The Holy City

We've spent the past five days in Charleston, SC, the city they've modestly dubbed "The Holy City". Allegedly it's named so for the abundance of churches and synagogues which they host, but I suspect the real reason is the city's proximate relationship to heaven. Charleston is a delightful town, certainly, and we enjoyed our few days there visiting many colonial and ante bellum homes and carefully tended gardens. But Charlestonians sure are full of themselves!

If we heard it once we heard it a half dozen times: "This is where visitors want to return to live the rest of their lives." Well, not every visitor, I thought to myself. It's a pleasant enough town, with lots of history and shops and restaurants and walks, and we do intend to go back often, but they really do need to lighten up and do a reality check.



In a strange twist, however, folks will tell you, with barely disguised pride, how miserable Charleston is during the summer. We would have architectural gimmicks pointed out to us, things such as cupolas and shutters, all apparently necessary because it gets so hot and humid in the summer. Another cliche we'd hear is, "This is the only place where the humidity is 100%...and it isn't raining!"

Well, surprise: Charleston is not the only city on the southern coast of the country. We've been here in Wilmington for 35 or so summers, and it's hot and humid. We've visited Savannah in the summer, and it's hot and humid. Plus I have some personal experience of living on a Low Country island (Parris Island, specifically) during July, August and September, and it was hot and humid. So spare us, please, with the thinly veiled crowing about weather.



While I'm in the mood, there's one more habit I wish Charlestonians would sit on, and that's the constant teasing about Yankees and those from "off" (their term for anyone who comes from elsewhere). It's as though they, the locals, all arrived with the "First Fleet" in 1670, and everyone else straggled in from the far edges of civilization. Only with considerable restraint was I able to pocket my own ancestral credentials and not play that rather ungracious game.

Having said all that, we still love Charleston. In particular we love the way they have preserved their history within a still living and dynamic city, we love the openness of people who give a friendly greeting as we pass on the sidewalk, we love the narrow cobblestone streets in neighborhoods of architectural gems, we love the incredible variety of cafes and restaurants of every type, and, yes, we love their baseball park, where we saw the Charleston Riverdogs defeat the Savannah Sand Gnats.

You bet, we'll be back.

Silence

This week the muse is silent. Every time I tried to jot down a few thoughts on this subject or that, an idea or two about thing or another, it always seemed so inconsequential in the shadow of the unspeakable horror at Virginia Tech. Everything seems trivial in comparison.

It would be too easy to add to the blathering of blame that's currently making the rounds, such as...

...finding fault with the school's security and/or alarm systems,

...lamenting the fact that we're all being held hostage by the NRA's gun control lobby and the spinelessness of our legislators to deal with it,

...condemnation of the media for giving a platform from which the assassin can postumously spew his venomous bile,

...yada, yada, yada.

One of the affirmations we made at our baptismal vows has to do with the renunciation of "the evil powers of this world which destroy the creatures of God", and this week we've had a first-hand personification of that evil. There is no explanation of it, no defense of it, no rationalization for it. Evil simply is, it exists, and we renounce it. All the other words are, at least for now, unnecessary.

So enough already. Give it a rest. There's plenty of time in the days to come for thoughtful analysis of and some appropriate response to the evil this tragedy presents. For today let's just grieve in silence, let's pray to God for some wisdom that's stronger than the killer's hatred, and let's listen when the muse returns to speak.

"Love 'ya"

Three times in the past week I've heard people say to me, as they were taking their leave, "Love 'ya". Now, in some cosmic sense perhaps they really do love me, but I have a hunch it was more a matter of signing off a conversation, a nice way to say "See you later" or "Take care!" Just as folks will casually say "Bless you" after a sneeze, in the same vein they often blurt "Love 'ya" as they go on their way.

It's a pleasant convention, and nice enough to hear, but it got me to thinking (which by itself is often scary!): Whatever in the world, I wondered, did it mean to say "I love you" to another person? It's obviously a term of endearment, a pledge of affection, but is there anything more at stake? So I wondered, and so I came up with what those magical words really mean. Here's my translation of, "Love ya".

It means "I trust you". It means I can give you my deepest secrets and scariest dreams, and know they'll be safe. It means I can let you know what I'm really like and what I really think and who I really am, confident that you won't reject me. It means that whatever you tell me will be true even when at the time it doesn't seem like such a hot idea. I trust you, in other words, with myself.

The corollary of trust is that it means "I respect you". It means I admire what you can do and not do, even to the point of sometimes wanting to do and not do those same things myself. It means I'm happy to give you all the space you need without intruding into it. It means, that without putting you safely up on a distant pedestal, I honor you.

Perhaps most crucially for me is that it means I'm willing to die for you. Obviously that's mostly metaphorical since those opportunities don't come along very often over the course of a life, but it's a test I would make of anyone to whom I might say, "Love you". Is this a person for whom I'd actually, literally, physically, give up my life? There are some such folks, but a precious few. And the amazing thing, which I really don't understand, is that they know who they are.

So I use that little phrase very cautiously and therefore very rarely. Those are powerful words, loaded with meaning and nuance, hence I'm not often ready to casually respond, "Love you, too". Nothing personal, you understand!

Easter Home

It's Holy Week, days when we're ordinarily thinking of Good Friday and Easter and all their attendant implications. Usually it's a pretty busy time of year, physically as well as spiritually, but Holy Week this time has been quite different around our house. For one thing, I've been pretty well focused on the recuperation process after last week's carotid artery repair, and while everything's gone well according to the doc's reports, it's still been a pain in the, well, the neck. I'll spare the details, but trust me: I haven't had many wonderfully spiritual insights this week.

I have, however, had a wonderful time during a brief visit with brother John and Caroline, his wife. They stopped here for an overnight on their way home after a month in Florida, and we made the most out of our short visit. (We were scheduled to visit J. and C. while we were down in Florida for some baseball, but that trip got short-circuited and we haven't been able to see each other for a while.)

In the course of this visit John and I got to talking about our folks and South Charleston and home in general, and I realized somewhere in the course of this conversation that the whole construct of "home" means such different things to people. For some, the idea of home conjures up first of all an image of a place. In Ann's life, for instance, it would be "The Farm", that place out beyond St. Elmo, Georgia, down Chattanooga Valley Road, where she spent some of her earliest and fondest years, that place where she and I first got to know one another and fell in love, and now, generations later, we still have pictures of that place hanging on the wall of our subdivision home. There were people in that place, of course, wonderful and important people, yet we were always locked in the embrace of that place.

Others, and here John and I would fit, have felt "home" filled our minds eye first of all with people. In our case they were primarily our parents, but they could have been any others, such as some of those "Most Infuential" that I blogged about earlier. The places have, of course, been terribly important to our lives, and we'll always remember our homes in Reading and New York and South Charleston, but when "home" comes to my mind I think first off of mother and dad. Where they were was where home was.

My mind wandered from there back to Holy Week and Easter, and I realized something: Easter is my spiritual "home", the event from which everything else flows. Easter is my tap root. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the mechanics and details of Easter, about whether or not the resurrection of Jesus happened exactly when or where or how we're told it happened. But I've bet my life that it happened.

I enjoy Christmas and all the gloriously fuzzy stuff about angels and mangers and struck-dumb shepherds, and I treasure the many long held affections with unforgetable people and well-loved places met along the way, but they can't hold a candle to Easter. If Christmas should vanish and all the memories fade, if everything around me should crumble into dust, the New Creation of Easter would still be the prime reality in my life, the starting point of all that is true and holy. That nutshell-phrase in the Eucharist says it all: "Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again." Easter is the source of my spiritual home.