Issue 02: Humor’s Grace

Editor’s Note : Humor’s Grace

Our readers’ support of Ruminate’s first issue had been the bread that kept us going, which proved essential because this second issue, Humor’s Grace, was a great test of endurance (mostly because the initial endorphins wore off and the sleepless nights took their toll). And yet we found laughter and your letters coming alongside our prayers for wisdom and strength, encouraging us through the muddle. Thank you. And again, I am proud to admit that, despite our muddle, Ruminate’s artists have emerged—their grace has spoken.

One of our contributors, Yahia Lababidi, wrote: “Our Metaphysical eyes are experts at collapsing distances, seeing through the apparent to the infinite.” So too does humor collapse distances and see through to the infinite. Billy Collins said that humor is a door to the serious; it seems that humor is also a door to grace. We discovered this door opening unto comics and being short enough to miss the bullet, holy chickens, and ordinary objects (flamingos and origami to name a few), the possibilities of runaway truck ramps, dreams about Noah, letters to E.B. White, the alphabet, and God’s multitudes.

Appropriately enough, in case I wasn’t getting it, in the past few months my ten-month-old son has truly learned to laugh. He laughs at paper bags, wind chimes, and our black lab Samson, collapsing all my definitions of mundane, just as each of our contributors have collapsed, retrieved and then given great liberties to our definition of humor. We have discovered that humor is intuitional; it is wit and irony and sarcasm, mood altering, whimsical and full of delight. And when it is really good, it is grace. We hope this is evident for you and that you are able to move through the door and into the gift.

Many blessings,

Brianna Van Dyke

*This issue is for all our laughmakers.

The Tenure Rabbit

Just last week, I turned in my dossier to apply for tenure and promotion at the university where I teach. The process marks yet another juncture in academic sanctioning,  preceded by trials including doctoral exams, a dissertation, a grueling job hunt, and the publication of a book. This final step, tenure, is the ultimate hazing; if successful, I am awarded a permanent spot (save for unforeseen budget crises) in the guild; if not, I’m fired. That is to say, if I receive tenure, I am allowed to stay exactly where I am.

It’s no wonder that I know several academics who, once granted tenure, experienced both exhaustion and depression. The symptoms stemmed not so much from the marathon toward it, but from the false promises of the finish line. These colleagues realized they had been motivated by the illusion of a professional nirvana, a blissful state of enoughness, where one can bask in her achievements, while experiencing relief from the pressure to achieve more. What came instead was a version of postpartum let-down. This is it?  There were still classes to teach, grade appeals to answer, committee meetings to attend, and departmental battles to surmount. And worse, there was no longer a rabbit to chase.

I began the road to tenure with much fervor. I’m a first-born, high-achiever type, and I like to succeed.  For me, success is satisfying largely because it indicates I haven’t failed—yet. Success is also a way to stave off the anxiety that walks at my heels. It provides momentary relief, like a cigarette or a bag of Peanut M&Ms.

If you met my family, you’d know I come by my anxiety honestly. My mom feeds on a steady stream of CNN and Fox News, which sustains her appetite for catastrophe. 24-hour broadcasts provide her ample stores from which to draw when she wants to offer her adult children examples of why we must be more careful, more guarded, more paranoid. After the young woman was kidnapped in Aruba: “You never let my granddaughters out of your sight, do you?” Always, subtly indicted.

My dad too has honed his worrying over the years, and this activity is typically in service of one primary dream: that his three kids will be “settled”: gainfully employed and financially secure. But his children keep getting in the way of his plans for them.

With the exception of choosing a career as a professor instead of a pharmacist, my dad’s preference (high-paying job guaranteed, right of school), I’ve been the child who most easily bends to his wishes. Pleasing other people is a way to slow the spin-cycle of my thoughts, to loosen the constrictive knot in my throat.  Eventually, though, the remedy loses its effectiveness, or worse, the cure makes me sicker, because this particular game can never be won. No pleasing is enough pleasing. No external reward ultimately quenches my thirst.

Anne Lamott, whose writing is one of my healthier cures for anxiety, uses the metaphor of the mechanical rabbit to describe her own deflated response to finally “making it” as a writer. “I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she’d been chasing for so long—discovering it was merely metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn’t alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn’t feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, your own and the universal spirit.”

It took me approximately one semester as a professor (one semester and a lifetime) to begin to detect something fishy in my approach to happiness. I had what I’d long wanted: a job as a professor of English at a school I admired. The process of attaining the job had been sufficiently torturous, requiring the usual giving over of my power: “Does this person/committee/institution approve of me? Am I adequately shaping myself into their desired candidate?”  Perhaps it’s my Lutheran Midwestern upbringing, but somewhere along the line, I learned that all achievements were only truly earned if accompanied by enough pain.  So, check.

I spent my first semester in a mild state of panic. While some refer to the first year of the job as the “honeymoon” stage, mine felt more like the week of sorority rush I attended in college. If you want to get “in,” you follow the rules. Drink your ice water with lemon and make polite small-talk. For God’s sake, don’t mention the three B’s: boys, booze and bars. The girls will take notes on your performance and make a decision by the end of the week. I couldn’t stand the idea that these girls, who trotted like trained ponies to the manicured lawn of their sorority house to chant, “We’re Alpha Phi (fee) not Alpha Phi (fy), ‘cause Alpha Phi says E, not I,” would decide my fate about anything. I dropped out of rush.

But I regarded tenured faculty members with much more respect than the sorority sisters. This was a house in which I wanted membership, my own office with a nameplate. My university offered its version of rush, in the form of 7 a.m. “new faculty breakfasts” where we sat bleary-eyed and eager, nibbling starchy bagels and absorbing information about “faculty life,” including, of course, the process of and requirements for tenure. These gatherings, the administrators explained, were designed to promote community among new faculty and to offer information that would at once decrease our anxiety and encourage us to begin working for tenure now. That message was reinforced by informal conversations with colleagues, who repeatedly shared the cautionary tale of the English professor who spent too much time on service and not enough on publishing. Everyone liked him and he was an inspiring teacher, but he was denied tenure because he didn’t research and write enough.  The moral of the story: you may have gotten the job, but you’re going to have to stay on your toes to keep it.

I soaked in these stories like an A-student sponge; by December of that year, I had insomnia, worrying about my student evaluations (and what they would mean for tenure), fretting about getting my book published (and what not doing so would mean for tenure), and desperately missing the feedback loop of being a student, where praise and approval were a regular part of my diet.

Those of us who have issued a restraining order on our anxiety are taught to manage it by asking, “If the worst-case scenario happened, would I survive?” Would I survive if I lost my job? I wasn’t so sure.

But if this anxiety that jarred me from sleep was destructive, it also had a more positive side: my unhappiness led to my hunger for, and thus my openness to, something else.  The upside, I’ve found, to times of intense turmoil is that I become a seeker. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel: “Rushing through the ecstasies of ambition, we only awake when plunged into dread or grief. In darkness, then, we grope for solace, for meaning, for prayer.” The groping is the gift of the shadow if we welcome the darkness, if we trust that light can, will, emerge.

I spotted a glimmer on a crisp fall day, that same year, when my husband and I traveled to Des Moines for our goddaughter’s baptism.  It marked the first time I’d been to church in years. While the theme of the sermon now escapes me, this moment remains vivid: the minister asked us to consider how much time, energy and commitment we dedicate to our jobs, to institutions, in this culture that cares so much about work. The answer: plenty.

“But the truth is,” he said, leaning into the pulpit, “institutions don’t love us back.” Institutions don’t love us back. When I would later learn that our university president froze our (meager) salaries due to budget constraints, I felt betrayed. Here I had given this institution not only most of my time, but the greater part of my psychic energy. I let it lure me away from a lazy Christmas day with my family, upstairs to my childhood room, where I feverishly typed my annual report, rewarding its merciless petitions for attention with my worries, enticed by its seductive need for me. If I didn’t answer its calls, catastrophe would ensue.  It was the holder of my worth, the determiner of my merit.

Institutions don’t love us back.

A second glimmer. That December, I dragged myself to a gathering at the home of a new friend, Amy. I’m an introvert and when socializing will require small talk with strangers, I have to fight the urge to recoil under a blanket. But I made myself go and enjoyed my time there.  Just as I put on my coat to leave, Amy’s kids and their babysitter bounded through the door. It was a lovely reunion after, at most, a few hours of separation; Abby and Gabe lapped up their mother like thirsty puppies. She chuckled, delightfully taken aback by the power of her children’s physical force and their hunger for her. Gabe’s mommy need met, he rubbed his eye and nestled into Amy’s chest. I busied myself with my coat and gloves, embarrassed to find tears in my eyes.

Years later, I would hear from the spiritual director at my church, “When tears emerge, God is near. Let them come.”

In an email to Amy, thanking her for the invitation, I confessed my teary moment. “You’re ready,” she predicted. “It’s time.” Time, she meant, to think about my own motherhood, my own children. And indeed, in two months’ time, my daughter would find her way into my womb. She would teach me about the kind of love I witnessed in that moment.

Shari Stenberg lives in Nebraska with her husband and two daughters. She teaches writing at Creighton University, where she is Associate Professor of English and director of composition. Her essays have appeared in College English, Composition Studies, and Symploke, and her book, Professing and Pedagogy: Learning the Teaching of English was published by NCTE in 2005. Though she is now tenured, she still considers Wednesday night choir rehearsals her real job.

On My Husband’s First Sinus Infection of Our Marriage

He does not suffer well. This is because
he is beautiful, astounding
as the eye of a peacock feather,
tinctured blue and green, feathers within feathers,
shivering, a beauty beyond what even he is aware,

cheekbones sheltering the glory
of his ductless spleen, the blood’s
able proteins, each cell’s flagellar
motor, yes, down to that detail, and yes, too,
with that in mind, every buckle of the spine chicaning

its Grecian looks up the neck to the brow,
the nose, lashes giraffe-long
over the open tide what could be
sea-gray or sea-green of his eyes
and what’s more is his own unknowing, though

in some yawning pocket of that striking sundown
body—perhaps his finger creases—
he must be aware of it, a magnificence most of us
can only fathom: umber,
buttery ribbon of firefly’s gut, weathervane’s

volte-face, the rent of verility over the orchard
from last year’s fire, now, his whole
head hot as paraffin wax, ears
red-tipped mangoes ripening
on the sill, lips a pallid clair de lune, he offers music,

he’s brimming with it: accordian lungs, carotid
viola, toms of phleghm like lungs
themselves, bless him, my stunning husband
prostrate beside me, tacit, grumpy
as peat bog, willing the bronchial tubes to muscilate,

or at least to sleep so hard the bonnyclabber
will not bother—this man whose even
bilious corners speak enzyme,
rhizome, intelligent design—
will wake tomorrow feeling not a lick better, will rasp

among the antibodies, silt my hand to his cheek
and say to my fingers
as if fiberoptic points of joy, Principessa,
have you any broth of bone for me? And when
I bring a tray, steaming with soup, a single

Cymbidium orchid tucked beneath his spoon,
he’ll sit up slowly,
gazing into the bowl
with a forlorn welcome for his own
face, and pray his prayers aloud.

Susanna Childress is a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at Florida State University and currently teaches at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her first volume of poetry, Jagged with Love, was selected by Billy Collins for the 2005 Brittingham Poetry Prize with publication by the University of Wisconsin Press. Susanna has recently published poetry or short fiction in The Missouri Review, Image, The Notre Dame Review, Third Coast, Gargoyle, and Runes.

Multitudes

Any Truth holds a multitude’s attention.
Take the Sermon on the Mount,
the first fast food
with fewer than a billion served.
As each hand reaches for fish and loaf
the line gets shorter
and since there’s nothing else on the menu
the line moves steadily:
two fish, one loaf,
one fish, three loaves,
two loaves, hold the fish.
It’s a miracle,
people swallowing what’s available
then coming back for more.
And they say, Jesus wept.
I can sympathize.
The Truth looks too much like a fish
when people are hungry
but fill their bellies and off they go,
down the hill, heading home.
The taste they’ll remember
one or even two days later
but since a multitude always moves on
the faithful pick up crumbs
long after the hill has emptied,
filling their baskets
with what has been wasted,
as if to prove there’s room
for a billion more.

David Feela is a poet, freelance writer, writing instructor, book collector, and thrift store pirate. His work has appeared in regional and national publications, including High Country News’ “Writers on the Range,”Mountain Gazette, and in the newspaper as a “Colorado Voice” for the Denver Post. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for The Four Corners Free Press. His poetry chapbook,Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series.

Present Yourself

If you give yourself
to Yahweh like a newborn
at sundown,

he will say
you didn’t need to go
to all the trouble,

but secretly
like your father
he loves presents.

So present yourself–
unwrapped,
open-handed,

spent  from the exertion
of stripping away
to skin and bones,

nothing
to say for yourself
except a wail of tears–

a living,
breathing mystic sacrifice
in your birthday suit.

Give him what he
only wished for,
a child.

Give him nothing
more, just the way
you were born.

Margaret D. Smith is a writer, artist and musician who has published two books of nonfiction and four books of poems, including A Holy Struggle: Unspoken Thoughts of Hopkins (Shaw, 1992), with photographs by Luci Shaw and foreword by Walter Wangerin, and Barn Swallow (Brass Weight Press, 2006). Her poems have been published in more than 50 publications, including Paris Review, Christianity and Literature, The Handmaidenand The Christian Century. Margaret’s latest venture is creating one prose poem (or is it a short-short-short story?) per day for a year. Lately, God has been telling her one thing over and over: “Time is short; tell the truth.” No place seems better to carry out that kind of truth-telling than in a poem.

Heart’s Delight

like Turkish delight dipped in Belgian
chocolate, the prophet Jeremiah ate
God’s words, his heart’s delight

because we do not live on bread alone,
we need words like honeycomb
after winter’s sojourn in the desert

an apt word is like an apple of gold,
precious, admired, desired even,
but not always easily digestible

true words are stones that can be laid
down across the bog, a sturdy path
for others to walk amidst the lilies

words are seeds sowed in a farmer’s field
where wheat and weeds grow side by side,
different texts for interpretation

like a lamp that cleaves darkness, words
are sun and moon and constellations
of stars beyond the counting

to ignore thoughtful words is like peering
in a mirror, seeing our faces, only
to turn and forget what we look like

because too many words can be like
tramping on an anthill, wisdom is learning
to hold the tongue, to speak silence

for our heart’s delight, the word dwells
among us, full of light and life and truth

Carl Leggo is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia where he teaches courses in writing and narrative inquiry. He has published three books of poems:Growing Up Perpendicular on the Side of a Hill, View from My Mother’s House, and Come-By-Chance.  Much of his poetry is autobiographical, and seeks to understand what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. Poetry is an important part of Carl’s ongoing effort to know God with intimate wisdom.

Line Drawing, Chair

Katie Hayden‘s work has appeared in Westmont College’s journal, The Phoenix (2001 and 2002) and Prescott Fine Arts Magazine (2000). But if one considers the pieces posted on refrigerators and bedroom walls as works of art, then she has been showcasing for twenty-five years (mostly in Arizona where she grew up and California where she currently lives).

Crazy

Mat Barton is most famous for his novels No Means Yes and its sequel…Lesson Learned. Believe it or not, Mat’s work has appeared in print before this publication; however, most of it was self-published and printed in such small quantities that only a few of his close friends have dust-covered copies tucked away in the back of their bookshelves. If you recently attended a college in California, you may have seen his prize-winning animations: Edmund and The Visitor and Portable Love. His comics have appeared in The Blackboard, The Daily Titan, Ride On and several seldom-visited websites.