On a "Love My Job" kind of Month

Monday, March 16, 2015

You’re catching me on a “love my job” kind of month.

No, it’s not always that way.

When the questions are not answered and I don’t have the right words.  And the lines in the Eagle’s Nest are long and I think that the 20 minutes we have to wait for food will somehow delay our “real” conversation. 

But that’s just it.  Te acompaño.  Whether there is bread or not.  Whether you’ve gotten your salad yet or not.  Jesus is accompanying us in the breaking of the bread.  We’re accompanying each other in the sitting in the Eagle’s Nest.  (It all happened while [they] sat around talking)

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I’m loving my job this month because I am seeing the students live the questions.  No, but really live the questions. 

We’ve started a “F.A.S.T.” week this year – Faith, Action, Solidarity, Today – and it has been such a joy to watch the students struggle (yes, a joy to watch them struggle), with the questions, concerns, realities.  How do we live this life?  Of faith and justice?  Of privilege and humility?  Of downward mobility in an upward reality?  We must carefully discern what is ours to do.  And then do it.

An alum tonight on the “Fall in love, Stay in love” Panel said something along the lines of, “When you beginning really leaning into these questions of what you are going to do, you begin to realize you are already doing it.”

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I guess that’s it.  I’m doing it.  I work at a college campus (a very awesome/incredible/wonderful one at that), and I help students think about their lives and their vocations. I create/coordinate/support a program that exposes students more deeply to the realities of another community, often one which suffers from poverty or marginalization, and help facilitate that they fall in love.

Fall in love with what?  With compassion, with solidarity, with love and faith in action.

I walk around a beautiful university and learn from each student that comes through the door; each work study student whom I ask for assistance; each graduate student from the STM who shares another bit of faith.

It’s not perfect.  It’s not always this way.  And that will have to be a topic of reflection for another day.  But this month, yes, loving. 

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How blessed am I to be among this community.
How blessed to love my job for a month.

Gratitudes

Our theme for our second session is Gratitudes.


You can read Wendy Lee's Christmas reflection.

This is from Pete Mosher around Thanksgiving 2013 just before he died.

Here's one I wrote a few years back.

Bridges Abound

Sharing the address of a blog that I contribute to from time to time. Visit to read poetry and accounts from family adventures.  With peace.....  Chris      

Why I Choose

I take this course to rediscover what I've lost... to seek what I never realized I was seeking. In the cold, dead of winter, I call out to god & the echo - the void- calls back with a whisper. Yet, I hear nothing. And, it's been this way for so long now. How do I reignite the fire, fan the flames, & find my way Home again?


I seek my Truth once again.

I've lost my way through the disease, the betrayal,the broken heart, the recovery hasn't completed, yet. From the police shootings, protests, riots, children killed, cops shot, cops shoot, families break. We have all realized we are victims in this city, state, country, world. & it's my job... No,my duty... to hunker down in the newsroom,at my computer, gawking, seeking that prime video... video so deep the pain of this city and the broken families within feel like they're from a film, not a 20 minute drive to the Other parts of town. Watching all of the drama unfold... Who benefits from this shared drama & amusing pain? The advertisers? The anchors? The show? We seek no clear Soul-ution in the Newsroom... Only the Stories of this city we and our loves call Home.

Six months ago... 11:58, Monday, August 11, 6 months ago, we went on air for News 4 at Noon after a night of rioting, looting, and peaceful protesting.

Working Sunday, August 10, I have never seen or been involved in covering anything so extreme in my life. It was a surreal sight. Friends, co-workers, up in the middle of everything. . . “Ground Zero.” Canfield Green Apartments. . . Protesting, reporting. Trying to stay safe. Emotions running high. Threats being thrown at news crews, officers, protesters, neighbors. Broken windows on live trucks and a burned down Quik Trip.

An endless work day. A never ending story and movement begun.

The anonymous drone of 12 police scanners chirping in my ear takes my attention back to this course... And what do I seek? I take this class to fall in love once again with the Compassion and Poetic Beauty in waking up with my lover, José, by my side, Bird songs chirping their morning melody, the cool breeze tempting me awake.


Another day is here. Another day has begun.

Where does the time go?

What Draws Me to This Course by Brent Fernandez

I arrived last night at Bethlehem Farm, a place I call home even though I haven't lived here for almost 4 years. I call it home for many reasons: the connection to the land, the simplicity of life, the fact that I feel myself here, and I can be myself. It is also great to be in a place where you are surrounded by like-minded folks who want to transform the world, or part of it, and also their lives. 

Andi and Lauren are two of these folks. Both went to Creighton University and both have a passion for life and justice and love! It energizes me to be around such people. It also helps that they are 10 yrs younger than me and have a lot more energy. 

Some of us went to a dance and a "pie walk" last night. I struck up a conversation with Lauren. Since they went to Creighton, I mentioned Kate Linden to Lauren to see if she knew her. She flipped out when she found out that Kate was my first college friend and still a great friend to this day. Kate had mentored Lauren through college and helped her find her path. It's great to be surrounded by great people. It's great to be interconnected in this web of life with great people. I am the luckiest guy on earth... This is how I feel when I think about my friends. 

Last night while we did the pie dishes, Andi asked if I knew Fr. John Kavanaugh at SLU. I mentioned that I took a class with him and how amazing of a man he was. Andi and Lauren had both read Following Christ In a Consumer Society and were very excited to talk about him. 

We continued to play our game of "Connect the Jesuit dots," which lead to them asking if I knew Mark Chmiel and if I had ever read The Book of Mev. 

"As a matter of fact, yes! And I'm re-reading it NOW... and participating in a writing class with Mark right now." 

We spent the next 30 minutes discussing the book, how it influenced us, how we want love and life full, how we want to see the world, listen to the cry of the poor, but still smile and dance and sing. 

This is what draws me to this course. The fact that I knew these women for 3 hours and we started talking about this book and there was a connection. I felt an immediate trust. I found some comrades. This book does this... It connects people, it connects souls, and so I look forward to reading it and writing and sharing. 

This course gives me an excuse to read The Book of Mev_ again... Like I needed one. 

be in love with yr life: a goal

I’ve blocked myself.

It’s not writers’ block, some mysterious mental sludge that I have to wait to drain away, or just be less stressed out, or eat healthily, or what have you.

I’ve been keeping a blog since I moved to El Salvador, for whatever reason. Writing things helps me see my thoughts outside of myself, and it’s been important to share some of those with the people who loved me through the first twenty-two years of my life before sending me off, some more begrudgingly than others, into the rest of it.

When I came out to my parents, finally, a year ago, the pool of things about my life that we can talk about shrinked down to a puddle: am I healthy, what is the weather like, what am I making for dinner. And the pool of things other people are to know about me evaporated almost totally.

So I shut up a year ago, and I’m over it now.

Mev is the reason I’m here at all, quite frankly. She went with me to Nicaragua when I was a jaded twenty year old and held my hand as I remembered what God whispered to each of us as she walked with us silently out of the night: that she waits for us all to find her in the underside of history. I’ve met so many people along the way that remind me of the women Mev met writing The Struggle Is One, and I’ve lent out and exchanged around my copy of her gospel so many times that I no longer know where it is. It seems appropriate that she be the reason I start reaching out my closed up little heart roots.

So my writing project for this class is to write on my blog again. Whoop de doo. But like, my grandma used to read it to her Sunday school group at Wendy’s over junior bacon cheeseburgers after church. It gave folks at home words to ask about more than the temperature and what-is-that-in-Fahrenheit. It was my self-inflicted open heart surgery on the world wide web, and I stopped part way through. I don’t want to wait until it’s healed up in pieces to try to put it back together.

Probably it will be a lot of like, see-judge-act, talking about stuff that goes on here or there and talking about what God seems to say in all of it. A lot of leaving crumbs along the trail of my own processes, so I can see where I’ve gone. US foreign policy, food sovereignty, corn, pianos, public busses. The price of tomatoes, Anita’s son’s days. The forecast, the full moon, Celsius-to-Fahrenheit.

“Be in Love with Yr Life”*: A Spring Writing Course

Like Sontag and Beseda, many of us are tempted to be intolerant of the ambiguity and intimidated by the risks of photography and other art forms.  Ultimately, I believe we are most daunted by the mystery, the question, the possibility:  “It could be us.”  Through my own photography I strive to bridge the distant worlds of our small globe.  I contemplate the mystery:  It is us.
–Mev Puleo

This spring will mark ten years since The Book of Mev was published.  Over the years I’ve been gratified by the responses to that story, from people I’ve known a long time and those I just met. It appears the book has encouraged some people on different aspects of their journeys.

I’ve often noticed  how many readers recognize themselves in Mev’s words, say, from her letters and journals.  I’m reminded of the French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote:  “In reality every reader is, while she is reading, the reader of her own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable her to discern what, without this book, she could perhaps never have perceived in herself.”

For this spring’s writing class, I invite you to read (or reread) and write off of stories, themes, and questions from The Book of Mev.

I hope that reading and discussing this particular text may give you insight and encouragement on a writing project you’re in the middle of or one you’ve long wanted to start.  It could be a series of letters to someone, a blog, a long and rambling essay,  a one-act play, a chapbook of poems about life in Fenton.  You know what is inside you calling for more attention.

So we’ll engage such topics as being present, community, accompaniment, faith, spirituality, the state of the world, the state of our soul,  friends, mentors, teachers, creative arts (e.g., photography), travel, breakdowns, breakthroughs, solidarity, illness, celebrating, grieving, letting go, poetry, El Salvador, Palestine, Haiti, schools, gospels, letter-writing, gratitude, bearing witness, and much else.

Here are the specifics:

How Often: 7 weeks, 2 sessions a week, beginning Wednesday March 18 and ending Sunday 3 May.

Where and When: (1)  On Wednesdays, 6:30 – 8:15 pm, we meet at the home of Marty and Jerry King, 830 DeMun (Clayton, 63105) and (2)  On the weekend, we have a second weekly session for which you choose either meeting with us Saturday or Sunday  at Café  Ventana, 2-4 p.m. (3919 West Pine Boulevard, St. Louis, 63108).

Format: Class sessions will have at least an hour for concentrated writing; there will also be some time for paired and group sharing.

Essential text: The Book of Mev.

Recommended texts: Joe Brainard, I Remember;  Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces; Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One.

I am happy to meet up with participants to discuss whatever is on your mind during the seven weeks (at a time convenient for you).

Tuition  is $125.  For people outside of Saint Louis, I’m happy to offer an on-line writing, reading, sharing experience ($75).

Please contact me if you are interested in this class! Or pass this information on to someone who might be looking for some time and community for writing.

Mark Chmiel
markjchmiel@gmail.com
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text: 314-807-8769

*Jack Kerouac, epigraph to The Book of Mev