“Man Makes Plans; God Laughs”

One thing growing up above a funeral home teaches a person is that life can change on a dime. This past Friday I discovered that my mental list–from the mundane to the catastrophic–of the things that might send the future I expect into the toilet is woefully inadequate and an exercise in black humor. It is just another way to try to control things, but I can’t. I’m too limited. Not in a hundred years would I have thought that in the middle of an everyday conversation, with no pain and little warning, the vision in one of my eyes would turn to mist. So instead of spending Friday night with friends and Saturday at a kayaking seminar, I spent Friday afternoon in an emergency room and Friday night having emergency outpatient eye surgery for a retinal tear. For the next week at least I sleep partially upright and sit with my head at a weird angle. And the vision in my right eye will take weeks, if not months to return clearly, well after the tear is healed.

As far as things that can go wrong with our eyes, this one is fixable and will only involve discomfort, feeling off balance for a while, and being patient. I am near a top tier eye hospital, and my family is picking up the slack while I recover this week. As the adage goes, “Things could be worse.” Much worse. It hasn’t been fun, but it has reminded me of how much is precious in my life, and how grateful I am for the Lord’s strength, for people who love me, for excellent doctors, for my craftmatic bed and for my sight. I’m not sure why living fully in the present is such a difficult lesson, requiring constant repetition. Maybe it’s part of being amphibian creatures, as C.S. Lewis calls us in The Screwtape Letters, eternal souls living in finite, mortal bodies, one foot in time and one foot in eternity. Our life in time is fragile, and we should not expect otherwise, but it is also a gift.

So I’m in school again, relearning this life lesson once again and in new ways. But as an aside, if you see black or lightning squiggles out of your peripheral vision, go immediately to an opthamologist, and if the vision in one eye goes to mist get to an emergency room. Usually between fifty and sixty the gel in our eyes liquefy and shrink a little, sometimes pulling tissue with it. I’d never heard of this before. Maybe my experience will help someone out there be forewarned and forearmed. Meanwhile my daughter is calling me Cyclops. Did I mention I’m learning humility, too?

High Tea

I am an Anglophile. It came on slowly, beginning in high school with my love affair with Jane Austen and the world of Regency England. Then I was attracted by Oxford and the Inklings. A series of popular history books by Thomas B. Costain on the Plantagenet dynasty cemented my passion for all things English. I’m not quite in the category of mania, but avid maybe an understatement. The world of High Tea and English breakfasts and authentic fish and chips were three must-have experiences when I finally had my chance to cross the pond. Of the three, the one that stood up to expectation was High Tea. I felt like a bit of a rube at Brown’s Hotel, but I didn’t care. Knowing this, every so often a friend will ask me to partake of a touch of England here in New Jersey by inviting me to tea. This past Saturday was my most recent foray. My friend Julie invited me to go to a tearoom near her home.

I practiced all week holding my fine bone china tea cup with its delicate array  of violets with my pinky just so. Julie told me this wasn’t a place I had to dress up for, but it took all my willpower not to put on flower prints and lace. I am not the frilly-type normally, but this was High Tea, and in my own mind I was lady of the manor for a couple short hours. My compromise was to go bohemian.

We pulled up to an old Victorian house with peeling lavender paint and a lovely but overgrown garden. We walk in the door, and we were in the middle of a florist/gift shop with the lace and flower prints I wasn’t wearing exploding from every square inch. There was so much stuff that for a minute I felt dizzy from sensory overload, so I was a bit dazed as Julie led me through the labyrinthine shelves to a small glass conservatory with tables covered with a pretty, large-flowered chintz and matching upholstered chairs. Every detail had a worn, proportioned elegance. It was a room that really needed a hug. I’d entered the drawing room of one of the old aristocratic families that badly needed to marry a son to the heiress daughter of an American Robber Baron. I had to do some fast reworking of my fantasy, but I held tenaciously to my English tea dreams. I could do frayed gentility.

Then the barefooted, dirt-streaked urchin pattered into the room and offered us cast iron tea weights as chocolates followed by a four-footed black fur-duster that snuffled at our feet for crumbs. I was obviously in a parody of a Dickens’ novel, or maybe a Doctor Who episode. After three return visits from the urchin and fur-duster I surrendered. My pretensions were punctured. I was in South Jersey in a rundown Victorian with an overstressed proprietor, but I had great company, delicious cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey Green tea, and a good laugh at myself. That’s my definition of an afternoon well-spent.

Why This Writer Writes, Part 4

I write because I have a story to tell. I will never quite understand what happened the particular day I got the idea for my five novel series The Fire-Dragon Star Cycle, but I have read and heard the life stories of too many writers to claim it was a unique experience, the most recent being J.K. Rowling. I had long wanted to write fiction and made several starts, using semi-autobiographical events as a jumping off point. No matter how persistent I was, my ideas never took on life. Then one day six years ago, there it was, like an implosion of ideas from a wide-range of my reading. It was fully formed and my three main characters Samantha Fitzroy, Father A. David Fitzroy (once King Arthur), and Finn stood before me. It was a world where the intriguing mention in Genesis about the Nephilim, sometimes interpreted as the offspring of angels and humans, lived and worked for and against the planet and its inhabitants. Avalon was a place where all the stories are true. Only after the fact did I realize where all the elements came from, even many tiny details, i.e., why Sam had red hair and her siblings were triplets named JD, Jack and Jamie.

I discovered I was more storyteller than novelist. I was not writing literature and probably never would (a major obstacle for one whose education and training is literature). I was surprised at how much research it took to fully realize the fictional world I’d imagined in an instant, but I loved it. It’s taken years of writing to give the story texture and nuance and make it true to itself. Like life, I discovered my characters in layers until they lived and breathed, often confounding my plans for them. Most of all I had to understand as well as I could, the historical context of the late fifth/early sixth century in Britain; Celtic, Welsh and Roman life and custom; and the various incarnations of Arthurian tradition and literature. Sometimes it was frustrating to live within its limits, but the integrity of the story demanded it.

In the last phase I discovered a drastic change had to be made in how my Arthur would have lived to be true to Welsh tradition, law, and custom. I wanted to be as true as possible to the historical context, but by then certain elements of the 12th and 13th-century romances were too integral to the story, despite their absence in the earliest Welsh tradition (before Geoffrey of Monmouth, or as the experts call it pre-Galfridian). Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, once told me in an online book discussion that an author of fantasy will inevitably meet a few things in their story that can’t be explained entirely by logic, but they are necessary things to happen. When confronted with that situation, the writer must serve the story. She just has to hope that she has woven her fictional world well enough that the necessary suspension of disbelief is as effortless as possible. So I served the story. Now the first of the five parts of my story is done, and each of the other four are in rough draft form.  Marketing comes next, and I am ready to face that gauntlet and whatever comes of it. I have confronted the analogous question of the tree falling in the forest: Is a story only a story if it is read (and bought)? No . . . and yes.

Meanwhile I write and serve the story that claimed me one late winter day. Ironically, once started, I am teeming with ideas for other things to write. I write because I have stories to tell.

Full Circle

In my late teens I confronted that perennial question “What do I want to be when I grow up?” I had started out as an Art major and then switched to English Secondary Ed., but I ended up spending most of my time volunteering, working with high school kids and tutoring poor rural children. I assessed that I had two sets of gifts–people gifts and artistic gifts. I could not reconcile them. Creating is a persistent solitary pursuit. In my mind it was either/or, and helping people and righting societal wrongs were obviously the more valuable callings. I didn’t bother to ask, but I was sure God thought so. Helping people was a good fit, and I tried to do it as creatively as possible, but by my late thirties I was depressed and empty. I felt lopsided. I’d over-developed one side of who I was and put the other half in cold storage, and it wouldn’t let me ignore it any longer.

I went back to school and decided my original idea of teaching English integrated most of the things I’d found most fulfilling in the various jobs I’d done as well as what energized me most in my personal life. After two years of subbing and a year-long temp job, I discovered I was right. Big problem: I lived in a saturated market for teachers and moving out of the metropolitan area wasn’t an option. Financial need drove me back to jobs I’d done before, and it wasn’t bad. Finishing my undergrad degree and my MA and excelling at both had filled a lot of the emptiness I’d felt and eased much of my self-doubt.

Then I became debilitated by a chronic illness. No one could tell me whether I was ever going to get well enough to get back to an active life, so part of this new journey was figuring out how I could live fully and richly within these new confines. I began to write and research and write. Vocationally I have never been so happy. And I am on the verge of sending one fruit of that labor into the world again, but it has coincided with a strange twist in my journey.

Lately a number of things have caused me to reflect on that younger woman who was out in the world immersed in other people’s lives and active in social justice issues. I still have physical limitations, but I am able to do much more than I could five years ago. I began to notice how passionately I wrote in this blog about social concerns. And I began to realize that it’s time to find a way to do both. I’m not sure yet what I’ll settle on, but I have a few ideas to explore. I live near one of the poorest and most crime-ridden cities in the country, so I should have a few options. I know now that the creative end of things is where I feel called vocationally, but avocationally I need to act in some way to put hands and feet to the concerns that burn in my heart. It’s time to be whole.

“Let Right Be Done”

I just finished watching David Mamet’s “The Winslow Boy.” It is the story of a boy (Guy Edwards) in his early teens who gets expelled from the British Naval College for stealing a five shilling postal order and cashing it. The boy swears to his family that he is innocent, and they believe him. His father (movingly played by Nigel Hawthorne) takes up the cause to clear his son’s name, with the active support of his only daughter Catherine.

The family comes close to beggaring itself to hire the best barrister available (Jeremy Northam), and Catherine and Ronnie’s older brother Dickie both suffer major personal losses in their future prospects, all to clear young Ronnie’s name. Catherine insists that the fight continue because it is right. The phrase “Let right be done” is coined, and it is taken up as a rallying cry throughout the UK as people see the boy’s case as a David vs. Goliath battle.

Interestingly the boy is the least concerned about this crusade. He continues to declare his innocence, but he is settled in a new school happily enough. Throughout the adults around him care passionately about what is happening but conduct themselves in understated ways that seem so at odds with the toll it is taking on each of them. The well-acted, well-written script and the pace kept me involved. Rebecca Pigeon’s character Catherine (a beautifully restrained performance) proved the center of gravity for the film, but Mamet keeps his audience from the dramatic moments. The movie is almost entirely a series of quiet conversations.

Two-thirds of the way through I began to agree with the mother (Gemma Jones) who asked the point of their sacrifice, in her view for her husband’s pride’s sake. Ronnie was happy and doing well where he was. No one would have known about the incident if the father had not insisted on taking the matter public, and now their entire quality of life had been reduced. Then I realized that the audience’s emotional investment in the trial had been neutralized for a purpose: what motivates our choices? Do we champion a cause because of its consequences or because it is right? Do we champion a cause because it engages our passions or because it is right? Do we do it for what it will gain us, or because it is right? And if for right, is any cost too great?

Setting a precedent that right should be measured by what it will cost us is a silent thief that will rob us in ways we can’t imagine. I would have thought I agreed with that premise, but Mamet revealed my hypocrisy when Mrs. Winslow questioned the motivations and cost of insisting the world know that their son had been treated unjustly without due process, and I was right there with her. I won’t give away the outcome, but the way Mr. Winslow and Catherine discover the verdict is so anticlimactic in the most perfect way. “Let right be done.” Such a seemingly simple statement, but so very deceptive. One can never know where it will lead, but does it matter?

Memory Quilt

The last couple days have been a vivid reminder that human lives have seasons, and lately I seem to be revisiting mine in vignette experiences. For example I picked up my grandson at preschool yesterday, a vivid deja vu of an earlier day standing amidst a crowd of young parents, and the teacher’s nursery school voice pitched for us to hear, “I see Brandon’s mom, and Susie’s dad,” as she released the children one by one (you know, the one Miss Janie used on “Romper Room” when she looked in her magic mirror). Then to avoid a backup on the Schuykill Expressway I decided to go to New Jersey the back way, which required traveling roads I hadn’t driven in twelve years. I’d forgotten route 73 has construction perenially every couple miles. Then we got to the border between Philadelphia and Montgomery County, PA, and the only two roads I knew to get me to where I needed to go (Lincoln Drive) were closed, which left me traveling the highways and byways of Germantown. Thirty years ago I had a working knowledge of said streets, and familiar names floated up from the recesses of lost memory while my anchor to my present in the backseat began to ask, “How much longer, Grandma?”

When I got home Benjamin saw that the crib he’s always slept in had been dismantled, a reminder for both of us that he’s moving into a new season of life. Later in the afternoon I wrote an e-mail to a friend from high school who’d just gotten in touch on MySpace. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in thirty-eight years, and the time I knew him best was 8th-10th grade. That’s a time of my life I haven’t thought of in an eon, and it’s been one of those sweet serendipities.

Today I have been going through my reading journal of the last eight years in my latest website fad GoodReads.com that my daughter Sarah invited me to join, so we can stay in touch with what each other is reading. I’ve input and rated four-hundred book titles onto my page in the past couple days, but the titles I added today are not only a record of my pleasure reading since 1999, but my research for my Master’s thesis and my research for my novels. It is a record of a great deal of invested time that I haven’t considered before. Then I took my dog Charlie for a walk and saw the effusion of violets and a yellow wildflower that now carpet the bank of Newton Lake, which I first fell in love with last spring. Finally I got a call that a wonderful woman who has inspired me greatly these past seven years has died after a bought with cancer. She was a model I aspire to emulate in growing older with grace, generosity, joy and faithfulness.

So it’s been a journey from 13 to now and a glimpse into a season yet to come, all in two days time. It’s reminded me of how far I’ve come and that I am not nearly grateful enough.

Mourning Jane

It’s 8 p.m. (EDT) here in the U.S. In an hour Masterpiece Theatre will be on PBS here, but I will be going through withdrawal. The Complete Jane Austen is over. It was the first time versions of all six of her published novels were broadcast in succession. Granted a couple of the novels were super-compressed to fit in ninety minutes, but the four new versions and the rebroadcast of the older versions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma were a literary-cinematic feast. Even the biographical episode was very good and more on the mark than the recent film Becoming Jane. My book Complete Novels of Jane Austen has mysteriously disappeared from my bookshelf, so I can’t even ease my way with reading my old favorites.

Many have tried to explain the resurgence in Austen’s popularity over the past twenty-five years. Likely many of those behind the surge discovered Austen during puberty as I did and imagined themselves being strong, witty young women like Elizabeth Bennett with our own Mr. Darcys waiting. And then they returned to the novels a few years later and found something more. During my literary studies I had a bad case of Austen envy of those scholars who’d gotten there a generation or two earlier and amply plowed the field, leaving little ground unturned unless one was willing to go to extremes that stretched Jane’s “little bits of lace” out of shape. I esteemed her too much to focus on anything but her words, so I chose to dance around her and focus on other authors of the same period, particularly women (mostly Gothic writers). That way I could often draw her in through allusion. Reading deeply and analyzing the work of her peers have given me an even greater appreciation of how unique and rare her novels were. Wordy and more often than not ponderous was the style of the day. Even the James Patterson of the day, Sir Walter Scott, was not immune. Only one author came close in lightness of touch, Fanny Burney, though she did not have Austen’s gift for three-dimensional characters whose conflicts arise from human interactions and attitudes that are timeless and universal.

Limited as this is, I at last admit I have been a closet avid student of Jane and get to express that there is no one like Jane Austen. I mourn with legions of fans that she ventured publication so late and died too soon.  Oh, PBS, could you not have stretched it out just a wee bit longer?

Harmony in Counterpoint

I just watched “Bonhoeffer,” a documentary on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I am writing with my mind a rabbit warren of thoughts, emotions and questions. Normally I’d wait and live with it a little longer, but I can’t shake the need to write now. Little did I know that my thoughts about Wilberforce two days ago were only half of a story. Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer were both men of a deep, personal faith in Christ who shared a belief that following Christ meant wading into the messiness of life to stand with those who are oppressed, but their methods and outcomes could not be more at odds.

Wilberforce persevered through legal means to speak out for those without a voice and eventually succeeded in changing the law, taking a big step in the ongoing battle for equality before the law for all through outlawing in the British Empire the slave trade. Bonhoeffer, a theologian, spoke out as well, but when his voice as a vocal member of group of anti-Nazi pastors and believers called The Confessing Church was stifled, he became a part of the resistance actively intent on assassinating Hitler. He served as a double agent, nominally for the Nazi regime allowing him to travel outside Germany, while actually spreading intelligence of the conspiracy against Hitler. He was arrested in 1943, and hanged in 1945 (weeks before the fall of Nazi Germany) after the resistance’s final failed attempt to kill Hitler (1944). Not only did the final attempt fail, but when Hitler survived the Fuhrer used it as proof of his indestructibility. Superficially it would seem that the outcome of Bonhoeffer’s choices confirmed them as antithetical to the faith he espoused. But that is a very human perspective that is too easy to fall into. Outcomes are not the measure of right, or its justification.

My thoughts are only half formed, but what is clear is that neither man chose lightly. Neither sought the fight they gave their lives for. Anti-slavers came to Wilberforce because he was in a position to speak and be heard. Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law (as far as I can tell, not a religious man), working in a department of the Nazi regime that allowed him to know early and in excess the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, approached him. C. S. Lewis speaks in his Letters to an American Lady that we who follow Christ are called to do the present duty of the present day. Bonhoeffer believed that the love of Christ demanded he stand with the Jews and all those persecuted by the Nazis. He was not entirely certain that his involvement in attempts to assassinate Hitler was pleasing to his Lord, but as he prayed his conscience kept returning to the victims and the need to stop what was happening. According to interviews with his friends, he yielded his doubts and choices to the mercy of God and acted on what he believed to be the day’s present duty faithfully, just as Wilberforce did.

Sincerity and conviction are not the earmarks of right. Hitler was both, but what is remarkable is that neither man tried to force his convictions on anyone else, and they took full responsibility for their choices and the consequences, leaving the judgments to history and more essentially to God. Wilberforce saw his success as a gift not a just dessert. My guess is that Bonhoeffer saw his ‘failure’ in the same light.

When I wrote about “Amazing Grace” I championed that we can change things if we persevere, but what if we persevere and change does not come? That’s what has made most of us cynical and why most of us have fled participating in the political process. Does that excuse us? Bonhoeffer would say no, and so, too, would Wilberforce. They would say with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego before Nebuchadnezzar, ” . . . the God we serve is able to save us from [the blazing furnace], and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods . . .” (Daniel 3:17-18). Prayerfully we must be faithful to the conviction of our consciences. Outcomes are rarely in our keeping.

For most of us the present duty of the present day isn’t anything so grandiose or ethically demanding as those that confronted Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer, but I doubt it started out that way for them either. It may be no more than doing our work to the best of our ability, being kind (as opposed to nice) to those who cross our path, recycling our trash, paying attention to the news, praying for our enemies or preparing to vote intelligently. Above all we must watch and listen, ready to meet whatever might come to us and act. “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15) In the end, I find myself left with the question, “Do I have the courage to care enough to act?” We’ll see.

“Amazing Grace”

When I first saw a preview of the movie about William Wilberforce’s fight to get legislation passed in the United Kingdom to outlaw slavery, I was excited. Wilberforce has been a hero of mine for many years.  The more I learn of his life and the ups and downs of his crusades for equality and justice for all the disenfranchised, the more astonishing it becomes. Including Wilberforce’s relationship with John Newton, the former slave-trader-turned-Anglican-rector who wrote the words for the hymn “Amazing Grace” was a bonus. I recently picked up a book of Newton’s letters and found him a remarkable and engaging man. I saw the movie in the theater and just bought the DVD because this is an important story for anyone who cares about righting injustice and imagines it an impossible task.

As a film I question how well anyone who was unfamiliar with the story and the historical period could fully appreciate the story on one viewing. The writer and director had the uneviable task of covering thirty-plus years of a man’s life who was engaged in activities that don’t often lend themselves to a visual medium. But we do get a clear picture of a man of kindness, integrity and courage who spent his health, material resources and career to spearhead causes (he worked for child welfare and founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) that most of his contemporaries and peers found inexplicable during a period when the UK was under siege from within and without. At times it was truly dangerous. Wilberforce was not alone in his fight, but for much of the time those working with him (with the exception of William Pitt the Younger) were a who’s who of the marginalized.

If I were to grade this film for its merit as a film I could only give it a “C,” but it is a story that we all need to know, particularly now.  We are in an election year when the shouts for change are echoing in every sound bite. Whatever else may be said, Barack Obama’s candidacy has energized people of all ages to become engaged in the political process again, or for the first time. It is exciting to see. In our history watershed moments have risen every few decades when the pieces finally came together and the momentum was irresistible and needed changes long denied came to fruition. I lived through one such moment, and I hope this is another. Maybe the awareness we had and then most of us lost in the 1960s and early ’70s that the environment and our energy needs required our attention will at last become an integrated way of life, for example. But whether this is a moment of real change or a moment when issues are at last crystallized and the fight only begun, let us remember William Wilberforce and all those who did not give up the fight for what was just and right when the rest of us would have. May we be blessed with the “amazing grace” that vision and perseverence against the odds require.

Story Virgin

This morning I watched the French film “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” One of the gaping holes in my literary education is never having read any of D. H. Lawrence’s novels. I never knew Lady Chatterley’s Lover came in two versions (this movie is based on the second). So I watched this film as a virgin to the story. I don’t have any idea how right or wrong the filmmaker got it, and the semi-happy ending came as a shock. I don’t associate much of anything hopeful in the literature of the period.

The movie was set in post-WWI Britain, and the two leads were engaging in their awkwardness and reticense in the early stages, but having it all in French, including the pronunciation of English names colored everything. Something about the French language, the sound of it, changes the whole sensibility. I could not get beyond it and believe for those two hours and forty minutes (I’d expected the length to be arduous; it wasn’t) that I was in England, and these were English characters. The cavorting naked in the rain scene played into my French and English stereotypes making it harder to believe, and not having familiarity with the novel I could not say if the scene was authentic.

The viewing experience made me wonder if I had stumbled onto another way I’m an ‘ugly American.’ I realized an hour into it that this was my first foreign film set in an English-speaking world with English or American characters but filmed and acted by non-English speakers. My initial gut reaction was that it made no sense. Why didn’t they just transplant the story to French soil? Then I remembered the hundreds of films in English about non-English-speaking characters in foreign countries. What an English language prude I was! And yet, I wonder how much language shapes particular stories. The sound, the inflection, the flow. And is there a difference between English reserve and French reserve, or a French interpretation of English reserve? I will have to read the novel and get back to you.

As for the film itself, it is told lyrically and with leisure. The dialogue is parsimonious, and it needs to be. There is enough unsaid amongst these characters to fill an ocean, and maybe that is why they are each drowning in their own silent worlds. I liked how the film used nature and changing landscape to further the story, but I found the text shots to inform the viewer of time passing and the occasional narration in different voices to further the story annoying and somewhat arbitrary. The story would draw me in and then the text shots and narration would suddenly wrench me away. Some of the secondary relationships were elusive, and I felt I did not understand Constance’s relationship with her husband or lack of it well enough to appreciate the tragedy of what had happened between them, but the relationship between her and Parkin made it worth the investment to watch. I’m not sure what it says about a film that I don’t feel I can make a definitive appreciation until I read the novel it’s based on, but in this case being a story virgin left me feeling at a disadvantage.