Silas House's Blog

There is so much good music and television, so many great books and films out there today that I can't possibly see/read/hear them all but of the books I've read this year, these are my favorites, and I believe all of them were published within the last two years. I've curated this list for you on Bookshop and you can order any or all of them at .  I will donate any proceeds from books bought at this link to the Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund.  

I read thirty-four books this year (this morning I started the thirty-fifth but won't have it finished before the new year) besides books I read for blurbs and the like.  These are the ones that stuck with me the most.

Fiction

Clare Keegan's Small Things Like These is a book I want to give to everyone.  I think it is just about perfect.  The sentences are all precise gems, the main character is someone I want to spend more time with, and most of all the book conjures a feeling, an ambience.  I do not quite know how Keegan pulls it all off, which makes me love it more.  The story of a small Irish town in the late 80s and a call for empathy. I want to read everything she has ever written.  

   
This novel about a young man who befriends a mysterious older woman on the English coast tells the story of a remarkable friendship, and the way a chance encounter can change us forever. 

Migrations is an epic, a contemporary feminist retelling of Moby Dick.  It is a literary page-turner of the highest order.  I couldn't put it down but I also wanted to savor every word.


 A Burning by Megha Majumdar is the cinematic, compelling, and profound look at a young woman accused of a terrorist bombing in India.  An incredible debut novel. 

The Prophets is one of the most difficult and necessary books I've ever read.  The story of two gay enslaved men in the years just before the Civil War, it is violent, beautiful, and everything in between. I thought it should have won every award of the year but I will warn you that it is not a book for everyone.

Full disclosure: I edited this book and I am one of the people who chose it for publication but I still want to include it on this list because I never would have chosen it if I hadn't thought it was so beautiful.  Waldrop expertly explores the extraordinary nature of people who are living ordinary, everyday lives.  The whole book is filled with incredibly layered characters, and you'll never forget the two main ones that root the entire story. Not to mention the sense of place that is so vivid you will be transported to the lakes and towns of Western Kentucky. 


Nonfiction
I have rarely learned as much or have been as moved by a book as I was by Allison Moorer's beautiful memoir of raising her son after his nonverbal autism diagnosis.  It is a book of rare grace and toughness and one that everyone should read although it will speak especially to any parent and to every parent of an autistic child.  
Margaret Renkl is the best columnist working in America today.  Many of her best New York Times columns are collected here and I think this is an essential book for any library.

This book is not only a look into a tragic double murder but also into gender and the complexities of Appalachia.  It is expertly structured, beautifully written, and hugely readable. 

Young Adult
Few people write more beautifully about young people than Jeff Zentner and I think he also has special insights into what it means to be working class and rural.  You will need a handkerchief or some Kleenex while reading this book.  I certainly did.

So imaginative, so original, and so profound, Arnold's look into the future is a marvel of structure and philosophy.  

Poetry
You will luxuriate in the language of the first poetry collection from one of my favorite voices, filled with remarkable insights about what it means to be country, Black, and/or a woman.  

Full disclosure:  I edited this book of poetry but I loved it long before I became involved in its publication (which is one reason I ended up being its editor).  Worthington ties together country music, grief, and the balm of the natural world expertly.  A real beauty.  

illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira
I hope you will have time to read for the Ideas section of The Atlantic. A brief excerpt:

"My own parents...cut corners so that they could help less fortunate kids from my school, or our church. I was taught to sacrifice my own comfort for the good of others, whether it be by volunteering my seat to elders in a crowded waiting room, letting a pregnant woman go in front of me in the grocery line, or giving half of my sandwich to a hungry classmate. I may not have always lived up to these standards, but I was taught to try. I’m sure I’m not alone. Sacrificing for the common good was something most of us were taught when I was growing up. Just a few decades later, I’m seeing people in my hometown, and all over the country, thinking only of themselves. They’re not just unwilling to make sacrifices for others during a pandemic; they’re angry about being asked to."

First in a series of short essays based on photographs.

This is my Great Uncle Dave's camping chair. He carried it to Dale Hollow Lake for almost fifty years, from when he first visited there in the late 1940s until shortly before his death in 1996. These types of chairs are still common at some funeral homes in the South but when I was growing up the elders in my family always took the lightweight and sturdy folding seats on camping trips, too. It is still solid as a pine knot and surprisingly comfortable. It folds up smoothly and hooks right across my shoulder for easy carrying. My Great Aunt Mildred gave this chair to me a few years after Uncle Dave passed away.  She's gone now, too, like all of the real elders in my family.  

My family only recently rose to solid middle class so we do not inherit expensive antique sideboards or wedding China patterns and silver. Our heirlooms are the smaller things: the dripolator (a stovetop coffee pot) my aunt used every day of her life, the churn that belonged to my great-grandmother, a pocketknife that my uncle used to whittle or cut twine or whatever else needed done.  The things handed down in our families don't hold a lot of monetary value but contain plenty of pining. They won't fetch anything at auction but they sure conjure many memories. They're the stuff of family history.  

I use this chair to sit by the creek and read now, every day when I have my tea around three or four in the afternoon, before I get back to work in the yard or on my writing or grading papers.  I think of Uncle Dave every time I unfold it. The way he threw his head back to laugh. The stories he was always telling.  I think of all of them:  Aunt Sis, Uncle Sam, Uncle Silas, Uncle Bobby, Aunt Dot, Mamaw and Papaw Shepherd, Granny Mae, Aunt Jean, Uncle Ray, Uncle Red.  Gone, gone. With them was taken thousands of tales. I managed to snatch some of my history from them in fits and starts, listening when they told their stories, asking questions, always pumping them for more.  

In a couple weeks I'll be traveling back to Dale Hollow Lake, where my family has been going ever since Uncle Dave found those pristine waters and encouraged us all to go camping there every year.  Just like I have done ever since Aunt Mildred gave it to me, I'll be taking his chair with me once again.

There's a moment in the new film that tore me down.  I don't want to give too much away, but it involves a line about a queen sailing through space on a ship.  The scene moved me so much because it so perfectly captured the way I've often felt about death involving my loved ones:  that deep hope and faith that I will see them again, in some form, although most likely in one that our human minds cannot comprehend.  Lately I keep going back again and again to why art matters the way it does: because it works the best when it manages to articulate the abstract notions that seem impossible to articulate. 

I had a similar experience earlier this week when I read "", a long short story by Billy O'Callaghan that is one of the best pieces of literature I've ever read.  This story manages to capture the way it feels to be at a death bed, how the waiting feels, how the mystery of it all feels.  Anyone who has experienced the loss of someone they loved profoundly will relate.  

Earlier this month I read the novel by Douglas Stuart.  This is a heavy book about alcoholism and its effects on an entire family.  But at its heart it is more about the unbreakable bond and love between a gay son and his mother. There's more than one scene in that book where the humanity on the page is so strong that everything else around me fell away--the walls of my own house, the worries I possess for people going through hard times in my family, the uncertainty of the pandemic. After one particularly effective scene I had to put the book down for a few minutes to collect myself. 

These are not easy things to manifest on the page, yet the the writer of "A Death in the Family" manages to do it in such a shattering way that I will never forget that story, the writer of Shuggie Bain did it in such a way that I was there with them, in 1990s Scotland, grieving with them.  The creators of The Dig did it so beautifully that I was not only under those big starry skies of Suffolk in 1939 but I also somehow felt some kind of balm in the most open wound of my own grief, a loss of a family member nearly six years ago that is still as raw now as it was in February of 2015. 

This same power of art occurred for me earlier this week when I heard--for likely the hundredth time--the song "" by Link Wray.  Early on in that song the lines "I been in the city for awhile/but my soul's still countrified" always manage to give voice to the homesickness I feel everyday for the land where I grew up (specifically, one stand of pines on the ridge behind my parents' home), a place where I can no longer live.  

Last week, when I heard that Cloris Leachman died, I immediately re-watched one of my favorite scenes in cinema.  This is the five minute tour de force (captured in one take) of Leachman going through a barrage of different emotions--from supplication to raw anger to nurturing--in The Last Picture Show.  I love not only because it's such an effective look at the way love and sadness can so often be tangled together, but also because it's a marvel of acting.  I'm moved not only by what is going on within the context of the film but also by the artistry on display.  To know that somebody can possess such talent and empathy and display it in a piece of art--that bowls me over just as much as what is happening in the scene. 

The next day, Cicely Tyson died and I remembered the exhilarating experience of seeing her in my favorite play, on Broadway.  The entire play she went nonstop, running back and forth from one side of the stage to the other, hardly ever still, all the while delivering a masterful performance that caused us all to jump to our feet at the end for the longest standing ovation I've ever witnessed. Many of the audience members had tears running down our faces because we knew what we had just witnessed (not to mention that we were in the same room with her).  The applause was thunderous when she took her bows.

The time I spent with these pieces or art were often transcendent.  That is the power of art that really works for the consumer of the art:  to be transported beyond the normal range of human experience.

I can first remember this happening to me when I was ten years old and saw the film E.T.  The pivotal moment for me was when E.T. dies.  A piece of art had never made me feel like this before. I couldn't help it:  I sat right there in the theater and cried. The movie got to me, yes, but perhaps even more powerful was that among the two hundred or so people around me in that sold-out audience at the Corbin Cinema Four, most of them were crying, too.  And minutes later, amazingly, everyone was happy and applauding when we were shown that E.T. was .  The clapping and hoots of joy among the audience seeing this film for the first time made me so happy that I felt the strange sensation of wanting to cry from happiness. The only thing I love more than a communal cry is a communal celebration.  

Thinking of that makes me so thankful for the people I grew up around.  I was taken to that showing of E.T. by my cousin, Eleshia, who took me to lots of movies (legend has it that we went to see a total of seventeen times when you count trips to the theater and to the drive-in; I don't know if we went that many times, but we saw it so much that both of us knew every word of dialogue and lyrics).  I'm so thankful that Eleshia didn't lean over and say something like "Boys don't cry" or make fun of me later, on the way home.  Eleshia let me be who I was. Few things are more important to a child. While I felt at the time that the whole audience was in mourning for E.T. with me, I'm betting there were some boys there who refused to let their emotions overcome them because they had been raised to think they weren't allowed to do that.  I was brought up in a very traditional and strict home but I was never told to keep my emotions in check just because of my gender.  I was never taught that I shouldn't be moved by pieces of art.  I was fortunate to grow up around people who did not bury their emotions.  Men and women alike in my family displayed their emotions openly in church, at funerals, in talking about the dead or the past.  

This is often surprising for people.  Being from a rural, working class background is not the most common experience in the literary world.  After twenty years of being published, I'm still surprised by some of the things other writers or readers will say to me at literary gatherings.  Very often there is the expectation that it was an uphill battle for me to be a writer because of where I'm from.  While there are particular difficulties of being an artist in my culture (being vocally liberal will take you down a notch or two in my hometown), the truth is that I felt very supported as a young person who possessed the empathy necessary to be a writer.  Yes, there was the homophobic elementary math teacher who once made fun of me in front of the whole class for using the word "beautiful" in an article I wrote for the school newspaper (his words were something along the lines of "Only a sissy would use the word 'beautiful'") but there was also the English teacher I had who shed tears while reading an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem to us (""), thereby putting on full display that it was not only permissible to be moved by art, but by sharing her love for poetry and her own poetry with us, she showed that it was also okay to identify as an artist.  

I've had people say to me that it's highfalutin to identify myself as "an artist".  I think that in a world that so easily negates the arts it's more important than ever to use that word when we are creators of art, whether it be music, novels, films, dances, quilts, or whatever makes you feel as if you are putting art into the world. I've been loving the Fran Lebowitz docuseries "" on Netflix but I was miffed when she snarked "If you can eat it, it's not art" in one of the episodes. Clearly she's never had my mother's chicken dumplings or my mamaw's divinity: both examples of perfection that are among the most transcendent things I've ever experienced. 

All of this is simply to say that I'm thankful for art that moves me.  I'm thankful that people like my cousin cried along with me when I was moved by art as a child.  Pieces of art have always been salvation for me, and they've always especially carried me through hard times (like these last four years--Lord have mercy).  I completed a novel this past spring, just as the pandemic was hitting full steam. For each book I write, I draw on a host of different pieces of art, whether it be music, paintings, photographs, films, poetry, or whatever works. That new novel's touchstone was the first stanza from the poem "", by Theodore Roethke, which always reminds me that in times of darkness, or in all times, really, art can be the light: 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,   
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
There's a moment in The Dig where all of this summed up much better than I have here. Ralph Fiennes' character, Basil Brown, says "From the first human handprint on a wall," he says. "We're part of something continuous." 

---
of some music from this post
Photo: Movie still from The Dig

"The Dead" by James Joyce is one of my favorite pieces of writing to have ever been written.  A few years ago I was teaching the story in Ireland and it struck me that many of the issues being explored in the short story are still pertinent in my homeland today.  Themes such as the complications of being loyal to your own place in the world, choosing sides, homesickness, and the way a culture can become so immersed in the past that it threatens to impede its own progress.  I do not think there is any way to improve upon Joyce's story but I did think it'd be interesting to pick up the story from early 1900s Ireland and move it to contemporary Appalachia, so that's what I did in this story, "Another Country," which was published in Blackbird.  Today is the Day of Epiphany, or, Old Christmas.  While Joyce's story points to Epiphany several times mine brings up Old Christmas because that is the way the day is thought of in Appalachia still today.  I hope you'll have some time of stillness today--or whenever--to read "Another Country," which you can find .  

This year, especially: 

Find a body of water, and be still beside it for a time. Build a fire and watch the flames. Sit on the porch. Lie on the grass. Light candles. Take a deep breath. Write a letter to someone.

Discover something new everyday. Learn. Tell stories. Listen to old people. Ask them questions.

Do something nice for others when you can and treat yourself occasionally. 
Read actual, real books and newspapers. Buy grocery store flowers. 

Spend an entire day without looking at your phone. If you feel the urge to post a selfie everyday, take a picture of some other beautiful thing instead.  Remember that there is power in moderation.

Learn to cook or bake something new. Enjoy every meal. Savor your food. Drink water.
Any chance you get, hold a baby.  Anytime the opportunity arises, dance.  Always swim or wade in the water.  Study leaves. At least once this year, pee outside. 
Be completely quiet. Turn your favorite song up as loud as it will go. Sing.

If someone makes you feel bad all the time, get away from them. Laugh with others. Laugh while you're alone.

Spend time with animals. They make us better people.

Don't judge. Think this: "There but for the grace of God go I" or "Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."  
Forgive others.  Forgive yourself.

               Silas House, from "What I Know: a Prayer Essay"

1. Tired and Weary 

The of Advent meditates on peace. This sets me to thinking of all the ways the idea of peace has been given to me through music and literature throughout my life.  When I was a child, few songs at church moved me more than “There Will be Peace in the Valley”.  The image of being in the valley suggests being between high ridges, a familiar setting for me, so I always assumed the song had been written especially for my place and my people.  The moving song that has been recorded by everyone from Mahalia Jackson to Elvis to Loretta Lynn was written by a Black Appalachian evangelist and composer from North Georgia, , who wrote over 3,000 songs including another masterpiece, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”. “Peace in the Valley” spoke perfectly to the working class people of my church who were often fighting their way out of poverty with its opening, fatalistic lines: 

Well, I’m tired and so weary

but I must go along

till the Lord comes and calls me away (oh).

Where the morning so bright

and the lamb is the light

and the night, night is black as the sea (oh).

But it was the promising chorus that roused the whole congregation to stand up and raise their arms in praise: “There will be peace, peace in the valley, someday.”  In this promised valley there would be no sorrow, no troubles.  At some point as a child I realized that the valley in question was not the Cumberland Valley, where I lived, but Heaven itself, and this image—wide pastures, high ridges, tens of thousands of trees, a meandering creek—was a Heaven I could relate to much more than the one the pastor preached about, since his was always a jasper-walled city paved with streets of gold.   

2. The Least Sound

I was in high school when I first read “” by Wendell Berry, and I was overcome by it.  The poem had a physical effect on me; I felt it from the top of my head, to my stomach, to the bottoms of my feet. I bet I have read it a hundred times by now, but every time I do it makes me want to sit down if I am standing or stand if I am sitting.  First of all, there is that beautiful admission of depression in the opening: “When despair for the world grows in me/and I wake in the night at the least sound”.  Then, amazingly, the speaker crawls out of bed and goes out into the night, finds a body of water, and lies down.  There he is comforted by the wild things, by the heron, the wood-drake, the stars. I thought I was the only one who did such things. To know that there was someone else out there who felt the natural world so deeply and someone who also felt the need to put it into words, to set it down on paper.  To know someone else felt drawn to water in this same way, for comfort. To know this was life-changing for me. 

I’ve come to find this same kind of resonance again and again in music and poetry.  When I want to study on the peace of wildness I often turn to Berry or Mary Oliver. Oliver’s poems “” (my favorite poem, ever) and “” are touchstones for me when I am longing for peace. “Wild Geese” is the more complex of the two and is a call for a ceasefire on the judgment so rampant in the world: “You do not have to be good,” the poem begins.  “Wild Geese” is about the peace that can come to someone when they accept themselves, but it is also about the peace that can descend upon the judges when they decide to just let people be.  

3. You Do Not Have to Walk On Your Knees, Repenting

This is something that has been on my mind very much over the past few years.  In this time I have witnessed a great change come over many people I know and love.  I’ve seen too many give themselves over to the mean and growing rhetoric of anti-immigration, blatant racism, a celebration of discrimination against LGBTQ people, and the glorifying of misogyny, fueled by those at the height of power.  I’ve seen folks I used to respect become people who say they are being victimized because they’re being asked to be silent and listen to people who are experiencing injustice or who cry about their freedom being under attack because they’ve been asked to protect others by practicing social distancing and wearing masks. Time and again I’ve had to turn back to those bodies of water, to the peace of wild things, to the balm of poetry and books to keep from losing my mind due to the lack of logic and compassion on display.  Over and over I’ve had to find peace by not being around the people who exhibit this behavior. 

I’ve found that I cannot possess peace in the presence of people who see me as their enemy because I believe that I should leave the judgment to God, because I am aligned with a belief system that chooses community protection over individual comfort.  We can’t always offer blatant grace to those who are dangerous and damaging to us, nor should we. I enable their behavior by sitting by silently when they are doing harm to my children by way of their rhetoric yet to always be the one who points out their meanness makes me the one who is disturbing the peace.  Sometimes we have to live apart from those we love to keep that love alive.  

4. Quiet Love

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.  My reaction to it all has become a concept I call quiet love. These people accept me so long as I am quiet about being a gay man, accept people of color so long as they are not expecting justice or equity, accept trans people so long as they don’t have to acknowledge their true pronouns or true selves.  So my love will be quiet for them, too.  A small, silent flame, but still lit.  The important thing is that hatred not beget hatred.  I wrote about this at length for the Southern Foodways Alliance in my speech and essay , in which I sum it up this way: “I believe in forgiveness and offering grace.  I do not believe in offering myself up for a beating, neither physical nor spiritual.”

In troubled and divided times like these I do not want to make divides wider.  But I do want to have some peace.  It reminds me of the song “Let There Be Peace on Earth”, a prayer for patience and humility that suggests that the peace should always begin with each of us.  It’s a wonderful concept and one I try to live by, but occasionally you have to either stand up for yourself or walk away.  “Let us walk with each other in perfect harmony,” the song goes, and I believe in that, completely.  But the other person has to be willing to walk the walk, too.  

Sometimes you must step away from the battleground to find the quiet. Sometimes you have to just go to music and poetry and books, to the wild places.  And sometimes you have to fight back to get your peace.  We can’t just shut down and take it when injustice and judgement come our way, but we also don’t always have to be on the front lines.  It’s alright to find the riverbank and just sit down for awhile. Get rejuvenated and then rise up singing.

Another favorite hymn of mine is “Peace, Like A River”, sometimes known as “It Is Well”, which teaches me that sometimes I just have to talk to myself and say “It is well, it is well with my soul.”  That song reminds me of My Morning Jacket’s “Like a River”, a prayer and a meditation that is basically calling us back to Berry’s idea that to go to the water, to go to the wild is the way to peace.  It also reminds me of “All Will Be Well” by The Gabe Dixon Band, which tells us that the way to peace is to not be so hard on ourselves: 

 

All will be well,
Even after all the promises
You've broken to yourself.

This Christmas, this new year, I’m wishing for more peace for all of us, however we can find it. My hope is that each of you reading this can sing the African spiritual "I've Got Peace Like a River" throughout the new year:

I've got peace like a river in my soul.

I've got love like an ocean in my soul.

I’ve got joy like a fountain in my soul.

I've got peace and I wish it for you.

---
"" by Silas House by Gerard Manley Hopkins (another favorite poem on the wild)

 Note:  I'll be sharing some thoughts every Sunday through Advent to help myself plow through this time of stillness when I so often love to go to church for the ceremony surrounding the waiting time. 

 
One of my prized possessions is a 45 single of "Please Come Home For Christmas" by The Eagles.  I like The Eagles a lot but I would never call myself a super-fan.  But this particular record belonged to my aunt, Sis, and she loved them.  In particular she loved "Please Come Home for Christmas". 
In the gloomy evenings after Thanksgiving she and I would decorate her tree and pull out her Christmas music, which was a vast treasure.  We worked for hours on her artificial tree, which had to be perfect.  First it had to be shaped, then laden with thousands of lights and a hundred ornaments.  My favorite part was the finishing touch:  adding , which were some kind of shiny, silver, synthetic strands that you hung all over the tree to increase the amount of light via reflection.  They're a thing of the past now, but in the early 1980s lots of people used them. We got ours at stores like TG&Y or Rose's. 
We played albums like Elvis's Christmas Album, A Very Special Christmas, or Christmastime With The Judds.   I would also put on a whole stack of 45s. The record player knew how to make one play, then another drop and play, and repeat this until the stack was spent.  At some point in the evening the single of "Please Come Home for Christmas" would drop beneath the needle and a lone piano would play four inimitable notes and then Don Henley's rich tenor: "Bells will be ringing/the sad, sad news." Then, a meditation on missing those you love at Christmas.  Without fail I would find Sis had set down on the naugahyde couch with tears running down her face, a Winston Light in one hand and a pink Kleenex in the other.  I didn't have to ask why she was crying.  We all knew why Sis sometimes collapsed in weeping like this, especially at Christmastime.  This song in particular set her off. 
My uncle Jack was murdered during a card game when I was eleven years old and his death was a shadow over my childhood, shaping everything from how the family told stories to how we celebrated holidays. He was the brother of Aunt Sis and my mother.  It's one thing for someone in your family to die; it's quite another for them to be murdered.  In that case the grief is combined with an overwhelming sense of injustice and a heightened anger that sizzles out across years or decades.  No one in our family expressed that sadness or anger more openly than Sis.  In fact, she was the only person in our family who also readily admitted to having "the blues".  She sometimes cried openly, no matter where she was, despite having a steely demeanor that was not easily fazed.  She was no fainting daisy by any means and even in her crying there was always a defiance and strength present.  Sis was not only someone prone to depression, she also was easily moved, especially by music.  This was in a time when talking about one's sadness was not nearly as common, especially in the rural South where I grew up.  That was meant to be done quietly and privately.  
While we all know many people are hurting especially at Christmas, we still have the attitude that it must be the happiest time of year.  The third Sunday of Advent usually focuses on joy.  Some churches call this day Gaudete Sunday since gaudete is Latin for "rejoice" as we home in on the day that observes the birth of Christ.  
Unlike Sis, I have never been one to talk very openly about my own stints with the blues.  For a lot of people, talking about it helps a lot, but for me the opposite is true.  My blues cure has always been writing. Writing is my therapy and my prayer.  I've also been lucky because I have not been a person who has struggled tremendously with depression, more an occasional stretch of melancholy that comes and goes like clockwork and has no real impetus.  But for the past five years I have been experiencing thick grief.   
We lost Sis in February of 2015 and I felt as if I had been gutted, a tremendous loss that I examined at length in my essay that was published a couple years ago.  One of the things that hurt me the most upon her passing was knowing how often she had been lonesome and sad.  Some amount of guilt is often part of grief and I still regret all the time that I could have spent with her and didn't.  We all have our regrets when someone passes, and this is the dull pain I carry with me. Only a month later we lost my beloved Uncle Sam, then my cherished Uncle Bobby. The more people I lose the more I study on how much I miss my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandmother, all three whom I lost when I was much younger and who would have been as disgusted by this last four years of presidential atrocity as I have been. It would have been wonderful to have their wisdom in examining some of that mess.  Not long after losing my aunt and uncles we lost our good old dog Rufus, who saved my life a few times over the years ( for Garden and Gun's "Good Dog" series), and the dog I had the longest in my life. I think about him every single day.  
Sis and her Christmas tree, December 2013
All of these deaths have changed me in ways I could have never expected.  Mostly they have made me more thankful for every minute I have with the people and animals I love.  So has the pandemic.  I hope this time of waiting, of being still, might lead to a paradigm shift for us.  I don't believe that it will culturally, but it can individually.  I believe that as much as the loss of community has saddened me (which I wrote about ), the more I have found joy in the ordinary.  Likewise, I've experienced the kind of melancholia and grief that have heightened my sense of awareness, allowing me to see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the way an animal does.  When you do that, your joy is increased all the time.  
It's a beautiful third Sunday of Advent here where I am in Kentucky.  The sky is low and gray, but the sun is shining through like a bright yet smudged silver coin.  We recently bought a piece of property that possesses good old trees and a little creek with rocks that are covered in a moss that is greener than green. There is always the music of falling water there.  I'm going to go down there right now and study on how this Sunday of Advent is meant to focus on the joy.  Over the years the best thing I've learned about the sadness I carry with me all the time now is that grief can live alongside joy.  They do not have to be completely separate.  Sometimes when I look back on all the good memories the joy and the grief are so tangled together I could never pick them apart.  That's the stuff of living.  

---

*of some of my favorite sad Christmas songs, some that Sis and I used to listen to together, and some about joy.  

  

Note:  I'll be sharing some thoughts every Sunday through Advent to help myself plow through this time of stillness when I so often love to go to church for the ceremony surrounding the waiting time. 

On the Second Sunday of Advent it is traditional to light the second purple candle, which is a symbol of faith.  This makes me think about how so many people I know associate their belief with a building and struggle to keep their faith lit if they do not go to church every time the door is cracked.  During the pandemic I have certainly missed going to church but I have been thankful to be part of a congregation that values the health and safety of others more than its own desire to gather.  Too many churches throughout the country have exhibited a deep selfishness in refusing to close their doors, refusing to mask up, and refusing to social distance.  If any organized bodies should be setting themselves forth as an example, churches should, yet so many of them have not.  

Our church has mostly cancelled everything but online services, with very occasional gatherings of no more than ten people who are required to be masked and forbidden to get close to one another during shortened services.  Since March I have attended only two of these meetings, once as a liturgical reader.  Both times I was deeply moved to be part of the service again. I realized how much I had missed the way the morning light falls through the stained glass, the richness given to the human voice within the walls of our mostly stone church, the creak of the pews.  We were not allowed to sing or shake hands during the Passing of the Peace--only a distant wave to one another for that--and the Books of Common Prayer are not available in our seats anymore but we were still able to kneel, one of the acts of worship that most centers me. I relished the slight pain in my knees that always blooms after a few seconds despite the thin cushions on the kneelers.  

I'm reading a beautiful nonfiction book right now called .  The author, Christopher Nicholson, is obsessed with large patches of snow that never melt in the mountains of Scotland and he goes there to study them throughout the summer months.  There is not much to do other than look at them so he spends most of his time meditating on the way they make him feel, what they remind him of, why their existence matters to him.  I love this passage in the book, when he's talking about viewing one of these large patches of snow in the Scottish Highlands:

"It is their sheer presence that suggests life. This is something I occasionally feel in medieval churches.  Especially when the churches are small and quiet, when there's no one else around, the air seems full of a knowledge that runs back for centuries.  The stone walls, the dark pews, the altar, are waiting and listening.  There is that powerful feeling that if I too were only to wait and listen, if I were only to wait long enough and listen hard enough, then something of significance might happen, although it is difficult to put a finger on what that something might be." 

That significance, to me, is belief in the Great Mystery that I discussed in . Anytime I travel, I seek out churches.  I love to visit them for their histories and for the very feeling that Nicholson describes. I've felt that way many times at my own church, which is by no means medieval.  Although the origins of the in Lexington, Kentucky date back to the 1800s the cornerstone for the building itself was not laid until 1925.  But still, there is something about a space where people have been praying for so long.  I always feel this sensation in particular when I visit the (most famous for being the home of Thomas Merton for many years), where monks have been studying and praying without ceasing since the 1840s not only in the buildings there but also in its woods, pastures, and ponds.  

Being at those two strict services in the past nine months reminded me most of all of how much I love a congregation, mostly because I love the act of many people praying together and singing together.  One part of this, for me, is that for so long--from the time I was a teenager until I was in my early thirties--I could not find a church that accepted me for who I am.  Occasionally I would try a new church that I had heard was progressive only to go a few times and eventually hear the dreaded sermon wherein the pastor was condemning gay people as "abominations", at which point I immediately stood up and walked out.  To finally find a church that took me as I am was one of the most profound moments of my life.

But here's the thing:  as much as I needed a congregation, my faith did not become dimmer for not having one.  In that nearly twenty years of wandering in the wilderness, my faith was just as strong as it had been when I was a child going to Holiness services three or four times a week or as a grown man who had found a home for myself in the Anglican tradition.  To tell you the truth, in some ways it might have been even stronger because I was always studying on it, striving for ways to find the Divine in the everyday world.  For years and years my church was trees, the woods, the lake, the river, creeks, swimming, the porch, the Tom Petty concert, a Patty Griffin album, dogs, playing with my children, car singalongs, the smell of rosemary, the painting "Wandering Shadows" by Peter Graham, the music of "The Lark Ascending" and a thousand other songs, a tulip poplar flower, parties with friends, films and photographs and poems, books,  yes, sometimes even a bar where there were people who loved one another, where there was laughter (surely God lives in that).  My church was the wide world where I managed to find the God of My Understanding always shimmering nearby. But I think that during this time my faith was also buoyed by my doubt.  My questioning always led me back to my belief.  In his long poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes "There lives more faith in honest doubt,/believe me, than in half the creeds."  

I know this much is true:  God does not live in a church any more or less than anywhere else. I would hate to be the kind of believer who needs a building to keep my faith afloat.  And I am grateful to be part of a congregation that is willing, even eager, to sacrifice its community for a while in the interest of saving lives and helping to end this pandemic sooner.  My goal here is not to shame those churches that continue to endanger others by meeting the way they always have, but I cringe every time I hear one of those congregants talking on the news or Facebook about how their services shouldn't be cancelled because they believe their faith will protect them from the danger of the virus.  I don't see them applying the same logic to stepping off a cliff or walking out into oncoming traffic, strangely enough.  That arrogance and self-centeredness is the opposite of the kind of believer I think any major religion teaches us to be.  

I miss the Eucharist.  I miss the solemn service.  I miss that particular sound of two hundred people kneeling or rising or singing in unison.  But in missing these moments of beauty my faith is restored, time and again.  

--* for this week's Advent entry*Painting:  Wandering Shadows by Peter Graham, The Scottish Galleries

The Great Mystery-First Sunday of Advent.  

During this pandemic time when so many of us are unable to attend church because we want to protect others, Advent is more important than ever.  I'll be sharing some thoughts every Sunday through Advent to help myself plow through this time of stillness when I so often love to go to church for the ceremony surrounding the waiting time. 

The word Advent comes from the Latin word adventus and means  "coming".  Since the 4th Century Advent has been a season of preparation in various ways although the most widely held is the build-up to the celebration of the birth of Christ. Advent wasn't explicitly tied to Christmas until the Middle Ages. Today, Advent lasts for four Sundays leading up to Christmas.  Then there is the twelve day celebration of Christmastide that ends with the Day of Epiphany on January 6.  

I am one of the few writers in contemporary literary fiction who write and talk about people of faith as major subject matter in my work.  My favorite living writers who do this include Marilynne Robinson, Maurice Manning, Sonja Livingston, and Elizabeth Strout (I'm not comparing my writing to them--just some of our subject matter). Faith is not something that is often considered to be of polite conversation in the literary world and a few times people have told me that celebrating Christianity is celebrating the damage that so many churches have done to many people, especially in the LGBTQ community.  I know that damage has happened because I have been subjected to it by the evangelical church all of my life; not only when I was a child and teenager growing up in the church, but even today, when I face almost daily discrimination in one way or another that is fueled by the rhetoric being spewed at those churches.  

However, I know that many churches have done much good work, too.  We can't negate them because of those that do damage.  I also think it is a dangerous thing to equate churches with faith.  One does not depend on the other at all. Many people I know who go to church everytime the door is cracked are the same people who do the least for others or strive the least to follow the true teachings of Christ. For more than twenty years I wandered in the wilderness without a church that accepted me for who I was before I finally found a congregation first in the United Church of Christ at Union Church in Berea, Kentucky.  There everyone was welcome, no questions, no judgment.  As I did more theological study I found that the church that worked best for me was the Episcopal Church and several years ago I became confirmed as an Episcopalian, a denomination that does a beautiful celebration of Advent.  I will miss seeing this solemn ceremony this year as we are locked down, waiting out the pandemic.  

But to those who question how I am can comfortably talk about my own faith and those who go a step further and tell me how they think believing in any kind of higher power is foolish, I always tell them that the best thing about it all, to me, is the mystery.  I often think of God that way:  The Great Mystery.  I know one thing for sure:  the mind of God is bigger than any of us can comprehend, which is why I so often look at the judgements people make backed by Scripture and shake my head.  If anything is blasphemous, surely it's to assume we can know the mind of God or fully understand The Great Mystery.

All of this to say that Advent is a time of stillness, quiet, and meditation for me. A time of questioning. It's a time for me to ponder on the Great Mystery. Yes, I know that Christ was not certainly born on December 25.  Yes, I think on questions of divinity and miracles.  But it's the mystery that I love the most.  Ever since I was a child I have felt a little fire burning at the center of my chest. Most times it felt like a flame made simultaneously of belief and doubt.  Always it felt like a mystery. 

Because music always helps, in any situation, here's a I've made for the First Sunday of Advent.  

To close, this from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian who was hanged in April 1945 for his efforts to stop Hitler and Nazism.  His idea of mystery sounds a lot like empathy to me, and that makes good sense. 

“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.” 

*Photo by Silas House at Hindman Settlement School