Intégrité Fall 2022

INTÉGRITÉ

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Volume 21 Number 2 Fall 2022 A Fine Arts Issue

CONTENTS

POETRY 3 Making Connections: Poems from an English Pilgrimage Jane Beal, Featured Poet 20 “An Exhortation to Christian Living” Translated from Old English by Matthew Bardowell 24 “just like yesterday” and Five Other Poems Todd Sukany 30 “Retracing Jesus’ Steps” and “Psalm Haiku”: Haiku Sequences John Zheng 34 “Baby Books” and “Baby Names”: Poems Rebecca Duke 35 “Prayer, Prairie, 1872” and Other Poems Mark Tappmeyer 45

“church bells…” and “the way to church” John J. Han

NONFICTION AND PHOTO ARTS

47 Three Poetic Journeys: Alternate Paths to Expanded Meaning in Life (a review article) C. Clark Triplett

• Keith Polette. Pilgrimage. Red Moon Press, 2020.

• Margaret D. McGee. Haiku: The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines. SkyLight Paths, 2009.

• Philip Harnden. Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others. SkyLight Paths, 2003, 2007.

61 A Charm of Hummingbirds

Jane Beal

Traveling to Equip Local Church Leaders in Uganda: A Photo Essay Cordell P. Schulten 73 Holy Sights of the Mississippi Deltascape: A Photo Essay John Zheng 90 Missouri, the State of the Shepherd of the Hills

63

Han

How I Write Poetry of Faith:

I wish it were easy to express how I write poetry at all, let alone poetry of faith. I tried once, in an essay called “Cultivating a Creative Life” (Cantos, Spring 2014 issue). There, I shared what is for me the core principle of creativity, which is making in imitation of the Creator: the Lord is the Artist, and I am an artist, made imago Dei, imitating divine creativity whenever I create anything, but especially when I am inspired by the Spirit.

Listening prayer, lectio divina, and spiritual direction provide spiritual foundations not only for my life, but my art, and these in turn support my creative practices: in the world of Nature, walking, birdwatching, and caring for creation; in the world of Art, contemplating visual artwork, listening to music, and reading for inspiration; and in the embrace of Community, gathering together, enjoying performances, and witnessing Glory, in extraordinary moments, like when a woman gives birth, which I have seen many times, because I am a midwife as well as a poet. My spiritual foundations and creative practices help to cultivate a creative life from which poetry of faith can emerge.

For me, Jesus (whose name means salvation) is the cornerstone of the creative life. The Scripture says: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Psalm 118:22). Jesus is the cornerstone who holds my spiritual foundation in place, and the whole house of my creativity is built on it.

Cultivating a creative life has meant opening the doors to the home of my heart to allow the redemptive process of God to work in me and through me. The art that has come out as a result is the flower of the Lord’s cultivation. In my life, I have made it my aim to cooperate actively with the Gardener.

For I am his artwork, and my life is his garden.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Poems from an English Pilgrimage

London * Cambridge * Ely * Norwich * Chester * North Wales * Leeds

Part I: In the Middle of Things in Norwich

In the Garden of St. Julian’s Church

I step through the gate into the quiet garden, the secret sanctuary beside St. Julian’s Church.

In the solitude of a summer’s day, I move toward the sweet sound of a tiny robin.

He flits under leaves, and perches on bracken, and when I whistle a little, he comes out to look around.

There he is! Sweet, small, and perfect, peering up as the afternoon sunlight shines on his breast

as red as love, true love, that cannot be hidden but reveals itself to the beloved with a song!

The Labyrinth at Norwich Cathedral

In Norwich Cathedral, the cloisters surround the courtyard, where the green grass is cropped short and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee is memorialized with flat, gray stones in the shape of a maze:

O Labyrinth! I recognize you again, and enter in, pondering as I walk through each twist and turn, forgetting the Minotaur, focusing on redemption, the pagan past turned into the Christian present, as I whisper my prayers into an invisible realm, asking over and over again, “What is your will for my life, O God?”

Ely Cathedral at Sunset

As the train sped west from Norwich at sunset, we passed by Ely Cathedral: I could see it, across the harbor

of the River Great Ouse, where sailing boats were moored: light shone around it, as it stood steadfast on a hill.

I glimpsed it, and then it was gone, as the train continued down the train track toward Cambridge.

A Concussion in Cambridge

I had the misfortune to hit my head, hard, while I was in Cambridge: it happened late at night, or early in the morning, when I bent down in the dark to get something out of my rucksack, and instead experienced the exquisitely painful sensation that occurs when you knock your skull against a bedpost. Foolish, I thought, being so tired, and I laid down to sleep, thinking I would be better in the morning. But I was not. I was dizzy. So I stayed in bed, as it rained outside, and I rested.

I watched a documentary film, as I slipped in and out of wakefulness, about C.S. Lewis, called The Most Reluctant Convert. It was about conversations between men, and I missed Joy bringing light into the Shadowlands. In the evening, when I was feeling better, I got up from bed to look out of the window, streaked with rainwater, at the houses across the street. They looked beautiful, being made of dark brown stone, wet with rain and gleaming now as the westering sun swept over them and turned them to shining gold.

Part II: Flashback to Scenes in Cambridge, Ely, and London

After Walking in the Cambridge Botanical Garden

After walking in the Cambridge Botanical Garden, I went to the top of the FitzWilliam Museum where the “True to Nature” exhibit of plein air painting was on display: and I was thinking about how extraordinary it is to be surrounded by trees and flowers, and mountains and fountains, by succulents and sea waves, turning green in the light as they froth on the shore, by open roads and snowy fields, by cumulus clouds and giant lily pads, by volcanoes and grottos, by rocky terrain that leads down to duck ponds, by memories of the desert or the Italian peninsula, because English gardeners and nineteenth century European painters decided, more than a hundred years ago, to make a canvas of the earth.

Bohdan at the Alienarum

In England, I was much closer to the war in Ukraine: I met a Ukrainian refugee in Kensington Gardens, in London, at the Alienarum 5 exhibit in the Serpentine Galleries, where the artist asked the question: “What if aliens were in love with us? What would change?”

The Ukrainian man and I put on our virtual reality headsets, plunging into outer space together, and without realizing it, we met as atoms of color, cool blue and rainbow bright, and touched without touching in the vast reaches of someone else’s science fiction.

And afterwards, the techs told us what had happened to us in the interactive virtual space, where we were nothing more than atoms than photons passing by the stars and nebulas and galaxies, in a universe that is and is not, that was and will be

in imitatio Creatoris. So we talked afterwards, since we had connected, and it turned out that he had a Ukrainian friend in Los Angeles, where I work, who needed a place to stay, and I happened to know someone coordinating resources for Ukrainian refugees, so we put our friends in touch with one another

and hoped for the best for them. The man wanted to know why I wanted to help, so I told him about my sister, Asya, who came to California from Ukraine when she was a teenager, and lived with my family, so she could go to school and sing she was an opera singer

and how she died in a car accident when she was twenty years old ... So Ukraine is in my heart because of my sister, and I have been praying,

constantly, for the war to end, because the sight of the young people in Ukraine suffering and dying, reminds me of how Asya died,

and the memory is terrible. But maybe, someday soon, the war will end.

Punting

A punt is a flat bottomed boat that you can take out on the water of the River Cam that runs between the Colleges of Cambridge University, and Ella the Punter does that: she drives the boat with a long pole, down the river, and I was in her boat one day.

Sitting across from me were three generations of Americans a grandma, a mother, and six month old baby Eva and their friend, a student at Cambridge, whom they had come to visit. As we bumped along down the river, we all admired the splendid architecture of the college buildings and the way the flowers and trees, grass and ivy

adorn the water’s edge, but I more admired the baby, who insisted on being breastfed even though her mother was a little bit busy, and I liked that about the baby, who refused to be pacified with anything other than her mother’s love.

St. Ethelreda

In Ely, I stood in front of the white statue of St. Ethelreda, who never wanted to be married or have children, but rather wanted to live chaste and dedicated her virginity to God, which she did, even though her father forced her to marry twice. She somehow escaped the duties of marriage, even when wed, and Marie de France wrote about this in her twelfth century Vie de Saint Audree, a long poem I have read more than once and remember clearly, because it makes me reflect like white cumulus clouds do on the face of blue water.

The Round Pond in Kensington Gardens

I wish you could have seen the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens that morning with me: so still and beautiful, and so full of the moving pictures of white cumulus clouds as the statue of Queen Victoria overlooked it from a distance.

The Mute Swans and Canada Geese were all princes and princesses in sleepy glory, slowly awakening as the sun rose higher in the sky, and I was amazed and pondering many things in my heart, in my heart, in my heart.

St. Matthew’s Guesthouse, Westminster, London

There is a garden at St. Matthew’s Guesthouse, and a door from the second floor that opens to a spiral staircase that leads down it, but I could not get there, because the door was locked and barricaded. I looked down

at all the pretty flowers from the window, and felt like I was looking into my own heart, as an outsider, who cannot get in to a desirable place. Yet the next day, from the first floor, there was another door and I entered the garden easily enough, and I turned and saw something I could not see from the window above:

Christ Crucified on a White Cross, and his mother, Mary, looking up into the eyes of her beloved Son.

Isaac the Painter

1 two lovers

Isaac is a painter from another country, who paints watercolors, acrylics and oils in a tunnel by the footpath that runs along the River Thames between the Globe Theatre and Westminster Bridge, and I met him.

His paintings are very beautiful, full of gorgeous colors, like blue and red and white, and powerful images, like the one of two lovers in the rain, under an enormous umbrella, not far from the spike of the Big Ben Clocktower.

He said he could sell me any picture that I wanted, for a discount, except for that one and I knew that what he said was true.

2 butterfly

I showed Isaac some of my own art, because I had my cell phone with me, so I could connect to my website and bring up digital photographs of my work, including the pencil drawing I did of my own hands, laid over a pregnant belly, and a butterfly emerging from them, copied three different times, and each time, an orange wash that I laid over the picture grew big, bigger, and biggest and I told Isaac I made this one after a miscarriage. I did not say it was my own. I did not say I called the pencil and paint artwork, God of Hope.

3 prophecy

I told Isaac he was a special person with a special gift for the world, and he told me the same. When I came home to California, I read the verse in Genesis that says: I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.

Philip the Engineer “Keep calm and carry on” ~ A British Saying

On the train from London to Cambridge, I met Philip, an engineer. He told me his firm had worked out the designs for an upgrade for a major corporate building in Kyiv, and they had just been approved when

a bomb flattened the building and broke it down to nothing but rubble. So now the remodel is out, and rebuilding is not yet possible. (When will the war in Ukraine end, O Lord?)

I told Philip about the Ukrainian man I met in London, and his friend in Los Angeles, and how I wanted to help her, and Philip replied, “You have to do it, don’t you?” Then he told me about a Ukrainian refugee working for his firm, and even though they can’t get her officially on the payroll because she hasn’t got her work permit yet, they’re paying her until she does. And I told Philip about my sister Asya, and I started crying, thinking of all these very young people in the Ukrainian diaspora, seeking refuge from the violence in our dark world. Tears did not come to Philip’s eyes, even though he was compassionate, maybe because he was a man, or maybe because the British have a clear and present memory of how they fought to defend their country in the world wars and have no intention of surrendering to tyranny.

Part III: Continuing an Epic Adventure in Chester

Lost and Found

When I arrived in Chester, I first got lost, as I always seem to need to do. I was bewildered between the train station and my rented room in Shaz’s AirBnB. It was so close, and I knew it, but still it took time for me to follow the map: a gift unrecognized at the time. Though I once was lost, I now am found. I opened the blinds of my bedroom window. Then I could see the Cathedral.

The Shrine of St. Werburgh “Ora et labora,” ~ Rule of St. Benedict

The Cathedral was once a Benedictine Abbey, where monks sang their Psalms everyday and made manuscripts from vellum, stitched together and bound between boards, with pages first written upon with Latin words in calligraphic scripts, then decorated with historiated initials and flowering borders, illuminated with gold and silver, as the monks meditated on Latin grammars and gospel books, Psalters and sermon collections, books of hours and bestiaries and commentaries, saints’ lives and miracle stories, cartularies and world maps, chronicles and Christian thoughts from St. Augustine of Hippo and Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede and the Glossa ordinaria, classical literature by Ovid and Virgil, Caesar and Cicero, Horace and Livy, and Lucretius and Pliny, both the Younger and the Elder, thus proving the wisdom of Solomon: of the making of books, there is no end.

But they would pause from their work, and rise and go out of the scriptoria, from the writing desks carved out of stone on the second floor beside the windows, where

the light shown through, and they would go down to the sanctuary, to the Shrine that honors St. Werburgh, the princess who became the fourth Abbess of Ely, and they would bow down on their knees to pray, remembering how once, long ago, the geese were destroying the virgin’s growing corn, so she had them confined to a certain house, as if they were domestic, not wild, and in the morning, when she was ready to command them to be gone, she found that a servant had eaten one of them, so she said, “Bring to me the bones and the feathers of the bird that has died,” and when it was done, the bride of the Most High God prayed that the dead bird should be made whole, and should live, and it came alive again! Then all of the distressed geese were cheering and crying out at the return of their lost companion, when the virgin-saint told them they must depart, and never return, and so they left, taking flight into a blue sky decorated with cumulus clouds.

The monks imagined their prayers took flight just so from the Shrine of St. Werburgh to Heaven:

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven ...

The Creation Window of Chester Cathedral

The Artist made the world, and Rosalind Grimshaw made the Creation Window, in imitatio Creatoris, so that each of the Six Days is illuminated with light:

He made Light! So she cast the colors of her glass to show an angel with a yellow face and white wings, a brilliant star, and the Aurora Borealis, and an Eagle, representing the Spirit of God.

He made the waters and the firmament that separates them! So she imagined the Blue Marble of the World that we can see from outer space and a shuttle spacecraft that rises above to look below.

He made the dry land, and the seed bearing plants, and the trees! So she crafted red apples, a pomegranate, and half of a red and yellow bell pepper, a purple fig, bursting open, and grasses, bullrushes, peas, wheat, and herbs,

and a butterfly on an orchid flower in a glass beaker, suggesting the new science of genetic engineering, and the strange promise of what mankind’s future may hold one day ...

He made the sun, and the moon, and the stars! So she designed a universe of planets in glass, red Mars and green Earth and purple Jupiter, a gray Saturn with a ring around it, and the Sun, and then

to the macrocosm she matched the microcosm, the picture of her own brain scan, showing how it looks when someone has Parkinson’s Disease, her disease, which took her life, but not before she finished her Creation.

He made men and women and gave them dominion! So she brought the Morning Star, Jesus the Christ, into the stained glass window, and the image of a cow and a calf from an aboriginal painting man’s earliest

artistic effort remembered where she placed her own handprint on the cow’s shoulder, then made an African Adam and Eve, a spiral horned deer, and a Banyankoli cow, and the ultrasound image of an unborn child, her own grandchild: hope for the next generation.

The Promise

There is a garden in the heart of the cathedral, and a fountain in the center of the garden.

In the midst of the fountain, there is a promise, where the Samaritan woman looks tenderly into the eyes of Jesus, her face above his face, her hands gifting to him the bowl of water to answer the question of his thirst, his yearning

for her stronger than Jacob’s for Rachel at the well. Beneath their bodies, sculpted in bronze,

I read the silent words etched in stone that were his words to her:

Jesus said, “the water that I give will be an inner spring always welling up for eternal Life.”

Part IV: Under Enchantment in North Wales

Following Sir Gawain

Tracking the footsteps of another pilgrim, who sought to fulfill his vow, even unto death, I find myself passing through a valley of cold, green shadow, where the peaks of the mountains, enshrouded with cloud, loom like giants, and mystery and magic is all around me in the mist: the Green Chapel is not far from here, but I do not yet hear the sound of a man sharpening his axe.

Snowdonia

From far away, I glimpse the peak of the tallest mountain in the range: Snowdonia! Innocent white sheep feed in the green fields of your domain, and streams of water flow swiftly over the rocks in your lands, tumbling down in frothing falls. They make my heart rejoice!

The littlest lamb, by his mother, is safely chewing the grass between your river and the flowering purple foxgloves: it takes two years for the plant to fully bloom, and here their summer glory is displayed for me before they pass into eternity.

Castle Conwy

I walked along the medieval walls around the town where Castle Conwy overlooks the River, admiring the eight turrets of the fortress from different angles, and the seagulls nesting in the crevices, and the green ivy growing on the gray stones.

Roman Aquaduct

The Romans built this water-way a long time ago, when they ruled this country, before they were driven out or were called back, and now little, narrow gondolas traverse it, high above a valley, with passengers in awe of all they see from the height. I am in awe, too, though I only walk to the middle of the Aquaduct, and not across, because there are four horses running free in the field below and their freedom captures my attention: two are mares, and two are foals, and together they are a picture of the future

Part V: Returning from Leeds to London with the Elixir

Kirkstall Abbey

Here in the ruins, I see shadows on the grass, and I hear the echoes of the past in stories from a woman’s waterfall of words, spoken in a sanctuary open to the sky, beside stones blackened by industry, but mysteriously, golden underneath

like a parable that promises a seed will grow day and night, from the dark earth, until the time is right for the harvest of bright corn: can this church be rebuilt and restored? Can the stones that were torn down be resurrected? Like a valley of dry bones, like a bird from nothing more than its feathers and fragile phalanges, can this place come back to life? O, that the wind

would come whistling through, over and under and all around, so that I could be caught up like a prophet chasing a chariot of fire, looking to heaven for the Light as the Power of the Presence of the Almighty raised my life above the abbey tower to behold a vision of the future in the present moment!

White cumulus clouds in a blue sky: giant angels dancing before the endless Throne.

Jane and Jonathan Meet Up in Leeds

I had not seen my friend Jonathan from Israel in three years because the pandemic made it impossible from me to travel from America to the United Kingdom for our annual conference where we learn so much and talk so long.

But there was a shift in the world, and a window opened (if not a door), and I climbed through it like a child and met him, surprised and delighted, as we happened to cross paths between two buildings at the university: it was not a coincidence; it was a divine appointment. So we had

dinner at the Indian place in the park, and I told him all about my hardships and losses during the past two years. Then we went to listen to medieval Spanish music, sung in the dark, which was beautiful. And after that,

we went out of the concert hall, and we found a place to sit, and he told me about his hardships, and I listened to him, as he had listened to me, because listening is how people show one another their friendship that, and in our case, poems about hydrangeas.

Three years ago,

I wrote a poem for Jonathan about blue hydrangeas, which grow in acidic soil, but this year, when I was with him, I saw hydrangeas that were pink, because the soil in which they sank their roots was not harsh and that makes all the difference in the world.

Returning to King’s Cross Station

I arrived in London from Leeds, like Harry Potter with Hedwig, not far from Platform Nine and Three Quarters, and soon emerged from King’s Cross Station where I looked up at a tall, brick Clocktower, and I realized: it was Time.

The Elixir

Always trust in God, not your own understanding, and serve him while you are young, and old, because the Pilgrimage will go swiftly by and you will find yourself at the end, beginning again.

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An Exhortation to Christian Living

The Old English poem “An Exhortation to Christian Living” is found in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 201. The manuscript contains miscellaneous homilies, laws, and poems.1 The Old English text of the poem is taken from Elliott van Kirk Dobbie’s edition in volume 6 of The Anglo Saxon Poetic Records. L. Whitbread notes that the poem is not likely to be older than the 11th century manuscript in which it is contained and, as such, reflects “metrical decay,” which explains its atypical use of alliteration and “loose prosaic manner” (180). “An Exhortation to Christian Living” does, however, offer a characteristic example of the kind of paratactical style so common in Old English poetry. Readers unfamiliar with this syntax may notice phrases placed side by side without coordinating conjunctions to explain their relationship. I have translated the poem here because I believe it will be of interest to On the Edge readers as an example of Old English religious thought and 11th-century views regarding what constitutes Christian behavior.

Now I will instruct you as I must those dear to me. If you desire to reach that flourishing kingdom, then be thou humble minded and eager to give alms, wise with words, and love vigils be holy of thought in this transitory life, 5 joyous in heart, and abundant in prayer. most often, continually, in that place where you are alone. Therefore, holy prayer and the clear love of God and of men and the giving of alms and the great hope of your Healer2 , 10 that he will wash away your sins, and also of many other of good works will honor and bring forth the steadfast soul to peaceful rest in heavenly blessedness. 15 Whatever work you undertake,3 whether speech or deeds, have the fear of God always in your mind; that is truly the beginning of wisdom, that you do not entirely abandon the eternal light. This world is at an end, and we are yet poor 20 of heaven’s reign; that is a heavy burden.

Translated from Old English by Matthew Bardowell

And even though you after your end fully give that which on earth you formerly gained possessions with which you wished to please God, you might not deliver the entirety of your soul 25 if the dwelling within has been with devils taken, deprived of comfort, wealth denied; but you the God of glory, the eternal Almighty, always ask that he does not forsake you into the hands of the wicked, 30 your enemies to console, but flee thou from thence, make a gift of alms often and continually in secret; that is the Lord’s teaching4 to each man who believes in God.

Seek with wealth the eternal light, 35 lest you perish when you lack power over that wealth to give. It is great evil for any man that he possess much, if he himself does not fear God much more than his own will. 40 Beware you who yearn for a full stomach, because such desire assembles all evil practices which harm the soul most, that is drunkenness and adultery, uncontrolled desire for food and for sleep 45 that one may with fasting and self denial drive away from oneself, and with church going in cold weather humbly and assuredly ask the Lord of heaven that he give you health, 50 the gracious protector, as seems fitting for him. And fear thou the secret habits5 , narrow thoughts, which approach you at night very often exceedingly to greatly elicit sinful desires with difficulty you must fearfully, 55 greatly mourn your sins afterward, old warrior; your sins will seem heavy to you. Therefore, you yourself understand that you must resign transitory states, land and country. Unbeknownst to you then will be 60 what your Lord will do with you when you must no longer take pleasure in this life, of the earth and your homeland, as you did before, with exultant joy. Now you must defend yourself against fiends who hold fast 65 your soul; they always strive to do that * * *6

day and night against a lord’s7 life. You have the power to make them flee if you will follow my teachings, as I instruct you 70 secretly that at daybreak you often deeply reflect on your soul’s direction, how you might ever obtain that eternal light, to seek that journey; you must gladly toil towards heaven, which is our home 75 day and night, you must flee drunkenness and gluttony totally forsake. If you desire to choose heaven as a home, then you must reflect on it before on earth and you yourself greatly restrain 80 and totally forsake those evil practices that you before took pleasure in and nourished in this life.

Endnotes

1. For a fuller characterization of the manuscript and its composition, see Ker (82) and Zacher (83 84).

2. Hælende here means “healer” in the sense that Christ is the great physician, our savior.

3. Here I adopt Whitbread’s phrasing (181).

4. Whitbread suggests lar instead of the MS lac. The change is small but helps with the sense of the line that to give alms to the poor is the Lord’s “teaching” rather than his “grace” (181).

5. Here I translate wisan, “manners,” as “habits” in the sense of the cultivated dispositions of the soul.

6. The asterisks here represent an emendation in Dobbie’s edition of the text. One can view the manuscript, very handily made available digitally through Stanford’s Parker Library website and see that there is no visible lacuna in the text: parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/cr485km1781. Dobbie acknowledges that previous editors have printed the line as continuous, but he elects not to do this because of a disagreement in the gender of a pronoun and its presumed referent (184). I translate it here without syntactic disruption, but I have retained Dobbie’s asterisks to preserve the line numbering. I am indebted to Zacher’s translation for the resolution of these lines (96).

7. For line 68, I adopt Zacher’s translation: “against the life of a lord” (103). The term drihten “lord” is very often a religious term denoting “God,” but this usage

is borrowed from its earlier, secular sense, “lord,” as in a noble, warrior, or, simply, a man.

Works Cited

Dobbie, Elliot van Kirk, ed. The Anglo Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR, vol. 6. New York: Colombia University Press, 1942.

Ker, N. R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Whitbread, L. “The Old English ‘Exhortation to Christian Living’: Some Textual Problems.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 44, no. 2, 1949, pp. 178 183.

Zacher, Samantha. “The Rewards of Poetry: ‘Homiletic’ Verse in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201.” Selim, vol. 12, 2003 2004, pp. 83 108.

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 24 29

just like yesterday” and Other Poems

Todd Sukany

just like yesterday and the yesterday before that one, I peer backward in time, pining for days of old, the good life, the leeks of Egypt (or whatever land I recently called home). and just like yesterday, I find no trail, no path, no shortcut, and I grow more salty.

Of Memes and Headlines

The lower case “g” on your spelling of God reduces His existence in His universe

like a single herring snatched from a mega shoal while you become a cement filled bobber at the bottom of an ocean of love.

Until the Lion Walks among Us “And your spoil shall be gathered . . . .” Isaiah 33:4

A squad of jackals has been gathering just outside the steps and earshot of the others. They howl like air escaping a giant Teflon balloon. Collecting

has been their main activity for years. Of late, their diet has expanded toward mortal philosophy and empty deceit, in a word: melons. As the waste lines

increase and they plump on their own devices, the roar of visitation is being felt just over the hill.

In the City of Gold

“And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus . . .” Matthew 8:29

Once again a season of singing affirms: an hour with the Lord is as a timeless jewel. Song after song declare His holiness. A chorus explores the mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory. How sweet the sound that turns a wretch like me into a blob of snot and tears.

An angel, taller than the building, invites three others to join our refrain on their speedy way to another appointment.

Once again, dirty rats scurry back into holes of darkness like pigs into a sea.

In Tent

(Minnie Harris Park in Harrison, AR)

As the family gathers, the heat should be oppressive, but no.

Some begin to lift hands, a joyful noise, and Gramma G breaks into dance,

her age closest to the temperature. Several children stop coloring

long enough to smile. Soon the tent is rocking . . . Holy, Holy, Holy.

The next two hours blaze by as quickly as the cool breeze brushing against the fans.

Before the Council

“And he went in and sat down with the guards . . .” Matthew 26:58

I expect him to walk out . . . about . . . now, while I stand before this fire, eavesdropping, counting the flock of witnesses Barach, lover of the windy, Nani, leader of the house, Mitchiam, exemplar for the waffle all spilling stories and half truths.

Any second now, I expect him to walk out, truck right through the midst of them, past security, and not even flip a whip.

This third time, I expect him to walk out, without a sound, part the gaggle of guards, and head back to camp. Once there, he will stare into our souls and say “Children, beware of the rooster,” as though we know what that means.

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Two Haiku Sequences

John Zheng

Retracing Jesus’ Steps (After Terry Bidgood’s photographs in The Lands of the Bible Calendar 2021)

page by page each turn into a new view shepherds’ field sunshine billowing for the birth of Jesus

Nazareth rocks dotted with purple flowers a view of Christ’s home

Jordan River His baptism a constant flow

Judaean Desert Jesus’ fasting descends to the Dead Sea

time worn ruins of Capernaum synagogue His voice remains sermon on the mount the groundwork of all lives for all seasons

morning temple Jesus’ steps steady as rock walls

Dome of the Rock atop it the Father looks to the Son

gold gilded Dome the sun opens its arms to the messiah

Passover in the upper room Christ’s blood in the cup

Garden of Gethsemane Jesus’ loneliness in each blooming flower

Via Dolorosa way to the cross a route of pilgrimage Holy Sepulchre sunshine from the dome the light from Him garden tomb Jesus Christ rising again boat on the sea following Him to new life

Note: “Garden of Gethsemane” is written after Alex Soh’s photograph of the same source.

Psalm Haiku

1 rough sea a mighty voice over waves 2 flowing water the way to Him for a way of life 3 fenced pasture the open gate lets out lambs to roam 4 waterfall blessings pour into the heartland 5 blooming tulips the season of singing in His glory 6 brown bed of dead sea beauty of solitude from His hands 7 docked boat a break before sailing on His guided path 8 night sky in the shadow of His wings winking stars

9 morning sun each tulip a cup of red light 10 golden pasture soft fumbling of sunshine through grasses 11 hiking in banff His might and mystery in rocky mountains 12 sign of spring a ladybug cruising on the bare branch

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal 34

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 34

Two Poems

Rebecca Duke

Baby Books

When I first knew of you, I bought old books: The Mitten, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alexander and the Magic Mouse So we may know each other In your mother’s arms, Faith, And a world of talking animals.

Baby Names

it seems beyond my right to give a name, yet here you are, cooing to a sound that echoes the weight and lightness of His image.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 35 44

“Prayer, Prairie, 1872” and Other Poems

Mark Tappmeyer

Prayer, Prairie, 1872

You wondered if your prayer reached beyond the low ceiling of sod where the goat grazed the grass on the flat roof, its hoof step and munching woven into “Give us this day our . . . chew . . . step . . . chew.”

The dry sky, seed corn gone to rats, fever collecting on Maggie’s brow.

You sent hope soaring like an arrow into the blue above the wide Kansas plain.

You doubt it reached past the plop of the goat that never bent a knee.

Potency

“For the wages of sin is death . . . .”

The Bible, Romans 6:23

Here, dip your corn chip into this pulp of tomato and chunks of Anaheim peppers floating like tropical islands in a sea of steam. Tangy, at 500 units on the Scoville scale of pepper heat, don’t you agree?

But if you want more flame, try this slurry of Tabasco peppers or challenge yourself with the salsa of devil hot Habaneros, 50,000 or 350,000 units of blaze. The difference between a candle and a volcano.

Mind you and it’s not recommended if you have a wish for death, touch the tip of your tongue to this paste of the lord, the high king, of hot peppers, the Carolina Reaper, all bones and scythe and white fire. A cremation at 1,641,300 units.

More potent than the fabled Red Ghost pepper. Nearing the caliber of sin.

Habitation

“You . . . were deeper inside me than my deepest depths . . . .”

St. Augustine

Are you, O Master, somewhere behind my bladder or within the coils of my intestines?

Are you in the closet of my memories, the flash fire of my desires, even the wreckage of my confusions?

Somewhere you are there, crawling through me like the Holy Worm.

Longing

On the first round of the morning they found him lifeless, as was expected, but they gasped when they pulled back his blanket.

Every inch of the old fellow, all of him each joint and muscle, his ears, the nails on his toes, the toes were stretched like pulled taffy.

His pug nose had gone serpentine. The legs of his pajamas looked shinnied up his calves. His ankles, jutting from his knee socks, dangled off the end of the mattress.

“Well,” offered an orderly, “he said he was longing to go.”

On the Subway

“For we are . . . the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved . . . .”

1 Corinthians 2:15

I watched the man standing next to you lean closer, so slight a move. Were you aware? His nostrils flared like nostrils do at scents of honeysuckle for one or lemon balm or resplendence, when it ladens air. Something sweet in you.

A woman, passing to a seat, paused by your arm did you not see? and raised her nose like one does whiffing blooms of trumpet vine, of a puff of glory too, climbing a pole.

Down the aisle eyes scanned the car as if the smells they smelled were seeable, like eyes do when searching fragrances of mint, of peony or wonderment, wild grown and now invasive.

Combustible

“In the composition of the human frame, there is a good deal of inflammable matter . . . .” George Washington

You realize you are little more than a pile of shavings. Kindling really or pine straw, maybe dried leaves, packed foot to hip. Belt to neck. A skull full of combustibles.

You knew a woman stuffed with shredded newsprint who went up in a flash.

Squeeze

“God sent his own Son, born of a woman . . . .” Gal. 4:4

It was stuffing a skyscraper into a shoe box, a bridge into a thimble, the cosmic, the glorious, into a wad of tissue.

Atoms pinched infinitely dense with each cram of the Almighty foot, the heft of the Divine palm.

Until until a baby, this baby, had formed.

Descent

"The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout . . . .” 1 Thessalonians 4:16

He cinched his belt and stepped to the tip of all things, the apex of imagination. Cancer the Crab and Cassiopeia Vain Queen and a crowd of celestial bodies floated far below, as did human vanity, not yet a pinprick of light in the pitch black. A flick of the knees and He launched, arms outstretched into a cross, plunging as if forever. And ever. Slicing the thinness, the emptiness. Missiling down. A shout beginning to curl in his throat.

Jelly Beans

Kelly Ripa on “Live with Kelly and Ryan”

I want the black one in the middle of the pile, the licorice bean with its tinge of the woody and the floral, sneakingly bitter and sweet.

The mouth of the jar is too small, so I shake and swirl the beans. The colors red and yellow and blue, green and white rise and sink and rise like cars on a roller coaster.

The sole black bean appears then disappears.

Could Kelly Ripa be wrong that there are bad beans, at least some with insolence, refusing to give in, like me, endlessly working this jar?

“I don’t believe in bad jelly beans, just bad people eating them.”

Defense

C. S. Lewis

The bulwark you throw up with sweat, picks, and shovels a bucket of self at a time.

The walls, entrenched branchless, sharpened with persistence, with which you encase yourself.

The guard towers you erect. The sentries in squads with narrowed eyes, armed with blades and pikes and pride, relieved on the hour.

Even the endless routine the practice thrusting, feigning, blocking.

The tutorials in slashing.

If you only knew what you were working so hard to keep out.

“[H]ow cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 45 46

“church bells…” and Two Other Poems

John J. Han

(Two haiku)

church bells…* the pack of gum I stole fifty years ago reading Dante fire and ice mixed in a dream (A tanka)

the way to church ** I change lanes to pass a slow driver we exchange glances this holy morning

*

Previously published in Frogpond: The Journal of the Haiku Society of America, vol. 37, no. 2, Spring/Summer 2014, p. 40, and in Beyond the Grave: Contemporary Afterlife Haiku (ed. Robert Epstein), West Union, WV: Middle Island Press, 2015, p. 89. The poem was inspired by St. Augustine’s Confessions (written c. 397 c.400), in which the author regrets a pear stealing incident:

Fair were those pears, but not them did my wretched soul desire; for I had store of better, and those I gathered, only that I might steal. For, when gathered, I flung them away, my only feast therein being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy. For if aught of those pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin. (chapter 2)

Translated by E. B. Pusey (Edward Bouverie)

**

Previously published in cattails, May 2015, tanka page 4.

The Inspiration Tower in Branson, Missouri

(A tanka prose)

The Inspiration Tower, one of the landmarks of Branson, stands in the place where the preacher author Harold Bell Wright wrote his bestselling novel The Shepherd of the Hills (1907). As a student of Wright’s fiction working on two books on him, I have visited the Shepherd of the Hills Adventure Park, where the tower stands, three times. However, I went to the top of the tower only twice. In September 2022, the elevator was broken, so I had to leave after buying a few Wright souvenirs. A month later, I went up to the top, taking pictures of the surrounding areas in all directions. The rolling hills of the Ozarks looked wonderful even though it was rainy. On a clear day, one can even see the Boston Mountains in Arkansas and Oklahoma to the southwest. Most of the visitors to the tower seem to know or care little about the deep connection between the place and Harold Bell Wright. The Shepherd of the Hills is set in the places one can see from the tower Mutton Hollow, Dewey Bald, Sammy’s Lookout, Old Matt’s Cabin, Old Matt’s Barn, and Roark Valley (where Wash Gibbs’s log cabin stood), among many others. Having read The Shepherd of the Hills and other Wright novels set in the Ozarks, I find the place to be more than a tourist site. Going there almost feels like a pilgrimage for me.

towards dusk sunlight lingers on the ridge… shadows deepen in the valley

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring 2022): 47 60

NONFICTION AND PHOTO ARTS

Review Article

Three Poetic Journeys: Alternate Paths to Expanded Meaning in Life

• Polette, Keith. Pilgrimage: Haibun. Red Moon Press, 2020. ISBN: 978 1 947271 69 2. 94 pages, $20.00.

• McGee, Margaret D. Haiku The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines. SkyLight Paths, 2009. ISBN: 978 1 59473 269 0. 192 pages.

• Harnden, Philip. Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others. SkyLight Paths, 2003. ISBN-10: 1594731810; ISBN-13: 978-1594731815. 144 pages, $15.00.

C. Clark Triplett

All three of these books of poetry and poetic prose are about journeys with some common threads related to the type of poetry and the theme of a search for meaning, but each is also different in terms of what areas of experience are emphasized. All of them convey their journey through spare and unencumbered poetry and prose or poetic prose that explores such possible places and things as nature, exotic locations, fictional worlds, magical experiences, spiritual dimensions, everyday life as well as in between spaces. Each author seeks to share something unique about life that helps the reader tune in to a deeper understanding of life. Each of these books also raises important questions for the reader such as: Where do our journeys take us? What is most important about our journey? Has anything changed as result of our journey?

Keith Polette, Pilgrimage

This review starts with the work of Keith Polette’s little book of haibun, Pilgrimage, which is perhaps the most complex and thought provoking of the three. It is a journey that starts and ends at a rather strange place, the edge of the

desert. Although deserts are mostly filled with dead things, this desert has something to say: “Something calls to me from the edge of the desert…” (no page number). More than that, the desert even seems to sing to those who listen, “the scattered skulls of cows lowing to the wind, an arroyo mouthing dry poems, stones rising out of the sand to sing of constellations that have never been named…” (n.p.). Throughout this journey, Polette finds treasures in some of the most obscure and overlooked places. Traditionally the pilgrimage in literature is a journey into some unknown or foreign place to find a new or expanded understanding of self, others, nature, spirituality, or life itself. While Polette does travel to a number of interesting places, sometimes he finds rich meaning in the discovery of a penny or a clothesline which are as polysemous as more exotic places and things. His discussion of novel skills such Kinsugi, the Japanese art of mending pottery, the image of the kiln in “The Hollow,” and Boketto, the Japanese art of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking, all lend themselves to multiple meanings that extend the possibilities of new perceptions of reality. This is what Paul Ricoeur described as the “surplus of meaning” in which the text escapes the finite horizon lived by its author (Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning 30). Each of these vignettes encourages an extension of thought that opens up doors of imagination and possible contexts.

Polette’s vignettes include a cornucopia of sounds, sights, and images. He makes even the most mundane and easily forgetable leap off the page. “Walking to my car in the grocery parking lot, I noticed a shiny dot on the asphalt. Coming closer, I discovered it was a new penny, its copper color beaming with sun, causing it to resemble the burning eye of a tiny cyclops” (n.p). The creative use of metaphor to link the “shiny dot” to the “burning eye of a tiny cyclops” provides a new configuration for this ordinary thing so that its creative value is extended. There is a movement or interaction between something our eyes might pass over because it so common to something that captures our imagination in order to expand and re figure the reader’s vision of the world (John Searle’s “world to word fit”). In this way, the author takes the reader on a journey that may have a transformative impact of possible ways of being in the world.

On this journey, Polette also explores both the visual and literary artists such as Van Gogh, Blake, Frost, Twain, Kafka, Borges, Yeats, and Hemmingway. In most cases, these are imaginative strolls through the world of the artist. For instance, Van Gogh’s famous “Wheatfield with Crows” is usually interpreted in a melancholy way as a foreshadowing of his death. However, the author offers an alternative vision which is much more vital of the birthing of a great and terrible bird “whose wings will cut the air like scythes and whose heart will beat with the will of savage divinity” (n.p.). Although this is a novel interpretation, it allows for a broader alternative reading of Van Gogh’s work and life. In his elaboration of William Blake’s tiger image, Polette considers multiple interpretations including a sculpture forged by a blacksmith “who found beauty burning in ferocity,” or parts of the author’s soul, or even a divinity “who had the rawness of heart to conjure and create such a clawed creature,” or maybe to come to grips with “the tiger of time” (n.p.). As his consciousness streams back to the present,

the writer contemplates how tame modern tigers in the zoo just lie in the shade ‘like a lumpy throw rug.” In his somewhat surreal haibun “Kafka Calling,” the narrator is called on to “visit Borges.” When he says, “You are both dead,” he is told to go anyway. He then engages in a bit of magic by catching a flight of crows south, perhaps to Argentina, where he is greeted by Borges or “someone becoming Borges.” The vignette ends when he is led into a library “where books were singing on shelves.” In each of these journeys, Polette attempts to imaginatively enter the creative spirit of the artist and provide multiple perspectives on their work.

In his Pilgrimage, Polette visits several in between spaces. In “Silence” there are sounds in an old train station that would be lost in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The silence makes it possible to hear the sound of a dripping faucet in the diner that fills the space…“and a porch swing that creaks once, because the wind being paper thin, cannot even conjure a whisper” (n.p.). The vignette ends with a haiku that is transitional from silence to everyday life:

gray morning the woodpecker wakes the day (n.p.)

The prose poem “In Transit” tells the story of uncle Joe Bone who says he was born “on a train halfway between Chicago and St. Louis.” He always felt his life was in motion, like “his legs were made of river water, the currents pulling him downstream towards a destiny that most likely would be a waterfall.” Here, as in many other vignettes, it would seem that Polette’s prose completely overwhelms his poetry, but the haiku is quite subtle, as it should be in a good haibun. They are in a way tangential to the story, often only providing a hint or key that helps unlock the deeper meaning of the descriptive prose. Sometimes it even provides a follow up to the story. In the haibun “The Choice,” which includes a quote from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” the author describes a wild cotton tree that took root just behind a rock wall in the yard and now has grown to over fifty feet. The choice is that, if nothing is done, the wall will topple. The haiku that follows is less subtle than most in the collection, but provides an answer to what choice was made and another question about why choice may have been so difficult

sound of chopping my daughter asks if trees have feelings (n.p.)

Polette’s little haibun book is fascinating and well worth reading because, in his journey, he pays attention to the great diversity of life. He is able to tune in to the mundane and forgotten things and the sights, sounds, and experiences that are often missed in everyday life. The ability to see things from odd angles and alien perspectives helps open the doors to strange new worlds, realities that are not always comfortable, what Freud called “the uncanny.” This book is a treat to the reader’s senses, offering many opportunities for discourse on the meanings of life.

Margaret

D. McGee,

Haiku The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines

Haiku the Sacred Art is included in a series of books on art and spirituality. The journey for the writer of this book begins with a “haiku moment” when “the mind stops and the heart moves” (3). This kind of experience happens when a person is tuned into a special way of seeing and there is a connection between human experience, nature, and the unity of God's creation. In this journey, there is a kind of perceptual shift which is also a religious or spiritual experience that expresses “a human longing that lies deep within all great faith traditions: the need to find our place in the world, to feel in our hearts our relationship to each other and to all of creation” (6 7). It is the capture of these special perceptual moments in writing, however, that is transformative, “that make you feel alive and whole moments that make you aware of holiness in a way to relate to the Creative Spirit through the ‘now’ of this moment” (8).

Margaret D. McGee teaches the reader the basics of writing haiku, but this learning process also becomes a spiritual journey because “as you enter this book, the images and connections that come out of your imagination will be expressions of your creative self, showing that you are made in the image of the Spirit that creates all things” (7). So, the central theme of this book is that the process and practice of writing haiku is a way of spiritual living. McGee uses religious language and symbols to articulate the experience of writing haiku. It is like taking the sacrament taking the bread and wine is an experience of joining with others in a sacred activity. Haiku is not simply an idea or technique. It is also participation in a special experience so that, in the writing, the author becomes a conduit that passes along the mystery of life that the Spirit gives “the language of creation” (10). The journey of haiku is a moment in time in which the writer taps into the essence of creation and viscerally feels and touches a mystery. This experience is captured in a quotation from R. H. Blyth: “A haiku is…a hand beckoning, a door half opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature” (12). So, for McGee, haiku is clearly a way of connecting the human experience to nature or creation in a way that creates something more than the two, “a deeper unity that lies beneath the surface of things” (14).

Taking time to look at the world and to really pay attention to the theater that is played out every day is a way of celebrating and acknowledging the Divine, according to McGee. “Become a spectator in the greatest drama ever played the drama of the open leaf, the rising bread dough, the drilling woodpecker, the chasing dog, the cloud that crosses the moon. Then in a few words, give the moment its due by writing a simple three line prayer” (28 29). So, haiku is a form of prayer that reflects back like a mirror God’s created world away from the often-narcissistic world that everyone lives in and which seems to permeate everything.

McGee makes a case that haiku is a way of being grateful: “O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” Human beings tend to want to shape and

revise everything according to their own needs. Haiku looks in a different direction: “The relief I feel in turning my focus outward comes from not only escaping the confines of my hungry little self, but also in finding my true self, transformed in the essence of the world around me” (30). This does not mean that human imagination is cancelled out, rather it is enhanced by being tuned in to the broader creative Spirit. So, a posture of gratitude is more likely to lead to a deeper sincerity for the truth and reality that confronts in our present experience of creation a way of striving for “makoto: the sincerity, or poetic truth, for which a haiku poet strives” (33). McGee does spend some time discussing early forms of poetry in Japan, such as tanka, that preceded the development of the haiku. The tanka that is translated in five lines of 5 7 5 7 7 sound symbols (on) which are somewhat similar to English syllables. In the ninth through the twelfth centuries, poetry was widely practiced at the Japanese imperial court, and almost everyone at court wrote poems about the human condition, politics, religion, love, and everyday life. This common practice led to competitive poetry, which in turn included collaborative efforts that emphasized tanka’s two- part form in which one composing the first three lines of 5 7 5 and the other responding with the last two 7 7 lines. This two part poetry was called tan renga and later became an important part of social occasions as a diversion from everyday life. Later, this short poem was extended into a longer poem called a renga which repeated the five line several times in the 5 7 5 7 7 pattern. “It was in this lively milieu of writing poetry as a social game that the peculiar character of haiku began to take shape growing out of the requirements for the renga’s three line starting verse, called the hokku” (46). Since the hokku became the launching point for the rest of the long poem sometimes poets would compose the hokku ahead of time hoping to have their verse chosen for the beginning of the renga. The recognition of the hokku as an independent form of poetry evolved gradually particularly as Bashō, a respected teacher and popular renga leader, published hokku in his travel journals in the seventeenth century. It was not until the nineteenth century that Masaoka Shiki proposed treating the hokku offshoot of the renga as a separate form which he named haiku.

It is in the chapter dealing with the development of haiku that McGee discusses the difficulties and rewards of sharing haiku with the rest of the world particularly in its English forms. For instance, the 5 7 5 sound pattern in Japanese has no equivalent. Early on there was no effort to follow the 5-7-5 pattern using free translations that they thought would sound more natural, but in the end the poems did not seem much like haiku. Eventually, translators decided to simply equate one Japanese sound symbol with an English syllable. This created a structure that was easy to understand in English, creating a new form that eventually caught on. Of course, translations from Japanese are still often difficult, and some places and season words lose their rich religious, poetic, and cultural meaning in the process. However, believes this process has been important because “(i)n sharing haiku with others, we discover that we are not alone in our feelings, but that sorrow, joy, and all that comes between are part of the universal human spirit” (51). It is here that she shares some of the very basic

elements of writing haiku and concludes this section by reminding the reader: “The crux of writing haiku is recognizing what is right in front of you, writing it down, the stepping back to see all that was hidden before you took the time to really look” (56).

According to McGee there is an interesting relationship between the moment of personal insight in writing a haiku and the universal aspects of time and place. “Over centuries of verse writing in Japan, a body of recognized season words developed, becoming a standard part of the haiku form. These special words and phrases called kigo have been collected in seasonal almanacs over time and continue to be used in writing haiku, particularly in Japan. These words remind readers of a particular time of the year of experiences and events that evoke deep feelings and longings sometimes from the distant past. This is why the “haiku moment” is so fertile because it can trigger a whole universe of memories and personal feelings. Even small things like an ornament on a Christmas tree can bring multi layered associations of childhood or collection of family rituals. “By situating a haiku in its own season, we can tap into the depth of generations that are contained in the essence of one moment, at the same time opening a door for feeling from the past to come into the present and touch us again” (69).

Writing haiku not only brings a universal sense of time where God is felt and known, it also reminds us that we are tied to sacred places in our lives that define who we are and what is important to us. According to McGee, “If we can better understand what it is about these sacred places that gives meaning to human life, we are better able to offer back that meaning in our haiku” (73). Any place where and individual feels a sense of awe or wonder or recognizes God may become a sacred place. Some sacred places are associated with such deep memories that they easily evoke emotions that are close to the surface, “especially feelings of deep sorrow and comfort” (72). Some places are very special over time because they bring a sense of belonging, eventually becoming places that feel like home: “Over time, the places where we have a sense of belonging, a sense of home, come to hold feelings that can stretch from sorrow to joy and all that lies between” (74). Home is perhaps the most sacred place of all because offers a universal anchor that grounds a person no matter where they may travel on a journey or wander in life. Even in the most alien places, the poet may look out at a place or thing that evokes a memory or image of place that brings a sense of wholeness: “A haiku grounded in place can reach us and share the ties that connect us to the earth, to each other” (77).

McGee draws inspiration for her haiku writing from spiritual practices used by different faiths that help focus her awareness. One such practice that is discussed in some detail is one in which Jewish rabbis and their disciples chant scripture in the form of prayerful meditation called haga. Haga turns an encounter with scripture into an experience of deep feeling and meditation that often includes weeping out of sadness for the world or sometimes out of pure joy because you have tapped into your own heart and God’s heart as well. The word itself can mean many things such as “moaning” or “roaring” or “groaning,” which reflects a diversity of feelings as one meditates on scripture. In Christianity, the

desert ascetics carried this practice forward in what they called the lectio divina, meaning “holy or sacred reading” (85). This was a way of meeting God in scripture and experiencing God’s presence. This is not a form of analysis or exegesis of scripture, but rather leads to an encounter “that is active, immediate, and engaged” much like the experience in writing haiku. It is because it is focused on language or words that it connects well with haiku writing. The process of lectio divina includes four steps: lectio (reading and listening), meditation (meditation), oratio (prayer), and contemplation (contemplation). The author, who is a spiritual leader in the Episcopalian church, uses this process to write haiku based on a contemplation of scriptural passages and associations and images after meditating and prayerfully reading the written haiku. Ultimately, the process of following the lection divina as an inspiration for haiku was to carry the words of scripture out those around you: “When you carry the words of sacred texts out into the world with you, and look with attention, you may see the words reflected back to you in the common events and objects of daily life” (94). McGee stresses the importance of writing and sharing haiku in a group. Although the result of writing in community is not always great poems, it does allow everyone to participate without intimidation. It is also a demonstration of the group’s words coming together to see what happens. Quite often the result is unexpected and the opportunity to share creative moments in which doors of personal connection and understanding are opened that were not possible before. “Linking to other voices leaves room for serendipity, and serendipity opens a door for deeper sensations and feelings to come out and play” (116). Developing the sacred art of haiku requires an awareness of what is going on in the world out there right in front of you every day: “A haiku is an expression of openness to God’s creation, just as it is” (138). But this is something that must be developed as a habit. Writing haiku every day helps to form patterns of awareness and attention that show the way to experience the wonder and joy of creation. When you decide to write a haiku every day all you really have to do is pay attention to something and give a written response. Not all of the responses will be great poetry, but some will find some treasures and over time you will collect many memories and recorded events that will be markers in your life. McGee suggests that one way to start a haiku habit is by integrating it into a habit you already have, such as reading or a daily devotional or even prayer. Another way is writing haiku around holiday themes or a particular season such as autumn or Thanksgiving. McGee provides a number of helpful books to help deepen your understanding of haiku. Some of the suggestions include Hiroaki Sato’s Bashō’s Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passage which renders many of his haiku with beautiful illustrations by master painter Yosa Buson. The author also mentions R. H. Blyth’s four volume work Haiku reveals his deep love of haiku. Several books that will help sharpen skills for writing haiku include The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku by William J. Higgenson with Penny Harter, and Lee Gurga’s Haiku: A Poet’s Guide. The student who is learning to write haiku should read as many of the old masters as possible as well as sharing your haiku with others who share their work with you, “a circle comes around and we inspire each other” (142).

For those who are interested in using haiku as a form of spiritual practice, as does the author, “[l]istening to the haiku of others and sharing your own on a common spiritual theme opens multiple pathways for its meaning to enter your heart” (143).

This is a very helpful book for those beginning the journey of writing haiku, it also has useful hints for those who have been practicing haiku for some time. What makes this work unique is how McGee makes haiku a form of spiritual practice. Applying it as a form of prayer and meditation, writing haiku becomes a way of learning how to be more alive and aware in the moment and tuning into God’s presence in creation. Sometimes as the practitioner goes looking for God’s presence in the world through the writing of haiku and “sometimes it seems the Spirit comes looking for me” (95). As one begins to practice haiku daily, it eventually becomes a spiritual habit that honors the sacredness of everyday life.

In Journeys of Simplicity, Philip Harnden travels vicariously through the lives of some well known writers, spiritual seekers, naturalists, literary characters, and others. He focuses on what these pilgrims took with them and, in some cases, what they left behind. Mostly, these are stories of unencumbered living in which the travelers considered only what is most essential in life. Each fellow pilgrim is “traveling light” and the poetic prose focuses on how graceful each lives even when they have only the necessary baggage. Like the ancient middle aged man from China named P’ang Yūn, they live life “like a single leaf” (1). So, this is a book about choosing priorities and what is most important in life. With the few things they carried with them, each travels with focus and intention “from place to place, day to day, from birth to death” (Back Cover).

In each of the vignettes, the author provides a brief glimpse of each of the forty travelers with a description of the traveler and their and itinerary and then a list of things they brought with them “in a battered leather bag” (45). Some of the descriptions are pretty simple and sparse, but they make a significant point: “He traveled light, and there was nothing except friendship he wasn’t prepared to leave behind” (34). The poetry or poetic prose is as spare as the belongings each traveler brings. Although the vignettes are light, they are meant to be read slowly and pondered because they raise questions about life and what direction it is going. As the author indicates, it is “a journey of lightness and light” (1). Most of the fellow travelers in this book are committed to lives that go beyond the ordinary even though they live simple lives. Such interesting travelers as Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, who was a social activist and scholar, was ironically committed to living a sparse existence in a “small unadorned…cinderblock building with cement floors” (6) where he cut his own wood and prepared his own food on a Coleman stove. His personal effects included: a Timex watch, a pair of dark glasses (tortoise frames), two pairs of bifocals (plastic frames), two

Philip Harnden, Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others

leather bound breviaries, one rosary (broken), and one small icon of wood (virgin and child). Merton’s way of life spilled over with irony because the Trappist way was a vow of silence, but his words and thoughts were heard all over the world. He traveled light throughout life until his death and then his light shone in so many corners of the world.

There are forty travelers in all who are committed to a more graceful way of life that leaves behind most material things. Some of the travelers are much better known than others such as Henry David Thoreau, “the American Transcendentalist, writer, and apostle of the simple life” (24). Although Thoreau is best known for his writing about the essential way of life, he was best know in his own time for his pencils. He helped his father create one of the finest pencils of his time. Interestingly, on a canoe trip which was unusually overloaded, it was “noteworthy for what it omits a tool of both his trades: a pencil” (24). The other, less encumbered Thoreau lived in a ten by fifteen foot cottage on Walden Pond. He only had three chairs: “’one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society’” (28).

Some of the most intriguing travelers in Harnden’s list are the ordinary, unassuming character’s such as Sue, an impoverished but skilled and gracious cook in M.F.K. Fisher’s 1942 book about wartime food shortages How to Cook a Wolf. “She spent less than fifty dollars or less on food. Yet her salads and stews were renowned because she blended them so skillfully, with such thought, and she cared enough to share them with her friends” (40). Sue was the epitome of what it means to travel light to know what is essential and to make the most of it. At Sue’s table there was:

A few plates no knives no electricity only one candle whether two or eight at table mysterious perfume of bruised herbs sage gathered in the hills knew a hundred different kinds (41)

Harnden’s list includes many other fictional characters including Father Terrence, an Irish Catholic priest and Cistercian monk on the coast of Australia in Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines. He lived years in a humble hermitage “cobbled from corrugated sheet” who exclaimed: “Isn’t it wonderful? To live in this wonderful twentieth century? For the first time in history, you don’t need to own a thing” (34). There is also the initially reluctant character, Bilbo Baggins, grandson of the Old Took and diminutive hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit. When something tookish overtakes him, he suddenly decides to leave all his comforts and in his hobbit hole and join thirteen dwarves on a great adventure. There is Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Mehlville’s Moby Dick, who cannot wait to “get to sea” when life gets difficult and grim. He takes only the barest of essentials including “a shirt or two…stuffed in an old carpet bag” (53). Then

there is Bill Wasowich, a backwoodsman and born again Christian, in John McPhee’s book The Pine Barrens who lives the sparest yet most fulfilling in a “(s)turdy saltbox in the woods perhaps eighteen feet square clean within, almost empty” (65). All of these characters, among others, live their lives in the most basic way and yet are able to seize the moment and “kiss the joy as it fly’s by” (Eternity, William Blake).

Harnden includes a number of personalities who lived extremely humble lives but had an enormous impact beyond any particular time and culture. Travelers such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who, on the eve of his 1932 fast to rid India of Untouchability, “joked that he possessed few clothes and fewer teeth” (98). His earthly possessions included: two dinner bowls, a wooden fork and spoon, a diary, a prayer book, eyeglasses, three porcelain monkeys, watch, spittoon, letter openers, and two pairs of sandals. There is, of course, Jesus of Nazareth, whose life and teachings are the foundation of the Christian faith. When he sent forth his disciples, he said, “Take nothing for your journey save a staff. No knapsack, no bread, no money, not two coats, be shod with sandals. Go preach, heaven is at hand, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils” (qtd. in 69). Others, who may not be as well known as Gandhi or Jesus still had a significant influence on people’s lives such as Dorothy Day, devout Catholic “holy troublemaker” and founder of the Catholic worker movement. She lived among the urban poor encouraging Christians to works of mercy to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, give water to the thirsty, and care for the sick and to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” (86). All of these travelers gave up much and advocated love in action in spite of their poverty.

This is a book that considers what is important in life as it looks at the journeys of some people who are well known and some who are not so well known. It is a book that ponders the mystery: “We take delight in things; we take delight in being loosed from things. Between these two delights, we must dance our lives” (4). The book is meant to be read slowly as many questions are raised about what is important in life and what guides the way. The poetry in this work is less than spectacular, but it is meant to be spare and almost skeletal because it is about unencumbered traveling. As the author seems to indicate, it is more like writing on the back of an envelope, a kind of scribbling of a person on the way. Although the writing is meager, it raises deep questions about what is important and whether we have the necessary lightness and the indispensable light.

Alternative Paths to Expanded Meaning in Life

These three books emphasize different aspects of the journey whether to visit new and unusual places, finding spiritual awakening or expanded meaning, or discovering what is most important in life. Sometimes people notice things that have been overlooked before and discover a new significance or beauty. For Bilbo Baggins the journey stands for adventure and all of its possibilities in The Hobbit, but perhaps more about life and its dangers in The Fellowship of the Ring:

The road goes ever on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet And whither then? I cannot say. (58)

Whatever the emphasis, it seems that each author expects a transformation of sorts before the end of the journey even if it is only a matter of appreciating another culture. It is interesting that a pilgrimage or journey means a separation for a period of time and then a return to the everyday world of home. Sometimes a journey results in a change in identity or attitude because of some experience. For religious pilgrims, there is often an expectation of some spiritual encounter that brings change. Christian priest Frank Fahey writes that a pilgrim is “always in danger of becoming a tourist” (218) or vice versa since in his view travel always upsets the fixed order of life at home.

The pilgrimage or journey is a rather common theme in literature as found in Canterbury Tales or Pilgrims Progress. There are different motivations in literature for these journeys. Sacred travel usually includes a search for deeper spirituality or ultimate salvation, but sometimes there may be more practical reasons such as healing or forgiveness of sins. In other cases, a pilgrimage may be linked with travel for overtly secular reasons. In some literary and religious works, the pilgrim is not traveling by choice and sometimes is not welcome in the places visited. There is in some literature an inevitability a about the journey. The term sojourner, for instance, refers to someone who does not belong, a foreigner, alien, stranger, or exile. For example, during the exodus, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years without a home. “We are foreigners and strangers in your sight, as were all out ancestors. Our days on earth are like a shadow” (I Chron. 29:15). Literary works about sojourners are often books about slavery or disenfranchisement such as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth or the The Sojourner by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Interestingly, Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, uses the “motif of exile” throughout his critical writings. By this he means that we are never at home in the world because nothing is ever settled including and specific meaning or any final foundation, metaphysical certitude, transcendental signified or stable presence. According to Richard Bernstein, “Derrida seeks to show us that we never quite are or can be at home in the world. We are always threatened by the uncanniness of what is canny; we are always in exile even from ourselves’ (Bernstein 179). He comments that it would be easy to relate this motif to Derrida’s background as an Algerian Sephardic Jew who “has always worked on the margins of (‘Greek’) philosophy and metaphysics” (Ibid). However, there is another underlying ethical political concern that makes him feel so unsettled about the world around him. It is his continuous concern about how

any archē or fixed boundary can become a means of exclusion and exile for the contaminating Other. So, there is no boundary that cannot be questioned

What may be more important for our discussion is Derrida’s use of the term’s “canny” and “uncanny” in his discussion of exile and exclusion. He borrows these terms from Freud, whose 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimlich) discusses the two antithetical German words heimlich and unheimlich (literally “from home” and “not from home” or “familiar” and “not familiar”). So, typically the word “uncanny” has been used to mean something that is strange, unfamiliar, or frightening to us. Interestingly, however, Freud also argues that uncanny has, in certain situations, been used to mean “something hidden inside the home” that was never meant to come to light. Later on, Freud discusses how these two opposite words whose meanings tend to intertwine in the un in unheimlich is a reflection of repression and what is hidden is really something familiar. What is frightening, according to Freud, is when early thoughts from childhood “slip out” and we experience anxiety.

Ray Malewitz at Oregan State University explains that, for Freud, the uncanny seems to be related to beliefs that we have repressed as adults. We cover them up because, as children, they seem wrong. We want to seem rational and in control of the world around us. It would be embarrassing to discover that our childish perspective was more real than the one we currently have. For Freud, the uncanny is the dread we feel in situations in which our childish fantasies and fears appear more real and more true than our adult worldview (Malewitz 1).

The point of this interesting study for Derrida is that meaning develops in the direction of “ambivalence” and in different contexts can lead to exclusion, violence, and condemnation. So, we must always be on the lookout and critical of the language of fixed boundaries and exact borders. Therefore, man is born in exile and so must never cease questioning the Aufhebung, the reconciliation oppositions and differences of meaning (Bernstein 179). For this reason, postmodern man is aways on the way and the journey never ends. There are other post foundationalist philosophers, however, who accept the fact that there is a surplus of meaning in texts, but that behind the text there are always possible ways of seeing or understanding the world and human life in new and refreshing ways. Paul Ricoeur, in particular, considers Freud in a different light than Derrida. “Ricoeur builds a theory based on Freud’s ‘double action in the interpretation of dreams” (Triplett and Han 113). As is emphasized in Freud’s discussion of the uncanny, there is both a showing and hiding element in each text and so, for Ricoeur there is an interpretive process of unmasking and retrieving: “Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience” (Freud and Philosophy 27). While Ricoeur’s critical element (suspicion) is important for challenging many of the same regimes of power and textual idolatries as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, it is his hermeneutic of retrieval that opens up the text: “By thinking through restrictive categories of convention, language, and political ideologies, retrieval fleshes out creative new meanings in opposition to stodgy, reductionistic portrayals of reality” (Triplett and Han 114).

Although Ricouer understands the dynamics of exclusion, violence, and disenfranchisement, it is not an endless journey. There seem to be alternate pathways on the basis of an “ontology of the not-yet” (Thistleton 351). In his Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur discusses how metaphoric discourse can lead to opening up possibilities beyond the actual world. It brings the language of both cognition and mood together as a lens for seeing the human experience in a new way. Borrowing from Monroe Beasley, Ricoeur understands metaphor as “a poem in miniature” which allows for a productive use of ambiguity that opens up the meaning of words when literal meanings would not (Interpretation Theory 46 51).

In the three poetry books reviewed, it was discovered that the use of haiku, haibun, or free verse transforms the most mundane and ordinary things. The ordinary world comes to life or, in some cases, may even be viewed and described as sacred. Through these literary journeys, the writers attempt to awaken the reader to what is most important in the world and in life that is often missed in the clutter of human existence. As one of the authors reminds us, even long dead things can bring music to our ears if we just listen. The journey of writing poetry, according to these writers, opens the mind and the emotions to new imaginative worlds of meaning. Such journeys never leave the reader unchanged so that even home seems different than it was before. This does not necessarily mean that we are lost. We are reminded of this in the new Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, when the hobbit Poppy Proudfellow repeats in her walking song:

No matter the sorrow, No matter the cost, That not all who wonder or wander are lost. (“This Wandering”)

The journeys in the works reviewed in this article are journeys of discovery. They are for readers who are in search of new or expanded meaning about self, nature, the sacred or even a deeper understanding of the everyday life. There are rewards for those who open their minds and senses to the world around them and “listen to the language of creation” (McGee 10).

Works Cited

Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation: The Ethical Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Fahey, Frank. “Pilgrims or Tourists?” The Furrow, vol. 53, no. 4, April 2022, pp. 213 218.

Triplett, C. Clark, and John J. Han. “Unmasking the Deception: The Hermeneutic of Suspicion in Lois Lowry’s The Giver Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction, edited by John J. Han, C. Clark Triplett, and Ashley G. Anthony. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018, pp. 111 121.

Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.

_______.

Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

“This Wandering Day.” Tolkien Gateaway, https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/This_Wandering_Day, 13 Nov. 2022. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

Thistleton, Anthony C. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring. Nerw York: Ballantine Books, 1973.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 61 62

A Charm of Hummingbirds

Jane Beal

I was walking up the cement path that leads between the agapanthus Africanus toward my front door when I suddenly saw her: a hummingbird, like an emerald jewel, suspended in mid air.

She was flitting from one agapanthus flower to another, sucking out the nectar deep inside, in a tiny fervor of delight. I was spellbound by her exquisite beauty, by the contrast between her iridescent body and the pale lavender blossoms to which she was so attentive. Her wings moved so rapidly that they were a blur: two shadows frenetically beating back the still air.

She saw me when I saw her, of course, and she kept one gentle eye on me as she moved among the flowers. She was completely unafraid, as if she knew she had captivated me. She trusted me to stand still, amazed by her presence. And I was amazed.

hummingbird! lavender flower petals open wider

Ten years ago, I traveled to Costa Rica during Thanksgivingtime to visit my sister, Alicia, who was then living in the capitol city of San José. On a day when Alice was not working, we took a bus to the Selvatura Park in Monteverde in the Saint Helena Cloud Rain Forest. In the park, there is a zip line, a butterfly sanctuary in a Victorian era building topped by a glass dome, and a grove hung with at least a dozen red bird-feeders. Each feeder is filled with sugar-water, where hummingbirds galore fearlessly descend to feast on happiness among their fellows. After flying down the zip line and seeing the Monarchs and Blue Morphos in all stages of their miraculous transformation, we heard the hummingbirds calling our name.

There were so many of them! Green Crowned Brilliant and White Tipped Sicklebill, Magnificent, Cinnamon, and Ruby Throated Hummingbird, Purple-Throated Mountain-Gem, and Talamanca Cordillera: they danced beautiful circles around one another as if combining salsa, merengue, and cumbia all at once. Like sparkling jewels, they flitted between the feeders. I saw the largest hummingbird in the Americas, a Violet Sabrewing. I did not see the smallest, the so called bee hummingbird, but I did see hummingbirds that were no more than an inch and a half long extraordinary and perfect.

They were so fearless, so plentiful, and so near that they were actually flying through my hair. This magical experience brought tears to my eyes! My

sister teased me, but those tears were inevitable in the presence of so many tiny angels. The image of the birds was reflected in my teardrops.

a charm of hummingbirds! angels with rainbow wings in a Renaissance painting

I remember one afternoon when I was standing in the cul de sac where my brother Abraham’s house is located in the city of Vallejo, California in the San Francisco Bay Area. His wife and children were outside with me. His white work truck was parked close by.

A hummingbird suddenly went whizzing past us, immediately arresting our attention, as she spiraled upward into the blue sky so that our eyes, following her flight, were dazzled by the sunlight shining radiantly through the white clouds that day and illuminating her sparkling form high above us.

She was heaven’s answer to a deep sorrow I was feeling. More than a distraction, that glorious little bird was a messenger, telling us about how the soul can ascend from earth to a divine realm and much more quickly than we deem likely. She was an invitation to contemplate the possibility of a spiritual breakthrough in the midst of life’s discouragements.

That moment stays in my heart, written there with notes of music, and even now, years later, my soul replays the memory like a song.

hummingbird! suddenly the sky is wider

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 63 72

Traveling to Equip Local Church Leaders in Uganda: A Photo Essay Cordell P. Schulten

On July 21, 2022, I departed from St. Louis for Bushenyi, Uganda, to serve with a team of three fellow teachers providing leadership training to local church leaders. The conferences were organized and presented through the ministry of Equipping Leaders International (ELI). Our team presented two four day conferences for pastors and their spouses to encourage and assist them in their gospel ministry throughout the western region of Uganda. ELI provides these training conferences several times throughout the year to equip and support local church leaders who will then be able to further teach and equip their local church members with the training they receive.

Psalm 121 is often called “the traveler’s psalm,” and I pray it as I venture out on each new journey. I departed St. Louis on the morning of July 21 and arrived, by God’s good and gracious hand, in Washington, D.C., where I departed later that day on the second leg of my journey to Brussels, Belgium. There, I met two members of our ELI team, Rose and Dennis Kroll, and then we traveled together to our final destination, Entebbe, Uganda. We arrived in Uganda around 11:30 p.m. Friday night local time.

“If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me…. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith” (Philippians 1:22-25 ESV).

As Paul reflected on his ministry in his prison cell, he was convinced even more that God had called and equipped him to serve his sisters and brothers in Christ with the singular purpose of encouraging their progress and joy in the faith. This same purpose motivated our Bushenyi team as we began our first conference.

God has been and is now at work in a powerful way among the churches that these dear sisters and brothers are serving. Our first sessions stressed the foundation of the Gospel, God’s design and purpose for marriage, and the wonderful ways God has created husbands and wives to be mutual helpers in life by His grace. It also stressed how God even uses our differences God uses to refine and develop us in our walk with Christ so that the marriages of believers can be a strong testimony to the mercy, grace, and forgiveness Jesus shows to us in His love.

At the conclusion of the first day’s sessions, one sister and two brothers stood up one at a time and spontaneously gave testimony to the truth of God’s Word that they had heard for their mariages that day. Pastor George, our team coordinator and an overseer of 70 local churches, said that it was very special for such testimonies to come on the very first day of a conference. Ordinarily, such responses from the conference participants are spoken on the final day as an expression of appreciation and thanksgiving. The dear sister said that she had been praying for a very long time for God to bring this teaching about living out the reality of the Gospel of Christ through their marriage relationships.

“When Barnabas arrived in Antioch, he rejoiced as he witnessed the grace of God, and he exhorted them all that they should remain faithful to the Lord Jesus with steadfast purpose of heart ” (Acts 11:23 ESV)

As I anticipated and prepared to come to Uganda, I prayed that God would give me the spirit of Barnabas to encourage and strengthen the faith of my dear sisters and brothers in Christ. Now that I have been in their midst, especially in the first three days, the Lord gave me the blessings of Barnabas both to witness

the grace of God so abundantly present in their hearts and lives, and to rejoice with them in praise and worship of Christ who unites us with one another in Him.

“What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful people, who will be able to teach others also.” (2 Timothy 2:2 ESV)

Toward the end of our first week’s conference, I taught one of the concluding sessions on the topic of parenting. I emphasized the primary role and responsibility of parents to shepherd and disciple their children so that they too would become faithful followers of Christ. I stressed that discipleship is a four fold path that begins with parents saying, first, you watch me (that is, the parents must first be examples and models of obedience, confession, and repentance as Christ’s disciples themselves); second, you help me (with whatever life activity or task you are seeking to train them in doing); third, I help you (with the task for example, with Bible study and memorization, or life skills such as cooking, washing the dishes, or laundry); and finally, I watch you.

As our first conference came to a successful conclusion, we again reminded and encouraged all the conference participants to take what they had learned over the past four days and teach and train the families in each of their

local churches to follow Christ by becoming more faithful husbands, wives, and parents to their children, all by the grace and strength of God’s Holy Spirit, as they purpose in their hearts to obey God’s Word. Our team leader and local coordinator had together graciously arranged for us to spend a full day of rest for spiritual and physical renewal and refreshment at the Mbarara University guesthouse that day over the weekend. We were even blessed with gentle rain showers to refresh us during the time of rest.

“So we built the wall. And all the wall was joined together to half its height, for the people had a mind to work. But when Sanballat and Tobiah …. heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night. In Judah it was said, ‘The strength of those who bear the burdens is failing. There is too much rubble. By ourselves we will not be able to rebuild the wall.’” (Nehemiah 4:6-9 ESV)

When the workers rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem had reached the halfway point of their project, the enemy opposition increased to its strongest force, so that discouragement began to set in. When we reached the halfway point in our mission to teach and train the local church leaders of the Bushenyi District here in Uganda, discouragement, at least within me, began to arise. There was too much rubble in my soul. I realized that I was becoming quite short tempered and easily irritated by the slightest annoying behaviors (from my perspective) of others around me. I decided to take the opportunity of a day off from any scheduled activities over the weekend and spend the entire day in solitude, personal reflection, and rest. The day alone, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer directs for his students in his little book, Life Together (1939), was extremely needed and proved to be refreshing and renewing spiritually, psychologically, and physically.

After that day alone, I awoke Sunday morning before dawn, and I was greatly looking forward to worshiping with our sisters and brothers in Christ here in Mbarara. After a breakfast of omelets, toast, tea, and fresh fruit, our host, Pastor George, arrived to take us to the location where his church gathers for worship. We traveled a few minutes away from the university guest house and came to the church building where many local believers were gathering and beginning the morning worship by singing and dancing!

You would have thought all those fiery discouraging darts that had been piercing my soul the day before would be thoroughly quenched and driven away by such a vibrant spirit of worship. However, just as the National Bishop (for the Full Gospel churches who we are serving here) was invited to preach, an

extremely painful and violently cramping bout of intestinal distress struck me. It became unavoidably necessary for me to make a fast exit from the service and to be quickly driven by the church’s deputy back to the guest house. I made it to my room just in time. I spent the rest of the afternoon suffering the ill effects of something I had eaten at breakfast.

To add to my distress, the electrical power went out at the guest house and was off for over 4 hours. My team members stopped by the guesthouse on their way from church to a family thanksgiving celebration feast at Pastor George’s home. They provided me with Gatorade, ibuprofen, and English biscuits to nibble on as I began to be restored to a measure of health.

“When he had landed at Caesarea, he went up and greeted the church, and then went down to Antioch. After spending some time there, he departed and went from one place to the next through the region of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples.” (Acts 18:22 23 ESV)

As Paul and his fellow workers returned to the areas where they had first served in ministry after a short period of rest, our ELI teaching team returned to Bushenyi from our weekend of rest in Mbarara. We were graciously enabled to begin the first session of our second leadership training conference with a new group of local pastors and their spouses, and, as if to show us His refreshing blessing, the Lord caused the latter rains to begin falling as the session was progressing.

Our second group of pastors and spouses appeared to be a little older (as a whole), more serious minded, and more mature in their faith. We also returned to our accommodations in Bushenyi at the Crane Hotel, where we have been provided quiet and comfortable rooms for evening rest and hearty meals to strengthen us during those final days of teaching and training.

“So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.” (1 Thessalonians 2:8 ESV)

We learn from Luke’s account in Acts 17 that Paul had only two or three weeks to preach and teach the Gospel in Thessalonians, yet in that short time these new followers of Jesus captured Paul’s heart. In much the same way, I do not hesitate to say that these sweet pastors and their spouses, who serve over 40 local gatherings of believers in the Bushenyi District of Western Uganda, have likewise captured my heart and soul. Upon our first introduction 12 days before, I was immediately struck by the vibrancy of their faith in Christ. The vigor and enthusiasm of their worship through singing and dancing was so wonderfully infectious! Over the course of lengthy conference sessions of instruction, their hunger for the Word of God, like that of the Bereans, grew more evident as each day’s lectures and Q&A sessions progressed.

On the second to last day, I was called upon to present three lessons the first on the Five Love Languages (as illustrated by Jesus in the Gospels), the second on Effective Communication by Active Listening and Empathy, and the third on Biblical Parenting as the first task of Discipleship. Even though I grew wearier and weaker, the wide eyed attention of these true disciples of Jesus imparted a special grace that fortified and sustained me.

The cynics among readers of this account might attribute my increased energy to an adrenaline rush, but those fellow believers who had been partnering in this endeavor through regular and faithful prayers knew the true source of the power that equips us to serve and to persevere in that service when everything within these frail jars of clay urges us to quit the struggle.

“I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother [and sister], because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.”

(Philemon 4 7 ESV)

During my final three days in Uganda, “the Pearl of Africa,” I spent time visiting Jinja Town, where I was richly blessed by the refreshing fellowship of God's people, and especially the fellowship of my Handong Global University student, Boyeon Han. Jinja is one of the most international cities in Uganda. Many NGOs have located their offices there, including the Korean NGO, Good Neighbors, with whom Boyeon has been serving for the past six years. She recently accepted a 3-year posting in Jinja in March of this year, and she is now

an integral part of Good Neighbors' project to assist young girls with their education and healthcare.

Together, we enjoyed a delightful time of worship and praise with the believers gathered at Arise Africa Church, one of the largest international Christian communities in the eastern part of the country. Arise Africa grew out of a ministry started by World Reach Partners and a local Ugandan pastor. In addition to enriching worship, I was also blessed with delightful hospitality and delicious table fellowship provided by Boyeon at a number of local food courts, cafés, and restaurants. The Ugandan version of Kung Pao chicken that we enjoyed at a food court nearby the church was particularly tasty.

In addition to both refreshing fellowship in the Word and at table, Boyeon arranged for some outings to provide opportunities to view both the natural beauty of the equatorial countryside as we joined a cycling trek of over 30 km, and the glorious displays of tropical birds and animals along the shoreline of the Nile River viewed from our group's boat excursion. All too soon, though, my short visit in Jinja concluded. My driver, however, evidently wanted to provide me with a few more minutes of joy and encouragement by arriving nearly 90 minutes late (yet one more experience of “African time”) to our departure to Entebbe, a two-four-hour drive depending upon the jam (short for traffic jams, that are all too frequently encountered along the roads in Uganda).

After a farewell reminiscent of Acts 20:36 37, I took my seat in the driver’s Toyota SUV for our journey to Entebbe airport. Within a few minutes, we were on our way along the route and enjoyed this final view of the Monday evening setting sun. Upon being dropped off at the airport, I began a nearly 38 hour journey back to my home in St. Louis via Brussels and Chicago. By God’s good and gracious hand, I arrived safe and sound Tuesday night to the welcoming arms of Sandy and my son, Justin, who met me at the gate!

“For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers. For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.” (1 Thessalonians 2:9 12 ESV)

My heart has been refreshed and profoundly challenged to make the most of every opportunity that the Lord provides to me to strengthen the faith of our sisters and brothers in Christ both nearby and in the remotest places of the earth. I invite and challenge you to consider the possibility of joining me in another mission abroad in the coming year.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 73 89

Holy Sights of the Mississippi Deltascape: A Photo Essay

John Zheng

Having lived in the Mississippi Delta, a vast flatland with the most fertile soil on earth, I have grown a crop of hobbies. Many weekends I drive on a backroad or a state highway to look for whatever catches my eye: a shotgun house in Rolling Fork where Muddy Waters spent his early years, an abandoned shed like post office in Nitta Yuma, a corner of the gravel road edging the cotton fields in Berclair where the BB King blues marker stands on the site of his house, an abandoned bridge in Glendora where the lynched Emmett Till’s body was thrown into the river, a tombstone signifying Robert Johnson’s last rest by Money Road outside Greenwood, a large stretch of corns shuffling in the wind, a caboose in Itta Bena which jailed civil rights protesters, a setting sun spinning its spokes of light over the horizon, an orange moon peeking up over the roof. Of the many drives in the Delta, churches always form a unique Deltascape. Some look alone in the fields; some abandoned; some solemn; some exquisite; some grandiose, but they are all representing God as a symbol of connection hand in hand and soul to soul. Shown here is a group of church snapshots grabbed in different places of the Delta. They are historic, evocative, nostalgic, religious, and holy, belonging to memories and dreams.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 90 100

Missouri, the State of the Shepherd of the Hills

John J. Han

Missouri is known as the Show Me State and the Cave State, both of which make sense. Early Missourians did not believe anything without evidence, and approximately 7,500 caves exist in the state. One could also call Missouri the Shepherd of the Hills State. Many place names come from or seem to come from the title of Harold Bell Wright’s 1907 novel, The Shepherd of the Hills. In addition to the Shepherd of the Hills Adventure Park and the Shepherd of Hills State Park in Branson, one can find other places that recall the novel’s title. They include Shepherd of Hills Living (Branson), Shepherd of Hills Episcopal Church (Branson), Shepherd Hills Cutlery (Lebanon), and Shepherd Hills Cemetery (Barnhart). Driving to those sites from outside the Ozarks, especially in inclement weather, can be treacherous Once, I turned west from Searcy, Arkansas, toward Branson to take pictures of some of the Wright sites. The detour added several hours to my itinerary and caused a close call on a rainy, foggy mountain road near Heber Springs. Nevertheless, it was a delight to finally visit the places I had viewed on the Internet dozens of times. On the next pages are some of the photos from my recent trips to some “shepherd” sites in Missouri.

Notes on Contributors

Matthew R. Bardowell <matthew.bardowell@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University, where he teaches British literature, world literature, and composition. His research centers on Old Norse and Old English literature as well as the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and his recent scholarship engages questions concerning emotion and aesthetics. His work appears in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Mythlore, and The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. He is currently co editing (with John Han and Clark Triplett) Certainty and Ambiguity: Essays on the Moral Imagination of Mystery Fiction (forthcoming in 2023). Bardowell holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University.

Jane Beal <jbeal@laverne.edu>: See page 3.

Rebecca Duke <Rebecca.Duke@mobap.edu> is an adjunct English instructor at several universities and colleges as well as a stay at home mother. Rebecca enjoys engaging students in both the academic and creative writing processes inside the classroom. In addition to writing lesson plans that encourage students to develop their voice and to record meaningful detail within their essays, Rebecca has studied creative writing within her undergraduate and graduate career in English studies and has written and produced a short play at Bob Jones University. Rebecca personally keeps a poetry journal by her side during travels, Bible study, and when recording simple observations about daily life. Poetry challenges and retreats with friends and colleagues, as well as quiet Saturday mornings with her family, inspire her to fill her poetry journals. She has served as a guest editor of Fireflies’ Light: A Magazine of Short Poems

John J. Han <john.han@mobap.edu> is a Professor of English and Creative Writing and Chair of the Humanities Division at Missouri Baptist University. Han is the author, editor, co editor, or translator of 31 books, including Wise Blood: A Re Consideration (Rodopi, 2011), The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature (with C. Triplett; Peter Lang, 2015), Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction (with C Triplett and A. Anthony; McFarland, 2018), and dawn returns: The Haiku Society of America 2022 Members’ Anthology (New York: HSA, 2022) He has published numerous critical essays, book reviews, and reference entries, as well as more than 2,200 poems. His recent poems appeared in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Wales Haiku Journal, World Haiku Review, and other periodicals. He earned his M.A. from Kansas State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Cordell P. Schulten <Cordell.SchultenJD@mobap.edu> is an adjunct professor at Missouri Baptist University. Prior to his return to MBU, he served as a teacher, the Dean of Students, and a staffer at Valor International Scholars (VIS) in

Anseong, Korea. He has also served as a guest lecturer at L’Abri Fellowship in Korea, a teacher at Heritage Classical Christian Academy, and the English Ministry pastor at the Korean Presbyterian Church in Kirkwood, Missouri. From 2009 through 2014, he taught American Law at Handong Global University in Pohang, Korea. He previously taught at Missouri Baptist University (1995 2005) and Fontbonne University (2005 2009). Before teaching, he practiced law for ten years. He earned his M.A. in Theological Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in 2004 and his J.D. from Saint Louis University School of Law in 1986. He has also studied Theology and Culture at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He and his wife Sandy have been married for 43 years. They have four grown children and five grandchildren. He is the author of Life Abroad @ Handong (2017) and Le Chemin: Wholly Following the Path of Jesus (2019)

Todd Sukany <tsukany@sbuniv.edu>, a Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over 40 years. He holds degrees from Southwest Baptist University and Southeast Missouri State University. His work has appeared in Ancient Paths, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. Sukany co authored a book of poetry, The First Book of Mirrors, with Raymond Kirk. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, loving three children, their spouses, six grandchildren, and caring for three rescue dogs, and two feral cats.

Mark Tappmeyer <mtappmeyer@sbuniv.edu> is a retired English professor from Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, where he taught his entire career and served as the department chair for twenty four years. He observes that while Kansas City Royal George Brett won major league batting titles in three decades, he taught at SBU in five decades, though, it should be noted, without batting titles. While on sabbatical in 2001 2003, he and his English professor wife Linda taught English in Dalian, China. Currently the Tappmeyers live in the Indianapolis area. He has written Wisecracking, a book of poetry published by SBU Press, and has had poems published in Disciple Journal, Intégrité, Cantos, Calliope, St. Anthony Messenger, Penwood Review, Publication of the Missouri Philological Association, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

C. Clark Triplett <Clark.Triplett@mobap.edu> is Emeritus Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Psychology at Missouri Baptist University. He served as co editor (with John Han) of The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature (Peter Lang, 2015) and as co editor (with John Han and Ashley Anthony) of Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction (McFarland, 2018). Triplett is the author of many articles and book reviews published in Intégrité, and his poems have appeared in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, and the Asahi Haikuist Network He earned a B.A. from Southwest Baptist University, an M.Div. from Covenant Theological Seminary, an M.S.Ed. from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and a Ph.D. from Saint Louis University.

John Zheng <zheng@mvsu.edu> is the editor of African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, The Other World of Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, and Conversations with Dana Gioia. His essays have been published in journals including Paiduma, Southern Quarterly, Japan Studies Association Journal, and The Explicator He teaches English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor for two literary and scholarly journals: Valley Voices: A Literary Review and Journal of Ethnic American Literature.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Submission Guidelines

Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay)is a peer reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church Related College, it is published both online and in print copy.

Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles (15 25 pages double spaced), short essays on faith and learning (8 12 pages double spaced), book reviews (4 8 pages double spaced), and poetry (5 15 poems single spaced) for consideration Along with your work, we need an author bio of 100 125 words written in third person and in complete sentences. Manuscripts should be sent as e mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for inclusion in the fall issue.

Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith learning integration Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• the current state and/or future of the church-related college

• history of Christian liberal arts education

• Christianity and contemporary culture

• a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity

• service learning

• academic freedom in a Christian context

• implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines

• Christian education in the non Western world

• global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic Articles are expected to be research based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We also do not consider articles that use more than twenty five secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most Intégrité readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles, short essays, and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, and easy to understand style.

Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancy words.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers Articles and short essays should include in text citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Enter endnotes manually instead of using the “Insert Endnote” function in a word processing program. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.