Yes, You Can! Touch Another's Life

Two weeks ago I opened the small book that had laid on the table all summer (except for when it was in my pack at the Boundary Waters). The first time I had read it, I didn't realize the author had also penned these words:

“The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done... The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”i

When I first read Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner (pronounced Beek-ner) I was at a crossroads. For months an awareness had been growing in me which I felt would be wrong to ignore. I knew that as a clergyperson I was expected to respond in a certain way yet in my bones I felt myself being let in another direction. I had made a habit in recent years of following such leadings but, mindful of how easily we can be swayed toward our own preference, I was cautious. I prayed… I journaled… I listened and watched… I prayed some more...Then, one momentous day in April, as the city readied itself for a snowstorm, I began reading. But not for long. I stopped short on page 3. 

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition – that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.”ii

It's important, the author explained, to tell the secret of who we are, even if only to ourselves, lest we begin to accept the version we show the world. Telling our secrets helps us to see where we've been and where we're headed. Our telling also encourages others to share their secrets with us. Such exchanges are “what being human is all about.”

Opening my journal, I began to write, copying those first two sentences and then composing my response. As I worked, I found peace and knew what was next for me. My life’s path was shaped, in part, by these words which confirmed what I already knew but wasn’t ready to believe on my own. I would live my truth – whether it worked out well, whether I faced repercussions, or not. 

We each have the potential to affect another’s life. It’s not just preachers and writers (though Buechner was both.) I began posting here again not because of the “Rev.” that precedes my name but because I have things to say that could lend others courage or temporarily lighten their load.

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”iii

That said, Buechner's art is part of what has kept me from pursuing a long-held dream. Although sometimes more florid than I prefer, he wrote as I’d like to write. I can’t compete. My writer-daughter would say I don’t need to – I just need to write my story. True, yet it’s hard to see past his ability to shape words into ideas. (Don’t even get me started on Victor Hugo!) 

Only after I began rereading Keeping Secrets on August 15th, did I realize Buechner's contribution to this incapacity. 

On that day, I read again that he was ten in 1936. “Hm, that’s the year Daddy was born.” And then “This was published in 1991. Thirty years ago. He’d be 96 today. He’s probably dead.” This thought left me sad. And surprised at the sadness. 

I too believe that “Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention” and found it an odd coincidence that – as I learned a few days later – Frederich Buechner died on August 15th. 

It seems strange that he’s gone when he had only recently come alive for me. I empathized when he wanted to fix his daughter’s illness. Sat with him in the cramped space of Little Ease, knowing that a place of torment can become home. Nodded when he said that a rustly license plate propped on the bookshelf was “as holy a relic as I have ever seen.” And I’m thankful, because my life is better for having known him, even just a little.

“One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.”iv

i   Found at frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2021/7/18/vocation on August 26, 2022, originally published in Wishful Thinking, 1973.
ii  Found at frederickbuechner.com/telling-secrets on August 26, 2022, originally published in Telling Secrets, 1991.
iii Found at frederickbuechner.com/listening-to-your-life on August 26, 2022, originally published in Now and Then, 1983.
iv Found at libquotes.com/frederick-buechner/quote/lbd4a2z on August 26, 2022, originally published in The Hungering Dark, 1981.

A Wilderness Reflection

How well do you listen for that calm, inner voice?

Since returning from our Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area adventure eight days ago, I had been unpacking the experience, listening (at least, I thought I was), trying to discern what to tell you. I wanted to write about something beyond paddling, wind, and water. Each day I asked the heavens for a thread of an idea. If one was offered, I missed it. Until today. A single thread showed up in not one but two devotional readings. (Okay, one was a New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks, “The Man Who Found His Inner Depths” but it was a tribute to Frederick Buechner who died this week.) Thank you!

In Rachel Hackenberg’s UCC devotional called “Ashamed,” the author spoke of how “being listened to without judgment allowed me to be everything I loathed myself for being but didn’t let others see…” For an hour, a friend simply listened as she wept. From that, Rachel began to trust that healing awaited even her. That's nothing like my topic but the word listening jumped off the screen as I read. This is it! Brooks’ piece (next week, I'll offer a reflection on some of Buechner’s words) accented that awareness.

As we paddled onto Lake One our first morning, I was struck by the near-palpable silence. The lake was calm. We were surrounded by nature’s beauty. Besides a variety of trees and undergrowth on all sides, we had already seen a large snapping turtle sunning itself on a log and countless smaller painted turtles on rocks that jutted from the water. An eagle flew just ahead of us as if beckoning. I felt awed. That evening, the quiet seemed so intense that my tinnitus (a symptom of the Lyme) grew to gigantic proportion. Listening can be hard, even painful, at times but it’s still a gift.

After nine days listening to my friend’s actions and silences, I know them more truly. I know myself better too. A few days in, it came to me as we paddled – epiphanies always came while paddling – I’m strong! Having spent so much time sitting and lying around the last two years, I’ve lost muscle mass, only some of which I’ve regained. Yet there we were – doing this amazing thing – venturing through a wilderness with only a map and a compass. And as we paddled for hours each day and carried everything across and over portages from one lake to another, I could feel my strength return.

Another day, another lake, another awareness. A sense of “all-right-ness.” Although these last years have been hard, I don’t need to fret. In the wilderness, I found I was capable. During the weeks before the trip, I had feared I was taking on too much, too soon but my limitations weren’t what I had believed. I did all I had to do. Even now, I have unplumbed depths. Reflecting further, I realize that it was only because my mind was clear of all save how to keep paddling through eighteen-inch swells that I could hear this message. 

Let me again express the hope that through the sharing of my experiences and learnings, you might come to know yourself more fully as well. We each have unplumbed depths. Through all the stuff that life sets in our path, our ability to continue putting one foot in front of the other, to get out of bed each morning, or to speak our truth and to go on from there, resides in our willingness to allow God as Spirit to empower us. To fill us and to use what is then in us for our own, and for the world’s, best good. This is our best superpower. After the isolation of pandemic, we may have forgotten. Let the reminder sink in. Even when you’re the solitary figure, fearful and empty, you need never strive alone.

Pathogens still inhabit every part of my body but while I work to eliminate their threat I’m also less consumed by it than I was before the trip. The world offers many things about which to worry (and pray) and yet, for now, I remain centered. I have breathed in a sense of rebirth on viewing lush green hillsides that only eleven years ago seemed a fire-blackened wasteland. Having heard that inner voice, I am uplifted, converted by a fresh sense that

All shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well. (Julian of Norwich)

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Do We Take Friendship for Granted?

We stood, facing each other in our black gowns and mortarboards outside Philips Hall, that Gothic-style building whose red-velvet-seated auditorium we knew well.

“Let’s stay in touch,” she said, handing me her address.

Surprised, I took the slip of paper. “Sure.”

Lisa and I had met while waiting to audition for West Chester State College’s School of Music, she on flute, I on clarinet. (I was accepted as a piano major, she as a bassoon major.) We became friends in the way classmates do, through regular interaction in classes and ensembles, in the halls. We each joined Sigma Alpha Iota, a women’s music fraternity (yes, fraternity, to highlight that this was not a social club) and eventually served as officers together. Yet for all that, I never felt that we were close. Still…

I really tried to correspond regularly but my efforts were repressed by an assumption and by another, well-meaning, letter-writer. Grandma McIntosh who wrote me pages and pages would include some version of “I wish you’d write more often” in each of her letters. This undid me. I hadn’t yet realized that we all think our lives are ordinary. No one would want to read about my life. Even when living in New Mexico teaching Navajo youth, a place and a situation completely unfamiliar to most, I’d lament, “I have nothing to say!”

Lisa and I wrote back and forth for six or seven years. Her letters were prompt and full of newsy bits while I struggled to fill a page and a half (again not realizing that what I deemed ordinary would make good stories for someone living in New Jersey with a husband and three daughters). Eventually I received a “Dear Jayneann” letter: She needed a friend who made the effort to connect regularly and she was cutting me off.

As an adult, I’ve had friendships in tae kwon do class or with colleagues but none of them were close. (It’s no one’s fault; this is simply part of how I function. I take a l-o-n-g time to connect.) Not really understanding what close friendship is, I would listen longingly as others spoke of doing things together and about the friends who were always there for them.

This is the backdrop for my question:

Do you realize how truly amazing it is to have a friend?!

Researchers indicate that whatever happens in our lives, however wonderful or terrible the event, we will soon revert to our previous happiness set-point. You could win the lottery, lose the love of your life (or find them), travel the world for a year. In the end you'd be no happier or sadder than you were before it occurred. I have no reason to doubt this so I suspect that those of you with close friends seldom consider how truly blessed you are.

How do I know you’re blessed? Because I have a friend. And when I pause to consider our friendship I am blown away. This friend dropped everything to take me to and sit with me in the emergency room after I broke my foot last year. We hang out, talk and laugh together, hike or snowshoe… My friend tells me when I have food in my teeth and also that this thing that I do, this habit, is annoying. Wow…

Later this month, the two of us will head to the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area. I’ve wanted to visit there since hearing four years ago about endless lakes and meteor showers and old-growth red pines. Blueberries will be ripe. (Hopefully the bears will share.) The BWCWA is a designated Dark Sky Place and I look forward to seeing the night sky well again. The Milky Way. The Perseid meteor shower.

I’ve been lifting baby-weights to strengthen my shoulders. I’m uncertain about my stamina but we have no agenda so when the tick-disease-induced fatigue surfaces we’ll slow down. I’ve been tenting for as long as I can remember. And although I’d done almost no canoeing until recently I really enjoy it. Wild places nourish my spirit.

Soon, we’ll load up the Prius, head out and… the adventure will continue. I intend to return with great memories!

I'm taking a break for a couple weeks but I’ll be back after that. See you then!