Author Archives: Sam Turner

To Love a Place Is to Love the World

Posted on by under Travel & Place

Last week, I walked out of my families ranch house at the late hour of a summer sunset. The night was clear, the air was finally relieved of the record rainfall Texas experienced in May, the stars were already shining, and the sun was releasing its last embers on the edge of the darkly hued sky. I was taken away by that beloved place. I was almost breathless as the moon rose to meet the dying sun, and simultaneously I was saddened by the thought that maybe someone else does not have a place that wraps them in their love for it.

Every summer since I was 18 I have gone somewhere outside of my beloved Texas. I have been back to China, all over Europe, to Russia’s great city of Moscow and its deep eastern heartland in Siberia, seen a sunrise against magnificent Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya, and also seen maybe the world’s most beautiful sunset on the island of Santorini south of Greece. I have been to almost every state in the US on yearly road trips with my closest friends. I spent parts of last summer in Columbia, my first trip and hopefully not my last trip to South America, Colorado, New Mexico, and several other long road trips through the state of Texas.

Yet I never set out to be well travelled, nor do I consider myself someone who seeks adventure. But here I am in my late 20’s and by most measures well travelled, maybe it’s a product of affluence plus my generation’s disposition toward travel, but even then, I have gone to more places than those averages would suggest. Sometimes I have gone at the behest of others, sometimes because I was just curious. I have been to every continent except for Australia and Antarctica, yet I never intended to go anywhere. I love where I live. I love Texas.

Recently, I have been watching a couple documentaries titled “A Long Way Round” and “A Long Way Down” which are about Ewan McGregor and a friend riding around the world on motorcycles. My close friends and roommates watch them because they are planning on going around the world for a year starting this summer. Half-jokingly Ewan will make the same remark whenever he gets to a beautiful place on his journeys: “Ah, this looks like Scotland.” And then he’ll say something like: “the Scots created the rest of the world and they made it in our image, that’s why the world looks like Scotland.” It’s funny mostly because he’ll say it about a place like Russia or Ethiopia, so far from Scotland, and in many ways so different from his home, and he’ll say it in this quirky, nerdy scottish accent that would make me laugh anyways. But there is still some honest to goodness wonder in Ewan’s voice as he says it. He believes it to some degree, and you can tell he really relishes the different, but similar beauty.

In a similar way in all my journeys, I have found the places I have loved most, the places I found most beautiful, reminded me in some way of Texas while also being extraordinarily different. Kenya shaded its rough West Texas red dirt with a wide Texas sky, yet there were zebras and Giraffes running around underneath this indescribably massive mountain. I found it astonishing and bemusing when all the Kenyans wanted my rough, beaten cowboy boots because they realized just how well it would suit them walking on their red dirt, just as I find them befitting while walking around on my grandmother’s land in South Texas. I loved them for it, and I loved Kenya for its  its shadows and shades of Texas. I learned to love all of it that was beyond what I knew, but it started from the roots of what I already loved. Its beauty grew on me because of its strange sameness. Maybe that is the essence of beauty: a new appearance which evokes a beloved place while simultaneously changing the way we loved that past place.

It’s an often spoken cliche that it’s easier to love all of mankind than it is to love a single person. But we batter the word ‘love’ by using it too often to mean too many things. To love something, someplace, or somebody requires a textured romance, a felt knowledge of its individual flecks. Our human love, the real kind that comes from our bodies, souls, and minds, is bought with the precious care of given attention. The one thing that I can add in this time of travel and placelessness is that if we pay attention to the little beauties in the places we go, we will find in them hints of our home. And if we have known a place where its sights and sounds wrap us in the arms of our love for it, we may find that to know a place is to know the world and to love a place is to love the world.

The Last Day of School: Lessons in Humility

Posted on by under Role & Place, Uncategorized

The first day I walked into a classroom and the door closed, I was terrified. I was all alone with 14 8th grade students. The room was oddly silent. I was in a very foreign world: an inner-city school, a middle school teacher, and math class. None of those phrases fit me. I am as white and upper-middle class as they come. I do not have the hip persona to connect with a middle schooler; I am more bookish and odd. Also, I barely knew what was going on during my own middle school experience. Relating to my students was like trying to jump across the Grand Canyon. Lastly, I was teaching math even though my passions, majors, and expertise are in literature and history.

When my first class started three years ago, I began by listing the rules of the classroom. I am not a rule follower in just about every area of my life, yet here I was expected to give and enforce obedience to many little rules. I told the students what I expected of them throughout the year:

“Show your work.” My 8th grade math teacher was somewhere rolling his eyes.

“Turn in your homework on time.” Some of my teachers are still missing many homework assignments from me.

“Write neatly.” This was just laughable. As my students quickly found out, I have probably the worst handwriting of any teacher ever.

By the time I was done with the rules and expectations, I was stunned to find myself still enclosed in this room with a bunch of students for whom I was responsible and was supposed to teach. I was even more shocked to find that even though the first day’s lesson was complete, I still had 25 minutes left in class. This was the first of many times where I had to think on my feet while teaching. I opened my text book and taught them Chapter 1 Lesson 1 from our Algebra books. Oddly, they followed along, did not immediately discredit me as a teacher, and learned something.

Teaching has been for me over the last three years an immensely personal and taxing job. I know there are many jobs which are more physically exhausting, but for me as a deeply introverted person, teaching is the most mentally and emotionally draining job I could imagine doing. Every moment with my students requires intensely thoughtful but intuitive responses to the immediate needs of many growing, emotional human beings. The Christian school I work at rightly asks its teachers to be habit trainers and disciple makers as well, but those parts of the job take an incredible amount of emotional energy. Every student I have taught carries a personal story, more often than not, those stories include poverty and broken families. But categorizing them never fully remedies their brokeness or sees them wholly as they are: human beings who desire to know and be known. This manifests itself in a thousand different ways. Sometimes in uncomfortably bold ways, and other times in quiet conversations. Each one teaches me something new, and in their own character and actions, whether good or bad, I find reflections of myself.

These reflections often reveal my own brokenness.

I have learned while teaching that to serve in this world as a Christian means to incarnate Christ in His most down trodden and bruised moments. Before I could really serve though, I found deeper and deeper layers of pride and selfishness. They were peeled back painfully and then trampled on as I thought I was doing a great service, but found all I could really do was pour myself out and hope to give something of value. When I think about the rough sides of serving, there is this deep, dark image that comes to mind from Shushako Endo’s book Silence. In this book about the persecution of Christians and Portuguese missionaries in Japan during the 17th century, this little statue of Christ is rubbed down to almost a non-image by the feet of the apostatizing Christians who instead of facing the suffering of persecution step on the statue to symbolically reject their faith. Their feet trampling Him with their rejection mar His face. Somehow this seems like the place Christ stands most deeply saving the world – He is the one serves us even as we deny Him.

In teaching I have found seemingly never ending tasks required to repair the broken breaches, and then as I work, the breaches within me have leaked my own sinfulness out into the kids’ messes. There have been deep, painful moments of brokenness in teaching which seemed to completely unravel any good I was doing. Sometimes it felt like the effort I was putting forth was getting nowhere and somehow the students or the parents or the world were just trampling down upon the work I was doing. But I think this often is the reality faced in serving this world: we get stomped on and don’t always see the benefit of it until much later. In humility we serve a beyond not our own.

There is this lovely poem/prayer often attributed to Oscar Romero but actually written for his memorial service which goes like this:

A Future Not Our Own

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

 

This is my last day teaching in a classroom. I am thankful for the rest to come, but I am even more thankful for the lessons on humility and service which I have received the last three years.

Finding My Place While Alone

Posted on by under Alone in Place

There are two types of being alone. You can be alone and lost in the pulling chaos of your desires, or you can be alone in a place with the universe present to you and free from the consuming fashions of your own heart.

After work one day, I sat alone in my apartment. The feel of the room was like the sedated air of a cave. My heart was crowded with its own thoughts:

“What if this happens? What if they find out about me? What if she does not really like me? What if I am not good enough? I heard him say that, but what if he meant this?”

And, “I know I am supposed to do that, but my couch looks really good. The TV and mindlessness are close. I need this.”

Heart, mind, and will grow sticky under the odd mixture of shame and selfishness. It’s a common and crippling feeling I’ve known often in my life. Shame creeps through everything. It enters you in silence, and it will take years for you to uncover its source. Even then, who knows if you’ll ever unroot it. Selfishness is natural, but it loves to couch itself next to shame. They sit together when I’m alone speaking in rationalizing consonance.

“I am not good enough, so don’t mind anyone else. Do what pleases you now.”

The apartment I live in is more of a home for cockroaches than people. There is a growing graveyard for them on the very desk on which I am typing. Often, I feel its dankness wearing on me reminding me too well of my own thoughts. The decaying wood and plaster rubs its ruin into me.

On this day the joy of every other moment I spent with people dissipated within these wall. Sometimes, I let this sensation rule for whole evenings, but on this day I walked away from it. I needed to get out of there, out of me. I went outside.

As I walked, steps began to form words, and my mind cleaved to meanings more than to the previously crawling feelings. Hard shapes formed in my motion. My senses snatched stories of the universe outside of me as I slowly tread in my raggedy shoes around a couple blocks near my apartment.

The immediate smell of spring’s fecundity trampled the plastic stasis of my self-contained thoughts. I crunched on thousands of scattered seed pods thrown about by the will of the trees and wind who seemed intent on ruining cars with their loamy stains. They remained on the concrete smashed into brown-green stains and reminded me of nature’s hopefulness. In this concrete desert the trees still cast their life to the ground because life is meant to be given from one to another even in the face of certain failure, it’s never meant to be self-contained. The whole world of life honors this, why wouldn’t I?

As I walked further, I became lighter. I was surprised. There were so many robins. One picked up a worm but then let it drop to look at me. It stopped to see what I’d do. I watched the earthworm wriggling out of the moistened mud then took three steps away and witnessed the robin happily return to his meal.  Even the death of an earthworm and the life of a robin made me think of things outside of me. What life and death in this world means is always hard to figure, but being present to it even while alone is being open to the the life outside of us: the only life that will bring us joy.

I marched on through busy honey bees buzzing about in the white flowers of a shoulder high bush. They bumped about me as if I were one of them. People run together and into each other like this most of the day. We are happy to be busy, happy to be amongst others passing through this cacophony of life and death, and our thoughts do not crowd into us like the ruin of my apartment crowds into me when I am alone. But when we are alone, we get to order our lives and our thoughts. We must choose to mark our moments with a thoughtful intention to enjoin the universe with our lives or be left to dankly decay in our own fickle desires.

I walked home leaving the weight of my formless, self-devouring thoughts along the walk around my block. I prayed to be reminded of this all again tomorrow.

   

Life Together: The Gift of Family

Posted on by under Together in Place, Uncategorized

We often express brokenness in our lives to share in each other’s suffering. This vulnerability about the hard things in our lives seems to be an essential element of building community. However, I wonder sometimes if we know what kind of community we are hoping to build. Too few of us have experienced the sweet gift of an unconditionally loving community. Many of our homes seem to be hodge-podges of love and hatred, and the hope we may have of building our own homes seems to be more of a prayer or a stab in the dark than a definite, intentional progression.

I teach many students who have never seen a father and a mother love each other. They have so many broken relationships around them that they have no idea what a right relationship is, and I wonder: what do I have to give them? I have a lot of brokenness, but they see that every day. Do I have any true goodness in my brokenness to leave with them?

Any goodness, any hope, any true light I have to give I owe almost exclusively to my family.

Let me explain:

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A Beggar in a Summer Storm

Posted on by under Season & Place

My favorite word is ‘jaded.’ I love the odd flowiness of it and its root reference to a beautiful stone. But its meaning is what really gets me. Webster defines it ‘as made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience.’ This seems like such an apt description of myself and many others. We are thoughtlessly wasteful of the joy and wonder of the world. Even if we are aware, we are often only viewing it in reference to what it has to say about us, who we are and how we are seen. We fear the sacrifice and suffering which might end this self-centered apathy and make us humble beggars seeking a wonder we do not own. Instead, in the midst of the abrading banality of life we lose vision, we numb ourselves, and we fall asleep.

During the summer months, I am jaded. The oppressive Texas heat shuts me inside both my house and myself. I find little joy in suffering through 105 degree days. If I have to walk or work anywhere outside during the summer months, my clothes turn into wet, salty rags.

Several summers ago, I was still at Texas A&M taking the last few classes I needed before I could graduate. The whole summer I walked to all my classes. This lead to the ruining of a few shirts after dreaded 20+ minute walks across A&M’s vast campus. The summer was full of heat, humidity, and horrible cricket infestations. Nature was a dank, fecund destroyer, but there was one day from the summer that I will always remember.

It was early in the afternoon in the middle of July. I was walking back from my History of 19th Century England class where I would laugh at every other sentence my sarcastic, thickly accented British teacher would utter. As I traversed across a lonely part of the large campus hurrying to escape the numbing of another oppressively hot day, rain came pouring down on me from a sun soaked sky. I stopped, stunned… awake. I held my breath wondering at the intercession of rain. A moment passed in the brief shower before I found cover underneath a gazebo to wait for it to stop. After walking home and sitting down, I wrote the following:

The grey light sheds raindrops onto the motions of my weightless body. Falling drops tinge me with their bombardment and the sensuous smell of rain emanates a taste of life. The reigning clouds lift me out of the heavy weight of a Texas summer sun. The passing rain is not more than a breeze and a grey shadow, but swift, this life is poured into the world.

There are stories about blind men who can see the world through the echoes of pattering rainfall. The rain’s knocking on the sides of the world opens the eyes of their minds. Are we not blind souls unawake until we hear and feel a knocking on the hard surfaces of the world? Are the poignant passing of pain and bitter tastes of life a rainfall into our world? Are true moments of sorrow and joy, the depths of human experience that mingle together in the heart of the universe, not the heavy beating of a life-giving rain?

Now I sit sedately in my comforted chair and would pass this world away, but a merciful God acts sorrow and joy into my heart with cauterizing nails to awaken me to the cloud of His presence.

The thunder roams off in the distance admitting that it too is a beggar at His feet.

The Fullness of Fall

Posted on by under Season & Place, Uncategorized

 Everything dies. Nothing dies.
That’s the story of the Book.

It’s like this for me in Texas: fall is when love blossoms only to die in the spring.

In the fall, the air is fresh. The promise of cooler weather is heralded with storms rushing from the north. The grey winds from afar release the death grip of the Texas summer heat. The fall is football, Friday night lights, and the romance of a dying summer. It is a chance to actually enjoy the outdoors again, and a reminder that Texas is still a great place to live.

Autumn with its too-muchness,
Stretching the boundaries
Of Song

Fall is full. The wounded red of fall drips from the trees. There is an aching in the shadows of leaving trees, and even the very slant of autumn light stirs my overly romantic soul.

I once kissed a girl on a fall night after a heartbreaking home football loss. It was my first kiss. We were out under the October stars, still warm enough to only need sweatshirts as we lay looking up at the eternal markers. I am not sure I have ever been more scared. I am sure I have never been happier.

In a Texas spring the weather is violent. It unleashes furious storms, snows in the middle of a perfect week, and then hints at the hated summer heat. The wildflowers come roaring along Texas highways bursting forth in strokes of crimson, yellow, and blue. But their life is doomed by the coming heat. Aborted beauty burned up like martyrs holding out against the summer’s tyranny. Even the spring’s green brings with it an awareness of the brown it will turn to in the overbearing sun.

I was heartbroken by the next spring. The first kiss in the fall turned into a last parting kiss on an April day. A Friday, holding her at the door, my first broken heart left exposed before the summer heat.

**********

Others in the north will speak of seasonal depression hitting them during the long winter, but for me, the weeks of early spring, the lenten season before easter, is when it comes. For the past 7 years, I have waited ominously through spring for it to strike. Sometimes it does not arrive, but sometimes it does as the creeping nausea of blank feelings emptying my heart of any joy.

Several years after my first broken heart during my last spring semester in college, I met this girl with burning blue eyes. I fell for her like a boy lost at sea, but she was unable to return it. Another spring romance born only to die.

The wave of depression that followed was one of the worst I have known. The weeks of late March and early April nearly crushed me. I could hardly breath much less attempt to write my senior paper, and I almost failed my last class at Texas A&M. It was the first time in my life where I fully felt the need to take a pill.

For the last three years I have attended an Ash Wednesday service during February before spring could come. It has been my bulwark against spring. I would like to think the reminder of my death, the passing from dust to dust recalled in the service, protects me with my own weakness. We are dying, yes and amen. On Ash Wednesday there are no false promises.

**********

I read the Book for years
And never understood a word.
Scrawled in its margins.
Wrote my own versions
Of what I read there,
But never got a thing right.

Didn’t understand that each
Poem was a magic spell.
Was a voice,
And under that voice: an echo
That was the spell

As if each poem clearly spoke
The word “Death”
And the echo said “Life.”

And this is why I love the fall: it is full of death, but its echo is life. Roiling under its scenes of dying, I often sense the true vibrancy of life. Amidst all the life of spring I am too aware of its coming end, but in the fullness of fall heaving with death, I hear what sounds like a symphony to my soul: the oblique cry of life like an echo from an empty tomb.

(All quotes are from the beautiful poetry collection Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr)

Like Shards of Shattered Stained Glass

Posted on by under Role & Place

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable

Love is itself unmoving

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless…

        ~ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

This is my third year teaching at an inner city middle school. My common refrain when asked what it’s like to teach is it’s exhausting but never boring. I often tell others the most overwhelming challenge I have faced in life is the emotions of a middle school girl. I previously had no categories for the appropriate responses to their occasionally incongruous behaviors. This has led me to be uncomfortable, anxious, and downright turned about at times in my role as a teacher, authority figure, and role model.

When I started teaching I had no notion or intention beyond the present need to have a job and hopefully do something which gave me some purpose. The long term desire was always to do something grander- namely go back to school and do something more than just teach 8th grade math and science. This was the desire of my heart.

I have enjoyed teaching and the relationships I have formed, but what has always made me uncomfortable about my job is disciplining students. I often enter into it with fear and anxiety. My thoughts run like this: “You are disrupting my class and wrecking any peace we (I) might have enjoyed here. I need to stop this.” What follows, almost invariably, is a classic mistake of teachers. We do not realize how well students can read our emotions. In these cases the student either reciprocates my fear or anxiety with his own or simply shuts down and detaches. Even if the behavior is corrected through coercion, there is no ground gained in character or relationship, and we percolate along in our functions without growing. There is intrinsically within the personal desire to regain control a tyranny of the moment which gets in the way of transcendent change.

In the previous two years I had taught 6th through 8th grade math, but this year I only teach 8th grade math and science. This has created the chance for me to teach the same 20 kids all day, students who I have taught for going on three years. By now they know my middle name, my pet peeves, and just about every emotional expression I have. They are hyper aware of even the slightest change in my temperament. Also, the way I relate to them personally has changed almost without me realizing it. There is more than simply a nice hope that they might improve or grow. The welfare of my students has grown over my own personal desires. I only realize this and act on it in broken flashes like the shimmer of light off the jagged cut of shattered stained glass.

Two weeks ago one of my students had an emotional reaction to something she was asked to do and stormed angrily out of my class. This was a reaction characteristic of her strong-willed, vitally independent personhood which has shown up in sporadic, irrational outbreaks of defiance that are shattering to my classroom’s peace and also harmful to herself in the form of ensuing consequences. These incidents have occurred over a three year period with me, and as a result of disciplining of her, I have grown a strong bond with her. This time, in the moment of her explosion, I did not feel the usual anxiety and fear which generally accompanies her outbreaks, instead I felt only heaviness. I felt sorrow.

When I spoke to her later my words felt thick, my eyes began to water, and the thought dominating my heart was a worry for her: she was self-destructing in these meltdowns and the continuance of them would not only hurt her relations with others but also her chances of pushing beyond the boundaries of poverty around her. The initial and usual response of defiance in her eyes faded into a reciprocated sadness. In front of me was a lost child. She was aware of the deeper emotion in my eyes of sorrow over her brokenness. I have known this in the eyes of others looking at me when I was so far gone I thought I could not be rescued, and here I was with my eyes full of the same emotions with a girl so different than me yet so much like me.

The reflection in her eyes stirred something beyond my present volatile and inconstant desires. The timelessness of love momentarily overwhelmed my temporal desires. I spoke as honestly and deeply as I have ever spoken to a student.

The truth is I don’t really love people. I am often affectionate, kind, and even generous towards others  but rarely without an ulterior motive. I have not cared for anyone in my life with the charity of God which the puritans described as “benevolent indifference.” But in this moment, I felt the stillness of indifferent love.

Near the end of the school day, after I had meted out the discipline for her actions, she stopped me as I walked by her in study hall. I sat down next to her. She immediately apologized to me with sincerity for her actions. I choked up, hardly able to say anything in response. As I walked back to my room tired and at peace, I was reminded that in our broken friction, in the destructive collision of our obese, selfish desires, we are vulnerable to the entrance of timeless, co-inhering love. Into our time-filled world, in these messy moments enters the God who is pursuing us.

We like the shards of shattered stained glass are brought back together, one crude edge fitting the next, to form the reflection of our Pursuer. He, who in his love let us shatter ourselves and sustained us in our wrecked state, weaves us back together one to another into the unity of a living body, organic in its diverse, messy flesh, and glorified in the binding coinherence of love that threads us to a living-in-love triune God.

My role in this world, however shoddily I accomplish it, is to reflect this all encompassing, pursuing love. I uncover this only in gasps and stabs.

Home Plate

Posted on by under Home & Place

I am fond of irrationally loving things. I get a little too giddy about game 121 of a long baseball season. You would have no idea it was a game that hardly mattered by the way I am yelling obscenities at a single missed strike call by an umpire who is deciding within fractions of an inch whether the little white ball flying in at 90 MPH went over the plate or not. I cannot rationally defend why I love baseball or college football or Texas or Dr. Pepper, but I will fight with every breath in me to love them all the same. There is something in me which desperately needs the rousing breath of unreasoned, childlike passions.

I was at a baseball game a few years ago with my dad. We were sitting in the third deck in the midst of one those late summer Texas evenings where cirrus clouds hang high like streaks of vanilla in an otherwise sherbet colored sky. You can put on Explosions in the Sky and get a feeling of how I feel about these kinds of evenings. Next to us was a father with his 5 year old son. The son was falling in love with the game; the father was there to watch.  The son knew the players, he knew the rules, and he knew that the only way to watch the game was standing up on the tip of his toes leaning against the rail ready for the suddenness of something grand in the midst of the mundane rituals of a summertime game.

Irrational passions like baseball fandom demand our hearts be ready to be broken and spoken to in a way completely counter to most realities in our lives. Life tends towards the typical, but our hearts restlessly ask to be reconciled to and even wrecked upon something more. One of my favorite quotes about baseball from one of its great living chroniclers, Joe Posnanski, reminds me of this: “I never argue with people who say that baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn’t. And that’s what makes it great.”

The boy waited on his tiptoes. He was calling out the players’ names as they ran out onto the field. His favorite player was every boy’s favorite. His activities were the accents of love as love. He could not explain why the game grabbed him, but it did. At some point I loved the game the same way. We have videos of me with a bat bigger than me swinging and hitting whiffle balls at the age of three. I’ll never forget the triple play I made in tee ball, or the perfect game I went to at the Ballpark in Arlington when I was in first grade. Those were moments of magic. When I was a teenager, the magic died. I felt nothing when I watched the game.

In the recent movie Boyhood the most poignant scene of the movie for me comes when an adolescent boy asks his vagabond father:

“Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right?”

Right. We all answer the question the same way at some point. There is a death for all our irrational loves. A death held in their inability to sustain against the pervasive banality of our lives.

When I came home for the summer in 2008 after a very bad year in college, I decided to start going back to a few Texas Rangers games. There was some hope that year for the team I grew up loving more than any other team. The Rangers had just traded for this guy named Josh Hamilton. He was a drug addict who had just made it back to baseball the year before after a 5 year hiatus, and he was looking for a second chance at the game. The probability of Hamilton picking up a bat after five years and hitting a baseball well was very low, much less so because he had spent those five years blowing almost 2 million dollars on drugs. But something truly magical happened that year. Within the first month, it became evident that Hamilton was a player with transcendent talent. I went to one game after another and by the All-Star break I had attended over 20 games, more than I had gone to in the previous five years combined.

The crescendo of the year came when Hamilton hit in the Home Run Derby at the Mecca of baseball, old Yankee Stadium. His first trip to the plate in the derby was the most extraordinary display of baseball prowess I have ever witnessed. He hit 28 home runs, and at one point, he hit 14 in a row without recording an out. Each home run seemed to go farther than the last until he was hitting 500 ft home runs like they were routine. His performance was so remarkable that the usually surly New York faithful rained down a chant which I still get chills recalling in my head: “Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton.” There was magic in the air that night in New York, and baseball had romanced my heart once again.

The truth is there was always magic in the game, magic in the rituals of the game, in the batters’ gimmicks, pitchers’ grimaces, summer evening skies, and well broken leather. I don’t always catch it, but after losing and re-finding my love for baseball, I find a fullness in even the smallest of details. It’s something like finding life in the breaking of bread and forgiveness in the bitterness of wine.

When the fifth inning of the game came, the boy’s focus suddenly shifted towards his father. And with the absolute confidence of a child he said: “Fifth inning is ice cream inning!”

Dutifully, the father took his son down the aisle and out to the concessions while I sat there grinning like I had not grinned in a long time.

A Passage Home in a Passing World

Posted on by under Home & Place

The morning rose as promise quickly succumbed to the extravagance of the mounting sun. Five of my best friends and I were headed west through the high plains near Lubbock under the cracking brilliance of a Texas summer morning. This was the fulfillment of our pact made almost a year before to drive to San Diego and back after we graduated from High School. The road and its rushing welcome beckoned us westward into the long journey that would echo through our lives for the next ten years as we would return again and again to the road together every following summer.

We passed into New Mexico in the early afternoon and found ourselves in the middle of nothingness. Clouds like clots stood against the oppressing light casting shadows onto the speckled desert. Our car passed as a breath through the dry cavity, and in it, the green roots of deep friendships were growing deeper.

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    I often wonder if my home is the road. Upon Texas highways I have experienced more beauty and joy than anywhere else.

The countless sunset drives where every sunset original in its peculiar quality grabs the deepest pieces of me and puts them together. Nights under stars uttering mystery in the tongues of ancient light. Late shadows cast sidelong by trees only glimpsed but caught in my memory forever. Middle of May wildflowers, Bluebonnets and Indian Blankets, painting a canvass of glory just outside a middle-of-nowhere Texas town. The rushing surprise of spring bursting forth in a shade of green I had almost forgotten in the winter. All of these are visions of the road, hints of home in a passing  world, and the passing only makes it sweeter.

Nothing awakens in me the poetic sense of experience more than the road. The road as an archetype signals a new hope, and when I drive, I hope for home.

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    Somewhere along our first day’s drive in New Mexico, we stopped and ran around naked through a boy scout campsite for a while acting as if the world were really all here for us to romp through. This led to a speedy getaway back into the summer evening. When we finally caught our breath and reminded each other what we had actually done, we smiled and began to speak to one another in a new way. The night took us as I drove us west, and each of us conversed with the other slower and deeper.

Night closed and there were no lights. Nothing before us, nothing behind us. There was only blackness and our meagre headlights. Our car was a mere passenger clinging to the two lane road. The space of the car and the 20 feet our headlights pierced in front of us were all we had, yet we twisted through the dark world with joy.

Each head in the car slowly nodded off, and I drove on alone. The deepest darkness I had ever known enshrouded our now seemingly miniature vessel as it forged deeper into the nights mystery. I had never been so alone with others around me. After ten minutes of driving silently and looking around at the void on all sides, I stuck my head out of the driver’s side window and caught a glimpse of the high, moonless, New Mexico sky.

The sky was softly illuminated with a million stars buried on top of one another in the deep ocean of space. Their light was far away, but the stars tangled the entire sky with their white shimmer. I rolled the window all the way down and climbed out of my seat keeping one hand on the wheel as I sat on the window with most of my torso out of the car and my face free.

I drove this way for a moment before climbing back into my seat. The widow rolled back up and the space within was still and silent once again. I looked down at the glowing green clock reading 11:54 P.M., and I felt a wave of exhaustion creep up the back of my neck. The road passed in twenty foot increments as I drove wearily on, and I turned inward to my own deeper thoughts for the first time all day. I was alone, and my mind recalled the weeping nights I had spent on my bed the past year feeling the caving in of my own heart.

We rolled on westwardly weaving our way as a narrow passage of light through the darkness. Above, we were being watched by the infinitely interwoven stars.

In the Aching Hour, We Wait

Posted on by under Out of Place

The dying light of a sunset is an encounter with the aching beauty of the eternal. As I watch the light unfold, my heart also unfolds. Here and longing. Flashes of mystery in the familiarity of light.

Two days ago, in the early winter hour of sunset, I drove into the southwest horizon. The crisp, yet not cold, December air felt light and clean as the sun’s horizontal shine blew the heaviness and rush of daylight away. But as the light went its silent way into the deep blue fading sky, low in my chest, something heavy grew. Sorrow and the fullness of joy were somehow interwoven in a single feeling. The black shadows of trees etching upwards like arms and fingers reaching to the sky, like black spires aching in the light, recalled something eternal, something of death in life and life in death. The aching of my heart quivered under the hope the leafless trees promised. But quickly, the image faded. Too often, beauty is a shadow passing–leaving only a thin hope, a momentary awareness of a true home. As it passed over, this thin hope found its place in my heart, a heart now missing a faraway home.

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Deep in South Texas, my grandmother’s childhood home sits at the base of the Texas hill country and is dominated by slow rises, wide views, and red dirt. Everything about the ranch reminds me of her–rugged and beautiful in a Texas kind of way. It’s an old house complete with a 1980’s Ford pickup to drive the property.

On a visit one summer evening, the old pick-up with Texas Country playing on the radio took me to the highest point of the ranch, and I rolled the windows down to watch the sun set into the grey of a coming storm. As the clouds turned from shadows into the surface of a burning sea, the storm and its rushing glory moved towards me. The smell of rain, thick in the vital air, mingled with the vision. Far in the low sky, silent lightning struck. The coolness of the coming rain and the sedation of the setting sun spoke peace, but in the moment, there was also fury…fury in the rising storm and a wild otherness in the red dirt and fiery skies, tremors of holiness within the peace. It was a fleeting sight of a home I did not know, a place I had only sensed.

 

My longing for that home, only glimpsed, is often full of sorrow. I, and all those whom seek, wait. We wait for the Son in the midst of a sullied world. We wait for him to be born. We wait for him to die.

In the aching hour of the setting sun, we wait.

Yet, in the promise of his advent, our waiting is full of hope. For he said he will come again, and we, with John, say: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”