In light of the sun

The Rascal in repose

In the space between the shifting of shadows, there is warmth. And he is there with it. Within it. Yes, bathing in it.

The daily rhythms of silent movement while we're away. Yet he is there dancing silently with them. Swaying. Dreaming.

What can we learn from the Rascal cat in his slumber? Are we no less absorbed in the radiance of our suns? Hovering around our constellations?

In the silent singular shine, fur glistens. Muscles twitch. Sighs from the deep eek effortlessly out. Releasing. Renewing. The sun sets, after all, and the Rascal cat reanimates.

The Butcher's Apprentice

Photo by Andrea Nissolino

With a tentative push my index finger dug into the flesh of the pig, searching for a bundle of tendons - the "leaders" - in one of its hind legs. Got it. Tugging them out a bit, I slipped in the S-hook but my first-timer anxiety amidst the surrounding men - only one of whom I actually knew - caused me to fumble the hook and it dropped to the ground. Frustrated, I let out a groan. Behind me, the butcher gently said, "Don't worry. We learn by doing."

His name is Ike and he's an 81 year-old retired Mennonite pastor. Fifty years ago he came to this little holler at the foot of the mountains lining the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley. Many of the people around us, the locals, have known Ike since they were old enough to remember. He displayed the qualities of a wise master and for a day I was his apprentice. In the course of a day's work butchering pigs, though, he gave me much more than a lesson on the work at hand. Ike's approach to ministering to the community has for years included being the local butcher.

"When you give a sermon, people might remember a phrase or two, maybe a story you told to illustrate the Scripture. But if you come out here," Ike said gesturing at our surroundings with his knife, "people remember you. They trust you."

In this post I'll do some narrative theologizing (more narrating than theologizing) on Ike's long career as pastor/butcher, plus butchering as an analogy to the Christian faith, and finally the experience in general as a somewhat graphic illustration of the gift that is life. So you've been warned: This is not a post for those with weak intestinal fortitude (or PETA people)...

Fluorescent Buzzing Silence

The smell of pot strikes me in passing
Simultaneously out of place
But whispering, familiar, and lost.

Words spit into a cellphone:
"Our bikes have been stolen."
Not a good sign.

Settling in, now the chalkboard imperative:
"Leave this room as you found it."
Fine with me. Empty I entered.
Empty I will depart.

Through the slats in the blinds, and glass,
More percussive words punch through
A story between me and the setting sun
Behind the slouching mountains across the valley.

In this fluorescent buzzing silence...like what?
Like it's just what I need today.

Myths and fairy tales; Truths for all times.
Except tonight. Tonight they wait.
Tonight we pause, and in the silence...

Let's call him Carl

"You should be doing that at home."

The elderly store clerk looks up from the trash can she was emptying and spots the source of this unsolicited comment: He's just a few years younger than her - maybe 70 - and dressed in ragged blue jeans and an untucked dark blue polo shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. The clerk blows him off and returns to her work.

The obnoxious old man (let's call him "Carl"), meanwhile, has strolled over to the beer cooler and grabbed himself a 40 oz. bottle of Busch Light. With a donut in one hand, I look at my phone in the other: 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday. I chuckle to myself and fall into line behind Carl, who's just grabbed the morning paper. At the register he asks for a pack of GPC's, pays for his beer and smokes and struts out the door, the scuffled hair on the sides of his balding pink-splotched head whipping around in the breeze.

The clerk and I stand inside at the register, but we're both gawking out the window at glorious Carl as he hops into a spotless Cadillac SUV, the morning sun gleaming off the shiny silver rims. Our jaws drop a little lower when Carl pops the cap off his 40 and takes a few swallows off the top. Finally, he lights up a GPC before driving away, probably off to enjoy the best day ever.

Pass the Pepper, Please

Here's a piece I wrote up in my diary this past Tuesday after hanging out with my wife's granddad who's 83. He's not been in the best of health for a while and I wanted to have some quality time with him before we head back to Virginia (we've been in Iowa the past week). We went to his favorite hangout, played cards and drank coffee for a few hours. It was amazing. Read on after the break for my impressions...

Francois

(Photo by calico_13/Flickr)

[My brother called me up one night in 2007 when I happened to be working late at the office. At that point, I was a Software Quality Assurance Engineer and on this particular night that meant I was babysitting some critical jobs that were running, making sure they were completed successfully by the start of business the next day. I don't miss that part of my former career, but it was fortuitous this night. When my brother called me, I was bored. And the story he told me, which had just actually happened to him, captured my imagination. With a few hours to kill, I gave the story the creative writing treatment.  This is probably my favorite piece of my own writing. The only theological reflection I have on it is that I'm grateful for my brother's and my imaginations, and I'm grateful for interesting people in the world that we're blessed with encountering, if only we place ourselves at the ready...]

The world from atop the shed

One of the things I thought of while reading through my journal a few weeks ago was to take some of my meager creative writing efforts captured there and stick them somewhere else for posterity. This thought continued to percolate as I read Donald Miller's excellent book on stories and life. So here's one of those pieces, which I wrote one February evening in 2006.

I'll classify it as a word picture and not a story. There is a character (me) but no plot. Just a description of a shed and the backyard of the house where I grew up in tiny little Prairie City, Iowa. My author self speaks to the reader (which also appears to be me) with the benefit of not being time-bound. There is a rooted period of time in the account but it shifts to the past and the future based on the full sweep of my memories as a then-26-year-old. My immediate family and a few of my childhood friends might also register some recognition by reading this. I've made only a few editorial changes from the original, so the style should be fairly true to what I was feeling four years ago, while still working on my BA in English.

So read on after the break for a short piece from the pages of my journal...

Looking back at A Season of Service

This post is a mix of housekeeping and navel-gazing. I'll get the latter out of the way first and move on to the former after the break. "A Season of Service" is a paper I wrote for my senior project to complete my BA in English at Simpson College in the fall of 2007. Creative nonfiction had been (and continues to be now) a literary genre that I enjoy very much, especially from folks like Jon Krakauer and Donald Miller. So I wrote this paper from my own experience facilitating a creative writers' workshop at a women's correctional facility in Des Moines, Iowa the summer prior. The experience of the workshop and the paper that was born out of it became life-changing events that would soon radically change the world within my family. In March of 2008, I was speaking with my co-facilitator and a workshop participant who had since been released from the facility at a restorative justice conference in Des Moines. Howard Zehr was the keynote speaker and someone I had never heard of. I've told this story many times in the two short years that have passed, so I'll go light on it here. Essentially: Howard Zehr radically altered my life and the life of my family. Of course, I qualify that with the years of discernment and spiritual growth that had preceded this moment of seeing Howard, but I'll let the statement stand.

A few months after finishing "A Season of Service," I posted it on my other website, Honnold.org, in serial fashion. About once a week, I would drop a section of the paper onto the site and let people comment on each. [Update: The original posting is no longer available on Honnold.org - BG, 1/16/2011] I'm reposting the entire story here on the Restorative Theology blog, all at once, for posterity and that it may be incorporated into this new-ish web project of mine, because it is a significant marker along the journey. It marks the end of the last chapter of my family's life together and the transition into this current chapter. The story itself is a reflective one, bouncing around over a few years in the midst of the primary timeline, the summer of 2007.

I've been posting long papers recently, and I assure this is the longest. But if you're interested, read on after the break for an important story from my not-so-distant past: A Season of Service...