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January 19, 2021

The Talbot Spy

The nonprofit e-newspaper for the Talbot County Community

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Snapshots of Daily Life: Color by George Merrill

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It’s Fall. Its colors beautify the landscape.

Just the other day, I walked from the house to my studio. A thick autumn mist had formed around the house. The marigolds had been in bloom in front of the studio, but the mums now joined them; the panoply of colors glowed in the ambient light the mist cast. I could not imagine that even if sunlight had shown directly on the flowers they would have appeared any more radiant than they did that morning in the mist.

I’m feeling good about the post-election world. It’s beautified our political landscape with some much-needed color.

Americans, sadly, don’t have a history of being color-friendly, or working well with colors at all. Separate and unequal has been the name of the racial game. Artists who work regularly with color, know that red, blue and yellow are primary colors; all other colors are variations thereof. For many Americans, there’s just one primary color: white. You are, or you are not. For many Americans, I suppose this view simplifies matters, but it severely limits possibilities.

I was moved to learn that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the election as the next President and Vice President. I saw it as one more manifestation of America’s cultural evolution, like the election of Barak Obama. This present election will be the second time in America’s history that the executive branch will consist of persons of color, and the first time that both a white man and bi-racial woman would be elected to the office. This bodes well for the future of the country at a time when it is struggling to come to terms with the lingering vestiges of its long history of racial and gender oppression.

When I look back on my life I’m embarrassed by how naive I’d been in racial matters. I’m also amused by how I lived the first eighteen years of my life, sublimely confident that I was not racially prejudiced. Why? Because race never came up in family discussions. I knew only one black family and no Asians at all. My blithe unawareness of the real world only confirmed for me the magnanimous nature that I believed I possessed.

My neighborhood was solidly middle-class and white. Growing up, I knew only one Black family. The DeHarts were members of my all white church, and the only African Americans I’d ever met. I recall there were four children. Two were slightly older than I was. I liked them, but had only a distant relationship to them. I remember nothing about them except that they were always very well dressed. I was never in their home, neither were they in mine. I accepted them as a part of my childhood circumstances, but they played no part in my life. Only years later when I grew curious about my own racial attitudes did I look deeper. The two younger DeHart kids were of an age to have been naturally involved in the Young People’s Fellowship which most kids in the parish attended. The DeHarts never participated. What was that about, I’ve wondered? I will never know for sure.

It occurred to me one day, well on the far side of my middle age, that my mother’s ancestral family were DeHarts. In doing family research, I learned more about the DeHart family. In the middle of the eighteenth century they were landowners and had a large farm on Staten Island’s North Shore, not far from where I grew up. They reputedly hosted George Washington once on his way from Jersey to Long Island. “I don’t suppose,” I wondered to myself, “that I’m kin to the DeHarts from my church?” Slavery was practiced in New York. The thought intrigued me. It was one of those moments when I wished I could go back in time and talk about it with them. It’s a compelling feeling, like a moment rife with possibilities that slipped through my fingers and was lost forever.

Black with white can enhance the beauty of the other. I know this from seeing how Habitat for Humanity brings black and white men, women, and children together to build houses and befriend one another as they do it. I’ve seen how Talbot Mentors has created intimate bonds between blacks and whites in the service it provides to support at risk children.

I have also been an avid black-and-white photographer for seventy-five years. I love the medium; even the messy, smelly chemical process by which the photographs are created. Ansel Adams once decried black and white photographs that had tepid shadows and weak highlights, looking, as he put it, like “soot and chalk.” His point: the importance that shadows and highlights have in creating contrasts needed for making strong and enduring images. Truth be told, by virtue of light, our world everywhere is a total mix of shadows and highlights accented by colors.

When I drive from home to Easton I must go through St. Michael’s. Approaching the town, Perry Cabin is on the left and on the right, there’s a basketball court where local kids come to play. It’s been heartening over these 30 years I’ve been here to see more white and Black kids playing together. I remember years ago seeing only Blacks. The sight leaves me hopeful for our future and for its possibilities.

Erratum: We’ve had a more colorful history than I realized. I learned only this morning reading the Washington Post that Kamala Harris “is not the first multiracial vice president or the first one of color. That distinction belongs to Charles Curtis, who served as vice president to Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. Curtis’s mother was a Native American.”

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

 

Snapshots of Daily Life: Elections

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I am writing this essay on Sunday morning, November 1st, All Saints Day in the Christian calendar and two days before the election when America chooses its next president.

I would describe my feelings that day in this way: it’s the kind of anticipation I remember having as a boy on Christmas Eve. I knew exciting things were on the way and I could hardly wait for the day to come. However, now there’s a new rub. On Christmas Eve, I was always sure it was Santa who’d come down the chimney. On Election Day, I fear it might be the Grinch.

It may seem odd to some that I entertain Election Day and Christmas morning in the same thought. It’s not as quirky as it first appears. Consider, that for many people, both events are significant communal experiences involving the entire nation, if not religiously, certainly socially. In one sense, Election Day and Christmas Day have this in common: it’s a time when we finally learn what’s been wrapped up and hidden, or, in election parlance, the ballots are unpacked, counted, tabulated and the results made public. We open up on Election Day what has been wrapped and kept from us, like the Christmas presents that sat unopened under the Christmas tree.

There are other ironic parallels to the social experience of Christmas morning and Election Day. It’s the common experience of people, when getting what they say they want, to find fault with it. They soon feel cheated. They complain it wasn’t what they really wanted after all. This is why stores, the day after Christmas, never sell a thing; they only exchange. On Election Day, what we get is like a sale item; there’s no taking it back or exchanging it for a long time. That makes people mad.

I suspect this kind of disappointment happens a lot more in elections than with Christmas presents. I hear people complain regularly that politicians are all liars and not to be trusted. In saying that, I think I must also own the fact that there is nothing as fickle as the American electorate. A blog called, ‘The Fickle Finger,’ announced giving its, “2016 Fickle Finger of Fate Award” to the American electorate. It was the tenth year in succession that only fifty to fifty five percent of Americans turned out to vote in the presidential elections. This recognition was not meant to bestow honor on the electorate. The number may be greater this time around.

Americans complain loudly if they think their rights are being taken away. They’ll get mean if they think they are being denied any of them. We demand our rights, but even having them we fail to exercise some of the most important ones, like voting. I think of such people like the kid who wants straight ‘A’s in school, but never does any homework or studies. Still, he faults the teacher who flunks him. American citizens have trouble showing up: We take our blessings for granted. Americans are also embarrassingly ill informed.

I confess I was feeling very nervous in anticipating how this election might go. An aura of uncertainty, even fear, has characterized the experience for me and for many; it seemed as if the president himself was working hard to stir up confusion during the election. How odd, I thought, from the very person who is supposed to champion and assure the optimum conditions for Americans in exercising their rights.

I have a book I’ve looked at over the years, particularly on mornings when I have sought inspiration for the day. The book is about saints. The saints have been selected from a broader base than sectarian hagiographies normally choose. The author’s intent was not to showcase a gallery of stained glass saints, colorful but remote. He wished to present us with stories of authentic human beings “endowed to awaken that vocation in [us] others.”

For each of the year’s 360 days, there’s a brief sketch of one saint’s life and work. It names saints we’re familiar with like St. Mary or St. Francis, but also people whom we don’t normally think of as saints; historical figures like Dag Hammarskjold, Dorothy Day, artist Vincent van Gogh, the prophet Moses, and George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement.

I couldn’t resist an impulse to look and see what saint the author selected for Election Day November 3rd. I will own, being nervous as I was, that I was indulging in some magic thinking, hoping for a sign from heaven that would signal, when the election was over, that all would be well.

The saint profiled for that day happened to be St. Martin de Porres, a 16th century, mixed-race Peruvian. Martin’s bi-racial profile –– African and Peruvian –– placed him in the culture’s social “minority,” its underclass. Dirt poor, profoundly humble, he exhibited great compassion for all living things and, like St. Francis, had a mystical relationship to nature, even to the most humble of creatures like the mice that plagued the monastery. Martin had an extraordinary gift for healing. He healed noblemen, as well as slaves and other disenfranchised folk. He made diseased animals well again.

If I could have it my way, I ‘d like the person we elect as our next president to have at least two of those characteristics: a heart for compassion and the gift for healing and reconciling. We are, after all, a deeply wounded nation, hungry for healing.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

Snapshots of Daily Life: Rain by George Merrill

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I hear the ship’s clock in the living room strike twice. It’s five in the morning. I’ve been awake for an hour.

It’s raining hard. I lie in bed and listen, mesmerized by the torrents of water falling on the roof; the sound fills my bedroom like a rush of cascading streams echo through forests.

I’m awake, but in a dream state –– almost asleep, almost awake –– that psychic twilight zone between here and the nether world. I don’t yet notice the usual pains I feel in my body during the day. I feel warm and safe, quietly happy. I’m in tune with the world. The rain begins tapering off. A breeze occasionally shakes some tree branches already laden with drops of water and raindrops pummel the roof with sounds like drumrolls.

The rain finally stops. The world is still; no rain, no birds no crickets, not even the ubiquitous sounds of cars, trucks and jet planes in the distance, or as Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, would have it: “the greed of machinery or the hum of power that eats up the night.”

It’s great to be still. It’s great just to be. I’m in tune with the world.

In the late morning, the sun makes tentative appearances. I go outside for a moment and feel its pleasing warmth on my face. There are pockets of mist here and there, as I always imagined it had been in the garden of Eden. The world smells clean and sweet like a baby fresh from a bath. Still, I find that I’m missing the rain.

The front yard is soaked. It’s making a strange sound like peeps, as if tiny creatures were talking to each other all at once, like excited children do at recess in a school yards. I’d never heard my yard make sounds like that. I keep trying to identify the sound: it’s a crisp bubbly sound, a little like seltzer water poured into a glass but unlike seltzer, not fizzing out but maintaining its effervescent conversation? I am enchanted, listening, although I don’t understand it.

What’s going on? I know only this, that heaven and earth have had a long relationship. It goes back to the very beginning. They know each other intimately. The earth and the heaven, soil and raindrops, all of a piece, a community. During and after the rain, I’m listening to inhabitants of the universe speak with one another, each in their own language.

Scientist James Havelock has a theory. It’s called the Gaia hypothesis and he proposes that “Living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form synergistic and self-regulating complex systems.” Simply put, we exist in a huge web of connections.

There’s a charming children’s book in my library. It’s called On the Day You Were Born. Debra Frazier wrote it. The book contains bold, dream-like images accompanied with spare texts. It begins:

“On the Eve of your birth
Word of your coming passed from Animal to Animal
… and the marvelous news migrated worldwide.”

The book is saying to the child that she is welcome:

“While you waited in darkness
tiny knees curled to the chin
the earth and her creatures…
each ready to greet you.”

The story, in its fanciful way, expresses our fundamental connection to the planet and to each other, sketching with words and images the primal goodness of relationship.

Today I can’t imagine anyone who would say this is the way it is or this is how it works; the story is all very dear but totally naïve. But then consider that no one had seen the relationship that exists between time and space except for a boy who once had a whimsical dream of riding a light beam. Alfred Einstein’s dream was realized years later. He never rode a light beam but he grasped what light was all about. The dream’s vision led him to discover a new reality: that time and space are not only connected but they influence the behavior of the other. A childish dream inspired him. You might say his dream changed the way we see the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr, also had a dream once and it changed the way we understand each other. His dream prepared a new path for us to follow, a way for blacks and whites to walk together as equals. King understood how our human condition is an intricate web of connections. Einstein helped us understand how our universe’s activities are reciprocal. The entire planetary system is about how things are connected and how they work together as a whole. Poet John Donne put it this way: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Even though each of us is only a small “part of the main,” we have a hand in creating a more hospitable world for ourselves, our children and all those with whom we share space. It will involve a careful stewardship in managing the ways the world is connected, connected to nature or connected to each other. Being aware of this allows for greater possibilities.

And speaking of greater possibilities, this coming Tuesday Americans, come rain or shine, will exercise (or by then will have exercised) a privilege our citizenship offers us: the opportunity to vote. Voting provides us with the hand we need to make difference, to affirm our values in shaping what kind of nation we dream it can be.

I know this is a long way from a rainy and sleepless night. But there you have it: the way things are connected never ceases to be amazing.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Op-Ed: Election Jitters by George Merrill

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Got election jitters? I have. 

One fear I have is that when the election is over we will have no skills left to us to share its results as one America.  It is now painfully evident, and has been for a while, that no matter which side of the political spectrum to which we belong, we can’t seem to speak to those on the opposite side in ways we can be heard and understood –– not to agree, but just to be heard and understood. This chasm renders any significant conversations almost impossible as if both parties were speaking in different tongues.

Of late, good will in political conversation and communication has begun to atrophy, leaving in the wake only party sound bites and tense recriminations as if vitriol and moral indignation were all that was needed to establish one’s credibility and to clarify differences. This also occurs in families, my own included. I fear I can’t talk about the election in any way with some members of my family for fear, not so much about what they’ll say, but what I will. The result for me, and I know it is for many, has been to duck the whole topic with the relatives we differ with. This gets tense.

There’s an old story that marriage counselors tell about fighting couples.

Betsy and Bob sleep together in the same bed. They have one electric blanket with two sets of controls. Bob gets cold easily so he turns the heat up.    Betsy, likes it cooler so is always turning her dial down. Unbeknownst to both is that the control dials are mixed up: she has his and he has hers. As each of them try to find their own comfort zone, they inadvertently create more discomfort for their spouse. They become angry. They don’t realize that ultimately, the mechanism available to regulate their own comfort must be in their own hands. I think we Americans are in a similar fix. 

If there’s good will and curiosity about what had been happening, that the couple in fact did have the means to regulate their own comfort and at the same time accommodate their differences, it might save the marriage. The problem in standoff’s like that is that people get so angry, they begin building up stories and rationales in their minds that justify their feelings. That makes attempts to meet in the middle feel like weakness or even personal defeat.

In situations of marital discord, establishing good will is critical in resolving conflict and preserving a marriage. It works pretty much the same way in a democracy. Good will is where accommodation begins, not in the courts. 

Pray for good will. 

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

Snapshots of Daily Life: Cardinals

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The cardinal from hell is back. This time, he’s assaulting my studio windows.

Many years ago, I had a disturbing experience with a cardinal. He became obsessed with the rear-view mirrors of my car. Every day he would fly at them, pecking furiously at the mirror while leaving his droppings down the side of my car. What was he doing? Was he attacking what he saw in the mirror as if it were his adversary or had he fallen in love with his own Image and, like Narcissus, lavished it with pecks and kisses?  After a while he finally gave up and that ended the matter. In the meantime, he’d left a dreadful mess on my car. I was furious. 

In my studio recently, I heard a noise at the window. Would you believe it was a cardinal attacking or ravishing the window exactly as I’d seen happen years ago with my car mirrors? What does one do? He would not stop. The light struck the window such that the window was able to reflect his image, like a mirror. I thought the only thing I could do was to somehow put something over the window so that there would be no reflection.

Taking several sheets of paper on which I had old research material written, I taped the papers on the window, effectively blocking the reflection. That way I hoped he would lose interest in the window.  I inadvertently left a small section of the window uncovered and sure enough he went for it and began his combative assaults, or was he abandoning himself to his passions. I never knew which

I was determined to put an end to this outrageous behavior. I went outside again with more paper, and taped additional pages on all of the places at the window where I thought he would be able to see his image. After taping them up, I went back into the house. I stayed there, undisturbed for several hours. I knew that I’d successfully driven him off.  I had put an end to this unnatural behavior. I went outside just to check to see how secure the pages were. 

I noticed for the first time the nature of the research material I had written on the several sheets of paper. The material contained data I’d collected on the history of cathedrals.

I am a member of Trinity Cathedral here in Easton. There had been increasing interest in the diocese in reviewing the place and function of a cathedral in the religious and social life of the twenty first century. What new functions might cathedrals have in today’s changing society. I did some research on how cathedrals evolved and what role they played in English, French, Spanish and more recently in American societies.

Cathedrals have occupied a significant place in medieval social and religious life. As the Church of England spread its influence here on the shore, Trinity Cathedral here in Easton was the Shore’s first and only Cathedral. I am a communicant, there.

Cathedrals today are visual remnants of the power and wealth that Christianly once enjoyed. The majestic aura of cathedrals that once awed Christians and others as well, had mystical significance, to be sure, but were also monuments to power and prestige. They remain an awesome sight today and people the world over, religious or not, travel to see them, simply because they are magnificent structures. I myself was ordained a priest in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Sadly, many cathedrals have become increasingly museum pieces, valued for their architectural magnificence, but not venerated for the divine vision that inspired them. 

I had since lost interest in my research and doubted whether I’d ever apply what I’d learned to anything useful. I tucked the papers away planning to use the blank sides for scrap paper.

Only much later did it occur to me that cardinals (clerics) are regular visitors to cathedrals. They go in and out of them all the time. Cardinals belong there.  They perform many of the ritual and liturgical rites of Christianity. What had not occurred to me until I recognized the subject of the papers I’d placed on the windows, was how, in a sense, I was using my investigation into one kind of cardinal’s habitation, to drive another kind away from my own. Like a homeopathic physician, I was administrating to myself a modified dose of the toxin attacking me, in order to mitigate its debilitating effects.

Of course, cardinals, the ones with wings, are not literate. The cardinal attacking my windows would have no way of knowing anything about the subject of the documents that were frustrating his access to my studio windows. While the irony of this may well have been lost on this cardinal, it was not lost on me. Where the papers ended up may have been an ignominious end to my noble research endeavors. They were covered with bird droppings. I took some comfort in the thought that at least my efforts were not totally in vain. They found a use.

I normally associate a cardinal (cleric) with heavenly preoccupations. This cardinal hammering at my studio windows, was surely from hell. It’s worth noting how traditional satanic images appearing in masks and paintings, will portray the devil as bright red . . . like a cardinal.

There are cardinals and there are cardinals.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Slugs by George Merrill

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Slugs prefer getting out at night. They’re at their best in the dark.

Slugs travel nightly along the brick walk leading to my studio. I see glistening trails left from their nocturnal sojourns. I notice the trails routinely on my morning treks to the studio. I’d not seen one quite like the one I saw just the other day.

The trails I normally see suggest that a slug is on his way somewhere; heading to a definite destination so that, although the trail may weave a little this way and that, it’s usually comparatively straight.

This trail however seemed as if he’d created a minimalist painting, making some kind of statement; but just what is anyone’s guess. It looked to me like a human head, a person whose mouth seems open, trying to say something. It looks as though he had not finished making up his necktie.

When I see minimalist paintings, my first thought is, “That’s easy, I could do that.” I think viewers work harder trying to guess what a picture means than the artist took in painting it. All the slug had to do was keep walking (slithering? crawling?) and his or her wake became the creation. That’s about as easy as art can be. Its apparent simplicity seems free from all the intense angst normally associated with creative acts.

But, of course I am reading into the glistening trail he left and shamelessly attributing anthropomorphic motives to this humble slug.
I photographed the slug’s trail so that when writing my essay, anyone reading it could see why I might have been fascinated, and be on the same page with me as I ruminate about this creature’s remarkable ability to capture my attention.

We have had this brick walk for about 20 years. While seeing these trails regularly, I’ve never actually seen a slug. Where do they come from? Where do they live, I wonder?

Doing some light research on slugs, what appeared first on several sites were ways to get rid of them. Why so harsh? I’ve never been bothered by a slug. I thought they were slimy and maybe slightly icky, but not harmful. In fact, they are a sort of lagniappe for birds and other animals and for thrushes especially, slugs are regarded as haute cuisine.

The hapless slug’s vulnerability, brings out the worst in little kids. They delight in watching the slug shrivel up into nothing when covered with salt. For kids, the kick they get is up there with pulling the wings from flies. Hopefully, mellowed with time and experience, this unfortunate inclination to harm others will disappear. I do know that our dark side can be mitigated some, but we need to remain alert to it.

When we’re provoked, it can return with surprising vengeance.

But to return to the slug as artist; after seeing his artwork, I now think of slugs differently, even reverently.

Art and creativity of most kinds involve a person’s entire being. Artists, writer’s, and sculptors speak regularly of how their work proceeds from some place deep within them; it rises unbidden ––it just comes out.

Certainly, the same might be said of the slug who leaves his trails behind. Something within him is naturally released –– it just comes out. He does his finest work crawling around at night. Like all artists, slugs are never sure that what comes out of them will look like or what shape it will finally take. It’s too dark to see. I can say this confidently of the slug; that whatever he does, he gives it his all. The legacy he leaves behind –– the visible one –– can be surprisingly enchanting.

Slugs, like most artists, are plodders. Plodders creep along, grinding away slowly at their tasks, and, like the mills of the gods, they ‘grind slowly but exceedingly fine.’ In that regard, I’m thinking of a botanical artist whom I know. Her work renders stunning illustrations of various plants and flowers, studiously crafted with minute and in the sharpest detail. It is slow, tedious work. I’ve been told that it once took her three months to illustrate one ear of corn. I can only imagine that a person’s whole being must be totally absorbed, even consumed by such activity. The art of seeing more deeply into things is not to regard them hurriedly, but to slowly ponder them. I read somewhere that a famous writer, when asked how his writing had gone that day, replied, “I finished a sentence.”

There are, so many dreams, hopes, and wonders that come to us under the cover of night only to vanish at daybreak, in the way our nocturnal dreams, so vivid in darkness are lost to the light.

This is not so with my tiny friend, the minimalist slug; his narrow path says so much with so little. What he conceived in darkness, glistens in the light for all to celebrate.

Of course, this is fanciful thinking. I’m imputing more to what this slug is and has done than he ever has ever himself . . . or have I, really? But I will tell you that I have to wonder how many people there are in this world –– how many creatures there are who will never know how much beauty and grace they have brought to others from the hidden riches of their own inner lives, resources they never really knew they themselves had. They discovered them when they were reflected back to them by those people whose lives they had made better because of who they were. I wish I could say thanks to the slug. I guess by writing this, I am.

Think this is too far-fetched? St. Francis didn’t.

Contemplative, Fr. Richard Rohr, writes: “Francis of Assisi is known for his love for animals, but too often the stories become overly romanticized . . . Francis’ respect for animals is far more profound than mere “birdbath Franciscanism” lets on. Everything was a mirror for Francis. What he saw in the natural world, in the sky, in animals, and even plants was a reflection of God’s glory.”

If Francis hadn’t already, I’d op for adding the humble slug to his list.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Vulnerability by George Merrill

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We’ve learned recently that our president was infected with the coronavirus.

Reactions have varied. I’m sure the president’s followers are anxious and feel concern. His adversaries, I suspect, have reacted with a kind of “I told you so” attitude and probably with some feeling of vindication. In the corridors of government, I can imagine how anxiety and confusion rein while the country, and even the world, feels a generalized uneasiness about “what’s next.”

The worldwide spread of the virus is frankly terrifying. In the US, alone, there are over 7.4 million known infections identified, and over 210,000 deaths reported. If the numbers haven’t brought the pandemic’s virulence home to some, the news that the president tested positive has.

The media brings intense scrutiny to the afflictions of public figures in general and to an American president in particular. The coverage creates a sense of immediacy. This urgency gets fueled with hourly updates as we sit watching television in our dens and living rooms. The affliction becomes grist for political calculations.

In this essay, however, I want to focus specifically on a piece of our human condition that these present circumstances highlight. Of the emotions men and women hate, feeling vulnerable is one of the most loathed. We do almost anything to flee or deny it. From my experience, speaking in general, I’d say men manage their feelings of vulnerability differently from women. Women allow themselves to feel vulnerability openly and are more inclined to embrace candidly what they’re feeling. Men steel themselves against the pain of vulnerability. They’ll often react defiantly, as characterized in admiral Farragut’s famous cry: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” A derring-do attitude in times of personal vulnerability is always good theater, and may embolden the derring-doer himself. Bold reactions sometimes address some threats effectively, depending of course, on the complexities involved. A habitual cavalier disdain of danger, however, breeds its own hazards; it can minimize and trivialize the real threats involved and, by so doing, worsen them.

Feeling vulnerable is as human as it gets. It’s also an experience that everybody hates. At the end of the day, we human beings are and have always been, regularly exposed to all kinds of mortal dangers and we don’t like it one whit. We dread feeling vulnerable. We regularly create illusions of our invincibility for any number of reasons, but the most basic is to ward off the fear that exposure to danger evokes.

The matter of human vulnerability and addressing our powerlessness is a spiritual matter as well as a psychological one. The first of the twelve steps of recovery begins with an acknowledgment of personal vulnerability and powerlessness. Managing personal vulnerability is also the central challenge in living a spiritual life, and is seen in Christian and Buddhist teachings.

St. Paul makes what seems like a contradictory, if not outrageous, statement when he writes, “my power is made perfect in my weakness.” To embrace suffering (and by implication, to acknowledge personal vulnerability) defines Buddhist spirituality as well. “Suffering is a fact of life,” the Buddha begins. The way out of suffering, the Buddha teaches, is to first acknowledge suffering’s inevitability with a clear mind and recognize the vulnerability implied in it. For both spiritual traditions, including AA, facing this reality transparently is how one deals sanely with any adversity, and offers the means by which suffering is mitigated. But first you have to acknowledge to yourself, just how exposed you are.

The largest and most successful social revolution in history launched against powerful oppression was the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. The power of the movement wasn’t in meeting force with greater force, but instead demonstrated how a society’s most vulnerable population found extraordinary power in publicly claiming its vulnerability and weakness. That’s how one begins to overcome just about anything.

Embracing vulnerability is act of humility. It’s just naming what is, and not trying to duck it or pretend. As clergyman and therapist, I’ve heard countless stories from people who’ve been feeling vulnerable, but ashamed to say so openly. When they can finally articulate and own it and embrace the circumstances openly, people say they feel less alone, as if they were freed and a burden had been taken from them.

The legendary Mr. Rogers of ‘Neighborhood’ fame, once encouraged children, when feeling scared and vulnerable, to “Look for the helpers.” Rogers was spiritually aware and psychologically sophisticated. He understood how people fear sharing their feeling of being defenseless because they will be seen as weak and inadequate. These are people who feel they must always go it alone to save face. In real life, the most enduring bonds we will ever build with anyone, will not be when we shared with them moments of our greatest triumphs and achievements –– real or imagined –– but when we spoke of our greatest fears and
uncertainty. We grow stronger by joining hands in our mutual vulnerability. We also grow closer to others because we don’t need our pretenses that had kept us so distanced.

Scholar and writer, Brené Brown, has extensively studied the subject of our human vulnerability. She identifies the cultural myths that shape our feelings about it. The association of vulnerability with personal weakness fuels the dread we have (especially in men) in acknowledging and accepting our moments of genuine helplessness and exposure to threat. Culture assigns to these natural human feelings, connotations of moral failure. Feeling frightened and vulnerable has been culturally regarded as cowardice, evidence of a serious character flaw and something to be ashamed of. The contemptuous use of the word ‘loser’ reflects this kind of disdain for being vulnerable.

Right now, I can say without any shame at all that the idea of catching the virus makes me feel, well, vulnerable. I am scared for myself and others as well.

I wish for anyone infected with the virus the comfort that others can offer and the blessing of hope. For anyone who must suffer this dreadful disease, I hold you in the light, whoever you may be.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Knowing by George Merrill

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Socrates said “Know thyself.”

“So, what’s the big deal?” you may ask. “Sure, I know myself. I mean, like, who doesn’t; I’m me, right, me.” Well, sort of.

If I tell you, “Of course I know myself,” chances are pretty good that I don’t. In my experience, being self-aware takes a lot of dead ends, trials and errors, embarrassments and the willingness (or the coercion) to sit still long enough to sort out just who’s who. It’s not a one- time thing. Knowing myself gets dicey since I have this exquisite capacity, as humans do, to deceive myself.

In my opinion to know oneself is a very big deal. It’s the heart of all knowing.

The writer James Joyce took this issue on when he wrote the sentence, “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

I read this some years ago in one of Joyce’s short stories. Joyce recognized how much of the time we (and the Dubliners of his day) live as strangers to what we truly feel, think and actually believe. Psychologists describe this as living out of our “idealized self,” –– a self we prefer to claim rather than the self we really are but with whom we’re disconnected.

I’ve been confronted with my “idealized self” several times in my life. One was especially significant. It was associated with my early aspirations as a writer.

Years ago, I submitted my first essay for publication to the Georgia Review, a prestigious literary journal. I realized I was a beginner, but I had high hopes. My desires were driven by the intoxication my own story had awakened in me. I was sure my essay, if it excited me, it surely would do the same for others.

The essay, to put it bluntly, was bad, full of hyperbole and mawkish sentimentality. I shortly received my rejection in a form letter. However, the editor enclosed a hand-written message. He wrote that my tone was too certain, perhaps preachy, and he advised that I might consider being more tentative in my observations, rather than so certain.

I was hurt. I didn’t know what he meant, but only years later did I realize the significance of the rejection.

I know now that his gesture was incredibly kind. It was only when over time I became an editor myself, that I understood how the volume of submissions editors receive is daunting. It leaves little time to write individual responses to any submission. He saw how the piece presented me as someone I wanted to be. At that stage in my life, I was not sure of just who I was and he saw through it. His response was encouraging the best in me by confronting me with my pretentions. It was a form of tough love. He took the time to do it.

My writing slowly evolved. It became a kind of deconstruction: a disassembling of an idealized self and a search for the person I am. Writing also became my way of reaching out to others, inviting others, as they might, to join me while I tried to figure out what was for real and what was not. I worked to write from the person I am rather than the one I imagined I was. I will tell you this: there are days when I don’t like either very much.

The personal essay, the genre I write, is peculiarly suited to this kind of search. American essayist Phillip Lopate put it this way: “The struggle for honesty is central to the personal essay
. . . since humans are incorrigibly self-deceiving.”

How is it that we can we be living “a short distance from our body” and remain totally unaware of it? It is not uncommon. We see it at work in our role as parents. We can be shocked by who we really are. The confrontation occurs when we’re dealing with a difficult child who’s being especially obstreperous. You may have had the experience yourself of saying things or acting in ways your own mother or father had years ago in similar circumstances involving you; you swore to yourself then you’d never say or act in the way they had. “How can this be?” you say to yourself when you do. But there you are, blindsided.

There are some frightening ways in which our lack of self-awareness wreaks havoc.

In the Bible’s timeless story of self-deceptions, King David seduces Bathsheba. He then schemes to have Uriah her husband killed so he may have Bathsheba for his own wife. Nathan, one of David’s advisors tells David a story: there once was a poor man who had a little lamb that he nurtured and loved “like a daughter.” A rich man came along and took it from him. When David hears the story, he becomes enraged at the injustice and proclaims to Nathan that “the man that hath done this thing shall surely die . . . and he shall restore the lamb fourfold because he had no pity.” Nathan confronts David: “You, David, are this man.”

Taking time to know who we are has perks. We’re much less inclined to do stupid things. When we do, we will have a sense of humor about it. We won’t blame others, punish ourselves or be defensive.

Another perk: In the second century, Christian writer Theodotus wrote: “To know yourself at the deepest level is to know God.” He went further: “Learn the sources of your sorrow . . . your joy . . . your love . . . your hate . . . if you carefully investigate these matters, you will find God in yourself.”

It’s the last place we think to look.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Fungi by George Merrill

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Transformations occur daily. I see some from the corner of my eye.

Since I have an unruly attention span, like a child or a dog’s, my thoughts are easily diverted by whatever catches my eye at the moment. Some peripheral object I catch from the corner of my eye will suddenly command my attention and arouse my curiosity. Immediately my mind begins working backwards from the fragment itself and starts wondering about the source from which it came.

And so recently, from the corner of my eye, I saw fungi formed next to our porch stairs. They grew on the stump of a fallen birch tree. They made a lovely formation. My reaction was quite contrary to the feeling I’ve generally held about molds and fungi, namely, that they’re yukky.

I wanted to photograph the formation ––black and white, of course–– but it was situated in such a way as to make camera access very difficult. I nevertheless attempted it. It turned out to be a production to get positioned for getting a good image –– while my arthritic back protested –– but finally I did.  I thought the formation of the fungus, enthralling. A picture of it accompanies this essay.

A fungus, among other things, is a visible witness to the ecological phenomena of organic decomposition. I like to think about it as yet another manifestation of transformation that is as fundamental a process to our spirituality as it is of organic life. Transformation is the way of the world.

Transformation is also at the heart of hope. Hope is about sitting quietly with an intimation that we are becoming but just what, we’re not really sure.  Generally, our hope is that whatever may happen, when we get there, all will be well. Just what we are becoming is never clear except for some happy souls who are sure of what’s going to happen next. To them I can only say how Buddhists would offer the thought that they are indulging illusions, fragments of imagination that are best not taken seriously.

We live, today, in a black and white world; psychologists and philosophers call it ‘dualistic.’ Politics is one example; its soundbites are framed to have us believe things are either this way or that. I think this is grossly misleading. Things vary far too much in life to assume that we can nail anything down for sure. Being uncertain, however is an anxious feeling. Having opinions is reassuring and can offer us comfort by assuring ourselves that we know what in fact is unknowable.  I’ve noticed that those who suffer this uncertainty acutely, are the most strident in the expression of their opinions.

One reason we can never know what’s next is the way time works. Time transforms everything big and small. Time has ways of exalting the humble and humbling the exalted or to say it differently, messing up the best plans we ever made or redeeming out grossest snafus we’ve committed. In that regard I’m fond of the old story of Joe Jacobs, a humble man and a professional fight manager. One night in 1932, Jacobs, upon hearing that his man lost the decision, seized the mic and shouted. “We was robbed.’ I would have imagined his grammatical error would have consigned his declaration to oblivion. Instead it earned him literary immortality. You never know just how things will play out over time.

The downed birch tree where I saw this lovely fungus is another instance of the unexpected transformations that can surprise and may offer significant comfort. The birch tree was a beauty. It grew close to the house and for over fifty years offered shade for the porch. Birches like this are more common to northern climes so I was often amazed and especially pleased that it fared so well here in the mid-Atlantic.

The time came when the tree began ailing. Leaves turned brown, limb by limb. Was it dying? We consulted an arborist the way patients anxiously turn to doctors with their complaints, fearing the worst but hoping for the best. There was nothing he could do. Saddened, we postponed the inevitable until we finally had it cut down. When it was gone I felt as if I had lost a limb. Only the stump remained, like a grave marker, inches above the ground and close to the house, as I’ve seen in some family cemeteries around old farm houses in rural areas here on the Shore.

It was two years later when I noticed the fungus for the first time.

Seeing beauty in the formation of the fungus softened the harder edges of my mourning in ways I would never have suspected. I don’t know if I shall ever completely get over the fact that the tree is gone from my life but I have found some pleasure in the beauty of the transformational process that had been effected on the root stump.  A new life of a very different kind had appeared in this transformation. It appeared wholly unexpected and I saw it first from the corner of my eye.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Artifacts by George Merrill

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Recently, a northwest wind combined with a tidal low, emptied water from our cove. Herons and gulls lit on the mudflat to feed. They lingered there while the water was out. As the water rose, the birds retreated. They’ll return when the flats are exposed.

We, too, are always searching. It’s a sign of life.

The Thames River snakes through London, England. Tides range anywhere from fifteen to twenty feet. Low tide exposes the riverbanks. There, mudlarks (people, not birds) scour and dig along its banks, ‘forebanks,’ in search of artifacts of London’s past dating from pre-Roman times. Mudlark and writer Lara Maiklem, seeks to nourish her spirit by feeding her imagination. She writes of mudlarking in her book, Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames. “Mudlarking is a quest in two parts,” she says; “the hunt for the object and the journey to identify what it is and learn more about it.” Her imagination is fed by the ways that her fragmentary discoveries might open windows into the lives and habits of those who once lived in London. Her story is haunting. She caught my imagination in two ways: in describing her own imagination and the way she satisfied its hungers. Imagination is the locus of the spirit. It has appetites as the body does. We recognize its hungers when we feel curiosity. When curiosity is laced with wonder, we know our spirits are ravenous.

Her portrait of her school days was similar to my own. She, too, was a dreamer. She lived a kind of alternative world in her classrooms. She writes, “… my school reports… they were in all honesty, dreadful… one overriding theme throughout: my ability to dream my way through class… inclined to be rather dreamy… must be willing to concentrate fully… would benefit with more interaction in class… does not seem to realize that she must concentrate at all times.” Hers was my story, too.

Her teachers were gentle. Mine played hardball. In an irritated tone, my mother would hear how “George is always daydreaming in class… never pays attention… will not apply himself… he doesn’t stay on task… I don’t know where his mind goes.”

As Maiklem described her own school days, I felt my past legitimized by this kindred soul. She also enthralled me with her descriptions of mudlarking, the curiosity driving her messy and tedious tasks of eking out clay pipes, glass, pottery shards, Roman coins, and pins from the mud. She was really after the story they might tell.

Maiklem is a self-confessed dreamer. Dreamers romanticize. I would offer that certain romanticizing is more than just wrapping a gauzy film around the stern realities of life. It’s more a hunger to understand, while living in the now, how it was for those living in the then. Like compassion, romanticism is a way of knowing, attended by a feeling of belonging to the lives of others and participating in their reality. Romantics and mystics try unraveling stray threads by which the entire human family is knit together. Maiklem describes her search as “grounding.”

When I was young, my father and I would search for Indian arrowheads. He had a large collection. Some seemed new, others battered with time. He said they belonged to the Lenni Lenape tribe who lived in the Mid-Atlantic, roamed the coast and hunted here on the hill where we stood. What were they liking? Did they see the same landscape I did, I wondered? How marvelous it was to stand where they once stood, at a time long before I was.

My kin rarely talked about family history. I regret that. I’ve had so many questions. I knew only that my mother’s family were in the marine trades around New York Harbor and the Hudson River from at least a turn of the 19th century, and that my paternal grandfather was an “oyster dealer.” As I’ve aged, my imagination has hungered to know more. I began my own mudlarking. I didn’t scour the shores of the island on which I grew up. Instead, I perused the contents of an old file box dated ‘1946.’

The box contained only a few artifacts of my family history. The contents were a hodgepodge of legal documents, cards, correspondences, a few yellowed photographs, birth, death, and marriage certificates. Like Maiklem’s findings along the Thames, I Identified some objects, but not their story. I found a yellowed photograph of a Victorian sitting room. It felt strangely familiar. Why was it saved at all? Was there a story for me? Would the corridors of my memory reveal anything?

The room was small, cluttered with bric-a-brac and there were pictures on every surface. Tapestries hung on two walls; doilies were placed on chair backs, and a table stood in the middle of the room. A tablecloth covered the table, and sitting on the floor at each end of the table were cuspidors. All I recognized for certain was the chair –– a platform rocking chair, the Morris Chair that I had in my room as a boy.

Tiny fragments of life experiences, like the ancient shards Maiklem unearthed from the Thames, endure over time in the corridors of memory. The photograph revealed a room, but not one I recognized. Time had altered its looks, but the fundamentals remained intact. Would my imagination reveal the whole from the part? Eventually it did. I felt a thrill of discovery.

The photograph was the sitting room of my grandparents’ old Victorian house along the Kill Van Kull. I’d been in that room with my relatives for some fifteen years on Thanksgiving Days during my youth. Then, in the late forties and fifties, all the Victoriana, appearing in the photograph cluttering the room, had since gone. Like all ancient artifacts, time altered it.

I thought I saw the presence of what was absent in the photograph, the presence of my father. I remember him there in that room for the last Thanksgiving of his life. He died two days later.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.