photo credit: with much gratitude to Nicole Louden, Sandhills Prairie Girl

I love Nebraska because every word is sifted through its great sky. –Don Welch, journal entry, 1997

I left Nebraska in 1979 after I finished graduate school at Kearney State College. I transplanted my life first to Wisconsin and then to Iowa, where I’ve lived ever since. I left physically, but never emotionally. Never spiritually. Nebraska will forever be the home I return to in my dreams.

For years, I bore the brunt of Nebraska “burns” delivered in jest by co-workers, friends, and students in Wisconsin and Iowa: I’ll bet Mrs. Vesely took a Conestoga wagon to school! Hey, I told my husband to drive straight through Nebraska at night, since there’s really nothing to look at. You probably had to mow your sod house occasionally, right? You get the picture. Before each school vacation or break, one of my college instructor friends always told me to have a good time in Kansas. He would laugh and wave me off, gleefully refusing to acknowledge that I was traveling to Nebraska. When I first moved to Iowa and, naively, wore my Husker gear to grocery shop one weekend, I was met with open-mouthed stares. In Hawkeye and Cyclone country, publicly sporting my Husker sweatshirt was tantamount to treason. Over the years, I’ve taken the ribbing and purchased the requisite Iowa college clothing. But I’ve never forgotten my home.

This week, as I read reports of the catastrophic wildfires that continue to blaze across Nebraska, my heart broke. On Sunday, when I asked my church to pray for Nebraskans as they battled these fires, I was disheartened—but not surprised—that most hadn’t even heard of the ongoing tragedy. Even in Iowa, one state away, what happens in Nebraska rarely appears on the radar. As a former student once said, “After all, Nebraska is flyover country.”

To refute this claim that Nebraska is merely “flyover country,” in 1980, my father wrote his poem “Nebraska.” At that time, he claimed it to be “one of many apologias written for the state in the past decade.”  He explained that “if it sinks back into that morass of poems which are unable to keep their heads up, then it will have had at least a small advantage: for a moment it gave me a better definition of the place I love.” His response to those who argue that Nebraska is a good place to be from was to say that “[b]y starting in Nebraska, one may very well get a good interior compass; there is much here which points true north. I would go farther, however, Nebraska is not only a good place to be from: it is a good place to be.” In the 1995 Midwest Quarterly, my father recounted an experience with an “Easterner [who] kept calling the prairie dispiriting.” He responded by noting that “it was the beginning of evening, and there was a fine rare circling of blue. Like an old hawk’s inflection, barely holding us, it was true.” What the Easterner found “dispiriting,” my father found “rare” and “true.” For my father, Nebraska was truly a “good place to be.”

In Every Mouth of Autumn Says Goodbye, my father confessed that “[a]s good as it is to love the world, it’s better to work lovingly hard on the local.” In a 1998 journal entry, he noted that to become a famous poet, you must write about a famous place, providing a better description of that place than anyone else had. If you did this, my father wrote, “your immortality is assured, but you must pick a famous place.” He mused, “Can you imagine a poem written about the meeting of the Loup and the Platte rivers in Nebraska?  I could do it because I grew up in Columbus, where they meet.  Unfortunately, none of the three is famous enough.” Even in adolescence, I was painfully aware of my father’s struggle to publish as a Nebraskan competing on a national stage. For most, Nebraska is neither a “famous” nor a notable place. Submitting a poem about the meeting of the Loup and Platte rivers near Columbus, Nebraska, might be like pissing in the wind. And yet for decades, this is exactly what my father did. He worked “lovingly hard on the local,” ultimately doing his share to bring national attention to Nebraska, as he published poetry and essays, winning several awards and the hearts of many. Could Don Welch imagine writing poetry about the Loup and Platte Rivers, about the sandhill crane migration, about the wind and the prairie and the vast Nebraska sky? Yes, he could.

After visiting Kearney and reading poetry on the University of Nebraska-Kearney campus years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver mentioned the Platte River in her essay “Winter Hours”(Upstream: Selected Essays, Penguin Press, New York, 2016):

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together We are each other’s destiny.  

As astonished as I was that my parents hosted Oliver during this Nebraska visit (and that she actually spent the night in my childhood bedroom!), I was even more astonished that a Northeasterner shared a reverence for the Platte River and the Central Nebraska Flyway, where 80% of the world’s sandhill crane population, along with millions of ducks and geese, converge each spring. Oliver didn’t see Nebraska as “flyover country,” but rather as one of the “unbreakable links between each of us and everything else.”

In his 1997 journal, my father wrote, “I have always been like Thoreau, preferring broad margins between myself and others.” For him and many Nebraskans, the plains offer these “broad margins,” the physical and spiritual space to live “the good life,” as Nebraska’s iconic road signs announce. Years ago, I encountered the prairie photography of Solomon D. Butcher and began researching his journey to chronicle the settlement of the plains. In one of his photos, “Lookout Point Near the Snake River, circa 1890,” the “lookout” bumped up just enough from the prairie that you could call it a hill. What immediately interested me about this photo was that Butcher had drawn in seven trees, two horses, and a man. Into the photo, he inked life where he saw little. Perhaps he believed scarcity wouldn’t sell art to patrons east of the Mississippi, who, like the Eastener my father encountered, might find the prairie dispiriting. Perhaps he loved the land enough to give it a spit shine of life. And perhaps he feared he wouldn’t find an audience of those, like my father, who preferred the “broad margins” of this land. There have always been these folks, however, and there always will be. Where others see nothing, they see home.

I don’t wish to romanticize life in Nebraska, which can be good but hard. I think particularly of those ranchers who face the challenges of unpredictable weather and cattle markets, as well as rising costs for equipment and fertilizer. Today, fires have burned more than 820,000 acres in Nebraska and left more than 35,000 cows with no grazing land. Aerial shots of these fires reveal the devastation. What’s left looks more like a desert than a prairie. There were 24 fire reports across the state on March 12-13, according to the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency. Today, the Morrill fire, the largest, has burned 643, 074 acres and is 98% contained. The other large fires, too, have been mostly contained now. Life for Nebraska ranchers has always been hard, but for many, it will be much harder in the months to come.

As I read about this natural disaster and the challenges ranchers will face in its aftermath, I’m grateful that, for years, Nicole Louden, ranch wife and mother, photographer, and writer, has brought ranch life to thousands worldwide through her photography and posts. Nicole, Sandhills Prairie Girl, works “lovingly hard on the local,” sharing her family’s land and life through stunning photos and poignant posts. Through her lens and pen, Nicole reveals the qualities that mark this way of life: perseverance, faith, family, and hope. In her, my father would find a kindred spirit, a Nebraskan who loves the place she calls home, a “rare” and “true” land where one can find a “good interior compass” for all seasons of life.

This is the land where my father chose to “stick.” In a 1997 journal entry, he wrote that “Wallace Stegner described those who settled the American West as ‘stickers and boomers,’ those who settled down and those who rushed dollar-first along.  All my life I’ve been a ‘sticker.’” Once, as we were standing in my backyard and looking into the timber which surrounds our acreage, he turned to me and said, “Don’t you ever get tired of all these trees?” I chuckled, confessing I’d grown to love the trees and hills of my home in southeast Iowa, and knowing full well that he would always be a “sticker,” preferring the wide, open spaces of Nebraska where “every word is sifted through its great sky.”

As I pray for all those affected by the Nebraska wildfires and pay tribute to all Nebraskans, I leave you with my father’s poem, “Nebraska,” a poem he claims to have given him a “better definition” of the place he loved. It is a testament to his great love for the state—and to mine.

Nebraska

Going west when the sun is going down, following

the highways like light cords. 

*

If Nebraska were the name of a Russian woman,

they could love her. 

*

There would be a certain large-boned beauty

about her.

*

Or, she would be dressed in black and lace.

Her waist would be small,

and she would drag her long dress over a floor into

a study lined with French books. 

She would be a pawn in huge novels of war. 

*

As it is, she is a woman of spare beauty. 

*

Turning away from him so that the fine hollows of

her back were toward the bed,

she said, Why do you do this to me?

Why do you keep imagining me in other

places and states?

And why do you keep assuming our children 

are unhappy?

     Don Welch (1980, The Rarer Game)

Crane migration in Nebraska – Credit: Kylee Warren / Crane Trust

If all the birds disappeared, men’s eyes would starve. —Don Welch (journal entry)

In a letter to friend and fellow Nebraskan Stan Smith, my father anticipated crane time: “It’s in the air. Pretty soon we will hear them before we see them, that long, high yodeling sound as if the sun had its symphony of wood-winds.”  As missiles are launched and stock prices fall, I confess to logging onto the live webcam from the Rowe Sanctuary, a wildlife refuge on the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska. Here, you can lose yourself in the chortling masses of sandhill cranes during their spring migration. This refuge is, in the words of poet Robert Frost, “a momentary stay against confusion.” It may be momentary, but I’ll gratefully take it.

My siblings and I grew up loving cranes because our parents first did. When we grew old enough to ask about how our parents met, they regaled us with the story of their first date. While other college students were holed up in vinyl booths of local diners or necking in parked cars, my parents were crouching behind a haystack in a field along the Platte River. My dad said he sprung for two dime cups of coffee and drove my mom into the countryside, where he planned to introduce her to the magnificence of the crane migration, close up and in person. And so began my parents’ annual spring pilgrimage to the crane fields.

After my father’s death in 2016, I inherited many of his books and files. One file labeled “Old Pete” caught my eye. In it was research my dad had collected from Mark Peyton, a Gothenburg, NE resident, regarding Old Pete and the whooping crane recovery and captive breeding program. A wounded whooping crane found near Brady, NE, in May 1936, Old Pete became the patriarch of this recovery and breeding program. Housed at the Gothenburg Game Refuge, 3,000 acres south of Gothenburg, NE, along the Platte River, he was one of 20 remaining whooping cranes in the world and one of only two whooping cranes in captivity. Peyton’s interest in Old Pete’s story was sparked when Gothenburg natives Tot and Pauline Holmes told him that the whooping crane population today owes their existence to Old Pete. From there, he gathered information from locals, biologists, and scientific journals concerning Old Pete’s contribution to whooping crane survival. It was clear my dad was fascinated with this research, for his folder contained copies of Peyton’s work.

As my dad was introducing his poem “White Cranes in Spring” during an address he once gave at the University of Nebraska Kearney, he recalled how, as a child, his father had taken him to Bert Daggett’s place, south of Gothenburg. Daggett ran the city dump, mended fences, and fed the birds at the Gothenburg Game Refuge. At the time my father visited, Bert had a menagerie of wounded and crippled birds, including Crip, one of the few existing whooping cranes at that time, and who, along with Old Pete, was one of the first cranes drafted into the captive breeding program. 

My dad loved a good bird story and came to regard these whooping cranes as heroic figures to be memorialized. In his book Gnomes, he writes of Old Crip:

        For just a moment
	I am 6 and running again with Crip,
	a white crane dangling his hopeless right wing.

	Running ahead of him,
	my hand full of tease bread, his left wing way-high;
	under the blister of a Dust Bowl sky.  

Last year, I made a trip to Nebraska in April and was dismayed to discover I’d missed the cranes. In previous springs, when I’d returned to Kearney, I’d roll down my windows after I passed Grand Island in hopes of hearing the cranes in the fields. Even with Interstate traffic, I could often hear them. Their collective voices, “that long, high yodeling sound,” welcomed me home. My dad wrote that without birds, “men’s eyes would starve.” As would our ears. Entering a field of sandhill cranes is a full-body experience.

For my Iowa readers—and readers unfamiliar with Nebraska’s crane migration—consider a trip to central Nebraska some spring to take in the spectacle. As you look out upon the Platte River, you may be fortunate enough to spot a whooping crane, a descendant of Old Pete or Crip, a stately white figure among the gray masses. Visit the Rowe Sanctuary, where one of my father’s poems hangs in the entry, and where you’ll be graced with all-things-crane. You won’t be sorry.

White Cranes in Spring
                     —for Marcia

There were white cranes that spring
the feathered bowls of their wings
scooping out air, lifting them up
like unstemmed peonies.

Over the Gulf they could only circle
so long as Galveston’s halos
before they broke for the Platte,
a blue braid which runs through Nebraska.

For centuries they had danced on 
corn bones, on the fossilized memories
of nomads, or played contrabassoons
to the winter through the long folds

in their syrinx. In each bird
was a red germ, the unison cipher
of sex. And that spring,
paired up, we too flew north,

following the kissed-out leaves
of the willows, as if for a million springs
we had said the same thing
and were crying it hoarsely.
          Don Welch (1992)


My Mother Visits the Sandhill Cranes

She remembers the first time.
When others were coupling in dark theaters 
or drinking sodas in corner booths,
she knelt along the Platte River behind a haystack 
where her date promised she would be amazed,
where soon his presence would eclipse
the universe of gray bodies that had spread out
before them.

The day was ending,
but the field would not succumb,
the warm earth breathing beneath great wings
which hummed and fanned the flames
of last light.  

They mate for life, he told her,
his hand finding hers 
as the March wind took a corner of the haystack
and blew it towards the river.

When it was finally too dark to see
and they made their way back to the road
where he’d parked his car,
she’d already seen how she would return: 
      
      to this field of a thousand dancing birds,
      to this love with an enormous wingspan,
      to this man.
                                                              
          Shannon Vesely (2022)

I believe in the kind of light which magnifies itself, which gives off a radiance in excess of what we might expect, then stays a victory in a world of loss. —Don Welch, journal entry, 2003

If I were to give a Valentine to the world, I’d give just this: a “light which magnifies itself” and “stays a victory in a world of loss.” This would certainly trump all the Valentine cards I painstakingly taped candy onto and inserted into construction paper boxes we decorated in elementary school. Even the most expensive greeting card and the most decadent box of chocolates would quail in the presence of such light. This would be a Valentine that would keep on giving through whatever darkness and loss life throws at us. Each day, I think about my dad’s words and his steadfast belief in a light that buoys and urges us onward.

And I think about the light in two remarkable women: my dad’s grandmother, Vallie Welch, and my mom’s grandmother, Minnie Zorn. Despite significant loss and scarcity, these women not only persevered but triumphed. When my dad spoke of his grandmother, Vallie, he always noted her “indomitable spirit”:

My grandmother lived her adult life on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, weathering widowhood and the Great Depression among other adversities. By our standards her life was not only meager, it was terribly poor. Having no car, no horse, nor ride-giving neighbors, she walked everywhere she went, including to towns 8 miles away. Yet she was rich in spirit, and her indomitable spirit was as tough as it was sensitive.

As she walked to town, Vallie sang, “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road; and I’ll be in Scotland before ye.” My dad described her soprano voice floating “over the wheatless fields of the Great Depression until the dust assumed her voice, and even the clods assumed they had been sung to.” In circumstances that defied song, Vallie raised her voice above the hard-scraped earth in a triumph of will and heart. In the face of scarcity, she gave “off a radiance in excess of what we might expect.” As grasshoppers, drought, suffering, and death took her life by storm, she walked on.

Although I never met my great-grandmother, Vallie, I feel as though I know her through my dad’s stories and poetry. In the following poems, my dad memorializes the uncommon beauty and heroism of his grandmother.

When Memory Gives Dust a Face

When dust like flour sifted the road,
and weeds were skeletal corsages;
when horses broke their hooves unshod
with careless grass their only forage,

she sang high songs. And we listened
as we walked to town. No voice
was more enriched by pain. Her tongue
cleaved to love to make it new.

In loss the dust assumed her songs.
And clods assumed they had been sung to. 
          Don Welch (2008)


Funeral at Ansley

I write of a cemetery,
of the perpetual care of buffalo grass,
of kingbirds and catbirds
and cottonwoods;

of wild roses around headstones,
with their high thin stems
and their tight tines
and their blooms pursed
in the morning.

I write of old faces,
of cotton hose and flowered dresses
and mouths which have grown up
on the weather.

And I write of one woman
who lies a last time in the long sun
of August, uncramped by the wind
which autumns each one of us

under catbirds and kingbirds
and cottonwoods, and the grey-green
leaves of the buffalo grass. 
          Don Welch (1975)

Like Vallie, my great-grandmother, Minnie, was a remarkable woman. A German immigrant whose husband and eldest son abandoned her, she settled in Falls City, Nebraska to raise my grandfather, her youngest son. For years, working as a housekeeper for a family there, she spent her days and nights cooking, cleaning, and helping to raise their two children. After she’d retired, she lived for years in an apartment building with a series of blue parakeets. When one Billie Boy died, she replaced him with another. In one letter to my mom, she reported that her most recent Billie Boy was “touched in the head,” unable to learn to talk. Still, she kept busy with other things, she said, like running errands for the “old folks” in her building. The fact that, at 90, she was considerably older and less able than her 60-70-year-old neighbors was entirely lost on her.

Recently, as I stood at the kitchen sink, I heard the familiar thump of my 10-year-old parakeet Billie Boy and turned to see that he had once again fallen from his perch, plummeting to the floor of his cage. Stunned, he looked up and began to climb up the sides, pulling himself up with his beak, rung by rung, until he reached his perch again. Two years ago, he lost the ability to fly, his wings reduced to balancing agents he uses now to right himself when he crashes to the cage floor several times a day. Every day, I expect to find him lifeless under his food bowl, for ten parakeet years is probably the equivalent of 100 human years. Billie Boy, like Great Grandma Minnie, is older than the “old folks.” And yet, he greets each morning with song.

Minnie often concluded her letters with unique postscripts. One that I’ll never forget went something like this: Well, as the old woman who peed in the river said, “Every little bit helps.” I’ll never be exactly sure what this meant to her, but I like to think it was just another way of encouraging us, coaxing us forward with small acts of kindness. For her life was a testament to her claim that “every little bit helps.” As she moved through her life in cotton house dresses and aprons, she glowed with such small acts, an ambient light that stayed “a victory in a world of loss.”

This is the provenance that Minne and Vallie leave us, a legacy of light which “magnifies itself,” defying the darkness. And this provenance seems a fitting Valentine for this day and the days to come.

Provenance

Why do you do this?
my daughter asks.

I’m wiping clean a piece of used aluminum foil,
then folding it into a neat square 
to be stacked with others in the drawer near the stove.
My hands know the way
and make quick work of it.
My heart, too, knows the way
as I remember the words of my mother 

who saves foil still—
as if this is a lesson all must learn,
as if the economy of the world rests on this.

Why do you do this?
As a girl, I asked my mother 
when she patted shiny squares of foil where they sat—
as they always had—
beside assorted pencils and pens, a box of sandwich bags 
and a new roll of aluminum foil,
round and royal, nestled on a throne 
of hot pads.

To make do, she says.

And she tells me of the years 
her mother and grandmother suffered 
though the Depression and both World Wars. 

So, today, I tell my daughter:
We do this because your grandmother and great grandmother
and great great grandmother did this,
because in a world of throw-aways, 
we remember a world of want,
because to make do
is to honor the women we love.

She looks out the window to the yard
as if the lean years wait there, 
crouched and urgent, in feed sack aprons.
       Shannon Vesely (2023)

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.” 
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Flannery O’Connor: An Ugly Route to Goodness” is the title of Molly Tompkins’ March 2025 article in Plough. I’ve thought a lot about this title and have begun to wonder if there may be any route to goodness that isn’t inherently ugly. That is, as flawed and fallen humans, more often than not, we tend to claw our way to goodness, one ugly, hard-fought grab at a time. American writer Flannery O’Connor understood the “price of restoration,” the cost of the “redemptive act.”

In her article, as Tompkins reflects upon O’Connor’s works and reviews Ethan Hawke’s 2023 film about O’Connor, Wildcat, she asks us to “confront and contemplate the nature of goodness”:

Her [O’Connor’s] short stories and novels, ever shocking by design, still ignite confrontations and conversations about what is good. She stirs a stagnant world. O’Connor’s stories unmask hypocrites and puncture the self-righteousness. The splinters in her characters’ eyes reveal the planks in our own. By swelling the familiar to spectacular and grotesque proportions, we may recognize the monstrosities in O’Connor’s stories for what they are: a mirror in which we see ourselves.

A student once accosted me before a college class, accusing me of requiring students to read an O’Connor short story that wasn’t “very nice.” I had to smile because that was an understatement, to be sure. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, as Tompkins claims, begin by exposing the “splinters in her characters’ eyes” and end by convicting us of the “planks in our own.” Not very nice, indeed. To read O’Connor well—and as she intended—is a kind of self-flagellation, a necessary and salvific humiliation. The “monstrosities” we encounter in her fiction become painfully familiar as we confront ourselves through the mirror of her characters. Those characters who find a route to goodness only do so after experiencing genuine “ugliness.” Some suffer physically through illness, disability, and even death, and some suffer intellectually through humiliation and confrontation with pride and ego. All suffer spiritually, brought to their knees and called to repentance.

Take for example, the protagonist, Ruby Turpin, in O’Connor’s story, “Revelation.” Ruby is a pig farmer’s wife, a Christian woman who’s proud of her devotion and decency. As she sits in a doctor’s waiting room with her husband, Claude, she scrutinizes the others there and considers who she might’ve been if God had made her a different woman. She imagines what she might’ve said if Jesus stood before her and offered her only two options: “You can either be a nigger or white-trash.” (Though we bristle at such language today, O’Connor, a realist writing in the 1940s-60s, used the word “nigger”—spoken and written openly by her fellow Southerners—throughout her fiction.) At first, she imagines bargaining with Jesus, asking if she might wait until another choice was available. She thinks about how she would’ve struggled, pleading with Jesus until she was ultimately forced to concede that if these were the only two choices, she would’ve said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” In her imagined encounter with Jesus, Ruby is certain that he would’ve made her a “neat, clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.”

Ruby’s route to goodness in this story is characteristic of O’Connor’s protagonists. As she looks condescendingly (but charitably, she convinces herself) upon those in the waiting room, she is buoyed by her gratitude that of all the things Jesus might’ve made her—“nigger or white-trash or ugly”— he “had made her herself and given her a little of everything.” Privately, she rejoices and thinks, “When I think of all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’” Just as this wave of gratitude washes over her, she’s struck in the head. A young woman from Wellesley College, Mary Grace, had been listening to Ruby prattle on about “how there’s a heap of things worse than niggers.” Insensed, she throws her book at her and strikes Ruby with such force that it knocks her out of her chair. Before she can even get up, Mary Grace is upon her, seething, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

Like other O’Connor characters, Ruby Turpin suffers her “come to Jesus” moment. Later, as she considers the encounter with the young woman in the waiting room, she wrestles with God, the Savior she’d previously thanked for her many blessings. When she stands alone in her pig lot, enraged by God’s apparent dismissal of her hard work and service to the church, she shakes her fist at him, shouting, “Who do you think you are?” Just as the sun begins to set, her answer comes in the form of a vision: a “horde of souls” making their way toward heaven, “whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” And bringing up the rear is a group of people Ruby instantly recognizes, for they’re people who, “like herself and Claude, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.” Yet, even as these folk march onward, keeping up the rear respectably and in perfect time, she can see “by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Like Tompkins, I’ve been convicted and burned by O’Connor’s fiction. Just when I’ve found myself sitting in smug judgment of characters like Ruby, whose hypocrisy and self-righteousness are unmasked, often by violent means, I’ve come to realize that I’m confronting myself. In her fiction, correspondence, and life, O’Connor, too, confronts herself, unwilling to ignore her own sins. While studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1946, the twenty-one-year-old O’Connor kept a prayer journal published decades later by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In entries like this one, she confesses her pride and ambition, the self-love that often separates her from God:

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon . . . I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

She admits that “[i]t does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming. I see my ridiculous self by degrees.” She laments that “[m]ediocrity, if that is my scourge, is something I’ll have to submit to.” And in her final entry, she confesses her shame in failing, once again, to be worthy of God’s love:

My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a shame. I don’t want an of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me. 

This is a woman whose route to goodness was fettered with the ugliness of disease, ambition, and sin. Stricken at 25 years with debilitating lupus, she moved into her mother’s home in Millidgeville, Georgia, when she could no longer care sufficiently for herself. There, she lived a life dependent upon her mother, far from the literary world she dreamt of inhabiting. As a devout Catholic, she wrestled with her own ambition, admitting that “I want so to love God all the way. At the same time, I want all the things that seem opposed to it—I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head—unconsciously even.” For O’Connor, this suffering was redemptive. She came to see that she was both Ruby Turpin and Mary Grace. And she came to understand that her route to goodness, to God, was through grace alone.

I think about Flannery O’Connor often, remembering the characters who reflected some of the ugliest things about human nature, about myself. And recently, I often find myself repeating the final words from perhaps O’Connor’s most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. After having killed the Grandmother’s family, the Misfit, a criminal, ultimately shoots her, too. Like Ruby Turpin, the Grandmother is a self-righteous hypocrite. Having lost patience with her hypocrisy and pleas for her life, the criminal resorts to killing her. She dies, but not before she has a moment of clarity during which she sees the truth of the faith she’s proclaimed her entire life and her failure to live up to it. In the seconds before her death, she is repentant, recognizing the Misfit as a child of God, no less deserving of God’s grace than she is. In the aftermath of her murder, the Misfit turns to his partner and says, “She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 

I think about these words each day as I open my newsfeed. Wouldn’t we all be better people if someone were there to shoot us every minute of our lives? I remember these words as I audibly sigh, confronted with ever-alarming headlines. I find myself thinking about what Flannery O’Connor would write if she were still alive today. I’m confident that she’d set her stories in new environments—intellectually, spiritually, and politically fraught environments—but that she’d populate them with the same character types. They’d come from the right and the left, from the faithful and the faithless, from the rich and the poor, from the educated and the uneducated, from the native and the alien, from the able and the disabled. Their route to goodness would be as hard-fought and ugly today as it ever was, and their reckoning would redeem those willing to receive it.

Sometimes, I take solace in this notion that the route to goodness is often ugly, but more often, I’m disheartened by what I read and hear. I find myself dreaming of a world in which people don’t have to hold guns to our heads to bring us to repentance, of a route to goodness traveled by those who’ve already seen and plucked the planks from their own eyes, of a road less ugly. But when I’m whisked from my reverie, I’m reminded of a line from O’Connor’s collected letters: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us, and the change is painful.” Despite her own physical, artistic, and spiritual challenges, O’Connor held fast to the redemptive power of grace—even, and especially, for the respectable folk bringing up the rear. Folks like her. Folks like us.

Synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon where stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another, blurs the line between sight, sound, taste, and even emotion. It’s rare, mysterious, and oddly beautiful—a natural mental remix that turns perception into a multisensory experience. –“Why Some People Can Taste Words: The Brainy Phenomenon of Synesthesia,” allgoodhealth.net

Recently, I read an article by a man who documented his journey with synesthesia. I was fascinated and marveled at his description of how each word and name he encountered immediately elicited a particular taste. In his Newsweek article, “I can taste names, some are delicious” (Nov. 8, 2022), Henry Gray explained that “[f]or me, Francesca is one of the most delicious names. It’s like a silky smooth chocolate Frappuccino, filling every crevice of my mouth.” But the name Dana? This made him feel like he was “gnawing on a leathery rubbery inflatable.” Gray and fellow synesthete, James Wannerton, are among the 4% of the population who possess this rare sensory ability. Wannerton, President of the UK Synaesthesia Association, writes that he experiences “a constant flow of flavors. It’s like a drip, drip, drip from an eyedropper on my tongue, one taste after another, varying in strength and intensity and each overlaying the previous one.”

There are over 60 documented types of synesthesia, including lexical-gustatory synesthesia (words triggering particular tastes), chromesthesia (sounds—like musical notes or voices—evoking visual experiences of colors and shapes), grapheme-color synesthesia (letters and numbers evoking colors), and mirror-touch synesthesia (feeling physical sensations when observing others being touched). In the article, “Why Some People Can Taste Words: The Brainy Phenomenon of Synesthesia,” the authors contend that “[s]ynesthesia reminds us that perception is not a fixed experience—it’s deeply personal, richly layered, and sometimes downright weird (in the best way). For synesthetes, the world is a constant remix of sound, color, shape, and taste.”

I like this idea that the “world is a constant remix of sound, color, shape, and taste.” As a poet, I’ve always been fascinated with the sounds of words, how individual consonants and vowels evoke feeling, and how the rhythms and rhymes created by word combinations move us in the most remarkable ways. I’m not technically a synesthete, but I confess to my “weird (in the best way)” love for certain words that thrill me when I encounter them in print or conversation. Take the word “winsome,” for example, which is so humbly beautiful that I believe it should be spoken with reverence. Or the words “willow,” “twilight,” and “saffron.” If I were a word creator, I would have happily retired upon releasing these words.

Still, the world of synesthesia is not without challenges. You can imagine the potential difficulties that someone with lexical-gustatory synesthesia might experience. What if the object of one’s affection has a name that evokes the taste of overcooked brussel sprouts or rancid butter? Do you persevere in your relationship, working hard to tamp down your gag reflex each time you speak your beloved’s name? Or do you move on to a partner with a different name, one that evokes freshly baked bread, creme brulee, or strawberries (provided you like all these things)? Or consider living with mirror-touch synesthesia and feeling the impact of physical sensations—pleasant and painful—you witness in others. I remember watching in horror as one of my children was just about to topple over the handlebars of her toddler bike. I could see it about to happen and felt something like an electric shock run through my body. I suspect many parents experience something similar. We may not be synesthetes, but we may respond to what we observe in a profoundly painful and physical way.

Considering these challenges, James Wannerton was asked if he would prefer not to have synesthesia. He responded emphatically:

No. It is a fundamental part of how I perceive the world around me, and I couldn’t imagine that world without all the flavors that come with every sound. How could I possibly remember anything without an attached taste? I have met and spoken to hundreds of synesthetes and nearly all of them consider their extra perceptions as a gift rather than a curse, and they just roll with and enjoy the experience.

This is the way of things, I think. Or perhaps, it might better be the way of things: to consider our sensory gifts—whatever they may be—as blessings more than curses. And, for me, this is a splendid way to begin the New Year, turning “perception into a multisensory experience” even if I’m not a synesthete. Just yesterday, when I was walking in the nature preserve, I found a large snail shell right in the middle of the path. How did that get there? I thought. It hadn’t been there yesterday. I stood there for moments before I pocketed it and felt the kind of wonder of a child with a new treasure. When I got home, I placed it in a ceramic dish where I keep my other treasures: a buckeye, a perfectly shaped acorn, and an assortment of shells.

That day was, indeed, a splendid multisensory experience. Moving up the path, I fingered the shell in my pocket, watched an eagle in a cornflower blue sky, and tried out some lines for a new poem I was drafting. As I walked, I spoke: At sixteen, she wore aubergine gloves and spoke only French, her vowels descending through the house in a rose glissade. This was as close to a multisensory experience as I could imagine: bright day, small, unexpected treasure in my pocket, and words that sound as good as they mean. So, Happy New Year to synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike. May our days be “a constant remix of sound, color, shape, and taste.”

P.S. I’m curious if there are words (or names) that evoke a strong sensation—good or bad—for you. If so, kindly comment and give us your words and names!

Celebrating Advent means learning how to wait. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dec. 2, 1928

As parents and grandparents, we’ve inevitably experienced the impatience of our children and grandchildren as they look longingly upon the wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree and plead, “Can’t we open just one? It’s too hard to wait!” We can empathize, remembering the long December days of our childhood, the excruciating countdown until Christmas. As children and adults, we’re not generally a patient sort. We take speed for granted as we order fast food, rely upon two-day Amazon deliveries, and depend on the Internet to bring us information in seconds. Patience is a virtue we consign to the saints who live among us.

Bonhoeffer understood the challenge in waiting:

Not all can wait – certainly not those who are satisfied, contented, and feel that they live in the best of all possible worlds!  Those who learn to wait are uneasy about their way of life, but yet have seen a vision of greatness in the world of the future and are patiently expecting its fulfillment. The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.

When I read the words from his 1928 Advent sermon, I was struck by his claim that only “those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come” are truly able to celebrate Advent. Traditionally, we celebrate the joy of the season as we sing about peace on earth and goodwill to all. Oh, we have our Blue Christmas services, but we often fail to do much more than pay lip service to “those who are troubled in soul” as we bustle about with holiday cheer. Bonhoeffer’s words should challenge us.

I confess that, for most of my life, I’ve been an impatient person. I’ve been a hard worker bent on getting the job done—and getting it done quickly. Or at least in a timely fashion. And through all this working and striving, I’ve been taught powerful lessons about waiting. From childhood, I dreamt of being a mother. This dream was fueled, in part, by the wonderful example of my own mother. I wanted to grow up to be just like her, for I couldn’t imagine a better life than the one she’d given my siblings and me. But my road to motherhood was fraught with infertility, miscarriage, pregnancy, adoption, and much waiting. Waiting for test results, waiting for surgeries, waiting for communication from our adoption caseworkers, waiting for paperwork, waiting and waiting and waiting. I was “troubled in soul” and found my barren self woefully “poor and imperfect”. No matter how hard I worked, no matter what plans I made or medications I took, I was left childless.

For a time, I wondered if God might be punishing me. In search of a theological explanation for my infertility, I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1981 book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. As I bought yet another pregnancy test or contacted another adoption agency, I felt my hope and resolve flounder. And I grew weary of waiting, weary of worry, weary of being weary. But through the weariness, God was teaching me that in the waiting, He was preparing me for “something greater to come.”

In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes:

Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, one hopes, and does this, that, or the other—things that are really of no consequence—the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.

This is the lesson I was learning: to stop rattling the door of my own cell—the prison of work and worry I’d created—and to accept it could only be opened from the outside—and only by God. I’d like to say that I was a quick learner, but regrettably, I wasn’t. I would surrender my hopes and fears to God, only to pick them back up again. One night, I would pray, “not my will, Lord, but yours be done,” only to lie awake the following night as I made plans about what I might try next. I learned slowly. I surrendered in fits and starts. I came to understand that my true poverty and imperfection had less to do with my fertility and much more to do with my human nature. And I came to know the truth and solace of Psalm 121: From where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord.

I’ve been blessed with two births and two adoptions, four incredible children for whom I’d prayed. I’ve told Quinn’s adoption story many times. I’ve recounted the day we traveled to the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, where our caseworker would bring our new son from Columbus, Georgia, two days before Christmas. Because of complications—winter weather and adoption paperwork destined for government offices in Des Moines delayed on a FedEx truck beleaguered with Christmas deliveries—we had to wait six hours for confirmation to leave Minnesota and legally enter Iowa with Quinn. For most of my life, I’d been notoriously bad at this kind of waiting. On this day, the hours without confirmation seemed interminable. At one point, I looked up from the sweet face of my sleeping son to find our caseworker pacing the floor, fraught with worry, and perspiration running down her temples. She announced that, if the paperwork hadn’t arrived in Des Moines by 4:30 (the time that government offices would close for Christmas), she would have to fly Quinn back to Georgia, and we could try the adoption transfer again sometime after the New Year. I looked at the clock and saw we had 30 minutes. But I was uncharacteristically calm, wholly besotted with Quinn as others bustled about me. And in the waiting, I felt the peace of surrender. There was nothing anyone could humanly do at this point, but God could—and did. At 4:25, we received phone confirmation that the paperwork had arrived, and we could take Quinn home.

Imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood much about waiting. Like the Apostle Paul, he wrote from his prison cell with the joy and certainty of a vision of greatness in the world of the future and the expectation that this vision would be fulfilled. For both men, there was joy in the waiting for something greater to come. We wait to celebrate Christ’s birth in these final days of the Advent season, remembering God’s humility in entering the world as a child and suffering on a cross. And as we wait, may we be assured of Christ’s sacrificial love and the promise of something greater to come.

P.S. My sweet Christmas boy, Quinn, and his wife, LIndsay, are expecting. There is much joy in the waiting for the birth of their son this summer!

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. –-C. S. Lewis, Miracles

C. S. Lewis contends the Incarnation is the “central miracle” of Christianity, that all other miracles reveal and result from it. During Advent, we celebrate this central miracle, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. But as we remember this miracle, I’d also like to consider the miracle of Old Testament prophecy.

There are over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament regarding the coming Messiah. Centuries before Christ was born in Bethlehem, prophets foretold the circumstances regarding and the significance of his birth, life, and death. In the books of Genesis, Isaiah, Zechariah, Psalms, Jeremiah, Numbers, 2 Samuel, Hosea, Malachi, Micah, and Daniel, prophets foretold that Jesus would:

• be born of a virgin in Bethlehem
• come from the line of Abraham and from the tribe of Judah
• be an heir to King David’s throne
• be called Immanuel
• spend a season in Egypt
• be rejected and despised by his own people
• be a Nazarene
• be declared Son of God
• speak in parables
• be a light in the darkness
• enter Jerusalem on a donkey
• be betrayed and falsely accused
• be hated without cause and crucified with criminals
• suffer—his hands, feet, and side pierced
• pray for his enemies even as he suffered and died
• be a sacrifice, an atonement for human sin
• ascend into heaven and be seated at the right hand of God
• return as Messiah a second time

Each Advent season, we hear some of the most quoted prophecies from Isaiah:

“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call Him Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Isaiah 9:6

“But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities.” Isaiah 53:5

That there are so many other prophecies in so many other Old Testament books, however, should give us pause. It gives me pause, for the number and accuracy of these prophecies are miraculous. It seemed miraculous to American mathematician and astronomer Professor Peter Stoner, too. Stoner was a co-founder of the American Scientific Affiliation, a professional organization for Christians in the scientific field. In his book, Science Speaks (first published in 1958), he and Robert Newman (who held a doctorate in theoretical astrophysics from Cornell University, a M.Div. from Faith Theological Seminary, and an S.T.M. in Old Testament from Biblical Theological Seminary) explore the statistical improbability of one man fulfilling just eight of these prophecies. After statistical calculations, they determined the odds of one man fulfilling even eight of these Old Testament prophecies are one in one hundred quadrillion. To help math-challenged people like me, they offer the following scenario as explanation:

Suppose that we take 100,000,000,000,000,000 dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote using their own wisdom.

Ultimately, Stoner and Newman concluded that “[n]o human being has ever made predictions which hold any comparison to those we have considered, and had them accurately come true. The span of time between the writing of these prophecies and their fulfillment is so great that the most severe critic cannot claim that the predictions were made after the events happened.”

If the statistical improbability of one man fulfilling eight of the Old Testament prophecies is one in one hundred quadrillion, just imagine the odds of this same man fulfilling 300 such prophecies. Mathematically, this is beyond what I can comprehend. It’s a miracle of unimaginable proportions. And it gives weight to C. S. Lewis’ claim that myth becomes fact as these prophecies are ultimately realized in Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection.

The central miracle of Christianity is, as Lewis contends, the Incarnation. In his personal correspondence, he wrote:

God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape Him. Of His great humility, He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane.

Lewis understood the “humiliation of myth into fact, of God into man.” He understood this humility—a man who weeps, sweats blood, and suffers on a cross—would lead to greater glory. And he understood that “every other miracle prepares for this [God becoming man], or exhibits this, or results from this.” As we celebrate the miracle and mystery of the Incarnation, I’d like to remember the miracle of prophecy, too. I confess that, until recently, I hadn’t given this much thought. Yet, as I have considered this (with the help of mathematicians who understand probability), I’ve been humbled and astonished by the incredible odds of one man fulfilling even eight of the 300 prophecies about Jesus. I can’t help but think of Stoner’s example: the odds of one man fulfilling eight prophecies are akin to a blindfolded man attempting to locate one marked silver dollar out of one hundred quadrillion silver dollars scattered across the state of Texas.

And I confess it gives me pause to consider the realization of just one prophecy. I’m astounded by the realization of Micah’s prophecy, written 700-800 years before Christ’s birth, announcing that the “ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times” would come from Bethlehem, “small among the clans of Judah.” It is in the spirit of this wonder that I prepare for the birth of the Christ child, for the man who “wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweat blood in Gethsemane,” and for the Savior who was “pierced for our transgressions.”

Have you not often felt in Church, if the first lesson is some great passage, that the second lesson is somehow small by comparison—almost, if one might say so, humdrum? So it is and so it must be. That is the humiliation of myth into fact, of God into Man; what is everywhere and always, imageless and ineffable, only to be glimpsed in dream and symbol and the acted poetry of ritual becomes small, solid—no bigger than a man who can lie asleep in a rowing boat on the Lake of Galilee. You may say that this, after all, is a still deeper poetry. I will not contradict you. The humiliation leads to a greater glory. But the humiliation of God and the shrinking or condensation of the myth as it becomes fact are also quite real. –-C. S. Lewis, “Transposition,” The Weight of Glory

Myths are narratives that help explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon. They feature supernatural beings, heroes, and incredible journeys of triumph and loss. There are creation and moral myths, hero and trickster myths. Regardless of the type, most of us prefer them, like our fast food meals, super-sized. Anything less than a super-sized Atlas would collapse under the weight of the world. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have won the Mr. Olympia title eight times, but he could never throw a lightning bolt. For that feat, you need a super-sized strong man. You need the mythic Zeus, the Greek god of gods.

To “humiliate a myth,” to degrade and humble it, seems counterintuitive. It seems wrong. As humans, we’re limited by mortality and subject to natural forces that are indifferent, at best, and hostile, at worst. As myth consumers, it would seem foolish then to stand in line, only to place an order for a small myth (no extras). Consider the confused employee: “Excuse me, did you say a small myth? After centuries of typhoons, earthquakes, derechos, fire, drought, acts of unimaginable violence, and war, you want a small myth?” And you can imagine the talk in the break room: “Get this, some guy just ordered a small myth! Who does that?”

Yes, who does that? Who would have the audacity to humble the almighty myth? Who would dare transmute the glory of God into something small, solid—no bigger than a man who can lie asleep in a rowing boat on the Lake of Galilee? And who would consider something even smaller still? Not the Greeks, whose goddess Athena’s birth is legendary. Springing from her father, Zeus’s, head, she is born fully armed and ready for battle. Here is myth exalted, myth super-sized. But consider the birth of Jesus, who neither sprang from God’s head or—as the Norse giants, the Jotuns did—from the sweat of their father Ymir’s armpits (unpleasant but the stuff great myths are made of). Instead, Jesus came to earth as a baby—vulnerable, hungry, and placed in an animal trough. As Christian author C. S. Lewis writes, this is the humiliation of myth into fact, God into man. If God were attempting to out-myth the Greeks or the Norse, he might’ve had Jesus born as a superhero whose powers exceed all the Greek and Norse gods combined. If he were trying to make the New York Times bestseller list or sell rights for a feature film, he’d most likely receive polite but emphatic rejection letters: Thanks, but no thanks. Our readers/viewers would find your protagonist too colloquial and his birth story uninspired.

But God entered the world, not as a being imageless and ineffable, only to be glimpsed in dream and symbol, not as a myth but a human. Who does that? What god enters the world and lives among its inhabitants as a human, breaching the barrier between the immortal and the mortal? And who peoples his story with shepherds and innkeepers, tax collectors and census takers? God does, and herein lies the great paradox of how humiliation leads to a greater glory. Because we know how the story ends: how the humiliation of a birth in a stable and the agony of a death on a cross lead to a greater glory.

During Advent, we remember how the Christmas story begins—and ends. The world was a dark place at the time of Christ’s birth, as it continues to be today. But we come to the manger, blessed by a Savior, who is Emmanuel, God with us. We come, preparing our hearts for the mystery of the Incarnation: “the humiliation of myth into fact, God into man.” This is a mystery that continues to confound and amaze us. O come, let us adore Him.

Luke 2: 8-20

⁸ And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. ⁹ An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. ¹¹ Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

¹³ Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

¹⁴ “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

¹⁵ When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

¹⁶ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. ¹⁷ When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, ¹⁸ and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. ¹⁹ But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰ The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 1 Thessalonians 5:18

Years ago, I remember listening to Amy Grant’s newly released Christmas album (still one of my favorites and one to which I can sing all the lyrics of every song!) and being especially taken with “Grown Up Christmas List.” As I prepare for Thanksgiving this year, I’m taking stock and writing a grown-up gratitude wish list with a little help from some friends.

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh 

Like Piglet, I may have a Very Small Heart—being just one individual in a world of 8.2 billion—but as I’ve grown up, I’ve marveled at how I can hold a rather large amount of Gratitude. It’s the mystery of a tiny, teacup heart that never overflows, that defies sense with its bottomless wonder. This is the first thing on my grown-up gratitude wish list: that we know the magic of paradox, embracing how big and generous small can be.

“I thank God for my handicaps. For through them, I have found myself, my work and my God.” –Helen Keller 

I’m not often grateful enough for my handicaps. And though I’ve been blessed with good sight and good health, I’ve been handicapped by other things, namely, insecurity and anxiety that have been crippling at times. I’ve been handicapped by a consuming inwardness, a paralyzing compulsion for self-reflection. And self-flagellation. But like Keller, I’ve grown to see how this handicap has led me to deeper faith, deeper peace, and deeper joy. In Gravity and Grace, French philosopher and activist Simone Weil wrote, “Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.” I’ve been learning to lean into this, to be grateful—in equal measure—for joy and suffering, strength and weakness. So here’s the second thing on my grown-up gratitude wish-list: that we give thanks for our handicaps—seen and unseen—trusting they will give more than they will take from us.

“The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.” ― Thornton Wilder

As I was walking this morning, I began thinking about my mom’s famous frozen cherry salad, the Thanksgiving tradition she faithfully made with and without nuts, for our family was nearly equally divided in their love or hate for walnuts. In the years since my parents’ deaths, I’ve grieved, sometimes more profoundly and deeply than I might’ve imagined. But I’ve always been grateful, immensely grateful, for their lives. Increasingly, I’m overwhelmed with the power of this gratitude, how its mercies are new every morning. I walk and remember, giving thanks for things as extraordinary as their legacy and as ordinary as frozen cherry salad. The third thing on my grown-up gratitude wish-list is this: that we remember to pay the highest tribute to those we’ve lost through gratitude.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
—e. e. cummings

One morning last week, the fog was heavy enough as I walked that I didn’t see the doe at the water’s edge until she crashed through the cattails and over the pond dam into the timber, her white tail flying into the amazing day. I’m thankful for this doe and for the muskrat who leaves a deep wake that fans across the eastern pond. I’m thankful for hedgeballs the size of fists that lay strewn across my path, for the lime green mystery of them. I’m thankful for the smell of earth and the sound of owls and coyotes. I’m thankful for each dawn that gilds the hills and for the silver-blue berries of cedars. I’m so grateful for this nature preserve, for its leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky. I’m grateful for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes. In her 1981 novel, Tar Baby, Toni Morrison writes: “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” This is my fourth wish: that the world’s beauty becomes enough for us and that we respond to it with a resounding yes.

“A desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body, or rather it is as if my body has been meant and made for the act of kneeling. Sometimes, in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge, head deeply bowed, hands before my face.” —Etty Hillesum

Years ago, as I stood singing beside a friend during worship, I felt an overwhelming and unmistakable urge to lie prostrate upon the altar. After the service, my friend confessed he’d felt the same urge. Neither of us acted, but I’ve never forgotten the sense that my body had been meant for this, that my spirit had been ready when my will was not. When I recall this moment, I see how it was born from deep gratitude. I understand the inclination to fall before God as a natural and appropriate response. And I regret not giving in to it. I regret standing stiffly in the pew as I denied the Spirit’s prompting, too concerned about what others might think. That Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish author, should feel such gratitude in the face of her impending death at Auschwitz humbles me. That she could kneel before God, in gratitude and devotion, both shames and inspires me. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, confessed that “[f]or me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.” This is my fifth wish: that in gratitude, we kneel more, for every hour is grace, and embracing this is our first and best response.

“I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.”
― Stephen King 

The world can, indeed, seem like a very hard desert. We’ve all felt its pricks and pokes. We’ve thirsted and wandered through its dark nights of the soul. But friends who share our joys and bear our suffering are flowers that grow . . . against such high odds. In seasons of drought, they walk with us, and in seasons of bounty, they rejoice with us. I’m profoundly indebted to my friends—past and present—and regard them with such sweet gratitude. My life has been much richer because of them. They’ve shaped and challenged me, encouraged and celebrated me. So, here is my sixth wish: that in the hard deserts of our lives, we nuture friendships that blossom against such high odds.

“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” —Elizabeth Gilbert

It’s safe to say that I could never pay back all the people who’ve sustained my life. It’s better I surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity, better I just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as I can. This would be but a small measure of my gratitude, for how could I measure the worth of such sustenance? How could I not be astonished by human generosity? How could I not thank God for the many ways he works through humans, the times when I’m pulled up and forward by beneficent hands? Years ago, when my son, Quinn, was a baby, I strapped him to my chest in a newly purchased baby carrier and headed down the aisles at Target, feeling pleased and proud that I’d discovered a way to shop with two free hands. Until he began to fuss, and I couldn’t extract him from the carrier, which had become a torture chamber—for him and for me. As I stood in the shampoo aisle, sweating and near tears, an elderly gentleman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he might help. Before I could even respond, he lifted Quinn up and out of the carrier with the skill of a seasoned pro and the patience of a saint. I was gobsmacked and couldn’t thank him enough. As he grabbed a bottle of Head and Shoulders from the shelf, he smiled and said, “You’re very welcome, my dear.” I didn’t know this man and never saw him again. But in my book of human generosity, he has a page of his own. And herein lies my seventh wish: that when we’re tempted to surrender to darkness and chaos, we remember the scope of human generosity and give thanks.

In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 1 Thessalonians 5:18

So, I’ll leave you with the Apostle Paul who says it succinctly and best: In everything give thanks. This is a tall order. Many of us may have scoffed at those bumper sticker slogans that admonish us to develop “an attitude of gratitude.” As we’re running late for work, driving distractedly, and dribbling coffee on our laps, we may have thought, “Not grateful today. Maybe tomorrow.” We may doubt those who give thanks for everything and in every situation, refusing to believe the sincerity of their gratitude. And yet, most of us know individuals who are genuinely grateful, despite—and perhaps because of—the circumstances. To be in their presence is to stand on hallowed ground. Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton, claims that “[g]ratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.” So, this is my last grown-up gratitude wish: that we actively grow our gratitude, strengthening it through practice, grounding it in faith, and refining it with wonder.

Wishing you and your families a Happy Thanksgiving.

In gratitude, Shannon

Stourhead, Temple of Apollo, near Mere, Wiltshire

The meaning of a folly is that of a decorative structure that has no practical purpose. It is usually built for purely aesthetic reasons and is often designed to look like a ruined or unfinished building. Follies can take many different forms, from towers and temples to grottos and bridges. They are typically made from a range of materials, including stone, brick, and wood, and are often decorated with carvings, statues, and other ornamental details. —Anglotopia

When architects Louis Sullivan and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made their architectural statements, “Form follows function” and “Less is more,” they clearly weren’t thinking about follies, which are less about form and function and more about beauty and wonder. For a folly, less is not more; more is more—more whimsy, more history, more ornamentation, more grandeur. In the UK, 1700 of these fantastical structures “built purely for aesthetic reasons” adorn the hillsides, lakes, and gardens of great estates. Architect Daniel Libeskind speaks to the heart of a folly: “Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It’s based on wonder.”

I love architecture. In Europe, I stood gawking at buildings and was frequently separated from my tour group. I couldn’t help it. At every turn, there was another architectural splendor. In Florence, as I stood at the foot of the Duomo, I might’ve died and gone to heaven right there. It was that magnificent. When I first read about follies in a historical novel years ago, I was smitten with these small structures with such big souls. I’d always had a special love for playhouses and “she sheds,” and follies are their grand dames. What they may lack in size, they more than make up for in extravagance and artistry.

We can trace the concept of pleasure pavilions in gardens back to ancient Greece, but it was the British landscape movement of the 18th century that gave birth to follies. The sight of a folly would make “the pulse quicken as a distant tower comes into view at the end of an avenue,” wrote the late architectural historian Gervase Jackson-Stops. In “Follies in the English Landscape” (Britain Express), we learn that the most common types of follies are “belvederes, grottos, obelisks, pagodas, pavilions, towers, pyramids, ruins, arches, fishing pavilions, bridges, hermitages, cascades, and statues.” Although the folly craze began to dwindle at the end of the 18th century, many contend that it never entirely died out, arguing that lawn ornaments, the ever-popular garden gnomes or pink flamingos, could be considered small-scale follies. In the past, while some follies were used as hunting towers and lookouts, today, they’re alive and well, serving as wedding venues, movie locations, and tourist sites.

It may seem insensitive and untimely to write of follies in a time of scarcity and uncertainty. When I consider the excesses of Versailles and its subsequent fate, I understand why any talk of follies—then and now—may seem woefully tone deaf. Who can think of turrets and towers when a pound of hamburger is $7, and the government remains shut down? A folly is a symbol of desire, not need. It trumpets its extravagance. Nestled throughout the estates of great manor houses, a folly is decadent frosting on an already sumptuous cake.

And yet, some follies were constructed as a response to hard times. During the Great Famine of 1845, the Irish government offered economic relief by employing people to build follies. In our own country, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) did much the same by putting people back to work during the Depression. The Rock Garden in Harmon Park (Kearney, Nebraska) was built through a WPA project, approved on September 4, 1936. The Rock Garden remains one of my favorite places in the world. It’s a magical labyrinth of stone paths and waterfalls, ponds laden with lily pads, and in the center, a lighthouse whose staircase winds around its exterior to open onto a balcony from which you can see the garden below. This lighthouse is a folly, a miniature replica of the real deal. And though you can’t enter it from below (the door off the path is always padlocked), as children, we happily climbed the stairs to look out over our kingdom below. The lighthouse’s whimsy fueled our imaginations, and its beauty stirred our hearts. Each time I return to the Rock Garden and climb the lighthouse, I feel the same assurance that the world will right itself and its beauty will sustain us. Perhaps this is the folly’s greatest gift: to throw us a dazzling lifeline as we struggle to keep our heads afloat, to offer us a bonbon as we struggle to put a chicken in our pot.

The world is a difficult place, and follies won’t cure what ails us. But the world is a better place with follies in it. It’s a better place when, if even for a moment, we can be transported by something so fanciful it takes our breath away.