Apertures, August edition. No. 10
Pressure machines; sobriety & perseverance; learning to be more "ish"; the boy who said, wow; finding grace in Norman Maclean's tragedies; + a playlist for overwhelm, and favorite moments
Welcome to Apertures. A monthly letter collecting themes of grace from short essays, poetry, music, movies and photographs. All pictures taken by me unless otherwise noted.
West Hills, by The Killers
“they got me for possession / enough to kill
the horses that run free / in the west hills”
Lets start with a smaller aperture, shall we? Less light is making it through, but lets see if we can find it.
I’m late to The Killers party. I didn’t grow up in the craze of their Hot Fuss album, and even Sam’s Town was lost on me. But their Day & Age album was the soundtrack to a couple of kids figuring out what’s it’s like to be married and move back to Portland. We rode our bikes or skated to our places of work. Things were close together back then; manageable, simple. Our little basement apartment off of Hawthorne, boasting of white concrete floors and a tiny stove, kept us content and we couldn’t help but get to know our neighbors dwelling above us.
But then Brandon Flowers wrote a concept album (my favorite kind). He wrote about growing up in his childhood home of Nephi, Utah. Released in 2021, Pressure Machine came in like a glass of cool water for my hot heart.
You see, in order to release the pressure, you’ve got to talk about it. And sometimes we need to belt it out at the top of our lungs while blazing down the freeway.
That old myth that us American’s carry, that this is God’s country, seeps into our bones and I’m afraid we’ll wrestle with it until death has released us of our birthright.
Cain and Jacob are still sitting around the campfire telling stories.
“I was born right here in Zion
God’s own son
His Holy ghost stories and bloodshed
Never scared me none
While they bowed their heads on Sunday
Cut out through the hedges and fields
Where the light could place its
hands on my head
In the West Hills”
Even in God’s House, the pressure machine infiltrates underground and the gears crank until something, Someone, reminds us of His presence and pierces our side.
As
writes frankly,
if there is no release valve, no open window (as Wendell Berry laments in Jayber Crow), we will run for the hills “where the light can place it’s hands on my head.” And even out there in hills, there’s wide open spaces, but what are we left with after we’ve caught our breath?
On the hunt to be absolved is to descend even further into the hills. All any of us want is to be set free, but from what? Even the blood and the body can be found when we’re all numbed out and escaping. Out there in the hills, the Body and Blood flows -
“That delicious half-time show where humans of every size and shape and age and color and hair style and wardrobe selection and musical taste and political conviction and Bible translation preference rise from our seats and walk the line to a rail where we kneel unworthy to receive the body and blood of the Lord.”
(John Blase, Things I Don’t Like About Our Church)
Even in our escape plan there is liberation waiting for us to receive. Or, to put it in the plain language of Pete Townshend and The Who:
“I know there's a place you walked
Where love falls from the trees
My heart is like a broken cup
I only feel right on my knees
I spit out like a sewer hole
Yet still receive your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
After such a love as this?”(The Who, “Who Are You?”)
Maybe one day, Brandon Flowers will know what’s it’s like to be those horses that run free in the west hills.
Maybe one day, there will be no need to possess a drug strong enough that ironically, kills our freedom.
Maybe it’s possible to taste pure, unadulterated joy just for a minute. A desire so pure, it’s not a drug at all. It will not bound you, unless you try to possess it. It will only remind us of “something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be,’” as C.S. Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy.
It’ll take the rest of our lives to get used to that feeling.
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
- Sylvia Plath
Out-of-Focus Photographs as Symbols of Perseverance
by Janell Downing
Perfectionists unite! There is hope for us. In 2021, I took part in a six week Learning How to See photography course with photographer, Joy Prouty. Did you know it only takes two to three seconds for a bad experience to last in our memory, but it takes at least thirty seconds for a beautiful and good memory to last?
I’ve been thinking about those six weeks lately…how everyday I was challenged to slow down and let the good and beautiful seep in. Right now I’m in the in-between space before starting my certification process to become a Spiritual Director, and there is a word the Holy Spirit has given me:
sobriety.
It’s an interesting word because it makes me think of addictions and the areas of my life I avoid. You know the old mixtape - why try at all if you can’t do it perfectly? Or even, well? To be not sober is to not look at, or have the capacity or ability to face something hard and painful. What I’m realizing, with the help of my Spiritual Director, is it’s not just the sacred and spiritual “practices” I’m called to be sober in, it’s all of life. Particularly the parts that my natural self is not very good at. Enter into those spaces sober and they become a spiritual practice. So instead of avoiding and numbing, (hello Sloth, my old friend), I can practice sobriety and perseverance. My focus might still be a little left or right of center, but at least I’m there. I’m practicing. I’m asking the Spirit to expand my capacity.
And you know what really helps? Taking out-of-focus photographs on purpose. Playing that musical piece intentionally with wrong notes. Because after about thirty seconds or so, it becomes really fun.
Ground Control to Major Tom
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
Ground Control to Major Tom (ten, nine, eight, seven, six)
Commencing countdown, engines on (five, four, three)
Check ignition and may God's love be with you (two, one, liftoff)...
Here I am
Floating in a tin can
And I don't know what to do
And I don't know what to do
Except that God's love is with you
Here I am again
Despairing, desperate
for what?
For You.
Find me here. You always do.
You found me in the Garden
Hiding in my tin can
Your grace can be too much sometimes
I had to shield myself.
Why did you have to make me so magnificent?
You sling me through spaceI tumble and roll,
Born again on solid ground.
Ish, by Peter H. Reynolds
We could all use a little more ish in our lives.
“I have become less active but more effective,
more passionate but less driven.”
- Alice Fryling, “Seeking God Together”
The Boy Who Said Wow
As Anne Lamott says, “wow” is a prayer of wonder. We say wow when we’re speechless or in awe. And the best part is, there was a boy who didn’t talk much, but after witnessing Handel’s Messiah, he said one word - wow.
And that’s enough.
It Will Take Something of a Storyteller to Find it
“If there is a story in Mann Gulch, it will take something of a storyteller at this date to find it, and it is not easy to imagine what impulses would lead him to search for it. He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”
- Norman Maclean, "Young Men and Fire"
Norman Maclean is one of my favorite authors. A River Runs Through It is in my top 5 favorite novels. The way he empathetically writes of ecological devastation intertwined with our humanity and our relationship to the land is breathtaking. There is a curiosity I have about the intersection of God and natural disasters. What does one’s faith look like when it’s natural habitat is “acts of God?” When the soil is charred, when thousands of trees are snapped flat in a millisecond, when your town turns into a water bog? (Has anyone read Tornado God?)
I’ve slowly been reading through Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, a searing account of what went wrong on August 5, 1949, when fifteen U.S. Forest Service’s Smokejumpers, “stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Less than an hour after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Man Gulch tragedy.” Like Norman says, it’s going to take something of a storyteller to find what that last and final word will be. No matter our age, we’ll always have an identity problem and I’m getting used to that not being resolved. While I might know my identity is held in the Beloved, after all, this is August and summer rain is falling tonight as I write. It’s not yet Fall, and time is odd and uneven.
Maybe all this harsh summer sun has been too hot and bright to see anything rightly in. My state is burning again and the smoke wafts through the Columbia Gorge twisting up my nostrils and pricking my eyes. Maybe it takes the Autumn sun to look at our ghost stories with compassion. Let the golden light stream through those dried up leaves and let our ghosts come back to life. Let time slip and let an act of God take over.
August Favorites
- ’s interview with Andy Squyres on her podcast 1517. You can listen here. “God’s faithfulness doesn’t mean he’s predictable.”
Finishing the third season of Derry Girls. Cried like a baby at the end.
Lots of made-at-home cold brew
Playing the piano again
Ben and I celebrating 19 years together and having a good wander around our city
Currently reading
Holy Listening by Margaret Guenther
St. Augustine’s Confessions
Middlemarch by George Eliot
August playlist (or, odd uneven time)
When I’m overwhelmed I make playlists. I stay up way too late and find myself again. Always worth it.
See you in the Fall, friends.
- Janell
Your playlist has a well-timed title for me. I once read an essay about a person who reread Middlemarch in each stage of their life - 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and each time they thought it was about something different, that a different character was the true main character etc. I have always wanted to read it because of that essay, hope you enjoy it.
Janell, I look forward to this every month. So good.