Translating a World on the Edge

Taking someone for granted is the act of not appreciating what that person does for us. Sometimes it means ignoring a person we say we love, by thinking more about ourselves than them. And sometimes, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

We often take our loved ones for granted. We think we’ll always have their support no matter what, so we put off, or sometimes don’t even think about, telling them how much we love them, or how grateful we are for all they do for us.

But what if someone we love dies suddenly and we’ve never taken the time to express our love and appreciation? Or what if a friend who was always there for us, moves away, or finds someone they like more? Or what if the job we gripe about every day is taken from us?

Love is not one-sided. If love is real, it is shared equally–no taking the other for granted.

I think we should remember this, too: Nothing is guaranteed. A single day can make a huge difference in our life.

Now is the time to act lovingly. Now is the time to show appreciation. Not next week, not on vacation, not even tomorrow. Now.

Showing our love and gratefulness for others not only makes them feel good, it makes us feel good, too. When we see the same love and gratefulness returned in their faces, we can be certain we are sharing the goodness of God within us.

I don’t look forward to old age. Yet I know it’s a stage   that  comes for everyone who inhabits a  long life.

My grandmother lived to be nearly one hundred.  I loved her dearly, as well as my grandfather, for all the many years I knew them. My family lived in my grandparents house until I was five years old. To say that they were influential is an understatement.  They were crucial to each of us.

My grandfather worked his way out of the Great Depression and became  Executive Vice President for the Bay Line Railroad. I’m named after him.  His name was Kenneth Shealy,  but at the railroad he was simply called Mister K.  He was a tall man with a crooked smile, like mine. He was quiet and generous to a fault.  I remember Christmas mornings in my grandparents house when porters from the Bay Line inevitably appeared at the back door with their greeting to him.  “Just wanted to wish ya’ll Merry Christmas, Mr. K.” And my grandfather would have ready in his pocket a ten dollar bill for each. Just one of many examples.

My grandmother, Ethel, could do anything–really! And she ‘ruled the roost.’ She had marvelous ‘good sense’ and compassion.  There were not many times either of my parents disputed anything she said. Both of my grandparents were readers. On their bookcase in the living room were the classics they loved. Among them were Aesop, Grimm, and Andersen; Cervantes, Dana, and Defoe;  Poe and the Bronte sisters, and an old set of encyclopedias called The Books of Knowledge.

When I see aged people, I see my grandparents in them. People who led good and caring lives. And I know that one day I will look in the mirror and see myself as old. I may even say, as I heard my grandmother say, “Oh, that can’t be me!”

There is a textured story, though, in the face of every elderly person. We cannot possibly know the intricacies of their story, but we can appreciate them for the  lives they lived. And we can hope that one day the story of our life will be appreciated, and maybe even influential, in the mirrored memory of someone we care about.

When certain people bring nothing but drama to the table…you know it’s time to let them eat by themselves.–Anonymous.

I  admit it. There’ve been times in my life when I’ve been guilty of being a “Drama Queen” and blown small things out of proportion.  Those times were most prolific when I was around ten to twelve years old. Maybe I’d returned from seeing a movie with a friend–a movie that struck us in some way. What else would two ten year olds do but play out the movie again? Her part, my part-and all the drama that went with it.  Or when I went to spend-the-night parties with a bunch of other twelve year old girls and a sad song came on the radio. Oh, how we’d hang on to each other and cry—real tears!

Thankfully, most people outgrow these things, But some don’t, so we have to limit the havoc they can wreak on our lives. We cannot sit at their table . We have to let them “eat by themselves.”

Characteristic of an adult Drama Queen is the over-reaction to minor events with excessive emotion, and obsessive behavior, that exhibits theatrical, attention-grabbing ways. The damaging theatrics of drama queens may spring from defects etched in the brain. This is the type of friend or family member, who derails a casual lunch to tell you a two-hour story about the devastating fight she had with her boyfriend, or the co-worker who constantly obsesses about how he is about to lose his job and needs your support to make it through the day.

 Trauma to Drama
What drives the drama? Childhood trauma might be a trigger in some cases. Psychiatrist Bruce Perry of the Child­Trauma Academy in Houston has found that children who experience trauma—from abuse to natural disasters—undergo changes in brain chemistry affecting regions that make them moody, oversensitive to stimulation, and unable to accurately assess certain social and environmental cues.

Childhood neglect could also be a factor, experts in the field believe. If parents or guardians habitually ignore, discount or dismiss a child’s thoughts, feelings and experiences, the child may decide that dramatic presentations—from dressing provocatively to telling stories of wild adventures or crises—are necessary to get attention.

Genes could contribute as well. Excessive behavior runs in families, according to a 2004 study led by psychiatrist John Gunderson of Harvard Medical School. Gunderson’s team found that 27 percent of the relatives of BPD patients displayed aspects of the disorder’s problematic relationship style as compared with just 17 percent of the relatives of people with other personality disorders. Shared environmental factors—say, particular parenting practices that a child learns—could play a role in this pattern, although Gunderson theorizes that as yet undiscovered genetic variations may also predispose some family members to difficulties with attachment and mood regulation.

Altered Circuitry
Whatever the roots of their personality, the brains of drama queens seem to be constructed differently from those of calmer people. In 2007 psychiatrist Emily Stern and her colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain activity of 14 healthy individuals and 16 people with BPD while they performed a task that required reacting to negative, positive and neutral words. The BPD patients displayed diminished activity in part of the brain’s prefrontal cortex that controls planning and emotional reactions when they had to inhibit a response—in this case, pressing a button—to a negative word.

This  post was based on an article by Ophelia Austin-Small in  “Scientific American.”

The following video  is  the hilarious assessment and comedic prescription for the Drama Queens in our lives.

Do you see yourself as ‘part’ of something? Do you play a big part, or a small part?

Maybe you  think “big” is more important than “small.”

The strirrup bone inside the eardrum is the smallest bone in the human body. And the femur is the biggest bone in the human body. Which is most important?  Well, I wouldn’t want to do without either of those parts, would you? How powerful those parts are!

On the other hand, many of the deadliest creatures on Earth are also some of the tiniest (like the deathstalker scorpion) It’s the diminutive size of these animals that makes them so terrifying because they’re hard to see. Their small size gives them power, too

A few weeks ago, one of my sons put a new radiator in his car–all by himself! It took him time, many hours on quite a few days to do it, mostly because he was missing a tiny little part of what it would take to complete the job–a disconnect tool. Everything was fine except he needed that tiny tool to get his big radiator running like it should.

Whether a thing is “big” or “small” is not important. What’s important is that it do the job it was created to do.

Each of us has a part to play in life. It may seem a small part to us, but small things can literally change the world for the better—if we are  not so absorbed in ourselves, if we remember that everyone we meet is journeying through life with us, and if we hold out a hand to another fellow traveler every now and then.

Today–unless we’re involved in a church, or have parents who are believers, or Christian friends who influence us–we don’t hear much about God. We might wonder: Does God really see me and care about me personally?

Not so  long ago, if you turned on a local radio station in Dothan, Alabama, the music that came up was Gospel. You might hear The Blackwood Brothers, or the Blind Boys of Alabama. You might hear Mahalia Jackson or even Elvis Presley, but all of them were singing about the presence of God in our world.

As a people, we are more divided than ever. This is not how our country was meant to be. As we say in the Pledge of Allegiance, we are meant to be ONE nation, under God. Generations have fought and died for our right to be free Americans, to think as we want to think, to live as we want to live–as long as we do not trample on the rights of others to think as they want to think, to live as they want to live. In the sight of God, we are–all of us–his children. So, why won’t we act as brothers and sisters?

Here, expressed in the lyrics of songwriters and through the performance of their work, are reminders of why we should act as brothers and sisters:

The second and third stanzas of America the Beautiful. The lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates, and the music was composed by church organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward.

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.  Who more than self their country loved

And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic“, also known as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” outside of the United States, is a song by American writer Julia Ward Howe, using the music from the song “John Brown’s Body”.  The song links the judgment of the wicked at the end of time (New Testament, Rev. 19) with the American Civil War.  Since that time, it has become an extremely popular and well-known American patriotic song.

Although most sources credit Ohio-born Daniel Decatur Emmett with the song’s composition, other people have claimed to have composed “Dixie”, even during Emmett’s lifetime. Compounding the problem of definitively establishing the song’s authorship are Emmett’s own confused accounts of its writing, and his tardiness in registering the song’s copyright. The latest challenge has come on behalf of the Snowden Family of Knox County, Ohio, who may have collaborated with Emmett to write “Dixie”.

I’ve entitled my blog “A World on the Edge” for a reason. I believe our world, created by God, is in many ways eroding. Nowhere is this more evident than in the present fight for religious freedom all over the world. And now, the fight comes to our beloved America, founded on principles of liberty that reflect the individual rights God gave each one of us: One of the basic rights is Freedom OF Religion. Not Freedom FROM Religion. That means your religion and mine.

Imagine yourself standing in the sand at dusk on the edge of the beautiful, blue-green Gulf of Mexico while waves, with each rush, pull the sand from beneath your feet. At first, you may not notice, but if you stand there long enough, a hole will occur around each foot, and you will lose your balance. This is what is happening to our religious freedom in the United States of America. And we are barely noticing it.

As they did last year,  from June 21 to July 4, Catholics across the nation are observing a Fortnight for Freedom. Not a special freedom just for us, but the right of all citizens for religious freedom.

In the words of George Washington: “If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed in the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it.”

A year has passed since the first Fortnight for Freedom. Things are no better. We are in danger. Take notice that America is tottering on The Edge. Help keep her balanced. Join us again as we stand up for Freedom of Religion.

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ANDALUSIA LAUNCH of Birds of a Feather

Today, Thursday,  at Andalusia, the home place of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, Georgia, I’ll be touching the pulse of my identity as an author of fiction.  For those of you who can’t make it, I’d like to share what I’ll be talking about.

My gratitude goes to to April Moon and Elizabeth Wylie of the Andalusia Foundation,  to Joshua Hren, publisher at Wiseblood Books, and also to  author Charles McNair, who’s such a integral part of this event. Finally, thank you to all who’ve come today.

When Charles and I were deciding on a name for our event at this wonderful farm, we looked for something that would correlate with Flannery O’Connor.  “Misfits, Mission, and Mercy,” seemed to be just the right thing.

So under that flag, each of us will give a talk on our perspectives and read from our works. Charles is taking on Southern Fiction, fiction in general, and magical realism in his novels. My talk concerns Catholic Fiction, Catholic Imagination, and the influence of Flannery O’Connor on my writing.

And since, in the South, it’s always “Ladies First”– I will begin.

When we read a book, we absorb the author’s story. But as readers, we absorb the author, too. Either we’re drawn to him or her, and want to read another book, or we turn away. And we often like a certain writer because we identify with them in some way.

Flannery O’Connor, as we know, was a Catholic and a Southerner. Being a Catholic Southerner, too, reading her work is like hearing a kindred spirit speaking in my head. And being an author, as well; she’s sort of a mother figure to my writing. Of course, I never met her, but she seems always to have been in the peripheries of my life.

In fact, Flannery O’Connor and my mother were born months apart in Savannah and for a time, attended the same Catholic elementary school. After reading O’Connor’s letters in Habit of Being, and the frequent accounts of conversations with her mother, Regina; I can hear the attitudes and inflections in speech, of my own mother and grandmother arguing, or gossiping, or telling a story.

Any of Flannery O’Connor’s stories can be enjoyed without knowing the depth of her Catholic faith, but when her faith is delved into, she’s just phenomenal. There’s no one else like her. I don‘t think there will ever be.

This statement by Flannery really sharpens understanding of how she identified herself as a writer:

“Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.”

It wasn’t always so, but today, everyone realizes that the identity of Flannery O’Connor as a writer came, not only because she was Southerner, but because she was a Catholic—-a Catholic writer with a Catholic imagination.

As for myself, like O’Connor, my perspective on life comes from my Catholic faith and my Southern roots. I know who I am as a writer, and I don’t try to be different from that. I’ve never lived, or wanted to live, anywhere but the South. And I’ve never wanted to be anything but a Catholic, despite that All the men in my family–my father, grandfather, and four uncles, were Southern and Protestant. Nearly all of those men married Southern women who were Catholics, then they, themselves, converted to Catholicism near the end of their lives. So I believe I understand–and I know I try to address—-all readers, whatever their faith, or lack of it.

A great thing about being a Southern Catholic writer is that here most all native Southerners, the greatest percent Protestant, know the Bible, can quote the Bible, and try to live by the Bible. And most of them admit they are sinners in need of being saved.  I don’t think you’ll find that anywhere else to such a degree; so for writers like me, concerned with sin and salvation, a southern setting is ripe ground for fiction.

Add to that, my grandmother’s Macon, Georgia family of nine children produced three nuns and three Jesuit priests, and that one of those cousin priests taught Theology to my husband and I when we were students at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Al., and you can see why my writing is influenced by Catholicism.

But at Spring Hill, there was another wonderful Jesuit who was not related to me. Father Robert McCown taught me Creative Writing, pushed me into writing my first one-act play, and then helped to produce it on campus. And this is especially interesting–Father Robert McCown was the younger brother of yet another Jesuit, Fr. James “Hooty” McCown, who served as Flannery O’Connor’s spiritual advisor, and to whom she wrote many letters included in The Habit of Being.

My Catholic Imagination was bolstered by every Jesuit who taught me: that God is truly present in everything we undertake in our lives. As an Art major, studying under a another talented Jesuit priest, I learned about the shadowing color Gray–not only as it appears in Art, but in life.

So this is the way I see it, and try to portray it, as a writer of Fiction who is both Southern and Catholic: In my characters–—and really, in life itself, there are always two extreme actions: Good and Evil. To ignore them in Fiction is to ignore Truth. Think of two ends of a horizontal line. At one end is the bright white of absolute Good. At the other end is the darkness of absolute Evil. In between those ends are lighter and darker hues of the color of GRAY. The farther we travel from either end, it becomes more difficult to see, or find our way back to the other.

The fact is most human beings travel daily along a line like this. They travel toward one end or the other, to the light or to the darkness. But in between the two ends is a lot of area in which to turn in an opposite direction—–either a fall, or an epiphany. This is core in Catholic Fiction—-the possibility of spiritual epiphany is always present in the work, though it may not always be accomplished by a character.

Now, the question: What is the Catholic Imagination?

   At first, for me, it had nothing to do with writing. It was an accumulation of Catholic belief instilled in my childhood that I used to decipher the world around me. I saw and acted according to that lens, believing it was the way everyone else looked at the world. Even in the Protestant South, where in the 1950’s and 60’s, Catholics stood out like sore thumbs; it took years for me to find out that not everyone saw the world the same as I did.

The Catholic imagination perceives people as good because God made them to be like Him. Except he also gave us the gift of free will. We can choose not to be like Him, and even choose not follow Him. No human being can honestly understand the magnitude of intelligence in the design of our Creator who gave us this free will, and whether we love him back or not, the Catholic Imagination contends that He loves us every second of our earthly lives, all the way into infinity. So, the desire of a Catholic writer is to translate our Creator and his goodness in some concrete form for readers; and that is a difficult job in our world today because many are certain there’s no such thing as a sole Creator, and others don’t see our world as good. So what is a Catholic writer to do? What did Flannery O’Connor do? I think she simply stuck to her guns.

There are wonderful intellectual authorities, such as Dr Bruce Gentry and Ralph Wood, who I believe serve on the board of the Andalusia Foundation, and have authored scholarly works about Flannery O’Connnor’s Catholicism. But I’m not an intellectual. I’m a writer who thinks of herself as a Heart-ellectual. Much like a Cardiac suregeon does every day—-for real–when I write I attempt to perform a surgery on my characters hearts looking for the goodness inside them, no matter how evil or diseased their actions might be. Maybe that’s what Flannery did, too.

A Catholic Imagination gives a writer like me, an identity. But that writer also finds the same identity in her characters, her readers, and with every other human being:– That we are children of God. That we are brothers and sisters. The Catholic Imagination perceives all people as good because God made them to be like Him. But as I mentioned before, writers, along with everyone else, have to also recognize free will. And because of free will, goodness within a person isn’t always outwardly practiced— in fact, often we do the opposite.

I believe a writer with a Catholic imagination will have strong emotion about current events where goodness is not: The murder of children. Debilitating disease. Sadistic, sexual perversion. Dishonesty. Meanness, and on and on—–just check ‘I choose not to follow” on each of The Ten Commandments. The question then becomes, “Can the mercy and grace of God, our Creator, be found where goodness is not?”

Well, Flannery O’Connor said that “often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.” In other words—describing an opposite of grace. Something she did so well in her novels and short stories.  

    So, Yes. To the Catholic writer, God is powerful enough to draw out goodness from atrocities that emanate because of the misuse of human free will in real life. And this is what he or she writes about.

In the Catholic writer’s imagination, there is a link between the divinity of God (the supernatural world) with the natural world. The task of writing becomes that of interlocking the two.

Representations are created, and specific truths about God’s presence in our world appear in the writer’s mind. She translates those truths in her settings, and in her characters and their dilemmas.

And what she translates is the tenet called grace, both Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace. Sanctifying Grace, inherited from the God who made us, lives in the soul and stays in the soul—it’s what gives us our dignity as human beings. By contrast, Actual grace doesn’t live in the soul; rather, throughout a lifetime, it acts in the soul as divine pushes from God toward His goodness—often when a character, or a person for that matter, is far from that bright white light. But those pushes must be noticed, and must require cooperation. A Catholic imagination will translate that in fiction.

The translating writer understands that a person must accept grace by his own free will; and that grace, like love, is sometimes prickly. I’m going to read a short excerpt about the prickliness of love from my first novel, A Hunger in the Heart, because it deals with the sacrifice real love must make. It’s relayed by Sarah Neal Bridgeman, the alcoholic wife of a decorated, but mentally disabled, World War II hero–and the mother of a young son, Coleman, who’s struggling with the upsets in his life. Because of her alcoholism and spitefulness, we don’t at first see the goodness in Sarah Neal. We see her as hypocrite who wears a crucifix around her neck and hangs a Cross with the suffering Jesus in every room in her house. This excerpt is when she and Coleman visit a newly-opened religious gift store in Gator Town, Florida. P.80 A Hunger in the Heart.

“Love isn’t a symbol. It’s an irritant, and it will cost you some skin.” Real life Love IS often painful. To give up some skin for it, requires Grace.

     A writer with a Catholic imagination translates grace, even in a world, or a character, on the edge of evil. She sees a double beginning and ending in everything, and I mean everything, including the awful, current events I mentioned before. Along with this, she realizes that knowing ‘reasons why’ is a human characteristic. She perceives a cause, and an effect that creates another cause, and effect, and on and on until an epiphany–or a fall–is created.

Stories are discovered in her imagination and brought to light by a very intimate flashlight, one that shines a light on the many causes and effects of free will, and on the causes and effects of grace; both working, and often conflicting, in the same human soul.

The stories in my collection, Birds of a Feather, are about the commonality each of us share as human beings: sin and its risk, and the presence of God’s mercy, waiting for us to realize it’s there, and then—-act with it.

It’s my opinion that this common identity is key to the Catholic Writer and his or her imagination.

Here’s what Flannery O’connor says about Identity, from Mystery and Manners:

“… An Identity is not to be found on the surface; it is not accessible to the poll taker; it is not something that can become a cliché. It is not made from the mean average or from the typical, but from the hidden and often the most extreme. It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure regardless of what passes, because they are related to the truth. It lies very deep. In its entirety, it is known only to God; but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist.”

So, As a Southern writer—-my identity is wrapped in the wonderfully changeable, material world around me–the world I live in. But as a Catholic writer—my identity is also wrapped in the mystery of mercy and grace in the immaterial world that lies deeply behind this one—-because that is the world that is unchangeable and enduring.

My short story collection, Birds of a Feather, published by Wiseblood Books, will be out July 14, but I was sent some advance review copies for today.

I’m going to read a story, called, “Jimmy’s cat.” It’s tone is definitely different from the other gritty stories in the collection. But I chose it because it speaks in a more humorous way, to what happens when a person lets Go of His or her Indentity.–And also, it’s the shortest story in the book.

p.165 “Jimmy’s Cat”

There’s an old song–I think from the 1940’s– that says we always hurt the ones we love. I think that’s pretty much true.

What I don’t think is true is the lyric that we hurt them–“because we love them most of all.” There’s something very wrong with that.

Intentional  hurt and love don’t go together. There may be many reasons for the hurt, but one of the most frequent is anger. Anger causes us to lose control, to say and do things we might not ordinarily do.

Anger is described as an emotional response related to one’s psychological interpretation of having been threatened. Often it indicates when one’s basic boundaries are violated. Some have a learned tendency to react to anger through retaliation.  And some use displays of anger as a manipulation strategy–think of a threatened lion showing his prowess. But we are not animals.

Anger is a valid human emotion, still we shouldn’t let it get out of hand.  We need to recognize the psychological or emotional factors that could predispose a person to intermittent explosive anger so that we can be onguard— growing up in an unstable family environment, marked by severe frustration, lack of a positive role model, physical and emotional abuse, alcoholism, violence and/or life-threatening situations.

We know  unrestrained anger can lead to misery for its victims–even victims the perpetrator professes to love . And that kind of anger is one of the Cardinal Sins.

If our first response in many situations is anger, it is very likely that our temper is covering up our true feelings and needs. This is especially likely if we grew up in a family where expressing feelings was strongly discouraged.  Explosive anger is especially destructive to children. As a result, an adult who experienced that sort of anger as a child may have a hard time acknowledging feelings other than anger.

If your anger seems to be spiraling out of control, remove yourself from the situation for a few minutes or for as long as it takes you to cool down.  Here are some of the dynamics of  Explosive  Anger:

• We become more angry when we are stressed and body resources are down.
• We are rarely ever angry for the reasons we think.
• We are often angry when we didn’t get what we needed as a child.
• We often become angry when we see a trait in others we can’t stand in ourselves.
• Underneath many current angers are old disappointments, traumas, and triggers.
• Sometimes we get angry because we were hurt as a child.
• We get angry when a current event brings up an old unresolved situation from the past.
• We often feel strong emotion when a situation has a similar content, words or energy that we have felt before.    Source: Get Your Angries Out

Let’s try to put our sincere love for a person in the forefront of our thoughts the next time we feel explosive anger rising within us.

My new short story collection, Birds of a Feather, is all about broken people. Some of the characters don’t realize it at first. They are the ones who won’t see themselves as they really are. Others are shattered, or left behind, by someone they’ve loved. But then, as in life, something changes for them, or more specifically in them. Some of the characters, but not all of them, recognize an offer of healing.  The recognition comes when GRACE is offered.

God’s grace is infinitely available. We only have to want it, to take advantage of it. We only have to trust in Him. We only have to turn around and see Him behind us, possibly in the face and actions of a caring human being that He’s called to help us.

Our lives will change then; maybe in ways we never imagined, or maybe in the way we’ve prayed for.  Whatever–we will be transformed.

Can we think of a time in our lives when we were so down, so miserable, that we couldn’t put one foot in front of the other? Grace is very present in these circumstances. It is a ‘waiting’ grace, waiting for us to take it. Maybe we have to admit our weaknesses. Maybe we have to give up what is dragging us down. Maybe we need to dig deeper for courage, or patience with others, or let go of our anger, or forgive another–or maybe we just ignore its presence.

But we should never imagine that God is not present.  Instead, we should imagine ourselves reaching out to Him, to realize that being broken at a given moment does not mean being broken forever.

And it is, after all, up to us.