1. Fangs
I became less averse to contemporary worship music while teaching English at a Christian school. The school’s founders were classically Pentecostal and they were not shy about it. Speaking in tongues, laying of hands and falling on the floor were standard features of weekly chapel service. Regardless of what tradition they emerged from, the students and teachers accustomed themselves to the vibrant culture—Presbyterians, Independent Baptists, even Orthodox Christians like myself.
One time, Jason in the 6th grade became curious when he overheard the lead and assistant pastor praying in strange tongues in a closed classroom for their daily prayer hour. His eavesdropping made him late to my class. “Why are you late, Jason?” I asked.
“Ms. Menyhert,” he replied. “They be speaking Chinese again.”
At Friday morning chapel service, the musically inclined students would perform songs from the Hillsong canon on stage. The more I came to know my students, the more the songs I formerly despised emptied themselves of their triteness. They became, in their own way, sacred.
There was one student who was particularly forthcoming about her testimony. The details of her story are not mine to share, but it will suffice to say I was humbled by how hollow my own life experience was compared to this teenager. And she was not the only student whose suffering eclipsed what any should deal with at that young age, or whose redemption displayed marked maturity. Standing in the auditorium on Fridays, thinking about my students, their families, the betrayals and miracles, the songs meant something. Hearing my student with the harrowing personal story sing in her soft, high voice, “With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God” while Pastor lay spirit-slain on the carpet and the one Catholic freshman knelt beside him asking “Are you ok, Pastor H?”—that meant something.
Across much of his work, David Foster Wallace would talk about how the most overused cliches contain the sharpest fangs. Like the expression “One day at a time.” The only way the suffering addict can handle the grueling day without their vice is to condense it into a platitude. The cliche came into existence because the painful truth necessitated it.
Cliches like “God’s goodness” have fangs in their own right. For my students, many of whom I judged before I understood the core of their distractedness, the goodness of God was something seen, something lived in the face of inconceivable suffering. God transformed my perception of them and then, through their testimonies and idiosyncrasies, they transformed how I heard the songs. For the first time, they grew fangs.
2. Wind
As I write this, I am aware of the breeze from the ocean through my back porch window. But I am even more aware of having employed the cliche “ocean breeze” and find my whole being rebelling.
But it does happen to be the truth. A heavy, gusty breeze is coming through the window from over the ocean, slapping my ponytail around even though I’m indoors, begging to be written about, and there’s no use trying to pretend it isn’t.
Maybe the “fangs” of the ocean breeze are its associations with my home, with my first few months of marriage, which I will never get back once they’re gone. I think of my favorite set of Townes Van Zandt lines:
All you young ladies who dream of tomorrow
While you are listening these words will I say
Cling to today with its joys and its sorrows
You’ll need all your memories when youth melts away.
I remember at a poetry workshop once being given a list of things never to include in a poem. Roses, doves, blood, oceans and sunsets all made the cut, among many other cliches that escape me. I also remember editing our college’s literary magazine. We had a whole slush pile dedicated to poems about stars.
You can see why I struggle to express the joys and sorrows of today. Through no fault of my own, this time in my life contains all the features of bad writing. I walk on the beach with my new husband. I brew coffee and bake pumpkin spice cakes and fold laundry. I feel the breeze from the ocean. And I try to name these goods despite the cultural baggage they carry.
3. Company
There is a Son Volt song I like that has the chorus, “May the wind take your troubles away, May the wind take your troubles away.”
I am not at all bothered by Jay Farrar writing lyrics about wind. I’m not bothered by my teenage students singing a pop song about God’s goodness, or by Townes singing about dreaming young ladies. Yet with my graduate-school sensibilities, mentioning wind through the window, even in my private journal, feels downright dangerous.
But it’s true. The wind from the ocean is keeping me company while my husband is visiting his parents. A burn on my wrist from a hot cake pan that should have healed weeks ago still itches. Slightly uncomfortable but inspired, I compose a letter in my head:
Dear husband, I remember you told me you loved me for the first time while I was having an anxiety attack waiting for a background check to clear. In Yellowstone, Beth tells Rip when he’s about to say “I love you” not to say it right then, to say it when it saves her. You said it to me when it saved me and it’s been saving me ever since. Thank you for these first six months of marriage. I miss them already. Love, wife.
The wind is my companion. It’s making me nostalgic for the very season I’m in. And it is taking my troubles away. That’s just the truth.
Image Credit: Georg Friedrich Kersting, “Children by an Open Window” (1843)
