May 8, 2023

The chapel, built of brick, is the size of a large living room. One wall adjoins the main church. The ceiling is high and centered by a large chandelier. The altar is covered by a deep red cloth, set off by large potted plants on both sides. The eucharist is locked in a gold receptable called a monstrance, perched on the tabernacle above the altar. Candles in four-foot-high bases stand in front of the altar, the tiny flames steady, silent, and bright against the dark background.

It’s not a lovely place, a little on the garish side. I’d like it plainer, more austere. The chapel is nearly empty most of the time, one or two people may be there, praying or meditating. Silence is the rule. Silence, always.

This goes on at lots of Catholic churches and some non-Catholic ones, those with chapels adjacent to or part of the main building, on a schedule of church members who sign up for an hour or more per week on a 24/7 schedule of perpetual adoration. The point is private prayer, contemplation.

The chapel routine is one of countless ways ordinary people seek contact with the source of their faith, the transcendent, sublime, elusive, majestic idea they may call God, or something else, or nothing at all. Some walk on the beach at sunrise or at midnight, others stare out from mountain vistas or practice yoga, expanding their minds privately or with others.

Some folks jog, listening to podcasts, others gather in groups to ponder Bible verses or the Koran, or teachings of the Talmud and Torah, or the Bhagavad Gita. Some nod at stemwinding harangues by televangelists, on TV or in giant megachurches. With some, beer, wine, or booze is involved.

For a change we drove out to a church in the country for Sunday Mass. Arriving, we saw no one else. We had got the date wrong. We ended up at a tiny church tucked in the boondocks of this huge county. It was a casual, easygoing Mass. After the closing prayers the priest called a young boy and young woman to the altar, wished them “Happy Birthday” in English and Spanish and blessed them. The congregation applauded. New to me.

On the drive home we passed two Baptist churches across the street from each other, their parking lots near-full. Sunday worship was going on full-tilt everywhere. Some of it is for show, going through the motions. How much? I recall a gaggle of priests and nuns at the January 2020 March for Life in Washington breathlessly applauding Trump as the “pro-life” president, the same one who confided to his erstwhile legal gofer, Michael Cohen, “I bet [my supporters] think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.”

The struggle—to seek the divine, the immortal, the ineffable—always is at risk of falling into routine, which means it no longer is a struggle. Immediately after February 24, 2022 we heard prayers for Ukraine in every church—now, hardly ever. The churn of daily headlines: the shootings, the wars and famines, the soap operas of political corruption, drain from us the contemplative will which, if we allow it, may part the veil of the mystery of faith.

The silence of the chapel is one way of brushing aside the cobwebs and distractions, and laying bare the reason anyone goes there. The silence drives an awakening, an understanding that prayer isn’t verbal babble. It is whatever we hope it is, whatever we conceive of that transports us from our rushed schedules and hectic priorities to confront what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the Act of Existence. The existence that is for Thomas simply being: the vastness of everything we can imagine: the universe, the tangible, touchable world in which we live, our sense of ourselves and our surroundings, those we love.

All this remains a bit of an abstraction, Aquinas generally now lives in dusty philosophy and theology courses, and not just Catholic ones. But who, besides seminarians and the diminishing number of philosophy majors, are taking those courses, although now you can get them online. And no area of human interest has had more books written about it than spirituality. For every Sunday morning TV preacher, bookstores and the internet offer hundreds, maybe thousands, of how-tos on getting right with God.

One is out there, The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic who traces his turn from despair, the “dark night,” to the ecstasy of salvation. It’s his own intense, agonizing journey, and a tough read. But the title captures something of the place where so many find themselves, in this generation of smart, sarcastic cynicism. That is a place from which to extricate ourselves and run away. Run away, but to where we don’t have a clue.

Years ago we visited St. Peters in Rome and strolled through the huge square. You can buy a rosary blessed by the Pope. We’ve been to St. Paul’s in London, Notre Dame in Paris, to another Notre Dame, the one in Montreal, and to St. Patrick’s in New York. A cousin was married at the San Juan Capistrano Mission in California, famous for the sparrows. Years ago, when our kids were small we went to Christmas Eve Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. At all of them, you can buy souvenirs, postcards, get lunch.

All those places are stunning, beacons of faith, like every parish church everywhere, like the one we visited a week ago. I read up on it, the congregation, until they raised the money to build their modest church, attended Mass at a nearby Methodist church.

It’s true that not as many attend services as in past generations or even decades.  Pastors blame lots of things for that, the internet, the distractions of modern life, the sex scandal. But faith is elusive. It’s not in the tracts or the texts. Faith is a solitary thing, scary, even. That was St. John’s lesson. It comes in silence, in a dark night.                      

April 24, 2023

Everyone knows Habitat for Humanity, the outfit that builds homes for people who struggle with life’s challenges. President Jimmy Carter made it famous. Ordinary people step forward and pick up tools and building materials and work together to create modest livable spaces, each house about 1,000 square feet.

Habitat for Humanity International was founded by Millard and Linda Fuller in 1976, expanding the concept of an organization they had established with Clarence Jordan on Jordan’s farm in Americus, Ga. Supporters contribute funds to build houses at no profit and pool resources to maintain a “Fund for Humanity” that enables construction of more houses. Habitat operates in all 50 states and 70 countries, and has built houses for some 46 million people.

In this town Habitat has built 411 houses over the years. Six more are going up on the west side, about ten miles from our place. I drove over the day before my assignment to be sure I could find the site. It was bright and hot, a crew of a dozen or so was working on three houses, the other three looked nearly complete. A team hammered roof sections into place on one house. A guy was clearing rocks from the foundation of another, two men on ladders were taking measurements for gutters. Two women marked lines for raising a wall for the third house.

Habitat projects call on volunteers, some with extensive construction experience, others with moderate skills, and people like me, with no skills. Years ago I built a prefab shed in our backyard, which mainly required following the manufacturer’s directions. It took a week of assembly, fixing mistakes, and reassembly. I once sunk posts for a kids’ swingset, poured concrete, and years later removed them when the kids lost interest. Home construction? Never.

The folks at the Greenville site were a mix of volunteers and contractors. Habitat hires professional electricians, plumbers, and sheetrock people. The low-skill volunteers do the grunt work, hauling roof sections, hammering nails, making simple measurements. 

It rained hard early on my volunteer day, turning the site into an ocean of red Carolina mud. The supervisor pointed us to stacks of hardhats, safety glasses, nail vests, and hammers. “Don’t take those hats off while you’re on the site!” he yelled.

He split the group of about 40 into four-man teams, each with one experienced guy, for wall construction on the already-completed house foundation. The lumber was stacked on skids, the anchor pieces coded by room:  2x4s for interior sections, 2x6s for exterior, with shorter pieces for window frames. Our team hauled them bucket-brigade style to a workspace on the foundation. The team lead had the printed designs. We lined up the lumber.

Soon the site was racked with ear-splitting hammering. We nailed the boards in place, galvanized nails for the treated wood, simple sinker nails for the dry pieces; two nails for the 2x4s, three for the 2x6s. As teams completed their sections they leaned them against the nearly-completed house next door. Within a couple of hours around 20 wall sections were stacked against the neighboring house.

At a third site nearby teams installed vinyl siding. A Habitat supervisor cut sections while team leads sent workers scooting up and down ladders, fitting the siding sections together. Another team shoveled mulch.

At times the hammering subsided and the pace of work eased a bit as the teams caught their breath. Hammering nails (did you know?) is hard work. After a dozen or so, I slumped, gasping, climbed to my feet and restocked my vest.

By mid-morning the rain had stopped, blue sky broke through. By noon we felt the sun’s heat on our necks. As the temperature rose we moved more slowly, hauling, positioning, measuring, nailing. Sometimes we got the measurements wrong and pried nails out for do-overs. But we kept stacking wall sections.

We stopped for lunch around noon, staff people set out chairs and grilled burgers and hot dogs. We stuck our hardhats under our chairs, stretched our legs, talked with teammates, and closed our eyes for a few minutes. The morning shift left, reinforcements arrived for the afternoon session.

Someone said we’d be lifting the sections into place. That didn’t happen, the morning shift ran behind schedule. We could still see stacks of lumber on the trailers. We straggled back to the worksite and checked our design paperwork, and hauled more boards into our work area.

As we started work that morning, the project supervisor introduced the young man who with his family would become the owner of the house. They had had a tough time, the supervisor said, but he didn’t dwell on that. And yes, he would be paying a modest mortgage. The house, after all, was shelter for a young family, but it wasn’t free. And there he was, working with the volunteers, hauling wood, pounding nails, doing his share, sweating with the rest of us.

We quit around three and tossed our hardhats and hammers in a Habitat truck. Staff people carried gear to a utility shed next to the site. The Habitat people, in their bright green shirts, thanked us, with a generous “God Bless!” The organization has a distinct religious-spiritual tint, many volunteers are recruited from local churches.

I turned in my gear and slogged to the car, dragging pounds of Carolina mud on my boots, jeans, shirt, and gloves. The vinyl-siding team was still at work, wearing far less mud. The work looked impressive, professional. Good for that family, I thought. Good for all of us.

April 17, 2023

The IGA in Rosman, in Transylvania County, N.C., in the western end of the state, appears to be the town’s only grocery store. IGA is a chain of markets mostly in small towns and rural places. In Rosman it’s more of a 7-11 or a Dollar General, with fuel pumps outside, shelves crammed with cans and jars, a solid wall of beer and soft drinks.

I stumbled into the IGA after a hike in nearby Gorges State Park. It was a warm afternoon, I looked for ice cream, but the store didn’t stock individual pops or cones. I grabbed a Gatorade and waited while the cashier rang up a customer who bought about $60 worth of groceries. I stumbled back out to the van.

Around 700 people live in and around Rosman, about six miles north of the South Carolina state line. The French Broad River begins at a waterfall just west of town, flows as a narrow stream through downtown, then broadens into a powerful torrent close to Asheville. The town has a post office, a Mexican restaurant, a combined high school and middle school, and at least three Baptist churches. Small industrial businesses are scattered along east-west U.S. 64, which intersects north-south U.S. 178 near the center of town.

We drove through Rosman about a year ago, heading up 178 with no particular destination. It’s the place where we first saw a “Trump 2024” banner. We asked a guy laying the yardage lines on the high school football field for directions to a restaurant. He sent us to the Country Skillet. From there we drove ten miles east to Brevard.

The history I could find is a little vague as to when the town was established. It went through a couple of name changes, settling on Rosman in 1905, derived from the names of businessmen Joseph Rosenthal and Morris Osmansky.

As you make your way up 178 you cross the Eastern Continental Divide. You then pass Rocky Bottom, still in South Carolina, an unincorporated place, site of a conference center for the blind and a couple of summer camps. A few frame houses teeter from the cliffs. I guess the population is fewer than 100. It’s on the map because it’s at an intersection with a spur to the summit of 3,500-foot-high Sassafras Mountain, the highest point in South Carolina.

More than a few memorial roadside crosses dot the shoulders of 178. The road, mostly without railings, veers sharply left, then right, then up, then down, below looming peaks and above steep crevices as it climbs a couple of thousand feet to Rosman. It’s a steep, scary stretch through the thick forest of the 50,000-acre Jocassee Gorges Management Area.

About 12 miles west of Rosman on 64 is the headquarters of Gorges State Park, an end point of the Blue Ridge escarpment, which becomes the western North Carolina Smokies. All this is virgin country, nearly empty but for a few hundred souls in Cashiers, another unincorporated place.

Sitting in the van with my Gatorade, I wondered about the place. It’s not beautiful. From the south you pass a collapsed building surrounded by rusting autos, propane tanks, and household appliances. As you draw closer to town one-story frame houses, mobile homes, and trailers show up, including one with a sign, “Bed and Breakfast,” a flophouse no more than ten feet from the shoulder. The highway turns at one of the town’s two traffic lights and you’re out of town.

Rural communities like Rosman are everywhere in America, The IGA is pretty much the entire business district. No McMansions, Starbucks, or microbrewery. The nearest Walmart and fast-food outlets are in Brevard. There’s some work in businesses like M-B Industries, which makes small machine components just outside downtown.

When I first stopped at the IGA last Tuesday morning it was busy. The girl at the register smiled when I asked for directions. “Left at the traffic light at the high school, then left at the stop sign. Then you’ll see 64.” A man in line gave me more specific directions to Frozen Creek Road, the access road to the state park.

Frozen Creek winds through the trees past small homes, truck gardens, signs for cabin rentals, and yards where a few cows graze. The mountains loom high on both sides. Within a few miles the houses become scarce then disappear, the forest thickens, the road turns to gravel. I turned in at the trailhead parking lot. My map showed the road ending in dense woods, which extend a half-dozen miles south to the headwaters of the Toxaway River and giant Lake Jocassee.

Except for the hike I had no reason for visiting this inconspicuous town, a gateway of sorts to other inconspicuous places. Sapphire appears on the map somewhat off U.S. 64 between Cashiers and Rosman, known for vacation homes. These are places for folks who really want to get away.

Passing through a place twice doesn’t reveal its inner life. Still, I felt a sense of solace on arriving in Rosman and later, a pang of regret driving away. Maybe it was relief at surviving the mountain road. The high school/middle school and the churches reveal something of community life, or at least awareness that it exists. On Friday nights during football season students and players’ parents occupy the bleachers. On Sundays folks attend services at their three churches, maybe afterward they head to the Mexican restaurant.

What is the draw of this nondescript place? It may be the deafening silence that is consoling. My impression is of a dreamlike calm, a kind of serenity amidst the surrounding miles of rough, fearsome country. My imagination may be working too hard here. It’s no Shangri-la, for sure. But somehow Rosman, the community, conveys to passers-through, or maybe just me, an undefinable, mystical sense of being, a retreat in their place here on earth, which is home.

April 10, 2023

The Easter Triduum arrived here chilly and gray, then turned stormy, but the solemnity of the Resurrection may rebuild spirits and break the back of winter. Then, from our waterlogged backyard I noticed the dark silhouette of another commercial aircraft passing high overhead. I wondered where it was going—if those aboard were heading to some mysterious place at the far end of the earth, some place I had never seen.

Everyone knows it: travel broadens horizons. Those who venture from their hometowns to see the world learn of the history, cultures, and values of other peoples. They marvel at the wonders of Europe and Asia, the majesty of London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Athens, Jerusalem. Some hope to see the pyramids, the Greek isles, the places where Christ walked and where St. Paul preached. Watching PBS specials and reading National Geographic isn’t the same.  

We have friends who have been to Estonia. I have a friend who traveled through central Africa for business. Calling the roll of places our kids have been: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Spain, The Netherlands.  Our oldest daughter, right now, is living in Colombia.

In 1980 I visited Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Mexico on two work trips. In the late 1980s we went to London and Paris, also for work. In 2004 we paid our own way for a 25th anniversary trip to Rome. A year later Sandy went back with her church choir. In 2010 I took my son fishing in Canada’s Northwest Territory. Sandy and I visited Prince Edward Island, setting of the girls’ story, “Ann of Green Gables,” in 2011, and Quebec in 2012.

In 2013 our passports were due to expire, we renewed them for the standard ten years. We tucked them in a drawer. Everyone, it seems, has one: all our children, my siblings, all our friends, our friends’ adult children. Passports can play a role in gripping drama. Movie secret agents and spies, like Jason Bourne, seem to have dozens. The conflict in the classic, “Casablanca,” has to do with “letters of transit” that enable Ilsa, Ingrid Bergman’s character, and her husband Lazlo to escape the city to fight again.

Watching those aircraft soar overhead, listening to others’ travel stories, the idea to go somewhere returned. We thought we should take a trip, see something of the world we haven’t seen.

We talked about it. A cruise to Alaska, maybe? You need a passport for the Canadian port calls. Okinawa, site of the last battle of World War II, is a powerful draw for me. I spent a year there as a Marine Corps lieutenant in the early 1970s, marking time to ship to Southeast Asia. I want to see the beaches of Normandy and feel the history of that immortal place. We should visit Ireland, our clan’s ancestral home. We’d like to see Oxford, home of one of England’s famed universities.

I fished the passports from a bottom drawer. The covers were shiny, as if brand-new. I thumbed through them. Every page blank. Not a single stamp. I let out my breath. The passports would expire in two months. Over those ten years, we never used them, not once. Never traveled overseas, nor even to Canada or Mexico.

Why not? We never dreamed the big dream: to visit Ireland when our daughter spent a year of college there, to walk the Camino de Santiago, the walk of St. James across Spain; to climb Machu Picchu, to ride a camel to the Great Pyramid, to gape at Victoria Falls in the heart of Africa. We never hiked England’s Lakes Region or stared at the horizon from China’s Great Wall. We never took a Caribbean cruise, or a cruise anywhere. Neither did we do anything else that required a passport. We had the passports. We didn’t have the imagination.

Over those ten years we visited our youngest daughter in Colorado, drove across Montana a couple of times. We saw Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and the Little Bighorn National Battlefield. We stopped at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. We drove to Philly and Pittsburgh a bunch of times to visit the kids. We flew to New Orleans to see our oldest girl. The big excitement was recent, 2018, our short-lived cross-country road trip that got us to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Never did we stray across the nation’s border.

Now it’s different. Time is short, memories and short-circuited dreams creep back. During my year on Oki I took a week’s leave on Taiwan. I tramped around the capital, Taipei, took a train to see the wondrous lakes in the island’s mountains region. On a weekend junket to a beach spot in northern Okinawa I paddled a canoe out into the bay that fed into the East China Sea. A quarter-mile from shore the canoe slipped into the outgoing tide. I couldn’t turn it around and had to swim back.

On our trip to London for the big Farnborough Air Show in 1988 (still the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent its newest fighter aircraft), we took a train out to the countryside and had lunch in a quaint pub. From the patio we watched local men play cricket in their gleaming white outfits. On the 2004 Rome trip, at the papal audience, we got close enough to Pope John Paul II to wave, he stared but didn’t wave back. I recall he was scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin that afternoon.

We printed the forms for renewing passports. I filled them out, making a couple of mistakes, meaning get a new form and start over. We got the photos and wrote the check. The State Department warns renewals are taking months. We had to send the expiring passports. I wondered: what will the passport renewal person think when he sees ours, which show we’ve been nowhere?

Our ingrained inertia may set back in. Some days, all the world’s famous places blur together. I once saw photos of picturesque Slovenia, tucked in just north of Italy, a tiny land of gorgeous lakes, mountains, and mysterious-looking castles. I wanted to go. Then I wanted to see the Norwegian fiords, the museums of Madrid, the jungles of Brazil. Then I didn’t. Instead we jumped in the van and hit the highways through America’s South.

But soon we’ll have passports. The doors of the world will open, we’ll pick up brochures, listen to the pitches from friends and family. We’ll buy tickets to fly to some exotic but affordable faraway place, and sign up for the cathedral and museum tours. Maybe. But then there’s the Maine seacoast, the Minnesota lakes. Never been to either.