Defiant Imagination, Part 2: Frank Ocean's "Moon River" and Seeing Possible Worlds

As the final episode of When They See Us was coming to a close a song began to play that grabbed my attention.  It was a new arrangement and performance of an old standard.  It had been foreshadowed earlier in the episode by a recurring appearance of an unknown prison inmate ("Singing Inmate") who took every opportunity to sing "Moon River" as loudly as he could.  In those scenes, he was singing it with the powerful intonations of a golden-throated crooner.

I should include a comment on the type of writing I am doing.  I do not intend in offering my interpretation of a song's lyrics and music to be telling you what I think is in the mind of the composer.  I am not even claiming to know why the song was included as part of the movie soundtrack.  I am writing about possible meanings of the lyrics and musical structure, intertwined with the scenes of the film, and filtered through the interpretive context of my own viewing.  I'm not saying that it is arbitrarily subjective, but I am saying that interpretation of texts and films is multivalent.  The song's performer and the soundtrack composer may have different perspectives.  Yet I am analyzing musical lines, harmonic relationships, and actual words and sentences which do guide the interpretation.  So, don't take me as saying that I am offering the authoritative meaning of this song or soundtrack.  I am offering a reasonable and reasoned set of insights into a powerful creative composition of music, lyric, and film.  Now back to the song discussion.

Lena Horne, Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Pat Boone, and especially Andy Williams had made this song part of their performance repertoire.  Some artists like Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, and Eric Clapton with Beck, gave it their own twists.  "Moon River" is one of those songs that was pervasive in popular entertainment throughout my childhood, but I did not really learn the song or know much about it.  Vague memories of watching the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's suggest that I must have once known that Aubrey Hepburn sang it in the movie.  I mainly remembered the song as a standard sung by Andy Williams who was on television all the time in those days.  Beyond the opening line, I couldn't have told you the lyrics.

I think I listened carefully to the song for the first time after hearing the Frank Ocean version during the epilogue of the final episode of When They See Us.  This new cover of "Moon River" played as images of the actors faded into the actual exonerated men, with text overlays describing the current life situation of each of them.  Looking upon the bodies and faces of these boys who became men while wrongly imprisoned presses the viewer's consciousness into recounting specific events and relationships portrayed in the four-episode film, linking the visual narrative to flesh and blood.  In the context of these men's experiences of interrupted youth, injustice, and eventual exoneration to face a life so different from their plans, the song's lyrics opened up a wide space for imagination.



The song's lyrical images portray looking across a river toward what may be on the other side.  Getting across a mile-wide river is a daunting challenge, at the end of which one cannot be sure what she or he will find.  Then, the image shifts to traveling on the river, representing moving toward dreams of one's future.  The dreams are accompanied by heartbreak and the narrator's uncertainty about what's around the next bend.  As poetic imagery often does, the song starts mixing metaphors: the words speak of chasing the end of the rainbow as equivalent to flowing with the river's direction around bend after bend.  The narrator is pursuing what he or she longs for, not fully knowing what that is.

Thus the river is portrayed first as a barrier between the protagonist and the future.  Is it even possible to get across to the other side?  What will the other side bring?  Second, the river is a path upon which to journey.  The journey finds a sojourner facing an uncertain future, hoping, longing for what could be, but without assurance of what actually may appear.  And finally, the river is also the companion.  The narrator describes "two drifters off to see the world" who are "chasing after the same...rainbow's end."  The caring companions, the fellow-travelers, equally facing the unknown, sharing and bearing their hope and burden together--this may be the deepest message of the song.  If I step out into this river, it will bear me along toward its destination.  We will travel the same direction and meet the same obstacles and vistas, whatever they may be.

Ocean adapted the lyrics to his own version of the song.  It's a "crazy world" that they will see, not just "such a lot of" world.  Things won't always make sense how they turn out, but even the nonsensical is something we may find and see and experience.  With reference to the end of the rainbow, Ocean adds the phrase "chasing after" to give an even stronger sense of desire and longing.  Believing that there is something good to find, the protagonist passionately chases a dream yet not clearly formed.

He doesn't use the word "huckleberry," but says simply "my friend."  He omits there a reference in part to Mark Twain's famous character, for any number of reasons that could include the often racist language of that story from another era.

A final major lyrical change is the addition of more concrete lyrical descriptions of the formation process of one's life.  "What I see, who I become" echoes behind the lines about traveling on the river journey.  Ocean is making explicit that by joining this river journey, his life is taking a particular form through the experiences and growth specific to the river's path.  He says "Life's just around the bend."  It's not only the figment of imagination, the rainbow's end, that is around the bend.  With or without the rainbow's end, the protagonist's life will emerge from the contingent circumstances, the unanticipated relationships, and the mystery of the world encountered on the journey.  This practical language presses the viewer's mind toward the unexpected world unfolding for the exonerated men, filled with challenges and also possibilities.

The performance itself brings intellectual and emotional challenges to the listener.  The surprising opening stanza sung by a child's voice drills into the emotion of how the tragedy of this story explodes into the lives of children who went to the park one afternoon.  It's not an untrained voice, but neither is it a smoothly polished voice.  Quickly, another voice joins with harmony for a phrase--but the harmony turns out to be another melodic line in a different key, a beautiful dissonance of open harmonics.  Soon a kind of improvisational polyphony emerges as the mode in which the song progresses.  Going from solo line, to rich harmonies, to echoed motifs and improvised riffs, the performance partly deconstructs the traditional crooning ballad.

At times staggered entrances to melodic lines, fractions of beats apart, give a sense of fragmentation, a center that cannot hold, a whole that is invisible and out of reach.  These stuttering entrances and rhythms especially appear in relation to the lyrics about the uncertainty of the river's direction and destination, through heartbreak and uncertainty.  This performance itself touches a deep consciousness of the injustice and unreasonable path the young men's lives have taken.  

Yet the repeated motifs, the sense of a hopeful if uncertain destiny, are powerful themes and echoes throughout.  The polyphonic structures feed toward longer homophonic phrases of multiple layered harmonies.  Ultimately the richest, most intense harmonies and elaborate ornamentational riffs occur on the lyrics about chasing what is around the bend.  These unproven hopes, the deeply held conviction that even in a world that has been snatched away, where hopes are crushed, there is yet something worth finding up ahead.  It is a liberative theme, a recognition that the world as it is is not the world as it should be.  That better world, even if only partial and fragmented, still calls us forward.

This particular song drew me into recognizing how much a role the soundtrack had played for interpreting the film.  So I went back to review the soundtrack, making note of other songs that had projected an interpretation of the story.  In the process, I realized the way that the defiant imagination was at work in the music and the story.  "Moon River," like "What a Wonderful World," challenges the realities of a world dictated by white supremacy and white vision.  The river, always a potentially dangerous realm of currents, darkness, and hidden dangers, also represents the flow of life, the structures of how land and sea flow one into the other, the constancy of change and possibility of the new.  Ocean's interpretation recognizes both meanings, yet casts its lot with the someday, the dream, the chasing after what may and must be there for us.   Rivers have been a fruitful image to narrate the experiences of African Americans resisting oppression in the U.S.

Mavis Staples sang about lynched black bodies floating in the Mississippi River, that harsh and hateful world in which no black person is safe.  The song of lament was itself an act of defiance for putting into words and music the truth about life and death under a system of racist oppression.  Dissonant tones emphasized the incomprehensibility of such hate.  The lament ends with a call to action to "stop them from going in the river."

Other traditional songs such as "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "Deep River" recognized the danger of a great river's treacherous current and deep waters.  Yet they also saw also great promise in the power of a river that can carry one from harsh circumstances to beauty and joy, even overwhelm an army of enemies.  They sang of a river deep and wide that marked the passageway toward relief from suffering and fulfillment in a land of peace, a true home, a welcome table, a banquet at which they were honored guests.  As we know, all such songs point not only to an afterlife, but also to a promise of goodness toward which the defiant person can strive in this lifetime.  Not only eschatological Jordan, but the Ohio River or the Detroit River as markers of emancipatory power, are part of such songs.

One of my favorite songs and another river song, Kate Campbell's "Lanterns on the Levee" has much in common with this version of "Moon River."  The coming together of two people, by Kate described as the falling rain which enters the river's flow, is again a central message.  Hardships, falls, failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, can be isolating.  They can feel as if one's very life is dissipating, dissolving.  But joined with the strength of the river's strength, that life takes on new possibilities.

You can fall like the rain
And I will be a river, winding forever,
Strong and true.
I'll carry you away to the peaceful waters...

Perhaps Campbell's lyrics possess a different degree of optimism about what may be around the bend, that it will be peaceful.  Yet the offer of shelter recognizes more storms will come, even from beyond the horizon.  The path is winding, and goes on and on toward new horizons.  What it will bring is unknown, but whatever comes will be better through solidarity among those on the journey.

"Moon River" reflects a kind of defiance which looks beyond the so-called realism of the world and sees a truth much deeper.  In a recent conversation with local artist and community leader Pierce Freelon, we discussed something he had said about "creating black spaces without asking permission."  This is part of the defiance I see in this work of art.  Recognizing that the young men who were falsely accused and wrongly incarcerated found themselves at the mercy of a world which saw them as evil, the film and song also help open one's consciousness of building possible worlds that differ from the world that powerful people seek to impose on the rest of us.

A world made for everyone cannot ultimately be hoarded and controlled by a few.  In the midst of the horrors of a world with its designs on breaking, throwing away, and killing young black men, there is yet a remainder of truth, beauty, and goodness which one can glimpse and place one's hope on, just around the bend.  Look around at all those on the journey with you.  Chase the dream with all you've got.

Double Consciousness and Independence Day

I have resisted writing lately.  I'm not one who often suffers writer's block.  I don't mean writing is always easy, but I mean that I usually have something I want to write about and rush in where angels fear to tread.

We are in a time when white supremacy's terror has become so vivid that we cannot easily avoid seeing it.  It is a time that excites strong reactions.  I have not avoided talking about what is going on in the streets and in the pulpit.  I have made sure not to ignore these events in preaching and in teaching.  We have had lively Sunday School and seminary classroom discussions.  I have tweeted and Facebook statused some of my sentiments in shorter form.  I've had coffee to ruminate with friends.  I have read and listened to many opinion pieces and scholarly discourses.

But I have had specific reasons to resist writing lately.  One thing that happens when events turn attention to racism is that we white people who consider ourselves sensitive to and appropriately positioned toward racism feel a need to remind people of our credentials.  In a more crude way, we are anxious to make sure people know we are "the good white people." But this anxiety tends to subvert the very purpose we believe we are pursuing.  Rather than focusing on work necessary to overcome the structural and systemic forms of white supremacy that shape every part of life, we are caught up in making ourselves feel better, assuaging white guilt, and sustaining the pretense that at least around us, things are soooooo much better.

So in part, I have been inclined to believe that it is better to shut up and listen. (I would hope that in explaining myself here, I am not simply doing what I described in the previous paragraph. I guess I can't avoid it completely.)  To that extent, I have set aside writing about what is happening on purpose to hear other voices.  But that is only part of it.  I have also found it hard to write.  I have worried that I would simply be making noise when there is so much need for insight.  I have feared that in such intense monologue and dialogue all around, I would say something stupid, reveal from somewhere within my misunderstandings and my formation in a culture of domination. I don't want to be that writer.

This subconscious or semi-conscious fearfulness about writing something stupid comes at a very inconvenient moment for me, in that I promised to write an essay on race and theology with the title "The Deformed Imagination of Why We Are Light and What We Call Darkness."  But last night, the writer's block on that essay finally broke, and it is underway.  Somehow, that opened the floodgates and I decided to write a brief comment on Facebook concerning a post about the Declaration of Independence.  That turned into a poetry analysis of a song by Kate Campbell, bringing together the insights of W.E.B. DuBois, Cornel West, and some things J. Kameron Carter and I were talking through over coffee.  After a while I realized that I was writing a blog post.  So I might as well copy it here.  Here's hoping I'm making my way down the road to get my essay written.

I found this article about the ambiguity of the Declaration of Independence to be worth sharing. It echoes the equally powerful words of Frederick Douglass concerning the paradox and travesty of Independence Day in a system of slavery. It also got me thinking about a song by one of my favorite songwriters.

A very moving song by Kate Campbell tells the story of a fire one night in the late twentieth century, burning down an old mansion with its "sixteen stately Doric columns." Anyone would recognize it as a plantation house, iconic of white domination in a landscape populated by enslaved workers of African descent. Yet the narrator tells the story from the point of view of a child who had not known the horrors and terrors of that system of trading and debasing human beings.

I was taught by elders wiser,
"Love your neighbor. Love your God."
Never saw a cross on fire;
Never saw an angry mob.
I saw sweet magnolia blossoms.
I chased lightning bugs at night,
Never dreaming others
Saw our way of life
In black and white.

Yes, it is naiveté that speaks such words. It comes from a life privileged to avoid seeing what others have no choice but to endure. One might say that it is early formation in the "normative gaze." Yet both black and white parents often seek to shield their young children from the worst of the world. Since Sanford, Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, and now Emanuel AME Church, it has become so much harder to hide from these realities. This is the world we live in. This is the world given to us by our parents. This is the world produced by the centuries of European-American world domination.

I mention this song because it shows something that is not always present in the reflections of dominant culture. W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the "double consciousness" of being African American, being both and yet neither. He wrote it in the context of knowing that "American" meant white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. This double consciousness exists in contrast to the forgetfulness of a singular consciousness. It is the privilege of some to forget that "one ever feels one's twoness:" Irish and American, Italian and American, English and American, Scottish and American, French and American, both and yet neither, living in a land claimed, annexed, appropriated, "reaping where you did not sow."

Kate's song illustrates the dawning of such double consciousness in the narrator, and its eschatological orientation toward the possibility of community to emerge from the dismal swamps of human cruelty to one another. Parsing out the death and life in the structures and systems around us forces one to face what James McClendon said of theological reflection, that "the line between church and world passes through each Christian heart."

Part of me hears voices crying.
Part of me can feel their weight.
Part of me believes that mansion
Stood for something more than hate.

But it is not promoting the assumption that one can go back to a pristine golden age when it was possible to pretend everyone knew her and his place and rank. We must, in fact, retreat from our falsehoods and retreat from our forgetfulness. We want to forget the repression of the black churches through laws making them illegal, through domination by white church leaders, through burnings and massacres. But Charleston won't let us forget.

Forgetting is deadly for our souls, and it is deadly for the bodies of those whose lives are considered not worthy of preserving in the streets or in the prayer meeting. Learning our twoness is also learning that we need to be made whole. But we cannot be made whole by a purifying ideology of triumphalism, which only makes of us tools of those who benefit from such violent systems. It is an eschatological hope, but I don't mean pie in the sky by and by. I mean a hope that looks for and longs for and works for the beauty and goodness of that promise to be done "on earth as it is in heaven." That's why

It's a long
And slow surrender,
Retreating from the past.
It's important to remember
To fly the flag half-mast,
And look away...

The Dilemma of the Fourth of July - OnFaith

The roots of America's systemic racism are printed in many of our founding documents.

faithstreet.com

Waiting for Something and Not Writing About It

Over the past two months I have sketched out many blog posts.  I have put down some notes about things I'd like to write.  I've even started writing what I thought would be one post, but later decided I needed to divide into about four different posts.  That one was really convoluted and complicated (I know, that's my style sometimes).  I thought of many things while driving to Texas and back at the end of October and beginning of November.  I have done a good bit of thinking about the current public outcry about the treatment of blacks by police and society, and wondered how much I should say and how much I should listen.  And I've been busy with teaching, reading papers, grading, and completing reports at work.

But I have come to see this week that one big barrier to writing here on this blog has been a kind of fearfulness about what is happening in my life.  It started to hit me when I read one of Denise Levertov's poems over a month ago.  So I've decided this is where I need to start.

The poem that I keep coming back to is called "Terror."

Face down; odor
of dusty carpet.  The grip
of anguished stillness.

Then your naked voice, your
head knocking the wall, sideways,
the beating of trapped thoughts against iron.

If I remember, how is it
my face shows
barely a line?  Am I
a monster, to sing
in the wind on this sunny hill

and not taste the dust always,
and not hear
that rending, that retching?
How did morning come, and the days
that followed, and quiet nights?

I bought the book of poems, having read lines from her in a post from The Plough, the publishing ministry of the Bruderhof communities.   Specifically, it was The Daily Dig, a daily email with a reflective quotation and a simple bit of photographic art that comes to me each day.  I looked for further information on the poet, and found that she had written poems about her own process of grief, so I rounded up copies of some of her books from used booksellers.  I've just finished reading the first one, which has the title of one of the poems about which I have posted before, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads.  The poetic imagination and profound grief work have not disappointed.

About halfway through the book, I came to this poem.  The title put me off, and at first I could not see the link between the title and the poem.  But as the words rested on me for a while, I started to recognize that potential for terror.  The crux is in the first sentence of the third stanza:  "If I remember, how is it my face shows barely a line?"

The poem flows from an experience of utter desolation, face down in a carpet, engulfed in anguish.  The particularities of what is heard, what is smelled and tasted, the reaction of feeling the rending and retching, are not very specific.  But they portray the totality of the pain that the narrator has in memory.  It's not so far away.  The sensory remainder is conjurable.

But it is also not immediate.  The poem ends describing morning and the passing of days and quiet nights.  It expresses shock or dismay at singing out in the wide world.  And thus the "terror" at stake is the narrator's wondering if her ability to live on after such wrenching grief means that she has lost her humanity.  "Am I a monster?"  That is the terrorizing question.  It is stated in the extreme.  Maybe others might find ourselves asking more urbane questions such as, "Have I gotten off track?", or the common adolescent query, "Is something wrong with me?"  Still the heart of the question is the same.

The poet understands that going through something so terrible tears one apart, and the intense grief and pain are the human responses to the loss, the injury.  And so much of what I have written in the past two years has been in the midst of that intense pain.  I've reached out for solace, for understanding, for companions, for salve.  I've dug deep into the history of living a life with Everly.  I've marveled at her complex and expansive goodness.  I've imbibed the faith and faithfulness of my formation as a follower of Jesus, a child of God, a participant in the life of the Spirit.  And the smell of those hard days stayed ever present in my nostrils, the sounds, the images ever in mind.

I turned to everyone who would lend an ear and a kind word, trying to think of how I could go on.  I made pilgrimage to places where Everly and I had gone, to people whom Everly and I had known together.  I thought about what she and I had cared for and how we hoped to live our lives in the world.  I remembered the ways it had gone right and the ways it had not.  I sought to care for our children as she would do, always knowing I could offer my best, and at the same time never be what she was for them.  And I tried to discern what my life should be on the path that continues forward from her death and her absence.

As you know, I concluded that I should continue to teach at Shaw where I have now completed twenty-one years.  To do so, I determined it would be best to relocate back to North Carolina.  Because so much of our lives and view of the world have been shaped by Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, I bought a house just down the road from there.  In August, I moved to Durham and started setting up household, with the added blessing of having Naomi with me while she is attending graduate school down the road.  And having gotten back to being in town and on campus every week, rather than just a few weeks each semester as during the Texas sojourn, I started trying to become a more complete member of the faculty and participant in the work of the Divinity School.

Those efforts met with many successes, and some struggles.  I began to see emerging some of the characteristics that I remembered in myself from earlier days, and I believe they are also characteristics that Everly admired in me.  My life was taking new shape, and I was finding myself investing in my work and academic life in ways that I have not for many years.  A number of close friends and colleagues invested the time in me to engage my thinking and encourage my efforts, awakening a confidence I did not remember feeling for some time.

And thus, I arrived by increments to the place and time Levertov's poem describes.  Everly is on my mind daily.  I speak of her whenever I get an opportunity.  I have pictures of her in all the places I go.  But no longer does each day bring wrenching sobs.  I don't mean they never happen, but they are not so frequent as they were.  I am more likely to think and speak of her in pleasant memory and timely insight, without it always shifting into sharp pangs of grief.  So when this poem sank in, I thought to myself that I was somewhere along a path of change that put me in the midst of one of the grief tropes--that of the person who is noticing the change of intensity or even wondering if he "will forget her face" as the time passes.

I tend to resist almost any sort of classification system for human personality and behavior, including the so-called "stages of grief."  Yet there is little denying that over time the human mind and emotions can find a path of adaptation to the new circumstances of loss.  As I have mentioned before, fellow widower David Forbes calls it "renorming."  I'm adapting to the new normal.  And the new normal now includes my trying to make something of my life without Everly walking with me.  I've written this many times now, yet it can be a troubling thought.  Am I being unfaithful to her love and her importance if I am no longer so intensively feeling the pain?  This is the question the poem asks so harshly, "Am I a monster?"  It is the question asked in the Psalm of terror, "How can we sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?"

And so the poet faces the very same dilemma.  How can I sing?  And I think even further, how can I sing out in the world where people can see me?  I remember many times in the past year, and it still happens, when I seek to sing in church or I play music that I love, tears begin to flow and the words get choked up in my throat.  But sometimes I can sing.  And I might even feel like cutting loose a tune in front of people now and then.  Yet it contradicts a way of being that had become my standard.  It had become my characteristic way for some time to be the grieving widower, the pitiful, sad man.  Somewhere along the way, I have become less comfortable in those clothes.  I notice myself carrying on work and participating in groups without bringing all things back to my loss of Everly.  I wonder how this is possible, knowing how rough it has been during this season of life.  I find myself telling people, as I get to know them, about Everly's death without getting choked up.  I wonder if that makes me seem cold, even though my inward gaze still sees the time of weeping as present.

Once in a while, not every day and not even every week, I may find myself overwhelmed.  It may be at home, in the office, on a drive, or just about anywhere.  I've borrowed a term from Kate Campbell for those times:  "fade to blue."  It's from one of her songs, and it describes well the sort of drift into a sorrowful place that seems to have to happen now and then.  But those times have become rarer, if not less intense when they do come.

So this week I realized that my frustration over not having written for this blog in so long had somewhat to do with this poem.  Upon first reading it, I thought that it would make an excellent jumping off point for describing part of my journey of grief.  But perhaps subconsciously that nagging question was pressing in the other direction.  I was not sure I wanted to put a public face on how things have changed.  Is something wrong, that I don't feel the same pain the same way?  I don't believe that to be true.  It is not wrong.  It is next.  It is different.  It is walking another step.  It is living.

The change came from a whole lot of intentional work, of striving to keep on living, of discerning the particulars of a life I hope will be well lived.  Yet with all the effort, it also "snuck up" on me, as we say in these parts.  It came as something waited for without waiting.  It makes sense, but it was not itself the goal.  The goal was to live an honorable life that holds on to all that I have received from knowing Everly.  One outcome was to begin to find meaning and purpose in that life that offers its own rewards, even without her to share it.  I don't call it moving on.  Thank you to bob and mj patterson-watt for teaching me that we don't "move on."  That implies leaving Everly behind to go do something else.  So all of you friends of those who are grieving, there is another cliché to drop from your vocabulary.

If it's not moving on, and it's not monstrous, what is it?  You won't surprised if I say that it is a form of grace.  It is grace to live on in the face of unbearable loss.  It is the superabundant possibility of the grace in which we stand, wherein waiting (suffering) produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.  It is an unexpected life, partly undesired, yet bursting with grandeur, with "the dearest freshness deep down things."  Therefore, it may be moving, but without the connotation of being finished with something past.  It is a continuation of walking with a changed presence of my beloved.  And as I let myself think of what might come of the life we have thus far shared, I'll agree with the Indigo Girls, "When you're learning to face the path at your pace, every choice is worth your while." 

Out of this comes my Advent meditation.  Waiting for the little child who will lead--God the baby entering our world, and now each year waiting again.  In this season, I wait to see what this new life will be.  I wait to write, partly because I fear what it might mean.  Yet as Everly would assure me, I don't need to fear.  Her message, like that of the angel on that blessed night, "Don't be afraid, for there is good news of great joy."  Don't postpone it.

Palpable Absence

These are challenging days for the Broadways and Esteses.  We are still tender from the losses of our beloved Everly and Herbie, and we will be for the foreseeable future.  Today what stands out to me is a palpable absence.

It is the absence that is filling all available space.  It is not so much that I am thinking about specific things that Everly said or did, nor that I am seeing her in my imagination. All of that is true, but what seems to press most on me is the lack of the one who for so long was always in the midst of my life.

It struck me last weekend when I was attending a professional conference in Pennsylvania.  I have attended these meetings at this time for almost two decades.  On a few occasions, Everly and children have joined me for the early summer getaway.  Usually, I have gone on my own to be with friends.  We would call our wives or husbands during the evenings to catch up.  If I were giving a paper, I would report on how it went and whether I believed I was making significant scholarly progress.  I would tell her about various friends at the meeting, and she would fill me in on job, home, and the kids.

Thus my attendance at the CTS/NABPR meeting in late May and early June was a regular rhythm of our lives.  Though usually not together during those days, it was a time for mutual investment in my career progress, for thinking ahead into the summer plans for our kids, and for a period of years, a season of planning and sharing family time around our kids' high school graduations.  It was a time, even though apart, that we were in the work together.

That must be why on Saturday afternoon I began to be overwhelmed by waves of grief.  As I thought about how Everly would have enjoyed the weather and the beautiful scenery of Latrobe, PA, and the Lincoln Highway that took me there, her absence overwhelmed me.  I had driven alone from Durham to Latrobe, and it was a pleasant trip.  But car travel was often some of our most important conversation time.  Everly enjoyed sleeping in the car, but she also enjoyed working things out, figuring out problems, making plans, and generally talking through whatever was on our agenda.  I was feeling the absence in the car and at the many sights and stops we would have shared.

That night I turned on the iTunes playlist that I had made on our anniversary, May 24, 2013.  Everly never actually heard too much of it.  She was not much for listening to other people's music, or for much variety of music at all.  But I had put together the songs believing she would like them tolerably, and in the last weeks of her life I played this music often for my own help and comfort.  One of my friends came by my room to find me lying in the bed, listening to music, and sobbing.  He was at a loss, wanting to provide support if appropriate, but not sure how to respond.  I told him I was doing what Kate Campbell says in a song, "fading to blue."  I made as much sense of my mood as I could for him, and let him off the hook of needing to help me get through it.

Again, it was a palpable absence.  She and I would not share a traveler's room again.  We would not take scenic drives.  We would not enjoy the beauty of a new place.  The next day, I would drive home alone, and she would not be there when I got there.  It's the absence, above all, that weighed on me.

Today was another day of absence.  I have been looking at houses in Durham for the past few weeks.  I am relocating back to North Carolina, and I want to make this move a good match for my convictions about where to live in relation to my church and ministry.  It is my effort to respond to the first "R" of John Perkins's "Three Rs:"  relocation.  Perkins came to believe that the only way that church people can play a role in transforming their communities is to relocate to the neighborhoods where they feel called to minister.  In one way, it is a reaction against the dominant pattern of "commuter churches" which functions within a consumer model of "church shopping."  It elevates the neighborliness of being in walking distance of one another, of making friends of those around us.  In another way, it is the response to Jesus' incarnation, to go to the people where they are and live among them.  There are many implications for class and race that you should be able to imagine.

I had identified three neighborhoods in which to search.  Rather than go into detail about them and raise all kinds of questions about why I did or did not end up in a specific place, let me simply characterize them generally.  One neighborhood already has in it a number of friends who share similar views about relocation.  That would be a place to become part of existing structures and practices of community life, a very attractive possibility.  Another neighborhood has some churches involved in community organizing, as well as several which would likely be willing and even eager to join the broad based organizing efforts with the right kind of relationships and leadership to pull them into the fray.  Another neighborhood is near the church I have been attending, as a "commuter member," for almost twenty years.  It would mean putting my body and energy into sharing life with the neighbors who are in close proximity to the place our church meets.

All of these neighborhoods are outside of the main popular areas of town.  That means housing prices are somewhat or even significantly lower than the "aspirational" neighborhoods.  That is a good thing, since my income is much lower now than when Everly was our major breadwinner.  Combining the money from selling our Demerius Street house in 2012, savings, and insurance money, I am hoping to keep a purchased house as affordable as possible.  Yet, having lived in a very small house for 25 years, I do wish for a bit more space to spread out.  I also want plenty of room for my kids to come and stay a while as needed over the next few years.  Finally, I want to be able to be hospitable to neighbors and other folks God will send my way.

So today I was taking a third look at what seems to be the most promising house to come along.  No house has been perfect.  These are not perfect house neighborhoods.  Most houses are old.  The ones that are renovated to match the trends of the times start to be priced out of my range.  The ones that have not been renovated much at all often look like nightmares of slow, even interminable repairs.  Many are too small, too deteriorated, or too oddly arranged.  Buried oil tanks, water leaks, poor drainage, and shifting foundations crop up everywhere.  This house I was looking at had big promise:  priced low for its size, all new inside renovations which are done well, new HVAC, all new bathrooms, a big yard, nice porches, including an upstairs porch.  I know I could be pretty comfortable in the house.  Another small one not very far away lacks any "extra" room for me to spread out, and it also is not within the walking distance criterion that I want to stick by.

So on the third look, I can't help but see the things that undermine the house's promise.  There are some old structural concrete items that need to go, a dead tree in the yard, and branches from another tree too close to the house.  There are questions that will require an inspector to search around in the crawl space, which I have not yet tried to do.  A few details of the renovations are consistently left undone.  I'm uncertain about many things.  I need to talk it through.  My good friends Nancy Bumgardner and Joanne Jennings have been kind enough to go with me on separate occasions to look at this house.  They each have different and good insights into how to look at and evaluate it.  My realtor thinks it will be possible to have certain work done as part of the purchase contract.

But the absence is palpable.  There is one that I trust, one whom I want to please.  She understands the strengths in how I think and also recognizes my blind spots.  She is not here to talk this through.  So I go on trying to think on my own.  I can see multiple points of view, strengths and weaknesses, promises and potential dangers.  The yard is so big, and I'm not a lover of yard work.  The house has idiosyncrasies.  Will I get sick of them, or will they just become normal to me?  Can I make the space work as a place of hospitality for neighbors and for my family when they come to visit?

I would love above all to be able to sit and dream together about this or some other house and what we think about the life we could live in it.  We did that in Austin about a year ago, and we were actually in the midst of buying a house just twelve months ago.  It would have been the home for our last years.  We were trying to be near a certain church and in a certain neighborhood.  We felt pretty good about our options.  We were making room for all our kids to be comfortable visiting with us.  But the change in her cancer led us to back out of that contract.

Here I am a year later about to start the same process.  I wish I could sit and chat, share a drive, and ease into the comfort of knowing that the two of us are ready to face the challenges of a new home together.  I won't get that this time around.  And wherever I end up, there will be an empty side of the bed, empty closet space, and a big room with an even bigger palpable absence.  Yes, there is a constant and abiding presence of Everly in and with me all the time.  But that presence exists in and alongside her absence.

Reflecting on Liturgy

It's not an insight unique to me that baptists have depended on their hymnals to learn theology and formalize at least some parts of their worship liturgy.  Having said this dozens of times, or maybe it is hundreds, it occurred to me during worship today to do some reflections on our liturgical texts.  Moreover, after my last post, an expositional look at some poetic texts, literature professor Jane Childress gave me high marks for an excellent set of reading notes on the poems.  Having again experienced the thrill of making an "A" on a paper, I'm encouraged to do a bit more expositional note-taking in this post.

The first text of interest comes from a hymn I once knew by heart during my youth in Southern Baptist churches of Texas, "Jesus Saves!"  It has been so long since I've sung it, however, that I had to open the hymnal and read the lyrics in order to keep up.  Although I made it fairly well through the first stanza, "We have heard the joyful sound...," I was a bit more stumped by "Waft it on the rolling tide...."  And probably because third stanzas were for some strange reason considered anathema when I was growing up--"Let's sing the first, second, and last stanzas"-- I was completely lost on "Sing above the battle cry...."  The final stanza, beginning with, "Give the winds a mighty voice," was completely familiar again.

But it was in the third stanza that the liturgy rose up to overtake me.  Halfway through, the following three lines of text built toward the struggling place in my faith.

Shout it brightly through the gloom,
When the heart for mercy craves;
Sing in triumph o’er the tomb.

They "snuck up on me" because of their third-stanza unfamiliarity.  On the other hand, they were lyrics like I have sung many times before, echoing sentiments I would consider basic to my faith formation.   First, I was caught by the word "gloom," which describes where I find myself so often in this season of life.  I am one of the millions and billions of people who have lost a beloved one, my darling Everly, and find making sense of my life hard in the wake of her death.  Gloom is a good word for that mood.  So that first line alerted me that the liturgy was addressing my existential situation.

The next line dug in deeper.  Yes, that is what my heart craves:  mercy.  The overwhelming pain that appears repeatedly each day, even if only for a few seconds most times, can wear me down.  I know my problems are not so vast as the many people who live among constant violence, who lack for food and shelter, whose water is poisoning them.  Their situations are more deserving of the term gloom, their need for mercy, including mercy from people like me who prosper, is greater.  So I know that to have had Everly in my life for so many years is cause for thanks and praise.  Yet I cannot make the gloom and craving for mercy go away, for to have loved and lost, though better than not to have loved, is still a difficult road to walk.

Then in full force, the liturgy drove home its intent with language that we learn so early in our Christian training: that Jesus has won victory over death, that we need not fear death, that even the dying thief can rejoice to hear, "This day you will be with me in Paradise."  At that point I found myself encased in the liturgical moment.  My hope in God is one that can strengthen me to shout in the gloom, even when I contemplate the grave where Everly's remains are laid.  This tomb, this earthly symbol of her life, well-lived, well-loved, is not a final defeat.  There, where we mark the dates of her life sojourn's beginning and end, we also acknowledge the triumph of knowing God who is the author of life, who is greater than death.  So even through the tears, the thickness in the chest, the lump and tightening of the throat, there is a song of triumph to sing.  She lives in peace, and we await a reunion.

Perhaps this liturgical moment took on such momentum because of another text from last week.  As Naomi, Lydia, and I drove across the Southland toward North Carolina, we spent a good part of one day celebrating Everly's and our own love of Kate Campbell's music.  One song I had not spent much time listening to before that day is "Sorrowfree."

On the banks of the Alabama,
Autumn falls into spring,
And a day is always longer than it seems.
White camellias, winter blooms--
When summer comes I will think of you.

There will be a shining river
There for you and there for me.
There will be a sweet forever.
There we will meet, and we will sing,
Glory! Hallelujah!s.
Golden bells will ring.
There all will be forgiven
In that land called "Sorrowfree."

There are three more stanzas of this song, but I think its impact on me is focused in this stanza and refrain.  As I've written recently, I have been planting and thinking about flowers.  We planted wildflowers on Everly's gravesite, and more wildflowers and iris bulbs at our house in Salado.  I think often of the germination, the establishment of roots, and the eventual blooming of these flowers.  They seem to function in my consciousness as a parallel material operation to the hidden work of grieving. 

Grief work has been studied and analyzed, but it remains somewhat mysterious.  For those of us who are in the midst of it, we don't really know how to predict or comprehend how it emerges from our depths to stir us or shake us.  Since each member of our family has our own idiosyncracies, we regularly find ourselves at different places in grieving.  What may seem to me a good moment for conversation may only make David or Lydia or Naomi want to retreat to solitude.  Grief work is at least as much subterranean as public and visible.  And that's like the seeds and bulbs are now, in the ground.  So I think I am hoping and wondering what they will do, in part as a way of hoping and wondering what is happening to me.  What will I be, what will I find myself doing, in Spring and Summer, when flowers may, or may not, bloom?  Thus my thoughts turn often to the potential for germination and root growth in the ground, where I cannot see it happening.  When summer comes, I will think of you.

The refrain of Kate's song goes directly into my heart, again as a way of rehearsing what I have been taught from earliest faith.  I have preached about the River of Life, and received great appreciation for those words and testaments of hope.  I have known the stories, and they have formed me.  But now, I find myself fully embedded in this part of the narrative.  That river, along which strong trees grow, bearing leaves for the healing of the nations, is a river where I long to stand together with Everly.  It is a river for the nations, and it is for her and for me.  And this pain of separation will one day be gone in a sweet forever.

That hope is why I posted on Facebook last week that I was practicing my "Glory! Hallelujah!" so that when I get the chance I can sing it with Everly with all the gusto in me.  She will probably roll her eyes at my singing so loud.  I will enjoy seeing that again.  Naomi probably rolled her eyes a few times today with all the shouting "Glory!" that I was doing in church.  (By the way, trying to figure out how to punctuate Kate's line about singing glory hallelujahs remains a real puzzle to me--I settled on the weird placement of the plural s after an exclamation point.)

Dr. Turner preached from Ephesians 3:14-21 today, focusing on prayer for one another's strength, that we would be upheld by sharing our lives in the pattern of shared love and dance of the Trinity.  He took an aside at one point to say something very important, something to which Everly would have offered a loud "Amen!"  He said that we have to stop this thing of telling people to smile and be happy.  He said that the amount of smiling a person does may have nothing to do with being Christian.  There are hard times, struggles, and tribulations that we face that are not times for smiling.  In those times, we don't need knee-jerk reminders that things will get better.  We don't need to be chastised and exhorted to "cheer up."  We need to pray one another's strength in the Lord.  There are seasons for weeping, for seriousness, for facing the real effects of the rulers, authorities, powers, and principalities.  Hope does not dissipate or disappear in serious and solemn and challenging times.  And smiles will return in due season.  But it is no one's job to enforce smiling at church.

Finally, I want to mention another bit of our liturgy from a gospel anthem, "Order My Steps."  A line that has often been for me a "throw away" or "space holding" line took center stage as I listened and sang along.  In the refrain, the song says, "The world is ever-changing/But You are still the same."  The first part, that the world is ever-changing, had always been for me a simple acknowledgement of the flux, the flow, the vicissitudes, the emergent, the passage and fruition of the world.  But in this liturgical performance it spoke to the vast change in my life that losing Everly has been.  Yes, there have been many changes.  I have lived in Texas, California, North Carolina, and now in two states at once.  I was a child, and later I became a husband and father.  I was a novice, and I became Rev. Dr. 

There have been many changes, and up to now they seemed to drive onward toward a destiny I had glimpsed.  But this change was not in the plans.  This change was unthought, undesired, unimagined.  This change shook the foundations.  Can it be true that when the foundations are shaken, God remains faithful?  Such is the claim of today's liturgy.  The God who has ordered my steps can continue to do so.  I don't mean God planned Everly's death from cancer.  That is the absurd intrusion on the path of destiny, the as-yet-unfulfilled promise of welfare and not calamity, of a future and a hope.  But God held us through that struggle, guided our feet while we ran that race.  And today I reached once more for the hope that God will continue to order my steps.