I recently found an unexpected e-mail in my in-box. It was from Joe, my youth pastor from over twenty-five years ago. I haven’t spoken to him in as many years. He was reaching out to apologize for any spiritual harm he had done me all those years ago. The e-mail got me reminiscing.

Joe was one of those youth pastors who seemed to have a sure calling, the kind of guy people called on fire for the Lord. He preached fearlessly, with the zeal of a prophet; unlike others I’d encountered who believed they had the gift of prophecy, Joe did not see it as an excuse to be a loud and judgmental ass. He was open and honest, transparent about his struggles. It drew kids to him. He and his wife opened their home to us, were endlessly patient with the teenage noise, hormones, strife.

Joe’s Sunday school classroom was packed. He led emotionally-charged prayer meetings and revival gatherings, full of crying and repentance. He had a beard and crazy hair, and eyes as wild as John Brown raiding Harper’s Ferry.

I remember an anti- rock and roll wave that swept through the group after going downtown to a rally in which they played The Eagles and Led Zeppelin and ELO backwards—and, yes, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”—so that we could hear the satanic back-masked messages. After that, Joe instructed us to bring all our secular cassettes to his house, where they were burned in a green wheelbarrow on the front drive.

We stood in a circle as the black smoke twisted inky from the melting plastic and coated our nostrils and throats with the taste of chemical poison. Boys took turns squirting lighter fluid to make flare-ups.

I caved into temptation when my friend Danny tossed in his Pink Floyd The Wallcassette and it fell to the edge and rested there intact. Pink Floyd was my favorite band. Though I felt horrible guilt, I slid it into my pocket when no one was looking. The case was a little melted, but the tape played fine.

We sang songs, and took turns praying. We sang, “It Only Takes a Spark,” one from Joe’s youth, among other songs. It was his personality that pulled us along. Attempted by a different youth pastor, this could have been uncool in the extreme and failed miserably.

Not long after that, Joe loaded us up and took us to a Petra concert—“God Gave Rock and Roll To You” Petra—before what is now called Contemporary Christian Music, offering us an alternative to secular rock and roll. His approval of rock music—Christian or not, the beat itself was used in Africa to call up evil spirits, we were taught—was a problem in the church back then.

It was Joe’s honesty however that got him into real trouble. It started with the Bible. In front of the youth group Joe puzzled over our denomination’s stand on inerrancy. He asked honest questions, and though he always came to acceptable conclusions in front of the class, I could tell he wasn’t comfortable with them.

This was too much for the church leadership. He was too unpredictable. Too inconsistent. Joe was effectively shunned. I don’t know if he was asked to step down, or if he quit, but his leaving was abrupt. I was not sure where Joe’s journey took him after his leaving our church until recently.

His Facebook page makes it clear that he is back in the church with a vengeance. I’ve watched his posts with interest. He did not return to a Baptist church. He is attending a hyper-charismatic church now—a church considered, at least when I lived in that area, to be one pastoral revelation away from being a cult—and it suits his temperament.

I see that he and his whole family are now doing street ministry, finding the dropouts, the indigents, feeding them, clothing them, and of course laying on hands and praying over them. I see posts in which he exults over numbers saved, numbers healed of physical infirmities, drunks who are miraculously sober after a prayer.

Joe prays and preaches, and sometimes rants, in his posts. This is the Joe I remember: He is nothing if not passionate. When he commits to something, he holds nothing back.

And that’s why, when I see posts about his having been in the wilderness for twenty years, I wonder. Not about his present religious activities, or whatever will inevitably follow. I will not be surprised when I see that Joe’s wild, passionate nature has swung him to some other extreme of belief.

What would have surprised me would have been to find that he was no longer a generous man, giving of both his time and money to those in need. The compassionate man I see now—crazy as some of his posts about signs in the sky and the impending rapture seem—working among the down-and-outers, giving with an open hand, is the same man I knew before he left my childhood church.

I would be surprised now to find that in those twenty years he feels he wasted in the wilderness, he was not still that same generous, caring man, helping countless people. That seems to be the one consistent thing about him, his good heart. So what if he had been consistent in his doctrine and his church attendance all these years, and had not charity?

I want to say to him, so you were in the wilderness? Maybe those years weren’t wasted just because you weren’t on fire or in a church. Maybe this was your calling, right where you were meant to be all along. Maybe that’s where the people who needed you were.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

And all were guests.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Arabic Coffee”

The first thing that struck me about Moneerh was how much she terrified me: her face half-cloaked by her hijab, her dark eyes narrowed at me as I shuffled books, rushed through the steps of the lesson.

“Teacher, please slow down,” she said, her voice muffled, yet insistent. “Please.”

At the ESL center I help direct, most of our students are from the Middle East. They come on scholarships, looking to improve their English before they apply to American universities. Sisters are escorted to class by brothers and male cousins. Wives, many of them less than twenty years old, bring their husbands into my office to discuss failing grades, their eyes downcast while the husband shakes a report card at me, demanding that I “do something.”

Perhaps that’s what unsettled me about Moneerh, the way she stared directly at me, unwilling to let my bare arms and quick words disarm her.

In Saudi Arabia, where Moneerh is from, women are not allowed to drive, nor are they allowed to travel without an escort. I learned about this in an essay Moneerh wrote, arguing against the law that keeps her from driving a car.

“I do not think this is right,” she says, holding the paper in her slender hands. “If something happens to my mother, and I am the only person there, who will drive her to the hospital? So many women, they do not go to the doctor because they are afraid of a man seeing them; this is a shame in my country.”

I make sure to clearly mark her grammatical mistakes, and to write many comments in the margins; she has asked me to be thorough with her, to leave nothing unchecked. She consistently writes at least a hundred more words than her assignments require. When I ask about her weekend, she is firm: “I studied.”

Already twenty-five years old, Moneerh is an anomaly among our female students. She wants to marry, but also wants to wants to get her education, to “help society” by being a teacher in her home country. She has a degree in economics, but wants to add more degrees, attend more school.

Perhaps this is another reason that Moneerh challenges me: She moves with ease in a life that many would claim is restrictive. She commands the space around her, not in spite of her veiled body, but with the directness of someone who inhabits her life fully, whose words and actions are a single offering to a world that would easily dismiss her.

And what she offers is pure gift. On my birthday, she brings me a bottle of perfume. In class, she brings chocolates for her classmates. We share stories about cooking, and she brings me a container of Saudi spices and a jar of dates.

She kisses me on the cheek, and her eyes, still intent, crinkle with the smile that, though hidden from me, stretches across her face. I have seen students negotiate, and I know that the dates, the kiss, are not steps in that insidious dance.

The intensity Moneerh brings to her studies also moves her to laugh at my lame jokes, to weep at BBC reports about children’s deaths in Syria, her hand wiping tears away as she scrolls down a computer screen, unable to stop reading.

At church, I chat with an older woman. She begins talking about something she saw on the news, some angry flag burning in a Middle Eastern country, and my insides tighten.

“I just can’t understand why they are so violent over there,” she says. “Maybe if all those people got out of their pajamas and got jobs, they wouldn’t be in a such a mess.”

I know what she is reacting against. I know that I, too, have been afraid. But in that moment, I want to drag this woman to my classroom, to a small group of desks in a dingy university building, where Moneerh rushes against the clock, scribbling answers furiously on a test that she will fail, a test that will bring her into my office with angry, righteous tears: “I know that it was my mistake. But it is so hard, and I do not have much time here.”

I want to bring the woman from church to the small group of desks where Moneerh and I read Mary Oliver, where she flips the pages of Red Bird and exclaims loudly, “This! This is a good poem,” and strokes a line with her finger: I don’t want to live a small life.

This is what intimidates me about Moneerh the most—most days, I’d be content with a small life, one without demands or exertion. A life the opposite of Oliver’s lines: Open your eyes, open your hands.

In my classroom one day, I watch as Moneerh pulls a white carafe out of her backpack. She brings out small porcelain cups, a few candy bars. She sets the cups in front of us, and brings the carafe to me, pours a caramel stream of coffee.

“For you, teacher,” she says, eyes dark and smiling as she moves onto another classmate, another cup, all of us guests, our own eyes unable to look away.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

On the day I graduated from medical school I took the oath of Hippocrates. I didn’t think much about the words: the oath was one more hoop on a long hot morning. My promise to keep patient confidences, always treat patients with justice, and never harm them seemed doable, straightforward, and common sense.

But, I hadn’t actually been a doctor, hadn’t made decisions when faced with suffering and inadequate data and unknown futures.

About four months after starting my first medical practice, one of my new patients, Sharon, called and asked if I would come to her home to answer her husband’s medical questions. Although an unorthodox request, I decided to go.

I was ushered into a living room where, to my surprise, I met ten family members. Once seated, Sharon’s husband Ben—the most prominent lawyer in town—rose and addressed the room.

Ben had recently received the diagnosis of advanced pancreatic cancer from another doctor. After intense research he concluded no treatment was reasonable and calmly noted he had, more or less, a few months to live—months that would likely be filled with pain.

“Doctor,” Ben addressed me, “my family and I agree…” He turned to the assembled group and with varying degrees of speed and emphasis, each of them eventually nodded.

“We have asked you here to request a prescription of sleeping pills sufficient that I could end my life on my own terms.”

I remember being indignant. I couldn’t imagine how a lawyer could ask me to perform such an illegal act.

When I asked why he had selected me, Ben answered without hesitation. “Your partners are all Catholics and we know you are not. We hoped you might take a more enlightened view.”

He and his family were pleasant enough when I refused. I pointed out that although I wasn’t Catholic, my church was similarly unenlightened and Hippocrates had long ago given a mandate for doctors: Primum non nocere (first do no harm). It had been an easy decision.

I thought of Ben when I watched the Oscar-winning (Best Foreign Film) Amour. The female protagonist Anne returns home after an unsuccessful surgery intended to remedy her paralyzing stroke.

Alone with her husband Georges, Anne makes clear she has few illusions concerning her condition and wants him to end her life. Georges, convinced assisting Anne’s death would be an act of harm against his beloved, refuses.

Georges’s certainty concerning the ethical course to be followed reminded me of my early confidence. Georges and I would never presume to suggest or impose on others the “correct” moral choice. However, because of our confidence in a moral vision without blind spots, we would know the correct action.

As Anne’s suffering increases, Georges’s world is reduced to feeding and cleaning and bathing his wife. However, it is neither the grinding physical labor nor Anne’s disability that crushes Georges, but impotence and then rage when he realizes his every action increases Anne’s pain.

As a surgeon, despite understanding the necessity of surgery, I spent sleepless nights worrying if I had caused unnecessary pain. When the surgery did not cure or worsened the situation, my sense of helplessness, like Georges’s, became anger.

In a late scene Georges seals the apartment doors and windows. Like Sartre’s characters in No Exit, he loses hope when he finds himself unable to leave a torment of his own construction. He cannot know precisely Anne’s isolation and pain but now understands that he cannot share or bear her burden.

Suffering, like DNA, is unique.

Georges cannot imagine a hope beyond the four walls; he believes he and Anne are cut-off. Without hope, moral lines he once believed absolute have become sand castles too near the ocean, washed smooth by the tide of Anne’s suffering.

Watching Amour, the faces of former patients jostled my memory. In Georges and Anne I heard the cries of Alan whose heart transplant failed and Roger who was reduced to ninety pounds by melanoma.

These two, like Georges, would have been offended at the thought of suicide or euthanasia until engulfed in their personal hell. I heard again their pleas to end their pain.

After years of caring for patients and second-guessing my own decisions, I now know the line between relieving suffering and doing no harm is thin and hard to see.

As a physician, despite my empathy, I remain an observer. I do not understand why some individuals in the midst of suffering can see a hopeful open door while others cannot.

I confess I do not understand why Jesus’s disciples Peter and Judas both crossed deep lines and came to different ends.

I share a contented life with my wife Terry, whom I have loved for over forty years. While both of us fear becoming a stroke-disabled Anne, my fear is becoming like Georges. I fear watching Terry drool and cleaning her incontinence; but even more I fear a lonely suffering so smothering that she believes she is alone.

I fear a life defined by respirators, feeding tubes, and a morphine drip; but far more I fear believing I am so alone I cannot see the line defining love, and could murder the wife I imperfectly love in service to what I imperfectly believe to be love.

I have always believed in Emmanuel (God with us) but after spending two hours with Georges and Anne I left with questions and a fear that challenge my certainty.

I wonder if the disciples looked back at the cross and feared interpreting and making practical decisions about Christ’s words.

Perhaps like me, they understood the concepts but the messy world narrowed and blurred their vision rendering them unable to separate conditions of the heart from less important issues.

Maybe they worried they’d be like Judas and Peter, lacking courage to stay true.

Or, maybe they worried they’d be like Georges, a man whose vision became so overwhelmed by the darkness of Anne’s suffering, and whose hearing became so deafened by guilt, that he could not sense or imagine or hope in the God who promised never to abandon us.

Like them, I wonder and I’m afraid.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

I once saw a girl beaned in the head with a Bible.

Her attacker was a well-muscled star of our middle school football team, so his throw was hard, accurate, and had a bit of a spiral.

To be fair, the weapon wasn’t a full Bible, neither was it large. Someone in this guy’s group of cronies had procured a box of those miniature New Testaments kids are given in Sunday school, and brought them in his backpack with the intention of evangelizing—through force.

I noticed something was up that morning in the gymnasium, where the buses unloaded and students lounged in the bleachers waiting for the bell to ring so we could go to homeroom. With only one teacher—usually a distracted gym coach—on duty, it was easy to get away with mischief, and many of the students, hormonal and restless and facing another day of Algebra and cafeteria food, had mischief in their hearts.

Usually this manifested in mostly benign ways—spitballs, lewd shouts, or dropping someone’s clarinet case beneath the bleachers, so the unlucky student had to navigate the sticky darkness beneath to retrieve it. But on this morning it transformed into something more sinister.

From my seat across the basketball court, I noticed a few students stand up and begin moving at once. Without realizing at first what was happening, I watched as a pack of good old country boys surrounded a bunch of black-haired Goth kids—eyes heavy with liner—like a pride of lions might surround a herd of gazelles. By the time the prey raised their eyes, it was too late: they had been accosted by the words of Jesus.

Afterwards, whistles were blown and the ensuing fight broken up, but on my way to first period I saw a girl, walking alone, on the receiving end of a long pass. I knew little about her except she had dark hair that hung to her waist and a fascination with vampires. The Bible hit her in the back of the head and she whipped around in shock, blood drained from her face, tears pooling in her eyes.

Rumors spread throughout the day of assaults that continued across campus when no adults were around to see. I witnessed no others myself, but after lunch I found a few loose pages from the gospel according to John, with gold-rimmed edges lying in the mud. The words spoken by Jesus were printed in ink the color of blood.

About a year ago I was trying to write an essay on evil for an arts journal, and as I began, this story was the first one that came to mind.

In the evangelical community where I was raised, evil wasn’t an abstract concept. It was all too real, and was embodied in the form of the devil. The devil, like God, was everywhere, actively trying to thwart Christians from doing the work of the Kingdom.

Obviously thieves, murderers, rapists, and adulterers had succumbed to the devil. We were told, however, that his influence might be more subtly veiled.

For instance, the devil might break your carburetor, which could frustrate you so much that you might yell at your child or forget to invite your coworker to church. Or the devil might tell you it’s okay to sleep an extra thirty minutes in the morning instead of rising early for prayer or a devotional reading.

We were told that the devil was seductive, and beautiful, and could come to us disguised as light. We must be diligent and guard ourselves against him, girding ourselves in spiritual armor, and clothing ourselves in righteousness. Tying our shoelaces so tight that they are on the verge of breaking, but don’t.

In high school I saw students welcomed into class late without rebuke because they had been leading prayer meetings where exorcisms were performed. I dated a guy who prayed over the television set in his brother’s room because he thought it was a gateway for demonic activity.

As I grew older I experienced new communities and my worldview broadened. I began to believe that cars break down because they aren’t well maintained, or for any number of other reasons, none of which have to do with spiritual warfare. I began to see televisions as hunks of wires and plastic broadcasting only what man-made signals they receive.

Still, I found there was something I missed about having a clearly-defined foe, a personification of evil I could battle against in prescribed ways. More than that, I missed feeling that there was another agent who was ultimately responsible for my own sins, someone who had tricked or beguiled me into wrongdoing.

I still believe in good and evil, and I believe that both reside in the hearts of men and women. I believe that both reside in my own heart, and that I have within me the capacity for both types of action. That I have manifested both. That I will manifest both in the future.

I still, too, ask God to help me embrace goodness and act on it. I still believe the stakes are high.

That day in middle school, I wasn’t hit with a Bible, nor did I throw one, but I feel that in some ways I’ve experienced both since then, that I’ve been both victim and assaulter. That day, though, I picked up the pages I found, wiped off the mud, put them in my pocket, and carried them with me until I got home, hoping they were a guard against threat from without or within.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

Monks, I’ve found, having spent some time with them over the years, make good company—rewarding enough, in fact, to spend my birthday with some of them on one of my visits last year.

It was the ideal holiday for an introvert, but I came for more than silence and solitude. I wanted a stiff dose of contemplative prayer—straight, no chaser—what the late Walter Burghardt called “a long, loving look at the real.”

The gift of contemplation is precisely that—a gift, neither earned nor grasped—but there are habits, cultivated over time, to better receive that gift, to keep the self from forever stepping in the way like an attention-starved child, to still the mind’s nervous tic of racing in every direction but deeper.

There are also quiet places and good company in which to sharpen those habits. I’ve prayed—which is not the same as reciting prayers—on my bedroom floor, on a rock shelf in the Grand Canyon, and in the cramped seat of a commercial airliner, as well as in churches, monasteries, and shrines.

A failure to pray rarely results from want of time or space; most often it’s simple lack of resolve. Yet, if the artist who wishes his meager talent to flourish chooses to learn from masters, and if the athlete in training seeks out the best in her sport, then the beginning contemplative should exercise with the athletes and artists of prayer.

Perhaps everyone who prays is a beginner, forever learning to stand at the crossroads of humility and eager longing, but even from the prospect of eternity, there are some who speak or write with more experience and greater authority. Attention to their example and wisdom is rarely wasted.

What I particularly like about Burghardt’s phrase is its confidence that patience and affection help the seeker apprehend reality. Perhaps there’s a quick and emotionally disengaged way to approach the real, by whatever means, but I doubt it.

Visionary scientists rhapsodize about the objects of their lengthy studies, and true contemplatives are living monuments of concentrated effort, assiduously paring away a lifetime’s illusions. There are, to be sure, phony contemplatives (just as there are fraudulent scientists) but few of them last long.

Monks who stay, however, often turn peculiar. Some can be downright cranky. Then again, I have no idea what they were like before or where they’re being led. When I’ve asked monks why they chose their vocation, they typically speak of great need and profound longing.

Not one has told me they came because they felt special, unusually gifted, or particularly holy.

What I suppose I like most about monks—the good ones—is their refreshing honesty. They know themselves to be deeply flawed and in desperate need of help, which is why they seek God and the company of others in the same straits.

If contemplative monks are like anyone else, they’re most like recovering alcoholics who seriously work the twelve steps. Contemporary spiritual writers such as Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr have drawn this comparison before. If you love someone in the long, slow process of recovery from addiction, or if you’re there yourself, you may know what they mean.

The monk and the recovering alcoholic know their powerlessness and accept that their problems are humanly insolvable. Sick and tired of the labyrinthine depths of their self-deception, they surrender to a greater authority—a decision not made once but again and again, growing less difficult in time only through long practice, many failures, and with much support.

With encouragement and wise counsel, they conduct an ongoing and fearless moral inventory, adopt new behaviors, make thoughtful reparations, and accept a lifetime of prayer and meditation in search of God’s will and the grace to carry it out.

In acknowledging their brokenness, the monk and the recovering addict make their slow pilgrimage to serenity, even joy. They find neither, however, without humility, which has nothing in common with the obsequiousness of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, and everything to do with honest self-regard.

True humility is the fruit of turning that long, loving look at the real toward oneself: a way of tears that ends in a wistful smile.

On my birthday retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, not far from Georgia O’Keefe’s home at Ghost Ranch, I reveled in a desert silence punctuated with liturgies rich with the lush, melismatic chant of Benedictines who know how to sing and to smile.

Knowing they have nothing to offer God other than heartfelt thanks and praise, the monks carefully attend to their singing. It’s a joy to hear and, when appropriate, to join.

One morning, as I stood in the first row of retreatants, Abbot Philip hit a rare sour note on the small keyboard used to announce the melody about to be chanted. If I had done the same in front of so many listeners, I’d have been mortified and likely would have devoted the rest of the liturgy to mental self-flagellation. Instead, Abbot Philip, seeing me looking at him, cocked his head to the side, and with a sheepish grin raised his hands to the side as if to say, “Oh, well. Wasn’t that a funny sound?”

Then, still smiling, he returned to the work of praising the Maker of the Universe, the work to which he has given his life. And in that place and moment, he and his fellow monks looked serene, joyful, and very much at home.

That’s why I seek the company of monks: their lives call me not so much to be a better person but to become—at long last and after many false starts—myself.

Brian Volck is a pediatrician and writer living in Cincinnati. He graduated from the Seattle Pacific MFA program in Creative Writing in 2007. He is currently writing a memoir and a book about the intersection of health, history, and culture in the Navajo.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

When I taught Spanish in public school I projected Hispanic and Latino artwork on my pull-down screen and had students journal or make comments for a daily grade. Initially, the still worlds of painted color intimidated my media loving students, and they complained.

“How am I going to use this painting in the real world?”

“This isn’t art class.”

“Can’t you just give us a worksheet?”

“We’re going to study it silently for five minutes, then make three comments in Spanish,” was my answer.

“It’s ugly. It’s hard. It’s weird,” someone called out every year.

My students were not stupid, but they lacked the practice required to see.

I learned to start the unit with Fernando Botero, a contemporary Columbian artist who paints everything rotund, enormous, and downright fat. Even unmotivated and bored students loved to make judgments on the appearances of others, so we’d get the conversation going with one word: gordo.

Rony, an immigrant from Honduras, took my Spanish course because it was an easy A. He scooted in daily, just before the bell, and flashed me a brilliant smile as he shook my hand at the door. He chatted constantly with a pretty girl who sat next to him, and I frequently had to prevent him from “helping” other students on quizzes.

He took one look at Botero’s Niños Ricos and rattled off three comments for his grade: “There are three kids and a nanny. They’re wearing old-timey clothes. They’re fat,” he said in Spanish, leaning back and grinning ear to ear.

“He’s taking all the easy ones,” a girl said, rolling her eyes.  “I was going to say those!  That’s all I know how to say.”  The rest of my students grumbled in agreement.

I looked back at Rony and raised my eyebrows.

“Ok,” he said and took a breath. “Maybe the artist paints these people fat so that you have to think about how everyone would look if they were fat. And then it’s like no one is fat, and we all just see each other for the beauty on the inside.”

I was the one smiling this time and noted Rony’s grade.

Down the hall, my friend Kim Alexander taught Rony and one hundred other immigrants English as a Second Other Language—ESOL. Like Botero, Kim is also a painter, and in honor of her students she has a series of paintings entitled “The Young Immigrants.”

Like Botero’s fat people, most of Kim’s students are not truly seen in our country. They don’t play football, they rarely make the honor roll, and they’re usually too poor to be fashionable. Some of them are in gangs, are teenage parents, or don’t wear deodorant. Their whole sub-group grieves the annual statistical analysis compiled by the public school system because when you try to work their problems like equations the answers often fall below standard.

And though Kim is required to test and tally scores for her students, she knows that she can’t strip Rony and these other children down to slender, pale, creatures of transparency. Like Botero, Kim understands that people are gargantuan, rotund, and strange, so she accepts their complexities and then translates their beauty using acrylic on canvas.

Yet despite Kim’s gifts, the beauty of these students is not instantly apparent even to her. She must practice using her vision on a daily basis. Waiting, sometimes months, until she finds something extraordinary in each child, and files it away in her heart.

Then she uses that small moment to help her love each one.

It is only because this vision is her practice that she can show it to the rest of us through her craft.

Similarly, my students grew to appreciate the paintings we studied; and by the end of the unit their commentaries switched entirely.

“How come we’re not doing a painting today?”

“Señora, we studied Picasso in my geography class, and I already knew what cubism was!”

“Did you know there’s a mural at the rec center?”

Seeing really was possible.

Last summer, Rony Parada died while trying to save his younger brother from drowning in a lake during a sudden storm. Despite the danger, he dove bravely into the crashing waves and was pulled under. Divers recovered their bodies and journalists told yet another story about young immigrants who didn’t make it in the United States.

But before he died, Rony showed truth to each of us in that class. We practiced using our vision together. And for that small moment we could truly see.

He was beautiful.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

I am boarding a plane to Detroit, and so is she, her thick coat falling onto my lap from the center aisle, the smell of smoke thick enough to make my head swim. She shoves it under her seat, her thick gray hair brushing my arm as she sits.

“I’m Dianne,” she tells me, wiping the hair from her eyes. “Boy, am I not looking forward to this flight.”

I agree with her, my voice surprisingly loud. Maybe it’s the migraine I’m fighting, or the nausea that accompanies me with every airborne flight I take. Maybe something inside me recognizes Dianne’s movements, the way she mumbles and laughs to herself, the instability of motion that somehow demands my response.

At first, I’m only asked to listen. Dianne tells me that she’s heading out to New York to visit a daughter and her newborn baby.

“She was married by a justice of the peace,” she says, “and I didn’t come because she told me it was no big deal. No big deal? It was my daughter, for Christ’s sake.”

The story, as I sensed it would, spills into me for the next two hours, its twists of plot too fluid, the words of this stranger too slippery to track without me asking “What did you say?” every few moments, my head throbbing as I try to catch how Dianne’s life, as she lays it before me, holds together.

What it sounds like is this: Her husband, a composer of pop music, currently sleeps in a nursing home in upstate New York, his legs too damaged from a car accident for him to move freely through his life. He is ten years younger than Dianne, which didn’t keep her from marrying him, once she heard his music.

“Beautiful,” she says. “It was all beautiful. He is a genius, and those pirates stole everything he ever wrote.”

The “pirates” are superstars: Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Santana, Quincy Jones. Music moguls who somehow caught a line of this man’s music and took the credit.

There was no written music, only the genius of her husband’s fingers, and the cassette tapes, which held the only original recordings and were destroyed in the car accident that smashed her husband’s legs, leaving them more penniless than they were before.

“He never cared about those recordings,” Dianne says, cupping her hand for a pile of airline pretzels. “He sold me the rights for a pack of gum and a yoyo. But I have it all written in my book, all the facts, so we can get back what’s been stolen. All of it.”

The only problem, according to Dianne, is that she made the same mistake as her husband—the only copy of this book, her memoir, is currently in the hands of David Letterman, whom she hopes to see in New York, if he’ll return her call.

“I keep trying,” she says, sifting the pretzels in her palm, “but no answer. He probably thinks I’m crazy. Don’t you agree?”

The dull blow of that question cuts straight to the bone of my childhood, my mother and father each silhouetted against the screen door of our kitchen, watching clouds, relaying the logic behind their choices in a way that made me their confessor, the medium through which sin was pardoned.

Don’t you agree, Allison, that we deserve a better life? Don’t you agree that, if you had told us how to love each other, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now?

Those are the questions I heard, even if my parents didn’t ask them directly. But Dianne looks straight at me, and I cannot help but keep listening, her lips lined with beads of spit, her blue eyes milky beneath her thick bangs.

“You know, he was just as much a pirate as those musicians were,” she says. “He used to tell me that God was punishing me for not believing in him, even though I do believe. But how do you love someone who fools you twice? Don’t you agree that it’s impossible to do?”

Before I can say anything, Dianne suddenly starts hacking, a pretzel lodged in her throat, her body rocking under the demand for air. I wonder if I should do the Heimlich. I stare at her heaving frame and am unable to move, her need paralyzing me beyond the ability to act, or judge, or move.

But I somehow catch the words of the Jesus Prayer—Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner—strumming in my ears, the prayer itself pouring through me, for her, and a moment later, she looks up at me, gasping, smiling as she reaches for her Coke.

“Good thing I got my breath back!” she says, and I nod my head, a small agreement with an essential fact:

Good thing, Dianne, that you have breath, that there is life, the chance to love in spite of what is taken from us.

“I won’t forget this,” she tells me. “I won’t forget this conversation.” She settles into her coat, her face at the window, the clouds forging their own hills and valleys in the air around us.

She turns to me smiling. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she says, her hands twitching in her lap. “Isn’t it amazing, to see what we get to see?”

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

At the end of December I talked to a friend of mine who lives in Seattle. He was going to a New Year’s Eve dinner and was having trouble deciding what to contribute to the meal. “It’s strange,” he said, “that Americans don’t have any traditional New Year’s foods. We have Thanksgiving food, and Christmas, but not New Year’s.”

What I found strange was that he’d grown up without a food tradition on this holiday, because my family always ate black-eyed peas, greens, and cornbread on the first of January, and although I knew it had originated in the South, I’d thought the tradition was now widely known, if not widely practiced.

Each year my parents, brother and sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, and I would gather in my grandmother’s kitchen.

“The black-eyed peas are coin money,” Grandma told me, stirring the big, black pot where the beans floated in a bubbling liquid, a smoky chunk of fatback bobbing in the middle like a buoy.

“But the greens are paper money,” she said, “so that’s what you want to eat the most of!”

While collards and mustard will do (some even substitute cabbage or kraut), Grandma made turnip greens. She cut them into small pieces and boiled them with chopped onion and lots of salt, then served them sprinkled with sugar or vinegar. I’d eat two bowlfuls of greens in potlikker—their savory liquid—and was proud when she said she’d never seen a little girl as good at eating greens as I was.

While some prepare rice to accompany the black-eyed peas (Hoppin’ John), families I knew served cornbread as the starch, baking the aromatic yellow discs in cast-iron skillets greased with lard or shortening. The golden color of the cornbread signified further luck or riches in the new year.

Eating greens or cornbread alone, however, wasn’t enough to ensure good fortune. The magic key—and center of the meal—is black-eyed peas, which came to signify prosperity because of how they swell as they cook.

Black-eyed peas aren’t really peas at all; they’re legumes, and a subspecies of the cowpea. Transported to the low country coastal regions of America (in Georgia and the Carolinas) by African slaves, they were at first considered a lowly food, fit to feed only slave families and livestock.

During the Civil War, however, after Sherman’s troops stripped fields of their crops but neglected the black-eyed pea plants, the beans became an important source of nutrition, and earned a permanent spot in the Southern culinary repertoire.

Some believe the tradition of eating black-eyed peas on the first day of the year began this way, while others think it originated with Sephardi Jews who settled in Georgia early in the eighteenth century and considered black-eyed peas (along with some other foods) symbols of good luck, to be eaten at Rosh Hashanah. If that tradition carried over to non-Jews, it also happened around the time of the Civil War.

Either way, it seems unlikely that black-eyed peas would, all this time later, symbolize our hopes for a prosperous year. As far as beans go, they aren’t the handsomest specimens—neither large like the red kidney, nor glossy like the black, nor mottled like the pinto. They are small and white, with a black spot in the middle reminiscent of a pupil (hence the name). When cooked, they look even more unappetizing. They turn gray, shed their delicate outer casings, and muddy the boiling water.

However (and I realize not all are in agreement on this point), the final product is delicious. The beans are soft and creamy, with a nutty, buttery flavor. While excellent cooked with pork, and divine topped with chow chow (a spicy pickled cabbage relish), water and salt are all one needs to turn the dried beans, which don’t need to be pre-soaked like most others, into an appetizing dish.

This year I made my own black-eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread, and ate them happily with my husband and roommate as we talked through our hopes for the upcoming year. After the extravagance of Christmas—its rich gingerbread and frothy eggnog, its crispy roasted meats, sugared fruits, and frosted cookies—enjoying a simple meal felt right.

The humble foods symbolized not only our desire for health, luck, and prosperity in 2013, but also our humility in the face of the unknown. Who knows what will happen in the future? Not one of us. But we can face the unknown like these small beans in our bowls, each a separate eye gazing out, unblinking.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

The following article by MFA Program Director Gregory Wolfe was originally published in

Among our national pastimes, there is none more persistent than the ritual lament over the decline and fall of the arts. The death of the novel . . . the end of painting . . . if an art form exists, we’re willing to believe it has seen better days.

Religious believers are equally prone to this sort of thing, and they often give it their own spin. One version goes like this: Whereas in the 20th century there were literary giants who grappled with faith—T.S. Eliot, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor—our own time is devoid of distinguished writers exploring religious themes.

That perception is encouraged in the media. In The New Republic in 2008, Ruth Franklin noted that “the absence of God from our literature feels so normal, so self-evident, that one realizes with shock how complete it is.” Last month in a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay entitled “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?,” Paul Elie suggested that “if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature.”

Really? From where I stand, things don’t look that way. That is in large part because for the past 24 years I have edited Image, a journal that publishes literature and art concerned with the faith traditions of the West. Our instinct when launching the publication was that the narrative of decline was misguided, but we honestly didn’t know if we could fill more than a few issues.

Sometimes when you look, you find. Over the years Image has featured many believing writers, including Annie Dillard, Elie Wiesel, Christian Wiman, Marilynne Robinson and Mark Helprin. But these writers of religious faith and others are not hard to find elsewhere. Several prominent American authors—Franz Wright, Mary Karr and Robert Clark—are Catholic converts. Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer last year published “New American Haggadah,” a contemporary take on the ritual book used by Jews on Passover.

In short, the myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that—a myth. Yet making lists of counterexamples does not get at a deeper matter. It has to do with the way that faith takes on different tones and dimensions depending on the culture surrounding it.

Mr. Elie quotes Flannery O’Connor’s manifesto: “For the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” That made sense in the context of her time, when the old Judeo-Christian narrative was locked in a struggle with the new secular narratives of Marx, Freud and Darwin.

However, we live in a postmodern world, where any grand narrative is suspect, where institutions are seen as oppressive. So the late Doris Betts could say that for all her admiration of Flannery O’Connor, her own fiction had to convey faith in whispers rather than shouts. Indeed, one of the most ancient religious ideas is that grace works in obscure, mysterious ways. But obscure is not invisible.

Consider Christopher R. Beha’s “What Happened to Sophie Wilder,” published last year, which in Commentary magazine critic D.G. Myers said contains “what is perhaps the best conversion scene in an English-language novel since [Graham Greene's] ‘The End of the Affair.’ ”

The title character, an intelligent, sophisticated writer with no religious background, begins to read Thomas Merton and other writers much concerned with faith. Nothing happens to her for a time, but one day in Mass “something came over her; she walked out changed. It got closer to it to say that she was, for a time, occupied. . . . But mostly she knew that it was something outside of herself, not an idea or a conceit or a metaphor.” God is what happens to Sophie Wilder.

Or consider Alice McDermott, whose National Book Award-winning “Charming Billy” presents a moving meditation on faith. After World War II, an American soldier, Billy Lynch, comes home and has his heart broken when an Irish girl to whom he is engaged returns to Ireland. His best friend tells Billy that she has died, but the truth is that she has abandoned Billy for a childhood sweetheart.

Much of Billy’s life is lived believing this lie and he turns to alcohol. But he’s a charming drunk, one who lives by poetry and prayer, which fuel his immortal longings. His best friend concludes that Billy “wanted too much.” But the strength of his desire is the heart of his faith. When someone attempts to play down the reality of death, Billy bursts out: “Our Lord spilling His every drop of blood on the cross to show us death is terrible . . . and all the while we’re telling ourselves that it’s not so bad, after all.” “Life goes on” after a loved one dies, he is told. His response: “I won’t let it.”

Ms. McDermott asks us to consider how believing a beautiful lie might be like an act of faith. At the same time, Billy’s faith makes him almost holy—mysteriously, truth slips in alongside falsehood. Ultimately, the novel is as much about the narrator, a postmodern “apostate” who in telling the story comes to hear the whisper of faith in Billy’s life.

Today the faith found in literature is more whispered than shouted. Perhaps a new Flannery O’Connor will rise, but meanwhile we might try listening more closely to the still, small voice that is all around us.

This site grows out of the dynamic low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program based at Seattle Pacific University.

At the heart of this blog will be creative writing by the talented authors emerging from our program.

Many of these posts are taken from “Good Letters,” the blog of the prestigious literary quarterly Image, which is also based here at SPU.

We’ll also post news items about the faculty, students, and alumni of the program.

We hope you enjoy all you find here. Check out our About page for more information about our program.