The Natural History of the Chicken

"They're Just Doing This" by Brian Kershisnik

I liked the film all right, for the most part. It had a lady in it who resuscitated a frozen chicken. That was a heroic and a lovely thing. And she called her hens “girls,” just like the kind Long Islander who runs the little bed and breakfast in Salt Lake and makes exquisite morning food. And the movie had that gentle bearded man with the intelligent eyes who likes to know where his food is coming from and so he raises chickens and sends his small children out into the slanting early sun to gather the eggs of the free-range birds from the long grasses of his backyard—like Easter every day.

But sometimes the film almost seemed to smirk a little, you know? And that sort of bothered me. Look at how idiosyncratic some people are, it seemed to say, elbowing me in the ribs, urging me to join in with a conspiratorial smile, I mean, this lady puts underwear on her rooster and drives him around in her car.

Well, people are idiosyncratic. That’s a lovely thing. Quirky, sacred human beings living out their eccentric, holy lives all over this peculiar, blessed planet.

Here’s Hopkins:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

That’s what was missing from the movie—a sense of reverence for the strangeness in others, for the otherness of others. Idiosyncrasy is to be met with honor, I believe, with great affection. I have long appreciated something Joseph Wirthlin, that quiet-voiced apostle, once said: “The Lord did not people the earth with a vibrant orchestra of personalities only to value the piccolos of the world. Every instrument is precious and adds to the complex beauty of the symphony. All of Heavenly Father’s children are different in some degree, yet each has his own beautiful sound that adds depth and richness to the whole.”

The novel Gilead begins and ends with a similar affirmation. Old Reverend Ames tells his young son, “You might have a very different life from mine . . . and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life.” And this from the final pages: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” And thousands of thousands of people living this life, every one of them cherished and sufficient and worthy of reverence.

Which makes me think, for some reason, of that baffling response Spencer Kimball once gave when someone asked him what he does when he finds himself in a boring sacrament meeting: “I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve never been in one.” That anecdote is usually told in the church with a little bit of a chuckle, because heaven knows some meetings are tedious. But a large part of communal worship may be the privilege of experiencing the holiness in others, of attending to someone’s utter otherness. This may be a large part of why I go to church—to learn to love and to briefly inhabit the foreign countries and strange planets of other people’s souls. Neal Maxwell once commented that “God is never bored . . . because of His perfect love for His children.” Boredom, then, is a failure of love, and also, I think, a failure of imagination. Every unusual human being, every ostensibly wearisome speaker, every oddity and every quirk I encounter is an invitation to see God’s image in the countenance of the other, is a summons to reverence.

There may have never

There may have never been a lovelier morning in the long, radiant history of this planet than the one that greeted today. Sometime in the five o’clock hour Ellie woke, making small animal noises in her crib. When I went to retrieve her so she didn't wake her siblings, she leaped into my arms and curled tightly into my neck and and shoulder, the shirt of her pajamas lifting a little to expose her cool back against my warm palm. I thought to snuggle her back to sleep, but she was awake, her little mind whirring like a small, sacred machine. “Des wat, daddy.” “What?” I’d whisper. “Ho ho,” she would say, and then chuckle, a learned, feigned burble of laughter. And five seconds later: Guess what? Julie woke to sing to her as the boys clambered into our bed. The body longed for sleep, but the feel of children was a blessing.

And then the sunrise. Clouds blue and gray and rimmed in glory slowly crawled toward orange and red across the tops of mountains, backlit by the song of God. A low, loose cloud like a fog gathered around the base of the entire mountain range: the valley’s fringes, the healing kanaph.

I do love this world. And I want to be a good man.

Unadorned

"Halo Repair" by Brian Kershisnik

My exquisite hazel-eyed wife has no sense of style. Absolutely no feel for fashion. She asks me, a reformed punk rocker and an ignorant boy, if her clothing matches, if her outfit “goes.” She did not know that brand names existed until she was in high school. I think I could count on one hand the number of clothing articles she has bought for herself since we got married almost ten years ago. She almost never wears makeup and happily lets our children go out in public wearing things that somehow got sucked from the 80s into some mysterious hidden river of time, eddying the edge of eternity before surfacing in my children’s closets. Of course, I mean this as highest praise. How does a person come to be so unattached to the things of the world, so unconcerned, so secure in robes of light? “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. . . . Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.” My wife is poetry. She startles wonder. She elevates me from my common ways of approaching reality, awakening me to the potential of being. She offers a new way to see the world, to be in the world. She transfigures existence.

“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life . . . nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment? . . . And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field . . .  even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Who care about clothes? Jesus and my wife ask. Let’s all be small Saints Francis, walking away from the world, buck naked and confident in God. This must be where my toddling daughter obtained her aversion to clothing. Her mother was a little nudist as a child, too. There is another covering, more resplendent and lovely: “And above all things, clothe yourselves with the bond of charity, as with a mantle, which is the bond of perfectness and peace” (D&C 88:125). Jesus said that God would clothe us as He does the grass of the field if we seek first the kingdom. Julie pointed out to me the other day that God keeps His word. Bags of hand-me-downs appear on our doorstep like handkerchiefs from magician’s hats. Because my wife trusts God and loves beautifully.

“What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they? . . . These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

She draws joy from her unfashionable pockets, light is her gift. God be thanked for my unadorned, unabashedly gorgeous helpmeet.

Eveningsong

Some nights when we are lying in bed, bodies disintegrating into the sheets, sinking deep into the mattress, minds evaporating into the surrounding darkness, becoming night ourselves, embracing the sweet oblivion of the often-elusive rest, I will hear Lydia’s voice dancing down the hallway from her bedroom in a high-pitched song—clipping off the walls like a top or a ballerina. And sometimes I am tempted in my exhaustion-drunken state to rage and roar for her to shut her mouth for crying out loud, can’t she see we are trying desperately to snatch at a few moments of blasted sleep, is that too much to ask, is it, IS IT? And sometimes in those moments an awareness flutters like falling ash or snow, like a bright moth, alighting on my consciousness, whispering that this might be a sacred experience, this music being born of a child—a song that has never before existed in the history of the world and likely never will again because it is pure inspiration poured into her soul as she spins and grins in her mirror, standing on her bed and emanating joy. And I think of when she was very small, much smaller than the lanky second-grader she has become, sitting on my lap in a meeting with my mission president. She began to sing in the middle of the meeting. I was uncomfortable and tried to quiet her. From the pulpit, my president said, “Let her sing. She will not always be a child.” And in my bed I begin to weep at the memory of that and the truthfulness of it, and I am tempted to rush into her room and scoop her into my arms and tell her that I love her, I love her, and I always will. But then she would stop singing. So I just close my eyes and watch the song spiral around the room, joining the whir of the ceiling fan, weaving itself into darkness, into my dreams, into my happy old father’s heart.

Thy Nursing Fathers

"We're Just Doing This" by Brian Kershisnik

I have a guest post today at modernmormonmen.com. Please check it out there: http://www.modernmormonmen.com/2013/01/guest-post-thy-nursing-fathers-some.html

A Story of Jack and Norie

"Disheveled Saint," by Brian Kershisnik

Today is the national day on writing. So here are my thoughts about why writing matters: Story is the heart of writing, and stories are the food we live on from the time we are very young. They are the crumbs dropped from the beaks of our mothers into our open, eager mouths as we nestle into our pillows and words flow over us, creating strange images in our minds and mysterious stirrings in our souls. These stories become a part of us and create our worldview. Each life is a story composed of all the stories that have fed it. When I was young, I would ask my mother to tell me stories, and she would. When she was tired, she would say this: “I’ll tell you a story of Jack and Norie, and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another of Jack and his brother, and now my story is done.” And I would groan. “Please, mom.” And she would smile and kiss my forehead. Now I am a father, and when I am tired, I tell my children very short stories—one sentence stories about the births of butterflies or the flights of whales or the smells of gardens. And sometimes they groan. And sometimes they smile. A story does not have to be elaborate, but we are creatures that crave narrative.

One of my favorite writers suggests that perhaps God invented time so that there might be narrative: creation, fall, atonement. Incarnation, resurrection, return. Hope and miracle. These are all stories. And stories connect us. They are a form of communion. In a very real way, we share stories. While I took the sacrament today, my son held up to my attention a piece of bread roughly the shape of Chile. It was the longest, biggest piece in the tray, and I could tell it felt like victory to him. He smiled and said, “Dad, do you remember the story of the Last Supper? It was Jesus’s last night and He broke the bread and gave them water.” (We are Mormons, and so we remember the wine as water, you know?) “Yep.” “And then He died.” “Yep.” “And do you remember the story of the five loaves of bread and the two fishes? Jesus fed five thousand people.” “Yep.” These are stories we share, of the bright, gentle Son of God wandering around the plains of Judea, feeding people. We ate these stories together, my son and I, as we chewed small pieces of bread and sipped from small cups of water.

We share the story of the young curious farm boy who wandered into the woods and cracked open the heavens, who talked with God and spent the rest of his life telling people that God wanted to talk with them, too. Who gave his life for his witness that God is not so different from us, or we are not so different from Him. This story made a people. We are part of that people. It continues to make us, to teach us our value in the eyes of the Holy One of Israel.

I tell my children stories so they will know me. One recent Sunday night I asked them if they wanted a mission story. “Yeah!” shouted my two oldest. “I want a fight story,” Oliver said. “Do you want a mission fight story?” I asked. “Yeah!” they all three said. I told them the story of one of my mission companions who grew up in Mexico City and whose brothers were car thieves for a living. He told how he sometimes rode in the backseat of the stolen cars as a young boy and how he remembered them speeding across the border into the Distrito Federal, being pursued by police officers. This companion’s name was Elliott, and he had seen some things, let’s say. The companion he had before me had said something Elliott didn’t like, and Elliott punched him in the face. That’s how he and I became companions. That was the fight I had promised to tell my children about. But the story was really about how much this kid taught me about love. We would get on our bikes and ride past all the houses and out through the countryside and stop on bridges and watch turtles sunning themselves on rocks. Some of my favorite memories of Mexico are those bike rides with Elliott, sunning ourselves like turtles on rocks. But when we went far enough out, we found very small communities of outlying people. And one day we knocked at the fence of a small house with a big yard and lots of chickens, and we met Claudia. She was blind and she had two daughters, and they craved the stories we told about God’s love and God’s attentiveness to human cries. About pillars of light and the warm voice of God. They were baptized and each week made the long journey to the church in the city to hear more of these stories. I left that area shortly after this. I did not speak Spanish very well then, and I did not think this little family would remember me. Elliott was the one who taught them the stories, really. Elliott was the one who loved them so very much. But about two years later, I returned to Mexico with my parents, and we drove a car out to the little fence around Claudia’s house and banged on the fence. Claudia came feeling her way out of the house. “Hola, hermana!” I cried. “Taggart?” she said, a smile slowly creeping across her worn face. “How did you know?” I asked. “How could I forget the voice of the boy who taught me the stories of God?” As I told my children this story, I cried. Six-year-old Emerson began to cry as well. And then Lydia. Oliver looked at us, and said, “Stop crying!”

So we write to tell stories. Because stories matter. Stories matter more than we can put into words. So we tell stories. And we write so that the stories do not die with us. We write to connect, to commune. That is why we write.

Six Hours

"Thorn and Sparrows" by Brian Kershisnik

A boy who usually comes late and almost never says anything stood up at the front of the classroom and looked at the other students in the class and said, “I want to tell you a story.” The story was about his great uncle. “I wasn’t really close to him,” he said, “but I really loved him. He lived on this big field, this farm. He always laughed. He made everyone laugh. He was my grandfather’s brother. He was very old. He was out walking, and something happened to him and he fell down, he like collapsed. He could not stand, and his wife did not know where he was. He lay on the ground in his field for a very long time and it was cold and then his wife finally found him and took him to the hospital. My family went to sit with him at the hospital, and we were all, you know, crying and stuff, because the doctors said that he was going to die. He was very old.” The boy looked in the eyes of the other students and then looked away and continued his story. “He was telling jokes and we were laughing and crying. I mean, he was dying and he was making people laugh. He was such a nice person. And then he said, ‘Why are you all crying? Isn’t it time for General Conference? Somebody find a TV.’ So we found a TV and set it up in his bedroom. And he was dying and he just wanted to listen to the prophet, and he was so happy all the time, and I thought, ‘I maybe should want to watch Conference.’ So next time I am going to watch it more. And now I know he’s up there with God. And, well, that’s really all I wanted to say.” He sat down and no one said anything. But they didn’t really need to. He had pretty much said it all.

And then this big old football player boy said, “Well, I was going to play a song on the piano, but since my, you know, my concussion, I don’t remember some things too well. And I can’t really read music, but I have played since I was three just by ear, and I, well, I’ll just play what I can remember.” And he sat and played something that sounded like grace. Why does it always surprise me when boys like that have magical fingers?

And a girl said, “You know, the scriptures don’t really say what the angel did in the Garden of Gethsemane to comfort Christ, just that an angel came and comforted Him. And I kind of wish it said how he did it because I have a lot of friends and some in my family who struggle with depression, and I sometimes wonder what I can do. But I think I might know some of what the angel did. My dad has this sign by his bed that says, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ And I think sometimes people just need us to stand there, by them. You know? They just need to know straight up that we are going to love them no matter what. And then we need to actually do it. To make good on our word.”

And a boy who grew up in Samoa and has more cousins than I have days on my calendar said, “When I was ten my mother died, and ten days later my best friend died. And it was in the tenth month. And so now people ask me why I always choose the number ten for my football jersey, and I tell them about my mom and my friend. And some people think that’s weird, but it’s like, I don’t want to forget them, and the number ten reminds me of them and makes me want to play better and to be better because, like, I know they are looking down on me, and, well, I want to, you know, make them proud and live to see them again. And I know I will. So ten is a hopeful number to me. I don’t know if you get it, but it is.”

And a big, strong, silent boy said more words than I’d ever heard, and I had never noticed that he sort of has a lisp, and it made me wonder if that’s why he’s so strong and so silent. And it made me wish I had known he had a lisp before today. Man, have I never heard him say enough words to know that? You know?

And another quiet boy—the younger brother of two boisterous, gregarious boys I have taught before, a boy who one day told me, “I am not my brothers”—this boy said, “Everybody gets sad. And if the great sorrow has not descended on you yet, you are not off the hook, because it might one day. You never know, you know? So you kind of have to be patient with people. And you have to know that God always loves you, you know?”

And a girl told about her friend who doesn’t believe in God and this girl in my class “sort of tricked her,” as she said, to come to her grandma’s house and listen to the apostles speak at Conference. And in the first talk this atheist girl heard, someone shared that scripture from Matthew 22: “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And this girl in my class looked over and her friend was crying. “And she’s sort of a tough girl, and she never cries. And I asked her why she was crying. And she just said, ‘That scripture was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.’” And that girl in my class sat down, and we all sat there thinking about that. The most beautiful thing she had ever heard. Love. Love was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. And I sat there thinking that it was probably the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, too. You know?