A Holiday Metaphor Mashup - Issue #12
On Snowblowers, Existential Crises, Abandoned Train Stations, and Church (Non)Attendance
It snowed here yesterday. A lot. I think we got around 14 inches, which is more than we’ve had from one storm in a few years. At least, I think that’s right. I’m not actually very good at remembering snowstorms from year to year, which is actually kind of the point I’m building to here.
Our house has a very long driveway leading up to an almost comically large garage. For the three winters we’ve been here, the big debate is whether to park our cars in the garage, thus eliminating the need to clean a foot of snow off of the cars (particularly challenging when you’re not tall enough to reach the top of a SUV), or park them in the driveway, thus eliminating the need to shovel the long driveway. Better than either of these, of course, would be to park in the garage and get a snowblower, but snowblowers are expensive.
And here’s the thing: yesterday when I walked out of the house, shovel in hand, and surveyed the driveway, I thought, this is crazy. We need a snowblower. And with every backbreaking shovelful of snow that Steph and I lifted, I swore I’d buy a snowblower by the time the sun set. But then, after all our hard work, the snow stopped and the driveway was cleared and I pulled a snow-free car out of the garage and down the driveway. Then I thought: That wasn’t so bad. We don’t need a snowblower. And so it goes, with the arrival of each major snowstorm, I feel the need for a snowblower acutely. We have to have it. But by the time it’s over and in the intervening weeks or months, the need dissipates and I forget all about it.
Is this anything? It feels like there’s something here. Like this should be a metaphor for something… But I don’t know what it is yet.
So what about this: Over the past week, I stole every extra second of time I could find to read the latest issue of Harper’s magazine. There were two essays in the most recent issue that captured my attention and ended up, in my head at least, speaking to each other and to me. The first, I can’t commend to you enough. It’s an essay by Ann Patchett titled “These Precious Days,” and, as the magazine cover says, it’s “An essay about Tom Hanks, tornadoes, running bookstores, taking mushrooms, making art in quarantine, stories without endings, and an unlikely friendship.” I’m not even going to try to summarize it. It’s all of those things, and more. It’s long. You should read it.
All you need to know for now is that a whole tremendous chain of events is kicked off because Ann Patchett decides to read Tom Hanks’ collection of short stories, Uncommon Type. She ends up befriending Hanks and his assistant Sooki. Okay, that’s all you need to know to understand this quote: “What Sooki gave me was a sense of order, a sense of God…the God of my childhood, a belief that I had gone into my study one night and picked up the right book from the hundred books that were there because I was meant to. I had a purpose to serve.” Patchett, as a novelist, is thinking about how our days are not ordered, not really, but sometimes it feels that way. Sometimes, picking up a book to read before you go to bed can set off a chain of events that leads to finding one’s life’s purpose. Life’s like that.
The other essay is called “The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere” by Fred Bahnson, and it’s about the Christian contemplative movement in general and Richard Rohr in particular. The author identifies himself as a Christian—a member of a mainline Protestant denomination—who grew up evangelical. Though he has a master’s degree in theology and teaches at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, he writes, he has “more or less stopped going to church.” The pandemic is in part responsible of course, but then he writes, “But I find myself not wanting to go back, at least not to church as I’ve known it: an institution weighed down by a thousand cultural accretions. The parish subcommittees. The lackluster preaching that hinges on lame sports metaphors. The insufferable blandness. None of it seemed to be leading me any closer to what I really craved. Which was what? That was harder to name.” You ever have one of those moments when you feel like someone stole your thoughts and wrote them down for the world to see? Yeah, this was like that for me.
So here are two things: Finding and reading a book can kick off a chain of events that leads to finding one’s purpose. And also, starting off “found,” you can somehow lose the name for the thing you thought you had.
And here’s what it’s like for me: I’m always looking for order-purpose-God like a person on a train platform waiting for the last train. I have hope based on a remaining scrap of a train schedule that I carried around and referred to so often that it became worn, and then torn, and then shredded so that all I have left is this ripped and tattered corner that may or may not say what time the last train is coming. But I also have hope based on what people have told me. As if some passengers departing the station said they thought there was one more train coming and I decided to trust them. What reason do they have to lie?
And so, in this season of Advent. I’m waiting, and looking. I’m looking for Ann Patchett’s sense of order, or sense of God—that hard-to-name thing that Fred Bahnson isn’t finding in church anymore—in books and movies and songs and family and friends and students. Sometimes, I think I see it; the light of the train rounding some distant corner far down the track. And in those times, finding it seems like the most important thing, but then—to mash up all the metaphors—eventually the snowstorm ends and the snow melts and I think that wasn’t so bad and I wonder why I ever felt like I needed a snowblower—or was it the last train?—or purpose or order or belief in the first place.
What I’m Listening To…
Adrianne Lenker released two brilliant, and brilliantly titled, albums simultaneously this year, songs and instrumentals. My friend Craig Jenkins, music critic for New York, picked them as #2 in his best albums of the year list, writing, “like magic, songs and instrumentals feel both effortless and painstakingly thought through, a little bit cast-off yet also very refined.” I’ve spent the most time with the instrumentals record, but the embed isn’t working for that one, so here’s the songs album, and you can find instrumentals on Bandcamp as well. Enjoy…
What I’m Reading…
Harper’s magazine, apparently. And still enjoying Uncanny Valley.
We’re going to take the next couple of weeks off for the holidays. See you in the new year!
Thank you, as always, for reading.