A WRITING LIFE

I am quite confident that many people who follow my blog will recognize that this blog -- www.365sunsets365.blogspot.com -- is a “narrative.” It’s by a new friend of mine in NW Manitoba where my father’s nuclear family homesteaded in the Twenties. There is no explanation or “about” -- just a Steichen-type repetitive photo every day. It’s a journal, a diary. A sidereal Muybridge of horizon.

Certainly I recognize it as a naturalist’s, a gardener’s, interest in sequential developments. I once had a rancher friend with a kitchen paneled in plywood. With a pencil he daily traced the edge of the shadow from the noon sun and noted the date. On the door frame he registered the heights of his children. They say that the 19th century popularity of keeping records on calendars as well as in diary books provides invaluable information for those trying to understand the new worries over climate change. And I once attended a lecture where it was explained that in annual records, like those kept by the church, it was the years of omission where nothing was written that were often eloquent, for instance, the lack of entries during the Black Plague.

Anyway, I was already primed by Richard Stern’s little anthology called “Honey & Wax: Pleasures & Powers of Narrative” which was the text for his class at the U of Chicago when I was there. He suggested music as narrative and surely it is. What distinguishes sequence from narrative? Art, certainly. (It was published by the U of Chicago Press, 1966, and would probably have to be sought in used book sources now.)

Classically, one marks the hours with prayer, not just in the Islamic world but across Christianity and probably other traditions. The sunset photographer suggests that his photos are a daily benediction. Then this clergyman/farmer asks:

So how long have you been writing? WHY do you write? What does it do to you when you put down words? What's happening in your guts?

What I've been trying to get at from the beginning is the universal human "felt concepts" under the words and images. I connect it to religion through a little epigram to which I've lost the attribution. In fact, the original was in French which I can't even get straight for sure. "Man is an animal both inconsolable and gay." Of course, that's out-of-date in several different ways. But it is these polarities and their management in consciousness that seem so vital to me in worship. (We’re ALL bipolar.) For decades I've been working towards a "poetics of liturgy" that is not Christian. Not that it would contradict Christianity, but that the Christian "names" are not the only ones.

Another strong concept is that we arise from the earth, are somehow able to move around on its crust and even make minor alterations, but we always go back to the earth. We are as grass. Every time the sun kisses the horizon, either coming or going, we acknowledge that.

My morality is not commandment-based. Rather I go with “natural theology” which suggests that beings should do as well as they can what they are created able to do. A cow should go about being the best cow it can be, not grieve that it’s not a kangaroo. A human being should go about “observing creation and praising it.” But I find that because of my constant reading and writing I’m sometimes chided for not “doing good works”. (I’m not very good at good works.)

Blogging is like preaching. I'm retired. I can do anything I want to all day long, so I ignore the housekeeping and just write, only pausing to make the cats stop nagging me for more cat muck. My head chatters constantly. At night it slips over into images and maybe slides down into the felt concepts (gut feelings). But it doesn't stop. Some people would think this is an affliction. I see it as a gift. I don't care whether it gets published. This is what I was created to do and that I have the capacity to do well if I pay attention.

When I walked away from the Unitarians so I could come back to the Blackfeet, the Methodist pulpit needed a minister on an emergency basis. I'd once been a member there. They knew me. I needed a place to live and if they had rented the place to someone not ordained, they would have had to pay taxes. So I took their pulpit as an interim with the parsonage as my salary. (The woman who suggested it was Anne Pilgrim. Can’t get more explicit than that!) Methodists use a lectionary, so I took it as a kind of discipline to write a sermon every Sunday that combined ALL the lectionary suggestions. Easier than one might expect, since they were organized to fit issues and calendar. (A lectionary recommends specific texts from the Bible for each Sunday, usually a psalm, an old testament, a new testament and a gospel.)

But for the liturgical elements: call to worship, prayer, confession of sins, assurance of pardon, and benediction, I felt I was on my own. I could and sometimes did use a prescribed order of service, but most of the time my other "discipline" was composing those elements on Sunday morning as I drove to my first "charge," Babb, up in the mountains. What does call us to worship this morning? What sins -- land abuse, animal neglect, something from history, the news? What pardons us with grace? Then I returned to Browning for the second sermon.

Thus, the liturgical elements were natural history observed on the way into the mountains, which was often pretty exalting. One morning I drove into the hearts of THREE concentric rainbows at once! I noted the animals, the weather, the crops and all that. The people loved it. Hard-headed and (some of them) hard-hearted old ranchers and tourist industry folks, mostly white in Babb, mostly mixed-blood in Browning, I'd look out and they'd be smiling or crying. They knew what I was talking about.

So I suppose I was leading worship and they were following. But since the leader must be the "unmoved mover" I was also watching the art of the thing: timing, pace, emphasis, movement, etc. People always wanted to take me out to eat afterwards, but it was risky because I always came off the services a little manic, like a mild drunk.

As I post this, it's 5AM. The cats are fed and it's still as dark as the inside of a cow. I'm going back to bed to delve a little deeper.