AN OLD BLUE SHIRT

Some people develop a fondness for shoes and wear them past everlastingness; others become attached to coats, dresses, and various pieces of clothing that end up in five percent of the material in landfills. I confess to a fondness for old blouses, sweaters, and shirts that can be worn with blue jeans and lounging pants, and my favorite among the latter is an old blue Liz Claiborne shirt that was designed for jeans wear. I am not only inured to the shirt, I can’t wear it without thinking of the tumultuous time in which I acquired it. Unfortunately, the shirt has reached the frayed, underarm-holes condition that has made it suitable only for bedtime wear. Its demise is near…

In late August, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and at that time I was director of Solomon House, an outreach mission in New Iberia, Louisiana. Many who could not be housed in the Super Dome in New Orleans fled to New Iberia for temporary housing, food, water… for their very survival. Two days after the exodus, Solomon House began receiving clothing from everywhere in the United States – truckloads of used and new clothing from the Eastern coast, the West coast, Midwest, and from all southern states. We stacked, sorted, and distributed clothing, food, diapers, and medical supplies in the six rooms and a back porch of Solomon House, a gray frame house built in the early part of the 20^th century that we used for outreach work. Our hurricane recovery work lasted for at least four months following the most devastating hurricane to hit Louisiana, and I was on duty from 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. during that time.

One day as I sorted through the clothing, this almost-new Liz Claiborne shirt appeared in one of the numerous boxes we were unpacking. It was made of soft blue cotton, and I coveted it at first sight, but I consigned it to a table of shirts and offered it to every woman who came in looking for shirts or blouses. “Too hot for that shirt,” most of them said. “Not dressy enough for my liking,” several said, and none of them seemed to like the soft blue color. The shirt lay on the table for at least two months before I decided that it belonged to me. After all, I had been working 12-hour days, no one wanted the shirt, and it had the look of “wanting attachment” to me. I took it home and tried it on. Too large, but comfortable, I surmised. After I took the article home and began wearing it, I thought many times about joining the people who began to model the clothing they had found on our tables, but felt a twinge of guilt that I had taken it home, rather than trusting that someone would finally make it their own. So I wore it in the privacy of my home. Instead, I wrote a poem about someone else modeling their Solomon House clothing entitled “Rising Water,” which appeared in my book of poetry by that same name, and a few verses of which appear below:

“…the awful body of the humiliated

on our doorstep, to whom we said

and he will transform

the body of your humiliation,

those victims of inundation

driven not by realism

but by visions of a redeemed future,

the miracle of faith in a God

who would help them survive.

We clothed a young evacuee from New Orleans

and he returned in his used outfit,

parachute pants, a striped polo shirt,

mimed a fashion model for us,

called his outfit

“The New Solomon House Line,”

sashayed through the outreach center

consoling us with his humor,

in the midst of agony showed us

he could see God…”

The young man was a bright light in the flooded world, and perhaps I’ve persisted in wearing the worn shirt just to remind me of the resilience of humans and the place of humor in redeeming an impossible situation. However, eleven years later I am giving up my blue shirt. According to an article in the September/October, 2005 issue of Green American, I don’t have to consign this favored piece of clothing to the dump, my old friend “too worn to wear” can be salvaged for such projects as “ugly quilts,” bedding for animal cages, textile recycling centers, or just for rags to use as a substitute for paper towels.

I will miss the comfortable shirt, but it’s better that I give it up for use in another home. However, I’m already looking for a replacement — an article of clothing that will carry the spirit of resilience and humor of the first one delivered to me, albeit illegally, on the heels of a vicious hurricane.

SUNDAY ON THE MOUNTAIN AND IN THE VALLEY

Agreeable responses to sermons have a salutary effect on those who preach, and Sunday I received perhaps one of the best responses to any sermon I’ve delivered since I began preaching seventeen or more years ago. I’ve mentioned Peanuts and his gang in previous sermons, but yesterday when I brought up Snoopy as an example of what Robert Short calls “the little Christ,” the small crowd in the chapel at St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, TN, became instantly alert. I apologized for seeming irreverent but went on to explain that, according to Short, Snoopy may be lazy, sarcastic, a coward, and quite weary of being a dog, but he also possesses love, loyalty, watchfulness, and courage. Furthermore, Short advises that before we can become a good Christian who loves well, we have to take on the dog’s lowliness of complete obedience and humility at the feet of the master and in service to others. When I said that Hegel, the German philosopher, recognized the dog as the most religious of all creatures who loves with complete dependence, the congregation seemed to be on the edge of applause. It was a memorable moment, and Penny, the Convent dog, who was curled under Sister Madeleine Mary’s feet, awoke from her usual nap in the sanctuary during church service and looked around for recognition.

I received a similar response when I went down to Grace Fellowship Church on Garner Road to deliver the same sermon. The response both gladdened and saddened me because I love dogs but cannot withstand too much exposure to them as I’m allergic to animal dander. Of course, Sophie, the Convent cat, isn’t as polite as Penny and insists on following me around, hiding under the table when I share breakfast with the Sisters in the refectory. Yesterday I was informed that the Sisters were up late vacuuming the chair on the altar where I sit before delivering a sermon because perverse Sophie had been lining it with animal dander all week in preparation for my arrival.

Sunday afternoon, we went down to the valley in Cowan, TN, to view an exhibit of the work of Carolyn Tocco who is one of the members of Grace Fellowship. Although Carolyn owns several dogs, I didn’t find any renderings of them; however, one wall of the Artisan Depot in Cowan featured a beautiful display of her oils that depicted wildlife and nature. Carolyn works in a studio of her home at Winterberry in the woods near Sewanee that we had visited last fall before we left Sewanee. We had come away from the visit with two small depictions of bugs and berries now hanging on the walls of the cottage here on The Mountain, and yesterday I added a painting of butterfly weed to our Tocco collection. I also left the Artisan Depot with two ceramic tea bag holders by Gretchen McCance who has a kiln at her home in Tim’s Ford, TN and another in Blue Ridge, Georgia.

The Artisan Depot just moved into a new facility on the main thoroughfare of Cowan and is a part of the Franklin County Arts Guild, which features fine art and crafts from Franklin County and surrounding areas. The Arts Guild is an organization of local artists and friends who promote the visual and performing arts for all ages in Franklin County. It also provides a scholarship for a promising high school senior who plans to study art or education at the university level, and an annual Sweet Tooth Theater, which is a musical act accompanied by coffee and dessert. The Artisan Depot is one of those galleries found in small communities throughout the Appalachians that promote venues for artists to sell their work.

It was a Sunday filled with “glad surprises,” as Thomas a Kempis says, made more pleasant by a Mexican dinner at the Fiesta in Cowan where the walls are decorated with another visual experience —the work of Sewanee artist, Edward Carlos.

THUMBPRINT IN THE CLAY

In 2014 I reviewed a book entitled Adventure of Ascent: Field Notes From A Lifelong Journey by Luci Shaw, an account of a woman getting older that recorded the challenges and opportunities of “the stages of aging and as a mountain-climbing experience.” A few days ago I received another book entitled Thumbprint in the Clay by Shaw in which she explores the idea of finding thumbprints in creation – explorations in faith, art, and creativity. She discovers God’s presence in “imprinted adventures" and records, in essays and poetry,  her awareness of the Creator in her physical surroundings and in “living clay.”

Her ruminations about poetry and its imprint on humans speak to me as she writes that our senses allow us to observe, sort out and differentiate, and poetry brings them into clearer focus. Shaw’s delight in the ordinary is contagious. She devotes an entire chapter to coffee mugs, hand-thrown pottery such as fruit bowls, salad bowls and jugs, trays – vessels for storing, serving, holding and pouring. Each of her vessels have a history, but it is the look and feel of their shape and texture that enchant her, “combining earth and human eye and muscle with individual design, skill, and intense heat…” Fascinated with the art of pottery making, Shaw once enrolled in a ceramics class and found that manipulating clay on the wheel was sensuously satisfying. She refers to each of the pieces of clay she has collected as “examples of a kind of incarnation – a unique physical expression of the potter’s skill and artistry…a reflection of the artist’s soul… embodied in the individual’s creation…”

In an outstanding chapter of Thumbprint in the Clay, Shaw focuses on “Beauty,” and covers terrain showing God’s thumbprint that has always inspired me – the landscape of Big Sur, California.  At a monastery high on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Shaw spent retreat time to recover after assiduously pursuing her writing career. She felt unsatisfied because she had experienced a disconnect with her spiritual life; however, in the monastery she gained fresh insight and was able to open herself to wisdom from beyond, finding God’s imprint in her surroundings that pointed her back to him…and to her work.

Shaw encountered Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was provided with an elemental example for enlarging her contemplative life. While she and Rohr sat at a table, gazing out a dining hall window and focusing on a poplar tree in front of them, Rohr told her that he could sit for hours and contemplate the tree. “‘Those leaves. Even that one leaf in particular’ (he points). He suggests to me that when my mind complicates or questions what I believe, I might choose an object – rock, leaf, a pool of water – for quiet contemplation. When your mind wanders, as it will, return to focusing on what is there in front of you. Let your gaze stay with the awareness that God is in you and in this object that you are both part of a universe that is an ongoing creation of love. He called this a long, loving look at the real.” This chapter resonated with me and evoked my memory of sitting in a chair on the patio of a small motel in Sedona, Arizona, gazing up at the cliffs of red rock that mark this area. I sat there for several hours, in one of the most non-thinking times of my life, enfolded in the texture and color of this particular “thumbprint” and feeling at one with my surroundings.

One of the last chapters in Thumbprint in the Clay, “God-Printed People,” includes a portrait of Madeleine L’Engle, renowned author of children and young adult books, and both fiction and non-fiction books regarding the spiritual life. Shaw and her husband befriended L’Engle and published her first book of poetry, The Weather of the Heart, and Shaw writes of how a friendship burgeoned, despite differing theological views – L’Engle was a liberal, left-leaning Episcopalian, and Shaw was a conservative, right-leaning evangelical. “Somehow, [by] the grace of God, we met in the middle, learning much from each other, influencing each other and being enriched in the process,” Shaw writes. Later, Shaw Publishers became L’Engle’s publisher for eleven of her religious books. When L’Engle moved into a nursing home in Litchfield, Connecticut, Shaw flew out from Bellingham to see her and was dismayed that her author friend seemed locked into herself; however, a month later, she was able to connect with L’Engle before she died and wrote a poem honoring her, a poignant tribute to a woman who had created a lasting impression in the world of spiritual writing: “…Fog has rolled in,/erasing definition at the edge. Walking/to meet it, she hopes soon to see/where the shore ends. She listens as/the ocean breathes in and out in waves./She hears no other sound.”

Luci Shaw is an inspiring co-creator whose thumbprints in poetry and prose help readers to see the marks of beauty and inspiration everywhere in the Creation and to ruminate on the markings of human artistry and skill. She is the author of ten volumes of poetry and other books, and co-authored three books with Madeleine L’Engle. Her papers are housed in the Luci Shaw Collection at Wheaton College. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.