LOVE AND LOSS A Reflection on Memory
James Ishmael Ford
11 February 2007

Text
We are created from and with the world
To suffer with and from it day by day:
Whether we meet in a majestic world
Of solid measurements or a dream world
Of swans and gold, we are required to love
All homeless objects that require a world.
Our claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?
From Canzone by W. H. Auden

One of the many gifts of being away for a while and then to return home is to see everything in a new and fresh light. Admittedly the new paint here in the sanctuary, the refurbished great window and all these other improvements, doesn’t hurt with my sensation of newness and brightness. Still, it’s true; a little time away and it is easier to see things that have been dulled by familiarity and regularity.

I admit a very small part of me was hoping things might be at least a little touch-and-go here without me around. But, no, you all have just been going great guns, and doing very nicely, thank you! I’m exhausted just learning what has been happening around here.

I’ve promised a brief report today, sort of “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” or more correctly, “What I Did on My Sabbatical.” So, I will. But we are so near Valentine’s Day, and I had one particular experience that led me to reflect a little on the nature of our human condition, specifically about aspects of the miracle of human love. So, I’ll end with that.

The rough outline of my sabbatical was to have two unequal parts. That happened, although one of the parts changed quite a bit. The bigger part was my sojourn among the students, staff and faculty at Meadville Lombard our denominational seminary in Chicago. The second half, or really last third, was intended to be a trip to India where I hoped to walk in the footsteps of Gautama Siddhartha, the historic Buddha. As many here know, back problems intervened and I spent the balance of my sabbatical here visiting doctors and rehab people. To start with that end, I’ve been diagnosed with spinal stenosis, caused by degenerative disc disease, which itself is largely arthritis. There is a serious narrowing of the space where nerves are supposed to travel. A couple of spots, including one caused by scaring from a massive herniation some years ago, are directly touching some of the nerves. The upshot of this is there isn’t a lot to do other than strengthen what supports my spine, relive some of the compression. That means I’m on a project to lose some weight and discovering the joys of exercise. I’m sure over time you’ll hear more about this. Sorry.

But, right now a little more about my Chicago adventures. It was a great treat serving as the John Lester Young Fellow at Meadville Lombard, their minister-in-residence. My tasks were to teach a single class, which I did using my new book on the history of Zen in the West as a required text. That was fun and sold a few books. The other task was to be available to the students and avuncular. I’ve been told if you go to the dictionary and look that word avuncular up, the illustrating picture is a snapshot of me. So, I was in hog heaven for those months.

Among the vivid memories I return with is the view from my apartment. It was on the third floor of a three story building, a large one bedroom apartment with dramatic views of the Hyde Park skyline which was roughly three stories in that part of the metroplex. I could look out several different windows with a lovely urban rooftop vista where houses and buildings danced with long established trees with massive canopies. The school is right in the middle of the University of Chicago’s sprawling campus, so in every direction gothic towers would shoot up into the sky. Really impressive, and quite beautiful.

Then there was the evening I was walking along Woodlawn Avenue coming back from the local co-op grocery store. I was making my way with my thoughts gathered around me like a cloak when all at once I was shaken from my reveries by an astonishing and loud squawk. And then a second, and then a third, blending into a great cacophonous din above my head. I looked up into the trees and saw a gigantic herd of parrots and their astonishing twig, well, it seemed stick, well it seemed just short of brick and mortar bird apartment house nests. Two breeding flocks of Monk Parakeets have occupied Hyde Park since at least 1973. While there are conflicting stories of how they came to be there, they are the most northerly flock of parrots in the world. They don’t compete with native species, apparently, and have found a place in local hearts. You might expect a sermon on this someday.

But I want today to focus on a trip Jan and I took on one of the long weekends when she flew out to Chicago. Our goal was to visit the Fine Arts Building at 410 South Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. It had been built as a Studebaker carriage and wagon assembly plant, but as Studebaker went on to manufacture other things eventually was dedicated to providing studio space for artists and sundry related, for something well over a hundred years now.

Once we found the building we took the elevator up to the top floor. This was one of those old fashioned human operated elevators. And the operator wasn’t particularly concerned with the floor of the elevator meeting the floor of the floor precisely. So stepping up we carefully made our way onto the tenth and top floor. There we were greeted with some grand murals painted who knows when, surrounding a deep stairwell, and a long hall that ran down the middle creating a large H floor plan with the bar being the longest part. It had a shabby genteel feel to it, some paint peeling, obviously cared for by people who didn’t have quite enough money for the task.

At each of the doors were small plaques that named previous denizens of the rooms. We walked past such names as Frank Lloyd Wright, L. Frank Baum, another for his illustrator, W. W. Dennison, before coming to the end where we found what we were looking for, the name plaque for Ralph Fletcher Seymour.

You might notice the similarity with my spouse Jan’s last name, Seymour-Ford. Her grandfather, Frederick, was born in Milan, Illinois, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As a young adult Frederick would move to the Pacific Northwest, eventually settling in Seattle where he ended up a finish carpenter.

His brother, Ralph also appeared to feel a need to move on from Milan. He studied art in Cincinnati, and then continued his studies in Paris. Eventually he settled in Chicago where he gained local fame as an artist, writer and publisher. Great Uncle Ralph taught decorative illustration at the Chicago Art Institute for a time. But he was best known as an etcher and publisher. In fact one etching illustrating a Southwest Native American scene, “Baking Bread” hangs in the De Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco.

While researching Uncle Ralph, I was startled to come across a painting of his which I’m pretty sure I recognized from my childhood. While artist-in-residence at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, he painted “Old Main” a depiction of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates for and still on display at Knox College. A painting in the American Regionalism style inspired according to its official description by “a little research and a lot of imagination.” It seems it was reprinted in several text books in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Great Uncle Ralph is a life long hero of Jan’s. He lived the bohemian life many details of which are recorded in his memoir Some Went This Way: A Forty Year Pilgrimage Among Artists, Bookmen and Printers. I wasn’t particularly surprised, but certainly gratified to learn in my researches how in 1919 he published Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year a controversial novel with its undisguised gay theme. He was an amazing character, Great Uncle Ralph, providing a vision of how life might be lived for his great niece, who was otherwise surrounded by a constricting fundamentalist childhood. And increasingly, he has become a hero for me. We own three of his etchings as well as a watercolor painting that all hang in our house, in addition to a small but growing collection of books he wrote or published.

So, there we were staring at his old space in the Fine Arts Building. We saw that the office was now occupied by David Swan’s architectural firm. The door was locked. We returned the next day, this time instead of having to step up from the elevator to the floor we had to step down, and walked the hall to discover the door slightly ajar. We knocked and introduced ourselves to the fellow who answered. He introduced himself as David Swan and invited us in. It’s a large studio with a small loft; the way the light flowed in through the large windows you could imagine how an artist might enjoy it. The three of us swapped Ralph Fletcher Seymour stories for a few minutes, when all of a sudden David said, “Want to see something?” and without waiting for the answer ran up to the loft, brought down his well bookmarked copy of Uncle Ralph’s Some Went This Way, opened it to a picture, saying “See This?” Jan said, “Yes.” He then pointed out the window. “There it is.” And there it was.

You know how an absolutely mundane event if it’s at the right moment can open whole new vistas? We’ve all had such moments, I suspect. Well here it was for us. My arthritic spine tingled. I felt a cascade of emotions. Things have changed a lot between the engraving of the picture and now, even though it was also easy to see how it was the same vista, so different and so similar, all at once. I really realized how close I felt to Great Uncle Ralph. In fact it was as if he were in the room with us.

Such a flood of feeling followed that noticing on my part. So as I try to describe my experience consider the word “thought” shorthand here for a rushing flood, more color than line, more feel than discursive. I thought of that picture and the scene out the window. I thought how much I hated being away from Jan. I thought of how I missed the Society and all of you. The roiling waters of thoughts washed through my body. I found myself thinking of my California life. I thought of Arizona’s big sky, of snow and ice, of hot humid summers eating ice cream on the porch of our house on Lexington Street watching traffic flow by. I thought of drives up the Maine coast, of sitting in the great shed at Tanglewood while Itzhak Perlman opened the heavens with his violin, like Moses striking the stone to reveal life giving waters. I thought of friends, and friends, and friends. I thought of this pulpit. I thought of those angels.

All these things were in that room crowding up with Great Uncle Ralph and the three of us and that picture and the scene it represented. So, what’s the take away for us? I suspect each of us might find something different. Me, I find myself thinking of W. H. Auden’s haunting poem Canzone opening with one of the fundamental questions of our human condition. “When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,/We cannot choose what we are free to love?” Perhaps you caught that when the choir sang it. I found it a Valentine’s message about the contours of love.

Like that visit to the Fine Arts Building. In the bitterly cold Chicago Fall Jan and I were given a Valentine’s card from our long dead Great Uncle. He was, is still with us. And perhaps it’s a card for you, as well. In some wonderful way we are all in this mess of life never really alone. And that’s a pointing to something about what love might really be. I think of standing in that room at the end of the Fine Arts Building with Jan and David Swan looking at the picture of the scene outside that window, and the new vision outside that window, how in the midst of change there are, nonetheless, remarkable, compelling threads of connection. A hint at what love might be, I thought. And my arthritic spine tingles.

Amen.