Life and Death: a memoir

Pieter Claeusz, Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball, 1628

The argument of Todd Billings's The End of the Christian Life is forever true, even if it seems a little morbid to bring up associated issues. Billings goes in a particularly "Christian" direction, but never leaves the path of long-established moral truth.

For Christians. . .coming to terms with this open wound [the reality of death] actually teaches us how to properly live and hope as creatures. Only those who know they are dying can properly trust in God’s promise of eternal life.

I finished the book yesterday, loved some parts more than others, but found it rich and fertile in springing memories from a thousand sites on a detailed map of my life. I doubt Todd Billings would mind me saying The End of the Christian Life is a meditation. It is. And I meditated, in the best sense of the word, just as the Claeusz's painting, above, is meant to.

If you're interested, read on. Some of what I'll say--like what's coming today--is already written and published, this piece already a decade ago, one of a bundle of stories I couldn't help but remember when I meditated on and in The End of the Christian Life. 

It's weird to have a skull on your desk. For the record, I don't. But I get it--and, morbid or not, I can't help liking the idea. 

___________________________________________  

The house where we lived at that time is long gone, as is the tiny kitchen where I stood, phone in hand, listening. The call had come in the middle of the day, in the middle of a lunch, our two kids were sitting beside us. It’s now 40 years later, but I haven't forgotten standing there because I was shocked, yet confident that my being chosen for a waiter’s scholarship—whatever that was—to Bread Loaf, the granddaddy of all writers conferences, was a sign that my own literary success lay just down the road.

If I had been both more sure and more vocal about my faith, I would have heard that news as the voice of the Lord, telling me, by way of acceptance, to go into all the world and be a writer. I’ve never been that style of believer: “the Lord told me not to take that job,” “the Lord told me I had to write that book,” or, standing there beside the dinner table, “the Lord told me to go to Bread Loaf.” I didn’t translate the scholarship offer that way; instead, I heard that voice as the revelation of another god altogether.  As a writer, I was on a roll. I'd just published a book, my first. Now, a year later, Bread Loaf Writers Conference offered a handful of cash.

Maybe I was bowing towards different gods right then; maybe I still am. That question, another legacy of my faith, is rooted in my never being altogether sure of such things as motives or outcomes especially when they’re my own, which is surely not to say I’m the descendent of that gloomy Young Goodman Brown. I don’t envy other believer’s blessed convictions. The Lord may well talk to other people in ways he doesn’t talk to me. I’m not being silly or self-righteous, and I’m too old to lie. What I know is, if it hadn’t been for that scholarship, I wouldn’t have gone to Bread Loaf--ever. What strings God pulled, if in fact he had his fingers in the decision, is beyond my ken.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the conference—early, because I was a waiter—I met a woman, my age, married with two children, who told me with a gorgeous smile that she was an aspiring poet. Her name was Deborah Digges, and she’d also be a waiter; that’s what brought us together. Someone from Bread Loaf picked us up, and together we took the hour-long drive into the mountains in the back seat of a Middlebury College car.

It must have been Deborah who first introduced into our conversation that she was as Dutch-American as I was because I wouldn’t have recognized her birthright by her name. We shared pics of our respective families, and somewhere that conversation opened into ethnicity, perhaps my own distinguishable Dutch name. "No kidding," she said, because her parents were Dutch. Holland, Michigan was part of the story, although she’d grown up in a suburb of St. Louis, her father a doctor.

Knowing she was Dutch-American brought was something of a blessing for me. We shared religious heritage we joked about, but meeting her—the first of the Breadloafers--was comforting: we were both Dutch, we had families back home, two children we’d miss—and we were both waiters.

Tomorrow: We were waiters and John Gardner.