*During my separation and divorce 3-5 years ago, The Hoosier Contrarian blog became a bit of a raw diary of that painful journey. The response from people touched by those posts was rewarding. Organizers of Anderson University's Faith & Writing Conference were also apparently reading those posts. They asked me to come lead a workshop at last weekend's conference about memoir and self-confessional writing. Seemed like a good time to reshare an old post that I used last Saturday in my class at Anderson.
The Foundling Wall, June 2013
In Medieval Europe foundling wheels
came into use. They were lazy-susan-type devices built into the outer wall of a
church as places to abandon babies. Mothers who couldn’t keep an infant, whose
lives were too fractured to accommodate it’s tending could place their child
within the wheel from outside the church and then turn the wheel, transferring
the child safely inside where a priest would find it. It was a way to let go of
a precious burden without doing it physical harm.
The wall of the building where these
devices were installed came to be known as foundling walls.
I’ve gone through separation and
divorce in the past 2 years and been handed self-help books from friends during
this time, but nothing spoke more directly to me than Thik Nhat Hans book
“Reconciliation.” It’s not about reconciliation in marriage, but personal
reconciliation with the inescapable realities of life.
I dog-eared a page that lists the
Buddha’s Five Remembrances and underlined one that struck me deeply:
“All that is dear to me and everyone
I love are of a nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated
from them. I cannot keep anything. I came here empty-handed, and I go
empty-handed.”
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| The Chua An Lac Buddhist temple in Indianapolis |
In the Vietnamese temple in Indianapolis
where I’ve spent many recent Saturday mornings, we’re called to meditate on a
simple counting from 1 to 10 to clear our mind of chaos. I did that for a long
time, and still do. But Thik Nhat Hans called for meditating on well-wishing,
compassion for others, and letting go of personal burdens. I went time and
again to those two “Remembrances.” And so I’ve spent many of those meditation
sessions within the towering temple, with the Buddha before me, making small
mental journeys to a foundling wall in my mind to give away the things I can no
longer tend. The things that are not really mine.
I made up my own rules about the
foundling wall.
The foundling wall is a place where
you let go of a piece of yourself, a part that speaks to your soul, something
you conceived or nurtured with love and diligence – but that has become a
painful burden to your or others you love. No one can force you to the
foundling wall. To have something taken is theft. You have to give it freely.
And no one can make the journey for you. You must go to the wall of your own
resolve, and you must go alone.
I am a persistent person, often
persisting beyond reason and logic. During my divorce I was hurt repeatedly by
a two close friends who had a hard time accepting it. I kept trying to reclaim
or nurture these fractured friendships — beyond reason and logic, blowing on
the flickering embers of our connections, offering olive branches only to have
them slapped from my hand or left to wither. At the same time I complicated the
friendships by forcing my own need for reassurance upon my friends’ hurtful
actions. I eventually saw I needed accept that we wouldn’t really be friends
anymore, but simply acquaintances. That was hard to do — to accept that two
people I loved and shared so much with would not be my close friends any
longer.
But there was peace in letting go of
those relationships, peace found in going to that foundling wall in my heart,
kneeling down and laying those friendships in that turret-like device,
symbolically turning it and letting them go. No pronouncement is needed at the
foundling wall, just resolve to love and feel compassion for things you
relinquise.
and count to 10 . . . and count to 10
. . . and count to 10 . . .
It’s not just a Buddhist calling. I
learned it first as a Christian prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to
accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and
wisdom to know the difference.”
While many parents of the middle ages
were no doubt driven to the foundling wall by desperation, others must have had
ample time to reflect and understand that while they could physically keep and
care for the child, was not enough, there was something in the failing of their
stars and their circumstances that would hurt the child. I can’t imagine their
personal journey. But I can imagine mine.
I am a trained carpenter. I build
things. There are many things in my home I’ve built with my own hands, like an
oak porch swing. I designed it in my own mind, imagined its form, the joints,
the flush-finished brass screws polished smooth with the sanding of the wood.
It would all be built from wood I’d salvaged over the years, every piece pulled
from a dumpster or garbage can. The discarded chalk tray from a school where I
once taught would be the back rail of the seat. A stack of half-inch oak slats
pulled from a garbage can would make the seat bottom and the back. Pieces of
baseboard from a demolished house would make its armrests. Then I built it. For
years my children sat there as I read to them when they were small, or they
swung hard and wild with childhood friends, pumping their legs with reckless
abandon, laughing, or they curled up and napped there on a long summer
afternoon, or cuddled with their first love as a teenager. Many of my friends
drank beer on that swing on warm summer nights and many a thunderstorm was
watched from that swinging seat while lightening crackled across Old Town.
It’s a small item in the scheme of
things, but a precious child of mine none-the-less. And so in yet another way,
I knelt at that foundling wall in my heart, the place I take the things I
cannot keep, no matter how much I want to. And there I gave it away. It was not
mine. Even though I conceived and built it, it was never really mine. I am
grown up enough — just barely, to do such a thing – to let go of yet
another piece of my identity.
and count to 10 . . . and count to 10
. . . and count to 10 . . .
But then a miracle!
An email arrived one day from my ex
saying, “Why don’t you keep the porch swing? It belongs with the house.” She
too has been to the foundling wall, the one in her own heart. And suddenly I
find myself on the interior, receiving side of the wall while she kneels
outside. I hadn’t imagined the easy return of this thing whose loss I had
totally accepted.
But be warned: you can neither count
on nor dare imagine the return of things left at the foundling wall. If you are
prone to such mystical hopes and magical thinking, as I have been most of my
life, then you do not belong at the foundling wall. Best keep clinging against
reason to things that aren’t yours than to relinquish them as an emotional
gimmick bundled to corrosive hopes of reclamation.
There are so many people and things I have said goodbye to
at the foundling wall these past two and a half years; family members,
friendships, and possessions I’d nurtured with love and attached great
expectation to. But that trying journey is now in the past. Regular, relatively
peaceful day-to-day life surrounds me now and lies ahead as far as I can see. I
knew that life once before, and it has returned to me now, in part because of
the things I let go of.
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