Looking Back

 On October 5, 2024, things were dire - that was the last day at our former house in Hagerstown, a nice place I really missed.  I recall the frantic search for a moving truck, the packing, and the constant chatter of an old Jewish lady named Beth who was "helping" us - she was actually somewhat of a blessing, but had she talked less we would have had more time to pack.  Later that night, Barbara, myself, and a menagerie of animals (including two cats, a rabbit, and three birds) were settling into a rather dingy motel room in Charles Town, WV.  The following day, we were unloading things into a storage unit in nearby Martinsburg.  In the coming weeks, I would be staying in three different motels before finally getting an offer from my current employer and securing a house in downtown Baltimore.  It was a time when I felt uncertain, scared, and utterly exhausted.  It was not a time I wanted to remember all that well in all honesty, as the circumstances were not ideal.  But, in time, I got settled in and life began to rebuild for me. 

So, it is a year later now, and I am about to complete my first year's lease where I am currently living.   I also have started (as of six weeks ago) my second year at the job I secured then, and have a nice salary.  It is a new normal - a new chapter - and while life is not ideal, I see progress.  At the point I am writing this now, I have the possibility of securing a mortgage for a nice mobile home in a good little community conveniently outside of the city, and things are looking promising for that.  Also, tomorrow, I will be taking my first overnight stay outside the house in ages, as the school I work for is sending a couple of us on a retreat to Connecticut for a couple of days.  I am kind of looking forward to that, as I have never been in that part of the country before, so I have a bit of excitement about it.  A lot has happened in the past year too, in that now I have the original two cats, but also obtained a third, and I had to rehome the rabbit and the birds as it was not practical to keep them here in all honesty.  At the end of this month also, we are retrieving what is left in the storage unit in Martinsburg, and we can finally have the rest of our things back here with us.  Life is much different than it used to be, as I am essentially starting over, but the rebuilding has been smooth and I anticipate good things for the future.  I am only praying I never have to go through anything like last year - my goodness!  I am getting a little too old for that now and want to settle and stay somewhere.  There is much more to say about that, but we'll get to that some other time. 

In reading more of Anthony Esolen's book on nostalgia, I was thinking about living here.  As I have noted before, I have always had a sort of connection with Baltimore, but living in the dead center of this city for the past year gave me a shocking realization that I feel like I landed in a foreign country.   The inner city of Baltimore is not anything like the rest of the state of Maryland, and it is even radically different from the suburban communities that lie outside the city.  I was watching an episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares from several years ago that featured a local restaurant here called Cafe Hon.  That little establishment embodied old Baltimore perfectly - I connected with that, as that is the Baltimore I remembered as a kid.  Oddly, that little restaurant (which has unfortunately closed) is located very close to where I am at now - it is located on the other side of JHU, a mere blocks from our parish church. Watching that episode of Ramsay's show brought back some fond memories - the people, the food, and the ambiance I recalled when I was a kid attending kindergarten at Steuart Hill Elementary over on Gilmor Street.  I haven't saw much of that version of Baltimore since moving back here, as now the demographic seems to encompass three groups - the majority Black population of the city (which, if I recall the stats, Baltimore is the second city after Atlanta to have a majority Black population), the growing Hispanic community, and pockets of young Millennial White liberals who have values radically different from mine.  I don't relate much to any of those three groups, although I know many people in at least the first two as they make up the majority of the students I teach now.  I think back to the Baltimore of 50-60 years ago, when areas like Irvington and Pigtown had large populations of Appalachian folks from West Virginia and western Maryland,  and areas like Little Italy, Fells Point, and Greektown were largely ethnic enclaves of Italians, Poles, and Greeks respectively. Northwest Baltimore - above the JHU campus and just prior to entering the community of Reisterstown - was also at one time the center of a vibrant Jewish community too.  Black people were of course in Baltimore then too, but for the most part they were also a cultural component of the city in a positive way.  Many of the older residents of the city have now moved elsewhere, many to the suburbs in communities like Dundalk, Essex, Towson, Middle River, and White Marsh, and the once-vibrant communities  where many of them once lived are now largely abandoned and falling apart - the rows of abandoned rowhouses are somewhat depressing to look at in all honesty, and they should really be torn down because they attract both vermin like rats as well as crackheads in the community. Many of my own cousins live in a fairly close radius to me, and even they (with many of the 3rd and 4th generations being born and raised here) have moved on and live in the outer suburbs of the city. It is definitely a changed world from 50 years ago when I was last here as a 5-year-old kindergartner.  Change is inevitable though, and it will happen whether we want it to or not, but it can be a lot to process when you have been away from a place for a while and then come back to it. Then, I read what Anthony Esolen writes in his book on page 67, and this is profound - the question is what to do now, and why, and there is such a thing called home - now it is up to us to take a step in its direction.  Reading that, I have thoughts, many thoughts, and let me just expound on that a bit.

The house I live in now and share with three other people is not my home - it is a way-station for finding my home.  This place here is a 102-year-old structure that requires a lot of renovation that I don't think the property owner has a full scope of.  The basement is so low that I get claustrophobic going down there, there is an apparent short in the household circuitry, and the accident in July has left a plywood-covered hole in the front where the basement is that the owner is taking his sweet time to repair.  The house is old, drafty, in need of new flooring, and the back steps are an accident waiting to happen.  But, it is where I have to be at this point.  The home that is mine is contained within my own spirit, and its essence is in the manner I have chosen to manage and live in the small living space I have, and it isn't always easy to manage it either.  And, being my home is with me, it can leave this place with me in a quick packing up and transporting to a new living space somewhere.  Once I pack up and leave this living space, it will no longer contain my home because home goes with me.  And, God willing, in the next few months that will be happening too as currently I am in the process of possibly purchasing something of my own.  If that succeeds, I will be able to establish a better place to contain my home for a long time, and it also means roots again.  That possibility both excites and frightens me a little, as it also means I have to take on a few more responsibilities too - owning a house is different from merely renting/leasing, as now the house is yours and it has maintenance and upkeep.  However, that too is going to be manageable as well, as I am in a place now where I can take on that challenge.  And, in time I will have the possibility of a new family being with me too, and that will be the beginning of a good life for me as I approach my 60s in a few years.  As Esolen notes though, it means I need to take steps in the direction of home, and although it is contained in a physical place, the home I think he is talking about as well is the essence of oneself that manifests in their routine of living.  I want that, and it's my goal now to make sure I can make that happen.  This now leads into something else I have been reading and reflecting upon recently, as there is a theological dimension to this as well.

I mentioned about a remarkable young apologist who I have been watching on YouTube by the name of Melissa Dougherty.  Earlier this year, Melissa published a book called Happy Lies, and I received that earlier this week.  Unlike some apologetics literature that tends to actually be more polemical than apologetic in nature, Melissa impresses me in that she has a balanced look at things, and I can appreciate that.  One of the things she addresses is how a certain mentality has invaded Christian circles in recent years that has nothing Biblical or traditional about it, and what she is talking about is New Thought.  One thing Melissa does is she notes that New Thought is not the same as New Age, although they are easily confused due to a lot of overlap between them.  New Thought, which has its roots in the mid-19th century, was also called the "mind science movement" in that certain things about it were taught which incorporated Christian language but were in reality a sort of self-deification - you have the same creative power as God, in other words, which means you are a "little god" and can use the power of words (called the Law of Attraction) to create your own reality.  It later came into play as the basis for a lot of self-help literature as well as some bizarre adaptations to Christianity, and while Melissa rightly attributes this movement to rising out of transcendentalism in the mid-1800s, I want to take it a step further.  The real root of New Thought, in my studies of it, can be traced back to Enlightenment rationalism - after all, was it not Descartes who said "I think therefore I am?"  New Thought, to me, is both a reaction against and an adaption of Enlightenment philosophy, and I would go further to say that at its roots New Thought is the ultimate Cartesian expression.  I don't think Melissa has made that connection in her writing or videos with Descartes, but I think she might want to explore that and I plan on writing her and sharing the idea with her.  So, Cartesian philosophy either directly or indirectly impacted New Thought, and because of that the latter is a product of the Enlightenment then. 

I said all that to preface my point regarding Esolen's point about taking a step toward home - this is not a matter of Law of Attraction or "blabbing and grabbing," but rather it is accepting what is in one's own heart, and then taking the steps to make it happen.  Positive thought - and I am thankful that Melissa also makes this point - is not the issue with New Thought.  There is a certain benefit in having a positive attitude, but it should be a motivator instead of baseless affirmation, and that is where the difference is.  One can easily make up their mind to succeed, and if they take the risks and invest the work into it, it can happen.  It won't be an easy way to go in many cases, because along the way mistakes happen and we get proverbial scraped knees and black eyes, but we don't let that deter us from the objective.  We work toward that, and in doing so here is where our faith comes in.  We pray for God to help keep us on track, and if it is God's will for us to achieve that objective, and if we are willing to invest ourselves into it, God will help us get there.  But, we cannot create reality out of thin air based on "positive confessions" we utter because we are too greedy, too impatient, or too lazy to invest in the effort entailed to get from Point A to Point B.  And, to expound on Melissa's points, that is where things such as New Thought fail miserably - they set unreal expectations, and try to find an easy way out, when in most cases getting between the points is not going to be easy.  Like a trail that needs to be blazed, it requires clearing brambles and brush, contending with snakes, and other things, and your back will get sore, you will get tired at times, but if you push on the reward will be in sight.  That is why the one petition in the Ignatian Prayer of Generosity is this "Teach me to labor and not seek rest."  We can rest when we finish the race, but not before - we have an objective to meet, and we need to be serious enough to give and not count the cost in that case.  Also, we cannot be afraid to ask help when we need that extra boost to push onward - ultimate help comes from God, but his way of providing it may be setting people in our paths who can take up the axe and help us chop down a few trees in the path.  We cannot simply "speak into existence" the end result, but we need to resolve ourselves to forge ahead on the path God places us to get to that result.  Again, it won't be easy, but in the end it will be worth it.  St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, understood that when he made that prayer.  Other great saints and pillars of faith have also understood that too.  And Scripture affirms this too - James tells us that faith without works is dead.  Is that faith in relation to our salvation?  Not necessarily, but rather it is for living a life that seeks to glorify God, even in the mundane daily tasks that can at times get tedious for us.  It ultimately cultivates our fruit, and the more we invest into it, the sweeter and more fulfilling the fruit will be.  This is true on a practical as well as a spiritual scale. 

I think that is a reason why so much of modern American Evangelicalism has in essence become sterile and disconnected for me personally.  And it is also why I don't really pay attention to self-help garbage or marketing schemes - they are ultimately unrealistic in that they promise much but fail to deliver.  They cannot deliver, in all honesty.  And that is the failure of the whole "Word of Faith" shtick in modern Pentecostal and Charismatic circles too.  I recall how much this was tied to marketing schemes - many WOF proponents, as Melissa has pointed out in her videos, also promote these get-rich-quick schemes called multi-level marketing, or MLMs.   Years ago, in the abusive Pentecostal church I was part of, the pastor's wife tried to push one of these things at us, and it was called Melaleuca.  I don't even know if that crap is even still around, but it was the most ridiculous thing ever.   I never bought into it, and didn't want to - I had neither the time nor the resources to invest in such things, and looking at the literature actually depressed me in all honesty.  But, the pastor's wife - a fat woman in her mid-50s then who was promoting "nutritional spirituality" (looking at her 350-pound frame, you can see how well that worked!) - insisted that it was the Holy Spirit's mandate to sell that garbage, and anyone who questioned it must have "demons."  Now, this particular Pentecostal church was not technically part of the WOF, but was part of another bizarre offshoot of Pentecostalism at the time called the Discipleship/Shepherding movement.  That movement sought to give pastors more authority than they actually have, and if you questioned them, then you were guilty of questioning God himself - a Fundamentalist variant of the same thing was evident in the Bill Gothard Seminars too.  It was an attempt to micromanage the lives of church members, and in extreme cases of Discipleship/Shepherding groups, a person couldn't even use the bathroom without the pastor's blessing.  Some of this does overlap with WOF too, but it is a potent enough movement of its own without the WOF influence.  So, MLM schemes were a convenient tool to control church members, in particular those who were deemed to be in jobs "unworthy" of them (that is a line of BS these pastors use as well, and it can have disastrous economic consequences on a family that falls for it).  It puts me somewhat in mind also of an episode of Designing Women years ago when Charlene's character got involved in an MLM called Mama June's Products.  The scheme was so pervasive that it even got beyond the original vision of the founder and everyone had to dress alike, sell quotas every month, and they had a lingo all their own like a cult.  Julia Sugarbaker started calling them  "the Junies" and fortunately the founder of the scheme had more common sense and she released Charlene from it without any hard feelings.  How many groups of "Junies" though are creating cults-within-cults in hyper-charismatic churches??  That number, if properly researched, may be staggering.  There are other dimensions of this that I will refer to Melissa Dougherty's videos, as she tackles that stuff more in detail, but sufficive to say this stuff can do more harm than good.  Now that I chased all those rabbit trails, let's get back to the original discussion about where "home" really is for me.

Your home is a reflection of your personality, so wherever you go your home travels with you.  While there are physical locations we can call, in our Appalachian vernacular, "homeplaces," the heart of the home is in the heart of the one for whom it holds meaning.  And, it is not necessarily about just stuff either - stuff is good, and it helps express things, but it is also replaceable.  But, "sense of place" goes with all of us, and we carry it with us into even the most oppositional of environments.  That is something I have learned in the past year, and thankfully too I have been able to express that as well in writing.  The connection here though with all the discussion leading up to it is that knowing home in your heart is not some New Thought-based metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, but is one's life experiences and memories that they themselves uniquely treasure.  There is nothing wrong with that, and many great pieces of literature, compositions of music, and works of art have been produced by that inspiration.  

Thank you for allowing me to share.  I may or may not write again later in the week, as I will be out of town on retreat for a school function this week, but always feel free to visit and you are always welcome.  

Sense of Place

 I am starting to read through Anthony Esolen's other book, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World (Washington, DC:  Regnery Gateway, 2018).  Again, while much of Esolen's work isn't exactly what I thought it would be, there are still insights he has that dovetail my own experience, and I wanted to talk about one of those today.  This is an important one, because there are dimensions to this that often cannot be articulated as well as they should be.  The concept I am talking about is a distinctive Appalachian trait called "sense of place," and it is to a degree one reason why it is of interest as it also affects me personally.  Esolen devotes a whole chapter in his book to this, with the chapter title being "Man in Place."  There are many aspects to this, so I will dive right into it. 

If you were to visit my hometown of Hendricks, WV, and were new in the area looking for something specific, it would be customary to stop and ask directions.  Many of the old-timers I grew up around there (the majority now gone) would have a unique way of giving directions too - it is landmark-based direction, as street signs and words like "north," "south," "left," and "right" would matter little to people there.  If you grew up in the area, you just know where something is.  The concept of "sense of place" has a huge investment in this thinking, as the landmarks are sort of an expression of the pride of the locals in where they come from.  I have to a degree inherited that same mindset, as even now I give directions based on landmarks, even when it is a place I am not from but have lived there a while.  For instance, if I am in Baltimore, and wanted to give directions to a restaurant, I would use directional words but also punctuate them with landmark references, such as "turn right at the coffeehouse on the corner of East and Eastern."  It is wired into who I am as a person.  It is at this point now we move onto another aspect of the "sense of place," that being the feeling a place invokes. 

Near my hometown in Tucker County, WV, we have several remnants of old mining, railroad, and lumber communities called "ghost towns."  They have names like Bayard, Kempton, Gormania, Douglas, etc.  Even though many of these places are now long-abandoned, and all you may see is woods or an occasional ruin of a chimney, that place is still known by that name regardless. As a kid, I loved going through those old places, as it evoked a sort of mystery for me.  Even today, I have fond memories of those old places, which don't look like much to most other people.  It is because I feel a connection to those places though, as I have deep roots there.  Dr. Esolen explains this on page 30 of his book when he says "Let me not suggest then, that man loves his place because it would be a nice postcard. He loves it because it is in him, and he is in it; it bears the impress of his fingers, and it touches the nerves of his soul.  The place that has once been seen and worked and loved by man is no longer a mere intersection of longitude and latitude."  I say to that - exactly!  I think more than anything Dr. Esolen captures the essence of  "sense of place" in that description, and as he goes on, he notes on the next page that one cannot belong in any place in quite the same way.  Granted, many of us have lived many places - I personally have lived in 5 states, and while each contributed to a chapter that is my life story, it is not the same as the place you have roots.  Now, that is not to say that other places don't evoke similar memories though, especially when related to childhood.  For me, just as an example, I have a "sense of place" over an entire region that stretches from roughly Morgantown, WV, to Baltimore, and my childhood played out over that entire region.  I have recently moved back to Baltimore, but I lived here before - I went to kindergarten less than a couple of miles from where I am sitting, and my folks lived in that neighborhood of the city for generations, so I have a history here.  While that history does not stretch to the east side of the city, which is where I live and work now, Baltimore still plays a role in my early history.  And, that old neighborhood over on the west side of town where I spent about two years of my life still evokes memories of things.  And, it creates a longing in my soul as well - the Baltimore of today is by no means the same as the Baltimore of 50 years ago, as so much has changed over time (and not for the better, I may add).  That being said though, there are some things that still evoke the old memories here - one place is a pizzeria over on Eastern Avenue called Matthew's.  Their pizzas are very unique, in that they evoke that taste of pizza I recall from when I was 5 years old.  Just a stimulus like that - a pizza - can serve as a reminder of our past.  I had another such episode the other day when we visited Solomon's Island, about an hour south of here.  We ate at a good seafood place, and I had ordered fried oysters.  As I was eating those though, I tasted something that was familiar to me, and it was a pleasant experience.  Our senses at times do that to us too, and it is quite the thing when it happens. Now that I have shared a little of that, let me now address a negative that Esolen addresses as well. 

On page 41 of the same chapter, Dr. Esolen notes that those who hold a more leftist/progressive mentality are of the belief that if something grows old, worn, or discarded, it should be forgotten.  This explains why they are so iconoclastic in society recently and are trying to recreate the society in their own image.  As Esolen notes later in the chapter on page 43, the secularist focuses on the future without having a foundation in the past, as the future cannot lay a foundation because it hasn't happened yet.  This is where utopian fantasy then becomes dystopian reality, and this can be disastrous as we have seen in recent history.  While we may not be able to recreate the exact aspects of the past - the past is the past too, and much happens over time obviously - we can preserve the best of our past, and it will shape the future for us in many ways.  But, we also must not forget the worst aspects of the past either - simply erasing those could cause problems of a different sort, as it is a denial of reality and will also create an atmosphere of dishonesty.  Preserving the good and learning from the bad is what helps create healthy memory, and bad things often happen for a reason.  The reason could be our own failures at something.  It could also be a circumstance we were thrown into that we didn't cause or expect.  And, despite a bad experience, a good thing could come from it.  Take the example of a manure-filled plot of ground.  It smells horrible, it is grossly unpleasant, and it is not something you want to be around a lot.  But, from that nasty experience can grow beautiful roses or succulent fruit, and it is the bad that makes the good possible in that regard.  It is a bit simplistic maybe, but there is also a spiritual truth there too - often, we have to die to self in order to grow, just like a seed planted in the earth.  It can be unpleasant, painful, and it is not something we want to recall, but we grow as a result.  Adversity can be a huge motivator for success, as it does build up the character and it also anticipates that we must overcome challenges to get to where we need to be.  It is called life, and it is a reminder that we live in a fallen world, but that we can also use that fallen world as fodder to grow too.  This is even true with places which shape our past as well - some places may be painful for us to revisit, but they remind us that if we had not had that bad experience, we may not be where we are today.  After all, a crucifixion of our Lord later led to his Resurrection, but the fruit that bore did something for all of us who understand what happened - it gave us salvation and eternal life.  Calvary is a place, and in sacramental life, we are endowed with a supernatural grace that allows us to revisit that sorrowful place in the partaking of the sacrament (in this case the Eucharist) and it in that regard is a time travel of sorts.  It is a mystery of faith we cannot explain in words, and nor should we unless we end up getting into a bog of potential heresy, but we know what it does for us.  The spot where Christ died for us is where we too are resurrected and given a new life, and a bad place becomes something beautiful because of the love that it represents for us.  We too can turn our bad places in life into a beautiful testimony of restoration, because supernatural grace makes that possible for us.  And, thank God for that.  

As I wrap up these reflections on Esolen's writing as well as my own ideas about "sense of place,"  it presents a challenge.  Sometimes we have to go back, to revisit, and to reflect upon certain memories, and given we are a creature that responds to physical symbolism, a place or an event can be what motivates us to do just that.  This is true both on the individual level, but also for humanity in general - we accept Christ's ultimate gift of himself for us by revisiting the event where he gave himself for our sins, and we then humbly and joyfully receive that grace in order for us to grow in our faith.  Hopefully that will be an encouragement to someone, so thanks for joining me, and will see you next visit.