back (and forth)
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright told how a lecture he received at the age of nine helped set his philosophy of life. An uncle, a stolid no-nonsense type, had taken him for a long walk across a snow-covered field. At the far side, his uncle told him to look back at their two sets of tracks.
'See, my boy,' he said, 'how your foot prints go aimlessly back and forth from those trees, to the cattle, back to the fence, and then over there where you were throwing sticks? But notice how my path comes straight across, directly to my goal. You should never forget this lesson!'
'And I never did,' Wright said, grinning. 'I determined right then not to miss most things in life, as my uncle had.'
I keep coming back to Frank Lloyd Wright's little story. Brother Mark used it one morning as a reading for Terce while I was at the abbey, and it's stuck. As I've tried to decide whether to stay or to go, the image of the anxious, intent, sense-absorbed nine-year year old cutting tracks all across a snow field has grown more and more resonant. Maybe discernment means finding direction from life in its fullness.
I've broken loose from the monastery, walked with her in the woods, along the beach, and across the parking lot of a suburban Los Angeles parish parking lot. I've carried migrant worker children on my back through a sandy and glass-strewn playground in Baja California, talked about health care, asshole bosses and women with employees in a Mexican packing plant where Walmart gets their vegetables. I'm reading Graham Greene novels and my most legitimate job title lately has been professional boyfriend.
She's smart, she's beautiful, and in some strange way being with her these past three months has given me a more articulate reason to leave. As I've been running across the field, so to speak, trying not to miss one damn thing, I've found a reason to do JVC, one better and beyond just meeting single Catholic girls and avoiding the complications of paid employment. If I want a future with her, I have to make something of myself.
I wrote the Jesuit Volunteer Corps South about a month ago and asked for a single placement. I wanted to work with the Lousiana Capital Assistance Center, on death penalty cases and with death penalty defendants, or not do the Jesuit Volunteers at all. If I didn't get it, or if there were complications, I'd stay in Portland and fight the good fight before applying to graduate schools.
I was offered the job, and after plenty of zig-zags, I've accepted it. She's as good as it gets, and maybe I need this challenge not just to fight unjust state killing, but to follow that will which seems to have led me to her. If a man is to know the road he treads on, he must walk it in the dark. I pray I'm abandoning myself to that darkness, and to that will.
Νew Orleans, here I come.
'See, my boy,' he said, 'how your foot prints go aimlessly back and forth from those trees, to the cattle, back to the fence, and then over there where you were throwing sticks? But notice how my path comes straight across, directly to my goal. You should never forget this lesson!'
'And I never did,' Wright said, grinning. 'I determined right then not to miss most things in life, as my uncle had.'
I keep coming back to Frank Lloyd Wright's little story. Brother Mark used it one morning as a reading for Terce while I was at the abbey, and it's stuck. As I've tried to decide whether to stay or to go, the image of the anxious, intent, sense-absorbed nine-year year old cutting tracks all across a snow field has grown more and more resonant. Maybe discernment means finding direction from life in its fullness.
I've broken loose from the monastery, walked with her in the woods, along the beach, and across the parking lot of a suburban Los Angeles parish parking lot. I've carried migrant worker children on my back through a sandy and glass-strewn playground in Baja California, talked about health care, asshole bosses and women with employees in a Mexican packing plant where Walmart gets their vegetables. I'm reading Graham Greene novels and my most legitimate job title lately has been professional boyfriend.
She's smart, she's beautiful, and in some strange way being with her these past three months has given me a more articulate reason to leave. As I've been running across the field, so to speak, trying not to miss one damn thing, I've found a reason to do JVC, one better and beyond just meeting single Catholic girls and avoiding the complications of paid employment. If I want a future with her, I have to make something of myself.
I wrote the Jesuit Volunteer Corps South about a month ago and asked for a single placement. I wanted to work with the Lousiana Capital Assistance Center, on death penalty cases and with death penalty defendants, or not do the Jesuit Volunteers at all. If I didn't get it, or if there were complications, I'd stay in Portland and fight the good fight before applying to graduate schools.
I was offered the job, and after plenty of zig-zags, I've accepted it. She's as good as it gets, and maybe I need this challenge not just to fight unjust state killing, but to follow that will which seems to have led me to her. If a man is to know the road he treads on, he must walk it in the dark. I pray I'm abandoning myself to that darkness, and to that will.
Νew Orleans, here I come.