 What’s It All About? Two OfferingsbyKatharine Hauswirth
In my world, all movies lead to books, even if they are not based on books. Take Hereafter, the 2010 film directed by Clint Eastwood. The movie surprised me with an “art imitating life” moment, a startling scene in which a French woman vacationing in the tropics is strolling through a sunny outdoor market one minute, caught up in a hellish ride in the waters of a tsunami the next. It turns out the movie was pulled abruptly from Japanese theaters in March due to its quite terrifying depiction of scores of people being swept away. Whether watching the news or a fictional portrayal of disaster, the next thought is to wonder how people endure the aftermath of tragedy. Kate Braestrup’s Here If You Need Me: A True Story offers a refreshing perspective on suffering and redemption and a brave attempt to address the age-old mystery of what larger, unseen truths may be behind, or perhaps hover above, it all. At first it wasn’t clear to me what exactly a chaplain for the Maine Warden Service—Braestrup’s unusual vocation—might do. Braestrup paints the picture vividly, reminding those of us who don’t live near vast reaches of forest that the woods are dark and deep but, contrary to Frost’s poem, not always lovely. Braestrup conveys how the woods are beautiful and terrible at once, terrible in that they can steal away parents, spouses, children, and friends who can wander lost, alone, and cold before they perish. The outcomes are random; sometimes the woods offer seeming miracles, returning the lost to their fold. Replace the word “the Lord” with "the woods”, in the well-worn quote from the Book of Job and you have, “the woods giveth, and the woods taketh away.” Braestrup’s description of the woods can be read as a powerful metaphor for the twists and turns thrown by life. The book doesn’t ask why the twists and turns occur; rather it recounts aspects of humanity that can often shine through even following a tragic outcome. Some of that humanity is her own; she often struggles for the right words when in the presence of newly grieving families, but it’s clear that these encounters are tender and that her words are a lifeline, sometimes an even more tangible lifeline because of their reality, their lack of finesse. In small and large ways throughout the book, in car rides, in search parties, at funeral homes, people come together and respond to each others’ needs. Braestrup knows that of which she speaks. She suffered a tragedy that made her a widow, and completely surprised herself by signing up for the divinity school that her husband had intended to pursue. It’s clear she’s not the typical seminarian. She tells her professor, “I’m religious, but I’m not really spiritual.” Readers get to ride along with Braestrup on pastoral rounds, which defy what one would probably expect from a chaplain. After leading a wordless prayer over a corpse, she wobbles as she stands, explaining “Prayer always makes me a little loopy.” When dealing with the frightened or the bereaved, she knows her role is primarily one of support for the wardens and not pontification—“I don’t make the difference between finding and not finding a body, between order and chaos, life and death. They [the wardens] do.” Here If You Need Me is written in a plain, straightforward voice that reports the day-to-day comings and goings of wardens in Maine and the sometimes quirky but always authentic perspective of their chaplain. Although you’d be hard-pressed to pick out especially lyrical phrases in the text, Braestrup succeeds at scattering pithy but insightful sentences that give a few seconds pause after a good story about the day in the woods, or her son, or one of the wardens: “The stories we tell of heaven and hell are not about how we die, but about how we live.” The book is not a neatly-wrapped package of explanations but a loose-ended, perplexed, contemplation of how people can be there for each other, how we may not have profound answers but can hold each other up in ways worthy of reverence and joy. The title of Mary Oliver’s 2009 poetry collection, unlike Braestrup’s aforementioned loose ends, sounds quite sure of itself. Evidence never explicitly explains what it is evidence of, but Oliver, at her lyrical best, builds a case for deep appreciation of the natural world and the experience of being human in it. The striking Thomas Moran painting Approaching Storm on the cover hints at how Oliver, in an approach completely converse to Braestrup’s sideways run at the miraculous, also revels in the juxtaposition of darkness and light and her own journey through both. There’s a reason Oliver has a Pulitzer; she can layer nuanced, savored meaning over a short walk, single tree, or lone sparrow. Take “Empty Branch in the Orchard,” about a hummingbird who used to perch there: To have loved a hummingbird I remember you, hummingbird. even as I am still here, “Mysteries, Yes,” finds words to express that which seems inexpressible with delicacy and delight: Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. Let me keep a distance, always, from those who think they have the answers… And it seems, as we read on, that the Evidence might be that there is joy to be had, even while we know so little about the mysteries. In fact, there is joy in the mysteries themselves. Oliver works hard, while making it look easy, at harnessing the experience of the natural world to, in her own words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought,” hardly an effortless task in this cynical age. So, what is it all about? Braestrup and Oliver both find ways to say that they mostly don’t know, although they’ve gotten some pretty powerful hints, but that it’s okay not to know. There are many mysteries to contemplate, many moments alone, with others, or with nature for the soul to savor. These are good books to pick up when faced with the vast tragedies like those that have lit up our screens in recent weeks. The phrase “tidings of comfort and joy”, although it’s left its season, is a fitting way to describe both of these small miracles. These are tidings that we need to sustain us year round. Books mentioned in this column:
Katherine Hauswirth is a medical writer by day and a creative writer by stolen moments. She writes creative nonfiction and poetry. She is the author of Harriet’s Voice: A Writing Mother’s Journey and contributed to the anthology Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough. Her current blog is The Year I Said No, an adventure in making room for a richer life by learning to say no to things that get in the way. Katherine has been published in many venues including The Writer, Byline, The Christian Science Monitor, Pregnancy, The Writer's Handbook, The Writer's Guide to Fiction, Women of Spirit, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Kit, Eat a Peach, Lutheran Digest, and Pilgrimage. A Long Island native, Katherine lives with her husband and son in Deep River, Connecticut. She can be reached through her website, Harriet’s Voice: Home Base for Writing Mothers, or at khauswirth [at] sbcglobal.net.
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