“Might the authority of those who suffer bring the diverse cultural and social worlds together?” –Johann Baptist Metz
The Life Line
Sometimes God shows us things months—even years—before they have meaning to us. It is only in retrospect that we begin to say “oh.” A few years back I began seeing this scene in my Spirit. Only I was the woman in the picture, and the metal was not part of a boat rigging but rather an actual hook, large and sturdy and deeply imbedded in my chest as it lifted me up and out. I did not resist, but rather hung limp, yielding, trusting, not unlike the woman in this picture. The scene travelled across my psyche, my soul, from time to time over the past few years, a season that has been marked with tumult and blessing. The painting was not unfamiliar to me. I had used it once in The Renaissance Service. When the visions started coming I tried to track it down, but could not remember the name or the artist—the slide was, curiously, missing from my collection. This morning I woke up and saw it all. The hook was gone. I had been delivered to the new shore. And the name of the artist and the painting was in my mind clear as day: The Life Line.
This very day God is speaking to us all, maybe in words, maybe in pictures, maybe in some faint dawning we must choose whether to lean into—or continue hiding from. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” (Hebrews 3:15)
God has a plan. May we learn to be like putty in his hands that he may rescue and deliver us our whole life long— and into the next.
by Winslow Homer
Growing Strong
“We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
Kathy, I’m Lost
The year was 1972. I was living in a house on top of a hill in Mandeville Canyon, L.A., playing the albums of my coming of age in a perpetual loop. There were other people who lived in the house but my memories are of being alone a lot while my mom was out on dates and my brother was holed up with his bong and my sister was too young to be in my field of vision. My dad hadn’t lived with us since I was seven, a heartbreak I never quite recovered from. Kate Campbell was born the same year as me—1961— and lived in a cheery home in Nashville, Tennessee, a Baptist preacher’s kid raised in the thick of the civil rights movement, surrounded by people— friends, family, admirers of her father. We each remember hearing the song, the foreshadowing hum, the line that launched the timeless seeker’s tale… “Let us be lovers we’ll marry our fortunes together.”
So begins the Simon & Garfunkel tune that was forever seared on our eleven-year old psyches; one line, we recount now, perhaps above all the rest. “Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said “though I knew she was sleeping.” In an instant we knew the power of art, and the stuff of truth: in the human condition we will forever struggle with being known, understood, heard, even by the people who know us best. We can never quite form the words. Not in time. Not before the moment passes. “Kathy, I’m lost,” the song which is called America says, an anthem to pining and searching and the ineffable ache of longing that is, perhaps, felt most keenly in this country where we fell in love with the idea that we could have/be/do anything we wanted, a freedom which has proven to be a greater burden than anyone imagined. Perhaps this generation, with their gnawing fear of missing out, will spark to these lyrics anew.
Kate and I have helped each other carry the load of the artist’s burden of uncertainty for 15 years now. Shared stories of lifetimes spent pouring out the gifts we each knew we had at eleven, at nine. I started reading at three. Kate begin singing in church at seven. “Out of the heart will flow rivers of living water.” Kate would have known that this was from Scripture decades before me; still, she was no clearer than I where the outpouring was leading, how it was all meant to add up. “What am I doing here?” How many times had we found ourselves saying this over the years, and then, by some primal mix of self-knowledge and faith, we kept going, certain in the way that our “friend” Thomas Merton captured so beautifully in this prayer:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
Kate pulled into my driveway in L.A. yesterday, making a loop to see me as she finished several tour stops in CA. The tracks for the new album are almost done. She recorded a lot of the songs on her iphone accompanying herself on an old Wurlitzer, or her guitar. Although 99% of her work is her own magnificent writing, she has covered three tunes in this one. The K.O.A. Tapes the album will be called when it’s released this summer. It is the soundtrack of her life on the road. A life of asking, “what am I doing here?” and continuing to show up anyway. And now, after 20 years, those answers are becoming clearer in a way that brings peace. It is this peace, this deep sense of being in our “right house” that we all seek. The peace that D. H. Lawrence describes as “sleeping on the hearth of the living world, yawning at home before the fire of life, feeling the presence of the living God like a great reassurance, a deep calm in the heart.”
When we struggle to find it, may songs like this let us know that we are not alone.
(America, sung by Kate Campbell, lyrics by Paul Simon)
The Director of Monsters, Inc. & Up on Faith
“If I start on a film and right away know the structure—where it’s going, the plot—I don’t trust it. I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. This could just be my Lutheran, Scandinavian upbringing, but I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things—which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable. Living through a few big catastrophes helps. After people survived A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2 (both of which were near disasters, until they weren’t), they realized the pressure led to some pretty cool ideas.”
Peter “Pete” Docter, Director, Animator, Screenwriter, Producer, Voice Over and Minnesotan
Heather Choate Davis 