Segullah's Blog, page 46

Map to the Land of Well

February smacked me in the face, hitting me squarely between the eyes and sending shockwaves to my brain to communicate this angry, urgent message: Get a grip on your routine! Don’t you know the holidays are over? Don’t you know how much you have to do?

 

While many people have spearheaded ambitious goals for the year, begun and already given up, or perhaps already forgotten what they committed to, I am in the special category of having the most ambitious of intentions that have stayed dormant, fermenting until turning noxious. After the delirium of Christmas, the fog of eating too much cheese, the wondrous delight of losing track of what day it is, a dangerous root has taken hold of me. My mental health has taken a familiar, downward tilt.

 

Perhaps it is the dark, short days.

Perhaps it is the apocalyptic cold.

Perhaps it is my busy class and work schedule.

Perhaps it is my ongoing family responsibilities.

Perhaps it is the overwhelming crush of feeling perpetually behind.

Perhaps it is me.

Perhaps it just is.

 

On a recent bad day, I watched every Netflix episode of a show featuring the famous Marie Kondo’s tidying up method. She repeats the question all of us who haven’t even read the book recognize as her mantra: Does this spark joy?

 

I balk a little. My slippery days and mountain of to-dos do not spark joy; I cannot hold them to my chest, thank them, and throw them away with the trash. But I am no stranger to joy either, and I want a map to get back to the land of well.

 

After talking with my therapist and consulting with a friend who is an expert goal-achiever, I came up with a plan. I made a list of small, daily habits—some I used to do, some that are new—to get back into a routine. A routine is all I ask for right now. Through a routine, I hope to develop the habits that will make space for joy.

 

I am starting small, with manageable steps like wash my face each night. Then, I will gradually add in my heavier goals like write every morning. I scavenged the internet for a mini calendar with landscapes from Ireland, a place that inspires me. Think of a rewards chart, but for adults. I bought some ridiculous, joy-sparking stickers of mermaids and unicorns to help motivate tracking each habit. I placed some of my favorite poems and quotes and pictures above my desk. Even though the mountain feels like a mountain, a sticker is just a sticker, and I know there will be more difficult days ahead where I don’t feel up to the challenge, I feel for the first time in a while that I can do this.

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Breaking the Silence: Surviving Incest

I am a sexual abuse and incest survivor. My abuser was my best friend. She was my sister.

A few years ago when the #metoo movement began, I thought, So many women I know have suffered sexual abuse: sister-in-laws, neighbors, friends. My brain kept insisting, Not me. But then it all came back. The dam broke.

I’ve been in denial for decades.

“You see, I very much did not want to open a door that could not be closed. I wanted to get on with my life. I feared destroying by my becoming conscious of these things the hard-won and fragile peace in my family, and I was hanging on to the hope that I was making all of this up.”

–Chieko Okazaki, “Healing from Sexual Abuse”

I was eleven when it started. I remember several incidents. The abuse occurred in my family home. My sister was thirteen, I was eleven. It grieves me that my sister played a formative role in my sexual life. Not my first love, not my first boyfriend. My sister.

At first the abuse didn’t feel like abuse; in time it became systematic. She created a code to signal when to meet her privately somewhere. My older sister wanted to spend time with me. She liked me. She pulled a younger cousin into it, too. Finally, one day I told her no. She never bothered me again.

Only recently did I learn she abused my younger brother and sister, too. I want to scream and kick and cry. I wish I’d known. Could I have saved them? I don’t know.

Often, abuse is passed on. This is true in my case. A boy sexually abused my sister one day at our elementary school. It was a newer suburban school in a new area of town with great teachers and funding. It happened anyways.

My mom switched us to another elementary school. My sister cried every single morning when we were dropped off. I didn’t understand why she cried but now realize she was suffering PTSD. She didn’t know how to cope with the abuse she received, couldn’t process it. I’m not sure how my parents helped her. She never went to counseling.

A few years after her abuse, she began acting out sexual abuse scenarios with the closest people she knew: her younger siblings including me.

Fast forward to today. My sister/abuser is happily married in the temple and has held several leadership callings in the church including Relief Society President. She’s moved on. I don’t know if she’s ever addressed the abuse she caused or received. She’s never said sorry.

When I see her a few times a year, we pretend everything is fine. However I’m not OK. I’ve never confronted her. I’ve never seen my bishop or talked with a counselor. I’m terrified to tell my parents. When you’re abused as a child, the memory haunts you. You try to convince yourself it didn’t happen, pretend it was a nightmare. You have to come to terms with the fact that your innocence was ripped away. You can’t rewind time.

The fall out from abuse is real. Now as a wife and mother, I have issues with trust and control. I worry about my children’s safety. No one is safe enough: neighbors, church friends, old friends, new friends, my own father. I constantly ask my kids, “Who’s house are you going to? Who are the parents? Do they have siblings? How well do we know them?” I study self defense and safety manuals. I wonder, “How can I protect my children from possible abuse?”

I believe in eternal families which means I’m linked forever with my sister, my abuser. Despite my grief about this, I’ve recently found comfort and healing through Christ.

In Luke 3:5, there is a beautiful passage:

“Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways shall be made smooth.”

When I read that, I felt incredible peace, knowing that through Christ and his atonment we can heal, forgive, and move on. A thirty-year weight has been lifted from my heart and my soul. I can’t explain it. I was prepared to go to dozens of counseling sessions and muck through this. But my deep grief is now gone.

I testify to you that this happened through Christ. Through Christ we can become whole again. We don’t have to carry around the weight of abuse and damage that has been done to us. We can acknowledge it, even forgive, and move on.

My sister is not leaving my life. I love my family. I will forgive her, I already have. I just have to pick up the phone.

 

Links:

Lds.org: Can I heal from this?

Chieko Okazaki, “Healing from Sexual Abuse”

Previous Segullah blog post: Please Consider Trauma Therapy for Sexual Abuse

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Finding Myself in the Temple

The first time I went to the temple I felt the Spirit. And I was also baffled. Stumped. Confused that the big mystery of temple worship was at once more simple and far more complicated than I had ever imagined.

I returned as often as I could before my mission and tried to figure out all the different layers of symbolism at once. This did not work. I returned after my mission and tried to figure out one thing at a time. Sometimes I would get a new flash of insight. Sometimes not.

As I became busier and less able to attend with the frequency I wanted, when I returned I tried to just feel the Spirit and receive revelation for needs in my life right then. This frequently succeeded. To feel the Spirit in the temple I had to take on faith that the endowment was real, and let it wash over me, absorbing what I could.

After over twenty years of attending the temple, I still don’t get it all. Or maybe I should say instead, I am still learning. But I want to share three ways that I have found myself in the temple.

1-The temple locates me in the context of the Plan of Salvation.

Several years ago I wrote a post about President Packer’s Talk “The Great Plan of Happiness,” given in 1993 to CES Educators. He says:

You will not be with your students or your own children at the time of their temptations. At those dangerous moments they must depend on their own resources. If they can locate themselves within the framework of the gospel plan, they will be immensely strengthened.

I love this. Once I began to see the endowment through the lens of the Plan of Happiness, it made more sense to me. As I wrote in that post,

“every time I think the Plan is too easy, that I’ve heard it since Primary, I step back and find more depth there.”

2-The temple locates me in the context of the House of Israel and the Abrahamic Covenant

As President Nelson began to emphasize the gathering of Israel, and our role in that gathering, I felt a little… I don’t know. Embarrassed is perhaps not the right word. All the stuff about Israel seemed distant to me, and vaguely weird. Why do we need to believe that, when we could focus on a basic love your neighbor sort of gospel, which is much more user friendly and less hard to explain? Why does gathering scattered Israel need to be a thing we actively discuss, instead of a sort of quiet byproduct of Good Things We Are Already Doing?

And yet, rereading the Book of Mormon I’ve been paying more attention to the phrases “the House of Israel” and “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” which are repeated over and over. God has not forgotten His covenant with the House of Israel. And me, I’m a part of it too. President Nelson says:

That gathering is the most important thing taking place on earth today. Nothing else compares in magnitude, nothing else compares in importance, nothing else compares in majesty. . . . When we speak of the gathering, we are simply saying this fundamental truth: every one of our Heavenly Father’s children, on both sides of the veil, deserves to hear the message of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

The more I ponder this the more humbled I become–in the latter days temple ordinances are available to every worthy member, as opposed to anciently, when they were available to prophets. I am part of the House of Israel, part of the promises God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Temples both place me in the context of those ancient and eternal blessings, and give me the opportunity to gather Israel on both sides of the veil.

3-The temple locates me in the context of my earthly and eternal family

This last one is painful, because earthly families are messy and challenging and hard. I almost don’t want to mention it, because I know so many people who are hurting. It hurts when spouses or children don’t keep covenants, and it hurts when you’re not able to be sealed in the first place, for so many reasons.

I have to acknowledge the pain.

I also need to witness my own truth, my own lived experience: I felt complete joy and peace kneeling opposite my husband on our sealing day. I feel that same joy performing sealings for family names. I don’t understand it, but I trust that the joy is real, that it is now and will eternally be more real than any earthly pain or loss.

I will continue to return to the temple, to find myself in the Plan of Happiness, in the House of Israel, and in my own earthly and eternal family.

How have you found yourself in the temple?

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Grandma’s Desk: A Mingled Artifact of Family and Church History

My grandmother’s secretary desk moved into my home last week. An heirloom of both classic and outdated beauty, its story has made me wonder for as long as I can recall.

One of Grandma Leone’s beaux presented the fold-down desk to her as a gift in the early 1930s. When I learned this origin as a little girl, I couldn’t understand why Grandma kept such a big, expensive token from someone who courted her before she married Granddaddy. It seemed almost as scandalous as impossible. Grandma? A young woman with multiple suitors? [image error]

But I was glad she’d kept this marvel of carpentry. Peering inside its tiny compartments and drawers felt like sharing secrets.

From this desk, Grandma sent letters and Christmas and birthday cards. She let me slide the adhesive backs of her postage stamps against the damp, red sponge in its clear, round dish that held centerpiece prominence on the inner shelf. [image error]Hindsight tells me Grandma also didn’t need my “help” moistening and pasting strips of yellow Top Value and S& H Green trading stamps into crooked rows inside redemption booklets. But she made me feel important as I worked alongside her. In those moments, Grandma’s desk became not just part of her history but of mine as well.

Decades earlier, this well-used assemblage of wood and hardware filled an unusual role in church history. From this desk, Grandma fulfilled her duties as the clerk of her branch. Yes, she served as the official clerk, a role seemingly held only by men.

In her corner of the Carolinas, my grandmother kept the financial and membership records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At this desk. Inside this desk. I wish I knew more, had asked more, but those who recall those days are beyond my reach.

Though forty-some years have passed since Grandma’s death, when her desk arrived at my house, in one drawer I found a brittle, 3×5-inch, leather loose-leaf notebook with a few narrow, yellowed pages. On the first, I read penciled in the same slanted writing familiar to me from treasured, handed-down recipes:

11-7-48

Precept and Example 

of Jesus in

Compassionate Service

Following Christ[’]s Patterns,

spiritually and temporally

we find in Matt. 6:1-4 …

[image error]My mother and uncle would have been young children then, barely old enough for baptism yet unbaptized. In those days, Granddaddy, a man of goodness but never a churchgoer, would not allow it. He did, however, permit Grandma to take the children to one church meeting per week.

And she did so. Faithfully. Grandma didn’t drive, so she walked my mother and uncle into town every Sunday morning. They rode a bus to the nearest town with a congregation and walked to the community hall rented by the church branch. After the Sunday school service (which in those days also included partaking of the Sacrament), they reversed the journey homeward.

All my life, I’ve seen the fruits of Grandma’s consistent efforts to live and teach the patterns of Christ-like service to her children in those long-gone days. Now, seeing Grandma’s words in her own hand, inside her desk, within my home, refreshes my desire to do the same.

(For a more about Grandma Leone, see A Tale of Two Grandmothers.)

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Words Fall In: Segullah Podcast Featuring Catherine Arveseth on Mary Oliver

January 2018 came in with a blizzard (where I live) and ended with the Super Blood Wolf Moon. It also ended with the death of the poet, Mary Oliver. We mourn her loss. We wanted to honor her at Segullah, so this podcast features an interview with Catherine Keddington Arveseth, one of her most devoted followers, discussing her works and what Mary meant to us. Catherine gives a beautiful tribute to this amazing poet. This interview was so moving to me, that I had a little cry…don’t worry, I edited it out, but I think you can still hear my heart. You can find Catherine at her blog wildnprecious.com.

https://segullah.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/catherinearvesethfinalsegullah.mp3

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Faith and Doubt – a dream

And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water

And He spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower

And when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him

He said, “All men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them”

Leonard Cohen

I had my little family out on the sea in our trusty, seven generations tried, little boat. We loved this boat! It didn’t look like much but it had gotten us to where we needed to go for over 100 years! Sure there were flaws – some big, some small, but we worked on them and often those flaws worked out! The captain even said, there had been mistakes, published the mea culpa on the website, and said we know better now how to steer the boat. Looking to the past, it was easy to be on the faith side, because it wasn’t effecting us right now.

Then our son, our most wonderful, kindest, big hearted, smartest son, said he was gay. Something we had known for a long time but now he knew too. The captain said, you are welcome to stay on the boat, of all passengers, we should be the kindest to gay people, only one thing – you can never hold the hand of someone you love, or kiss them, or for heaven sakes, marry them! Suddenly the water offered turned rancid and the crackers stuck in our throat. We didn’t need Evian or Perrier or deli meats instead of crackers, we just needed some nourishment, any nourishment. We were starving. Worse we were watching our child starve.

Then our son jumped out of the boat. He said it was killing him to stay in the boat and we could see it was. Then his sister said, if he is going in the water, so am I! He’s my brother, and I won’t let him go this alone. One by one our children jumped, feeling their covenants of charity, fidelity, and commitment to the love of the Savior were the lighthouses, and they had to go by those first and foremost. Isn’t that what we had taught them? Isn’t that what the Captain had taught them? After all, God, the potter, had created this son, who were we to say He had done it wrong?

My husband and I remain in the boat, wondering every week if we should jump, if we are failing our children by not jumping. If we are failing the Savior by not jumping. Like the woman of Canaan, we keep faith, eating the crumbs fallen from the table. We are distressed by our children cast out into the wilderness, without a shepherd, swimming in a giant sea to find their way alone. We feel very misunderstood by the Captain and wonder if our beloved ship has lost its way. We doubt.

We trust the sea will free us. We trust He can walk on water. We trust He will reach down and grasp us, all of us, every knee, even though we may be of little faith.

 

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Weed or read? Why not both?

I have a confession that might horrify some of my author friends: I don’t buy very many books. Last year I read 107 books, but I only bought 6. In my family, we are readers and book lovers, but maybe not book owners—a fact that tends to surprise some of my friends who know about my education, my job at a library, and my serious reading addiction. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit during the last week as I’ve observed the latest internet tempest in a teapot brought on by an apparently incorrect interpretation of Marie Kondo and her organizing philosophies.

To be clear, I have nothing against owning books or defining yourself as a “book person”. In the past, I defined myself in the same way and took pride in my growing collection, which I had to pack up and move to new apartments on a regular basis. I always apologized for the large stack of heavy boxes full of books, but that apology was laced with an undercurrent of pride in my status as an intellectual. Thankfully most of my moves were in and out of student housing, so most of those helping me were in a similar predicament when moving time came for them.

However, at some point along the way, I realized that I owned too many books. I had collected a number of books in the hope that my kids would pick them up and read them some day. I was a voracious reader as a child and loved perusing anything I could find, including the World Book Encyclopedia and large-format history books from National Geographic. However, none of my kids have inherited that propensity, and while they love reading, they prefer to get their books from the library  and watch National Geographic videos on YouTube. We’d also accumulated too many picture books that no one wanted to read, as well as beat-up used paperback fiction that was fine the first time, but didn’t need to hang around.

It definitely sparked joy to haul oversize, outdated reference works to the thrift store and to chuck some of the well-loved Dora the Explorer phonics readers in the recycling bin (I did a little happy dance that my kids have all outgrown “Hop Like a Tree Frog”). Other books are sticking around for the time being, even the Spanish-language short story collections that I have to admit I’m never going to re-read now that graduate school is far behind me. Perhaps in another ten years they will no longer spark joy when I reevaluate my collection, but for now they are still on my shelves.

At the same time, numerous studies have shown that children become stronger readers and do better in school when they are raised in homes with access to books. Last year I updated the carpet my family room and had to pack up all my books for a few months; I was surprised by how much I missed them and what a relief it was to have them all back in place on my new shelves. I felt joy after getting them back out of their boxes, and my kids have delighted in re-discovering many of the picture books they had forgotten about. As any librarian will tell you, re-evaluating and refreshing your collection (and thoughtfully removing some books) will renew its use.

Books are a miraculous invention and I wish that everyone in the world spent more time reading. Maybe you love buying books. Maybe you are a regular library patron and all the stacks of books in your home are borrowed. Maybe you combine both strategies. Whether you own 30 books or 30,000, it really doesn’t matter that much. Just be thoughtful about what you keep around, and if those books are weighing you down, it’s OK to get rid of some of them. As long as you keep reading, everything will be fine.

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Binding to the pasture, Chaining to the plow

There is a lovely song called “Homeward Bound” that you may be familiar with. It’s an expression of the ancient, existential longing for freedom–from expectation, from a life determined by birth and circumstance, and ultimately, from home. But in the song, this longing is coupled with faith that freedom will not result in abandonment. There is a certainty of returning home.

These are the lyrics to the chorus:

Bind me not to the pasture,

Chain me not to the plow.

Set me free to find my calling

and I’ll return to you somehow.

My scripture reading the past year has been a return to the pasture, so to speak, after some wandering (and wondering). It’s still early in the cycle of my current season, and I’m not sure yet what it will yield. One of the lines from October conference that most resonated with me was from Elder Uchtdorf’s talk–a line where he described belief not as a painting to be admired, but a plow that we take into the fields and use to create furrows for seeds. This concept of belief (and by extension in my mind, religion and all that it encompasses) as a tool to be wielded rather than a prescription to be swallowed felt empowering to me. Empowering and rich with agency.

At the same conference came Pres. Nelson’s challenge for the sisters to read the Book of Mormon (among other challenges). Others have written about their experiences regarding this challenge both here on Segullah and elsewhere, but at the risk of beating a dead horse (as well as seriously overworking a rural metaphor), I thought I’d briefly describe mine.

In short, I didn’t want to do it. I was happy with, and even felt led to, my current path of study and didn’t want to disrupt it for a fire-hydrant-like three months of gulping the Book of Mormon. Pres. Uchtdorf’s words kept cycling through my mind, and I had to decide how to use the tool of my reading time.

In the end, I decided on a compromise. Rather than read the Book of Mormon, I decided to start reading a commentary on it that I bought a few years ago and have been meaning to get to but had never cracked open. It wouldn’t be the same thing as doing the challenge, but it would help me think about and hopefully gain a better appreciation of the Book of Mormon.

The first morning I opened the book I was greeted by the opening line: This book is a plow.

And with that, I started to cry. Because it felt like a message from God to my wandering, wondering heart that it was okay to be in this field and to choose my tools. It felt like a confirmation that I still belonged in this pasture, despite the sense I often have that I do not. It assuaged the guilt I felt at making a conscious choice to not “obey” the prophet (Is it really about obedience? Advice? Or simply accepting a challenge?), but making a choice that still reached toward light.

The risk of telling this or any story is, I think, the risk of people ascribing meaning. This little story isn’t meant as a statement on following the prophet. Rather, it’s a story about mercy. And for all of the things that I don’t know, there are a few that I do. That God is merciful is one of them. And that we long for both freedom and home, the road and the plow, is another. My hope is that we can be merciful with each other as we walk the edges of the two.

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Unseen Worlds: Interview with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell

It is my pleasure and privilege to introduce Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell. She is an LDS Haitian-American poet, painter, and short story writer. She is as brilliant as she is charming.

Her latest book is the memoir, Unseen Worlds: Adventures at the Crossroads of Vodou Spirits and Latter-Day Saints (Calumet Editions, 2018). It is an intriguing story of spiritual life from her Eurocentric, Catholic upbringing in Haiti to a quest that brought her in contact with Vodou priests, Catholic monks—even a pope—as well as bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ, and its young missionaries. It has received praise from The Boston Globe, among others.

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As a Haitian-American, how has your roots and childhood informed your writing and artistry as an adult?

For all of us, our roots are everything that is deep in the development of our sense of self. Childhood is when we are most ourselves and where we generate our first sensations and emotions, free of familial, social, cultural imperatives that later become so tightly intertwined with our inner self as to direct our thought patterns and choices. My most immediate sense of self was drawn and formed from the unique cultural and physical context of a Caribbean island.

Childhood is also the inexhaustible well whence we draw the most powerful and the freshest emotions that can be used for our creative work. Somewhere in us, we do remember that freshness, each child having his or her own incomparable quality. Artists naturally have, or evolve a way of going back to that original inner space and quality of being. Childhood is the time when we define for ourselves what trees, dogs, friends, or the feel of the land are. Cezanne made Mount Sainte Victoire his own when he was an adult. No other painter would attempt that subject; but Cezanne also grew up near that mountain. Van Gogh made sunflowers his own, and a pair of old boots; I am not sure what private connotations they had for him, but I believe that they must be somehow connected to his childhood, hence the power of those images.

As for my writing, it seems that what I write about Haiti is what people feel is the most compelling. I may find that some of my other writing is best, and it may be so, but there is an untranslatable emotion that people feel when I draw my subject from times in Haiti. I forget which famous writer said that past twenty years old, everything we do or create is a recall and a remake.

In Unseen Worlds, I speak about my early attraction to the divine world. And there again, one might understand the adult I am from the stuff of childhood. As a little girl, I was fascinated by the lives of Saints. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read about them. They seemed larger than life. Miracles impressed me. For the love of God, saints were able to suffer torture and face death with calm. Their words and lives spoke of something greater all around us, invisible yet present. They alluded to an indescribable paradise that awaits us. I was charmed, I was tempted, I wanted to follow them. It is no wonder that I later joined the “Latter-day Saints.”

Vodou is also a subject in my book. I worried a little about reactions to that part of my past. But there is no avoiding Vodou once you grow up in Haiti. It permeates everything with mystery. Magic filled the air we breathed. Vodou is a religion that began in Haiti when African slaves brought their gods, devotional practices and native traditions with them as they were forcefully transported on slave ships. Slaves were forbidden to worship their gods, but they cleverly got around restrictions imposed by French colonial masters by equating their various deities with Catholic Saints. They used symbols and imagery that African gods and saints had in common in order to secretly carry on with their ancestral devotions.

I approached Vodou to study it only as an adult, as a Berkeley University anthropology graduate. I grew up a strict Catholic. The wife of a Seventy told me that at first she was taken aback to see the subtitle that alludes to Vodou spirits, but then, while reading the book, she decided that I have the fearlessness of a true seeker—I searched and searched, and once I found, I acted on it.

There are several reviews of the book posted on Amazon. In one of them, Michael Kruger, a Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ wrote that, “This book sheds a much needed light on a misunderstood people.” I loved that sentence because he could be referring both to Haitians and to Latter-day Saints. I don’t know which he had in mind.

For those in our readership unfamiliar with your work, please share with us your literary background, influences, and the reason why you write.

My early childhood was in Haiti, in a French and a Creole-speaking environment. My adolescence was in France, and part of it spent in a boarding school in Saint Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. It is not until my twenties that I came to an English-speaking environment, had to learn another language, and re-invent myself. I wonder if immigrants or exiles like myself—people accustomed to re-inventing themselves in new cultures and thought patterns—are not people easier to convert than those people firmly rooted in their environments of origin. Going to France, and even though my mother’s whole family was there, was a shock to my sense of self. In a way, I had to relearn myself in relation to a new people who reacted to me as foreign, as different from them. It set me apart. It was lonely but I got used to it. Perhaps that very loneliness and sense of not quite fitting became part of my sense of self.

That being said, French was the language of my school education and the language spoken at home. It was clear from the start that I had a love for words, and for reading. French literature was my first exposure to literature, and it is through French writers that I developed a love for reading. No one equaled Marcel Proust in my admiration for the quality of language, while Guy de Maupassant taught me about short stories. Honoré de Balzac was formidable. Of course, Rimbaud and Verlaine were the poets I loved and wished I could equal. And of course, I have acquired new loves in English literature both in fiction and poetry. T.S. Eliott is unsurpassed.

I wrote my first poem as a child of seven maybe. It was about sunlight over the water of a stream running in our garden, and the tadpoles swaying in it. So I can say that I write because I learnt how to read, and to go from one to the other came naturally. I probably write because I found pleasure in it—delight in describing beauty around me and the feeling this very beauty arose in me; there probably is also, unconsciously, a certain cleansing, a certain shedding that come from articulating one’s experience. Flannery O’Connor (a great love of mine!) wrote, “I write to discover what I know.” There is unfathomable truth in that. All writers have expressed the sense of wonder to see what they wrote and create—realize what was hidden deep within the mind and the heart, bring it to light in an unusually beautiful form that redeems even the worst ugliness we have experienced or felt.

You are a multi-faceted artist, from writer and editor to painter. Your work spans genres, from memoir to poetry to short stories. How do you move between genres? That is, how do you pick which genre is the most suitable venue for what you have to say?

Both genres are separate in that one is not illustrative of the other. They are similar in that both creative forms stem from the same spirit—mine. They probably express the same character and concerns. One uses a visual vocabulary while the other uses words. My visual sense most probably informs the way I write and some of what I write, but I don’t think that the writing informs the visual.

I don’t decide on the suitable venue for what I have to say because I don’t decide what I have to say ahead of time. It presents itself. It was most obvious when I only wrote poetry. And then stories came from poems that needed more information; again the writing showed what was needed. And once you look, “What you know” presents itself. So most of what I write comes of itself, at least at the beginning. Once the process has started I become more or less conscious of what is going on.

I have sometimes written upon request, but it has not been often. The prologue story, “St Bernadette at Night,” published in my Iowa prize-winning collection, The Company of Heaven, came from a request to write about my first experience of reading for an anthology that never came to be. The anthology was supposed to be a collection of very short stories on that question, and gathered from a wide selection of writers. I wrote mine overnight. Perhaps it wanted to come out, and “divinity” sent out a request. I never heard from them again. I did not inquire either because I soon realized it fit well as a prologue story.

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Tell us about your latest book, Unseen Worlds: Adventures at the Crossroads of Vodou Spirits and Latter-Day Saints (2018, Calumet Editions).

When I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my bishop, knowing that I am a writer, suggested that I keep a journal of my conversion experience. I followed his advice. Every morning, before I was completely awake, yet no longer asleep, I would grab my computer and start writing; I put down whatever came to mind; I did not have an agenda. This was also the time when I began reading The Book of Mormon for the first time. I had joined the church in a sort of leap of faith. I soon realized there was a kind of magic operating inside me. I paid attention to the rise and change of feelings in me.

After several months, I read all that I had written. I was astonished. The unconscious had worked as a kind of conductor, and there was visible order there. I saw the potential of a book. Yet things were missing for it to be whole. So I spent the next few months adding sections. This led me to look back in my life. I began to meditate over my past, about the present and the new people it had brought me, and pondered about the future ahead within that new spiritual space. It is one thing to be moved by the theology, it is another to fit within the subculture that people have developed around it. I am a foreigner, an older woman without children, the only member of the church in my family—it was not an obvious fit. But no matter, I loved it all. The book took five years to be shaped in its present form.

I find that members of the Church of Jesus Christ are more than a religious people. They are mystics. They look for their own relationship with God. As a former Catholic, I had been taught to be dependent on the priest to direct me and interpret my emotions and needs. In the experience of writing this book, I grew with the people I became close to, and alongside the book.

This is however not a book about the Church of Jesus Christ, or about being a member of the church. This is my story. Joining the church is part of the whole.

Unseen Worlds is divided into two sections. The first one is called “Innocence” and the second one is called “Choice.” “Innocence” starts with childhood, and then recounts those parts of my life where I went from one thing to another, not really understanding what I was after, besides wanting to find God. I asked the usual questions: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Interestingly enough, life does somehow direct us. “Choice” is the section where the experience of conversion starts.

The book has been well received. A Boston Globe review called it “bewitching and memorable.” Other reviews all seem to agree that it is an intriguing, dynamic, wide-ranging story of my spiritual life, going from my Euro-centric, Catholic upbringing in Haiti to a quest that brought me into contact with Vodou priests, Catholic monks—even a pope—as well as bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ, and its young missionaries. Woven in between all the family and personal stories is the history of Haiti that includes my famous martyred godfather, a kind of Christ figure in my life, who died trying to free the country from dictatorship.

But a memoir is not a history of a whole life. If it tried to, it would be disjointed. I think that a life is a series of puzzles, not just one big one. A memoir therefore must select slices of a life, experiences that reveal themselves to be connected to each other by a common thread and within a particular theme. This connective process in one’s life is unconscious while it is going on, but a later introspection will show that there had been a divine conductor all along. So, I had to evaluate where I was going, but also where I had come from. I was inevitably brought to perceive the links between different parts of my existence. I connected the dots.

What do you see as the role of LDS writers in the larger world of literature?

Such a vast question! And as a relatively new member of the church, I don’t feel qualified to answer it in any meaningful or original way. Perhaps I could only say that the role of LDS writers in the larger world of world literature is not so different from the role of LDS people in the world at large. We are a missionary people. We want to share what we have because we value it, and also because we want it to be valued by others.

Literature is a kind of missionary tool. It influences people because it can touch their hearts. The heart is the most powerful entryway into a person. Dictators throughout the world have understood this, have shown their mistrust of it, have banned some of it, have destroyed a lot of it, or have used it for their benefit.

A simple way perhaps to answer the question is to say that since literature shows the heart of a writer, an LDS writer will help demystify the people that the world still largely thinks of as “the Mormons.” In expressing her/his dreams and disappointments, in describing her/his experiences or failures, the LDS writer can show the world that we are people, not freaks; that we suffer all that people suffer; that we make choices based on profound reasoning. The LDS writer can do what any writer from any part of the world does—namely enlarge the world’s knowledge about a particular culture, expand the world’s sensitivity to, and acceptance of a people who are distinct yet the same. In this way, the LDS writer can help fight the human tendency towards marginalization of those who appear foreign, and counteract world racism.

What are you writing next?

I have a novel-size manuscript ready for publication. It is called House of Fossils. More than writing something new, I might be busy with this one for a while. Yet I am not sure that I am ready to embark on a new publication just yet. My time has been swallowed with the demands from presenting and promoting Unseen Worlds to readers. It has drained my inner space. Still, a few days ago, something presented itself. I have been doing a lot of genealogy work since I converted. I finished my father’s side and am now working on my mother’s. All in all, I may have done ordinances for nearly 400 of my ancestors. My mother’s line goes farthest, and well into the 11th century. I had no idea. A cousin of mine in France sent me the charts, not knowing what I would use it for. A knight of Malta, staunch Catholic, he might not have sent it to me had he known how I would use it. It has been a great gift. The dead keep me company. I feel connected and less alone in the world. The working title of what I started writing is “Blessed Art Thou Among Women.” I hope it makes you smile…

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If you could interview any author from any time period, who would it be and why?

I would choose 1Nephi, the good child, the immigrant exile, the faithful one, and obedient. I choose him also because he would understand how I feel, and he could teach me how to overcome loneliness, the loss of one’s roots, and develop the courage to trust in the unknown. He knew what it was like to be a stranger to the land he has come to live in, and the land of the spirit to which he aspires, and whose laws he chose to obey. America is my foreign land whilst the church I have joined is my spiritual land.

At this point of my life, I am more interested in the quality of the person than the author. The best of what authors have to say is already in their books. I am more often passionate about a book rather than an author. Writers are uneven in their publications. Rather than someone I would interview, I am drawn to someone I could sit with, not talking; sit in the quality of a being; feel that person, rather than learn about that person. Let their eyes radiate inside me. I have outgrown the authors I loved, even whilst I still love them. I have learnt from them what I was meant to. I am more interested in becoming what I am not. I am already an author, so that is dealt with. What I am not is a selfless, perfected being in Christ.

1Nephi is such a perfected being. His presence would enrich me perhaps more than his words if I were to interview him. Authors are often people with huge egos. Their beings could prove disappointing. 1Nephi does not write out of vanity or some sort of neurosis of the self. Many brilliant writers do, and thus misuse the gift of tongues. From them we get much “philosophies of men.” On the other hand, 1Nephi writes, “I am not particularly interested in giving a full account of all things… because I need the room to write about the things of God.” (1Nephi 6:5). This moves me.

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An excerpt from Marilène’s upcoming book, House of Fossils.

In the Year 2004…

HOPING for the fog to lift, I entered the house in Spencer’s Island and set my luggage down. The wooden walls smelled of the sea, and mist seemed to hover just below the ceiling in a sparsely furnished room. Subdued hues of a late afternoon light filtered through windowpanes, and shimmered like silk floating over silence.

The silence came from fossils. They appeared to be waiting, standing in great number and order like an army maintained by a sharp-edged sense of time the color of slate. They were of all sizes, stiffly born on every shelf and flat surface or propped up in rigid alignment against the walls.

A petrified branch, lone remnant of some immemorial tree, ran across one side of the living room as if a spirit had once taken form in it and remained confined in matter for a boundless expanse of time. A wide, cut section of a fossilized tree trunk was stationed next to a solid-oak table that looked flimsy in contrast, despite its heavy legs. On an aged writing desk-table set in a corner, a high pile of yellowed books loomed over a delicate display of smaller fossil fragments. The spine of the hardbound book at the bottom of the pile read ”Design and Construction in Tree Drawings.”

I sat down.

It felt as if I was in the presence of a long lost friend whose features I was gradually being brought to recognize, not as much by sight as is commonly experienced, but with other senses…

… Saul and I stood in the small house filled with fossils, getting acquainted. After we agreed on the rent, we quickly found ourselves involved in a long, easy conversation that had recurring inner movements like the roll of waves outside. We spoke softly, exchanging confidences.

Strangely then, during that very first meeting, Saul and I revealed things that we might never tell friends, as if there were realms of the heart that people more easily open to a passing stranger in whose eyes we think we recognize the profound kindness and timeless patience we imagine exist in the infinite, thus finding words for inner substance that had pressured us imprecisely until then. We become charmingly articulate, suddenly keenly conscious of the perilous structures of thought that had built up in the organic secrecy of our being. It’s as if ghost stories heard in childhood occupy rooms in the mind where creatures remained trapped in an unsettled, inaudible existence, needing to be exhibited to light that would both disclose and disintegrate them. We leap at the opportunity to speak freely to an anonymous person in whose eyes we see our image reflected, and draw out of our inner sanctum the many beings through which we want to be construed and prefer to be remembered. And so, for someone we will never see again, we extirpate with inscrutable earnestness the hitherto inarticulate refinement of our unique soul.

We thereafter feel strangely confident that our secrets are safe because they are revealed to people for whom they mean little and by whom they will quickly be discarded as irrelevant to their own lives, or perhaps they will be guarded in unconscious layers of the mind in the same way children hide things under the mattress.

It may also be that, for certain thoughts to transform us, it only matters that they occur once. A lesson may be drawn from the spider that continuously recreates its web with new thread; the old thread, like an old thought, hangs until the wind blows it away elsewhere; the creature thus endlessly re-invents the way it is attached to the world and maintains its balance over it.

“You’ll find here what exists nowhere else,” Saul finally said…

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Marilène was born and raised in Haiti and has also lived in France. She studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with an M.F.A.. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Tanbou, and Ploughshares as well as numerous anthologies. She has donated paintings to the National Center of Afro-American Artists.

Her awards include the 2000 Crab Orchard Review Poetry Prize and the 1993 Grolier Poetry Prize. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bunting Institute, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and the Center for the Study of World Religions, all at Harvard University, as well as from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In May 2018, she was awarded the NAACP Award of Excellence for Outstanding Commitment in Advancing the Culture and Causes of Communities of Color.

For more information about Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell visit her blog here.

The post Unseen Worlds: Interview with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell appeared first on Segullah.

An Invitation to Listen

Today those of us in the United States are observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when we remember the legacy of the great Civil Rights leader. It is a time to reflect on Dr. King’s legacy and where we are as a country and individuals in our journey to become more Christlike in the way we treat others. In an interview we published with Cathy Stokes, she said:

“There remains an awkwardness in the Church regarding race relations. Wherever there’s awkwardness it has to be dealt with. Conversation will help to do that…We have to talk to each other. Reconciling with our brothers and sisters is an ongoing task. We are called to forgive 70 times 7. As a Church we are still a work in progress. But Truth, like Charity, never faileth.”

As Cathy said, we must have conversations with each other and do the hard work of listening and learning with real charity. Today I invite you to read a few pieces from our archive and ponder the experiences of some of our sisters in the gospel:

An interview with Cathy Stokes

An interview with Lita Little Giddens

An interview with Jenn Lee Smith and Zandra Vranes

And, finally, a blog post by Sherilyn inviting others to grieve with her and her family

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