The Pope and the Sow

At my Catholic, all-boys high school, our theology teachers advised us students to be ready for people that would challenge our beliefs once we were turned loose upon the world. Probably the most prevalent reaction to this warning among us, for better or worse, was a sort of confused indifference; some of us armed ourselves with Catholic apologist thought, in preparation for future theological sparring matches; my personal feelings lay somewhere in the muddle between those two. I have little tolerance for some of the ossified social opinions that the Catholic church chooses to cloak in heavy dogmatic robes and impenetrable pseudo-legal prose. On the other hand, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of hearing the church criticized. I felt protective of it in a certain way, like one would feel protective of a relative with some odd habits. The purest dogmatic form of Catholicism is certainly not my spiritual center, but at the same time many of my strongest beliefs do come from the Catholic tradition. More traditionalist Catholics would likely criticize me as a “cafeteria,” or carelessly eclectic, Catholic, picking out beliefs like green beans, pizza, and chocolate milk at the dining hall.

But as Truman State’s Newman Center pastor Father Bill says, it’s hard to be in the middle. My beliefs, which I would never claim as the best or even particularly coherent, are just where conscience and experience has led me. Many of my friends in college are amused to find that I’m Catholic. The church seems to be regarded not so much with suspicion but with cautious interest, perhaps like the kind felt at a zoo when looking at a rare species of iguana. The iguana has little interest in them, but they are interested in its unusual form. “Huh,” they say. “Catholic. Interesting.” I have a tendency to offer fun facts in conversation, and when one of these is related to Catholicism, my friends acknowledge the occurrences by calling, “Catholic Fact!”

The one thing that non-Catholics have actually questioned me about in college is the tradition of saints. Why pray to saints when Jesus is supposed to be our personal savior, our direct link to the divine? I’ve never had a perfect, direct answer for that question, mainly feeling that such spiritual navigation is best left to one’s own working out. The idea of saints as good examples is too simple. Catholics and non-Catholic Christians are not likely to come to an understanding on that issue.

However, I do understand saints as stories. Many of our early saints are, plainly stated, made up. They are some of the countless mythic creations that are a large part of our story-telling species’ lives. That does not have to make the truths they represent less valuable, or that I don’t have great respect for most of the saint stories I’ve heard. Like any of our stories, saint stories begin with a seed of real-world experience. In some cases, it was the verifiable life of the person in question. In other cases, it is a re-working of messy experience into terms that can be communicated through a memorable story. Whether we realize it or not, we own the stories of our saints. They are what we will make of them.

Our new pope, Francis, formerly Arcbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, is the first pope from South America, as well as the first Jesuit pope. As my high school was Jesuit, this connects him to me. We share an important set of beliefs about living in the world. Many religious orders believe that a relationship with God is only possible through removing oneself from the world and living monastically. Jesuits believe that solitude is important, but that one must also find God in all things, particularly in the chaotic world of human society and of nature. The language of the Jesuits uses military metaphors because the founder, Ignatius, saw the new order as on the front lines of carrying out the Gospel, delving into the messiness of reality and doing their best there. Jesuits value connection with the world as it is. One of the first stories that CNN told about Francis is that, as Archbishop Bergoglio, he lived in an apartment and rode the buses of Buenos Aires to work. Anyone on the bus could chat with him if they wanted. That’s the mark of a true Jesuit.

Our new pope has chosen a name that no pope has ever chosen before. And he has taken partial ownership of a very important name and story, that of St. Francis. I’m thinking, as I would imagine the new pope was, mainly of St. Francis of Assisi than the other saints by the name of Francis (though, importantly, Francis Xavier was a co-founder of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius, and Francis Borgia was an early Jesuit.) The story of St. Francis of Assisi is to us very familiar—that animal saint. He is surrounded by happy, anthropomorphized smiling creatures when he is painted. It makes him a fun saint, and much approachable for non-Catholics than some of our bloodied martyrs or anti-Semitic crusader-saints (I’m looking at you, Louis IX, namesake of my hometown.)

You might be surprised to hear that St. Francis’s story was not always told this way—far from it. The original St. Francis had little patience for animals on their own, and much less for flawed humanity’s connections to the natural world that animals usually represent in our stories. One of the original, canonical tales of St. Francis was his interaction with a sow. The sow had killed a lamb with its muzzle, and Francis, linking the lamb to the metaphor of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, vengefully cursed the sow and proclaimed that no man or beast would eat from its dead body. This curse led to its death just days later. This sow is our fallen nature, our inclination to destroy innocence. The historical St. Francis—and even the St. Francis of many legends—had no particular kindness for most animals. Though he believed in the communion of all creation in praise of the Creator, he did not believe that all creation was anything near equal, holding to the medieval Christian conception of nature, in which humans were the privileged stewards of creation. In the Victorian period, however, St. Francis began to be pictured as associating in a friendly way with animals, based on the “Canticle of the Creatures” attributed to him. In the 1960s and ’70s, during the environmental movement, ecologists, environmentalists, and theologians began re-popularizing these images of St. Francis emphasized caring for animals that were created long after his death. In 1967, historian Lynn White argued that St. Francis should become the patron saint of ecologists, for he saw St. Francis as a radical that brought about a new, more humble conception of the relationship between humans and nature. White viewed St. Francis as what is known as a deep ecologist, claiming that the “key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species.” Though White’s goal was essentially to create a “new religion” of ecology, whose patron saint was St. Francis, the part of his paper that suggested a reconsideration of St. Francis as a medieval Christian ecological activist was accepted by the religious establishment. Pope John Paul II followed White’s suggestion and canonized St. Francis as patron of ecologists in 1979.

A year later, one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell, published a piece called “Saint Francis and the Sow.” (Yes, short and worth a read. I wrote a paper on it last year, which is why I’ve got all these fun facts about St. Francis ready to go. Catholic Fact!) In his poetry, Kinnell tries not to personify animals but to animalize humanity, and to seek out the natures of animals as valuable in their own right. In this poem, the reverse of the original story, St. Francis is depicted awakening the sow to its own powers of self-blessing, playing a surprisingly humble role for a saint. He “reteaches” the sow “its loveliness,” and the sow “flowers, from within, of self-blessing.” Kinnell’s St. Francis empowers animals. He does not presume to lift them above their animal-ness but rather affirms it, and in so doing affirms the cast-off, looked-down upon parts of ourselves.

Pope Francis the First reminded me of this humbler incarnation of St. Francis today when he asked the assembled crowds at St. Peters’s, as well as the millions tuned in around the world, to pray for him. The applause and hum on our TV gave way suddenly to a few moments of meditative silence as he and everyone else bowed their heads. It is a small sign, but it is a sign of a humble vision of the pope’s role, and a sign that perhaps this pope is participating in the continued creation of St. Francis’s story like Galway Kinnell and others. It gives me hope that I’ll be better able to explain why I am still a Catholic, and that the stories that we tell about this Francis just might have value for future generations. But we’ll have to see.

"Quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain"

It's been a while since I've put something up here. Don't think I haven't been working, though. I've been focusing on poetry lately, as well as looking into publishing in literary journals. It could be quite a while before the fruits of those efforts appear, though. For now, here's an essay I wrote for the Truman Writing Center's blog about choosing good verbs. I doubt that you folks need or want advice on the fundamentals of writing, but in this essay we get the chance to destroy a perfectly good poem, as well as explore the ways in which the original poem works.

On Verbs: Sink or Swim—Or Walk?

Trust your verbs. Always—and if you find that you can’t trust them, fire them and get new ones. You can’t have a sentence without a verb. Verbs are not always the showiest part of a sentence, not always the part of your writing that the reader walks away remembering, but they are the hub around which all the other parts of the sentence turn. To make a comparison to music, verbs are like the chords in a song, the essential foundation that gives just the right tension and shading to the ear-catching melody of nouns and adjectives.

The fundamental importance of verb choice is sometimes hard to see clearly unless you compare the disastrous effects of the wrong verb to the strong but flexible structure given by the right verbs. To see some verbs in action, let’s look at a poem by Billy Collins. He’s one of my favorite poets—the clarity and accessibility of his word choice often stands in sharp contrast to the surprising journeys his images take the reader on.

Walking Across the Atlantic

Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

thinking about Spain,

checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

(from Sailing Alone Around the Room)

Lovely little poem, don’t you think? So that we can contrast the firm, flexible structure made by good verbs with the chaos, or inflexible, impenetrable wordiness, caused by bad and unhelpful ones, let’s ruin this poem by just changing some of the verbs to similar, but much less effective, ones. With apologies to Collins:

Strolling Across the Atlantic

I stand waiting for the holiday crowd to vacate the beach

before hopping onto the first wave.

Soon I am strolling across the Atlantic

dreaming about Spain,

watching for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water keeping up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will snooze on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to visualize what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet showing up suddenly and vanishing.

Well, yuck, right? It’s not meaningless, but it’s not poetry any more. Everything’s either gone flat, or gone silly. See how “stand waiting” adds an unnecessary word and changes the simple, deft stroke of “wait” to a two-word phrase with a clunky –ing ending? See how “strolling,” which might appeal to us at first as a more interesting action than “walking,” just made things far too silly and egotistical, in contrast to the determined but everyday tone that the original poem had with “walking”? See how “watching” in the second stanza gave the narrator an over-anxious Captain Ahab attitude, in addition to adding a third word beginning with ‘w’ to that line, overwhelming the subtle, wispy alliteration Collins intended with “whales, waterspouts”? See how “to visualize” in the third stanza is so much more wordy and businesslike and less dreamy than “to imagine”?

I could have changed the verbs much more subtly and still spoiled the poem. On the other hand, it could have been worse: I didn’t throw in any nasty passive-voice constructions like “I felt my weight as it was held by the water” that invert the usual clearer order of doer of the action followed by receiver of the action: “I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.” Picking ineffective verbs—too wordy or too extreme—can keep your writing tied to the ground. Or, to stay in the world of this poem, the surface tension created by the verbs that keeps you on top of the water collapses, and you sink into the waves like the rest of humanity, splashing about in a sea of unhelpful language.

Our choices with verbs are more limited than other word choices in English. When choosing a noun or an adjective, we often have dozens of alluring options. But finding the right verb for a situation has a pleasure all its own. While they are sometimes less flashy than the adjectives or the nouns—I’m more likely to remember the “whales” and “waterspouts” than that the narrator was “checking” for them—they set the tone in a way that nouns and adjectives simply cannot. “Checking” is the same thing we do when crossing the street—it’s casual, almost thoughtless. In our mind’s eye, we see the narrator turning his head every now and then to look right and left for a whale’s back or a spout of water, as if for an oncoming car at a crosswalk—just in case. We get the sense that the narrator has done this before. He has walked across the Atlantic so many times that it’s as habitual as crossing a street with light traffic. He has dealt with the fantastic so many times that to him, it’s just an everyday occurrence. This is the essential tension of the poem—the contrast between the supernatural journey taken and the simple, confident word choice of the narrator. It allows this poem to retain its mystery and offer up new pleasures even after many explorations. Verbs can take you across the Atlantic—as long as they’re the right ones.

Tuesday

has a perfection that haunts me,

like the oracular whine in the cabin of an airliner

sailing over Ohio.

Something transient, the lack of judgment

gifted to time neither end

nor beginning, nor yet even middle:

some minor point in the development,

often missed by fast readers, where

the characters are quietly putting on

their humanity like early spring jackets:

a favorite word, a particular thoughtful expression

that comes over one’s face

when listening to music

or writing out French homework,

trouble falling asleep, trouble waking,

an inclination towards cloud architecture,

a mild hatred of cats, a violent affection

for a certain sitcom.

The events of Wednesday will swallow these things.

On that absurd and turbulent day,

someone new will hate us,

we’ll make Grandma angry for the first time

in twenty years,

we’ll be falling in love, we’ll get chased

by a nasty neighbor’s poodle,

we’ll save someone’s life,

we’ll run over a pregnant opossum

and feel evil for days.

But for now,

the sky as yet dim and bland,

the waking dog

raising its nose to the fading moon

and the Pop-Tarts hot in our hands,

let us drink up the perfection of Tuesday.

The Know-Nothing Consumer

One day I was having lunch at my usual dining hall at Truman. Whipping a glass for milk out of the glass-tray (with a small, habitual, careless flourish that is sure to destroy a glass or glasses someday) I approached the milk dispenser. There are little labels for “Skim,” “Chocolate,” and “2%,” and also little labels that say “Full” and “Empty.” To my satisfaction, I noted that the 2%, my milk product of choice, was labeled “Full.” I confidently pushed up the lever, but found that only a dribble of milk descended from the spout. “What the devil are they about, labeling this ‘Full’?” I demanded (silently. Suspecting dining hall workers of malice is unfortunately an occasional pastime of Truman students.) “It is clearly not full, not by any measure.” I began to walk away, but then some neurons in my brain made a sudden and astounding connection: the “Full” and “Empty” labels were two-sided—they say “Full” on one side and “Empty” on the other. And yet the insight went even deeper: I realized that it is not the cafeteria workers but the students who are expected to flip the labels when a milk dispenser runs out, because, of course, they are the only ones who would know that.

This experience, in which I was a necessary (and defective) component of an economic activity, ended up being quite eye-opening. I began thinking about other things I did not understand. I could think of quite a few. You see, like most people my age, I live in an economy in which I as a consumer am not expected to know anything. I don’t need to know how to fix a car because we belong to AAA. The auto shop people can decode those mysterious orange lighted symbols mean on my dashboard. (Is that really what an engine looks like?) I don’t have to count out bills for most transactions because I use a check card. Think about that one for a moment: I don’t have to count. I don’t have to know the roads of St. Louis, Kirksville, or any other city, because I can look on Google Maps or borrow a GPS from my parents. The development of my cooking skills has been ponderous at best, due to fast food, freezer food and college dining halls. I don’t have to know how to fix my computer—either the ITS department or my dad can figure it out. And I didn’t have to pay attention to the labels on the milk dispenser—until at last they betrayed me. The architecture of our economy is designed to coddle young consummate morons such as myself, whose ignorant money leakages are enormously profitable.

Our parents had to know less than their parents, and we know essentially nothing. Examples of the helplessness of our generation in basic life activities abound. Tonight, while studying in a dorm, I printed off a guide for my genetics lab tomorrow morning. I galloped down the stairs to the lobby printer, confident that I would find the guide waiting for me there. It was not. The desk worker suggested to check if I had printed to the right printer. “Have I really done that again?” I asked myself. “Surely I checked before I impulsively clicked print.” I had not. In fact, when I brought up the print screen again, the selected printer was located in the library, a 5-minute walk away.

I set out for the library. When I got there, I found the first-floor printer belching out a six-page document every 15 seconds. All print jobs have a cover sheet with our serial username. The cover sheets showed that these were all coming from the same person. One of my friends was stacking the documents on the printer, anxiously waiting for her own papers to show up. Then I realized that I had not checked which library printer I had printed to, and that it was probably the second floor printer. I went upstairs and found my papers. Delighted, I returned to the first floor. The printer was still vomiting papers as if it had a sort of pulpy stomach flu. There were now a few nervous people standing around the printer. I offered to go explain what was happening to the students in the ITS office upstairs, one of those islands of experts to which we are continually having to hop so we can have our problems solved. But suddenly the printer started printing out other people’s papers. My friend left without ever getting her paper.

I’m willing to bet that the student who printed out a septillion of copies thought that he or she was only printing one. But the darn thing wasn’t coming out at the dorm lobby printer in front of which he or she was standing, so the ‘Print’ button got irritably clicked a few more times. And then a few more times.

It all just makes me wonder: first it was misunderstanding the milk system in the servery. But what will it be next time? I operate all sorts of complex and even dangerous machinery—a coffee maker, a car, a razor, a computer. What if next time I can’t just cross the room to the other milk dispenser? What if next time I’m faced with the certain disaster of having to rely on my own abilities? But that, of course, will never happen.

A Day of Fog

This morning, banks of fog descended on Adair County. Many students found the fog creepy, suggestive of stranglers and dementors. I thought it looked kind of cool.

Thousand Hills State Park looked like it was in another country today.

A more northern, bracingly cold country with heather and fens and firths.

I was keeping an eye out for Nessie. No luck today, though.

The sun started to break through as the day went on, but the light was still strange, making the lake look like the coast of the North Sea.

And then, as if that wasn't enough of a treat, even heavier banks of fog rolled in tonight. My camera was not really up to the task.

The Quad, and some Christmas lights. That figure to the right is a statue of Baldwin, Truman's first president. Okay, so maybe the fog is a little creepy after all.

Escaping the Cycle of Political Apathy

The next time I hear someone my age complain that our votes are meaningless and that we can't affect the course of politics, I'll have a convincing counterexample.

A junior and a senior from Truman (one of whom is the student association president) co-founded Missourians for Equality, an organization that aims to fight for gay civil rights, according to the Truman Index. The students have recently filed a petition for an amendment to the Missouri constitution to prohibit discrimination against sexual minorities on an equal plane with other protected classes. If Missourians for Equality gathers 150,000 signatures for its petition by May 2014, then the amendment will appear on the ballot that November.

Read the full story by the Index here.

I'm truly impressed by what these students are doing. People my age have the chance to influence Missouri civil rights policy in a potentially historic way. I'm convinced that our generation's political apathy is not nearly as justified as we imagine. Believing that we can't affect the course of events is a self-fulfilling prophecy; these Truman students decided to ignore such thoughts and go ahead and change things.

Photo Essay: Two Trips in the Rural Edges of Missouri

Recently I went on two trips that skirted the extreme edges of human habitation in Missouri: areas where people live just this side of wilderness, with strange, transitional features. (Click photos to enlarge.)

Pasture-Hills South of Columbia

First, I hiked through hilly country south of Columbia with my friend Andrew. We weren't actually sure where the heck we were. We were looking for a decent trail to hike while driving along a highway that skirted the edge of a section of Mark Twain National Forest. Our search was made more difficult because the only sign with a map that we found had been shot through several times with a firearm, parallel to the plane of the paper, obliterating most of the map. The trail we eventually found was apparently just outside of Boone County, for after crossing this bridge (and there was some doubt as to whether it would actually support the weight of the Highlander I was driving) we were informed that Boone County was no longer responsible for the maintenance of the roads. Not that the roads encountered previously seemed much maintained, at all.

A heroic old bridge, to be sure; yet a daunting prospect to cross in a medium-sized SUV.

The creek was of a nice size--would have been nice for a canoe trip, had it not been so brutally cold.

Just over the bridge was a trail-head into the woods, which we decided to take, having no particular plan for where we were going.

This helpful sign explained who has the right-of-way on narrow wooden footbridges. Apparently horses reign supreme on this trail.

We found a very old overturned car a little off the trail. Any guesses as to the make/model?

 Very suddenly, the trail opened up onto wide grassy fields on the ridges of hills. For some reason, the view made me think of Poland, or at least the things I associate with Poland, seeing as I've never been there.

There were faint trails, perhaps made by horses, through these fields. And they seemed to be used for pasture-land, as evidenced by the fresh and abundant cow pies.

Hollows packed tight with pine trees separated the grassy ridges from one another. The thick woods, as well as the ill-defined trails on the fields, caused us to get moderately lost a number of times. Eventually we found our way back to where we started.

On another trail earlier that day we found this pair of cartoonishly large holes in a living tree.

The Western Pale of Kirksville

A few days later, I took my bike out to the western outskirts of Kirksville, towards the University Farm. I would like to take this opportunity to correct the mistaken and shockingly prevalent belief held by people unfamiliar with Truman that there are cornfields on the main block of campus, which must be crossed by every Truman student on their way to class. There is indeed a farm operated by the university a mile from campus, entirely out of sight of the main campus, and agricultural science classes sometimes meet there. But there are no crops grown next to the library, forsooth and anon.

Let's start the trip on campus:

The Sunken Garden losing its leaves. Thoroughly non-agricultural green space, such as can be seen on many modern college campuses.

A brick path on campus.

 Alright, westward we ride, under cloudy, dispersed daylight. Passing by several blocks of a suburban landscape such as you might find in St. Louis county (and indeed more than a few expatriates of St. Louis live in the area) we come up rather suddenly to the beginning of the transition to rural land. 

 A new subdivision adjacent to active fields, and then more houses west of the field. This pattern repeats a couple times until we reach the Boundary Road. 

This house is one of the smallest free-standing dwellings that I've ever seen in this country. Not sure if it's currently occupied.

Houses and fields near the Boundary Road, to the west of town.

Finally we cross the Boundary Road and go up the long drive to the University Farm.

My dependable Schwinn mountain bike, which has served as my steed on many adventures and misadventures, on the gravel drive up to the University Farm. In the distance, the farm's vineyard and some of its fields.

There are several academic buildings and structures at the farm. One is the university observatory, which includes this large telescope. In the picture it's closed, but on Stargazer's Club open house nights it's crammed out the door with people and lit inside with red light (which is less harmful to night vision than white or yellow light.)

Some astronomic equipment whose function I do not know.

What looks to be a vegetable garden. In the background, the windmill.

A strange autumnal sight: dead sunflower stalks taller than me, and a cleared field.

 A harvested field, covered with windfall tomatoes that were left behind. The sight of this field recalled something we learned in high school theology--that poor people known as "gleaners" would pick up unwanted crops, and that their right to do so was stated in Hebrew law.

An Angus cow, a surprisingly large animal, gives me a wary look.

I had just watched Fiddler on the Roof, so this path struck me as looking like a road on which one might find Tevye tugging his cart of milk and rambling heavenwards: "On the other hand... on the other hand..."