Don’t trust your gut.

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We need to see our proper place sometimes. Maybe you've heard about the psychiatrist who tells a client, “No, you don’t have an inferiority complex. You really are inferior.” Harsh words.

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I could sense the hint of danger in her voice--the warning. So I paid attention to Mrs. Hamilton explaining to my fifth-grade class how to avoid getting run over. “When you cross the street,” my teacher told us, “don’t just step out, but stop. Look. Listen.” Only then, walk.

When I cross a downtown street, I have hardly to think twice now. I do instinctively what I had to do by practiced effort back then. But I still have to work on the soundness of that pattern in other ways now.

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I’ve been re-reading J. R. R. Tolkein’s remarkable book, The Fellowship of the Ring.

“Why read a book you already have read?” someone asked me when I mentioned it. Some books are, of course, worth only one read-through (some not even that). But others, and Tolkein’s among them, draw me back again and again.

A scene from early in the book (the first part of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings) strikes me now. Frodo, a hobbit, the main character, finds himself uprooted from his quiet, calm life in the Shire. A resurgence of evil in the world has meant a new calling for him fraught with difficulty, a vocation pressed upon him.

At one point, as Frodo counts the cost and realizes the potential perils of the journey he has to undertake, he confides in Gandalf, the sage figure who has more-than-natural wisdom.

“I wish,” Frodo says of the disruption, “it need not have happened in my time.”

[photo credit: Joshua Baudelaire at unsplash.com]

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She wore green for the broadcast this morning because it’s St. Pat’s Day. Gayle King called attention to the color as she prepared to lay into the headlines because, the newscaster said, “I’m craving some normalcy when nothing is normal.”

Soon a program segment commented on New York’s normally bustling intersections as “deserted, desolate streets,” complete with eerie, quiet images. And another phrase from the newscast to depict the nature of things now: a “social-life shutdown.” And then there’s that phrase social distancing. What used to be a negative (“Oh, I don’t like how he’s so distant emotionally”) now, in the new pandemic normalcy becomes not just a virtue, but a mandate.

This is strange, new territory for all of us.

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“Where is the poetry section?” I asked the bookstore owner, who stood behind the counter. I wouldn’t say I’ve been a big follower of poets. But I’ve grown interested in the odd and stunningly articulate Emily Dickinson. I had visited her historic house just days before, while visiting in New England. And here I was in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a Massachusetts town given notoriety by a (somewhat depressing) movie of the same name, staying with my son and his family. And of course, I was drawn to the bookstore there--the cleverly named Manchester-by-the-Book.

Pointed in the right direction, I found a biography of Dickinson, as I hoped I might. When I came back to make my purchase, an elderly, distinguished lady--obviously a regular used to chatting with proprietor and customers--asked me what I was buying.

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Recently I discovered a disturbing web site: www.withoutsanctuary.org. It documents postcards of lynchings in earlier times in America, most of the victims black. The scenes printed for mass distribution depict gut-wrenching brutality and obvious signs of torture leading up to the hangings. Just as striking is the nonchalance of the perpetrators, and the fact that the photographs, some capturing a carnival atmosphere with children present, became postcard “souvenirs,” a grotesque testimony to the way humans can grossly dehumanize one another. My discovery of the unspeakable atrocities coincided with something that has come back to mind, during this season of Lent.

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A woman I heard about tried a prayer experiment. She had already decided she wanted to do less talking, more listening for a larger voice. She sat in a chair and tried to imagine the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the room sitting around her, conversing and communing. “I wanted,” she said, “to eavesdrop on the Trinity.”

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What does it mean to grow close to someone in a healthy way? Is it a merging of souls, a fusing of identities? Do we not instead grow closer, perhaps intensely and intimately so, but still remain distinct? Tackling the question in the sphere of human relationships helps me make sense of what it means to grow into intimacy with God.

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My new friend Kerry Egan spends her days with dying people, listening and talking. Those conversations come with her job as a hospice chaplain, but the way her eyes come alive when she talks about what she has learned shows that it’s also a calling.

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My mom rocked me when I was little, holding me close. She sang sometimes, the rails of the rocker creaking in calming rhythm. One nursery ballad told of the unlikely courtship of a frog and mouse. It sounded fairytale-like, though looking back now it seems more like a portent.

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Sometimes people who know about my past writing will ask, “Are you working on something now?” People might run into me at Indah or Drip--local coffee hangouts--my laptop open, and wonder.

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