“The final act of an unraveling society isn’t immoral behavior; it’s canonizing immoral behavior as a ‘new normal’ and celebrating it as a ‘moral victory.’” Jeff Iorg
Selvage is a beautiful word and a meaningful concept that denotes the edge of a web or cloth as finish to prevent it from unraveling. It is derived from Old English, “selfegge” and literally is ‘its own edge,’ derived from self plus edge. Woven from the thing itself. The edge of a lovely woven thing like a scarf or a bolt of good cloth or even a culture. Ours could use some selvage.
A couple of weeks ago, the general became specific, as cultural changes will do. Rita and I travel seven minutes west to Burma Road and the Weaver Cove Boat Landing on Narragansett Bay often at sunset. A large dock extends out towards Prudence Island, and in the summer it’s busy with boats coming and going – dropping and picking up passengers from the many small craft that launch and return there. Several boats are moored offshore and kept there for the boating season from May to October.
For the rest of the year, the only folks are sunset lovers like us. On a good night, there can be a dozen of us, but many times we have it almost to ourselves. We can walk down a long rocky beach or eat a sandwich supper in the car or venture out on the dock if the winter wind off the bay isn’t trying to cut us in half.
Recently we walked back from the beach. A solitary figure was sitting with his legs dangling off the end of the dock. An old yellow motorcycle was leaning on its stand near the end of it. After a while he laid back looked at the clouds and listened to the fish jump with the evening’s quiet waves slapping gently against the piers. Rita, as she often does, felt a stirring of the spirit. She is much more attuned to such things than I am, a better listener to heavenly interruptions. When he finally gave up his revery, she headed down towards his bike. I followed her. She has sensitive antennae for folks who are hurting.
He politely returned her greeting and commented on the beautiful end of the day. He told us his name, but for this we will call him Jason. She told him how much we enjoyed this lovely spot on this lovely island and said he must too. Jason sighed.
Well, yes, he said, but tonight he came to remember his best friend who died exactly a year before from acute alcoholism before he was thirty. This was his favorite spot. Had a boat. Ah. Then the gate opened to his heart, and it all poured out. Jason was twenty-nine. Three of his close friends were dead from alcohol and drugs. Another sigh. Then he said he was terribly lonesome. His “significant other” (I hate that phrase) had thrown him out of the apartment two nights before. Let’s call her Alison, although he told us her name.
They have four children together and were saving for a house. He missed her and the children with a deep longing. He sighed again. His dead friend’s brother, for reasons he didn’t understand, had waged a social media campaign of hatred against him with terrible calumnies and accusations that Alison believed. She had the car. He had the bike. She had the lease to the apartment. He had the bike. His paycheck was directly deposited into an account she had barred him from, but he was not overly dismayed because the kids needed to eat. He had a few bucks in cash. We offered him a place to stay for a few nights and some food. He said he was good to go and staying temporarily on another friend’s couch. Jason had pulled into the landing dirt parking lot by the dock to think about things on his way home from work.
He wanted things to go back to what they were a few weeks before. Just wanted to go to work, do his job and come home to his kids. Play with them. Hold them. Read to them. Goof with them. Stopped talking. Stared off over the bay.
Rita told him he was loved by God and that if he trusted in Jesus, he would find his way through this back to the truth of his life and his family. I joined in with a few things about how this would pass. His life was not defined by the last few weeks. That the Creator of all this beauty of the bay knew him and his pain. Rita and I had been married fifty-seven years with good times and bad; we would pray that things would work out for them. He listened with great attentiveness. Got quiet. He told us he had to go get something to eat and get some sleep. If he could sleep. He reminded us of us at his age when we were going through our worst troubles in Maine.[i] Bewildered at the sudden turn of his life. Confused. Broken hearted. Anxious. Miserable. Lost.
We all lingered for a minute or so. I asked him about his bike. He said it ran great so long as he could get it going. We started to go back to our car.
He headed to his motorcycle, hesitated, then he turned back towards us. Looked like there was something left to be said-something unfinished. Hesitated. Now shy, he asked if we would hug him. Of course. Rita hugged him with her motherly warm embrace. I hugged him. He clung to me like I was his father.
He thanked us, and after a brief struggle with his kick starter and choke Jason tinkered his motorcycle back to life and headed off south on the Burma Road after he emerged from the parking lot. Rita and I stood together holding hands and watched him go until the sound faded. We pray for Jason, Alison, and their children each day since. We look for him when we go to Weaver Cove, but so far, we haven’t seen him. May never see him again. Hope we do, but sometimes that’s how these things go. We pray together for Jason and Alison and their children everyday now.
“If I needed you, would you come to me,
Would you come to me for to ease my pain?
If you needed me, I would come to you.
I would swim the seas, for to ease your pain.” “If I Needed You,” [ii] Townes Van Zandt
The many articles and podcasts on the unprecedented epidemic of loneliness, depression, anxiety, and brokenness in our culture, especially among the young, are commonplace. Screen time, social media replacing personal relationships with a majority of kids living in single family or recombined families, the failure to commit phenomenon, low marriage rate, critically low birth rate, and COVID isolation are all frequently mentioned as possible causes. I have written in this blog about the many with an unfulfilled capacity for God. All topics unto themselves for books, never mind blog posts.[iii] The solution is one person at a time, and it is spiritual. I’ll retell an old joke that may fit the topic:
A believer who perhaps misunderstood how these things most often work was convinced that God would intervene miraculously and save him from the rising river in a hundred-year flood. A rescue vehicle pulled into his driveway and offered the man a ride to safety. “No! God will save me.” The river rose, and he fled to the second story. A rescue dory rowed against the fierce current to his window, and the firefighter told him to jump in. “No! God will save me.” He fled to his roof. A last-ditch paramedic helicopter hovered over him, and the rescue crew lowered a basket to him. “No. God will save me.” Finally, the river swept the house away and broke it up. He drowned within minutes. Arriving in front of God, he started complaining angrily, loudly, and bitterly. “You failed to rescue me, God; how could you desert me to perish in that flood?” “My son, you missed the outpouring of my grace; I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter.”
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18
We heard a moving talk recently from Amy Ford, the founder of Embrace Grace, a nationwide nonprofit that helps equip churches to help single moms and families. She talked about her times of hearing such “heavenly interruptions.” Some would call them invitations of the Spirit. Listening. Being attuned to that gentle whisper, gentle whispers which inspire us to do “small acts of kindness with great love,” as St. Mother Teresa would say.
I tremble at how many whispers I must have missed[iv] and am grateful for those I have managed to respond to. They come every day, perhaps many times a day. A kind word. Just an acknowledgement that another person exists and has struggles. Opportunities to love. Opportunities to be loved.
Just as selvage is the weaving together of the many threads of a cloth to make it strong, so our culture is made strong one thread at a time, one life at a time, one person at a time. By all of us. By me. By you.
“The ultimate test of your greatness is how you treat every human being.” Pope St. John Paul
[i] A summary of our struggles at twenty-nine and the fork in the road. https://quovadisblog.net/2012/05/28/maine-tales-iv-the-road-not-taken/
[ii] “If I Needed You” Don Williams and Emmy Lou Harris cover
[iii] Here is one article in Atlantic: “Loneliness, Solitude and the Pandemic”. There are many others. An excellent podcast on the lonely culture with Dr. Matthew P and Bishop Robert Barron.
[iv] I am rereading some of Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful, dark, and richly symbolic stories which remind me of the subtle invitations to grace that are often missed by her characters. We all miss occasional invitations to grace. Heavenly interruptions.
February is that sort of month. We’ve transited from the early bright lights and joy of the beginning of a New England deep winter in December to a grayer, resigned wait. The chores of winter are wearing and tiresome. The dust and mess on the floor from the woodstove are grinding me down; every evening ends with banking up a load of oak and maple for the night burn, and every morning starts around five with a few coals blown back to life with small wood and a hot start to keep the creosote buildup in the chimney to a minimum.
Late winter skies are startling blue, and the clouds look like they were painted with a pallet knife, almost unnatural. The sun is two months warmer than December, and with the windows up in the car the glare feels hot against our face. Hope is upon us, the promise of March and April unmistakable. Soon and very soon, the cascade of blooming will begin. First the crocuses, then the yellow profusion of daffodils and forsythia, followed by everything, the pink cherry blossoms, the white of the Bradford pears, magnolias, dogwoods, flowering crabs, azaleas, later the lilacs and rhododendron. The island’s splendor is persistent for months almost into autumn with the Montauk daisies.
Italian in four and a half centuries, the Politburo started to understand fully the worst mistake of its sixty-year history of brutal rule. When he was elected Pope, he immediately announced that “the Church of Eastern Europe was no longer a Church of silence because now it speaks with my voice.”
The red pumper bounced onto the driveway of the large ante bellum colonial with siren blaring. The house had once served as an inn, and currently was occupied by a half dozen mostly benign refugees from other late sixties communes. The flames fully engaged the structure and were seen through the windows. Everyone got out.
A “domestic disturbance” was treated like this: no police involvement because they were too far away to help. Bia, a recent resident, had moved into an apartment next to a small store front downtown, where she opened up a sheet metal artisan shop, welding and cutting small decorative pieces sold at craft fairs. Her boyfriend was an odd, slender, bearded, pony tailed archetype prone to buckskin jackets, cowboy hats, silver buckles and a 14” Bowie knife carried in a sheath on his belt. Bia’s daughter was my daughter’s age, and they became friends during the few months since Bia arrived in town. In January, our phone rang about eleven one weeknight, long after our bedtime. She called because we were one of the few she had gotten to know. The boyfriend, whose name fades, let’s call him Jim, was drinking, smoking dope and hitting her. Could I come down to help? Sure, I agreed, groggily.
steed, well actually, an F150. What could be better for a chainsaw guy than getting to play knight errant? On the way to her place, I practiced some tough threat lines involving emergency rooms, reconstructive dentistry and eating through a straw, all of which turned out quickly to be completely inadequate to the situation. The denouement was less than noteworthy. Jim had fled out the back door on the snow over the ice of Lake Minnehonk. I followed his tracks into the dark, axe handle in hand, and found him seventy yards out on the ice in a tee shirt disconsolately sitting and shivering in the snow, his knife still in its sheath. I asked him if he had a place to go. He said he did, in Waterville. I told him that’s where he would be staying. He started to cry. Bia packed a duffle bag into his dented Saab with Boulder County Colorado plates, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him. I went home to bed; Rita was glad to see me.
In the beginning, there were snowball fights after every storm, even though they presently are illegal in eight towns in Rhode Island, including nearby Newport and Jamestown. Not illegal here in Portsmouth, however, our town has a long history of dissent and rebellion against unjust laws and was founded in 1638 by Anne Hutchinson and others who wanted freedom from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Portsmouth was the site of the largest Revolutionary War
A rainy December Saturday is the perfect time for reflection and to get a short Christmas letter together. We said last goodbyes to some good friends in 2021, three in the last two months. We’ll miss their company and just knowing they are there. We’ve joined in prayer for each that they have been welcomed home. “Well done, My good and faithful servant.” Each one was unique and precious and unrepeatable and irreplaceable. As we turn the corner into our fourth quarter century, this Christmas and end of year season, natural for reflection, has special poignancy.
A local townsperson from forty or so years ago in Mount Vernon, Maine, taught in the English Department at the University of Maine. She grumbled to us once at one of her parties that the brilliant fall gold and red display of maples and birch and poplar was disturbingly garish, a vulgar excess that lures the tourists. The leaf peepers travel by the busload to northern New England and upstate New York each year to gawk and to raise the rates in the hotels and restaurants, filling the hospitality business gaps between the summer lakes splendor and the ski season. The leaf colors are enabled by the slow final ruin of the chlorophyll 
It has been written that the Holy Spirit is the Love proceeding from the Father and the Son within the Community of Love that is the Trinity of the Godhead. One of the key stories in the Christmas narratives occurs when Mary comes to help her also pregnant cousin after Mary began carrying the Christ child within her. In the presence of the baby Jesus, Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit; she was participating in the mysterious inner life of God. Human beings as their most noble calling possess the capacity to share in that inner life.
None of us likely has the same degree or skill or eye, but the capacity for beauty exists by our nature. Imago Dei, in the Image of God, are undeserved gifts to us in our nature and our souls. The senses are there; the mind is there; the heart is there; the soul is there for all of us.
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