Church of Lost Hats Sample Chapter

Chapter 5

A Tender Gale

     "Make us to choose the harder right than the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won."

                   From the West Point Cadet Prayer

     “Long you must suffer, knowing not what,

     until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit

     your suffering's taste comes forth in you.

     Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted.  No one

     will ever talk you out of it.”

                   Rainer Maria Rilke

     It was a rainy September day at West Point, and I was living a nightmare.  I sat in my room in Eisenhower Barracks with my head in my hands.  I was confined to barracks again because I had failed my Saturday uniform and rifle inspection.  The cadre had gathered around my M-14 rifle like sharks after chum, peering down the shaft of my rifle, zeroing in on my unworthiness as a cadet.  Their looks of disgust had been so dramatic and fatherly in their awfulness; they weren't even playing it up like they do sometimes.  I had not measured up.  I was not squared away. 

     The funniest part was I felt like laughing at them, at myself, at the Academy.  I knew I was losing it big time, letting the old dream slip through my fingers, ready to laugh at the boy who had driven me to this hell without haven.  I was marching and bracing even in my dreams and restless sleep; not squared away for the inspection of my soul.

I got up from my desk and the rifle I had been sentenced to clean on Saturday while the Army football team played Holy Cross at Michie Stadium.  Tailgate parties, a few brews, actually talking to girls who don't wear Army uniforms.  Not for me today.  Cadet Geary was deep in the dog house.

     I stood in front of my sink and mirror and looked at my reflection.  My crew cut made me look like a holocaust survivor, not a war hero, or a warrior in peacetime.  The scar on the back of my head was visible, and I had made up a story about hitting my bedpost while rough housing with my sister as a kid.  That's why I have the scar, not because of some tumor. 

I looked at the grey uniform with the black stripes, and I looked like a cross between a priest and a bellboy.  I frowned at the bellboy for his shoddy service.  Someone ought to fire this guy.  With my haircut all I could see was the boy with cancer.  Not a man, not a cadet.  Certainly not an Army officer.  Just a sick kid, a little boy running from himself and his fears.   I stared at the haunted brown eyes, and I saw in my presence a spark, a flash of recognition, that wanted to tell me the whole truth.  What was it?  What was I missing that was as close to me as my own hands? 

     There was a sharp knock on the door: A pistol-like report of paranoia.  Gestapo knock.  It was someone to mess with me, one of my buddies in the Hitler youth.

     "Enter, sir." 

     I snapped to attention as the door opened: Cadet Crossman.  Inside I relaxed, but I gave him all my respect.  He was a good person, an upperclassman, but not so uptight, like the assholes who believed every little detail in your day could have won the Vietnam War.  From the first day, Reception Day, Cadet Crossman had been kind to me.  He had blonde hair that he wore as long as possible and grey eyes.  He never yelled at the plebes when he made corrections; he said things quietly so no one else could hear.  I would follow him into battle.  I would follow him into the fire.

     "How's the rifle coming, Geary?"

     "It's going ok, sir.  Your cleaning kit helps a lot.  Thanks."

     He waved off my thank you with his left hand.  The rifle lay across my desk, and Cadet Crossman picked it up and stared down the barrel.  It was much shinier now.  I thought of him blowing his brains out as he stared down the dark barrel. 

     "Much better.  You can't call attention to yourself in inspection like that.  Now those guys will be looking for you to screw up."

     I nodded. 

     "Sir, how come you're not at the game?"

     "I'm reading some poems," he smiled.  "Plus, this isn't exactly Army-Navy.  Holy Cross is getting pasted by the good guys in black and gold."

     "What are you reading?" 

I grimaced as I forgot the "sir" punctuation.  More than anyone, Crossman was my superior.  But the rules of language at West Point could drive you crazy pretty fast.  Yes sir; no sir; no excuse, sir; sir, I do not understand.  Those were the four responses we were allowed.  The last one was my personal favorite, and I tried to use it as often as possible.  It could drive an upperclassman off the deep end by trying to explain himself more clearly.   

     "I'm reading Emily Dickinson," Crossman said.  "I'm giving a presentation on her understanding of death and God.  Iconography, feminine imagery, that kind of stuff.  But I'm not getting it exactly." 

     English Literature was the rarest of majors at West Point.  It really was still an engineering school like in the 1800s.  But if literature were a window into human nature, what better major for a man who would have to lead men into battle?  Crossman was on the right track.  He was also the middleweight boxing champion of the regiment.  Not even the tactical officers would mess with him, he was so squared away. 

I shuddered as I realized he was beautiful.  Not handsome, though that's what people would call him.

     "Sir, what is it?  I might be able to help."

     He gave me a quizzical look and walked over to the window and looked at the dark river flowing by.  It was a wonderful view of the Hudson.  The window was my favorite part of West Point.  If the fun kept up, I might have to jump out of it. 

     "I don't understand the dashes, the hyphens she uses.  It's really neurotic."

     "They're not dashes.  Or hyphens."

     He turned from the window and looked at me.  God, he was in shape, I thought, as he stood there looking not anything like a bellboy.  He was a warrior, something I would never be. 

I was a sensitive.

     "They're stitches," I told him. 

"It's her secret.  Some writers use painting as their motif as they write; it really opens things up in the narrative style. Virginia Woolf and Hemingway both thought of writing as painting, giving vision.  Emily is instead stitching.  Soul stitches as she brings patterns in words together.  The death poems, I think, suggest that she is making her own shroud."

     "How do you know that?"

     "Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to see, sir.  I've never met a teacher who understood the stitches.  But once you know they're there, you can't miss them." 

     "You're a real trip."

     "Yes, sir.  Been that way roughly since birth."

     I caught my own eye in the mirror again, and it suddenly came to me.  The vision.  For a split second, my cadet uniform was a priest's, and my grey tunic was black.  In another flash the collar was white not black, a blink of an eye showing the future.  Kindness washed over me. 

My eyes filled with tears. 

     Crossman crossed the room to my closet, and my eyes followed him.  I wiped the tears away as fast as I could.  My closet was not squared away, though my roommate’s looked great.  He was at the football game.  I frowned as Crossman passed his hand over my uniforms absently.

     "Geary, you're a terrible cadet.  I mean, you're not really into this little program we got going here at old West Point."

     "I know."

     "What are you going to do?"

     "I'm going to leave."

     He didn't say anything.  He didn't seem surprised.

     "How come?" he finally asked, probably out of genuine curiosity.

     "I have cancer," I blurted out.  Interesting slip. 

     "I mean I had cancer.  When I was a boy.  I've tried to forget it by coming here, but it's everywhere.  From the mist on the parade ground in the morning.  To the feel of the uniforms, down to the stitches.  It's always on the river, the ghost on the surface, the angel on the water.  The way I smell too.  It's in my eyes in the mirror.  I lied on my medical history." 

Honor violation in this tribe can just about kill you.

     "I figured something big messed you up.  But you remind me a lot of me when I got here."

     I held my breath.  How could a skinny kid from California remind Crossman of anything?  He watched my surprise and smiled.

     "A lot of time in the weight room, Geary.  Give it a try some time, you little shit."

     "Yes, sir." 

     "What kind of cancer was it?" he asked after a pause between us.

     "Bone cancer, sir."

     "Knock the sir stuff out.  If you're going to resign, I guess I can recognize you now.  My name's Ben." 

He held out his hand.  Recognition came in June, but it was coming early this year for the Californian.  I shook his hand, and his grip was firm.  I thought he would have tried to talk me out of quitting, but the opposite was happening.  I decided to tell him the whole story.

"There was a woman." 

     He straddled my chair after turning it wrong ways.

     "There's always a woman," he said with a smile. 

     "Her name was Gail.  She was my friend's mom.  We were swimmers.  She had leukemia when I had cancer."   

     I continued.  "After swim practice, she would take my hand.  Chemotherapy shots are given here."

I pointed to the back of my hand just above the wrist. 

     "After a treatment, a bruise would come up.  Plum colored, pretty dark sometimes.  Then they switch your hands for the next shot.  Gail would massage my hands, the bruise, away with her fingers.  She never said what she was doing, and I never asked.  I loved Gail, though I hardly knew her really, just her tender touch.  She died about the time my cancer went into remission.  She was an angel to me.  She's still with me, in me." 

     I stopped talking and looked into the window of his eyes. 

     "She taught me what it really means to be strong, but I forgot the lesson.  Not like the B.S. here." 

"Do you like it here?" I asked out of the blue.

     "Hell no," said Crossman.

     "What keeps you here?"

     "I'm a soldier.  It's in my blood."

     I nodded.  Crossman was a warrior to the core.

     "What are you going to do, Nick?" 

I didn't even know he knew my first name.  I took a deep breath.  It was strange to say the words out loud for the first time. 

     "I'm going to be a priest.  It's in my blood too.  I guess I moved three thousand miles to figure that out that little secret, to stitch my past and future together.  I've always known somewhere deep down inside, but Gail seems to have righted things again, smoothed the bruise away.  This time at West Point."

     "A priest, huh?  Be a damn good one."

     His hand found mine, and we shook for a long moment, the hands firm.  Ben held my hand with both of his.  Over the same spot near the wrist.  Gail had touched my hands again through Ben Crossman, and I would become a man in her image.  Gale and the Holy Spirit seemed to be a third presence between us in that moment.  Something strange was in the room with us, and I'm sure Ben felt it too.  I had goose bumps.  Looking into Ben's grey eyes, I realized his strength was feminine as well, deep down inside, the interior presence.  It's funny what you can find when you're trying to be manly and strong at West Point on a rainy football Saturday. 

     The cadet boxer with soldiering in his blood smiled as he spoke the secret words between us.

     "The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that kicks the ass."

     Ben let go of my hand at the soft spot, turned slowly, and left my room.  He swaggered down the hall, my image of the tender warrior forever. 

     "Sweet cancer," I said to myself and the gale I knew was blowing down the Hudson River.

The Ritual Places of the Past

8 September 2009

Opening Service for Faculty

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

The readings tonight are the ones assigned for the theme of Ministry, and they are often read on occasions of important beginnings in the common life of the church.  These readings have become something like ritual places in the faith, where the future is consecrated by remembering a time when God called humankind in the past.  In the lesson from Samuel, a mere boy is called by God to the vocation of prophet, the very first prophet of the Jewish people.  Samuel doesn’t understand exactly what is happening to him.  But with the help of his teacher and mentor, Eli, Samuel comes to understand that it is God’s voice who is calling him directly.  By the end of the reading, Samuel is ready for his future with God, for his true vocation.  His response to God’s calling is just as direct: ”Speak, for your servant is listening.”  The gospel from Matthew is also a moment of calling, from Jesus to his disciples and followers: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”  These readings for the Ministry are sacred invitations: to remember how you got where you are, and the lives you will touch in your vocation as an educator, as we say “yes” again to beginning this year.    

There is so much that is ahead of us just this week, and next, but my preference tonight is to look in the rear view mirror instead, at what is just behind us in the summertime.  There are so many rituals of summer: the places we go, the people we see, the books we read for pleasure (what a wonderful concept that is—reading for pleasure, I can’t get enough of it).  Time seems to slow down, and almost stop, in these ritual moments of summer. 

The places we go in the summer renew us; they remake us as human beings.  We get recharged.  For many of us, the summer vacation spots also represent our past, and the many years your family has gone there.  These are often places where the goodness of God, and the beauty of nature, are overwhelming.  Returning to these ritual places is a way that we measure our lives; and the memories of the past can be very deep.  I thought about my own endless summers past as I read the new novel That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo.  As you might guess, the old magic refers to Cape Cod as the sublime experience--as the regular summer destination for the protagonist Jack Griffin in his childhood.  Griffin is a former Hollywood screenwriter who now teaches at an unnamed college in Connecticut.  The Connecticut-Cape Cod dynamic is familiar to many of you, and the way everything, your fundamental state of mind, can change in the moment when you drive across the Bourne or Sagamore Bridges.  The moment you land on the Cape, everything is somehow different.  It’s like magic.  The wedding of a daughter’s friend is the occasion for Jack Griffin to return to Cape Cod after a long absence.  But the Cape was the summertime mecca of his youth, the place of yearly summer pilgrimage with his English professor parents.  For those of you who like to go to Maine instead, that’s the second half of the book, and I won’t give anything away tonight. 

If you are familiar with Richard Russo novels, you know you will always find exasperating parents stalking the main character, usually an impossible father figure, haunting his children well into adulthood.  The parents in Russo novels are always stubborn, intelligent, illogical, opinionated, unfiltered, childish, dominating, profane, ridiculous, and somehow—impossibly--still lovable.  The parents of Jack Griffin are all of the above, and his parents divorced years before.  But Cape Cod was the place, the calm in the storm, when everything seemed alright—or as close as his parents could manage.  The Cape was the golden time of Griffin’s childhood, before the divorce.  The novel is about Griffin’s struggle with the past, and especially his parents.  His highly intelligent and acerbic mother is now in a rest home, and his father has been dead for about a year.  Griffin is still driving around with his father’s ashes in the trunk of his car, a fact which becomes more than symbolic of his inability to find closure with his father.  He never knew what to do with his father when he was alive.  Death is no different.  He is tentatively planning to spread his father’s ashes somewhere on the Cape.  Because the Cape is where his family was happiest together.  Griffin also fears that he is becoming his father, his worst nightmare.  He is doing strange things, like having car accidents—fender benders, just like his father used to.  His father in the trunk seems to be doing the driving.  Griffin reflects on his past as he returns to Cape Cod.  The journey backward is somehow necessary for Griffin to go forward, but it doesn’t seem like progress much of the time.  But eventually Griffin makes his way to the present by visiting the ritual places of his past.  That old cape magic brings him back to life.  He begins to live again, with reverence and intentionality.  In the middle of his life, as a parent himself, Griffin comes of age again, in the place of his childhood memories.          

We don’t come of age just once; it happens again and again.  That’s what it means to be fully alive.  Christians call this ongoing process conversion.  We come of age even when we die.  Even then, we learn something new about how to live; how to be childlike before God.  To feel wonder at this world, and at this life we share.  This ending summer is just as important as the summers of your past.  This autumn is just as important as any other before it.  You can live this year just as fully, as completely, as any year in your life.  The wonder of doing something for the first time can come back to you, in that old cape magic here in Kent.         

This past summer my own rituals of place and pastime were seriously disrupted—by my 25^th high school reunion out in California.  For some reason, I said yes to going, yes to a trip to California to see the people of my past.  A friend who was on the reunion committee even asked me to do the Benediction.  For some inexplicable reason, I said yes to that too.  I was on a roll of bad ideas, like Griffin with his dad in the trunk.  I was so confused I started exercising.  Remember a prophet has no power in his hometown; it was Jesus who said that.  He was so right.  I’ve being doing Benedictions for years now, but somehow I was drawing a big old blank about what would be appropriate for a reunion of my large public high school class in Turlock, California.  But then I discovered a poem that set me right; or rather, it grabbed my heart and still hasn’t let go, even weeks later.  I’d like to share it with you tonight, as we begin our new year together.  The poem immediately made sense about why I was travelling 3000 miles with my seven year old Beatrice to the haunts of my past.  The poem is part of a play called Sonnets for an Old Century, by the Latino playwright Jose Rivera who wrote the play References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot—great title.  He also did the screenplay for the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which some of you may have seen.  The motif of the poem, which is so simple and yet mysterious, is the first time that you do something.  The first times you do something in your life, a coming of age.  Like Samuel, these are the moments that call each of us by name.  The poem is both holy and ordinary, sacred and profane (so be prepared, it can be a little… earthy).

     From Jose Rivera: 

The first time someone else’s tongue enters your mouth.

The first time a child trusts you to carry them to the next room.

The first time you drive from Westfield, Massachusetts, to San Diego, with someone you’re in love with.

The first time you watch birth.

The first lines of Paradise Lost.

The first time you make a decisive three point shot in a game that really counts.

The first time you get the dog to shit outside.

The first time you can read “I love you” in a lover’s eyes.

The first family reunion without homicidal fantasies.

The first love letter.

The first serious talk about love with your child.

The first time you contemplate suicide and change your mind.

The first hangover.

The first arrest.

The first acquittal.

The first epiphany.

The first time you hear Lorca in Spanish.

The first real friendship with a person of another race.

The first gray hair.

The first time you see Picasso’s Guernica.

The first time you visit your birthplace.

The first time you hear Lightning Hopkins.

The first visible comet.

The first time you feel attractive and someone calls you “angel.”

The first experience with something remotely like a god.

The first recovery after a serious illness.

The first beer with your father.

The first time therapy makes sense.

The first birthday of your first born.

The first time you can’t walk and your lover carries you to the next room.

The first foul ball you catch in Fenway Park.

The first time you stand alone and you’re scared to death and you don’t change your position.

The first time you’re convinced of your mortality and you laugh.

The first sunrise after the first death of a parent.

The first time you forgive the unforgivable.

The first time you see the Earth from space.

The first time it is truly obvious that it was better that you had lived, at this time, in this world.

The first time you decide every moment of your life should be a work of art.

The first time you die and you breathe again and you speak to the living.

The first time you realize that it all just might have been okay.

(The people in the space look up at the silent sky around them.  They wait.  No revelations come to them.  No answers.  No giant bolts of lightning.  Just a slow fade to black.)

These first times in life were the moments of great significance, where we became who we are as children of God.  But it is in the present, right now, that we are called to live out those promises of our beginnings.  The first moments point towards the future now, this year.  We get to come of age again.  How wonderful.  These moments, this beginning tonight, and this year are the places where we will meet God again, or perhaps for the very first time.  And, of course, we will soon meet our students, our advisees, our athletes, the ones who will fill our hearts with hope, worry, joy, dread, terror, and beauty this year, in the ordinary days and the extraordinary moments, the first times in their lives.  In these students, your presence, wisdom, knowledge, love and life lessons will live on the rest of their days.  May God bless all of you in your ministry this year.    

The Theology of House

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

19 February 2009

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

Chapel Talk

Getting through winter at Kent is tough, and it is very important not to make it any tougher for yourself.  I am from California.  Surviving the winter term at Kent is, for me, every year, a major accomplishment.  But I have learned something about survival in the five years I have lived in New England.  I have learned that pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, wins and losses, winter and spring, are not so far apart.  And you can’t have one without the other.  I have also learned that the best and worst of life at Kent are very close together.  Right now.  More than any other time, the good things and the bad things are neighbors.  The important thing is to keep going, keep the faith, and wait for the sweet release of spring.  It is really coming.  Also, beating Taft in basketball really helps, which my JV team did yesterday—very sweet.  Those rotten kids from Taft had it coming.     

But when my winter wisdom and my basketball team fail to help keep me going, I have no choice: I turn to a doctor.  That’s right, a medical doctor, who helps me survive winter.  He doesn’t give me a prescription, but his name is Doctor Gregory House of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.  You may have heard of him.  House is the ultimate curmudgeon; he is part Nietzsche as an uberdoctor who doesn’t have to follow the rules, part Sherlock Homes, and part Socrates lifting up the examined life for all of us.  And yet House is, in many ways, a very, very horrible person; yet he inspires both fascination and loathing.  As your chaplain, I confess; I can’t take my eyes off him.  Terribly, tragically, I identify with him.  I love watching him trying to outsmart his wonderful and very attractive supervisor, Dr. Lisa Cuddy.  I would like to have Cuddy as my supervisor, and then I would like to trick her too.  I really like her.     

There is so much that I enjoy about House, but his character is not mine.  We must be clear about that.  I’m much more like Wilson, I think.  I see the good side of people, most of the time, or I try to.  For House, there are no sides to people; otherwise we would be geometric shapes, right? 

There is only the truth that:

            “Everybody lies.”

            How many times have you heard House say that?  We will have plenty of Housisms before this talk is over, but here are some early House quotes.  House rules if you will.  

            “I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they do.”

            “It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies.  The only variable is about what.”

            “I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about someone that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”

            “Dying people lie too.  Wish they’d worked less, been nicer, opened orphanages for kittens…if you really want to do something, you do it.  You don’t save it for a sound bite.”

            Now the title of this chapel talk is “The Theology of House,” if there can be such a thing.  House’s vision of the human condition is by no means a modern defense of original sin, but it does sound a lot like Augustine, whom House would have definitely hated.  But it certainly presents the world as no longer one of good people and bad people, the sketchy people and the special people.  There are only patients; we are all patients.  There is a radical equality among all people, in the mind of House.  Jesus thought like this too.  Jesus and House.  What a horrible comparison, right?  Jesus is nice, right?  House is a devil.  Not exactly.  You can start reading the gospels tonight.  How many times is Jesus nice?  Stay up all night looking for the answer, and I, like House, will see you in the morning.  Jesus isn’t very nice either.  And Jesus and House both have disciples.  Jesus had James and John and Andrew.  House has Foreman, Chase, Cameron, a disciple named 13, and that guy from the Harold and Kumar movies     

Every time I hear a feeble excuse from a student, like why has Jun Hwan Kim slept through my A block class, again, I think of what House would say.  What would House do?  WWHD.  But I don’t think I would enjoy spending time with a real Dr. House.  What would he say to me?  How would he penetrate my clever lies?  I can only watch him once a day, for an hour.  That’s it.  But there, there it is.  I’m already lying.  If there’s more than one episode, I’m watching it, even if I have papers to grade.  Two nights ago, I watched three episodes in a row.  Two I had seen before. 

I promised House rules, House music.  So here are just a sample of the famous sayings of House, the rudest of the wise men, the curmudgeon messiah.  Here we go:     

            “Humanity is overrated.”

            “If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything.”

            “Tragedies happen.”

“Weird works for me.”

“In this universe effect follows cause.  I’ve complained about it but-“

“There’s no I in ‘team.’  There is a me, though, if you jumble it up.”

“Welcome to the end of the thought process.”

“If he gets better, I’m right.  If he dies, you’re right.”

“I hurt my leg.  I have a note.”

“If you talk to God, you’re religious.  If God talks to you, you’re psychotic.”

“Arrogance has to be earned.”

“…the fact that the sexual pleasure center of your brain has been overstimulated by spirochetes is a poor basis for a relationship.  Learned that one the hard way.”

“Never trust doctors.”

 “New is good.  Because old ended in death.”

“What usually happens when you poke something with a stick?  It pokes back.”

“Misery is better than nothing.”

“Reality is almost always wrong.”

And:

“You could think I’m wrong, but that’s no reason to stop thinking.”

My favorite House episode is the one with the hallucinating priest.  Among the many symptoms of the priest, he has seen a disturbing religious vision—of a hovering Jesus who is bleeding from the wounds of the crucifixion.  The priest is completely burned out by his ministry with the homeless, and it is no longer clear that the priest believes in a loving God anymore.  The dialogue between House and the priest is penetrating; each sees beyond the façade of the other man, to the core, the soul.  House calls the Catholic priest “Father Nietzsche.”  He is a patient that House even visits.  Though neither profess a belief in God, things happen to redeem them both that neither can explain.  When House eliminates the hallucination of Jesus as a symptom, rather than as an actual event in time, which it was, the doctor correctly diagnoses the priest’s disease.  At numerous points, House calls the priest a hypocrite.  The priest responds, without missing a beat, that House is the biggest hypocrite he has met in his entire life: for pretending that he doesn’t care about his patients.  Yes, he does care.  And we teachers care about all of you.  He may not like it, but Dr. House has soul.     

            More than anything, House believes that the universe is a puzzle; the answers are out there, we just have to find them.  Is this a kind of faith?  I don’t look to House for faith, I already have that.  He would call this faith my imaginary friend.  Yes, my imaginary friend, the suprarational God who created a rational and intelligible universe, for genius atheists and all of you to figure out.  So spin your Rubik’s cubes, if you still have one.  I love that God.  But enough about him, we talk about him all the time in chapel.  This talk is about House.  House gives me hope in winter.  I look to House to remind me that eccentricity works, and conflict is an intellectual necessity.  Progress comes from the eccentric people in our world, not the followers, and House sure makes it look like a whole lot of fun to think outside the box.  His inability to love is a problem, but hey, nobody’s perfect.  Be an individual, avoid Dr. Cuddy (unless it’s a date), and clinic hours whenever you can, and do not take painkillers without a doctor’s prescription.  Winter is almost over, thank God, but there is still work to be done.  And you can do it; you can even excel, and save the patient, which is you, after all.  The answers to your final exams are out there.  The answers to the problems in the world are out there too.  Now go and find them.  Amen.       

The Open Door

2 April 2009

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph's Chapel, Kent School

Chapel Talk

                I wrote this chapel talk, just yesterday, with our seniors in mind, the class of 2009.  But I think it has broad applications for all of us, for anybody who has a passion and encounters obstacles in the pursuit of that passion.  My talk tonight is about rejection, which is an experience that all of you will have in life; with the college process most certainly – and with the shape your life takes when you begin to follow your dreams.  Following your dreams.  Despite all the pragmatic talk about the economy right now, I believe that people who follow their dreams are the ones who will change the world, and shape the future.

                But let’s get back to rejection, there’s no happy ending, not yet.

                I have been doing something like a five year independent study in the field of rejection, the scope of which will surprise even some of my closest friends and colleagues.  In order for me to share tonight my unusual and quirky wisdom about rejection, I will have to reveal my life secret to you.  Now, no one should be worried or nervous, faculty members all have complex and intriguing personal lives (and if you don’t, you should get one, they’re still available).  We weren’t always on study hall or weekend duty.  There was a time when we wrote poems, not just comments.  There were nights when we dreamed big dreams, had visions that could change the world.

                As you know my day (and night) job is as the chaplain of Kent School.  But my other night job is writing novels.  I have written two novels, the second of which I am actively trying to sell.  And here begins your entry point into my secret and disturbing anthropological study in the field of rejection. 

Ok, get ready for it.

                I have been rejected 423 times.  Let me say again.  423 rejection letters.  Seniors, compadres, you may know some of the language, the rhetoric of these rejection letters, but my favorites always begin with “Dear Author.”  The personal touch always lightens the blow, right?  It’s better than “Dear Jerk,” so who’s complaining?  I am.  I am that jerk.  When I reached 100 rejections, I knew I was on an epic journey, so I kept precise statistics on my rejections.  I could wallpaper my house with them, then. Now I can wallpaper the entire school.  When I walk the halls in the dorms, I read with interest, and compassion, the rejections letters to our seniors.  The impulse, the tradition, to put them on the walls is a very healthy one, I believe.

                I will offer tonight the wisdom of my rejection experience (it is not insignificant), but stay with me for a moment, linger in this darkest place of human suffering that only a real romantic or the next Unabomber could withstand.  What would it be like to be rejected 423 times?  What kind of person would keep trying?  I have had to answer these very disturbing questions because I am just that kind of person, and I hope you can be too, in whatever your chosen field is.  You will succeed, wildly.  Some of these rejections come in the mail, some by e-mail, which the colleges seem to like these days.  Some are thoughtful about my work, some have no idea who I am, or what I have written.  Some people never get back to you.  It is not just a dog eat dog world—it’s a dog doesn’t return other dog’s phone calls world…There are several people – big shots in New York City – who began reading my manuscript in 2004, and I’m still waiting to hear from them.  I have been addressed by the wrong name in a rejection letter, and even by a woman’s name.  Interesting.  Good to see somebody’s doing their homework; I do have a strong feminine side.

                  So what happened on the 424^th time?  Has anyone wondered that tonight?  I got a literary agent, a contract, someone to represent me in my Don Quixote quest for justice and beauty.  I was rejected 423 times by just agents.  Now, I get to be rejected by editors.  That’s progress, huh?  But what about this agent of mine?  Is she a chic female agent working in Manhattan, wearing fabulous clothes, with long legs and brains, somebody who reads manuscripts on her weekends in the Hamptons?  Nope.  My literary agent lives in Lawrence, Kansas.  She’s a grandmother, and a big Kansas basketball fan.  And now we get rejected by publishers.  We get rejected together.  I am approaching 500 rejections now, but I haven’t been to the mailbox today.

                So what have I learned?  I must ask, and certainly, answer that question before anyone gets too depressed tonight.  But, perhaps, even the seniors are starting to smile.  I hope so.  You can even laugh at my experience.  I have, it’s better than crying.  What have I learned?  I have learned that perseverance is absolutely essential to any success in life.  It may be more important than talent.  At any other point in my life, I could never have gone through an experience like this.  It would have devastated me when I was younger.  My first novel was rejected ten times in the 1990s, and that was enough to get me to quit trying.  Now I know I will never quit.  And I absolutely treasure the stories out there of people who keep going in the face of significant rejection.  Nobody was looking for novels about a school for wizards in England, but now Harry Potter is here to stay in our world, an indelible part of your childhood.  But there was a time when J.K. Rowling was rejected by everyone.  There was a time when she was even homeless.  There’s perseverance.

                But perseverance is not blind faith, and faith should never be blind anyway.  The hardest thing I ever did was this:  I began listening very carefully to the criticisms of my writing, the thoughtful rejection letters anyway.  It is easy to lampoon the publishing business, an industry that will radically change in this economic crisis.  But, as I began to take my rejections seriously, a strange thing happened.  The book got better, much better.  It was a difference of night and day, lead and gold.  It is one thing to find a mysterious gem in your own creative process, in the middle of the night, it is quite another to polish that stone for years.  Adversity takes on a presence, a power; it becomes part of you, you don’t have to fear it anymore.  You become its master; you become adversity.  I don’t want to bore you tonight with English teacher talk about the writing process, but editing is the surest way to becoming a better writer, and perseverance has made me a better person, not just a better writer.  Working every day at your craft is the best way to become an artist, an accepted force in the world.

                A rejection letter seems like a door that is closed.  It seems like a door that will never be opened to you.  It seems like a judgment of you ability and worth as a person.  This chapel talk is not about happy endings for those who persevere, it’s about much more, and much less.  I don’t know if I will get a happy ending, but I am enjoying, more than ever, being a member of the human race.  I am enjoying the written word, and literature, written art, continues to delight and dazzle me with possibility every day.  I don’t stay up at night worrying about the economy.  I worry about art and artists, and I pray for them.  I dream dreams.  I like my craft, and my challenge.  I like working with all of you.  I like this place we share, and we should not take it for granted.  And I am having an extraordinary journey, with my fire hazard of rejection letters along for the ride.  I would never trade my experience for an early or easy success, when I could be so much more through suffering.  The closed door has opened me to the heavens, the stars beyond, above my own small architecture of rejection.  I think this is how God works in our lives, in mysterious ways, especially in our mistakes and disappointments.  The closed door can point you in a remarkable new direction. 

                When a door is closed to you, another one is opened at the very same time.  That is the mystery, and the possibility, of rejection.  Sometimes it is a better door than the one you wanted to go through in the first place.  Sometimes you are knocking on a sacred space that is not a door yet, but it will be in the future, because of you – because of your presence in the world.  Keep knocking, someone will listen.