CHAPELS

Convent of St. Mary, Sewanee, TN

At one time, New Iberia Louisiana’s premier artist, Paul Schexnayder, and I thought of producing a book about Episcopal chapels in Louisiana. He’d illustrate; I’d do the text. However, we both got caught up in work for other books, and all that remains of the proposed volume are the rough texts for three chapels, two of which I've attended in Louisiana and another one in a non-Louisiana region, Sewanee, Tennessee.

This morning, I discovered the notes for texts about two chapels that would’ve appeared in the volume dedicated to Episcopal chapels. At this stage of my writing vocation, I doubt if I’ll get around to writing the aforementioned book, so I decided to share the notes I made in a “chapel blog,” beginning with one labeled "Lagniappe," the non-Louisiana chapel at St. Mary’s Convent here in Sewanee, Tennessee where I worship regularly and sometimes preach six months of the year.

Angel at Convent of St. Mary, Sewanee

The chapel at the mother house of the Anglican Sisters of St. Mary, Sewanee, Tennessee was designed by Architect Robert Seals and consecrated in 1988. It was constructed of native stone similar to many of the buildings here in Sewanee, and the following text (after revisions) would have appeared as lagniappe about a noteworthy Tennessee chapel in the volume featuring Louisiana chapels:

They teach us about living in stillness with the One who guides a community that follows St. Benedict’s Rule. The Sisters, dressed in their unadorned blue jumpers with white blouses, wake up to a gray world of mist, praying the words of St. Benedict: “Let nothing be preferred to the Word of God.” At 7 a.m., a bell that was transported from their original Mother House in Memphis and placed in the tower of the stone chapel, calls them to Morning Prayer and the Eucharist, two of five offices they celebrate each day. 

    The white-walled chapel is the cathedral of our faith where we feast at The Table with this group of disciplined women. A cat lurks in the hall; an aging dog curls up on a cushion beside the Prioress’s chair and frequently goes to the altar to receive a blessing. Through the clear glass window behind the altar, mist rises over the rugged steep overlooking the Cumberland Valley. Outside, a black locust tree welcomes rain now pattering on the blue tin roof. The downpour drenches a garden of roses where a miniature stone angel sits on a swing, surveying her domain. 

    At the plain oak altar with a cross carved in center front, we gather for The Eucharist. On this particular day, the scent of Easter lilies, incense, and candle wax from the Resurrection celebration mingles in the chapel, along with the fiery words of a presiding priest who exhorts us to practice inclusiveness and justice. 

    The Sisters not only offer the world their prayers for all people, they include us in the chanting of Psalms and the Eucharist, then serve us breakfast in a refectory with windows on every side where they look out at a world they praise daily. Hospitality is part of their lifework. They began offering the sacramental life to mountain people on the Feast of the Transfiguration in the 19th century and have kept their doors open to all people since that time. The Sisters are kinswomen of the Order of St. Mary once led by four Sisters, known as the Martyrs of Memphis or Constance and Her Companions, who died nursing victims of a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee in 1878. 

    At early morning Eucharist, Sister Mary Zita, a Filipino nun, sits in front of me, a sock cap with a star design on it atop her head. She is silent, bent over her prayer book. She joined the Order of St. Mary of Sewanee after Prioress Sister Lucy of St. Mary of Sewanee went on a mission to the Philippines where she visited this religious order in the mountain province of Sagada and recruited the little nun. 

    “Life,” the Sisters would say, “is best lived in community. The Community is a microcosm of the Church. We live in dependence on God for all that is needed, using what is given with care and simplicity as stewards of God’s gifts. Let nothing be preferred to the Word of God. The altar is the home of our abiding.”

My notes about this chapel end here, but for those who wish to know more about the Sisters of St. Mary at Sewanee, Ten Decades of Praise is available in the library of the Convent of St. Mary, Sewanee, Tennessee. Also available is my book entitled In A Convent Garden, poetry about the Sisters.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

DESTINATIONS

“Our life is a constant journey from life to death. The landscape changes, the people change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station.” Paulo Coelho

Border Press announces the publication of Destinations, New and Selected Poems by Diane Marquart Moore. Her 50th book features glimpses of train travel throughout the U.S. and one memorable ride over mountain tracks in Persia. Included are portrayals of characters making trips via rail who convey feelings of escapism and nostalgia and record observations from “the platform” during the actual train rides.

Destinations also features Section III. Of “Everyday Journal” that contains ironic observations about ordinary life in both New Iberia, Louisiana and Sewanee, Tennessee. Photography by Victoria I. Sullivan. Available now at Border Press Books and Amazon.

SEASON OF FRIENDS

Vickie and Anne on porch

This summer has been a season of friends, traveling afar to be with them and staying at home to receive them, and the latest visitor was a long-term friend from New Iberia, Louisiana. Yesterday, Anne Simon, author of mysteries called “The Blood Series” — Blood in the Cane Field, Blood in the Lake, and Blood of Believers — sat a spell with us on the small porch facing our woods here in Sewanee, Tennessee. Presently, Anne, a retired district judge, has turned her attention from writing mysteries to telling the story of an African-American woman named Felicité who nursed yellow fever victims in New Iberia during the 19th century, and we enjoyed a good writers’ chat concerning the extensive research she has been doing regarding Felicité.

We sat on the porch “taking the air,” as we say in south Louisiana, and I was reminded of the essay I wrote for Porch Posts (co-authored with Janet Faulk-Gonzales) a few years ago. This morning, I re-read my last essay in this book entitled “The Ultimate Porch:” 

“It [the porch] would be a place to which people brought peace and conversation, laughter, and their willingness to take time out. For me, the ultimate porch would also be a dual haven, in early morning hours offering me a safe place where I could sit in silence, stilling the storm of some past suffering in my mind, or expressing myself in writing, all my senses effortlessly taking in the scene around me, interrupted only by the squawk of a crow bringing me messages of affirmation.

Mostly, I’d want to bring to it my “belonging”… with friends, family, and community… where, as C.S. Lewis said, we all saw the same truth: love. Evening would be the best time for porch sitting, a time like that of an old memory at early dusk when there was just enough light to read by, and my Grandmother Nell and I sat together in a scaling, green-painted swing, reading from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse: “The world is so full of a number of things,/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

In early September, we plan to venture over to LaGrange, Georgia to sit on the new porch of our friend, Mary Ann Wilson, who probably loves porches as much as I do and was laying the foundation for one when we first visited her in June. It’s a screened one overlooking a patch of Georgia woods “in the country,” she says, “a place I’ve never lived.” Every time she writes, she’s on that porch, enjoying a deserved retirement from the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, her “roofed-in observation post where she can sit to get a clear view of what’s in the world outside and that allows for amiable company…”*

Moon in a Bucket

*Introduction to Porch Posts by Diane Marquart Moore and Janet-Faulk Gonzales. Illustration by Paul Schexnayder in Porch Posts.

SPRING’S KISS

In 2014, Border Press published Between Plants and People, a book of my poetry about plant life accompanied by eighteen color photographs by Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan, a noteworthy botanist. It contained metaphors describing the impact of plants on humans — food plants, medicinal plants, and decorative plants, and is an innovative account of “humanistic botany” in poetry.

The second volume of plant poems I wrote this summer, with accompanying photographs by Dr. Sullivan, is now in press. Spring’s Kiss, a book of poetry praising the qualities of wildflowers that inhabit and create beauty in the plant kingdoms of the world, is a nod to Susan Albert’s: “One person’s weed is another person’s wildflower,” and many of those weeds are included in this volume. Medicinal, as well as aesthetic qualities of the plants, are touted in some of the poems, and the beautiful blooms of these weeds reinforce Albert’s observation about plants.

The cover of this volume is a photograph of Karen Bourque’s glass rendition of the Pickerel Weed as inspired by Susan Elizabeth Entsminger’s illustration of the aquatic weed in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown by Victoria I. Sullivan, and the photograph was used in the cover design by Martin Romero, a landscape architect who renders the final designs for my book covers.

Spring’s Kiss can be pre-ordered from Border Press, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375 for $20 including shipping and will also be available from Amazon by Aug. 15.

“A SENSE OF SELF AND PLACE”

One of the publications to which I subscribe is a magazine entitled Cooks Illustrated, a periodical that contains recipes, information about cooking utensils and other products, tips about processing food — a panoply of food fare contributed by three dozen test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Members of this staff test recipes over and over again until they achieve food excellence and also test kitchen equipment and food brands. My favorite articles in the magazine are editorials written by founder and editor Christopher Kimball. The editorials usually contain reflections on how to live a good life or highlight New England (Vermont) people and their way of life.

This morning while I had to sit still and treat an ailing back and leg with light therapy, I re-read an old editorial by Kimball that incited a lot of pondering in me. Although Kimball focused on the character of Vermonters, his musings, written in a style much like the essayist E.B. White, would appeal to a universal audience (in my opinion). The editorial was entitled “The Golden Rule,” and he prefaced his musings with: “It isn’t easy to scratch the surface of a Vermonter…” and concluded with the thought: “We often measure life by the number of new experiences we accumulate…Vermonters measure what remains steady…each of us is expected to measure up in the eyes of our neighbors. That’s the golden rule in country living, a sense of self and place in service of others…”

This editorial in a food magazine struck me as one that describes people who live in my first home of New Iberia, Louisiana. Recently, when a flood occurred in Acadiana, I went on Facebook to find out whose homes had been flooded so I could offer prayers and, in several cases, the use of my home, which wasn’t flooded. On Facebook, I read numerous accounts of the characteristic banding together of those in my home town — a place that already had the reputation of unifying “in service to others” in the event of disaster. The history of Acadiana is alive with the courage and steadfastness of those exiled from their native Nova Scotia by the British as far back as the 18th century.

During the recent flooding, when I read about the unifying acts of those who weren't flooded — how they helped their neighbors — I remembered the courage and steadfastness shown by everyone in Acadiana during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Lily. Victims of the flooding fled from New Orleans and environs to New Iberia for help, where they knew they’d find the unique hospitality for which Acadiana is noted.

After the recent deluge, those who had escaped the flooding went in groups, often in boats, to rescue flood victims, to help tear down the sheet rock in flooded homes and to reconstruct interiors, carry out sodden furniture, cook gumbos and étouffée for evacuated friends and family. With typical joie de vivre, they gave thanks that the flooding had spared many of them by cooking good food, storytelling, and holding rosary sessions and church services of thanksgiving. One of the unique ways they showed their gratitude for lives spared was through collecting rocks from the countryside, painting them with cheerful pictures — flowers, trees, people’s faces, anything that showed a “sense of place” for their lovely bayou country home. They shared these objects of art with their friends on Facebook. I don’t know where the repository for the rocks is located, but I hope to find out when I travel back to bayou country this month.

No, Vermonters aren’t the only people who measure what remains steady; however, reminders from editors like Kimball certainly seem timely in light of the storms and hurricanes that disrupt us this time of the year…not to mention the political storms that have made all of us uneasy about the country’s leadership. But I’ll be happy to return to bayou country to stay awhile among south Louisianans who have “a sense of self and place in service to others.”

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan, taken from my recent book of poetry, A Slow Moving Stream.