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At my job I (Ben) often get to handle customer complaints. Whether I’m any good at it may best be answered by those doing the complaining. As with all things, you get better with practice. So this little Saturday morning homily is not a seminar from an expert, just observations from someone on the learning curve.

First, it’s important to distinguish exactly which kind of complaint you’re dealing with here. I think there are two main categories: Justified and Unjustified.

Justified scenario: You have provided poor service. You or someone you manage has slighted the customer through rudeness, oversight or incompetence. Examples: You overcharge someone or leave an item out of their bag. You screw up their food order. You insult their personal appearance, their taste in literature or their appalling lack of fashion sense. You serve them undercooked wings and give them food poisoning and hire Jeremy Piven as a spokesperson. Etc.

Unjustified scenario: You have provided reasonable, maybe even exemplary, service but it is unequal to the customer’s desires (however unreasonable those may be). You moved mountains but didn’t walk on water. You did not have the book or CD or piece of clothing she wanted. You did not make a plane arrive on time. You did not not cook a meal that was as tasty as the one he had years before and has committed to memory with incomparable nostalgia. You did not prevent a hundred other people from rearranging their schedules so as to not impede the pre-made plans of your disgruntled customer’s Saturday. You did not murder in cold blood the person in the Toyota Camry who stole your customer’s spot even when he clearly saw it first and had his turn signal on to indicate this fact. You are incapable of making someone’s spouse finally forgive her or father love him more. You cannot personally bestow unto him or her the peace that passeth all understanding. Etc.

Both scenarios require the same basics in the tool kit: The ability to listen, empathize, apologize, make restitution. Every customer, regardless of scenario, wants to be heard. But from henceforth, I will address only the second category of complaint, the Unjustified.

The Unjustified Complaint always results from the customer not getting what she wanted. The sooner you acknowledge this and apologize for this fact ( “I realize you wanted x, and I’m sorry we couldn’t deliver x for you”), the sooner you arrive at the fork in the road. The customer will either be disarmed by you cutting to the chase (and may even come to her senses and say, “You’re right, my complaining is pointless”), or — more likely — she will redouble her efforts because you are trying, sincerely, to be direct, kind and understanding. Most angry customers hate this.

“If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink,” say the Proverbs. “In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” That last part sounds a bit like retribution, but Eugene Peterson translates it a little differently: “Your generosity will surprise him with goodness.”

This is really the only way I know how to deal with an Unjustified Customer Complaint. The customer has pain to dispense, and you give him back kindness.

This is of course the hardest path to take. You (I) want an eye for an eye. It doesn’t take long in retail to wonder if you have a bull’s-eye pinned to your chest. Even if you manage to avoid repaying an unkind customer with unkindness, you still have the problem of inheriting it. The Unjustified customers will win this battle nine times out of ten. They will resort to name-calling. They will spit bile and condescension. They will say, to use one example from my week, “I will do everything possible to take my business away from a store run by a bunch of flippin’ morons.” (Use your creativity to substitute other words for “flippin’.”)

What next? If you give into temptation, you will unload this venom on someone else. Maybe someone you manage, maybe someone you love. Then everyone’s miserable.

To borrow a spiritual analogy, it’s part of what Christians believe about Jesus dying on the cross. When handed injustice and persecution, Jesus took it but didn’t give it back. You don’t even have to believe that the symbolic weight of that injustice is “sin” or subscribe to the idea of atonement to agree with the basic transaction there. Something stopped at Jesus and went no further.

An Unjustified Customer Complaint isn’t persecution (or, obviously, crucifixion), but it’s the meager spiritual offering I could make this week, and I tried to receive it without passing it on. I resisted saying to that customer, “Well, your mom is a flippin’ moron. Sha-blam!” But just barely. You start where you are.

Enough preposterous spiritual/retail analogies for a Saturday. Especially a day off.

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When I (Ben) wrote about my ongoing battle with depression recently, several people responded with the same question: Are we crummy friends? They expressed that they didn’t realize the extent of my mental illness. They wondered if they had been aloof or unresponsive in a time of need. (One wrote, “I can just imagine I said something horrifically unhelpful like, ‘Dude, you just gotta cheer up, dude.’”) They may have felt betrayed that I didn’t open up to them. (One said — I hope sarcastically — “Uhg! I’m going to have nightmares! Thank you for reminding me again that I’m the worst person in world.”)

None of my friends are the worst people in the world, and betrayal is the last thing I want anyone to feel. As I told everyone who expressed this to me, my friends have done more to help me than they’ll ever realize. It is my own failure that I’ll never be able to articulate that fully to everyone who has saved me in ways both large and small. But it’s the truth.

It’s also the truth that I did what I suspect most everyone with a mental illness does to their friends: I hid. I elided. I told partial truths. I omitted key facts. (Like, in my case, going to the hospital.)

What’s hard for me to convey, but what I also desperately want my friends to know, is that my behavior had nothing to do with them. It was not a lack of character or trust that made me divulge something to one person but not another. It was, if anything, a matter of practicality. Anyone I saw on a daily basis, I probably had to tell. I calculated who needed to know what in order for me to keep my job, my living arrangement, a social life that I desperately needed outside of work. If I was brave enough, I talked about my depression with those outside my day-to-day life. But talking about it also made it real, which is why not talking about it was such an appealing option. Out of sight, out of mind.

One friend wrote this in response to my post:

Maybe this is something that you can address in future posts. How do we, as your friends, respond? What is helpful and what is just intrusive or annoying or completely missing the point? (Are these questions missing the point?) There is a history of depression in my family which seems to have skipped me, but when I talk to my sisters about the things that they feel and are going through, I feel helplessly inept. That last thing I want is for you to feel that I am cold and aloof and uncaring about your depression.

——————–

I thought about these questions as I read Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. The book is a lyrical meditation on what it takes to support and love someone with mental illness. The first two sentences give you a pretty good idea of what it’s about:

On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives.

From there, Greenberg details his daughter Sally’s manic flights, her hospitalization in a Manhattan psych ward, the suffering he endures as a parent, and the healing and grieving that must be shared as a family. It is a hard, unflinching book, honest about pain and patience. That Sally (and Greenberg) comes out alive in the end is a testament to endurance.

But even after reading it, I didn’t have a good answer for my friend’s question. How do you respond to someone with mental illness?

The first thing I should say is that I did some awful things to friends and family when I was hurting. So I’d rank forgive high on the list.

Right up there with forgive I’d add listen. The truth is you’ll never compel someone to open up about his mental illness if he’s not ready. And no one wants to begin a conversation, “So, how’s the manic depression been treating you lately?” (Mental illness, unlike the weather, doesn’t make for good small talk.) But being there, at that strange and sudden moment when we do want to talk, is a gift that only friends can give.

A corollary to this: You don’t need to be a counselor. We’re already seeing counselors. We don’t need more, trust us. (Hopefully that takes a little weight off your shoulders.)

A caution, particularly if you have your own mental illness to battle: You don’t need to share someone’s pain. After Sally is out of the hospital, Greenberg goes so far as to take a full dose of her medication to “try to see the world as she does.” (This scene — uncomfortable and comical, as Greenberg becomes lethargic but keeps a scheduled meeting with his agent — ends with Greenberg getting a screenplay deal though he can barely put together a sentence.) He sees the world as she does, and in doing so becomes completely useless as a caretaker. The gesture is a noble one, but you don’t have to feel sick to help the sick.

Greenberg makes this point when he says,

Later, when the meds have worn off and I have time to see Sally in the context of my few hours in that numbed world, I realize that the drugs release her not from her cares, but from caring itself. For caring, exorbitant caring — about the meaning of a passing glance from a stranger, the look in a news broadcaster’s eye on television, the fixed fired thoughts in one’s head — is the psychotic’s curse.

Manic depressives can be given to exorbitant caring. If you are one, be wary of just how much caring you can shoulder for another.

——————–

That said, nothing has given me better insight into mental illness than reading accounts from others who have survived it. Let’s call this one understand. This is Atticus Finch’s “You never really understand a person … until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” How you do this without falling into “exorbitant caring” is the trick.

What Hurry Down Sunshine adds to “the contemporary texts of mental disturbance” (Greenberg’s own phrase for the likes of Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar and An Unquiet Mind, among others) is an understanding of mental illness as something more than mere chemistry. There is a spirituality and humanity to madness as Greenberg conceives it. In the hospital he befriends an Orthodox Jew named Yankel, whose brother Noah is on the same ward as Sally. Yankel asks Greenberg,

“What do they know from ‘mental illness’ in this place? Maybe you can explain to me what such an expression means. I took Noah to the rebbe who said that he has become lost in his pleading to God. ‘I can’t help you with this,’ he told me. ‘Go see a psychiatrist.’ Our own rebbe! He should know better. There is no medicine for this.”

Another character from the book — Gato, a Dominican doorman — offers his own poetic insight, no less profound for its profanity: “Look, I got a loco of my own at home, it isn’t easy, I know the score, you got to keep loving ‘em when what you want to do is shoot ‘em between the fucking eyes.” That may not be the wording I’d use to answer my friend’s question, but the wisdom of that sentiment is hard to argue with.

——————-

Rachel Donadio offered an excellent review of Hurry Down Sunshine when it appeared in hardcover a year ago. “What sets Hurry Down Sunshine apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations,” she wrote, “is Greenberg’s frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter’s ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it.” A hearty amen. You can read the full review here.

——————–

I realize now that my three suggestions — forgive, listen, understand — form the nice little acronym, FLU. So there you go.

]]> http://voreblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/hurry-down-sunshine-michael-greenberg/feed/ 3 voreblog http://voreblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/the-deepest-silence-part-2/ http://voreblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/the-deepest-silence-part-2/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:36:41 +0000 voreblog http://voreblog.wordpress.com/?p=4605 ]]>

This is my sixth attempt to write this post. The first three times I (Ben) stopped because I thought, “The people who won’t be freaked out by depression will be freaked out by faith/Christianity. And the very few who may not be freaked out by either will likely be freaked out by both together.” I don’t mean that as underestimating my audience, only as an illustration of the mental roadblocks I had to navigate getting this out on paper.

I stopped during times #4 and #5 because I tried writing something about depression without addressing spirituality. Those detours dead-ended quickly and disastrously. I knew what I wanted to write about even if I didn’t know how to write it. I was in denial.

Here goes draft #6:

The most troubling question I have had to reconcile about being a Christian who suffers from depression isn’t why God allows it. It’s why God is silent.

John Updike said that God saves his deepest silence for the saints. This is, on one hand, perverse. But it is also, as one reads the Bible, true. Some of God’s most beloved were also seemingly the most cursed: Jacob, Jeremiah, Elijah, Paul, David, Moses, Job, to say nothing of Jesus himself. In crucial moments of their stories, God disappears, none more so than when Jesus feels forsaken on the cross. Why?

I want to be very clear before we go any farther: Depression — any mental illness, for that matter — does not make one a saint. Nor am I saint for feeling as though I have been intimate with God’s absence. Many, many people can attest to my failings, the co-writer of this blog being tops on the list.

I have known from a young age that my depression was tied up in my faith. Over time I have come to understand chemical imbalances and serotonin levels and hereditary defects; I acknowledge that these too are vital components. My frame of reference, however, has first and foremost been a spiritual one. (And I acknowledge, certainly, that there are those who believe that religious belief is its own mental illness.) This could be a tremendously harmful thing, as I often concluded that a bout of depression was something I deserved — punishment from God. I have matured enough by now to realize this is bad theology. The Christian God is not one of retribution. But this is another post for another time.

I am one of those kids who grew up in the church and would answer, when asked, that I had been a Christian all my life. But when pressed, I can trace my one conversion moment to my sophomore year at college, when I walked to the Church of the Holy Spirit on Kenyon’s campus at three in the morning, unable to sleep or get out of my own head. (Hell! I tell you.) In exquisite mental anguish, I sat in the stillness of an empty sanctuary and heard, for the first time in my life, God’s silence. I walked out of the church that night utterly defeated — what Frederick Buechner called “the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”

The following summer was my first at Summer’s Best Two Weeks, where I’d meet Erin five years later. (Fun fact: We were actually both there for two weeks that summer, me as a 19-year-old counselor and she as a 17-year-old kitchen crew member. We never met.) That summer was the first time everything clicked for me spiritually. I realized Christianity was not about being right or moral but about being alive, and I had never felt more alive than I did those three months. Not coincidentally, my mental health was almost spotless. This only confirmed to me that there was a spiritual component that couldn’t be ignored. Also, that healing was possible.

When I began seeing a counselor the fall after I graduated college, I was so desperate that I picked one out of the phonebook at random. It didn’t matter who or where. (The one I picked was a 45-minute drive from my apartment.) As we met and I began talking about depression and my spiritual beliefs, it was obvious my counselor didn’t see the same connections I did, or feel as though she was able to address them in a satisfactory way. She did what any good counselor should — she recommended me to someone else.

This man was a Christian, and over the three years I met with him he treated me both mentally and spiritually. Much of what I needed to learn then (and still do) are simple cognitive habits that discourage, rather than invite, spells of sadness. He taught me these things. But other days he saw, as no one else had, that what troubled my spirit was, in fact, a spiritual affliction. Some sessions he prayed with me. Other times he told me what his experience of God had been. At no point did he ever preach, judge or condemn. I may not be alive today if not for this man.

Faith and mental illness is the subject of a new book called Wrestling With Our Inner Angels; Faith, Mental Illness, and The Journey to Wholeness by Nancy Kehoe. It has, like virtually every “Christian” book on depression, a terrible title (though the Biblical moment it alludes to — Jacob wrestling the angel — is one of the most accurate pictures of depression in scripture). It is, however, smart and sharply written, a humane account from a woman who is both a clinical instructor in psychology and a nun. Back in 1981, when Kehoe agreed to a consultation with a psychiatric director at one of Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals, she made a startling discovery:

When I met with the staff to debrief the session, to my bewilderment, they said that many clients referred to religion, but the therapists simply ignored it, not knowing how to handle the topic. This was an amazing admission for mental health professionals, who are trained to explore every aspect of a person’s life, from the most intimate areas, such as sexuality, finances, and abuse histories, to the most public, such as work histories. Listening to, making sense of, and helping a person reframe the narrative of his or her life is the essence of therapy.

This conversation, however, suggested that the chapter that concerned religion was being omitted: that the whole story could never be told because no one wanted to listen. The image that came to mind was that of archaeologists on a dig, unearthing sacred artifacts and tossing them aside because they were focused solely on certain aspects of a culture.

Kehoe’s book is an account of her experiences reconciling faith and mental illness, and it is rich with wisdom and, for those of us standing at those crossroads, encouragement. One patient articulates exactly what I have felt too many times to count: “I pray, but I don’t know if God hears my prayers, because I have a mental illness.”

The path I am very carefully walking right now is one that acknowledges two contradictions: 1) mental illness is an affliction, but 2)  it can, in fact, be a gift. I am not saying it is a blessing to have it. I am saying that having it has taught me things about faith that I would otherwise never have learned. People with depression can be quite attuned to the needs of those around them. They can be quicker to, as one of my fellow inmates in the psych hospital put it every night, “let go and let God.” They can be slower to judge and quicker to forgive. They can, for reasons that still mystify me, sometimes be saints. When Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light was published, many were startled at just how bleak and despairing her journals were. “I am told God lives in me,” she wrote, “and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.” And yet she still did what she did.

The night I admitted myself to the hospital, I walked to the church where I worked and sat in an empty chapel. I couldn’t pray. I could hear only God’s silence. I cursed and cried. Then I called my counselor and told him I needed to go to the hospital. Waiting outside the church for him to arrive, I heard sirens in the distance. I wondered if those were the ones on the ambulance that would be coming to take me away. What a screwed up life I’ve got, I thought. I feel like I’m watching someone else’s. Then I looked up at the stars and thought of all the Psalms that were inspired by the same view. So many routes to the foot of the cross, I thought, and this is the one I chose, or the one that chose me.

For three days running now, I (Ben) have sat down to write a follow-up to Monday’s post. The response I got — online and offline — was very encouraging. Friends who I know have struggled with many of the same challenges wrote to say thanks. Three other friends who I had no idea have battled with mental illness shared their stories. After a tremendous amount of apprehension, I felt glad — and relieved — to have written the post.

On Tuesday I was faced with a choice: Continue writing about depression, or write a post about — as Matthew Leathers succinctly put it — Vincent D’Onofrio and poop. I carefully weighed the merits of both. All things being equal, I’d have preferred to write about Mr. D’Onofrio and poop. But I couldn’t do it.

So Tuesday night I sat down to write about faith and depression, since in my life the two have become so inextricably joined that I cannot talk about one without talking about the other. I couldn’t find the words though. I started three different posts, then scrapped each of them. I’d start over on my day off.

I did the same yesterday. Starting, stopping. Always running up against a wall. And, as has happened before, feeling increasingly helpless and defeated that I couldn’t shape depression into words. This, as has happened before, fueled an already dark mood.

This morning I woke up and something had lifted, slightly. I could write today, but only if I started by acknowledging why I couldn’t write before. I realized this after talking it through with Erin last night. I had a strategy now, not that different from the spiritual practice of confession, really: Name it, put it out there, and then release it. Which I have just done.

Later today I’ll post that faith and mental illness bit I’ve now written five times. Before that, I wanted to explain how I got there, and to acknowledge that while Voreblog won’t be all gloom and doom from here on out, we’ll at least follow this for now and see where it goes.

More later.

Part four of a four-part series recounting the romantic origins of Voreblog. Parts one, two and three.

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You may know a lot of things about Donald Trump, but you probably didn’t know he has a board game. Trump: The Game was a gift to Ben from his grandmother back around 1989, the giving of which appalled Ben’s mom. “But he loves to play board games,” Grandma said in her defense. “Mom, it’s a game about Donald Trump,” my mom retorted. “Do you want your grandsons to grow up like Donald Trump?” Grandma paused as if considering the correct answer to this question, saying finally, “It just looked like Monopoly to me.”

The game’s slogan, emblazoned right there on the front, is, “It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win!” Below a picture of The Donald is his signature, with what appears to be at least four m’s in his last name.

When Ben packed up his apartment to leave Pittsburgh in July of 2003, he put Trump: The Game in his backseat underneath boxes and boxes of books. It was still there when he arrived at camp later that month, and so he decided it could be good for a few laughs.

——————–

Erin left Nashville three days early, on July 17, for third term at Summer’s Best Two Weeks. She would be going back as the kitchen crew counselor for two terms — one month — and was kicking it off by spending time with Ben in State College before they both showed up for camp. The plan was to meet Ben in Pittsburgh, where he and most of his worldly possessions would be packed in his car, waiting to ship out. Ben’s first contact with Erin that day had been a cell phone conversation in a hospital. Ben was there visiting one of his youth group kids when the phone rang. Ben answered it in the hall. Erin was somewhere outside Wheeling — be there in about an hour. A nurse passing by informed Ben he couldn’t talk on his cell phone in the hospital. This was news to Ben as he had just purchased his first cell phone the week before. “I’ve gotta go,” he told Erin. “A nurse is yelling at me.” He went back into the room and watched a family he had grown very close with try to make small talk as everyone awaited a doctor. Not for the first time, Ben felt guilt at the kids he was leaving behind. He also felt guilty that he should be so excited to leave.

——————–

Erin and Ben arrived at camp on Saturday the 19th for dinner. It was a cookout, and since it was between terms there were only other counselors. They caught up with friends and filtered into the crowd, and at one point Ben found himself standing in a circle of guy friends looking across the lawn at Erin standing in a circle of girl friends. They had just spent two days together, and yet suddenly she had eluded him again. Ben watched a tall, athletic counselor cross paths with Erin, and after they shook hands he stood there nodding his head as Erin talked, looking tall and athletic and dangerous. Out of nowhere, Ben was filled with jealousy bordering on hostility.

Ben was walking back to his cabin when Erin caught him from behind. “Hey, where you going?” she asked. “Just back,” Ben said. “Gotta unpack.” “I was thinking it’d be good to, you know, pray together before the term if you wanted to do that,” Erin said. Ben stopped and considered this. “I think I’d like to do that,” he said.

Later that night, after dark and once the stars over Boswell, Pennsylvania, came out in a fashion far superior to that of either Nashville or Pittsburgh, Ben and Erin walked around Lake Gloria to the zip boat dock near the rope swing. It was the same place where, a year before on that same Saturday night, Ben had sat alone in prayer about the upcoming term. It was the following day that he met Erin Beers.

What they prayed about that night, neither remembers exactly, except that Ben was still on anti-malarial meds from his trip to Quito, Ecuador, the prior month. The pills were an unholy combination with Ben’s other meds, and on the nights he took them he had terrible fever dreams. He would wake up shaken and disoriented as if he had inherited a different brain overnight. Slowly everything would come back to him, but not without a toll. He asked for prayer for that.

It was a hard transition for Ben in other ways. It was his seventh year at camp, and yet the minute he arrived on site, tailing Erin’s Jeep, he was wracked with anxiety, as if it was his first summer all over again. The first day there he wondered if he could summon the strength and confidence to get through the day, much less the two weeks. Sitting on the dock that night, he found it hard to believe he couldn’t find peace in a moment like that one.

——————–

The kitchen crew is virtually the only place at Summer’s Best Two Weeks where guys and girls intermingle. Every high schooler working crew gets the “relationship” speech at the beginning of the term: You’re here for God, not a date. This is only a slight variation on the speech counselors get at the beginning of the summer. Once the speech is given, however, a moderate degree of harmless flirting is tolerated, checked when necessary with one-on-one interventions with serial flirters.

The Loveline was another way of channelling attraction into the relatively harmless confines of the written page. At the O.D. (Officer of the Day) Shack, every counselor had a clothespin with his or her name on it. Fellow counselors could pin an encouraging note any time of day. The lines that held these pins up practically coursed with both the low hum of modest admiration to the full throttle buzz of repressed sexual tension.

One benefit of being a high school crew member was that you also had access to Lovelines. There was only one drawback: You did not have your own clothespin, only the generic “Boys Crew” and “Girls Crew.” There was no way to pen a heartfelt and faintly suggestive Loveline without the near certainty that it would be screened by, if not two counselors, then any number of fellow crew interlopers who circled the shack before and after meals like buzzards.

The primary way around this strategy was to encourage everyone to write a Loveline to each member of the opposite crew. These letters would be group efforts, and both guys and girls had the same idea: If, for example, Heather liked Andy, then all the girls would help write/decorate Andy’s letter, but it would fall to Heather to add just the right personal touch or coded phrase which would communicate her true feelings in a discreet but unmistakable way.

Now add one more layer: Not only were crew members engaged in this meticulous game of epistolary romance, but the crew counselors who were artfully stoking these young passions were also playing the same game. Not that long after they began dating, Ben and Erin would both remark how weird it was to talk through their feelings as opposed to writing them down on a tiny scrap of paper in some coy or amusing way.

That particular term in 2003 it was the boys crew who launched the first wave of Lovelines. Trying to think of a creative way to write the letters, crew member Evan saw Trump: The Game sitting underneath Ben’s bunk. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Evan said. He opened it up, took out some Trump Money and passed it around.

“What’s this for?” someone asked.

“Fellas,” Evan said, “a wise man once said, ‘It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win.’ It’s time to win some lonesome hearts.”

He removed a pink $50 million dollar bill and wrote on the back of it: $50 MILLION IN TRUMP MONEY < ANNIE

“Gentleman,” he said, “Annie will be putty in my hands.”

The men launched into the Lovelines with a fury. Once they were done, Ben and the boys sauntered — no, make that swaggered — down to the O.D. Shack before dinner that night and pinned a mammoth stack of Lovelines for the girls crew. They were early so they could get a head start on the pre-meal chores that often fell to the (more enterprising) girls. When the ladies arrived on time they were all beaming and laughing, little notes in their palms or tucked in their pockets. The guys played it low key and saved their grins for when the girls weren’t looking. Ben did the same.

——————–

“The price of a Las Vegas casino in ‘Trump’: $50 million. Working with you on crew? Priceless.”

———————

Unlike a year ago, Ben and Erin didn’t spend their day off together that term. Erin drove to Cincinnati for the day to attend the Sweeney’s wedding, while Ben went to see Seabiscuit by himself. You can probably guess who had a better time.

———————

“Dear Emily, thank you for the encouragement like on the dodge ball field and caring when I hurt my arm. If I could have you or 50 million dollars, I would choose you.”

———————

Ben and Erin thought they were being discreet. But two people falling in love are about as discreet as — to borrow Tess Gallagher’s phrase — “tigers answering questions about infinity with their teeth.” Will, the camp director and a man not given to inhibition, was talking with Ben and Erin about film when he asked if their taste in movies would be compatible in marriage. (Erin turned red and walked away in response.) Ben’s co-counselor Brad, who knew Erin from college, picked up on the signals pretty quick. And one night in the girls cabin, a girl named Liz Lackey said to Erin, “So, Ben Vore is moving to Nashville.” “Yes, I think he is,” Erin replied. “And you live in Nashville.” “Yes, I do live in Nashville.” “So … do you think, like, you and Ben will hang out?” There were giggles. The cat was out of the bag.

———————

“We ♥ girls crew! (like whoa)”

——————–

What Ben and Erin remember about the crew that term wasn’t especially remarkable. It was a fun group but not an extraordinary one. Nobody made any giant spiritual strides. There was friction between the guys all term long, but they worked hard when they needed to.

Erin would stay on for two more weeks while Ben went home to State College: to rest, to prepare for Nashville, to transition from one thing to the next. They wrote letters daily, and on Erin’s fourth term day off Ben drove to camp and they hung out in Greensburg for the day. As they went about day off hikes and Bruster’s ice cream stops and the obligatory chill time at Barnes & Noble, they looked at one another and saw two things at once: the couple they were becoming, and the couple they might be, together, for the long haul.

That night they kissed for the first time, in the Adventure Fort across the lake, where the eight- and nine-year-olds camped during their overnight trip. Erin was the fifth girl Ben had kissed in his life, and he hoped the last. Erin had kissed so many guys that she stopped counting.

———————

“If I had to choose between $50 million and working with you, you would find me in the kitchen, right next to you, letting Tim do all the work.”

——————–

On Friday, July 18, the day before Ben & Erin arrived at camp and prayed on the dock, there was a downpour in State College. Ben had taken Erin to Meyer’s Dairy for milkshakes, and they were driving home when it suddenly became quite dark overhead. “Looks like rain,” Erin said. “Looks like the flood,” Ben replied.

It was the flood. It hit suddenly and came down so hard that Ben had to pull over because he couldn’t see the road. A lightning strike sounded like it was directly overhead. Erin said quietly, “Are we going to die?” Ben wouldn’t realize until much later that she was not joking.

Ben’s house was fifteen minutes outside town, close to the county line, situated in a flood plain with a stream that winds around the property. When they arrived home there was a gulley pouring down off the mountain. The storm had lessened but the rain was still falling hard. The stream had risen above the bridge between the driveway and the house. The current was so strong it was pushing the right side of the bridge up, tilting it at a slight angle.

“What do we do?” Erin asked. She was holding two half gallons of Meyer’s skim milk. Neither of them were wearing a rain jacket.

Ben said, “Here. Give me those.” He took the milk jugs. The mountain run-off was above their ankles. “Now jump on.” He turned his back to Erin and crouched down.

She hoisted herself up for a piggyback. As soon as she was on, Ben handed her the milk. “Don’t drop these, okay?”

“Are you going to make it? Isn’t there another way across?”

“I’m afraid this is it.”

“You won’t drop me, will you?”

“I sure hope not.”

Ben waded down the steps to the base of the bridge. The water was up to his shins. He stepped onto the bridge and it held.

“I think we can do this,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Erin asked.

“I’m sure,” Ben said.

“Then let’s do it,” Erin replied.

One foot in front of the other, they crossed the bridge.

x

Our friend Christine is hosting a confession tent at the Cincinnati Gay Pride Festival this weekend. She got the idea from Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, a book of “nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality.” Miller, who lives in Portland, writes about Reed College’s annual Renn Fayre, a weekend-long marathon of mayhem and shenanigans (sometimes involving nakedness and blue paint). Donald and his friends get the idea to have a confession booth on campus with the words “Confession Booth” painted on the outside. Being Christians, Donald et al. knew that the assumption your typical Reed student would make of this booth, at the Renn Fayre, being staffed by Christians, was that the people inside would deliver a fiery blast of judgment and condemnation. 

But that’s not what the booth was for. As Donald’s friend Tony explains it,

Here’s the catch. We are not actually going to accept confessions. We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.

Astonishingly, people came into the booth. The first, Jake, asks, “So, what is this? I’m supposed to tell you all of the juicy gossip I did at Renn Fayre, right?” No, Donald tells him, I’m actually going to confess to you. And so he does, haltingly, to the point that Jake gets teary-eyed and tells Donald, “It’s all right, man. I forgive you.” After Jake leaves, Donald finds someone else waiting to come in. By the end of the night, Donald himself has confessed to thirty people, all of whom left moved by the experience.

Miller said the whole shebang was liberating. “Many people wanted to hug when we were done,” he writes. “All of the people who visited the booth were grateful and gracious. I was being changed through the process.”

“I was out of the closet now,” he adds. “So many years before I had made amends to God, but now I had made amends to the world.” 

This will be Christine’s fifth year at the Cincinnati Gay Pride Fest. She built the tent herself and invites friends to join her. Everyone is a volunteer. Nobody represents a specific church or organization. “Once you show up, you realize it’s a blast,” Christine told us. “You think, ‘I should be paying to do this.’” 

What exactly happens once someone comes in the booth? “It’s simple,” she said. “I say, ‘I’m sorry, and God loves you.’”*

Do people get into a theological argument about what the Bible says about homosexuality? “No, actually,” Christine said. “The conversation never goes that route. Sometimes people share their personal story, many of which are incredibly painful. And I just listen.”

We like people like Christine. We’re glad she’s friends with us. We wish there were more of her.

CityBeat will post a podcast with her on its site tomorrow. Once it’s up, we’ll include the link here.

UPDATE: The link is up.

* = This is a page out of Marva Dawn’s playbook.

One of the more gratifying things I (Ben) have done lately was walk around Over-The-Rhine last Saturday with four seventh graders from my youth group. We were inviting everyone to a party. The occasion was something called Go Grub, dreamt up by Boca chef David Falk. Falk has been planning for a couple years now to throw a block party with some of his chef friends around town and — instead of charging big bucks and targeting the city’s elite — making it free and inviting everyone. That’s what took shape on Saturday at Washington Park. Falk and thirteen other chefs fed several thousands, many volunteers for the Go Cincinnati service projects that day, and just as many Over-The-Rhine residents or homeless. That’s what my job with the seventh graders was: to round up everyone, rich and poor, young and old, homeowners and homeless, meat-eaters and vegetarians. You might think it’d be hard for 13-year-olds from the suburbs to strike up a conversation with a man sitting on the corner of Vine and 15th, but never underestimate an ice breaker like, “Do you like pulled pork? There are a thousand pounds of it over at Washington Park.”

Part of the inspiration behind Falk’s vision was a story that Jesus tells in Luke 14, The Parable of the Great Banquet. A man throws a party and invites many guests, all of whom come up with excuses for why they can’t attend. The man gets steamed and, as Eugene Peterson translates it, says, “Quickly, get out into the city streets and alleys. Collect all who look like they need a square meal, all the misfits and homeless and wretched you can lay your hands on, and bring them here.” That’s what Washington Park looked like Saturday around one o’clock. The tab for the 1000 pounds of pulled pork (as well as the 300 pounds of collared greens and macaroni and cheese, plus hot dogs and drinks) was around $50,000. Falk raised $5000 of it himself by shaving his beard. (Gillette ponied up.) The chefs worked for free. 

It’s easy to forget that an awful lot of parties happen in the Bible. Banquets, feasts, weddings, last suppers. More than a few parables turn on a celebration. We’re not just talking stuffy church potluck here. We’re talking break-out-the-wine, slay-the-fatted-calf, round-up-the-homeless, pack-every-seat, lampshades-on-the-head kind of celebrating. Or, as was the case Saturday, break-out-the-eight-foot-rims-on-Race-Street-and-hold-a-dunk-contest, strike-up-a-conversation-with-a-stranger, dance-to-”Jody’s-Got-Your-Girl-And-Gone”-from-the-gazebo-loudspeakers, eat-your-heart-out kind of celebrating. You can only say so much to a teenager about what “thy kingdom come” actually means; it’s not until they catch a glimpse of it that it really starts to sink in.

Our favorite Easter story is a strange one. It’s commonly known as The Road to Emmaus. Two men are walking on a road from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus two days after the Crucifixion. As Frederick Buechner says of these two, “There was nothing left to do that Sunday but get out of town.” In the margin of The Magnificent Defeat, the collection of Buechner’s sermons in which “The Road to Emmaus” appears, Ben scribbled “This place is dead anyways,” a reference to Swingers when Charles says that of every party just before he leaves. 

Buechner continues,

Where did [those two] go? They went to Emmaus. And where was Emmaus and why did they go there? It was no place in particular really, and the only reason that they went there was that it was some seven miles distant from a situation that had become unbearable. 

Do you understand what I mean when I say that there is not one of us who has not gone to Emmaus with them? Emmaus can be a trip to the movies just for the sake of seeing a movie or to a cocktail party just for the sake of the cocktails. Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred.

Emmaus, he concludes, “is where these two went, to try and forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life.”

“Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her latest book, An Altar in the World. Spiritual failure might be an odd topic for Easter, but as Buechner says, the first mood of the day was despair. By every account Jesus had failed, and these two men did what we would have done, anyway: Get out of town. Move on to the next thing.

The story continues with a stranger joining the men on their walk. The reader is told it is Jesus, who eyewitnesses have already seen alive again, “resurrected.” But the two men don’t recognize him, even though they’ve heard the rumors of an empty tomb. The three of them walk all the way to Emmaus and the men still don’t recognize Jesus, even though he has talked with them the whole way, explaining the scriptures as they went. When they reach Emmaus, the men invite Jesus to join them for a meal. Only then, after Jesus breaks the bread and blesses it, do the men recognize him. And as soon as they do, he disappears.

Strange story. “All the stories about how Jesus appeared to people after his death are strange,” Buechner writes, “and the strangest thing about them is how unglamorous they are, how little fanfare there is about them.” What appeals to us so much about this story is where it happens: Emmaus, “the place” (sayeth Buechner) “that we go in order to escape.” But, he adds, “There are some things that even in Emmaus we cannot escape [and] it is precisely at such times as these that Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable.” 

One of the things we love about Barbara Brown Taylor — aside from the fact she’s a terrific writer — is that she’s well acquainted with failure. We’re pretty sure she’s experienced “life at its most real and inescapable” more than a few times. “In my life,” she writes, “I have lost my way more times than I can count.

I have set out to be married and ended up divorced. I have set out to be healthy and ended up sick. I have set out to live in New England and ended up in Georgia. When I was thirty, I set out to be a parish priest, planning to spend the rest of my life caring for souls in any congregation that would have me. Almost thirty years later, I teach school. … I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I stayed on the path. … These are just a few of the reasons that I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead. The Bible is great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

We are people who have been truly, seriously lost. We’ve gotten lost pursuing so much of what we planned to do with our lives — write a book, see the world, play in the NBA, go West. We’ve gotten lost in our marriage. We’ve both struggled with mental illness, and while that has literally been a hell to go through, we’ve learned things about God we certainly would not have otherwise. We have come to many of our beliefs through our failures. The truth is, our story would be a strange one like Emmaus. We’ve been on that road many times before, and what we celebrate today is that even there God still found us. 

Does that mean we wake up every morning relishing a new day of failure? No. That would be perverted. But we’re learning to see our trials and our shortcomings as spiritual opportunities. We’ve wondered before if Christians shouldn’t be better at failure. Are we, the church, guilty of worshipping success? Because Jesus wasn’t an example of earthly success. He didn’t look much like anyone expected, which may have been why the two men didn’t recognize him either. They weren’t prepared to see him. They were looking for someone else.

Easter is an occasion for celebration, and it’s top dog on the Christian calendar. But before it was the Easter story, it was the Road to Emmaus. The Road to Emmaus is the Easter story. It contains within it both failure and redemption, faithlessness and belief, death and resurrection. It is, to our ears, a true story. And so we believe it.

Happy Easter.

Ben once heard a speaker named Saleem Ghubril give a talk at The Pittsburgh Project where he used the comedian Dana Carvey for an illustration about failure. Carvey needed a double bypass heart operation. The surgeons performed it, successfully, then patched Carvey up and sent him on his way. He was fine for a short time until he started having the same symptoms again. When he went back in for tests, the doctors made an unfortunate discovery: They had bypassed the wrong artery. Carvey underwent an angioplasty (his fourth), this time fixing the problem.

The lesson Ghubril drew from this? “It is better to fail trying to do the right things than succeed in doing the wrong ones,” he said. The first operation was, technically, a success. It just failed to solve the problem. Better to come up short trying to fix something that matters, Ghubril said, than succeed at doing something that doesn’t. 

We had a conversation with some friends today about the subject of holy discontent. The idea of holy discontent is that there are things in the world — injustice, generational poverty, religious violence — that break God’s heart, and that should break ours too. We may not be called to work at an orphanage in Sudan, the way that one of the people in that conversation was. But we should be listening for those things (close to home or far away) that unsettle us, and then figure out what to do about it. 

The things that matter are probably going to be big things, not just weekend projects. Where do you start correcting generational poverty? Well, you start somewhere close to home, where you are, given the tools and resources you have. And when you get discouraged and feel like a failure, you take comfort in the fact that there’s a good kind of failure that’s better than an irrelevant kind of success, and that if enough people constructively fail at the right things, that collective failure might add up to a difference. 

For ourselves, we experience a holy discontent when our friends look at Christians and have good reason to see irrelevant, self-righteous successes and not constructive failures. We’ll just come right out and say it: We are holy discontented with Christians. And we are ones! Soren Kierkegaard got at it this way: “Christendom has become the very opposite of what Christianity is. Christianity is restlessness, the restlessness of the eternal. … Christendom is tranquility. How charming, the tranquillity of literally not moving.” “The restlessness of the eternal” is actually a pretty good description of holy discontent. (Sadly, “the tranquillity of literally not moving” may be an equally good description of many churches today.)

This is essentially all a lead-in to this video. We didn’t know who CitizenLink is, but some cursory research revealed it is affiliated with Focus On The Family. We’ll only preface this by saying that the notion that we need (even presented in tongue-in-cheek fashion) a new holiday called Merry Tossmas is really, truly stupid.

Christmas is a big deal on the Christian calendar. Maybe not Easter big, but certainly not insignificant. The idea that Christians need to faithfully recognize and celebrate it is, of course, a fine one. But recognizing it only in its context as the most secularized, commercialized, super-sized holiday of all, which reduces a Christian’s act of worship to his or her ability to spend money, and then saying we need to stamp a God label on that and boycott anyone who doesn’t agree? That’s not even bypass surgery on the wrong artery. That’s surgery using plastic utensils. Which is to say, a joke.

The courtship of Erin & Ben picks up four months after we last left off, when 569 miles (the distance between Pittsburgh and Nashville) and another man, “Rex” (booooo!), stood between our protagonists. 

PROLOGUE: When Ben and Erin parted ways at SB2W camp in August, neither knew what — if anything — would come of their two week friendship. Ben, while hopeful, was sobered by the existence of an offstage boyfriend (dubbed “Rex”). And the fact Erin would be moving to Nashville. Where Rex lived. Nine hours away from Pittsburgh. 

     Things brightened up once the two began exchanging letters. Erin’s first letter to Ben ended with the line, “If you are ever in Nashville or somewhere close by, give me a ring or drop a line. I expect to see you again.” This was enough hope to last a month on. I expect to see you again! Ben plotted the possibilities by which he could somehow casually be in the greater Nashville area. The key word there was casually. He could not be desperate. He could not crush a young friendship with the weight of romantic expectation. He also had a boyfriend to contend with. He needed an excuse to go to Tennessee.

     As a youth director, Ben planned to attend the Youth Specialties National Youth Convention in Pittsburgh that fall. Until, that is, Scott Guldin announced he would be getting married in Ohio on the same weekend. Ben considered the other convention dates and was struck with an epiphany. The convention would be in Nashville the weekend before Thanksgiving. Ben (casually) floated a trial balloon to Erin in a letter: Might be in Nashville in November. Cool, Erin wrote back.

     And by the way, Rex and I broke up.

     Ben immediately switched his registration and booked a flight to Nashville. He also called up Seth Swihart, who had a fold-out couch with Ben’s name on it and a neon Cubs/Bud sign to sleep under. “Your room and board consists of watching Hoosiers with me at least once,” Seth said.

     The plan was set.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21: Erin was waiting at the Nashville International Airport baggage claim with a sign that said, BEN VORE, VISITING HIPSTER. She immediately gave Ben the tour of the Nashville hot spots, from Percy Warner Park to Hillsboro Village, home to Fido’s, Bookman and The Belcourt Theater, where Erin worked part time. That was where we watched I Am Trying To Break Your Heart that night, which Erin had already seen twice but told Ben she had waited to see with him. The day’s proceedings — coffee, movie, walking and talking — were so long in the making, and yet so … ordinary. Ben went to sleep that night bathed in the glow of the Cubs sign, surprised but not displeased to realize how very normal the reunion had been, as if now that it had happened it had gone exactly the way he pictured it.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22: Seth gave Ben a Nashville tour before dropping him off at the convention center downtown, where the conference began early afternoon. The minute Ben stepped into the convention hall he did not want to be there. It was loud, noisy and unbearable. A Christian rock band was blaring contemporary praise. Everyone looked incredibly happy and psyched to be there. Ben sat down toward the back of the hall, with a backpack stuffed full of fliers and notebooks and freebies and a schedule jam-packed with seminars, activities and speakers. He didn’t know a single soul in that auditorium full of two thousand people. And as the worship ended and the main speaker stepped to the stage, Ben was surprised to discover there were tears running down his face. Where was this coming from? 

     The first and only other time Ben had set foot in Nashville was in April of 2001, for a retreat called Sabbath. That experience had begun in no less terrifying a fashion. When Ben arrived with thirty other people at the Scarritt-Bennett retreat center just outside Vanderbilt’s campus, he was disturbed when he looked over the schedule from the security of his own room to realize that most of the upcoming four days would be spent in silence. Participants were not allowed to speak until noon each day, and there were wide open blocks of time set aside for prayer, solitude and contemplation. What the hell am I doing here? Ben thought at the realization that he had no place to run for the next ninety-six hours. No distractions. No TV. No mildly diverting entertainment. I’m not sure I can do this, Ben thought as he set the schedule aside and stared at the blank wall of his monk’s cell.

     It was a different kind of terror in the middle of that jubilant convention hall, but Ben knew he still had to get out. After the speaker finished, Ben went straight out the door and began walking west on Broadway. He still had his luggage with him and a backpack bursting with resources that would make him a smarter, savvier youth director should he seize the days to come. But just then he couldn’t get far enough away from that. So he lugged his rolling suitcase and switched his backpack from shoulder to shoulder as he trudged four miles to the West End Borders.

     “What are you doing here?” Erin asked when Ben walked up to her in the second floor children’s section. She was sorting books in a manner which looked a lot like pleasure reading.

     “We’re done for the day,” Ben said. “I just thought I’d come say hi.”

     “Did you take a taxi?”

     “No, just walked.”

     “Oh. That’s like–”

     “‘Bout four miles. My shoulder’s a little sore. I think I’m going to get a chai and sit in the cafe.”

     Erin said later how strange it was to walk down the staircase and see Ben sitting there in the cafe, looking homeless with all his bags strewn about, staring out the window at who knows what. A good strange, Ben thought later. At least he hoped.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23: Mike Yaconelli, one of the founders of Youth Specialities, had given his typical pre-convention welcome the day before with the usual subversive charge: “If you’re burned out, don’t go to a seminar on burnout — take a nap! If you’re having marriage problems, don’t go to a seminar on fixing your marriage. Get your spouse, grab a bottle of wine, go to your room, lock the door, and don’t come out until Monday. Just buy all the tapes on your way out!”

     This was advice Ben wanted to take to heart but which also went against every fiber in his body. Didn’t his church shell out big bucks to send him here? Shouldn’t he be going to every seminar and general session? Shouldn’t he be living and breathing “Junior High Ministry ‘Til You Die” and “Ice Breakers and Games” and “Understanding Youth Culture”? Most of all, shouldn’t he feel guilty for sleeping until 2:30 in the afternoon at his hotel? Maybe, except for the fact he awoke feeling more rested than he had in months.

     Ben looked at the schedule he had not already slept through and then called Erin to propose a night out together. She was game. They had dinner at a Thai place. That’s all either of them remembers now.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24: Guilt caught up with Ben and he spent a full day at the convention center. He cut out early again to trek down Broadway to Borders. Erin seemed less surprised to see him than she had two nights earlier, but soon she was dropping off various reading materials at his cafe table for Ben to enjoy, some sincere (such as Empire of Conspiracy, by her former professor Timothy Melley) and others ironic (Everyone Poops). When Erin made the closing announcement over the intercom, Ben did his best to make her laugh by pretending to be thoroughly fascinated by the magazine Guns & Ammo, which he lifted up to reveal Thrasher magazine, which he lifted up to reveal Needlepoint Now, which he lifted up to reveal Muscle & Fitness, which he turned sideways as if admiring a centerfold of some grotesquely muscled and underclothed specimen of human meat. He stroked his chin thoughtfully and Erin had to pause for a moment to collect herself before finishing the announcement. Things were looking up.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25: Seth picked Ben up at conference’s end and after tossing the pigskin at Centennial Park they went back to Seth’s place to watch Hoosiers, the lines of which Seth knew by heart. (He chastised himself when he couldn’t quote Myra Fleener’s early demurrals of Coach Dale with word-for-word accuracy.) Later they watched the real life Hoosiers play UMass in the Maui Invitational while Seth dispensed newfound, hard-won marital wisdom. (“The hard parts are harder than I imagined but the good parts are even better than I imagined.” What were the hard parts? “Oh, having every character flaw you’ve ever had exposed and magnified times ten.” Hmmmmm. “And once you get married, you realize how much of a sinner you are.”)

     Erin came over to the Swihart’s for dinner, and Miriam Swihart indulged everyone an evening’s worth of Summer’s Best 2 Weeks small talk, with Seth reinacting his famous Lower Back Pull stretch as he hobbled around the kitchen, groaning. Later we went to one of Erin’s favorite haunts, 12th & Porter in the Gulch, for the traditional Monday night “Twelve @ 12th,” an open mic night for primarily local artists. Erin and her sister Bevin had discovered several new artists there, including Mindy Smith. “You’ll hear her name more soon,” Erin predicted. That night’s line-up was hit-or-miss, with the highlight and lowlight being a painfully sincere, emo/hard rock act called Hurts to Laugh, which performed its smash single, “When You’re Gone, You’re Gone.” (To this day Seth and Ben continue to amuse one another with those three simple words: hurts to laugh.)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26: Ben’s last day in Nashville was largely spent with Erin. They hung out at a coffee joint called JJ’s, then purchased art supplies and groceries for a night in at Erin’s apartment at Brentwood Downs. Ben grilled chicken for dinner, then they watched The Royal Tenenbaums before having arts & crafts time at the dining room table. As they were painting Ben asked Erin if her feelings had changed since August. Yes and no, Erin said. She wasn’t ready to be in a relationship, but she still had some feelings she needed to figure out. They agreed the timing was far from ideal. They agreed long distance relationships sucked. And they agreed to stay in touch, to keep writing letters, to be open and honest about where they stood.

     Driving Ben back to the Swihart’s that night, Erin remarked that she hoped what she said earlier hadn’t been discouraging. Which Ben didn’t think it had been at all. He had made do for four months on far less than what they had shared that night. So what was another four months? Or eight? Maybe they’d be reunited at camp the following summer. It was just a case of learning to appreciate and embrace the waiting. Now, at least, they had another reservoir of shared time and memories to draw from to fuel their correspondence. It was sad this little chapter was coming to an end, but not despondent or despairing sad. It was the kind of sadness that holds within it hope as well.

EPILOGUE: Back during that Sabbath conference in spring 2001, one of the exercises Ben participated in involved shaping a piece of clay as a form of prayer. More explicit instructions than that were withheld. I have no clue where to start, Ben thought as he found a sunny spot in the courtyard. He liked the clean lines of an undisturbed block of clay. Why did he have to alter it at all? Whatever I make, Ben thought, is going to look like a first grade art project.

     First Ben made a man. He was barrel-chested and his arms were lumpy and his right foot kept falling off. So Ben smooshed the clay back into an amorphous blob, aimlessly working it with his hands and wondering what to shape next when he realized he had something that looked an awful lot like an ear. He hollowed out the top of the ear (the scapha) a bit more and used his fingernail to make indentations for the cartilage. Then he turned the ear on its side, reshaped it ever so slightly, smoothed over the cartilage and hollowed out a circular, depressed center. It had become an eye.

     So Ben made a face. An irregular, misshapen face with two eyes, a nose and a smirking, upturned set of lips. He spent a moment or two rearranging the eyes, bending their angle to produce different expressions, before settling on bemused. Then, since it was getting hot, he went inside to change into shorts. He left the face lying flat on a sheet of tissue paper and set his name tag down beside his bag.

     When he came back out five minutes later, the face had changed. One of the eyes — the right one — had shifted a little bit. Then Ben noticed that his name tag was not there. Had he taken it inside? Was he still wearing it? No, he had left it right there. But it was missing.

     Irrationally, Ben’s first thought was, Will they still let me get into meals? He was annoyed and uncomfortable, and just wanted the security of the name tag back. That’s when he noticed the slight breeze blowing through the courtyard. Had it been blown away? Unlikely. But then a gust of wind sent leaves skittering by. Ben watched them whisk past, trying to determine what path his name tag could have taken. He looked up at the entire courtyard stretching out in front of him. 

     That’s the moment he suddenly realized why he was in Nashville. He was there to listen. He was there to play a game. The ear, the face that changed expressions, this quad before him now a garden of mysteries. Faith, he realized, was a state of perpetual anticipation and watchfulness. It was looking at a certain scene and seeing it both as it existed and as it might exist under different circumstances. That someone told Ben later what had transpired when he went inside — a bird landed by the clay face and picked at it before grabbing the name tag in its beak and dragging it halfway across the courtyard — diminished nothing. We don’t choose the roads by which we come to faith. But we choose how we see the road we’re on and where it could take us.

      That’s what Ben’s second pilgrimage to Nashville was about too. It was a prelude to nothing and a prelude to everything. It was spending six days with Erin as a friend and seeing it as the next six days in something far beyond a friendship. So which would it be? 

     After breakfast at Pancake Pantry on the morning of Wednesday the 27th, Erin drove Ben back to the airport. By now they were comfortable around each other again, and conversation flowed easily. Erin had introduced Ben to Grant-Lee Phillips, and he had become sufficiently obsessed with the song “Spring Released” to play it on repeat for the full duration of the drive. (“There are other songs on the album,” Erin noted.) As they unloaded at the airport curb, Ben pulled out what he referred to as The Trump Card: a sealed letter, postmarked August 28, that he had written shortly after camp. This letter was inspired by Scott Guldin, who had advised Ben to play it cool in the feelings department, seeing as Erin was already in a relationship. But write the letters you want to write her anyway, Scott said. Just don’t send them. Hold onto them until the day comes when she’s ready to read them.

     So Ben wrote them. Then he mailed them to himself and left them sealed. He said everything he was afraid to say in the open. What’s the worst that can happen?, he thought. Erin marries the other guy and disappears forever and I burn the letters. No harm done, aside from the crushing heartbreak, of course. Except now, somehow, it had come to pass that Ben was giving Erin the first letter, which was not a love letter so much as a prelude to a love letter, a sort of What if we did fall in love? kind of letter. Wouldn’t that be a kick? Which it was, Ben thought, after they hugged and he disappeared into the crowds while Erin pulled back into traffic and the two of them again went their separate ways.