Talking to Myself
I am not Scottish, at least not that I know of. I’ve never really put much stock in my genetic makeup. I teach my theology students that for Christians our anthropology is eschatological before it is biological anyways. I won’t attempt to explain what that means here, but it is true. Christ shatters linear time in such a way that what is last is actually first.
So I am not a Scot but I am a Presbyterian whose Christian heritage is much indebted to many a Scotsman. I love that tradition even if I don’t always see eye to eye with many of those from it in regards to the way that tradition is interpreted, lived out, and put into practice.
My sensibilities as a Pastor, on many things, seem to line up with those of Norman Maclean’s father. In his breathtaking novella A River Runs Through It Maclean wrote, “As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word ‘beautiful.’”
I often use the word beautiful as well—maybe too often. I’d go so far as to say that Christianity is first and foremost rooted in the beautiful and the Christian life is one, when well lived, that is a gradual preparation for a face-to-face encounter with the beautiful—the beatific vision.
I believe that the beautiful things of the world talk to each other. I hear them—not as much as I’d like to, but I hear them. You can too, if you take the time, if you catch the right wavelength. You just need to be moving at the right speed. Beauty has a speed and it’s slow.
I recently started reading through Ray Bradbury’s memoirish, novelesque book Dandelion Wine with a group of former students and other lovers of literature. Bradbury’s book is sort of an attempt to crawl back into the skin of his 12-year-old self but this time with the wisdom to slow down, suck in all the textures, sights, and smells of the bee-fried summer air of one summer now long past.
There is something simultaneously beautiful, haunting, and crushingly sad about attempting to view oneself as a child who can relive past moments. The beauty comes from the people and places you revisit. The haunting nature of it comes from the fact that so many of those people are gone and the places are no longer the same—if only for the absence of those who made the place worth remembering as different from any other. The sadness comes when you realize how few details you actually remember. “What did her face or that neighborhood actually look like? What color were her eyes?”
In Dandelion Wine a young boy, Douglas, finds out one summer night that his best friend, John Huff, was moving 80 miles away. He might as well be moving to Mars. Doug has no means at his disposal to stop the inevitable. But maybe, just maybe, he could delay it. He, John, and a gaggle of other boys play a last game of “statues” or freeze tag. Doug freezes John and refuses to thaw his friend. Once one is ambulatory all that is left to do is walk away.
There is something incredibly beautiful about freeze tag. In many ways we never stop playing it—adults just don’t use the words anymore. But we feel the words.
My parents moved out of their house tonight. They are moving 1,043 miles away. They might as well be moving to Mars. One of the last things I saw in their mostly packed house last week was an old photo from one of the summers of my childhood. The air of those summers wasn’t bee-fried but it had its own feel, its own aroma. My summer’s air held the mists of evaporating Labatt Blue beer, recently put out cigars, and smoke from the grill manned by Uncle Rich—there was another smoke smell that wafted out of his shed when he went in there alone, but that is another story.
The photo I saw, as my parents packed their belongings into their spacecraft, was of my grandpa Eddie, my grandma Lorie, my uncle Rich, my uncle Michael, and my great-grandmother. Holding the picture, a snapshot of my past, I realized everyone in that photo is dead. They are all gone. Seeing them sitting on that couch that overlooked the pool in Buffalo at my aunt Karen’s seems concurrently 15 minutes and a lifetime ago—a newspaper clipping from the basement of time with today’s date on it.
In the bottom right corner of the picture there is a little out-of-focus girl in a bathing suit entering the room. It could be my sister Rachel or Bethany, maybe my cousin Erica or Caroline. It’s hard to tell. I saw the picture and thought to myself that it was Dandelion Wine incarnate—a small child entering into a room of ghosts. One can try to re-enter but things are often out of focus.
The beautiful things talk to each other. Dandelion Wine spoke to and through that photo. I know I will forever hear beauty speak when I see children playing freeze tag. I hope they realize how profound that game is.
Justin Chiarot serves as Chair of our Biblical Studies Department at Chapel Field and Pastor of Christ’s Church of the Hudson Valley in Ulster County, NY.
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