Lenten Journal

2-20-07

After the Mardi Gras poetry reading at Goshen College last night--where we read poetry about New Orleans and Hurricanes and the rebuilding after Katrina and Rita and then announced the winners of the Broadside Poetry Contest, crowning them King and Queen--Ash Wednesday seems slow and weary. Almost like a New Year's Day, when resolutions suddenly seem daunting and dreary, and one's waistline swells with the previous evening's indulgences. The students in my Spiritual Writings of Women class are beginning their Lenten projects today, and so I thought I'd begin mine, too. I will keep a simple commonplace book, copy down a poem a day into a handmade book created by a young artist from Elkhart, Indiana, an act of listening to other voices. Something that it appears I will need to practice more and more with age. "Mother was sad that no one wanted her advice any more," one of my sisters told me over Christmas. We lost her in 2004 and we are still very much in mourning. She was such a wise woman, so full of experience, and yet, sadly, she was right--we didn't want much advice. We just wanted her to listen as we stumbled about our lives, and slogged through our mistakes, learning on our own. Listening is hard for me, especially at this busy time in my teaching semester when I have no time for my own writing, and I'm just bursting with ideas. Now even the classroom doesn't seem the place to express them. I've never tried a blog before, but in these days when I'm at the computer a lot and I keep misplacing my notebook, I thought I'd give it a chance. Perhaps writing out the voices in my head will help me open my head and heart enough to listen more attentively.

Yesterday a lovely student told me in an email that he thought that there wasn't enough discussion in class, because after I spoke there was nothing left for them to say. "You know the material so well and you've thought about it so much, that perhaps they are intimidated. Your comments are very good, but if you could save them for later in the class period, perhaps more people would speak up." So that was today's plan. I'd asked students to respond to one entry from Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, choosing in a lectio divina manner what chose them, and write about it. I was thrilled with the responses I was receiving over email. One student wrote about "Blood"--it connected the Vagina Monologues and the notion of honoring the body with incarnational Christianity for her. Another wrote about "Exorcism"--a word that's terrified her so much that she's afraid to watch movies on the subject. (I don't blame her--I also avoid them like the plague.) But when she discovered Kathleen's view of demon possession as addiction, she began to re-possess the word. Another student confronted her own fears about owning her own spiritual journey through Norris's entry on doubt and unbelief. So I lit a candle and then asked students to read their responses aloud, suggesting a bit of silence in between. Well, perhaps these students are such good listeners that they don't need to talk, but my --there certainly was silence! Was it reflection, or fear, or intimidation, or boredom? I felt so let down after class. What I'd expected, the gathering of a bouquet of voices, didn't happen. It didn't feel like any flower arranging was going on. The flowers stayed put in their individual plastic holders, nodding at each other vaguely across the room. They had gathered in my mind only, during late night and early morning reading on the internet. Perhaps this isn't fair. Perhaps these students' efforts were the seeds of future dialogue. Risking the sharing in the group is scary for them. They didn't read the most personal parts that would really have helped them connect to each other. Open the heart. Breathe in the fragments, breathe out unity. Keep doing it. Keep doing it, Ann.

I've been listening to Pema Chodron on Tonglen. I started last Thursday morning, when Elizabeth, my daughter, called at 7 in the morning to see if she could drop off Willow, her daughter, for the morning. I'd risen at 5:30 so I could read papers and would have had just enough time to finish them by the time I met Senior Seminar at 12:30, but now, Willow was coming my way with her seven months of energy and delight, and I would also have to drive out in the snow to get Lorana, the Amish woman who cleans for me. I knew Lizzie needed me--she needed to sand walls before the painter arrived, she said, and I didn't know how she'd so it even without Willow--so I said OK and tried to breathe my way through school preparations with Julia and David, Willow on my hip. The house was a disaster, and I couldn't even seem to get dishes in the dishwasher before the cleaning help came. At one point I lay Willow, who was clinging to me, down on the floor so I could get a load out of the washer and into the dryer. She just screamed her bloody head off. Well, this is not quality child care, I thought. Not what she deserves. How was I going to calm my racing heart, bucking with the pressure of all I had to get done and a child to care for who needs all the calmness I can muster? I snatched the Pema Chodron conversation with Alice Walker tape out of my office, buckled the screaming Willow into her car seat, and drove to get Lorana, listening to the voices of these two calm wise women. I'd heard the tape before, but wasn't really listening. This time I practiced the basic instructions for Tonglen as I drove by snow-covered Amish farms, the sun rise glow still in the sky. And I began to calm down. Open the heart I kept telling myself. Open the heart. And now, with Tonglen, I was being asked to take in suffering and breathe out joy and peace. So Willow lulled into sleep and I began to remember to breathe and I opened the heart. I began to feel how suffering can dissolve like alka selzer with the breath. Those hard knots of resistance and pain. A kind of lamaze for the groaning psyche, the groaning earth. And I made a space for Willow, and a space for myself, and all my papers did not get done for the seminar, but some did, and the world did not end.