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Silence Car

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Silence car

A wonderful feature of Dutch trains is the stiltecoupe, the silence car. I write there in the morning on my way to work.

I love silence. Before going into the seminary I read a lot of books by Thomas Merton, who was good at talking about it, and during my one year as a high school teacher, in Everett, Washington, I instituted “levels of silence” in the classroom. “Level zero” was the standard level: whispering or, at most, quiet talking. Below that you had “defcon one”: genuine silence, no talking, no whispering. And my favorite, “defcon two”: absolute silence, “quiet enough to hear the hair growing on your arm.” The kids were not keen on this approach and you’ll understand why I lasted only one year.

Nonetheless, I have persisted in loving silence, having seen in my own life that you can learn an awful lot just by keeping your mouth shut. At first, I thought the stiltecoupes would never catch on, but it turns out there are many like me who rejoice in the quiet.

Sometimes, though, you do have to remind people of the rules. Last week I was sitting in second-class silence, but could hear through the glass wall someone talking in first-class silence. So I entered to remind them. “This is a silence car.” Not until I was halfway into my sentence did I see that the two talkers were the conductors. The nearest fellow in uniform asked, “Could you hear me talking?”

“Sorry,” he said.

Arrowhead God

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resurrection cross Nijmegen 3 (2)

Wedging His way

into our world

The cross pictured above, by the artist Filip Moroder-Doss, adorns the foremost wall of the Sacramentskerk in Nijmegen. My workday begins in prayer before it. For an extended meditation, see “Cross Purposes” in the May 3, 2013, Commonweal.

Broken wing of the heart, and other poems

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ADAM AFTER THE FALL

Can’t wait to get started

 

BROKEN WING OF THE HEART

Even when I don’t use it, I feel it

 

O CHILDREN FRUIT OF THE MARRIAGE BED

sharp harvest of desire

and seed of waking worry

 

CORNDOG AT THE LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Sure

have at it

do it your way

 

IF YOU PUT A GUN IN THE HAND OF A CRAZY MAN

 

SO SORRY

So sorry to have saddled you

with my lost looks

a sinewy

Mr. Bones dancing

jaw jutting

the scandalous perversity

of his grin

a disgrace

 

IF GOD WERE GOD

of course He’d come down.

You don’t think He’d let things

go on this way?

How I got here

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Just out of college, I wanted to be a priest, so my diocese (Seattle) sent me to Leuven, Belgium, to study theology. It didn’t work out: I married a Dutch woman instead. We lived in Washington State for seven years before moving to Utrecht in 2001.  We have two children, one born in Seattle and one in Utrecht.

In our first years in Holland I wondered how to share the two most obvious sides of myself, my being Catholic and American, with my children in a culture resistant to the missionary impulses of both the Church and Uncle Sam. Now I don’t worry about that. My children are who they are, growing up in their own way in a culture excellent in its own right. But I continue to feel the tension of displacement within myself.

Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, was originally an outpost on the edge of the Roman Empire. That’s a good metaphor for the present distance of this super secularized country from the Church of Rome. It’s hard to know how best to nurture and express one’s faith here.

As an American, too, I wonder how I fit in. American culture is at once admired and suspect. Having grown up in the West, I miss the woods, fields and mountains of my native land.  Here in the house I have a room of books and photos that remind me of home (see photo on “Why this blog”). I consider it the most remote outpost of the US Forest Service. For a while I thought I’d call this blog, “Report from the Ranger Station.”