On Being A Piece Of Sea Glass

October 29th, 2013  |   

It was all a part of being trustworthy—of being a piece of sea glass. High tides, low tides, storms, sand and mistakes all contributed to the polishing process. Though difficult to endure at the time, the demanding elements helped smooth the surface, transforming one into a better person, not worse. A person who learned from the harsh environment, who knew the storm would end, and felt confident she would still be in one piece.                                                                                    Marie V. Snyder—Sea Glass

 

Walking along the shore after the storm

I look at things the tide has left behind…

as if the shore were some bizarre bazaar,

I hold the bits I want in my hand,

How ground down they are!

Vivian Smith—“Sea Glass” from the book Along the Line

 

The only problem with looking for sea glass…is that you never look up. You never see the view. You never see the houses or the ocean, because you’re afraid you’ll miss something in the sand.                                   

                  Anita Shreve—Sea Glass

 

I have had sea glass on my mind. Perhaps it’s because I see some on the kitchen windowsill and it reminds me of so many times Judy and I walked beaches and looked for sea glass to gather and take back home.

Sea glass, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is glass found on beaches along bodies of salt water. The glass comes from discarded bottles and containers that have been broken into small pieces and washed up on the beach. Cobalt blue glass may have come from a Noxema bottle. The brown, red and green pieces may have come from beer bottles, bleach containers or various food or perfume jars.

Sea glass isn’t fresh and shiny. The soda and lime used to make glass has been leached out of it and left it rough and weathered. It has a milky tint to it. It has been called “Mermaid Tears” and it was said that every time a sailor drowned at sea, the Mermaids would cry and the sea glass was their tears washing up on the shore.

Perhaps I am thinking about sea glass because of the tears I have shed since Judy died. Those tears let me know I am still alive, even though I have been ground down. I will still be in one piece, even though a broken one at that. Finding beauty in what has been broken seems like the challenge of a lifetime, one well spent.

As I write these Notes, it seems to be the right time to look up from those past walks on the beach, the broken sea glass, my own tears, and comment on what’s going on in the brokenness I find in the weathered world around me, and the beauty of it all.

Bent—Straight—Ground Down

The sun has not found the right combination to safe-crack through the fog that hangs over the Kanawha Valley. But the phone has. I reach for the bedside lamp switch that allows me to see the clock on the other side of my bed, the side that used to be Judy’s. It’s 5:30.

On the other end of the line is a man Judy and I met in 1974 when I became the priest at St. John’s Church here in Charleston. He was fifteen years old then. He is calling to tell me how sorry he is to hear about Judy’s death. He remembers how loving she was to him.

Propped up in bed, three pillows’ worth for my head, we recall the turmoil at St. John’s and around the diocese when I blessed the relationship of two gay couples in the church. He remembers it—of course he would. He was a teenager then who knew he was gay but could tell no one, particularly his family. Being a long way from home, he just wants to check in, share his life with me, and find out how I am.

The word “bent” has been used to define gay people. The word “straight” has defined heterosexual folks. The word  “broken” can be applied to anyone, no matter his or her sexual orientation. I have come to understand that God doesn’t write with a straight line only and, in fact, has a penchant for all that is bent and broken. I picture Jesus on the Sea of Galilee in his journey in search of sea glass.

Before our conversation ends, I ask my early morning caller if his parents have grown to accept him, as he is, not judging his sexual orientation. They have, but it was not easy. Silence still has a way of filling those awkward moments when their acceptance of him vies with their inability to understand why he isn’t who they thought he would be.   

It takes time for rough surfaces to be ground down.

As I hang up, I see that a shard of light has found its way into my room while we talked.

Being Ground Down To Tears

A wise counselor of men incarcerated in prison, a man who himself had been a prisoner, taught me a lesson years ago I hope I shall never forget. It served me well not only in the work I did in prison, but also in understanding human behavior, my own included.

He said that men who had been hardened by life, walled off from their own emotions and, therefore, dangerous to others because of their isolation from any and all empathetic responses, could only be transformed by being broken down. Tears were the only way to melt a hard heart and a crab-like, seemingly impenetrable outward façade. If he could wear a man down to the point where tears could drain, the restoration of that man’s soul was in sight.

Lately the news has been full of stories about prisoners breaking out of prisons in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Florida, not to mention the hundreds of prisoners who broke free from Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The news that prisoners have broken out of prison causes people to become fearful, of course. But let me tell you about some people who broke into prison. 

Breaking Into Prison

Back in the early 1980s, I assisted some Episcopalians in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in their plan to begin a new mission, a church, if you will, without walls. In our time together, searching for ways to reach out to broken people in the community, we discovered the power of breaking into prison. That’s right, breaking into prison.

Set against an innate fear of people breaking out of prison, we discovered a Jesus-like imperative rooted in the New Testament promise that we would find Him behind the towering walls of Jackson Prison. “I was in prison, and you visited me.” That was the verse from the Bible that challenged us. (Matthew 25: 35-36)

Passing through the barred security checks and finally inside, we sat side-by-side in a circle with the prisoners. When I asked both the men chosen to meet with us, and our own delegation, how they felt being together, the response was fascinating. All of us confessed to being fearful, we of them and they of us. The question, “Who are these people?” was the first experience of what united us rather than what divided us.

I can honestly say that, since then, I have taken many people into prison—in North Carolina and Delaware—and all of them have exited with a jarringly different feeling and understanding about who is incarcerated in prison, and the criminal justice system that put them there, than they had before making the trip. The distance between people, particularly when that space is defined by our differences, walls off from any possibility of healing and reconciliation.

Growing Up In Public

I’ve just finished reading a review of a new book about the life and work of novelist Philip Roth. I’ve long been an avid reader of Roth’s books, dating back to his 1960s novels, “Goodbye Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Over the years, his writings have helped me better understand the Jews I lived among in Baltimore, where I grew up.  

Where I grew up? Why did I write that? When asked many times over the years where I grew up, I have answered jokingly, “I haven’t yet.” That’s my way to play with grownup talk. It’s also an affirmation, in its own right, about a very basic truth. Human beings aren’t locked into an identity like an insect or an animal fossilized in amber. Family photo albums offer proof of growth, in more ways than one; expanded waist sizes, loss of hair, and wrinkles and scars that slipped into one’s calendar without invitation.

Am I the same boy dressed in knickers in a fading picture pasted in a family album?  I think not. How about various stops along the way? There are a whole string of pictures.  There I am, a college student, no gray hair. And look, I’m a nineteen-year-old guy walking down a church aisle with Judy, way back in 1958. And would you believe, there I am in a Marine Corps dress blue uniform.  Then with a black shirt and a white collar, the father of four children going off to his first job as a priest. Then there are those newspaper pictures from so many public battles over 50 years of ordained ministry. So many pictures over so many years—posed and candid, there to be seen from any number of vantage points, available for observation and interpretation. 

Philip Roth is an American writer who has been both praised and castigated by Jews for what he has written. Martin Amis, the reviewer of a new book about Roth, says that after a rather hateful public meeting in 1963 at Yeshiva University in New York, Roth, then in his 20s, “solemnly swore (over a pastrami sandwich) that he would ‘never write about Jews again.” I would only add that those who care about the written word should be grateful that he broke that promise.

Amis, in his review, goes on to say that Roth was young when he made the promise he finally broke. “One of the snags of starting young,” he says, “is that you’re obliged to do your growing up in public.”

Each one of us grows up in a personal and private way, but always in public space, rubbing up against family members and people we meet. Our experiences, in some mystical and paradoxical way, enable us to grow up while we are being worn down. Marie Snyder has it right when she writes: like sea glass, “High tides, low tides, storms, sand and mistakes all contributed to the polishing process. Though difficult to endure at the time, the demanding elements helped smooth the surface, transforming one into a better person, not worse.”

Of late, Philip Roth’s novels have been about the sickness that accompanies old age. Now he says he will not write another book. I can only hope that he was eating a pastrami sandwich when he made that declaration. I like to believe he has not stopped growing up, nor have I. There are more pictures to be snapped, don’t you think? And to borrow an old line from some of my more religious friends: “Please be patient. God is not finished with me yet.”

Dick Cheney—The Tell Tale Heart

As I write, Halloween is about to arrive on the scene. In fact, it’s been hovering over my space for weeks. Fake cobwebs have been stretched over neighborhood bushes, stores have been full of costumes, and the grocery store has candy on sale even before the Great Pumpkin arrives. Lord have mercy, we’ve already had a Halloween parade with more walking dead than you can find on the television show with that name—The Walking Dead.

For weeks, two major cable TV film channels have been showing classic slasher films, like A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a dozen Friday the 13^th films. The iconic serial killers, Jason and Michael Myers, have dominated major TV time. And if that weren’t enough, creeping onto the screen is the creepiest creep imaginable. While Dracula sucks freshly pumped blood from the veins of victims, Dick Cheney is running all over the place gobbling up talk-show space with his own tell-tale heart story.

Cheney has survived five heart attacks, had open-heart surgery, pacemaker implementation, a heart pump procedure, and a heart transplant. And if that didn’t exhaust the medical lexicon, get this—he has a high-tech device that will prevent a terrorist from hacking into his chest and causing a heart attack.

I watched our bionic man interviewed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. At one point he explained how he was miraculously able to go back to work after each and every procedure. GO BACK TO WORK? Judy, no longer at the table, I said to myself, yes, back to the work of waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I look at Dick Cheney and I see a sharp, angular man with a quiet, peaceful, gentle, presence he doesn’t deserve. Is it real or does it hide more than it reveals? It smells like luxurious privilege. After all, who but the privileged could get such medical care? The kind of care, by the way, the Affordable Care Act is intent on providing.

Mr. Cheney is unwilling to acknowledge the blood on his own hands from wars he will not say were horrible mistakes with outrageous consequences. His self-proclaimed innocence in the slaughter seems to inscrutably exonerate his complicity in these illegal and immoral wars.

Be clear about this, I don’t want to drive a stake through Mr. Cheney’s heart, one of the ways utilized to put a vampire to death. But it is hard for me to dismiss the fact that he was the heartbeat behind a senseless war that has caused an estimated 500,000 deaths in that part of the world, some 8,000 American troop deaths, and well over a hundred thousand American dead, wounded and disabled.

Perhaps I should knock on the door of his palatial home over there on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, located near the homes of Latino poultry workers longing for Congress to pass an immigration reform bill. Then say, “Trick or treat!” when he comes to the door. And, if he were to treat me to a humble confession, like Robert McNamara did after the Vietnam War, I wouldn’t pull a trick on him. I’d just wait for an international court to indict him for war crimes.

A Death In The Family

My basement is full of letters and papers and books collected over the years. It’s way past time to go through them to sort out what may be valuable and kept, and what can be discarded. I have a long way to go with this project but have already given away more than 100 books.

While sorting them out I spotted a yellowed copy of James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “A Death In The Family.”  I thought, as I leafed through it, how important it was to me when I read it years ago. If Philip Roth brought insights to me about Jews I had grown up with as a kid, James Agee schooled me on the subject of death as I began my ordained ministry fifty years ago in Annapolis, Maryland.

The book is an autobiographical novel set in Knoxville, Tennessee. Agee was a child when his father died in 1955 in an automobile accident, but he absorbed all that was happening in his family as they suffered through his sudden death. That is what he distilled in this magnificent novel. All his family members, are there, seen through the eyes of a boy named Rufus.

Thanks to the power of the Internet, I was able to purchase the 1963 film “All The Way Home,” an adaptation of the book, and view it on my computer. Memories often grow dim with age, but it was truly amazing how so many of the scenes had stayed indelibly fresh after all those years.

Sprinkling flashbacks into the story little Rufus is taken by his parents to see his Great-Great-Grandmother Follet. In the film, Rufus is encouraged by his father to approach the old woman hunched over in a chair. Disheveled, weather-beaten, she raises her head.  Rufus is told by his father to kiss her wrinkled face. She reaches out to him with her gnarled, translucent, heavily veined hands. Grasping him tightly, she finally is heard to say, as if energized by the boy’s embrace, “I’ve been born again!”

My primary physician has turned his office into a spa where he has added medical aesthestics (making people beautiful) to the practice. He offers skin treatments including facials, microdermabrasion, enzyme and chemical peels, anti-aging treatments,  hyperpigmentation (sunspot, age spot) treatments and other customized services.

I look at my hands. They are no longer the hands that held an ice cream cone as a child, or Judy’s when we took a vow to love one another until death do us part. They are not the hands of a new priest who held young children at home. Can the doctor restore them? How absurd. Great-Great-Grandmother Follet has taught me a better way to be born again.

More Than Spunk—Gumption

Watching movies years ago, I knew the film was over when the words THE END appeared on the screen. The lights would then go on and I would go on about my business.

Going on about my business. That’s what I must do. People tell me that these days. Judy would want that, I am told. She would want me to want that. Isn’t that what all of us are supposed to do, get on with the business of life? That’s what Mary is told by her brother at the end of  “A Death In The Family.”  

Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption. You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off of pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and you can too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice–except to go to pieces. . . It’s kind of a test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all.

One More Look At The Sea Glass On The Windowsill

It sits there like a cat looking out the window, or like a child waiting for a parent to come home. Maybe it’s just pieces of glass wondering if it can return to the sea and be as it was before it was broken, washed up on the beach and carried home by people who thought it was beautiful. Who knows? All I can say is that it does my heart good to look at it as I go outside and when I return home from wherever I have been.

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