Ending with Psalm 139, on the July 12 entry, establishes my fundamental perspective that I believe God was and is present in my life all along. Like the Psalmist, like everyone, I had no choice about when I was born, whom I was born to, where I was born, or my genetic makeup. Being is gift; being is thus nothing to be proud about, for I had nothing to do with choosing it. All of us come into this world with numerous givens; that knowledge and understanding should be humbling, instead of a cause for pride and division.
Since I have been thinking about the underlying pattern of divine presence, I have recognized certain secondary causes that led to the kitchen table conversion experience. Beyond that, however, is my continuing sense of presence—that I was sent, for instance, from Ohio University to Berea College to teach courses in English and General Studies, which I did. My evidence at this juncture is that in 1966 I applied to teach at 4 colleges, none of them Berea. Two students from Berea, however, came to grad school at OU, the year I was required to move on. They said that Berea needed two teachers in English. Two of us applied, we were accepted, and I have been here ever since. Thus, as with OU, my choices of schools were severely limited (one of the 4 I applied to offered me an awful job; 3 freshman writing courses); Berea stood out as the best, the most exciting, and the most reasonable choice: a good teaching position and a good school that I came to love dearly. I taught at Berea from 1967 to 2008, at which time it seemed right to retire.
What stood behind my presence in the classroom at Berea was primarily my concern for truth, as well as my pursuit of beauty and goodness. Those three themes, principles, or ideas—truth, beauty, goodness—stood behind all my academic endeavors. How, for example, do you learn to understand a text? You learn to understand a text by seeing what it actually says, by looking at the language, paying attention to what the language and images reveal about meaning, whether it be a John Donne poem, like “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” Gulliver’s Travels, with Gulliver’s severe body problem, or Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation,” and the presence of God in Mrs. Turpin’s life. What a marvelous story!
Or, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Oh, I know that one, says the lazy teacher. The woods stand for Death; the narrator is tired of living and looking forward to the end of exhaustion. Not fair, I know, but sometimes a Hollow Man ends up before a class too. The point is that to understand the poem the reader must see where the narrator is and what he actually says about his experience. Why did he stop to look at the woods on a very dark and cold night? Why is he concerned with who owns them? What does he understand about the difference between himself and his horse? What needs does his horse have? What need does the narrator have? What really makes him stop to look at the woods in the first place? The answer, I think, is exactly in what he says about the woods, the line everyone knows: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”; what need might they satisfy if only I didn’t have to get going. “But I have miles to go before I sleep.” [italics added]. The poem is lovely, delightful, I memorized it years ago; but the experience of the poem is also in a sense oddly unsatisfactory, for the narrator appears frozen in his moment, paralyzed, so to speak, intellectually and spiritually. The owner of the woods is in the village behind him; the weary future lies ahead, and he has stopped “between the woods and frozen lake.” This narrator has a moment of real insight. But he doesn’t really get anywhere; he is simply “between”: past and future, woods and lake. “Real life is meeting,” says Martin Buber, but Frost’s narrator is not up to the risk this “darkest evening of the year.”
The image below is not of a dark woods, but of a moment in Mary’s garden, a place also lovely, dark (at times), and certainly deep. It is also possible to understand her garden as a place where real life is meeting.
