Aaron stormed through the front entrance.
The retreat director sat in a chair bigger than he was, eyes obscured by glasses spattered with sunlight. Aaron thought he looked like a ferret but opened up to him anyway. He ranted and raved about his church which had fired him, his elders that had abused him, his wife and children who had left him, his friends who had ignored him, his God who had abandoned him. The director said nothing. Once, in the middle of the tirade, he opened a drawer in his desk and, without taking his eyes off Aaron, plucked a Scotch mint from a bag and popped it into his mouth. After about sixty-five minutes, Aaron stopped, hands and face burning, hunting for a better word, a stronger phrase, an accusation more fierce.
“Have you ever chopped wood?” the director asked.
They gave Aaron a maul, an ax, a chainsaw. And eleven cords of wood in fifteen foot lengths. Simmering with adrenaline, he told the director he would saw the wood in one day and have the lot of it split within a week. He put in two hours before dark that first afternoon. It was early December. The sun set before five. The snow and grass were blistered with small, angry woodchips. They flew from him in swarms. But at five it was too dark to work, even for a man who was reckless. There was a great deal more to saw.
During supper he sat at a long wooden table with three staff members and another pastor named Skiff, who asked Aaron how long he would be at the retreat centre.
“One or two weeks,” replied Aaron, jabbing at his grilled chicken. “Just enough time to get my head together and make plans to take another church. How about you?”
Skiff shrugged. “Another month maybe.”
“Then what? Do you have another church lined up?”
“Oh, no. I’ve pastored twenty years and that’s enough for me. I’ll go into business. Insurance.”
“But. What about your call?”
Skiff smiled and shook his head.
After an hour of communal prayer and Scripture reading the next morning, Aaron assaulted the woodpile with the chainsaw once more, chips snarling up from his fists. After lunch was free time.
“Read. Think. Hike. We can talk. You can work on the wood again tomorrow morning,” the director suggested.
“No,” cut in Aaron. “I have to finish the wood. I only have a couple of weeks.”
Stars sprinkled the backs of his hands when he was done. They were calling him for supper, ringing a steel bar. He set down the chainsaw. He had trouble flexing his fingers and his hands shook. The smell of gasoline rose from his skin and his clothing. Tomorrow, he thought, it is just the logs and the ax. My bone and muscle and will against years and years, centuries of wood. Myself against the Maker of Trees.
The maul was heavy, almost three times the weight of the ax, and his first blows the next morning glanced off the logs erratically. But he was determined to use the maul on the larger logs so he kept at it until his swinging became more sure. As the solid hits grew in number and the logs split with cracks like gunfire, a peace settled over him.
It did not last. With the rhythmic work an iron door in his mind swung open and faces burst upon his imagination, conversations, rooms, pulpits, meetings, angry sentences, words of fire, memory after memory scraping him, cutting around and around so that he struck at the logs with a sudden explosion of rage, blasting through stout rounds with a single heft of the maul. The first day of chopping ended with a snowfall that seemed to scald his forehead and cheeks. He came to the table swollen with pain.
“How goes the battle?” asked Skiff.
“I must have been out of my mind to say I’d ever go back,” spat Aaron. “Whipped like Jesus. Crucified like Jesus. By your friends. By Christians.”
He sat at the window in his room, his light out. The snow had stopped and torn-up clouds hurried over and under a half-moon. The mountain range had taken on a pristine whiteness and the moon was strong enough to give it a sharp, full, three-dimensional effect, almost as if the peaks were pulsing and throbbing, rising and floating, reminding Aaron of the luminous blacklight posters of the Sixties.
“You create so much beauty out there,” Aaron prayed. “Why can’t you do it with the human heart?”
The more rhythmically he swung the maul, the more the memories boiled up from the stew of wound and bleeding and betrayal. He tried to concentrate on how his blows landed. He learned to look for the faint crack in the top of the log and strike that squarely. The best feeling he could produce in himself came when a log split cleanly and fell away neatly from the cutting stump. The satisfaction of that hummed through his blood and his bones and even his mind paused to swallow it in, as if it were a morsel of lush scenery.
But not every log split cleanly. Sometimes his blows were off-center. Sometimes the maul blade sank into the round with a thud and apparently effected no change whatsoever. Sometimes he had to pull and pull and pry the maul loose. He learned to be wary of the logs lumpy with knots. He could strike and strike at some of these and get nowhere. Wedges would be used but frequently the wedges got stuck and it cost him more energy to drive the wedges out or through. He would pant and sweat even though it was fifteen below. The moments came when he wanted to quit. But he couldn’t leave wedges in logs or blades embedded in thick, wet wood. He thought of the retreat director sucking his white Scotch mints. I’ll be finished in a week, he’d told him. Yet he had to complete this before he left. Grunting, he yanked or beat the maul out of the knot-twisted logs.
“Some of you are hardly worth it!” he shouted.
It was important to finish each log, no matter what. It was a great victory to finally split the hardest ones in two. But there were clearly some which sapped all Aaron’s strength and still remained truculent. Not many. A few. It was hard to take, but Aaron learned to recognize these logs after a few blows and would toss them aside and never approach them again. They took too much and rewarded him with very little. When stacking came, they would go into the shed whole. A long, slow burn for somebody one winter’s night two years ahead. Someone holding the broken windows of faith in hands and shirt pockets, the fragments pricking and stabbing. Maybe a whole log would help. But to burn well, it would need a split piece too, dried by mountain wind. Maybe in the flame the hurting man, the dying woman would find God once more. Aaron had already burned other people’s anger and pain in the wood they’d left behind. He hadn’t seen much of God yet but at least his flesh had been warmed. Who were the others who had cut the wood two or three years before? Had that been a dry winter or an especially cold and snowfull one? He imagined them battling the woodpile in blizzards, cheeks and ears whitening from frostbite. Now he burned their efforts. In the month of December, the burning of this split wood in his room was the only act that seemed holy to him, a sacrifice that mattered to God, the souls of others an incense drifting up to him. Who would burn his struggles, send flames over his spirit, toss the wood he cut out of his heart into the stove and then pull out a novel, or maybe even a Bible to read? Who would his wood heal?
The woodshed took on enormous proportions when he set up his first stack of split wood. The stack cringed there, dwarfish and inconsequential - it blew down Christmas Day when a chinook gushed through the mountain passes. There was a day of rain and snow and then a high pressure system slashed out of the Arctic, so that Aaron woke to a glistening marrow-red sunrise of forty below.
It took him an hour to restack the wood, which at least had been under cover and was dry. The rest, heaped about the woodshed, split or whole, was frozen together. He whacked at it with the back end of the maul head to loosen it up, his gloves ripping as he jerked the wood from its ice cradles. When the day ended his fingers were bleeding. This went on all through January. Freezing rain, followed by ice, followed by snow, followed by subzero cold. He broke the maul handle trying to force a log from a mass of wood all iced over. He had to use the smaller ax to split. The wood broke apart quickly because it was so cold. But what the maul had done in one blow took the ax three.
“I’ll need a few more weeks yet,” Aaron told the retreat director.
The director sat, hands folded in his thin lap, and nodded, sucking at a Scotch mint.
“I thought you’d be at your new church by now,” smiled Skiff at the supper table.
“It’s taking longer to do the wood,” shrugged Aaron. “Snow. Ice. I need more time.”
“What does it matter? Let someone else do it.”
Other people came and went, on weekend retreats or day retreats. Pastors. Church members. No one Aaron knew. Some would laugh too much for him. Some would hover over fires and tables and shoulders like grey storms. Some were just taking a break. Some were hanging on for dear life. A few talked with Aaron. Sam was leaving the pastorate to go into accounting. John was returning to the military. Ben had had enough and was driving a taxi. Krystal was going into management with a big oil firm. Jerry sat with Aaron at the huge fireplace in the main lodge. The room was dark and the light flashed and flashed on their faces and bodies.
“What can I do?” The man stared into a sparking log. “I used to imagine Jesus huddled over fires like this with James and Matthew and Philip. What if they’d stopped? The heart killings came to them. But they rose from the dead. What if they’d put out the fire in the dark and gone home?”
Aaron clawed and chopped at the wood to free it from ice and snow. Then, his gloved hands slippery and shining, he would balance the logs on the stump and swing, silver spraying his face as the wood broke. Exhausted, he would end a day with an hour or two of stacking. When darkness poured over the mountains and over his eyes, the shed still looked large and empty. Eleven cords of wood. How much did he have cut and stacked now? Two or three, if he was lucky?
The days came when he didn’t want to do it anymore. He’d had enough. The adrenaline had been scorched from his body weeks ago. Now he felt tired. Alone. But it was the sort of tired that does not let you rest. And he knew if he did not go to the woodpile he would not be able to seize the bone weariness that would give him sleep. He forced himself into the rich royal blue of sky and the clear cold that traced the pattern of his spine. Chop. Cut. He had thought he would dream of the wood but he never did. His dreams were full of color and movement. No memories. No anger. No axes. No woodchips. Awake, he sat at the stove in his room and watched the stars fall gently. Wood from other tortured souls burned.
Weight melted from his body. His hair fell over his ears. Dirt worked under his skin and nails, water blisters broke and his palms thickened and yellowed. There was no one to care whether or not he grew a beard, so he let it come. Glancing into a mirror, he allowed himself a lopsided smile - he was perfect for a series of sermons on the Old Testament prophets.
February was a mercy. Yes, that was the only word that meant something. Dry and warm, chinook after chinook pulling golden fire over the foothills and forests. The wood loosened in the heat. He no longer had to break it out of its rock face of ice. Crack. Crack. The rounds split neatly, long grain exposed like a fine stone crystal. Scent rose through his being. He would chew the pale splinters for the flavour, sensing he was feeding on years as well as on minerals, on fresh resin in old trees nurtured by wind and frost and fast glittering meltwater.
He grew wearier. Sometime after Valentine’s Day he was sure the shed was half-full. But it had taken him so long to get there he despaired of ever finishing the job. Well, other things had never been finished in his life. The wood could be left too. He could walk away and be a free man anytime he liked. He’d done enough. His wife had written him a letter. What was he thinking, she wanted to know. Should they continue the separation? Should they divorce? His denomination sent a curt typewritten letter - If he divorced he could no longer serve with them as a pastor. Would he like some counseling? His pension stood at forty thousand dollars.
“Everything in me is tired,” he told Skiff. “But if I don’t chop, I can’t sleep.”
“I’ve been praying for you.”
“Thanks, Skiff.”
“It’s the terror that has to go, Aaron. I pray God will melt the ice that locks you in.”
The ax flew, a shining head painted red. At five o’clock it was still light. At six the sun remained well above the horizon. March blustered over his head - snow flurries, some rain, some cold, but more light, more warmth, slowly, the earth turning, the sun drawing near, spring advancing like a green-speared army of deep intent.
Aaron pulled an old Bible down from the bookshelf above his woodstove. How long since he had read King James? It was like delving into Hamlet or Macbeth. He chiseled away at the Psalms and the gospel of Luke. He lay back on his bed, someone’s wood work burning, the light snapping jaws on the ceiling, or no, was it David leaping in front of the ark?
“God,” he would breathe in the dark, “Oh God, Oh Father.”
Skiff met him at breakfast. “Some of us are doing a prayer walk each day to get ready for Easter. Would you like to join us?”
Aaron shook his head. “It’s good of you. But Easter is where the trees and the fallen wood are. I have to be there.”
Another stack went up, skimming the ceiling. Perhaps it was possible. The ax plunged into smaller logs now. Shorn, pieces dropped left and right from the stump. Carefully, he would build up the wood walls within the shed, as if erecting a stone wall without mortar. He had learned how to shore up the ends by laying the wood in alternate patterns. Wood stacked in December and January took on the color of honey. Greener wood was dark and stained. Round and split, small and large, knotted and smooth, clean split or ragged, the wood rose up from the ground, filling the shed.
He was no longer tired. Perhaps it could be done. If he stuck it out. He stood back frequently to look at the woodshed and its swelling substance. There is a beauty to this, how the wood fits together, he thought. Yet surely it was random. But how the symmetry then, the wholeness, the completeness? Out of January and the killing winter dark, how this?
April. He took Easter communion at the shed, sitting amidst the tall wood as if in a cathedral. He chewed the bread carefully. Drained the ceramic cup. Took a splinter of fresh birch and placed it between his teeth. Jesus and wood. Carpentry and killing. Tables, chairs, and crosses. Wood fire and light in all darkness.
Forgive me, he wrote his wife and children.
Forgive us, she responded.
Yes, yes, he penned in the light of another’s cross.
Let us love one another, he wrote the church. Even if I never preach to you again. Let us love one another.
Yes, responded the church.
May I have another chance? he wrote the denomination. May I be as one who serves? May I try to live the evangel somewhere? May I learn to shepherd and lay down my life for the sheep? May I try again to be like Jesus and not hide the wounds?
But the denomination did not respond.
“The wood is praise,” Aaron told Skiff.
They sat on a bench drenched in mountains and crystal clear sunlight. Skiff smiled, gnawing on an O Henry bar.
“Perhaps it’s time to go out then,” Skiff said.
Aaron shook his head. “I must complete it.”
“Let another take on that joy.”
“It won’t mean anything to them, just to cap off my work. Let them have their own vocation. Then it will mean something.”
“A cathedral was not built in one lifetime. Not by one man.”
“Some of this is second growth forest. Others planted it. Others cut it and drove the logs here. But it’s my task to split and build. All of it. This is what I give to God. It is all of my days. Years from now, at night, in terror, cold and alone, a man or a woman will carry the wood to their room and they will pray by its light, cry by its flame, hear God in the cracking of the poplar and birch, hope again after a week, a month, a hundred nights. It is what I have to give them. I can never know them. But we are going to Jerusalem together.”
Skiff nodded. “I ought not keep you from your worship any longer then.”
“Are you still going into insurance?”
“Sure. Insurance against evil. I’m staying with the Lord, Aaron. His walking. His campfires. His parables. His cross. And the resurrection of the dead - I’ve always wanted to find out how that fish tasted he grilled on the beach. When the morning finally comes, I’ll be with him for breakfast.”
And you could say the ax sang to God in the flash of its swing. That Aaron praised God as the wood rose to heaven. That he would not stop until it had been done and every log, every stick had found its niche in the house of God he fashioned within the eleven cord shed. That it sounded so crazy to him to think and act this way over a pile of wood. And it was so crazy. It must have been Jesus smearing dark mud and God’s spit over his eyes, fully blinding him and telling him to wash off the blindness in the pool of Siloam.
Mare’s tails shot out crimson, snapping with the coming of the light. Aaron stood looking at the cords of wood, reluctant to leave, having replaced a final piece of maple which had fallen with several dozen others during the night. The ax was propped against the stump. For another, he thought. Then he turned to go into the main lodge and the retreat director was behind him.
“That’s all,” said Aaron. “I can leave this morning. I’m meeting my wife for coffee in town.”
The director nodded. Blood light glistened over his glasses as the sun slipped up the mountain slopes. A warm wind puffed out his plaid shirt from his scarecrow frame.
Aaron looked back at the shed. “It has to be like the wood, doesn’t it? Bit by bit, cutting, stacking, ice, snow, another stack, another stack, some days ready to fly like a swallow, others just wanting to fall to your death. The splinters dig into your skin, the cold, the doubt rips at your mind. You try to pray, you try to worship, and you add another piece, and nothing is happening, you look and you look for God, and surely nothing can be happening. Jesus presses on to Golgotha. Paul presses on to Rome. Somehow we learn that God is most true when the dark is most real. All I did was swing an ax. I became a free man. Just one day after stacking another piece of a thousand pieces. I became the cathedral. It’s your whole life and maybe you’ll recognize it. Maybe another generation will see the cathedral.”
Now it was morning. The director had his hands in his pockets. But one arm reached up and around Aaron’s shoulders and a surprising strength pressed Aaron into the director’s skin and bone and life and the scent of garlic and earth, for the director worked in the greenhouse during the winter and in the garden during the summer. And there was the scent of Scotch mint. The director propelled Aaron toward the lodge as a cloud moved and the morning star, not yet obscured by the common day, lit up like a match head over the white mountains.
“Come and have breakfast,” the director said.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
a funny thing happened on the way to the pulitzer
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE PULITZER by Murray Pura
When I first began writing stories at the age of eight or nine they were exclusively genre pieces. That was because I had an audience of one – my mother – and mom’s favorite TV show at the time was a legal drama called Perry Mason. So, tailoring my story to my market, I wrote Perry Mason stories on 5x3 index cards, stapled them together along with front and back covers and an author’s bio, and distributed free advance copies to my mother. This was on the understanding I could use her endorsements on the covers of my future books. The setup worked for years as I graduated to sea stories and adventure stories and historical fiction.
In my 20s I was heavily influenced by the poetry of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes who filled my writing with simile, metaphor, and lyricism. American writers like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Chaim Potok also left their mark. I eschewed genre pieces and decided literary fiction was the way to go. Masterpieces like The Old Man and the Sea, Go Down Moses, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Chosen were buried inside me, waiting to be discovered by my imagination and brought to the light of day. No other kind of writing was so important, no other kind of fiction mattered as much. Along these lines I began to publish my first short stories and novels and received some recognition from the august literary circles where many felt as I did. The difference was clear – art like that of Norman Rockwell or Ronald Bateman paled in comparison to the works of Vincent van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci just as the stories of genre writers faded in the light of tales written by true literary masters.
Over time, I discovered that contemporary literary fiction is simply genre writing under a fancier name. Certain conventions must be observed: any expression of positive religious experience is frowned upon as are happy endings, happy characters, innocence, and bliss. Negative spiritual experience, tragic endings, dysfunctional characters, innocence lost, as well as agony and despair are welcome and praised as high art. I once complained that literary fiction had to be noir sur noir, black on black, to succeed, even though the same people who honored that approach mocked the “white on white” approach of the “feel good” genre writers. Nevertheless I persisted, trying to make a difference as a Christian writer in the turbulent realm of literary fiction.
Exactly two years ago I decided to write a genre piece for the first time since I’d been a boy. I’m not even sure now why I suddenly decided to do so – I think there was a challenge involved from someone who wanted to see if I could do it and do it well. It couldn’t be just any old genre piece, you see, it had to be a really good genre piece. So I set my literary fiction aside for several months and went to work. It was supposed to be a lark, a joke, a bit of whimsy, but as the story unfolded I took both plot and character development more and more seriously. Then, shock of shocks, it wasn’t a joke anymore: I was writing a story and I cared about it and the people caught up within it and I wanted to write the genre piece as well as I possibly could. One evening I realized I was enjoying myself and truly looking forward to my sessions with Word software and my Mac and my “genre specific” imagination. When I finished and passed the book on to my agent I felt a rush of loneliness – I missed the characters I’d created for the story, I hated to break off the relationship. Wouldn’t I ever be able to tell any of their stories again? It was like I’d lost living, breathing persons who had spent time in my kitchen, sat beside me at church, and gone on long walks along with me and my dogs.
I returned to my pastoral ministry and my literary fiction. A year later, in 2010, the book was picked up by a publishing house for release in 2012. I was gratified. So I still had the ability to write a decent genre piece! Well, that was wonderful, but I had to focus on doing the writing that really mattered, producing a book worthy of the Booker or the Nobel or even the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But then, just a few months ago, in October or November of 2010, an idea for another genre piece popped into my head. Except I didn’t call it a genre piece – I called it a story, a book, a novel. It was the real thing and it was insistent. Writers know what I’m talking about. It was one of those tales that bursts into your life and imagination and quite literally demands to be told. So I spent four months telling “the story that had to be told” and loving every minute of it. Really loving every minute of it. I wasn’t sitting in the garret agonizing over a finely tuned piece of literary fiction that resembled Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I was sitting by a fire and spinning a yarn. I felt like a Christian Louis L’Amour and it was a terrific experience.
Until I submitted the completed manuscript to my agent and then I felt that rush of loneliness I’d felt two years before when I’d handed over my first genre piece. I even felt a mild depression – would I never be able to talk about the lives of my new set of characters again? Wouldn’t someone let me do a series? Was I saying goodbye to these people forever? I realized these “genre piece characters” had become very real and very dear to me and that I was unwilling to let them go. Then I decided the only way to snap out of it was to do the obvious – keep writing. Not a genre piece even though others would considered it a genre piece. I would write a story, a good, decent, as big and beautiful as life story.
Which is what I’m doing now. Writing my third genre piece that I do not think of as a genre piece, but as another tale locked inside me that has to be let out and told as well as I can. In fact, I plan to write another couple after this one before the year is out. Hey, what’s going on, you ask? What happened to your passion for writing literary fiction? Well, I’m still doing that too. I spent most of 2010 writing a novel that is going to be published in another few weeks. Except I don’t think of it as a ”literary fiction piece” anymore. Like the book I just finished and the one I’m embarking on right now, it’s a story, and I tried to write that story a well as I could with all the fire and force and light within me, and I thanked God for it when I was done.
What writing pieces I no longer call “genre specific pieces for the industry” did for me was set me free and I mean that. I was totally at liberty to write about love and God and Jesus and prayer and spirituality and forgiveness and good old-fashioned adventure and romance without any fear of censure or disapproval or being warned I wasn’t producing “true art”. I’ve been having the time of my life, yet I’ve still been working hard at writing well and telling a story well. I’m a storyteller again like I was when I was a child and I’m writing my stories for my audience of one or a hundred and I’m writing my stories for Christ. How can it get any better than that? I have a million stories in me all waiting to get out and I intend to do what I can to let them walk and talk and breathe and praise God in the lives they live in readers’ hearts and minds and souls.
They say you can’t go home again. But you can.
I have.
When I first began writing stories at the age of eight or nine they were exclusively genre pieces. That was because I had an audience of one – my mother – and mom’s favorite TV show at the time was a legal drama called Perry Mason. So, tailoring my story to my market, I wrote Perry Mason stories on 5x3 index cards, stapled them together along with front and back covers and an author’s bio, and distributed free advance copies to my mother. This was on the understanding I could use her endorsements on the covers of my future books. The setup worked for years as I graduated to sea stories and adventure stories and historical fiction.
In my 20s I was heavily influenced by the poetry of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes who filled my writing with simile, metaphor, and lyricism. American writers like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Chaim Potok also left their mark. I eschewed genre pieces and decided literary fiction was the way to go. Masterpieces like The Old Man and the Sea, Go Down Moses, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Chosen were buried inside me, waiting to be discovered by my imagination and brought to the light of day. No other kind of writing was so important, no other kind of fiction mattered as much. Along these lines I began to publish my first short stories and novels and received some recognition from the august literary circles where many felt as I did. The difference was clear – art like that of Norman Rockwell or Ronald Bateman paled in comparison to the works of Vincent van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci just as the stories of genre writers faded in the light of tales written by true literary masters.
Over time, I discovered that contemporary literary fiction is simply genre writing under a fancier name. Certain conventions must be observed: any expression of positive religious experience is frowned upon as are happy endings, happy characters, innocence, and bliss. Negative spiritual experience, tragic endings, dysfunctional characters, innocence lost, as well as agony and despair are welcome and praised as high art. I once complained that literary fiction had to be noir sur noir, black on black, to succeed, even though the same people who honored that approach mocked the “white on white” approach of the “feel good” genre writers. Nevertheless I persisted, trying to make a difference as a Christian writer in the turbulent realm of literary fiction.
Exactly two years ago I decided to write a genre piece for the first time since I’d been a boy. I’m not even sure now why I suddenly decided to do so – I think there was a challenge involved from someone who wanted to see if I could do it and do it well. It couldn’t be just any old genre piece, you see, it had to be a really good genre piece. So I set my literary fiction aside for several months and went to work. It was supposed to be a lark, a joke, a bit of whimsy, but as the story unfolded I took both plot and character development more and more seriously. Then, shock of shocks, it wasn’t a joke anymore: I was writing a story and I cared about it and the people caught up within it and I wanted to write the genre piece as well as I possibly could. One evening I realized I was enjoying myself and truly looking forward to my sessions with Word software and my Mac and my “genre specific” imagination. When I finished and passed the book on to my agent I felt a rush of loneliness – I missed the characters I’d created for the story, I hated to break off the relationship. Wouldn’t I ever be able to tell any of their stories again? It was like I’d lost living, breathing persons who had spent time in my kitchen, sat beside me at church, and gone on long walks along with me and my dogs.
I returned to my pastoral ministry and my literary fiction. A year later, in 2010, the book was picked up by a publishing house for release in 2012. I was gratified. So I still had the ability to write a decent genre piece! Well, that was wonderful, but I had to focus on doing the writing that really mattered, producing a book worthy of the Booker or the Nobel or even the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But then, just a few months ago, in October or November of 2010, an idea for another genre piece popped into my head. Except I didn’t call it a genre piece – I called it a story, a book, a novel. It was the real thing and it was insistent. Writers know what I’m talking about. It was one of those tales that bursts into your life and imagination and quite literally demands to be told. So I spent four months telling “the story that had to be told” and loving every minute of it. Really loving every minute of it. I wasn’t sitting in the garret agonizing over a finely tuned piece of literary fiction that resembled Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I was sitting by a fire and spinning a yarn. I felt like a Christian Louis L’Amour and it was a terrific experience.
Until I submitted the completed manuscript to my agent and then I felt that rush of loneliness I’d felt two years before when I’d handed over my first genre piece. I even felt a mild depression – would I never be able to talk about the lives of my new set of characters again? Wouldn’t someone let me do a series? Was I saying goodbye to these people forever? I realized these “genre piece characters” had become very real and very dear to me and that I was unwilling to let them go. Then I decided the only way to snap out of it was to do the obvious – keep writing. Not a genre piece even though others would considered it a genre piece. I would write a story, a good, decent, as big and beautiful as life story.
Which is what I’m doing now. Writing my third genre piece that I do not think of as a genre piece, but as another tale locked inside me that has to be let out and told as well as I can. In fact, I plan to write another couple after this one before the year is out. Hey, what’s going on, you ask? What happened to your passion for writing literary fiction? Well, I’m still doing that too. I spent most of 2010 writing a novel that is going to be published in another few weeks. Except I don’t think of it as a ”literary fiction piece” anymore. Like the book I just finished and the one I’m embarking on right now, it’s a story, and I tried to write that story a well as I could with all the fire and force and light within me, and I thanked God for it when I was done.
What writing pieces I no longer call “genre specific pieces for the industry” did for me was set me free and I mean that. I was totally at liberty to write about love and God and Jesus and prayer and spirituality and forgiveness and good old-fashioned adventure and romance without any fear of censure or disapproval or being warned I wasn’t producing “true art”. I’ve been having the time of my life, yet I’ve still been working hard at writing well and telling a story well. I’m a storyteller again like I was when I was a child and I’m writing my stories for my audience of one or a hundred and I’m writing my stories for Christ. How can it get any better than that? I have a million stories in me all waiting to get out and I intend to do what I can to let them walk and talk and breathe and praise God in the lives they live in readers’ hearts and minds and souls.
They say you can’t go home again. But you can.
I have.
Friday, February 04, 2011
holy quotes 9
It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.
Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)