100 West Jefferson Street Charlottesville, VA 22902
PHONE: 561.414.3563
FAX: 434.977.1227
EMAIL: magazine@mbird.com
Summer 2024
A four-issue subscription is $60. To subscribe to The Mockingbird, sign up at www.mbird.com/store or by sending a check to our address here. All monthly supporters of Mockingbird receive a complimentary subscription.
COVER: Kristin Moore, French Quarter (Decatur St.), 2024. Acrylic on wood, 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of Ferrara Showman Gallery New Orleans.
The Mockingbird is a nonprofit magazine that seeks to connect the message of God’s grace with the concerns of everyday life. Our staff believes that grace, by its nature, is dynamic, unmerited, and expansive; we hope the range of voices in this issue reflects that nature. In surprising and down-to-earth ways, we aim to demonstrate how the Christian understanding of reality—what people are like, what God is like, and how the two intersect—bears out all around us. For more, visit our website, www.mbird.com.
THIS PAGE: Anna Freeman Bentley, The door to the office is open, 2022. Oil on canvas, 53 1/8 x 80 3/4 in. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Anna Arca.
Swan Song, Exile HANNAH KEZIAH C. AGUSTIN
Homemaking, Now and Then GRETCHEN RONNEVIK
A Much Humbler Abode
Home, Alone
From Bethany Loop
After the Windstorm
As a Father Pities His Own
Grief Shapes Every Home
SMITH Francisco Mayor Maestre, Abajo el trabajo, 2024. Oil, spray, and collage on wood. 59 1/10 × 35 2/5 in. Instagram: @mayormaestre
Cut and Run
It’s hard not to laugh when you see them: the kid on a leash, straining like a labradoodle against her harness, pulling her parent down the sidewalk or through a busy airport. Onlookers may well judge such measures as ridiculous, if not draconian—maybe also give your toddler a food bowl on the floor while you’re at it?
Then again, there’s no denying: Some kids just have a tendency to bolt, not necessarily for rebellious reasons. Maybe they’re distracted, or full of God-given energy. Surely, at first, it’s all good fun. Taking off has a certain thrill.
But imagine looking up to realize you have no idea where you are.
If you’re the average adult, that’s not too difficult to imagine. Many of us suffer this very tendency—to cut and run, even if only metaphorically. We run from our pasts, from the shadows of our parents, from whatever it may be that is good and wholesome, in our search for something else.
Simply put, home is a spiritual condition, most evident in the feeling that we aren’t there yet. We may spend our whole lives looking for it. Going out and coming back—this is the general motion of human life. It is the shape of great stories ancient and modern, reaching from the Odyssey to Where the Wild Things Are. We leave for work, for a relationship, for college, for grad school—for, you know, our destiny, basically. There is always the sense that we can make a home in this next place, until another calls to us.
Oftentimes, what feels most like home isn’t plush and comfortable but full of challenges: negotiating others’ peccadillos, living into childhood roles. It may involve more literal challenges like maintenance, repair, renovation, and just plain work.
The German poet Novalis once said, “Philosophy is really homesickness—the desire to be everywhere at home.” Of course, one could easily say the same of theology, which, like philosophy, pursues grounded understanding amidst the shifting terrain of life. “For men are homesick in their homes, / And strangers under the sun,” G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “And they lay their heads in a foreign land / Whenever the day is done.” These verses speak to the paradox of the human heart: We long for something that always seems out of reach. Such longings are ultimately a hope to be with God, who is our true and final home.
But the promises of faith aren’t only for the future. They speak to the present as well. God’s presence—our home in Christ right now—is not contingent on circumstances, decisions, or decorative trappings of any kind. In actual fact, God lets us run as far as we please, for He is “always with us.” In The Return of the Prodigal Son, the late Henri Nouwen defines our
theme this way: “Home is the center of my being where I can hear the voice that says: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.’” We at Mockingbird hope that through these pages, this voice speaks straight to you.
This issue of The Mockingbird is for the wanderers among us. Our lead-off essay by Hannah Keziah Agustin tells of a spiritual exile in the experience of immigration. The scholar Lorne Zelyck imagines heaven with help from the Gospel of John, and Gretchen Ronnevik writes about the niche movement embracing “traditional” homemaking roles. We also have new writing by author Lore Ferguson Wilbert on the liveliness of dead trees; Peter Severson on living alone; Natasha Smith on grief; Ross Blankenship on the grace of lemonade stands; and Trevor Sides on adoption. In a Q&A, the acclaimed poet Christian Wiman writes, “There is some sense of exile— from nature, from other minds, from ‘God who is our home’ (Wordsworth)—inherent in consciousness itself.” Other interviewees include author Sarah Westfall and Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper. Our poetry editor Andy Eaton reflects on the mixed experience of “following the Spirit” and “dying to self”—as a child. With Andy’s help, we are also publishing the most poetry a Mockingbird magazine has ever seen, from poets esteemed and emerging, plus a collection of down-to-earth prayers from theologian and poet Pádraig Ó Tuama. Regular columns continue from Sarah Condon and David Zahl.
We’ll leave off here with a timeless excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s 2008 novel, Home:
…when I think what it is that brings us to our Father, it might be grief or sickness— trouble of some sort. Weariness. And then there we are, and it’s a good thing at such times to know we have a Father, whose joy it is to welcome us home. It really is… Lord, put the veil of time and sorrow aside for us. Restore us to those we love. And restore the ones we love to us.
Amen to that! And always remember: Home may be where the heart is, but God’s office is at the end of your rope—or leash, as it may be.
Even if somehow you don’t know Mike Cosper’s name, there’s a good possibility you’ve heard his voice. From 2021–2022, he served as producer and host of the award-winning podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which, with over 2.5 million downloads, was an unparalleled sensation. That ambitious documentary project profiled the simultaneous (and bewildering) attractiveness and abusiveness of a church plant in the Seattle suburbs. For so many, including Cosper, that story is a mixed bag: It tells of mission-driven, incarnational friendships juxtaposed with shattered dreams and a tattered witness.
In his 2024 book, Land of My Sojourn, Cosper explores this duality—how the churches we love can knock us down and leave us out, and how, after long periods of feeling adrift, we can be restored to faith. “It’s a story about grace leading me home when I thought all was lost,” he says. Equal parts memoir and travelog, Land of My Sojourn weaves together the stories of Peter, Elijah, Jesus (and even Dante) with vivid descriptions of the Mount of Olives, Galilee, and the Garden of Gethsemane, to encourage readers that the only way out of the wilderness of exile is through it.
Mike Cosper is the director of podcasting for Christianity Today. He served for sixteen years as a pastor at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the author of Recapturing the Wonder, The Stories We Tell, and Rhythms of Grace. Mockingbird is indebted to Mike for being one of the early producers on our very own Mockingcast.
— The Editors
Mike Cosper
By Gretchen Ronnevik
Homemaking, Now and Then
Edith Schaeffer Versus the Tradwives
It’s an old story. A woman cuts off the ends of her ham before she sets it in the pan to bake it, just like her mother taught her. Her mother cut off the ends of her ham before she set it in the pan to bake it, just as the grandmother did. When asked why she cut off the ends of the ham before baking it, the grandmother replied, “Because my pan was too small.”
Traditions are often born out of necessity, and in moments of deep distress or overwork, it’s easy to seek comfort in nostalgia. As we often ask ourselves: How did the previous generations survive? How did they get everything done?
Everything is supposedly quick and easy now. The invention of “TV dinners” and the microwave revolutionized homemaking. When women aren’t spending hours a day preparing food, they have time to do many other things.
My grandmother was a working mother of seven. She worked as a psychiatric nurse to help support the family since my grandfather’s wages were modest as a church planter/ pastor. She loved instant anything. To her, it was the helping hand she needed. She fully
Prayers for Being Here
By Pádraig Ó Tuama
OPENING PRAYER
Turning to the day and to each other
We open ourselves to the day and each other.
This is the day that the Lord has made and a day we’ll have to make our way through.
Whether with ease or pain with patience or joy
May we find opportunities for generosity toward others and ourselves.
May we find moments of encounter even in isolation.
May we find stories and memories even in the most complicated corners.
May we start again where we have failed again.
May we confess and be confessed to.
Because this is a way of living that’s worth living daily.
DAILY COLLECTS
FOR MATTHEW 1:5–6
Grandmothers of Jesus, in your stories we hear of your courage and creativity, your tenacity, and the things you faced down. Here, today, we stand in the time after you and look back, with gratitude for stories like yours that help us live today. Help us live today in all the stories of our lives so that we can stand in your great ache and wash.
Amen.
FOR LUKE 1:41–42
Walls of Elizabeth’s room, You, too, heard the cries of delight when two judged women found shelter in each other. May all our rooms be rooms where people can speak from the deepest joy of them, the deepest need, the deepest trust, and the deepest truth. Because these rooms are blessed.
Amen.
By Andy Eaton
From Bethany Loop
Notes on a Childhood of Dying to Self
In the mountains north of Santa Cruz and south of San Jose, if you could go there, you would find a small village alive with study and prayer. At the crossroads—a Y junction below the hill that rises to the field marked with deer pellets and a perimeter of white oak and undergrowth—you could sweat out laps the way my mother did into a terry cloth bandana. You could cross the street and hike down to the creek among blackberries and redwoods, lean over the rail of the bridge, lose some time. If you came back, out under the tree light, you could check your mail in the room of little boxes glowing with their glass doors and combination locks. You could bump into someone you’d had dinner with the night before, or borrow eggs from the neighbor’s coop, or knock on the door of a side deck and enter for iced tea and a sandwich.
You could, at one time, but no longer. I grew up in this wooded miracle of a neighborhood, meaning that until the age of five I’d come and go, play with friends, and ride my secondhand Big Wheel down the gravel drive to the workout benches on the trail
across the road from our house. My school was a quarter-mile down the street, and still is, but almost nothing else I remember now remains. I lived in what I think of as a state of being present, what William Wordsworth called “spots of time,” mindfulness we might
say, but yes, pre-reflective, buried in realms of imagination those happier moments of childhood can be.
Now, if I take you there, I would have to tell you of the chain-link barrier around the gymnasium and rows of prefab studios,
the two-level apartment block for married students, and the pathway to the library and chapel. The humongous FOR SALE sign zip-tied on the bent-out fence I once tucked myself into and snuck behind. Each window pane a dustbin. Every room a warp
hat we learn from Christian Wiman are the knots and nots of belief. In his poetry, the “glitch” (his term) between word and world transforms our felt realities into syntax, image, and metaphor, purging us of the luxury of our distractions. Wiman doubles down on the sound and sense of language, writing—as the subtitle of one of his most widely read books has it—the “meditations of a modern believer.”
I’ve been returning to his work for two decades. In all his writing, from his editorials when he was editor of POETRY magazine to his poems and his cutting literary-personal writing, I feel the pulse of the adage that we read to know we’re not alone. To read Wiman is to encounter some of the best literature we have from a living writer. He renews our language and, through it, our lives and the life of faith as we understand it through our language.
The world in Wiman’s work is the actual world, the world “charged” with God’s being, as Hopkins said. But the actual world is also the world where we feel God’s absence as much as God’s holy and intangible presence. More than once as I’ve read his work, I’ve felt I was reading a prayer I’d been searching for, a steppingstone across the void.
Wiman writes from suffering, from what Simone Weil calls affliction. And he’s been candid about his rare disease, his hardscrabble family, and his griefs and longings, reminding us that while what we have to say might not make any difference, how we say it may just count for something.
In the essays, vignettes, litanies, and poetry in his newest book, Zero at the Bone (2023), Christian Wiman writes against despair. He takes us through his memories of rural Texas as well as his revisions of those memories into his present-day life as a professor, husband, father, and patient, choosing integrity and tenderness—forgiveness even—over and against the tell-all posture of mass market memoir.
Returning to his responses for this interview, I’m struck by how he gazes unflinchingly at our most intense experiences of faith and doubt, even bringing in the flinches, winces, and shrugs we sometimes pretend don’t haunt us through our lives. In the end, what we have is a literature of devotion, of love, of God, family, the earth, and the mind—and of the longings that keep us on our toes. Here we have a voice that helps us be at home in the mystery of God.
The following interview was conducted over email.
—
Andy Eaton, interviewer
Andrew Hendrixson, Everything Contains Some Silence, 2021. Acrylic, wooden armature, suit, and flowers.
The Confessional
Dear God,
I thought we had a plan, man. I would do my little part, and you’d take care of the rest. That was the bargain. So where’ve you been?
Look, I know I’ve done my share of ramblin’. I’ve lived in a dozen cities in three decades, and it’s taken a toll. As they say, three moves is as bad as a fire. I still get twitchy.
But after you needled me with all that Wendell Berry-Fred Rogers tripe, Lord, I was finally ready to listen, ready to change. I realized it was time for me to put down some roots, like Jeremiah’s mighty oak planted by the river.
I was tired of bowling alone, of always feeling like an outsider, a Johnny-come-lately, an exquisitely gnarled piece of driftwood. I wanted a taste of home. I wanted to feel safe, respected, and loved. I wanted to be an insider, a somebody. I wanted to belong.
So after a brutal year of pandemic life, my wife and I agreed: We were moving east to settle down. We were going to start a family, maybe even buy a house. And we were going to stay in one place for at least ten years. Ten years!
Like Goldilocks, we got to work surveying our options. We made lists, ran numbers. We had to pick the perfect place. Not too big, not too small; not too hot, not too cold. Plenty of natural beauty, minimal risk of climate-changey weather events, primo career opportunities, solid public schools, five-star hospitals, chic restaurants, punch-above-their-weight entertainment venues… maybe a zoo?
After months of hemming and hawing, we picked the best of all possible places. And within a few months, lo-and-behold, we both got jobs in the area. Surely we were on the fast-track to platinum membership in a charming close-knit community. Stars Hollow, here we come!
We arrived in July 2021, already in awe. We couldn’t wait to scope out all the best eateries, the best hikes, the best pie shop. We couldn’t wait for all those deep,
lasting, lifelong friendships to begin. God, it felt like you were with us, like you’d set the wind at our backs. It all felt so right.
Three years later, and I’m daydreaming about moving again. Burning it all down and starting over.
Yes, God, of course I thank you every day for the beautiful daughter you gave us. But my sweet Lord, the daycare costs are squeezing us dry. Where’s the village I was promised? Parenting is an ass-whooping.
True, there are some lovely neighborhoods here. But none we’ll ever live in. The thought of buying a house these days is laughable. We can barely afford rent. I’ve started buying lottery tickets. I love the little manmade lake in the middle of our development—it’s inspired me to take up birdwatching. I saw a white crane the other day. But Jesus, our human neighbors are weird. Like, tech-people.
The weather, too, has been disappointing. My allergies are out of control. Invasive vines are everywhere. I’ve tried the whole buy-local thing, but the farmer’s markets are overpriced and full of kitschy crafts, and I don’t know a single farmer by name. And there are too many damn wineries.
By the way, we did find an amazing pie shop here, but it closed down. There’s not a single dedicated pie shop in this whole medium-sized city—just a bunch of cake places. Low-blow, God.
You say: Love is patient. Well, I’ve tried to be patient, man. I’ve gone to church, voted, trimmed my hedges, volunteered, tried to make sense of local politics. I’ve even tried small talk when I’m out and about, like at Costco or the DMV. I figured that’s what you wanted—but now I wonder, to what end?
My point is, God, I’ve done my part. In return, you were supposed to soothe my restless soul.
I know what you’re going to say: It’s all about me, right? Well, what else am I supposed to pray about? The truth is, Dear Cosmic Gumball Machine, I want my damn gumball. In fact, I want the gumball, the one that never loses its flavor. And I want it now.
Whatever this actual life is that you’ve given me—this actual over-priced town, these actual strange quasi-friends, this actual boring job and stable mediocre income—it just doesn’t quite work for me. I just don’t feel at home. I know more time will help. I know, most of all, I need some faith—real faith, which I guess is another way of saying that it’s not all about me. I’ll consider that.
Not my will, but yours be done, right? As the old hymn says, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it … Here’s my heart, O take and seal it.” But maybe not quite yet?
