Of Memory, Toasts and Hometown Girls

Three of my sister's friends who had grown up with Martha in our hometown of Carmi, Illinois made the trip to North Carolina this past weekend to help her celebrate her special day when she would be "hooded," receiving her PhD in French Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am quite sure I had not seen any of these women at least since 1976, when I graduated from high school. Back then, since I was ahead of Martha by eight years in school, these girls had just finished fourth grade.

I was a little envious of Martha that she had maintained contact with these women over the years. Due to circumstances in my life, I have never attended a high school reunion and have only recently began to reestablish contact through Facebook with some of my high school friends. It turned out to be an amazing amount of fun to sit down last Friday evening with them, as well as with Martha's husband Koen and his parents, Greetje and Theo, who were visiting from the Netherlands.

Mark took this picture. Starting with me (blue shirt) and proceeding clockwise: Martha, Pam, Koen, Karen, Stephanie, Koen's daughter, Isa, and Greetje and Theo.

Greetje and Theo

Given that there were five people from Carmi sitting around that table, the conversation inevitably turned toward - you guessed it - Carmi. We talked about where they had lived in town, people we had known, teachers, and other subjects. As I listened and participated in the conversation, I realized that images were starting to flood my mind. Neighborhoods. Buildings. Schools. Teachers. 

The red balloon indicates where Carmi is.

As I have written about here, I have struggled with memory of my childhood and youth for years. When I first began investigating the abuse that had happened to me as a child, I had to rely on memories of my older siblings and former sister-in-law to piece together what had happened. There was so much I couldn't remember. And even when they told me things that had happened to me, I usually had no independent memory of the incident. It was as if large chunks of my childhood and adolescence were frozen, and I couldn't access them.

I think that my memory has also suffered because I simply have not been around the places and people I lived in and with. This became apparent - which I wrote about here - when two of my college fraternity brothers came to Mark's and my commitment ceremony in August 2012. They easily remembered and talked about events in college of which I had no recollection, and I think that the reason for this was that they had maintained contact over the years and lived in proximity both the University of Illinois, where we went to school, and to each other and other fraternity brothers.

Me and Pam

This is one of the reasons why last Friday evening was special to me - images of long ago started to cascade from seemingly locked memory banks. And I knew I was seeing these images through the window of my *own* memory, rather than someone else's.

Why do I care about this? What possible relevance could people and places from 40-50 years ago have to my life today? Because of my life experience. Because of fragmentation. Because I feel that I have left bits of myself in numerous places along the road of life, and I welcome the opportunity to feel more whole, more integrated.

The Hometown Girls: Karen, Stephanie and Pam

Plus, it was a just a whole lot of fun. There was a lot of laughter around that patio table that afternoon. Talking about junior high teachers and high school teachers. Remembering incidents, such as the time that a whole bunch of kids were sledding down an embankment and out over frozen backed up water from a flooded Little Wabash River, doing jumps off what we thought was a log - only to discover that it was the body of a dead man frozen in the ice. (Okay, that was pretty weird.)

Before long, it was time to go pick up my daughter, Rachel, at the train station in Durham. She had taken the train down from Philadelphia, where she has been working as a nanny since last September. Amtrak is certainly not Japan Rail; the train was going on two hours late. But she and I had been in contact via text, and we knew when she was due to (finally) arrive. It was so good to see her again! By the time we got back to Martha and Koen's house, it was time to eat dinner and continue the party celebrating Martha's hooding.

That part of the evening was, again, so, so much fun.

Rachel, Me and Mark

Rachel, me, Greetje and Mark

Koen's beautiful daughter, Isa

Pam and Stephanie

At some point, as we were gathered around the kitchen table, a toast was proposed to Martha on her very commendable achievement. Someone joked that everyone needed to remember to clink everyone else's glasses; otherwise, it would result in seven years of bad luck. That's when Pam pointed out that the clinker and the clinkee must also make eye contact; otherwise, this would result in seven years of bad sex. Lots of laughter at that one, and we all made a point of making and holding eye contact. This was carried to extreme lengths once the shots of limoncello started, as evidenced by the picture below.

Koen and Martha steal a kiss

It was a magical evening.

Tillich: Of Grace, Providence and Cheeseburgers

I grew up in a small town in Southern Illinois called Carmi. Fourteen miles away, just across a rickety toll bridge over the Wabash River, was New Harmony, Indiana - a site of several communal living experiments in the first half of the 19th century. 

Mainly New Harmony was a place one drove through on the way to Evansville - the largest city within easy driving distance of Carmi. My parents would occasionally go there to shop for groceries, and it was here that I went to see a podiatrist who told me that I had the flattest feet in seven counties. When I was in high school, friends and I would occasionally go there to see a new release movie. This is where, for example, I saw the "Exorcist."

The bridge across the Wabash

The toll booth on the Illinois side of the river

I heard recently that this old bridge is going to be torn down. Back in the 70's, I think the toll was 25 cents. There are probably all kinds of stories that could be told about this bridge and toll booth. One that I recall was when Ruth Ann Smith, my employer when I worked as a bus boy at Two Tonys Smorgasbord in Carmi, told us how, instead of paying a quarter (or whatever it was) she handed the toll booth operator a cheeseburger and drove on.

But I digress. When I was a kid, my family occasionally went to New Harmony, and I recall the "Roofless Church" that is pictured in the lead photo. I also vaguely recall a park adjacent to the church dedicated to the memory of the German Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich. In those days, I had no idea who Paul Tillich was, nor did I know that his ashes are interred in the garden. (Why I don't know - yet.)

I was introduced to Paul Tillich in my freshman year in college at Illinois Wesleyan University. (It's interesting ... I have written before about memory. As I have been thinking about that year at Wesleyan, memories have come back of hallways, of classrooms, of professors - places and people that I haven't thought about in years and thus thought that I had lost my memory of that time of my life. It is so exhilarating to experience the thrill of memory!)

That year really opened my mind to a lot of new ideas and concepts as I took Humanities classes and a religion class called "Man and His Quest for Meaning." It was in the latter that I first heard the terms "Christian existentialist" and "Christian Humanism" and read some writings of Tillich, who was a German Lutheran theologian and one of the most profound religious thinkers of the 20th century.

I was so taken with Tillich's writings that I read more than was assigned in class and even purchased the first volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology to read over the summer. But the following fall, I transferred to the University of Illinois, joined a fraternity and largely abandoned what I had found so exhilarating the previous year. What residual interest I had was extinguished when I joined the Mormon Church at age 24.

It wasn't until I came out three years ago and started on my (rather rapid) journey out of the Mormon Church that I once again encountered these words of Tillich, which resonated deeply:

This is only the last couple of sentences of a passage that speaks of grace and acceptance, both divine and by oneself - a passage that I plan to revisit and perhaps blog about.

In my reading over the past couple of months, I have run into numerous references to Tillich, most recently a couple of days ago in my reading in Catholic Means Universal, by David Richo. In writing about faith, Richo quoted the following passage from Tillich's book, The Shaking of Foundations:

"Faith in divine providence is the faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence. Providence does not mean a divine planning by which everything is predetermined ... Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the demonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world [such as those unleashed during the Second World War] can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted."

Bust of Tillich in New Harmony, Indiana

Richo added his own thoughts about "providence." "Actually," he writes, "providence means that in the face of suffering, cruelty, death and injustice, we have it in us to go on loving ... It is not that external situations rectify themselves but that interior powers of love remain intact no matter what. Our capacity to love surveys the pain and abuse we have experienced."

This, I think, is a large part of where faith comes in. We, I, need to have the faith that, no matter what,  we have it in us to love, to go on loving, to grow in our capacity to love.

I'm grateful that I have discovered Tillich once again after all these years. This post turned out entirely different than what I had originally contemplated, and it is a grace that, through this post, I have continued to re-establish contact with and embrace who I was before I joined the Mormon Church.