Calliope

Photo by Joe Stephenson

“Where DID those words come from?” I first asked myself this question during the last conversation I had with my mother. It was Friday afternoon, April 18, 1986, and Jennie and I had just arrived at my parents’ home in Perry, FL. We were there because dad called me, mid-morning, while I was on my Snap-On Tool route in Valdosta, GA, and said, “You need to come home. Your mother’s not going to last much longer.”

It had been almost six weeks – precisely what the Dr. predicted – since her diagnosis of an inoperable, malignant, frontal lobe tumor. She was at home, in bed, as she had been for the past few weeks; sleeping more and more, taking more and more pain medicine to dull the pressure of the growing tumor on her brain.

Dad woke her when we arrived. He had to gently shake her to get her to open her eyes. “Baby, look who’s here to see you!” he said. Her eyes opened brightly, revealing a glow I hadn’t seen since I don’t know when. With the simplicity, reverence, and passion of a five year-old, she spoke quietly.

“What have y’all been doing?”

Without skipping a beat or even thinking, I responded, “We’ve been playing at work.” It was all I could do to keep my vocal chords from vibrating again with, “Where did THOSE words come from?”

She responded, “Well, I’m glad you’re here now.”

About 24 hours later, she breathed another one of those infrequent and desperate gasps for air, and then there were no more breaths to follow. She was gone.

It was years later before I remembered my final conversation with mom, but now I can almost hear it out loud. I’m not sure, but I believe the conversation’s return to my memory may have been triggered by another experience similar to the feeling I had after my answer to mom’s question surprised me, and I thought, “Where did THOSE words come from?”

Only this time, it wasn’t words creating sound waves picked up by nearby eardrums, but words written on the pages of a prayer journal. The more I engaged in and was engaged by contemplative prayer, the more my writings seemed to come from a place that was separate from my brain.

I would hear these words inside me and write them down, but when I went back to re-read them, I had no idea what they meant and no clue from whence they came. It was like my hand was forming the words and sentences without the conscious guidance of my brain.

The collection of thoughts, ideas, and writings began to pile up. When I began to transfer them to digital form, and then use the keyboard to create new ones, their numbers multiplied. First, there were dozens of pages, then hundreds, not including the ones I thought I had figured out enough to share with a group of 140 or so acquaintances via a weekly email I call “Tuesday’s Muse.”

I could sense a presence – a place from which it seemed these words came – and this presence has a life that seems independent from me, despite the fact that I could hear and feel it within me. That’s the source for the word “Muse”, and Tuesday became the default day of the week for the email distribution of these ideas.

Early on in this process, I began to notice my writings were often about things I hadn’t quite figured out. Sometimes, I’m not anywhere near figuring them out, so I go back to them over and over, re-reading them until some event, conversation, or circumstance in my life helps me to make sense of them. Some of these ideas are still works in progress within my life.

In hindsight, I am sometimes able to see, not only that the words precede my understanding, but they even lay the framework for the place where my heart and mind need to travel in order to find peace. It’s like an invitation to a party I know I want to attend, a destination toward which I have yet to discern navigation. The words articulate understanding, and my mind and heart are drawn, by them, toward places I didn’t know existed. These are often places I’ve dreamed about, but need help finding my way to in waking – in living, breathing, and loving.

You might call the voice laying these literary bread crumbs the Holy Spirit. I think that would be a prime suspect in this mystery. Do you know Calliope? 

         "Here rise to life again, dead poetry!

         Let it, O holy Muses, for I am yours,

         And here Calliope, strike a higher key,

         Accompanying my song with that sweet air

         which made the wretched Magpies feel a blow

         that turned all hope of pardon to despair."

                    (Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, Canto I,l.7 to 12)

Detail of “The Muses Urania and Calliope” by Simon Vouet

Whatever name we use to describe this voice, my hope is that its trail leads us to places where we can find and fulfill our created purpose, and where we can more richly share in the joyful abundance of one another’s lives.

© 2015 Todd Jenkins