Raymond Carver: Recovery

Carver: Recovery

LATE FRAGMENT:
“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”—Inscription on Raymond Carver’s tombstone with  his poem “Gravy.”

This poem takes us back to Olivia Laing’s story in The Trip to Echo Spring, about the relationships of six award-winning but alcohol-addicted authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Carver is the only one of these six highly talented American writers who went into significant 12-step recovery. This tells us a great deal about addiction. It is a cunning and baffling disease, even for the most brilliant and creative minds.

I hope you read my favorite Carver story, “A Small Good Thing,” about a dying son, his birthday cake, and the cake baker. Also, make sure you read Carver’s original version, published after his death by his wife, Tess Gallagher, in Beginners (Vintage, 2015).

When people are caught in this disease, their addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex, relationships, or work becomes their God, their higher power. It is impossible to find the relationship with God that our life calls us to when there is something else in our “God hole.” The paradox is that the answer, the awakening, the Lazarus experience for any addiction, is spiritual: surrendering and turning our lives and wills over to the care of the God of our understanding.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Gandhi: A Tellling Silence

Buechner, Gandhi: A Telling Silence

“I remember going to see the movie Gandhi when it first came out. We were the usual kind of noisy, restless Saturday night crowd. But by the time the movie ended with the flames of Gandhi’s funeral pyre filling the entire widescreen, there was no sound or movement in that whole theater. We filed out of there—teenagers and senior citizens, blacks and whites—in as deep and telling a silence as I have ever been part of.”—Frederick Buechner in The Clown in the Belfry (HarperCollins, 1992). 

Gandhi

We long to silence the busyness in our heads. We try meditation, interacting with children, exercising outdoors, or simply sitting. Sometimes, art forms can move us from our heads to our hearts—to the Christ within us—in record time, as in the old Superman slogans, “like a speeding bullet.” Movies can do this for me, especially stories of those who know what suffering is and have learned from it rather than choosing to avoid its reality. I had the same experience as Buechner and his fellow viewers when I first saw the movie Gandhi. As we, by chance, might have glanced over at the strangers on either side of us in the packed theater, none of us needed to feel embarrassed by our tears.  

We all walked out of the theater in silence. There were no words. The transformative power of this 1982 movie still speaks to us each time we watch it over forty years later.

Since today we watch movies more often in our homes than in the theater, we are less likely to experience the powerful community reaction that Buechner and I had.

The movie Gandhi is about someone who brought about change by nonviolence.

We must remember this story daily, hourly, minute by minute, second by second.

Joanna   https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Chris Keller: Getting on Toward Home

 Getting On Toward Home

By The Rev. Dr. Christoph Keller

 From the first time we heard Chris Keller preach in 1991, we know intuitively that he is one of the most outstanding visitors to the pulpit we will ever experience. His exact technique for writing is a mystery. However, I do know he spends hours mulling over every sermon preparation. He has set a high bar for all privileged to step up with fear and trembling1 into the same pulpit where he has left footprints. His sermons are never a “Saturday night special.2” The number of us who have learned about preaching simply from listening to him is too numerous to count.3 He has mastered the formula for combining the needed ingredients of mind and heart into what he composes. This is especially true of his funeral sermons, where the heart almost always takes the lead through his innumerable homiletic journeys toward resurrection.

Today, as I reread each of Chris’ chosen sermons, many of whom I have heard in person, I try to share which homilies have been meaningful to me. Which sermons best follow Richard Milwee’s funeral direction, “to tell the truth, but not the whole truth?4” I decide on this one, then that. It becomes impossible. Each has significant meaning, written for a specific friend or family member, or even persons unknown.

Chris Keller writes about a beloved young man he baptized as an infant who died an early death. He has homilies for both of his well-known parents. He writes about beloved parishioners. He presides with words over the funeral of a talented physician who committed suicide. He preaches at the death of someone he has known since childhood with mental illness.

Finally, I decided Keller’s funeral sermons simply best represent Frederick Buechner’s description of preaching in Telling Secrets. “It is to try to put the gospel into words, not the way to write an essay, but more like a poem or a love letter, putting your heart and your whole life into it, your own excitement, most of all your whole life.”5 

1Philippians 2:12.

2Name of an inexpensive gun used by poorer neighbors, referring to preachers who write a Sunday sermon late Saturday night.

3“Too numerous to count” or TNTC is a medical term for a large number, usually about the number of organisms or white blood cells in a specimen.

4 Chris Keller dedicates the book to his longtime friend, Richard Milwee. One of my joys in ministry has been sitting beside Richard and Chris at the Diocesan Convention, and learning how to make a convention more exciting than I can write about.

5Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets (HarperOne 2000) p. 61.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/