Dan's Thoughts

Trish #38 - July 26, 2004

Today begins the final week of Trish's hospital stay. Friday night, Lord willing, she will sleep in her own bed. Saturday morning I will awake to her face, lying on a pillow beside my own.

Yesterday she was out on pass. We went to church and then came home. Steve Wesson, one of our board members, had given us a DVD of The Song Catcher, a story about Appalachian music and culture. As Trish and I watched it, we sang along with the actors. Later, Barbara Dyson, (the Evangelical Martha Steward sans the insider trading) brought us pecan tarts. I ate one. I then waited for an appropriate amount of time and then discreetly ate another. (OK. When she left, I ate more. I just didn't want to 'pig 'out' in her presence.) Trish also ate several tarts (how many I cannot say). Then she took the rest of them with her, to the hospital.

Life doesn't get much better than singing mountain music on a Sunday afternoon and munching pecan tarts!

So its a happy time for us; Trish is coming home. She will need 24 hour a day care for a while because though she is walking better and her balance keeps improving, it will take several months for her to return to normal.

"Return to normal."

Upon reflection, that's an interesting phrase. If by "normal" I mean life as it was before, then "normal" is not the appropriate word. Our life has shifted and changed direction. We don't know exactly what all that means yet but it certainly can't mean pretending that nothing has changed. Like most great changes in our lives, we will have to just discern and reflect for a while on what has happened. As life unfolds, we will know what all to do with it. Meanwhile, we eat pecan tarts and sing.

"Relinquishment" is one of life's most important tools. There are times to be tenacious, to hold on to what we desire with an iron grip until it is fully within our possession. There are other times to open our hands, to trust God to either give or to take what He deems best. To know which to do and at what time is difficult. Right now, the right thing for us seems to be "keeping our hands open." What God will give and what He may take as our hands are open, we don't yet know. But we do know that He is trustworthy. That's why we are singing and eating pecan tarts.

One's judgment is not usually the best during traumatic seasons. We can get jerked around by our anxieties if we are not careful. Momentary fears can motivate us to make radical movements that can yield disastrous consequences. So it is far better to trust in the decisions one has made (and the character one has developed) during the long, predictable seasons, if possible. One's "default position," that is to say the deep structures of habit and belief that he or she has developed over long years, is usually stable underneath all the momentary upheaval.

Well, that is just a long and complicated way of saying that singing mountain songs and eating pecan tarts is probably the best medicine and the safest activity for us right now. Sometimes, people need a powerful messenger of God to bring them an awesome and inspiriting word. Sometimes we just need a pecan tart.

Trish and I have enjoyed every place we have lived. However, we remain children of the mountains. The languages we have learned, the foods we have enjoyed and even the customs we have adopted have enriched but have never replaced, the essence of who we are. Yesterday, in the aftermath of all she has faced, in this season of unknowing about our future, we just laughed and ate pecan tarts with our friends. And we sang the songs of our people, melodies as old as the world and which have roots deep enough to hold us steady.

My mountain version of Christian faith can look weird to some people. It is full of wails and moans and strange harmonies. It can be crass and earthy are well as sublime and heavenly. But that was the package in which the faith was given to me and it is the form of the faith to which I return at the first whiff of trouble.How wonderfully it has sustained us through these difficult weeks.

It has been my greatest desire to help people move from trivial encounters with church life into the deep currents of a "faith once delivered to the saints." I know that "church lite" is a cheap substitute that will not hold in difficult times. The culture that framed my own spiritual personality is probably gone now. The context for its music and folk theology eroded with the strip mines and the strip malls that raped the pristine beauty of the Appalachians. But the faith itself, the culture which my mountain heritage framed, is everlasting and eternal. All believers need that. Without it, the house collapses when the winds blow and the rains fall.

As the years have passed, I have gradually realized that it is not my responsibility (nor my right) to force my nostalgic needs upon new generations and other cultures. My responsibility is simply to give witness through my life and my words that the faith of my fathers is my own. I can safely relinquish my attempts to control how others will frame that faith. So it doesn't matter if I am never completely comfortable with the particular modes and styles that others adopt to express the faith. If I look deeper, underneath the surface and can see the same faith that guides my steps, I can claim kinship with all those who walk hold it and who walk with God.

In my own house though, if you don't mind, Trish and I will sleep under quilts, sing mountain songs and eat pecan tarts. And, in our heart of hearts, we can know that this is the way God really made life to work!

This morning I read a poem I had written about a month before Trish had her aneurysm. (Which now seems like the dawn of time.) In the light of all that happened since it seemed rather uncanny. I thought some of you might like to read it.

Permanence

I have often searched the place,
That very special place,
Where once I spoke with friends
And breathed the breath of God.

In the precious days gone by,
Before the forest burned,
It seemed so clear to me
Where all the old paths lay.

When cinders greet my feet
And smoke gets in my eyes
I may stop awhile and weep
For the clearer days gone by.

How does one chant the tale?
What words reveal the pain?
How can one sing a song?
About a world that now is gone?

But it doesn't help to moan
About worlds you cannot know
That's why I laugh at tiny buds
That pierce now through the snow

We all carry down in our soul
The friends and songs we knew
For all the sacred; all the awe
Have never gone at all.

Dan