On Sunday we turned the garden soil, marveling as worms the diameter of my index finger squirmed and bunched in every clump we heaved up and over. Every time I sliced my shovel into the ground, I wondered how many worms I had accidentally decapitated. I hated to do so; they are good for the garden. When we bought this house you couldn't pay a worm to take up residence in the bare patch of ground on the sunniest side of the yard. It was dry as elephant skin. Not even weeds would grow there.

Now, just one growing season (and many, many composted banana peels) later, the dirt is the color of espresso and I kept stopping work to bend and gawk at the life writhing just under the surface. The worm real estate market has turned a corner, and bidding's gettin' fierce. Every worm on earth wants to live in our garden.

It's amazing how quickly you can go from parched desert to garden of Eden.

Do worms keep living after you cut them in half? my husband and I wonder. Because there they go, the poor injured ones, bunching and stretching, scrunching their severed bodies back into the ground. Nah, of course not, is the obvious conclusion. But the question still niggles at my mind, because stranger things have happened. Nature can be surprising, and ridiculous, and unbelievable.

I looked it up later: The head side of a worm can, indeed, survive the loss of half its body. Like salamanders and starfish, a worm possesses the power of regeneration. Cut off its tail and a new one will sprout. 

What is the process like, for a worm? After it loses half of itself, does it begin regeneration passively? The way, when your pregnant, cells keep dividing, things keep growing, whether you are thinking about it or not? Even when you're asleep? Or is regeneration something that takes intense energy and effort; like childbirth, is regeneration something that requires everything you've got?

In some circles, regeneration doesn't imply missing limbs but intense rehabilitation. Like an extreme makeover for your soul. They speak of something broken that needs fixing. A few stitches and a great big band-aid, give it a few weeks, and you’ll be good as new.

But regeneration actually speaks of something missing. Something amputated, gone. There's not a band-aid in the world, folks. We don’t like to talk like this, like we are fundamentally lacking wholeness. We don’t want to admit it. Denial is an attractive force when the alternative is facing a reality as bleak as this: Pieces of us have been severed, sliced to pieces. They are gone.

The mind is a tricky devil. It will lie to you. 

Human amputees speak of a phenomenon called “phantom pains.” It’s the sensation of pain, or itching, or cold, in a limb that is missing. Your rational mind knows your arm has been cut off, but your actual experience, your feelings, demonstrate staunch denial. The mind creates pain in the absence of what has been lost.

It has me thinking about the pain points of my life. 

It has me thinking about what pieces of me are beyond recovery, permanently cut off.

The phantom pains keep cropping up, in my relationships, in my parenting, when I sit down to write. Here, too, I lack wholeness. Part of me knows it. 

The other part just keeps shooting pain in the absence. I yelled at my daughter again. I cannot stamp out my bitterness toward another person. I keep crumbling under the self-imposed pressure to pursue a calling that I'm not sure really matters.

There are things that have been lost. 

Lost, Beth, lost. I tell myself again. It is not time for band-aids. It's time for regeneration.

Cotton Candy Craft

Probably one of the weirdest parts of getting married is marveling over how your soul mate could have come from parents who have practically nothing in common with you. Like my father-in-law. Every time we sit down to a conversation, it’s a rare moment indeed when we discover something on which we agree (so far I’ve found The Lord of the Rings and the indispensability of chocolate). Otherwise, we don’t have much in common. He listens to Rush Limbaugh; I like The Daily Show. He likes Jimmy Stewart; I like Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s a meat-and-potatoes Midwesterner; I prefer tofu on quinoa. And when it comes to poetry—something I truly adore—we cannot find one single poet on whom to hang our mutual admiration.

“How can you not have heard of that poem?” we both recently asked one another. I wondered how he could have gotten through school without ever reading Walt Whitman’s “When I heard the learn’d astronomer.” He could not fathom how I’d graduated with an English degree without ever having read the poem that contained the line “Only God can make a tree.”

“It’s really famous; it’s by a famous poet!” he insisted. So, as anyone of my generation is wont to do at the slightest provocation, I Googled it.

“Only God can make a tree” comes from this super sappy poem called “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer. It begins, “I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree” and ends with “Poems are made by fools like me/ But only God can make a tree.”

I’d never even heard of Kilmer, which meant a quick jump over to Wikipedia to find out whether my $40,000 liberal arts education had, indeed, failed to introduce me to one of the greats.

It hadn’t. “Trees” has managed to enjoy widespread popularity in anthologies, but the rest of Kilmer’s work is pretty much unknown, as most of it was rejected by the literati and banished to permanent obscurity. As Wikipedia explained: “Several critics—including both Kilmer's contemporaries and modern scholars—have disparaged Kilmer's work as being too simple and overly sentimental, and suggested that his style was far too traditional, even archaic.”

‘Of course,’ I thought to myself, ‘that’s why my father-in-law likes him.’ The iambic pentameter, the AA-BB rhyme scheme, the sentimental message: It was all exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to my highly traditional father-in-law. But me? Well, I probably have to agree with Kilmer’s critics on this one. The work is sentimental. Yuck.

                 

Why does sentimentality repel us? Or at least, it repels us when it is found in a poem or story, even if we find sentimental tendencies in our own private personalities. Much like picking one’s nose, sentimentality is not seen as an acceptable public gesture but something to be done secretly, at home, and with some embarrassment. And so for writers who endeavor to put forth their work into the world, sentimentality is received like a used tissue, the evidence of the writer’s urge toward an indulgence that ought to have been grown out of by now. Yuck, say the critics. Nobody needs to see this.

Perhaps it is because we—and here I mean the public consumers and critics of what may be deemed Literature—demand that the arts be adequate reflections of reality, and sentimentality produces art with an overly simplistic worldview. Sentimentalism wraps the world in a very neat package and ties a picture-perfect bow on top. Consumers of the arts prefer for the package to be torn open, its contents spread for examination upon the floor. The world is both beautiful and broken, and it is frustrating to contend with writers who insist it is only one or the other.  If they lean too hard toward the latter, the result is too bitter a pill to swallow; if they lean too hard on the former, the result is sickly-sweet as cotton candy, and leaves consumers feeling queasy.

                   

The cotton-candy approach to craft is one of the reasons the Christian presence in mainstream fine literature has diminished so sharply over the last century or so. Like the Catholic Kilmer, many writers who endeavor to write explicitly about faith or spirituality are dismissed by critics (editors, publishers) as sentimental. Even some Christian audiences find the offerings of the Christian community of writers “cheesy,” and lacking in the depth and complexity the faith truly deserves.

Too many Christian authors produce work that winds up sounding like a “Smile, God Loves You!” bumper sticker. It’s unclear whether the work is meant to be fine art or a Gospel tract in novel form. Writers yank the mystery, complexity, and disturbing ambiguity from their work in order to produce a Sunday School lesson for readers. It’s just no wonder that we see so little of it in the world of fine literature. Writers who lean into sentimentality depart from the mode of storytelling Jesus himself embraced—fully aware that he was speaking in parables to people who though hearing did not hear. Great Christian writing not only begs multiple readings and interpretations—it demands them. Too many Christian novels, poems and essays depart from this tradition, finding it irresistible to hit the reader over the head with a figurative two-by-four of theology.

Admittedly, it’s a difficult task to avoid sentimentalism when addressing topics like redemption, transformation, and of course love. How can one discuss these powerful concepts without sounding sappy? 

Too many Christian writers don’t seem interested in finding out.

What God Doing?

When we left church a couple of weeks ago, my toddler asked her first theological question.

"Where's God?" she wanted to know.

In the front seat, I glanced back at her little cherub face in the rear mirror and took a deep breath. Here it comes, I thought. At the age of two, she has begun the "God questions," and I'm just hoping I'm half up to the task. Get one of these wrong, and one day she'll be wondering why the foundation of her world is cracking in half, why I put her on the fault line.

"God is everywhere, honey. God is with you, God is with Mama, God is with Daddy, God is everywhere." (On top of the question of the "correct" answer, there's the question of how to translate it into terms a two-year-old can understand. Does she have half a grasp on the meaning of "everywhere?" I doubt it some, but then again, I tend to underestimate what she understands, as evidenced by how often I accidentally talk about her Christmas presents right in front of her.)

Anyway, I felt pretty good about that answer. Pretty sure.

The next week, she upped the ante.

"What God doing?" she asked me.

Smack. 

"Ummmm," I murmured, "good question, honey."

Only two years old, two "God questions" in, and I'm out of my league.

I think part of my problem was that I took the question quite concretely. My daughter is, after all, two. She asks, "What doing, Mama?" about 50 times a day, and every time the answer is something like, "Cooking your lunch, sweetie," or "Sweeping," or "Changing your diaper." I don't exactly answer her questions with an abstract explanation that I'm "parenting," even though that answer would of course be true.

In the same vein, I didn't really think answers like "redeeming the world" were exactly what she was looking for. So the question, as I heard it, was: What is God doing, precisely? Like, right now.

Good question.

The reason she's asking is because my daughter is concerned--you might even say obsessive--about the exact whereabouts and activities of her most immediate family members. Every morning, once her daddy has left, she wants to know "Where Daddy? What Daddy doing?" Even though the answer is always, always the same. It doesn't matter. She wants to hear me say it. Wants the assurance of placing her daddy on the map, imagining what he's doing.

Why is it that not once in the last two years have I shouted from the bedroom, "What doing, God?"

Anyway, the whole thing is bothering me, because frankly I don't really know "what God doing." I mean, I know a lot of things that God did. I know a couple of things that God will do. But here? Now? What doing?