Kate and the kids and I flew to Seattle last week on vacation. Flights west always trace the same emotional arc for me. Endless green (white in winter) of the East and Midwest suddenly give way to mountains (Rockies), blond desert, mountains again (Sierras, Cascades). My heart gradually lightens and opens. I’m back West. I’m home.

I remember once flying to Los Angeles from England. An English couple peering out the window marveled at a desert road far below. “It just goes on and on,” one said. “So straight,” said the other. I realized the vast spaces I’d grown up with aren’t universal. The American West really is different.

I used to feel foolish condescension toward the East, where I live now. No mountains here, no wilderness, no deserts, no rainforests, no sagebrush, no vistas, no loneliness. Everything’s domesticated. The so-called mountains are just hills without glaciers. That wilderness quality of fierce indifference simply doesn’t exist.

This trip my feelings were more complicated. Crossing the bridge on the way to JFK at sunrise I looked back at the Manhattan skyline. It was dark and broody, shrouded in winter morning mist. The density was choking. I thought of the concentration of life, the easy freedom of a big city where no one is too weird, too lost or too wrong to belong. New York is fiercely indifferent in its own way. And yet it welcomes everyone with brassy, tattooed arms. Welcomes and then ignores them. It never heard my condescension.

In Seattle towering mountain ranges appear and disappear behind hanging veils of cloud. Our last day we stood at a hilltop playground watching the Olympics slowly materialize behind the downtown skyline. The mountains were immense, thrillingly remote, a white-veined wall against which the city’s skyscrapers became so many upright matchsticks. Light rain fell. Clouds closed in and the mountains vanished.

My point here is that I used to be a person who put parameters around where and when I was likely to feel the presence of God. Usually that happened outside in some vast, wild place. It happened so predictably I became smug about it, or assumed there was some correlation between God and wilderness. There is a correlation, but it’s not limited. God is present everywhere. I just wasn’t looking.

We returned to New York late Sunday evening. Waiting for a cab outside the terminal we watched a song-and-dance traffic cop get into it with an illegal livery cab driver. “This man will swindle you!” the cop announced, jabbing a jivey finger at a beat-up Town Car. “You believe this guy?” the beefy driver bellowed. Cars honked. Drivers shouted. The cop shouted back. Tourists shrank away nervously. The four of us (well, Kate, Frances and me—Benjamin’s an infant) smiled. Frances stood by the curb, hands tucked nonchalantly in her fleece pockets. We were back in New York. We were home.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

If I ever leave New York one memory will burn in my mind. It’s an October night, cool and clear. I climb from the 66th Street subway station, cross Broadway and leap up a flight of shallow steps. I’m in the courtyard of Lincoln Center. The Metropolitan Opera House is lit up like a jewel box. A fountain leaps and hisses. Someone’s waiting beside the fountain. It’s Kate. She looks lovely. We’re meeting after work to go to the symphony. We’re newly married, just moved to the city, and on this night everything is perfect and perfectly wonderful.

Every year we’ve lived in New York Kate and I have subscribed to the symphony. Even with two small kids we corral babysitters and take the subway to Avery Fisher Hall several times each fall, winter and spring to listen to music in our cheap (the cheapest you can get, actually) seats far above the stage.

Why? Everyone says classical music is dead. It feels like an old-person thing to do, or maybe self-indulgent. But of all our nights in New York, especially all our nights out, these are the ones I will remember. The sky opens out in that Lincoln Center courtyard, the city seems endless against it. We gaze at the ranks of lights, listen to the furious scrum of Broadway, watch the ladies in furs and the shambling classical music lovers, hair combed from neck nape to forehead, and we think, This is our home.

And the music revives us. It’s always a mad dash to the concert hall, getting kids settled, babysitters instructed, navigating the subway, pressing through the crush. Finally we settle into our seats. The orchestra tweets and honks below, warming up. The day’s stress quickly slides away and my mind fastens on what we’re about to hear. It’s a miracle to me, who never learned to play an instrument, that all this physics of sound becomes a thing of such great beauty.

We have weird taste. Mozart, no. Bach, yes (as much math as music). Romantics, no. Elliot Carter, anything new or hard to listen to, anything from the west coast (John Adams especially), absolutely yes. The concerts we go to never sell out. Once we watched as half the hall walked out on a John Adams piece that had us transfixed.

Another night we heard Britten’s War Requiem, absolutely shattering. Last time we went, in January, we heard a John Adams piece called “The Wound Dresser.” Haunting, coaxing music played while a baritone sang lines from a Walt Whitman poem about a Civil War medic.

These are the words from the poem that seized me: “With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable. One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.”

We sat in that dowdy concert hall and heard about sacrificial love. The vast space around us seemed filled with holiness. I know of no other experience quite so grandly and yet so intimately nourishing.

Does music do this for you? Where? When? It’s no accident we’re told to sing to God. He is, always and everywhere, singing to us.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

When do you chafe at winter? Is it after the holidays when the lights come down and the deep dark settles in? Or is it April when a late snowstorm pronounces “Hah!” on your dreams of spring?

I’m chafing now. It’s only February and I feel housebound and restless. I can’t see spring at the end of the tunnel. It was quite cold last weekend, single digits with wind chill, and while that bracingly reminds me of mountaintops and clears Central Park of morning runners, leaving me in sole possession of the paths and fields, it aces out playground play and causes the radiators in our drafty apartment to go crazy, cranking like desert ovens.

If we lived in the country, if we had a car, it would all be different. We could drive to the mountains and snowshoe in the woods. My new favorite book, Sky’s Witness, about the Wind River Range in Wyoming, is laden with eloquent descriptions of snow. The crystalline structure of snow. Snow above and below tree line, falling and melting, its textures and remarkable behavior deep down inside the drifts, where mice carve tunnels and winter life beats on in muffled quiet.

Here in the city snow is beautiful for about half an hour. Then cars and plows have their way with it and it grimes up. The city always looks the same, winter and summer, except the parks have leaves and flowers in summer, which of course you don’t see on the subway or in an office. Winter just means it gets dark early and some weekends your kids don’t want to go outside. Metal playground equipment becomes scaldingly cold in winter.

I say all this and then this morning I went running in Central Park. I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep so I ended up out the door at five-thirty. It was dark, only a few taxis and delivery trucks on Broadway. The park felt empty. I ran slowly at first. It wasn’t all that cold, high twenties maybe, but I felt cold inside.

Then, somewhere near Columbus Circle, I warmed up. I neared the zoo and discovered my path blocked by closed gates (happens sometimes when I’m out so early). I backtracked onto Fifth Avenue and re-entered the park near 72nd Street. Right there is one of my favorite places in New York, a stone stairway mounting a low hill topped by a primitive pagoda-type thing fashioned from knobby tree branches. Beyond that is a short dirt path, maybe fifty yards, that amazingly looks and sounds like a mountain trail, crunchy and gravelly.

I ran up the steps and realized it was pitch black up there. I felt my way forward, going purely on memory. I skirted a bush, stepped over stones I’d seen countless times before. The moon was out but somehow its light was obscured. Then the path ended and I was back in the light. I felt exhilarated, like I’d momentarily left the city entirely.

I ran on past the frozen Conservatory Water (where Stuart Little pilots his sail boat) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Finally I came to the part of my run I always savor most, a path cutting across the park between baseball diamonds on one side and the North Woods on the other. The path crests a low hill and crosses a tangle of knuckly schist rock. The midtown skyline rises into view, jeweled with light at this early hour. It’s quiet. It’s the only place I’ve found in New York where I can regularly hear the sound of wind in trees. I listened. There it was, a cold breeze sifting the branches. A few hundred yards later I was out of the park and the sun was cresting the horizon.

I’m chafing at winter but I’m working my way toward thanking God for it anyway. The error is always ours when we resent God’s timing or yearn to be somewhere we’re not. We’re in winter now, beneath that crystalline snow in the place of cold and quiet. Let’s try to rejoice and be glad in it.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

We were cooped up. Winter cold outside, two young kids inside. We groused, missing the outdoor life we left behind long ago in California. It’s January in New York City. Everything’s brown, gray and dirty. And it was raining.

So we made a plan. Monday morning, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we rousted ourselves early and got the kids up. “We’re going for a walk,” we told Frances, our three-year-old. We told Benjamin, too, but he fell asleep the moment he landed in the front carrier. He’s three months.

Out the door at 8:30. The rain had stopped a few hours before. Raggedy clouds draped over Queens, slouching toward the Atlantic. Pockets of wide-eyed blue peeked from the west. The air smelled fresh, like turned-up earth and wet stone. The city was quiet.

We walked to Central Park. It was gray and brown, but here’s the crux of the matter. Kate and I run in this park nearly every morning. I could run it with eyes closed and never hit a tree. And when we’re feeling smug we like to complain that its manicured lawns and engineered waterfalls are no substitute for wilderness.

This morning, though, it was incomparably beautiful. The sun, burning through a veil of cloud, struck at a low angle, illuminating every blade of dead winter grass with fairy light. Water drops made a universe of pearly stars. Wet, black boughs stretched and spindled.

“When the leaves are gone you really see the trees,” Kate said. Frances found an immense stick and ran it through puddles. We compared a low hill called Summit Rock to a towering mountain that had made an appearance in Frances’ bedtime story the night before. “We’re mountain climbers,” Frances said. She took stomping steps.

We found a short unpaved trail and Frances ran down it. We passed the park maintenance yard and watched rain remnants drip from rusty tractors. We found hoof prints on the bridle path. By the time we reached 72nd Street we were warm and flushed and muddy-footed, full to the brim with outdoors.

We walked out of the park and into the waking city. Taxis, horn honks, garbage trucks, dog walkers. Then to Fairway, our grocery store, which, improbably, has a café upstairs with one of New York’s best breakfasts. We ate waffles and eggs and toast with butter and strawberry jam. Frances had maple syrup and jam on her waffle. We ordered extra toast, it was that good. Kate and I smiled at each other, drinking our coffee. The sun streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows.

God is never cooped up. And neither, I think, is New York. Just our hearts had gotten that way. A morning walk, a delicious breakfast, openness to the world around us. We felt like that sky we’d seen, clouds breaking, sun lancing through to give each dead blade of grass its share of new life.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.

I’m yearning for mountains. It’s inarticulate, a wash of images. I think of past trips to the high country, almost all in the Sierra Nevada in California.

Cerulean blue sky. Dusty green Jeffrey pines. Rust red bark smelling of vanilla. Blond trails the color of beach sand. A gentle summer wind blowing off sculpted granite peaks. In harsh sun granite glows like a beacon. At day’s end it blushes, solidifies, then disappears. Stars burn.

Why do I suddenly yearn for this? Part of it is a book Kate got me for Christmas, Sky’s Witness by C. L. Rawlins, about a year in the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. Rawlins spent the year in remote backcountry collecting snow and water samples for the U. S. Forest Service. The samples were to test for acid rain formed by coal-burning power plants upwind from the mountains. The power plants supply electricity to, among other places, Los Angeles, where I was born.

Rawlins is a poet and his descriptions of the Wind Rivers in winter, spring and high summer are heartbreaking. It’s more than a book, though. I live with a permanent mild case of nostalgia even at the best of times, like a low grade fever. Sometimes it attaches to the Pacific Ocean, which I could see out my childhood bedroom window (a sliver of it anyway). Sometimes it’s light, the suffused, living light of the L.A. basin. Sometimes it’s food, the world of food in immigrant-rich California.

This season it’s mountains. Kate and I got this way last year. We did something about it by spending a week backpacking in Death Valley in February. We looked at pictures from that trip the other night. We nearly froze camping at elevation above the valley in snow, watching the sun set behind the Sierras’ eastern escarpment.

Kate finds God in the wilderness and so do I, and I suppose that’s what it is. I find God in the city, too, but in the wilderness you meet God on God’s terms, not your own. New York is saturated with humanity. And these days we are particularly housebound with three-month-old Benjamin and his 5:00 a.m. wakeup calls. We tread our familiar paths here. We suit up to take three-year-old Frances to the playground, horse around in the freeze and come home and that’s our outdoors for the day.

Every evening when I leave the office I look out my 21st-floor window. The window looks west, toward where I want to be. The sun is low or disappeared when I’m ready to go. The lights are on in the corridors of power. To my right, north, the skyscrapers gradually rise to the thick heights of midtown. For an instant I imagine them an escarpment, a swelling peak lit by the sun’s last rays. I yearn for God in the mountains. Then I turn away and head down, down to the subway and the city’s endless life.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

I’ve been up at night these days. My son Benjamin is seven weeks old and he awakens reliably at around two each morning to eat. Kate feeds him and I rock him back to sleep if he needs it.

Life goes on as normal but it’s those times rocking I remember. They’re like stones in a river, unmoving while all around rushes and tumbles.

We have a dark wood rocker in the living room. It makes the wood floors creak and gently pop. I sit staring into the dark, praying in my usual fractured way (I’m maddeningly distractible), holding little Benjamin in his swaddle, smelling his scalp, hearing his irregular breathing, a series of profound, difficult sighs.

Maybe those brief moments at night are the kernels of true life and everything else—work, the world, aspirations, anxieties—are so many layers of unnecessary clothing. I count on that passage in John’s gospel: “I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” But I always wonder, what is abundant life?

Maybe that’s it, sitting in the dark, holding my little boy, lulling him to sleep, hearing the deep night settle and sigh around me. Why must abundance mean more? What about this, what Elijah witnessed: “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice.”

I’ve been up at night these days listening for the still, small voice.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

What do you think of this quote?

“Men invent means and methods of coming at God's love, they learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God's presence. Yet it might be so simple. Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business wholly for the love of him?”

The words are those of Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French lay brother in a Carmelite priory. I read them recently in a slim book called The Practice of the Presence of God, a collection of Brother Lawrence’s sayings compiled after his death.

Here’s what I think. I think that quote is the absolute truth, and it gets at something ailing almost everyone’s spiritual life, my own especially. That something is avoidance. As in, all of us, even those of us aspiring to live by faith, do our utmost to avoid direct contact with that very same God we tell ourselves we’re seeking.

Brother Lawrence knows all our tricks. Rules—our elaborate theologies, our litmus tests for who’s saved and who isn’t, our carefully hemmed definitions of God’s love. Devices—rituals, church committees, that prayer practice we swear we’ll take up after the new year but we never do. And of course A world of trouble—all of life itself, the endless toil of work and parenting and bills and how do I look and what do they think of me and why do I always feel so behind. Life as we live it is itself a distraction from God.

Brother Lawrence offers another way. Do our common business wholly for the love of him. What did that mean for Brother Lawrence? Not much. He spent most of his life washing dishes in the priory kitchen. In his last years he repaired sandals.

Here’s what he said about such lowly tasks: “We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.”

Which is another way of saying: you can be in God’s presence anywhere, doing anything, always. What separates you from God is not flagrant sin or failure to go to church or wrong theology. It’s yourself, your terror of living like Brother Lawrence, as if God is actually there in the room with you this moment, sharing your life, sharing the joy and the sorrow and the tedium of it, slowly and relentlessly making you something large and new and shining.

So I tried it today. On my run this morning in Central Park, sounding I’m sure like a crazy person, I said out loud, “God, run with me.”

And do you know, for an instant I let it happen. I looked east and saw the sun burning orange and low behind the skyline, saw the checkerboard of lights in apartments, New York awakening, stretching, coming alive again, the sky shading to deep blue in the west where dawn was still a dream.

I saw the trees all newly bare and remembered how much I like them in winter, so spindly and naked and somehow more honest. I saw how many of shades of brown are in a patch of ground, leaves, bark, dirt trampled by a thousand feet. I was cold. The air was moist and raw. I felt it in my hands. I felt God in the common things of life and I was filled.

Try it. Practice the presence of God. It’s that simple. It will always be that simple.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

Ten things I noticed on my way to work this morning:

1. The sky heavy with approaching rain, gray and moist, tasting of the sea.

2. A solitary yellow leaf drifting to the sidewalk on Broadway near my subway station at 96th Street. The leaf fluttered and swooped like a swallow.

3. Passengers swaying like sea grass on my packed subway car.

4. Streaks of orange—local train tracks outside the window of my express train reflecting the subway tunnel’s sulfurous light. I thought of car headlights in an overexposed photo, shooting stars.

5. Four African American men playing bluegrass on a fiddle, bass, banjo and washboard in the middle of a Times Square subway station. They’re the Ebony Hillbillies, aged 61 to 85. One’s a cowboy who teaches horsemanship part time in Arizona. One played in a classical string quartet. One toured with Harry Belafonte and has two Grammy awards at home. One uses a cane and wears dreadlocks. This is why I love New York.

6. Taxis crisscrossing on Park Avenue, arriving, departing from Grand Central Station. Like twin halves of a ceaseless pair of yellow scissors.

7. The stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, peering down 41st Street from the steps of the New York Public Library as I hurry along Madison Avenue. I think of them dusted with snow, wet with rain, uncomplaining, silent and still through the harried New York night.

8. Five trees, I think they’re birches, with half their leaves left outside the Morgan Library on Madison. A few of the leaves are green, most are yellow. The trees are like down-on-their-luck debutantes, tall, slender and elegant, raggedly dressed.

9. The gold dome of the old Metropolitan Life building on Madison Square somehow glowing with cloudy light. The dome is half obscured by a bulky brown skyscraper. It peeks.

10. A Christmas tree newly erected in the downstairs lobby of the GUIDEPOSTS building on 34th Street. Advent is almost here, my favorite season in the Christian calendar. We wait in darkness, under clouds, underground, and then all at once comes the light all golden and shining.

So many things to be thankful for. What are you thankful for today? It’s like the Psalm says: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

I’m Unsuitable

At the risk of sounding like a crank I have to say that when it comes to Sesame Street the world has taken a decided turn for the worse.

Like practically every other child in America in the 1970s I grew up watching Sesame Street. Recently my mom bought a DVD of classic episodes for my daughter Frances to watch. We rigged up a laptop in the living room (we don’t own a television) and slipped in the DVD.

A warning appeared on the screen: “These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Excuse me? My wife Kate and I looked at each other. Not suitable for today’s preschool child? Sesame Street? If Sesame Street isn’t suitable for today’s preschool child, what is?

Actually, I’m by no means the first person to notice this inexplicable admonition. Virginia Heffernan, a tart-tongued television critic for the New York Times poked fun at it here. NPR noticed it here. A mom who blogs for AOL lamented it here.

Virginia Heffernan went on to notice all the ways today’s Sesame Street apparently is suitable for kids. It’s happier. Cleaner. More sparkly. No more ghetto street. No more junk food (Cookie Monster eats vegetables). There’s a little fairy muppet, Abby Cadabby, designed specifically to compete with Disney. (Funny, since Sesame Street creator Jim Henson’s Muppets were sold after his death to the Walt Disney Company.)

I had a different thought after watching a few episodes with my daughter Frances. The main difference between then and now as far as I can tell? Old Sesame Street is slow. Glacially slow by today’s media standards. So slow it’s almost like…well I’ll get to that in a minute.

Here are some of my favorite segments from the old episodes, many of which I remembered the instant I saw them:

A woodworker makes a toy airplane while music plays. Two minutes. No words.

Construction workers build a house from foundation to roof. One minute, 39 seconds. No words.

Two girls color butterflies with crayons. We see how crayons are made in the factory. Two minutes. No words.

A man sings a blues song about trash while New York City garbage men do their jobs. Two minutes.

A Chinese-American boy explains how his father makes noodles. One minute, 41 seconds.

Big Bird visits a Puerto Rican family’s house and garden in East Harlem. Three minutes.

One and a half minutes, two minutes, three minutes. Doesn’t sound like much. But on television those are acres of time. Extraordinary amounts of time to expect children to sit still watching the same thing. Especially with no words. No flash graphics. No Disney songs. None of the sugary, amphetamine-like junk that comprises children’s television today, all designed to keep kids watching, watching, watching, long enough to pack in the product placements and squeeze tiny bodies and minds to the last penny.

That’s what’s different about old Sesame Street, and I suppose that’s what makes it unsuitable for young viewers. By today’s standards it’s positively un-American. It doesn’t attempt to sell anything. It doesn’t try to hook anyone on anything. Its goals: to teach and to recreate to the extent television can the rhythms and joys of ordinary life.

I am beyond sad that in the 30 years since I watched Sesame Street those goals have come to seem so naïve or even, from a certain perspective, unsuitable for children. Every now and then I wonder if Kate and I are asking for trouble raising our kids with no TV. The kids will get pummeled at school, I worry. They’ll be hopelessly clueless about the culture around them.

I think it’s worth the risk. I’ll take my wooden airplanes and crayon factories any day. What a relief to be unsuitable.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

Fort Hood: A Chaplain Speaks

I was all set to write a blog about my kids today when this story appeared: shootings at Fort Hood Army base in Texas, at least 12 dead, 31 wounded. Details are sketchy as I write but the story shakes me deeply.

That’s because last year I worked on this story for GUIDEPOSTS: Roger Benimoff, an Army chaplain in Iraq who nearly lost his faith, his family and his life to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Roger and I talked for a long time over the course of several conversations preparing his story. He bared his soul, a ragged, damaged, searching soul. “Why do bad things happen to defenseless people?” That was the question he couldn’t answer after two tours in Iraq, after watching American soldiers and Iraqis die indiscriminately, pointlessly. After burying American soldiers, praying over their caskets.

He became angry at God. He stopped believing in God. For a time he worked as a chaplain not even believing what he was telling damaged, grieving soldiers.

He’s healing now. He left the Army and enrolled in a hospital chaplaincy program. With the help of his wife Rebekah he’s regained faith, though he’s the first to say his faith is nothing like it was before Iraq.

“As a child I was taught you don’t question God, you just go with what God says or what you think he says in the Bible,” Roger told me. “But if it’s a relationship there’s going to be conflict…It feels like God isn’t there protecting us.”

Roger never found hard and fast answers to the awful questions forced on him in Iraq. Instead he learned a new, tougher, more nuanced kind of faith. He no longer believes all questions about God are answerable. Attempts to reason through tragedy, he believes, are bound to fail. What works for him is steadfast, almost blind trust in “God’s consistency in the midst of human inconsistency.” He used the word grace many times. God as the goodness that endures in spite of, not because of, human understanding.

That’s a difficult faith for a chaplain to practice. I wonder what chaplains at Fort Hood are doing right now. They are caught in one of the fieriest crucibles of faith. Men and women have died on their watch, senselessly, and people want answers. Where’s God? Why didn’t God stop this?

Roger gave an oblique, not obviously comforting, but ultimately true and therefore immensely comforting answer to those questions: “When I was at my lowest lows, God allowed me to cry out, out of anger, frustration, need, in all the different ways that I express myself. God did not abandon me.”

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

Laughter and Forgetting

Newborn babies move like shellfish thrown on shore. Their arms and legs wave helplessly. They struggle to roll over. They are out of their element.

But their faces! My wife Kate and I just had a baby, a boy, Benjamin. He’s a week old now. Last night I held him in my lap and stared into his sleeping face. He was solemn. His blonde brows were furrowed. His mouth curled the slightest bit down. Suddenly his brows shot up in a look of mild surprise. He smacked his lips. He sighed. His head rubbed against my hands.

What was he thinking? What do babies dream all those hours they sleep? Kate had an answer. “He looks like he’s in some deep communion with God,” she said. And he did. Like Benjamin and God were at that moment conversing beyond words, beyond thought.

If that’s true then life is a long, sad arc of forgetting. Before language, before a child invents me, there is communion with God, a way of being unburdened by this is me, this is mine.

At some point children break that communion. They become fixated on themselves (i.e. they turn two). Growing up merely deepens that break. Life becomes an endless project of self-realization, self-perfection. Relationships, especially long-term relationships like marriage and parenthood, chip away at that project. But it becomes tremendously difficult to persuade any grownup to stop thinking of themselves. Certainly nothing in American culture encourages selflessness.

When my daughter was born three years ago I was too preoccupied with the newness of it all to realize any of this. I was too nervous. Now I simply sit with Benjamin, admiring his face, feeling his warm skin against my skin. I don’t think about anything. We just sit. Perhaps he is helping me remember. Perhaps in his tiny, helpless way he is letting me in on that deep communion with God.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

Integrity

Here’s a poem I came across:

“First Leaf” by Lia Purpura

That yellow
was a falling off,
a fall
for once I saw
coming—
it could
in its stillness
still be turned from,
it was not
yet ferocious,
its hold drew me,
was a shiny switchplate
in the otherwise dark,
rash, ongoing green,
a green so hungry
for light and air that
part gave up,
went alone,
chose to leave,
and by choosing
embellishment
got seen.

It reminded me of this poem:

“l(a” by e. e. cummings

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

Which reminded me of George Herbert, a seventeenth-century devotional poet, some of whose poems look like this:

"Easter Wings"

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
        Though foolishly he lost the same,
                Decaying more and more
                        Till he became
                            Most poor:
                          O let me rise
                 As larks, harmoniously
           And sing this day thy victories:
  Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

       My tender age in sorrow did begin;
      And still with sicknesses and shame
              Thou didst so punish sin,
                     That I became
                         Most thin.
                         With thee
                     Let me combine,
            And feel this day thy victory;
           For, if I imp my wing on thine,
   Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

I used to dislike poems like these. I thought they were silly, too obvious. Now I like them. I study them. Maybe it’s because, now older, a parent, now taking faith seriously, I know how hard it is to match form with function, to live a life that looks like these poems. A life of integrity. Is there anything harder, or more necessary, in the life of faith?

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
 

Ugly New York

I watched an old movie last night, The Taking of Pelham 123. A remake came out earlier this year. I didn’t see it. I don’t want to see it. The point of the first one wasn’t the plot (silly) or the action (there is none). The point was the city, New York.

The original was made in 1974, when any movie set in New York was really about New York. And any movie about New York was about America.

New York in the 1970s was coming apart. The city nearly went bankrupt, its major industries were in decline, suburbs sapped its population and crime rates skyrocketed. New York became a byword for urban failure, a symbol of an America that similarly felt adrift after the Vietnam War and the economic upheaval of deindustrialization.

The Taking of Pelham 123 is about four hostages who take over a New York City subway car and threaten to execute passengers if a ransom isn’t paid. The metaphor is transparent. New York, and by extension America, felt similarly taken over by hostile forces. In the movie the city, humiliatingly, is so broke it has trouble coming up with the million-dollar ransom. The movie is about humiliation, the city’s and the nation’s.

And yet what strikes me is the exuberance of the New Yorkers in the film. The New York I know in the 2000s is a pale shadow of that dirty, seedy, broke-down and yet utterly alive city. Everyone is in everyone’s face in this movie. Everyone is a concentrated ethnic type, a factory of coarse verbal wit.

At one point a subway supervisor strides down the tracks toward the hijackers, heaping abuse on them not simply for threatening hostages but for bottling up his train system. He’s outraged, indignant. He sees their guns and he doesn’t care. He’s like a dried-up sinew of the city, invulnerable. The hijackers shoot and kill him of course. He’s not invulnerable. But he stands for a city that met its degradation with a sharp, hard kick.

I was mesmerized by that kick. The film happens to take place in a subway station blocks from where I work. I ride that line every time I shop at Trader Joe’s. The stations look the same today except they’re cleaner. Subway cars are air conditioned now. There’s no graffiti. A neutered electronic voice announces stations and politely encourages passengers to stand clear of the closing doors. “Remain alert and have a safe day,” the voice says.

How lame. Veteran New Yorkers have mixed feelings about the 1970s. They don’t miss the crime or the filth or the riots or the Bronx on fire. But neither do they much like what, say, Times Square has become, this weird no-place of chain restaurants, tourist traps, gussied-up theaters and, significantly, no New Yorkers. New York is cleaner and safer now. But it’s richer, too, rich with the wealth of out-of-town fools who work in finance or entertainment and who in fact do not like cities, or at least do not like ugly cities.

Ugly New York is gone, replaced as all New Yorks are replaced by the city’s incessant metamorphosis. For a moment last night I felt nostalgia for that ugly New York, though I was a baby when it existed and I knew it only through, of all things, Sesame Street, which in those days existed mainly to educate all those kids in the burning Bronx everyone else had written off.

If you notice, early Sesame Street takes place in the ghetto and what I learned from it is that it’s okay to live in ugly New York. In some ways ugly New York is my imagined ideal city.

Time passes. New York changes. It seems to improve but really it doesn’t. It merely swaps out one set of compromises for another. It grows enchanted with wealth and loses its soul. It’s a fairy tale, a trajectory we are all tempted to live. I prefer my ugly New York.

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.