Sabbatical Surprises: Blackberries,
A Phone Works in Brooklyn
The Reverend Thomas C. Willadsen
When I returned from my sabbatical in the middle of August my parishioners asked, "How was it?" and I answered, "Pretty OK!" They asked, "Did you have a good time?" and I answered, "I had a lot of good times." What is interesting though is that the best of these times were complete surprises. I had an agenda for my time away, of course, but as they say, "If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans."
Re-entry has been difficult, which I understand is common among clergy who have taken sabbaticals. At first, the planning was also difficult, but then I had an experience that got me thinking creatively.
A colleague took a three month silent sabbatical a few years ago. She retreated to a cabin in the woods, stockpiled food, and told her nearest neighbors that she'd be observing silence as best
she could. She did not read any periodicals, listen to the radio, or watch television. As she described her three months of solitude her face radiated joy and excitement.
I am an extreme extrovert. This kind of sabbatical would be a good way for my congregation to punish me. "Bad pastor, now you can't talk to anyone!" But Marcia's face told me that I should plan sabbatical with activities that would be renewing for me. In addition to "renewal," I was guided by the word "Sabbath," which I remember from my seminary days as being Hebrew for "Stop it!"
The renewal part was pretty easy. I planned the first month around two trips, with ten days in
between to prepare for a class. On the first trip, I attending major league baseball games in stadiums I had never been to before, bringing my life list of ballparks to twenty-six. I also visited more than twenty friends, some of whom I had not seen in twenty years. My first trip took me as far east as Boro Park Brooklyn, the neighborhood I lived in the year between college and seminary. When I got to talking to friends who had not moved out of New York, they told me I had to see Boro Park, it had changed so much.
A Phone Works in Brooklyn
The day I spent the afternoon in Boro Park was one of the most memorable and surprising
days of my sabbatical. I arose early and walked around lower Manhattan, the neighborhood I
had worked in the year I lived in Brooklyn. It had changed radically since the September 11, 2001
attack. Ground Zero is a bustling construction site, and there's lots of other construction going on
throughout Manattan, some of which was put on hold following the attack, some is just the typical life of a vibrant city.
After walking around lower Manhattan, I took the subway uptown to meet my college roommate
for lunch. Chip now works in journalism. To be honest, he is the author of Playboy's monthly
Advisor column. Is it incongruous that the Playboy advisor used to room with a Presbyterian minister, or is it the other way around? We've stayed in touch through the years, and he has even occasionally sought my guidance to answer a question a reader [Yes, there are people who read Playboy]] has posed. Check out the September 2007 Advisor column, where I am quoted, though not cited. We will see what this revelation does to my career.
We went to a Japanese noodle restaurant and talked about our kids, in-laws, and home repair-
topics that were not on our radar screens twenty years ago.
As I left his office, I gave him a hug and got on the elevator with a stranger. I said unto him,
"That's the Playboy Advisor; we roomed together in college."
"Hmhm."
"Now, I'm a Presbyterian minister."
"They're both good reads!" the stranger replied.
Only in New York.
Next I took the subway to Brooklyn to see how my old neighborhood had changed. The parks and
houses had not changed much, but the commercial strip on Fort Hamilton Parkway was completely different. It seemed that all the shops catered to a Spanish-speaking clientele now. When I lived here my landlord had informed me, "There's two kinds of Italians: Sinatra Italians and Cuomo Italians." 20 years ago Boro Park was filled with Sinatra Italians. Now they had been replaced by Central Americans, Dominicans (the shortstops, not the nuns), and Chinese-Americans. The Hasidic population had expanded a few blocks to the west as well. After a few hours of walking, I needed to find a bathroom and a payphone. Both were difficult to find. Boro
Park does not have many places with bathrooms which are available to the public, and payphones have gone the way of door-to-door salesmen, because everyone has a cellphone these days. Just as I was about to burst, I remembered the branch of the public library I used to frequent. I could use the bathroom there. I could not remember though whether it was on Forty-Second, Forty-Third, or Forty-Forth Street. I could not find anyone who I was sure would speak English to ask either. Finally, I spotted an African-American mail carrier.
"Excuse me, can you tell me where the branch library is?"
"Child! I am so new on this route, I don't even know what street I'm on!"
I found my library, and bathroom, a block away, on Forty-Third Street. Next I needed to fi nd a phone to find out where I was meeting a friend for supper. We have a standing bet. When we're together for a meal during baseball season, I buy the pizza if the Mets are ahead, he does if the Cubs are ahead. Miracle of miracles I found a working payphone, but my friend was unavailable. So I faced a dilemma, should I walk a little more and hope to find another working pay phone, or stay close to this one? I took a chance and walked to Sunset Park.
Sunset Park is on the western slope of Brooklyn. It looks out over the New Jersey and lower Manhattan skyline. It is really one of the city's hidden treasures. One strange thing about
Sunset Park is that you could only see one of the World Trade Center towers from there, because
they were in line with each other as you looked northwest. The view of the Statue of Liberty,
however, remains.
I found a second working payphone off Sunset Park and later made my way to Greenwich Village. I described the pizza as "ontologically different" from Chicago-style pizza. This, I thought was kinder, though less accurate, than calling it "vile."
Riding the subway again, walking the streets of lower Manhattan where I had worked and central Brooklyn where I had lived was an eerie, but satisfying endeavor. I did not feel as though I were visiting places where I had lived and worked twenty years before. I felt as though I were visiting myself twenty years ago. I remember what it felt like to be twenty-three, living on an island between the United States and Europe, as Spalding Gray described New York. I had not been aware of how young, wide-eyed, and free I had been then. Getting to visit myself in that place, at that time, was a moment of serendipity and grace.
I left New York on a Tuesday afternoon, thinking I would beat rush hour. By the time I went
from apartment to cab to ferry to parking lot I was in the thick of the New Jersey suburban gulag's
nightly traffic jam. I tuned in to public radio for an hour, then dug out "Audio Prozac." I commissioned Audio Prozac from a web-savvy friend. I selected thirty songs that make me happy the instant I hear their first notes on the radio. This is an eclectic mix of hip-hop, blue grass, mainstream rock and roll, and gospel. Many of these songs were popular in my preliterate days. I popped the music in and found, well, I was disappointed in the effect Audio Prozac had on me. It was as though I were trying to make a whole meal out of caramel corn. Ever notice how each handful of caramel corn is a little less enjoyable than the one before it? By the seventh handful, aren't you looking for someone to pawn it off on-I mean, share it with? That's how Audio Prozac felt. I love all these songs, but an unbroken diet of them was simply too much. As I passed into
Pennsylvania, I switched to country music, which was a little like getting a shot of insulin.
After returning from the East Coast and 1987, I had ten days to prepare for a class I was about
to take. I was back in town, but determined not to set foot in my office. I phoned the office staff, asked them to hunt down books I needed for my assignment, learned of pastoral prayer concerns,
and asked for the mail. I was determined not to return "behind" from sabbatical.
The staff rebelled, threatened to quit if I did not back off!
I was surprised and hurt by this revelation. And I soon understood that I was wrestling with my addiction to responsibility. A second after I identified this, a colleague waved and said, "Hi,
Tom!" as though we were at a twelve-step meeting. Being able to laugh with her, at myself, was a turning point in my sabbatical.
She also confessed that she suffers from "practical atheism," the creed that states, "Because
there is no god-I must step in and take the role!" I realized that if I were to be "away" I would have to accept that I would be "behind" when I return.
I was able to go from saying, "I suck at sabbatical!" to saying, "I'm taking a mulligan on my first month." I had two more months, and come heck or high water, I was going to get sabbatical
right!
I returned from class with two months left on sabbatical. I noticed a rattly cough when I was swimming in the lake with my sons. Lake swimming was a fascinating, disorienting experience. I left my hearing aids at the cabin and my glasses on the dock. I was in sensory deprivation. Still, I could look up and see shapes in the clouds with the same clarity as with my glasses. I had many Monet moments as the boys did cannonballs and scooped rocks and shells onto the dock.
It was difficult to embrace the non-productivity of the Sabbath. I did my best. Here's my July 5 to
do list:
AM pay electric bill
PM pick raspberries
A month later I was getting ready to attend my high school reunion when my rattly chest turned into bronchitis or tuberculosis-I wasn't sure. But I really could not remember ever feeling worse. I could not get to urgent care until the afternoon, so I decided to let my older son enjoy Dad's last few hours of life. I agreed to play Risk with him. He's eleven. Sartre wrote "No Exit" which contends that Hell is other French people. I'd put a different spin on Hell. It's playing Risk with an eleven-year old boy. I confess I was once eleven years old and played Risk. I know and understand the game and its strategy. This, and a stunning streak of fortunate dice rolls, explains how I managed to defeat a shrewd, fiercely-competitive, and wily adversary in this game of global domination. I beat my kid at Risk while running a 102 temperature! And we played to the bitter end. I controlled every square inch of the planet with my armies, as I horked up chunks of my lungs and popped Tylenol like jelly beans.
The physician at urgent care split the difference between my diagnoses. He informed me I had
pneumonia. I asked what restrictions I was under. He said I should not go back to work for a few
days.
"I'm on sabbatical."
"Oh, uh. Yes."
He did not say I should not drive to Peoria for my high school reunion in two days. So I did.
I had planned this trip exquisitely too. I put REO Speedwagon's "Decade of Rock and Roll," a two CD set into my car's sound system as I headed to the highway. In the summer of 1980, this had
been the soundtrack in Peoria, Illinois. REO is a fiercely average Midwestern rock band. Back then, they had toured for ten years, cranked out albums, but had never had a hit. They had millions of flannel-clad fans throughout the Midwest. Their lead guitarist was from Peoria, so we also had the "local boy makes good" angle. Decade begins with this insight:
I've seen women who cross their legs when they sit down to the table
And I've seen women who look to the sky screamin' ‘Lord I believe in the Bible'
Then it gets vapid, though the rhyming improves.
REO's "Decade" was the opposite of Audio Prozac. It didn't make me feel sixteen again; it made me nauseous. Loud and repugnant is how I'd describe their sound now. I was being kind when
I called them "fiercely average." Still, as with the Risk game, I stayed to the bitter end. I listened to all nineteen songs, over ninety minutes of bathos. When it was finally over, I felt like I had done my penance and was ready to spend a few hours with my high school chums.
I got to chat with Scott Zumbahlen. He sat behind me in algebra. Scott sat behind everyone in every class. I spent a lot of time near him in the alphabetical ghetto. It was in Mr. Higgins's
enriched algebra class in 1978, that Scott first hissed "smart ass" to me, just loud enough for me to hear. A few months ago an elder at my church chose the same epithet for me as we worked together in the kitchen one afternoon. I had a flashback to Peoria High School and quadratic equations. Sharing that story with Scott almost made the trip worth the time. Getting to visit the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile, as it made a rare appearance in West Peoria earlier in the day, sealed the deal.
Driving back from Peoria on a Sunday morning I felt two urgent needs as I merged onto I-80: more coffee and a good cry. I've learned to trust these sudden instincts so I found a gas station in LaSalle and popped "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" into the CD player. This 1973 album by Paul Simon contains "American Tune," which makes me cry without fail. Simon wrote it as a national lament during the Watergate scandal. It's based on Passion Chorale, the tune we know as "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded." I had forgotten that the first tune on the album is "Kodachrome," which begins, "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school..." I laughed till I cried. For the next fifty miles I drove trying to remember one thing I still knew from high school. The correct use of a semi-colon is about the extent of it. Oh, and the Pythagorean theorem.
Blackberries
I cannot say what I expected from sabbatical, having never taken one before. I tried to balance
structure and freedom. I think I expected a three month mountaintop experience, which is
completely unrealistic. For me, I get fifteen seconds on a mountaintop every few years, max. Still, I had a moment of insight and transformation while on sabbatical that I hope to carry with me through the months and years ahead.
Late on a Saturday afternoon, my family took a walk while I was away, and found many bushes
filled with wild blackberries. They returned home with their palms purple, and we decided to return
to the trove, appropriately dressed, the next day. Mary stayed home, but the boys knew where to
look. We found them huge, ripe, and beautiful about half a mile from our cabin. We started to fill
our containers. Sometimes we dropped a few, but there were so many we did not stoop to pick them up. "Some lucky squirrel will gobble that one and say, ‘Thank you, David!'" I told my son. For the rest of the morning we'd say, "Lucky squirrel!" when we dropped a berry. There were lots of berries. So many that we did not wade into the brambles very far. So many that we left those that were not quite ripe, or had some bad spots on them. We had enough for our pancakes and muffins and to freeze to eat in winter, when a slice of a warm, sundappled July day would be just what we needed to remind us of the hope of spring.
I got to thinking about gleaning, the Old Testament harvest practice of leaving some produce
in the field, not picking up what is dropped. I always had regarded this as a sort of Hebrew
welfare program, but I saw a different aspect of it this morning. Not picking every last fruit is a way
that the harvester can express trust in God. It's as though he says, "The harvest is so bountiful I can leave some; I don't need it all for myself." Gleaning, I realized, for the landowner, is an expression of trust in God. "Lucky squirrel" is an expression of trust in God.
Then I saw that the Sabbath itself is a practice to deepen and cultivate trust in God. "God cares for me so well, that I can stop working and producing once a week. God's love doesn't stop, so I can." These insights flooded me as I stood up to my waist in thorns in rural Waushara County. On a Sunday morning, right about 10:00 AM, when the supply preacher would be standing in the pulpit I usually occupy in Oshkosh.
Being able to trust him for his professionalism, my congregation for letting me be away for three
months, and God for providing such an abundance of fruit and grace were surprising, life-changing gift s. I could be away and free and disengaged and leave behind my responsibility addiction and practical atheism and just be. Thanks be to God, I could just be.
This column first appeared in The Cresset,published by Valapraiso University, Advent/Christmas 2007