I was thinking about this worldview of hers this morning as I was reflecting on my master's thesis. It was not nearly as big of a deal as my dissertation is turning out to be, but it was certainly important at the time. The last year of my MFA program was spent working on what eventually became The Book of Saint Anthony, a book-length series of poems about a Mormon kid named Tony who slowly falls away from his faith, makes bad choices, ends up accidentally shooting and killing his best friend while they are out target practicing, and gets sent to the Saint Anthony Juvenile Correction Center. Shakespeare it ain't.
Before it became this whole thing, it started as an idea I had a year and a half before while in a poetry workshop. I wanted to write a series of six or seven poems based on things that had happened to my best friend, Tony, and I when we were teenagers. There were four or five moments in our friendship when we probably should have died - driving too fast on icy roads, climbing too high on treacherous rocks, building fires in stupid places, etc. So I wanted to write this series of poems called "The Dangers." I liked the idea of calling some poems "The" something, you know? Like the name of a band - The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Commitments, etc.
I had an idea for a little chapbook and knew what I'd do for the cover, the binding, and so on. So I started tinkering with the poems and ended up writing a kind of preamble poem about Tony himself, a very loose, mostly fictionalized biography of him that I called "Hagiography." I'd recently learned that a hagiography is a biography of a saint in the Catholic church. I thought it was funny that, as Mormons, technically any biography of any of us would be a hagiography - because we're all saints, right? So I thought that was witty and wrote around that for a while.
The idea of a series of biography poems about this fictionalized version of Tony started to take hold. I figured I could add in "The Dangers" in with all the other work. Somewhere along the line, I melded Tony's fictionalized story with an actual experience from high school - a friend of a friend who had accidentally shot and killed a kid while a bunch of kids were out on a group date. I was supposed to be on this date. The plan was to go out to the riverbottoms to shoot cans and then roast marshmallows over a fire. I was too lazy to find a date and didn't like guns anyway. Tony, who was never too lazy to find a date, went. There wasn't any drinking - it was just an careless mistake. Sitting around the fire, a kid named Chad noticed he had a few of bullets left in the chamber of his rifle. He pointed the barrel up to the sky and pulled the trigger three times. The problem was that the barrel wasn't pointed straight up but instead slightly backwards. A kid named Matt had just gotten up to get something from his coat. One of the bullets hit him in the back of the head. His body hung on for two or three days, but he was probably brain dead from the moment Chad pulled the trigger. It was a horrible thing. Needless to say, it stayed with me for years.
Somehow, a version of these events found their way into these poems I was writing, and I had this idea to have my fictionalized Tony end up in juvenile detention in Saint Anthony. Saint Anthony is a real town and there is a juvie there. Again, like Tony's life, I took a vague bit of truth and had my way with it. I really liked that in the Catholic tradition, St. Anthony is, among other things, the patron saint of lost things. That seemed appropriate. Also, the idea that St. Anthony's creepy reliquary leftover was his tongue. Supposedly, his tongue never decayed and you could visit a reliquary to see it. A holy tongue seemed appropriate for a poetry project, I thought.
Around this time, the project evolved into a bookarts project that was going to be a file folder full of hospital and police reports, letters and postcards to and from St. Anthony, psychiatric notes, photographs, journal entries, and other ephemera that a reader could go through and end up creating their own version of the book.
That idea eventually shaped the different kinds of poems I wrote. I visited home and made a couple of special trips out to the Menan butte (where my version of the shooting takes place) and to Saint Anthony to take black and white pictures. I eventually incorporated the pictures and other images I found in public domain books into the final manuscript though the file folder of ephemera version never came to pass.
The title changed from "The Dangers" to "Hagiography" to "Casebook" to "The Book of Saint Anthony." I tinkered with it a little even after I submitted and defended it, and now both the library version (hardbound with an introduction and my committee's signatures) and the handmade version (chain stitched signatures between two cardstock covered bookboards) sit on my shelf.
When I think of what I originally intended and what actually happened, I am reminded of John Lennon's lyric, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." I thought I knew what I was doing, knew where I was going, knew what I wanted. Rather, I ended up with something entirely different and probably better and more interesting.
This has to do with my mother's favorite quote like this: everything is connected. Everything is part of God's larger plan. It isn't as though things happen in our lives (professional, personal, academic, or spiritual) and He's like "Hey, how did that happen? I did not see that coming!" He knows. It's all part of the gig. So, He can work through my bad ideas, my half starts, and my mistakes to get me to where I need to go. A small malformed idea I had in a poetry workshop in Martin Corless-Smith's living room in Boise, Idaho eventually evolved into something that allowed me to graduate, get a job, and be eligible for more schooling.
So often we see inspiration or revelation depicted as this big, light-filled moment in which we can see the whole picture from beginning to end. It probably happens like that sometimes, but I think more often than not, divine direction comes in the form of falling asleep at an unexpected moment so you miss the bus and are late for class and take the long way to campus and end up seeing the flyer advertising the job that you apply for but don't get but leads to the other job that you do get that eventually leads you to meet that really great friend that you otherwise never would have met.
Suzy got called to the nursery like two weeks after we'd been in the ward. No one in the Bishopric or any presidency met with us, asked about our skills or previous experiences, or knew a single thing about us. The call seemed totally uninformed and, frankly, kind of stupid. They just needed a body to fill a spot. A couple had just moved out, and the ward was short one nursery leader. No one likes to feel like your needs aren't being taken into consideration or like you're just a generic space filler. And for the Primary Presidency and Bishopric, I'm guessing that's all this was.
However, my point is, God can work through people's uninformed choices and dumb mistakes too. I'm not saying Suzy being in nursery for another year or two will necessarily result in the greatest spiritual experiences or best friendships of her life, but it could. Our mortal limitations don't necessarily thwart what God has in store for us.
I guess I am trying to see the world more the way my mom saw it: an organized, purposeful design that, while sometimes difficult and sad, is ultimately beautiful. I'm much more of a cynic than she ever was, and I don't think that tendency helps me when life gets hard. I think I would rather be a person who believes that everything is connected, rather than always doubting people's motives and always looking for the dark cloud in the silver lining.
1 comment:
This is a beautiful post Mark. I love the perspective and wisdom you have gained from your Mother's optimism.
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