Trains and Other Vehicles of Mystery: Some Not-So-Quick Takes (and two bonus train songs)

It’s my turn to post some music videos.

First, I’ll see Simcha’s “Jolene,” and raise her a “Train, Train”:

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Mostly, now that I think about it, trains fill me with a sense of something approaching melancholy:  of understanding what it is to be melancholy, maybe. Even the one which crosses at the bottom of our street, and which goes exactly two places — the coal source to the west, the power plant to the east — strikes me as a traveler through mysteries largely inaccessible to me. It rides its own roads which I don’t ride, passing the unpresentable backsides of the houses, curving away out of sight as I stand at the crossing with my kids, who just want to pick up the coal that shakes loose from the heaped hopper cars and write their names with it on the sidewalk.

Here in the South, we don’t have the commuter-train culture of the Northeast, or of England, where I lived for a time. There, I used to love to ride the Cambridge Cruiser, forty-nine minutes into London, as much for the views into people’s back gardens as anything else. There was something about the unrelenting gray-brown terraced houses, the narrow strips of yellow rain-beaten grass behind them, the wet clothes all round-shouldered on the lines, which fascinated me endlessly:  the visible evidence of lives going on, lives of real people  about whom I would never know the first thing.

Here, I wait at the foot of the hill with my children and my cowering loud-noise-hating dog, and the train passes me:  it goes on, I go on. The world which holds us both is big enough for us to disappear into, as if — from the point of view of the other, if a train can be said to have a point of view — the door were closed on our existence, though of course that’s not really true.

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This train song feels like that to me, melancholy and with a sense of going away forever into the distance:

More train songs: Elizabeth Cotten (with Pete Seeger), and The Seldom Scene.

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In today’s Mass reading, St. Paul exhorts the church at Corinth, and by extension all the rest of us,  to remember that we should be regarded “as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” Being a servant of Christ seems reasonably straightforward, if not always easy to do;  but this other idea, the stewardship of mystery, has been plucking at my mind ever since. I almost think I know what that means, but then whatever it is I think I almost know goes sidling out of view.

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It’s the feast of Saint Gregory the Great, who saw the slaves from England in the marketplace at Rome, and on being told that they were Angles cried, “Not Angles, but angels!” His impulse was to set out himself to convert these people who were so beautiful to him, but called back to Rome and the papacy, he had to send others in his stead to accomplish the work which he had aspired to do.

Here is an image of servanthood to Christ:  readiness to lay down even the best and least self-interested desires of the heart, the very desire for service in a particular way, when God says, “Not that. This,” as God is wont to say.

To our own questions of vocation and work, and of the ways God calls us, sometimes, against the grain of ourselves, Saint Gregory responds, “Perhaps it is not after all so difficult for a man to part with his possessions, but it is certainly most difficult for him to part with himself. To renounce what one has is a minor thing; but to renounce what one is, that is asking a lot.”

But then, the only God who asked little would be a God who gave little.

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My mother called the other day to ask if we were seeing any effects of the hurricane yet. Up-to-the-minute, informed person that I am, I said, “What hurricane?”

Well, now I know. Here at the western end of North Carolina, the sun is shining, and according to the Washington Post yesterday, Hurricane Earl, which had formerly been “barreling down” on the coasts of Virginia and North Carolina, as I think one news outlet put it, was “struggling.”

I almost feel sorry for it. Poor storm, floundering out at sea. Imagine a hurricane drowning. Where’s a lifeguard when you need one?

But then again, on behalf of all my neighbors to the east, I really don’t feel sorry for it at all.

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My dog doesn’t feel sorry for it, either. He hates weather.

He also hates cameras, which is the story this photograph really tells. I got out the camera a while ago to try uploading photos onto my spangly new computer, and the dog gave a little moan and crept away to hide under the table.

It’s not that he’s a fearful dog, generally. When we went to the shelter looking for a dog, almost two years ago now, my two youngest children were transported with — I’m sure it was joy, but it looked like your garden-variety hysteria, and having weathered that, so to speak, without flinching, you’d think he could weather the weather.

But there you have it:  you don’t pick your mysteries.

Thanks as always to Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary for hosting Seven Quick Takes every Friday of the world. If you want pithy, go read Jen. Today she takes up the cause for a “Complainer About the Heat Laureate” of Texas.  After all this windy mystiquing around, some good old complaining about the heat should set us right up.