Museum of Voices

Introduction On Tuesday morning, November 18, 2003, I suddenly realized I had lost my faith. It was a stunning and bewildering realization, to say the least. I had spent more than 30 years building, enlarging, conscientiously decorating and remodeling the hulking edifice of my Christian worldview. Then a series of unhappy events, like tremors, shook the foundations and structural supports. The very ground of my being shifted, without warning, along fault lines I had barely known were present. Bringing down the house in one slow, silent collapse. I sat amidst the ruins, numb, wondering what to do next. Within a month, I began writing—or rather, editing—this book. To find my way forward, I instinctively looked backward to see if I could discern the general direction of the path I had trod. Was it going somewhere I had forgotten? Should I make a sudden turn, an about-face, or just keep going? I had recently finished a book on finding one’s vocation, entitled Let Your Life Speak. “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it,” writes Parker Palmer, “listen for what it intends to do with you…let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” That made a lot of sense to me. I was lost. Maybe my life could offer some guidance, if I could just stop and listen. I opened my filing cabinets and began perusing old scribblings I had accumulated over the past three decades—short stories and poems from my high school days, essays and editorials, articles, letters, journals, notes for classes I had taught, speeches, memoirs, bits of this and that. Listening for the sound of my own voice. In Only The Heart Knows How To Find Them, essayist Christopher de Vinck says, “We think that we are known by the names we take, by the street addresses we have, by the places we work. But I believe there are things under our beds, in the closet, tucked deep inside a drawer or in the attic, that reveal more about who we are than all the rest.” I wanted to find out who I was, who I had been, who I might become. These writings, stashed away and lugged from apartment to apartment, house to house, city to city, some for as long as 35 years, were a sort of museum of former voices. Reading them, I could hear my younger selves—so many of them!—wrestling with variations of the same questions haunting me once again: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning and purpose of my life? How can I learn to accept what is? I thought maybe if I wandered through this museum again, spent some time reading the field notes, studying the archeological remains of my adventures—maybe my life, or my past lives, would speak to me with a new voice. Problem was, I was wandering through the back rooms of the museum, which were filled with rubbish, unopened crates, broken remnants of dead times and lost places, shoved randomly into file folders and stacked on shelves covered with dust. Before I could hear the voices clearly, I had to put these artifacts into some kind of order, discard worthless junk, clean things up a bit, properly label pieces for display. First, I culled all the files, boxes and drawers for potential items to keep. I started a new, smaller file, organized chronologically. One of the criteria I set myself was to include only pieces I had written—nothing written by others to or about me. But anything I had written was fair game, not just complete or neatly crafted stories or articles. I could include unfinished pieces, notes jotted on the back of an envelope, fragments of aborted manuscripts, writings from any imaginable “genre”. As Thomas Moore observes in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life: “There are modes of expression unrelated to the story form that speak well for the fragments of experience: journal entries, songs, poems, notes, letters…It is sometimes more revealing to read a writer’s letters than his or her essays and books, because fragments and pieces betray the soul, while a story may hide it.” I wanted to hear my soul speak, not just my ego. So this book is a form of therapy. I wrote it for myself. But that’s not all. In the back of my mind, I knew I also wanted to write this for at least a few other people. Not for the general public, mind you. But for my family, my children. A couple friends. And maybe for someone not yet born. A grandchild, if I ever have one. A descendant who will never have known me in the flesh. Maybe someone, someday, will wish to know who I was. Maybe my story, or my stories, or fragments of my stories, contain some wisdom or warning that might speak to someone else’s life. I don’t know. I’d like to believe it’s possible. If nothing else, my life might illustrate how not to live one’s life. How not to waste one’s precious time and energy. How not to express or repress one’s unruly thoughts and feelings. So this book is also a form of legacy. I wrote it for…well, whoever might want to know me. (If you don’t want to know me, I can’t imagine why you’d ever want to read this book.) To allow you to know me as I really am (or was), I’ve tried to be honest here. Ruthlessly honest. I’ve tried not to whitewash myself, or edit out the messiness of my life, my stupid mistakes, my idiosyncrasies. I’m a mess, sure. But so are you, whoever you are. If I can accept and forgive the messes I’ve made, the embarrassing things I’ve uttered, the catastrophic emotions I’ve battled, maybe you’ll accept yours a little more easily. You’ll realize you’re not the only one who feels so…well, so broken. Maybe you’ll lighten up on yourself. Come to like yourself, even. I hope so. In Telling Secrets, a book that had a profound influence on me 13 years ago, Frederick Buechner explains why he opened up the dark and scary corners of his life for others to see. "I have come to believe that, by and large, the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. "It is important to tell, at least from time to time, the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are, and little by little come to accept the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. "It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives, and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about, and what being human is all about." In a nutshell, that’s why I wrote this book—why I took more than 150 scraps of writing all the way from file cabinet to print. Yes, it’s a hodge-podge. It’s voluminous and yet it’s incomplete. It doesn’t fill in all the blanks. It jumps from this to that, sometimes smoothly, sometimes jarringly. I didn’t write anything just for this book. I only included pieces that already existed. And I made my selections with flagrant subjectivity. I did, however, add a few notes and comments to each one, to help orient you. I’ve put these artifacts in approximate chronological sequence, according to the time of the events described therein, not necessarily the date of writing (which, for the curious, is given in the notes). And I’ve tried to have some fun with this. You’ll notice a playful, even sarcastic tone to some of my little commentaries. A lot of my former voices are painful or deadly serious. So I’ve tried to balance them with more light-hearted voices elsewhere. If, at times, this book makes you yawn or brings a tear to your eye, I hope it also makes you smile every once in a while