On a summer afternoon in the late 1950s, my evangelical grandmother sat on her living room couch, finishing the final scenes of her favorite soap opera, As the World Turns, sponsored by Comet Cleanser. Unbeknownst to her, my brother David (11 years old) and I (12) were busy writing the "F word" on her blackboard above her rotary phone in the hallway beside the kitchen.
David and I were too young to know what the "F word" meant, except that it was one of those "bad words," and since we were feeling summertime naughty, we figured, "Why not write it on Grandmother's blackboard? What could it hurt?"
After we finished the job, David and I skedaddled through the kitchen and out the back door. We were on our way across Grandmother's front lawn when we heard her scream like she'd seen Satan himself leaning against her kitchen sink, sipping coffee like he'd been born to be right there.
"Dear God, dear God, what have you boys done!" She threw open the door and stood on the porch, wagging her finger and shrieking, over and over again, "Dear God, dear God!" as if somehow we'd managed to baptize ourselves in the breaching stream of original sin and doom our poor little souls forever. We ran down the dirt road underneath tall pines for 100 yards to our house, where we hid for the rest of the afternoon, pretending nothing had happened.
The brouhaha around caring for our doomed souls went on for a day or two until somebody finally decided that if we were going to avoid landing in hell, we both had to copy 500 times on lined school paper, "I will not write profanity on Grandmother's blackboard."
During the first hour of my spiritual renewal, I began to wonder if writing the same sentence over and over was the best way to care for my soul. I didn't know what the word "redemption" meant, but I did know that writing the same sentence over and over bored everything in me, including my poor little soul. During the last part of the second hour, I realized that being bored did little for my soul or me. By the time I reached the last line, I'd concluded that the best way to care for my soul was never to be bored again.
As you might have guessed, my goal of never being bored again was a rather soulful, albeit naive, little-boy aspiration. Even so, over the years, when I've encountered, as we all do, boring circumstances, like copying the same sentence 500 times, I think back to how much fun and excitement my brother and I had writing the "F word" over and over. We laughed when we ran through the kitchen door and out into the summer afternoon.
Even though we got caught and were sure our souls were doomed, I can tell you that all that soul-spirited F-bomb excitement in my grandmother's hallway was worth it. Even grinding out those 500 lines was worth it because somewhere in the second hour, my boredom gave way to the beginnings of insight, awareness, a love for all of life, and a sense of how to care for my soul, even during the most trying times.
Here's one way you can care for your soul. Give yourself over to your dazzle, your swagger, your cool, your electricity, your fire-breathing sword-swallowing days under the big top where trapeze artists soar and circus lights blaze.
Wet your hands, take yourself to the shallows, lower yourself gently in the easy flow. Move yourself back and forth, head to toe, until three bubbles of air emerge, and you regain your strength until finally, as if you were your own child, release yourself into the unreachable depths and velocity of the breaching stream.
James Navé is a poet, teacher of writing, and a member of the Order of the Rocking Chair.
