Triptych. April Vinding

      Triptych

      Copyright © 2016 April Vinding. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

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      paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9253-5

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9255-9

      ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9254-2

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

      Epigraph from “St. Thomas Didymus” by Denise Levertov, from A Door in the Hive, copyright © 1989 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing.

      The quotation regarding the Grand Inquisitor comes from page 243 of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Constance Garnett, published by W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1976.

      The French quotation is John 21:25 from La Bible Du Semeur (The Bible of the Sower) Copyright © 1992, 1999 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

      For Ella Joy, who restores hope.

      May you grow in the hum and be spared the clatter.

      I witnessed

      all things quicken to color, to form,

      my question

      not answered but given

      its part

      in a vast unfolding design lit

      by a risen sun.

      Denise Levertov, “St. Thomas Didymus”

      Prologue: 3

      Triptych always sounded like something to stumble over, edges to catch the nails on your toes and the jab of a turned ankle on the brink. A cozy, disturbing similarity to ‘cryptic.’ But the shape itself is not a secret.

      ‘Trinity’ says this faith is full of threes. A number with both points and curves—where each always seems to look like the other until, open, you find yourself hanging from a sheet metal angle stuck under your ribs or, armed, you’re whirled open by a satin curve, spun on your seat, looking right back where you came from.

      ‘Triad’ says this faith is bound. If two heavenly bodies, one pull to the core. If two coals on the earth, one flash in the sky. Burn oak, it will amber; burn ether, there’s azure. There’s no way to keep the fuel from coloring the flame. So I’ve looked at the fuel, and chosen. Looked at the flame to choose.

      ‘Triune’ says competition is not the problem. Instead, it’s the clutter—all that collects inside the angles.

      The shape of this faith is a triptych all its own: maybe a reflection of what should be worshiped, maybe an object of art all by itself. But even if this structure is a picture of the divine, it’s painted on wood with squeaky hinges. Some days, it seems ridiculous there need to be lines etched on to show where the figures are looking. Other days, those scratches are the only guides I have to God. But what the shape means is I can’t really call my faith a journey—this is not a pilgrimage down a narrow road. Because of this divine shape, faith is a container that holds a match: a puzzle, a flame, a fight.

      When I wonder about the struggle—to fit a shape, a name, an expectation—I wonder if my struggle will end up being my proof. Because struggle needs a preposition: with. I’ve been angry with God, crushed, lovesick, offended, but it’s always been something. Faith has been a puzzle about, a flame for, a fight to.

      I don’t know what follows the prepositions. But I do notice the three: the article that makes singular, the noun that makes tangible, the preposition that makes motion. Phrases with both points and curves. I’ve found myself hanging from sheet metal angles, and now, full of scars, I’m whirled open by a satin curve, looking back where I came from.

      As I look back, I see more than I saw the first time through. The edges of this altarpiece are neither right nor varnished, but I can see the interfolding, overlapping leaves. More lines than I’d like point to me than to God. And I don’t know yet if what’s burnished shows only my hands worrying the holy. What I do know is this: this puzzle, this flame, this fight makes a shape with counterpoint. As much as others might say (and I would say myself) parts are far from worship, this faith has been an instrument of something: a shape with just enough tension to hold me in.

      Fathers

      Surrounded for miles by cornfields and woodlands, the farm was a worn spot in a pair of old jeans. Dusty and threadbare in the center—where gravel showed through like the knee-skin of the earth—the house, barn, and garden were stitched around the grass fringes under the crisp and stacked Minnesota sky. The mile-long driveway spooled from the square seam of the county roads to the house: a piece of worn 70s embroidery, the best efforts of a 23-year-old farm wife to craft style from hand-me-downs and a little colored thread. The barn, corrugated steel with button ventilation chimneys, sat outside the homemade curtains and past the yard and its rusting and prized swing set. The garden, a calico quilt square, laid in leafy stitches on the bottom side of the gravel scuff, a never-ending sampler.

      Corn and soybeans in the fields, foxtails and wild grapevines in the ditches, the wind making everything wave just a little, the sun and the sky making smells: this place is the first home I remember.

      The farm was tired, but the little family in it, mine, marched to the blooming of tomato plants and the drying of the tasseled corn. The fields were our calendar, marking days and seasons as they checkered the land, and the farm itself our timepiece, the round face of hours circling barn, garden, home. And as much as it’s been said before, it was true. This place was my first world: the canvas and the blank staff, the open book, the unrecited chant. It was, as Eliot says, the place we start from.

      My father, slim and brown, his loose hair wavy and faded like his jeans, roamed the hazy light of the barn in the early mornings. In his spattered Red Wing work boots and Pioneer cap, he moved though the rows of sow stalls under the low ceiling, hot when the afternoons were hot and stoic when it was cold. A red paisley handkerchief hung out his back pocket for wiping his hands and glasses, the square brunette plastic of the 70s, and a pair of work gloves flopped from his right jacket pocket. If you caught him in the late afternoon in the dusty air of the barn, standing in the corridor of hay and rust-colored gates, it was hard to find him, to pick him out. Not because, like some men, his work suited him so well, but because he blended in with the light. Maybe it was simply he was as dusty as the air around him, but looking for him I always had to start down low, let my eyes run across the straw-scattered floor, and find his shoes: brown, scuffed, solid. Then, there he’d be, looking back at me, some kind of far-off question in his eyes.

      I always had to search to find my father. In the barn in my elastic-waisted jeans or at church in a cotton floral dress and patent leather shoes, it wasn’t hard for me to see him, but it was always the seeing of watching. Watching him stand in a brown suit by the carpeted stairs of the sanctuary and nod in conversation with a few of the men, the deacons, his brows furrowed over marble-blue eyes. Or watching him jog over to help