A Particular Kind of Easy

On the Spirit Which Descended Upon Southeatuary

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

I asked the girl at the counter of the Farmburger if she was sure, but she insisted. I will sometimes buy myself a Coke as a desert after a meal, but she very graciously offered this one to me for free, and I’m still wondering why.

I sipped it on the road from Asheville to Lake Junaluska, listening as I often do when driving, to another of Paul Vanderklay’s videos. My mind began to wander (as it also often does when I drive) back and forth between questions of what I might want to discuss over the coming weekend as well as how I would best hide from the embarrassment that if not for the Murphy Campbell performance happening the following evening, I may have never bought a ticket to Southeastuary in the first place.

Too late now, I suppose.

By the time I arrived at the first estuary session, after a round of introductions and a couple first pitches, it came time for me to share what was on my mind. The dissolution of enlightenment liberalism sprang to mind, a ‘thinky-talky’ topic for those among us with too much time on their hands with which to think. Namely, me. Or perhaps a deeper question plaguing me recently regarding whether a work of art (like perhaps, writing) could ever truly be an act of service, a question whose answer I yearned for about as equally as I dreaded. As I weighed them both, a third option emerged which presented itself in that moment as the only right choice.

Recently, someone I am by no means close with approached me.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” he asked.

Basking in vanity, I gladly obliged.

“Do you believe in God?”

Being the infantile & vane inquirer into Orthodox Christianity that I am currently, I answered excited to encounter his own perspective wherever it was and share my own. After a mostly breezy back and forth, I learned quickly that such a question is usually not asked lightly. What sparked his curiosity was related to the sudden and unexpected passing of a close friend.

“Why would God do this?” he asked me.

I struggled with relaying an analogy about blind men feeling up an elephant -- one may feel its leg and assume it a tree trunk, another its tail and mistake it for a brush -- but none of them would have the complete picture. Only God can see the whole elephant for what it is. A woefully insufficient response, in my estimation, and I shared as much with my estuary group, asking what is the best way to address such a question? Everyone in my group shared their thoughts, each circling a theme that (in retrospect) pointed to what would emerge in the first presentation, the subject which none of us knew ahead of time: The Book of Job, and the potential answers therein. Not clear or even coherent ones, as is so often the case with these things, but an answer would come soon enough.

The day continued with further presentations and conversations with other estuarians, both in and out of my group, culminating in Murphy’s performance at the Scottsman pub in Waynesville, a short drive away from where we were staying in Junaluska. It was there I shook hands with Michael Martin, and felt compelled to clarify.

“I hope you don’t think I was antagonizing you with that question,” I told him.

I’d asked him after his presentation earlier that day about a point he made regarding “listening to the land” when he writes his poetry. I wanted to know how he knew it was the land he was communing with.

“Poetic creation discloses worlds,” he said, among other things.

What I was looking for, somewhat facetiously, was an indication of what Percy Bysshe Shelley once described in A Defence of Poetry:

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the Imagination”: and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an everchanging wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.

Carl Trueman, in Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, expands on the significance of the allusion to a lyre:

This is a musical instrument played by the wind, not by any human hand. Essentially, the force of nature in the form of wind strikes the harp’s chimes and causes it to create music, to give expression to what would otherwise be an inexpressible force, in accordance with the harp’s own construction. The point of the analogy is clear: poetry is the result of the forces of nature moving the poet to give them literary or artistic expression. The poet is inspired by nature, not simply by way of his own emotional reaction to it but by forces that are innate within nature itself, and therefore external to him, and that moves him in his works of artistic creation.

If an emotion can intentionally and reliably be generated multiple times across multiple spaces through a piece of artistic expression, that would point to an external emotional reality the work acts as a bridge to which exists outside the subjective.

This reality was very much contested by one estuarian on stage the following day, who questioned whether it was even the voice of God people hear when reading the Bible. A likely heretical position, by his own admission, but emblematic of what I find so refreshing about the estuary space. John Vandonk describes estuary as a protocol for mutually respectful conversation across ideological lines. This is not the realm of debate bros looking to own one another with facts and scripture. Everyone here is pointed in a single direction: the seeking of that which is true, good & beautiful.

But to what end?

Some of us in my group, myself included, were interested in the practical application of what emerges from our estuary sessions. A pertinent question, particularly of the young parents among us. Admittedly, one of my biggest reasons for attending this and the previous Chicago event is to glean insight from parents as to better prepare myself for fatherhood. Not like I’ve even met their mother yet, but if getting miles ahead of myself was a competitive sport, I’d have gone pro years ago.

It can be, perhaps, a particular kind of easy to dwell in the collection of ideas, the temptation being that with just enough information, one can avoid the pitfalls of life. A folly, of course, as “the goal of knowing is an ongoing communion with the real,” as Esther Meek put it in her presentation. It never ends, of course. “Knowing explodes more than it explains,” she said, as one question begets the next -- assuming you’re asking the right ones. The only place from which to do so is never at but through, as engagement with the real demands integration enough as to yield to the multiplicity of potential.

What then is the right kind of question?

What Job teaches us is so often “why” is not the right question to ask, but instead: what can I do now? The next right thing, of course.

In other words, as put forward in all its brilliant simplicity by a mother of 2 in our group -- we honor God.

Taken from a hilltop at Lake Junaluska.

At the campfire on the final night, I had a lively conversation with a woman who earlier said the hesychastic Jesus prayer gave her the impression of cowering in a corner in fear, begging for mercy from a wrathful God. She later had it clarified by an Orthodox Christian among us that what we ask for when we ask for mercy in such a prayer is as a salvific, like a healing balm with which we ask Jesus to apply over our souls. In any case, I felt compelled to share with her based on her earlier impression that the foundation of my faith is that when we are called to our final judgment for all we have done, whatever decision God renders will be good.

It was there on that chilly night, surrounded by both new friends and total strangers alike, singing songs & chasing the tails of sparks as they danced upward from the flame we surrounded, that I was offered a whisper of the good of God’s creation. And what he said, was don’t worry about it.