My Final Goodbye Union

 6-20-2023

Leaving on a Jet Dream

We leave Union/Jackson for the last time today.  “All our bags are packed and we’re ready to go.  The dawn is breaking it is early morn” and the truck waits to be packed.  I remember the first day we arrived 27 years ago.  A much bigger truck and family, six of us, and Sarah still a baby.  Today my lover and I leave alone, six came, four left years ago, and we are the last.  It is a beautiful day to leave, clear big sky, mild, and filled with promises.  I long for Fair Haven and it is a sweet leave.  I have had the greatest run here; allowed to live and build dreams I could never have imagined 27 years ago.  Our Wonder Mountain has been summited at long last and now we move to the next peak.  Onward and upward although a little older, a little slower but facing east, wind in our sails, great adventures await...we are leaving, leaving on a jet dream.  Goodbye "Dearest Union."              

Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

6-18-2023

Retiring and moving have their powerful moments.  Yesterday was one.  We have returned to Union to move (Tuesday).  Home building, studio building, and dorm rental have all converged, so we are at it full tilt.  I had gone to the art department to return some things and I found it the way I always loved it in the summer, totally empty, the sweet quiet I had always cherished, filled with the possibility for my most imaginatively creative endeavors.  However, this time I was a stranger.  The house I had built was taken over by others.  I was out of place in my own palace, built perfectly to suit my creative efforts, my every creative need thought of and solved, everything created for my creativity, a 27-year tailoring to fit only me.  Now I felt oddly awkward, unsettled, I didn’t want to be here, too much loss, given over, taken.  I have no explanation—I have never felt it.  Sitting here now, the following day, I have tried to tell myself the story, to examine it as to know it but nothing is ringing my heart’s bell.  Here is the best I can do.  It was much like this must feel; being gifted a mountain meadow to make your home and 27 years gently pushing back the wild to allow you to live in creative peace, the earth, God, you alone being as creative as you can imagine. Then one day you were called away to another mountain.  After a brief period, you returned to get the last of your belongings only to find they had “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

The first time I came to Union I entered at the other
end of this hallway and walked to the Art Dept. at this end.
I thought it was the longest hallway I had ever seen.

 

What An Artist Eyes See

I have a small dear child, a waif, as dear as any student I ever had…and as gifted.  I have seen their giftedness, known it was, and moved by it.  Over time they have become wounded.  Self and other inflicted–and their art tells the truth of it; the way only art can, the way only an artist can see; their deep and meaningful well is now being drawn forth in a bucket with a gaping hole.  Thomas Merton would say we are all just animals trying to make sense of the tragicness of life until the day a Savior becomes ours, and makes or remakes us human.  I spent years making work like an animal.  I know that work when my eyes see it.  

      

Fair Haven

The whole landscape, unified by the church (my heart) and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose, than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonize together, that man’s reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole. 

Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you were forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative!  Where all day long your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House (my body) that hides the Sacramental Christ.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

 

My Trauma of an Ancient Event

Visiting my mom can be a traumatic event in my day.  Death's heinous grip has such a terrible hold on her body.  I once was so in love with her as only a three-year-old can love, completely.  No one was as beautiful as my mom.  And then I knew her as the most robust of humans, never tiring, ultimately organized, kept an immaculate home, raised four prodigals, got us dressed for Sunday, cleaned the baseboards of our modest homes, canned everything in the fall and filled her most precious gift, a 6-foot freezer.  And I knew her as utterly grief-stricken at how I turned out.  And then I knew her great relief at how I turned out.  And then I knew her orphaned, and then widowed, and then, and the last time I knew her as who she always was, I knew her alone in an empty home filled with 80 years of memorabilia.  Our trial trail is now over rocky and thorny ground.  She has become a translucent shell of herself.  She is almost, and absolutely still now.  Nothing who she was except the sapphire blue of her eyes swimming in confused and frightened whys.  She is as ancient as humans can become, a pajamaed shroud.  She is a reliquary of The Ancient of Days, a worn and weathered Edened oak, washed up on the shore of her end times—the cradle of her Holy Spirit.  She is my last mom, the House of the Lord for me.   The one I will know till her end.  She has no equal. 

 

No Heart Able To Write

I do not have the heart to write this morning, I am being pulled to other, more profound things.  I sit at Fair Haven as I will now do until my parting, thinking Christ, tall grass, death and love, and my lover’s softness.  Life often comes stark, no business to dull us, just me and life, great mysteries, and the greening, living earth.  I sat with the dying yesterday, held his warm hand as he talked resigning himself to his end.  I left Union yesterday, the beginning of the summer which will herald our separation forever.  The grass here is twelve inches, the river high, and the trees in full spring bloom.  Betty has just awakened to a reborn lover.  I am juxtaposed between endings and exuberant beginnings, a heart sincerely engaged with a body old.  Nature will not be bound.  Grass and clover and trees will grow, men will be resurrected from the dead and I have no heart to write.  Life is too meaningful to be lesser than with my words.    

Our seed.

   

"It is finished!"

SS Lesson John 19:17-30

EXPLAIN. Good morning, Father, my Wonderful Savior, and Holy Spirit. Jesus, Tetelestai, the Greek word You said at Your death, Your last utterance, “It is finished.”  I had never known this until this morning.  But it means more than it is finished.  It means it has always and will always be finished.  You have done it, the one thing you came to earth to do, and it is always done.  It means your sacrifice is good today for all who would call upon you for it.  It is never undone, You finished it once forever, to the uttermost.  Which gives us heir(ship) even throughout all eternity.  Your salvation is good forever, even to eternity.  Such a beautiful term but also such a renewed understanding of Your atonement.  It is eternal.  You will never lose us.  Nothing can ever separate us from you and your love—Tetelestai.  

APPLY. Holy Spirit you are always at work to give our salvation more and more meaning, to encourage us, teach us, comfort us, and renew our faith in Christ, daily if we will but show up.  So much of my living at the moment can so relate to this word, tetelestai.  My time here at Union is ending, it is finished and will always be finished.  My record is set, I have lived it for 27 years.  I do not know the exact number of days, but they were all lived and now the dye is slowly drying.  

RESPOND. Christ, without You, what?  I confess it is you, was you, only you.  My life here, is faulty at best, marred, messy, often wrong, but always me with You.  You never left me, even though I often went on without You.  I must now fall back onto you.  It was for You, because of You, and You alone.  I am grateful!!!  Thank YOU, my Great Tetelestai.