Tag Archives: grad school

Homemaking

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Today, I have been in Vancouver for three months, but it feels like much, much longer. October contained about six months in it. Six good months.

I have been making things: poems, dinner, friends, outfits that might have too much color, Hebrew flashcards, displays of advent readings to go up all around Regent.

I have also been beginning to learn not to make some things: definite plans for next term and the rest of my life, arbitrary childish boundaries set around who I talk to and where I go, excuses.

For various reasons, some of which have to do with the words and images that crowd through my head while I lie trying to sleep and some of which have to do with more official, public spaces like class readings and lectures, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about God’s makerness and my makerness in connection to it. The Lord makes things—he made me—in fact, I think he made me to make things. But it is so very, very easy to take what he has given and usurp it: to dismantle it and set about constructing Babel with great and hurried diligence, when what was called for was an altar.

I am always writing a story that I want to be true. I am forever deciding who I should be and how that should happen: my brain is always ticking full of dialogue that will never be said, I float the people around me into the narrative on carefully articulated sub-plots, and sketch out the peaceful house where I may never live, all with the goal of creating the glowing woman I want to one day wake up as. At best this is dreaming, at worst idolatry.

And I’ve been doing it for a long time, too. In eighth grade I developed an enormous crush on Skandar Keynes, who played Edmund in the Narnia movies, if you’re not familiar. (There’s no reason at all why you should be.) I drew out a careful timeline of our impending relationship, which part of me genuinely believed—I can be a pretty convincing storyteller. It began with his sudden, imminent move from England to North Carolina and culminated in our marriage at the age of seventeen, at which I wore a multi-colored ball gown. So that’s another thing: I’m not patient.

I would like to write the story myself and I would like it to begin tomorrow, on time please. When it doesn’t, I castigate myself. I must have made a misstep, so it’s back to the drawing-board to find the error and rewrite, rewrite, make it perfect. Probably the most terrifying thing about my decision to move to Vancouver was that I was throwing away the entire script. I was leaving everything I thought I’d do, and everyone I’d ever known. A kind of empty dread filled me some days when I thought about going, but I knew I had to be free of the structure of expectations I’d created for myself. I had to burn it, reduce it to ashes, step out through the smoke into the open air.

Now that I am settling here, though, I keep catching myself starting new drafts for this new home, trying to set things in stone very quickly about how this all will be: how long my degree will take, who I will know, how I will live, what songs I will sing, and what words I will write. I think I often associate being able to feel truly at home with how quickly my own scaffolding of control rises into the air around me—so what if it begins to block the sun? It keeps me safe.

I wrote a month or two ago that God brought me here. And he did. But I keep forgetting. I keep forgetting that not only did he make me but he made this home and the people in it. I bear none of the responsibility for the goodness of this place, nor can I claim it.

Reading Week is beginning and yesterday I helped decorate the school for Christmas. To string the lights back and forth across the tall atrium we attempted to use a tall paint roller with an extra handle taped to the bottom, so it would leisurely unspool from one spot to another. It was not leisurely. The roller either would not turn or turned too fast, standing on the upper level I couldn’t hear the directions that they called, and more than once we dropped tangles of lights practically on top of innocent bystanders. I trotted back and forth in the bright sunshine from one side of the mezzanine to the other till I began to sweat. I would not have written that scene with any of those details, but we laughed, and now the lights are glowing.

And last night I ended up sitting on a couch, dripping with sharp, tired tears while three friends sat close and prayed. I would not have written this scene at all. All I did was sit, suddenly surrounded and warm. But they prayed for me like they knew me.

My Lord is so much more gracious than I am.

Friendship and the Weightiness of Laughter

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Years ago, when our lives looked very different than they do now, my friend Abby used to call me up and begin the conversation with, “Alice, I’m wretched.” And then we would laugh. She would tell me everything that had gone wrong that day, and I would spend an hour laughing till my face hurt and we both wondered what we had done to deserve this goodness. This remains one of my dearest friendships, and I think that’s a central reason why. We take laughter seriously.

And when my friend Lauren and I were living together and we got stressed out we used to repeat to each other in high-pitched, giggling hysteria, “It’s fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine.” The joke, of course, was that everything wasn’t. But the indelible truth beneath the joke was that it would be fine: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. We laughed and were comforted.

When I stop and think I realize that nearly every important relationship I have ever had has had laughter seated at it weighty core. To laugh with a friend is to say, thank God you’re here and thank God all this isn’t up to us. Laughter, not derision or mockery or any thing with barbs on it, but the real kind, the gift kind, that some days begins in your eyes and some days begins in your gut, that laughter tells the truth. And the truth is that this business of being human is frankly a bit ridiculous, and we understand very little about how it really works. I mean, we get sleep in our eyes, we have toenails, we sometimes say nicer things about someone behind their back than we ever would to their face, and once I blacked out at a Walmart pharmacy and knocked into a display in full view of a crowd of people because I was too stubborn to stop walking. As I used to say about my students: we’re funny when we mean to be and funny when we don’t.

I’ve found that the people here who it’s already easiest to call my friends are the people who I laugh with, and, more than that, who are willing to laugh at me. So while laughter seems like the shallowest thing and simply the first, easiest way of communicating, used well it’s soul-baring. It can act as an admission of your own fallibility: that you’re a contradictory, limping creature with delusions of grandeur and everyone else in the room is too. So laugh.

Laugh because I wear purple tights and things that sparkle to compensate for my native shyness. (See, it works! It brings joy.)

Laugh because we’re too sleepy for this or laugh because we’re far too awake.

Laugh because we can’t remember or laugh because we can.

Laugh because we’re surprised to have failed or laugh because we’re surprised to have succeeded.

Laugh because we don’t know the words, or laugh because, suddenly, we do.

Laugh at our tears because their significance is not lessened by the reality that they will be dried in the morning.

Laugh without fear of the future.

Theology, Apple Sorting, and Starting at the Beginning

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Apparently I’m into long titles again like I was when I was fifteen. It’s cool–don’t worry about it.

This past weekend was the second weekend of the food course I’m in and we spent Saturday afternoon at a little local harvest festival. For a while I ended up at a work station sorting apples that would be good for eating all winter long from the apples that were already bruised and marked and would be pressed into cider. At first it was just me and an older man. He sorted away and I tried to keep up. But after a few minutes a young boy came up who was maybe ten or eleven. My companion explained to him what we were doing, that when he found a nice one he should set it into the box carefully, but that he was welcome to toss all the bad apples into their cider bin as hard as he could. And so he did, with evident joy. He really put his shoulder into it, throwing each warped apple in overhand, thunck thunck thunck, but each time he found a good one he cradled it gently in his palm and laid it in the box like a sleeping baby. Then we returned to the thunck thunck thunck. I laughed and wondered if I should tell him how much I admired his confidence.

On the official permit from the Canadian government that’s stapled into my passport, it says that I’m here at this place, in this country, to study theology. But I haven’t talked much about that yet. And not just on here, I haven’t talked much about that at all, anywhere.

Everyone else seems to have come to Regent with hard theological questions or with some driving desire to grow and learn, but I came theologically content. I’ve been too busy questioning most everything else in the past year or two to question my Lord. So my engagement in most of my classes, both external and internal, has been minimal. Sometimes I do have thoughts–appreciation will wash over me in Old Testament, or some unnameable frustration will creep into my shoulders while I’m reading for the food course–but the last thing I want to do is share them. I don’t want to say anything till I’ve really thought it through, and thinking it through seems to take much longer with God than it did with poetry or stories.

So I do the readings. I write brief response papers. I study. I talk to new friends about anything except the course material. But term papers are creeping up and I’m realizing that my days of relieved passivity are over. The time is coming when I will have to attempt to prove something: prove something about God, his church, his world. The idea of doing this still seems laughable.

I mean, I’ve written plenty of papers. I’ve made arguments before. But usually this meant I would pick up a piece of literature, read it carefully–backwards and forwards, up and down– and then I’d express an opinion. I’d engage with the critics, sure, but mostly that was a polite nod to companions in reading. The real content of my paper came from the text itself. The reason I argued that Katherine in Taming of the Shrew was a product of her environment and that Petruchio actually offered her release from her role as resident hellion was not because of anything Shakespeare said, or Liz Taylor did, or anything that happened in the sixteenth century. I argued that because of Kate herself, and what I saw in the text, and what I knew about being human. I wasn’t trying to give some definitive answer–I was just talking about personhood, and relationships, and the way it sometimes feels to be alive.

But theology is different. There is an answer here. They call theology the queen of the sciences, so decisions we make have an impact, on ourselves at the very least. This is serious business. My moving to Vancouver was in many ways a move away from responsibility. Studenthood, I thought, is freeing thing. I didn’t comprehend that I’d simply be switching from making pronouncements on the writing ability of the fifteen-year-old in front of me to making pronouncements on the state of the universe itself. I’m probably making up mountains where really there are only molehills to surmount, but still. I’ve been feeling a bit daunted today about my step forward into this next big thing.

A few years ago I taught a particularly high energy (and sometimes unmanageable) group of juniors. It was a big class, filling every seat I had and there were lots of long legs and loud voices and excuses and bold questions. They made me laugh sometimes, but they also wore me out and reminded me of my own inadequacies. One day as I walked around the room at the beginning of class, wading through low levels of chaos to pass back an assignment, wondering to myself how I would cope, one of the boys looked up at me quizzically as I passed him. “Miss Hodgkins, did you just say ‘Lord, help’?”

I bit my lip. “Yes. Yes, I did.” Lord, help.

Receiving, Retreating, and Other Non-Contributions

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The last summer I spent with my grandparents, right after I finished undergrad, is perhaps the one I remember most vividly. I came to Missouri in May and stayed straight through most of June, and one of the most painful moments was this: a sweet man from church came over one day and mowed the acre of front lawn, without pretense. I could have done it, of course, but he meant it as a gesture of kindness towards these good people for whom he had so much respect and affection.

My grandma didn’t see it that way, however. That afternoon in the kitchen she let loose to me about how unhappy she was. He had not asked, she said. Why would he do that? Why would he just show up? They didn’t need his help. In frustration, she repeated herself several times, more sharply with each go round. (To be fair to both of them, he may well have talked to her beforehand, and more than once, but her memory was slipping and slipping already.)

An hour or two later, as I sat up in my room reading, she climbed the stairs, the only time she did so all summer, and stood in my doorway on the verge of tears. She stood in my doorway, and with a tempest rising in her well-tested and stretched soul, she apologized to me. She said she knew she shouldn’t have spoken like that. She knew he probably meant well. But it was so hard. It was just so hard, Alice.

I sat on my bed, keenly aware of my dirty laundry scattered over the bright blue carpet and of my position as tenth of her nineteen grandchildren, middlest of the middling, and said in a near whisper, “Grandma, sometimes it’s good to accept help from other people.”

“But we’re the ones who help!” she said.

“I know,” I told her. “But sometimes that changes.”

Her world was spinning upside down.

I, too, want to contribute. When you are able to be the one who helps, you know you’re on solid ground, that something’s going right for you. To be the giver is reassuring. In my four years of teaching, I became a contributor. I was patient and I was reliable and I answered emails promptly. My desk was a mess, but my webpage was always up-to-date with homework assignments. I lent my students more paper and pencils than I should have when they came to class unprepared. I was comforted by my own regularity, and so, sometimes, were the kids. When they came in chaotic, I would be calm. All of us could count on that. Most of all, as a friend who’s still teaching said to me recently, I don’t know what I would do if people weren’t asking me questions all day. Miss Hodgkins, Miss Hodgkins, Miss Hodgkins…

I’ve been asked plenty of questions here too, but they’re harder ones. Beyond Where are you from? and What program are you in? I keep getting, Why are you here? Have you found your people yet? What’s been the hardest thing? What do you find lifegiving? My most honest answers thus far have been: I don’t know, Maybe–I was hoping it might be you?, Answering these questions, and What?

Partly by birthright, and partly by dint of having taught teenagers, I have a slightly overdeveloped sense of the absurd, so all this makes me want to laugh. And of course, as I’ve had others here warn me, if you look someone straight in the eye as you answer, you also might cry. It happens. I’ve done it. (No surprise.) But laughter and tears aren’t bad options, and people are pretty forbearing. In fact almost everyone here is out-and-out pastoral (with good reason–it is theology school.) And as they speak to a first year, especially one who sometimes unwittingly gives off the impression of fragility, they are kind.

And this is the crux of the matter: people are kind. Not kind because they love me or appreciate me or need me or enjoy me. They are kind out of their own God-given goodness. Though I am technically the focus of these check-in conversations, I am not the motivating factor. God’s grace, active and moving, is all.

I was the one who helped, but sometimes that changes.

So suffice to say, my world, like my grandmother’s, is spinning upside down. In a million other ways I will never surpass her legacy: her hospitality, her faithfulness, her work ethic, her pie crust, but I can take a lesson with her here at least. So I am relearning, for the thousandth time, how one accepts grace with humility.

I had reasons for moving and coming to this school, but most of the time I don’t remember them anymore, and when I do, they don’t seem very important. Out of the first five weekends of this term I will have spent four of them away on various retreats and course outings. It is occasionally exhausting to spend such concentrated time with new people, but I am becoming sure of one thing: I am grateful to be here. I thought I intended this move, that I planned and orchestrated it, but in truth, the Lord did. I am here because he set me here. He intended this. I am meant to know this place, to know these people, but mostly, to know him.

Happiness is not everything, but I am happy.

Time Being New (and Time Being Old)

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As of today, I have been in Vancouver for exactly a month, and I continue to gain bruises here and there from falling down things (like the stairs) and walking into things (like the table), which I suppose is proof that I’m not yet quite oriented.

I’m reaching the deeper level of homesickness now where I have a bank account and a bus pass and I’ve been to all my classes at least once, and even submitted a couple assignments, but when I see my former students pop up on social media on their class trip to Italy it feels like a welcome relief. To laugh to myself at their extra-polite smiles as a teacher takes their picture is much easier than reading the dozens of new faces, some with their own glazed expressions of fresh homesickness.

So what I am trying to tell you is that it’s hard to find some neat, coherent topic for a blog entry when everything is new. Everything is new except, of course, for all I bring with me: my loves, my habits, my fears, my socks, my memories, and my sweaters. Those things aren’t new at all. It feels like a Herculean task to marry the past and the future into the now, but in reality, it will happen on its own, so long as I let it. I will wake up one day and be comfortable.

But for now, as Auden says, I have “the Time Being to redeem from insignificance.”

So here are things to hold on to:

-I just did laundry, so I got to sleep between clean sheets last night.

-Everyone here, without exception, has been so kind.

-It is wonderful and a little nerve-racking to be writing for a grade again. It makes me feel like I’m growing.

-A couple days ago, when I ran into another first-year student at Regent, I said, “Oh hello, friend!” without even thinking.

-I have written two poems since I got here: a poem about life back home, and a poem about life here. The one that is currently nudging at the back of my skull is about the people around me now, so that’s a good sign. Onward and upward, through the “Land of Unlikeness”!

How I Came Here Collecting

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Well, my dad has been looking forward to this entry, even if no one else has.

I am here. After five airports, four flights, going through security three times, checking my bags twice, and spending one night in the Regina airport, I arrived in Vancouver, full of vivid daydreams about what it would be like to finally wash my hair.

In retrospect, I feel as if I did very little to actually get myself here. It’s as if some months ago I wandered onto a wave, sat on its crest for a while, watching the sky and worrying, and then was suddenly deposited in this soft, smoky city in British Columbia. In fact, I can’t think of much I did besides buy a plane ticket. Lynn and Leslie bought me a clock, Elizabeth Roberts brought me peanut butter, Susan told me over and over how wonderful I was going to be, and then Mary and Lauren packed my bags.

I’ve been here for a little over a week now, and I’ve had lots of time to think. This has been a little overwhelming, but of course, that’s why I came here: to think. I came to think and to breathe and to store all my sentiments up in some sensible way, to gather up the particulars of my past and of my present and of the reality that stretches far, far beyond my horizons, and build a story out of them.

I’m finally accepting the fact that I’m a collector by nature. Once in college a friend affectionately informed me that I was sentimental. I remember being a little offended, because I rankled at the idea of some kind of painter-of-light, Emmeline Grangerford treacle, but that’s not really what she meant. I save things. I save papers and notes and t-shirts and books and old, deflated birthday balloons. I remember what people’s hands look like and how they hold their shoulders walking up and down stairs, and I remember the way my Grammy’s back breezeway smelled, like eucalyptus and old knit blankets and morning chill. I am a sentimentalist–I collect all these things.

This place is still very new to me, but so far I have collected a new appreciation for rooibos tea, a goose egg on my arm from falling down the stairs, and the rainforest. I have a bit of the tall, cool, brown-and-green BC rainforest in my pocket (or maybe I am in its pocket?)

More to come. Grace upon grace.

Seismic Shifts

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In less than a week I move to Vancouver. This is the age of change, of the ground moving beneath my feet, but not mine only. Just in the last week or two there have been shifts around me as well: coming marriages, births, deaths, my dad turning sixty, my sister able to go back to London at long last, and two weddings to attend in the next three days. Time is always marching on, of course, but occasionally there are days when we actually feel that, in all its wind and its weight.

Last night my family had a goodbye party for me, which was very sweet. Many kind people prayed for me and we ate chocolate mousse and drank what rosé there was in the house so my parents wouldn’t be stuck with it.

Then afterwards I couldn’t sleep, maybe because all the changing and churning of the world beneath me had gotten into my bones and was making them ache. I don’t know exactly. But I got up and read the beginning of the book of Matthew.

It starts with a list of genealogies: marriages, births, deaths, tectonic plates grating against one another as the earth turns round and round, and then it announces the coming of Christ.

An angel arrives and tells Joseph that everything Mary has been saying is true: she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. Beneath the heaving, quaking breaths the earth keeps taking, there is a fiery core, a binding promise, a wonder: He will save his people from their sins.

Moving

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Since probably mid-elementary school, I’ve been shy. My teachers described me that way then, and generally, I would describe myself that way now, though I’ve managed to enter the adult world semi-successfully at this point.

And when I was a freshman in high school, right at the peak of my self-consciousness about the way I looked and walked and talked and thought, a senior boy started waving at me. I don’t remember when or why, but suddenly, whenever I passed him in the small hallways of my high school, he would wave insistently, obviously wanting a response. At first, I refused to give him one, because I assumed that I was being made fun of, that I was the brunt of some mysterious joke.

As a high school teacher now, this makes me realize how little I really understood the people around me, because teenagers’ meanness tends to be somehow simultaneously more obvious and more subtle than this–it doesn’t usually take the middle way–but this fear of some potential mockery I wouldn’t understand dictated the way I behaved with peers outside my own social circle for a very long time. In fact, I probably didn’t entirely outgrow it until my early twenties. A close friend once lightly called me “ice queen,” and it cut surprisingly deep. But I realize now the name was warranted: I used to stiffen, and behave terse or even rude, sometimes outright ignoring innocent and friendly overtures. I figured if I just kept walking and didn’t engage, I wouldn’t get hurt.

But this guy kept on waving. It went on for weeks, multiple times a day, whenever our paths crossed. I couldn’t understand it: since it was a small school, he probably knew my name, but he was confident, cool, unnervingly older. What could he want from me? Finally, with my stomach rising up into my throat like a balloon, I took what felt like a very great risk, and waved back. And he didn’t make some insulting gesture as if he’d caught me in his trap, he didn’t turn to a friend and snicker (in fact, I think he was alone), instead he jumped and he cheered aloud. And in the days that followed he kept waving, even more enthusiastically than before. Pink-faced, I would raise a hand in response. Sometimes he would ask how my day was going. Occasionally a friend would notice the interaction, and I would shrug and whisper, I don’t know…

Gradually I accepted these uncomfortable moments in my day as simply part of my lot in life, and continued for months to dutifully wave, much to his delight. At the end of the year, instead of just saying hello, he began to badger me everytime he saw me to sign his senior journal, which was laid out with all the others on a table in the upstairs hallway (one of many adorable Caldwell traditions). The first few times I ignored the request. I figured he didn’t really mean it. But he kept asking and asking. So finally I did. I know some great war must have gone on inside me between my shyness and confusion over the whole situation and my innate desire to be original and witty in writing, but I have no actual memory of what I wrote. What I do know is that he must have demanded my yearbook to sign in return, because here’s what it says on the second-to-last page: “Dear Alice, Even though we don’t talk that much I still consider you a best friend. I’ll miss your waves.”

The combination of complete understatement and complete falsehood in the first sentence broke through to me, and I think I laughed when I read it. Somewhere in the swirling chaos of my fifteen-year-old thoughts, I finally understood that I had, for months, been the recipient of an ongoing act of pure and joyful kindness. The last line he wrote was the simple truth.

 

Mary and I flew to Vancouver on Saturday to visit for a few days and the sun was rising as we came over Wisconsin. Snow sat in the creases of the mountains, and as we descended into Minneapolis, the new yellow sun shooting through clumps of bare trees turned their brown bones a glowing orange-gold like momentary stained glass. And everyone at Regent, where I’ll be in school next year, really likes singing the doxology: before meals, before class, probably under their breath as they ride the city bus.

I am moving very far away in August, and the little girl who was frightened to wave has left the stifling shell of her paralysis behind in the dusty past. I am thankful for her, but more than that I am thankful for the bright figures dotted throughout my memory, who have waved and shouted and jumped up and down to lure me out of my shell, into courage and sometimes even light.

Have Hope

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This week I told my students news I’ve been sitting on for a little while: next year, I’m not returning to teach because I’m going to graduate school in Vancouver, a city in some other country facing out over some other ocean. Some of them were calm when I told them, and some were less-so. Two fell out of their chairs. A few announced they could no longer do the assigned work for the day because of their great grief. I laughed. But my hands shook through the first two classes I had to tell. I am sad. I’m as sure that this is the right decision as I’m sure of my own right hand, but nothing can quite assuage the child-like sorrow I feel over leaving people and places I love.

However, my moving to another place and another life is the least of these things.

My sister told me this afternoon that everything feels heavy right now. This season has been one in which I’ve learned the weight of the world, and this week that weight has been not only burdensome but loud. All the pain in my peripheral vision, the groanings of the created beings around me, are making themselves known in cacophony.

I have been thinking of the Yeats poem I love which says: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” I grieve for the things I see that are lost, many beyond repair. He’s right: the things on which we rely will be shattered, and we can’t buy back past innocence for ourselves or for those we love.

I love that poem because it is completely true, but I also love it because it is completely short-sighted. I’m not disputing the obvious brilliance of W.B. Yeats, but human bitterness often assures that our long-distance vision is effectively nil. Things lost may be beyond repair, but they are not beyond redemption and rebirth. The things we rely on will eventually crumble beneath us, so that we may land at last on the Rock, the only one who can, in fact, buy back not only our innocence, but ourselves entire, and bring us into eternity. Yeats tells the truth, but only the first page of it.

One of my fellow teachers, a kind, kind man who was my English teacher himself back in the day, told me yesterday that I needed to write a book, because I had something to say. I hesitantly agreed, and perhaps what I have to say begins with this: I am hopeful.

Once I would have told you that I am hopeful because my students are sweet and bright and growing up into good people. I would have told you that I am hopeful because my family and my friends, they love me and make me happy. I would have told you that I am hopeful because God had given me far more comforts and blessings than I deserve. I would have told you that I am hopeful because spring comes every year.

But now, though my fears are bigger, because my fears are bigger, so are my hopes. They are stronger than they once were. Now I am hopeful because no matter where my students end up, they have a God who loves them each like the hundredth sheep. Now I am hopeful because that same faithful God loves me and has given me others to pass that love on to, in sinful fits and starts. Now I am hopeful because that love is so real that God saw fit to manifest it in his own bleeding, gasping Son on a cross. Now I am hopeful because I serve a God who dreamed up spring, who has pronounced that life can spring forth from the deadest death, that Yeats’ “blood-dimmed tide” will be followed by the clearest dawn.