01/12/2025
From our Fall 2024 Equinox Newsletter
Gently turning over the chimney glass of an oil lamp in my hands, I use a soft cloth to remove streaks of soot from the lamp’s recent use in our cabin’s sauna. It’s a task I regularly attend to. For a couple of special reasons.
First, it connects me to my grandmother Ada, who grew up in a sod-framed Kansas farmhouse in the 1880’s. She left home at sixteen, headed alone to Denver on a coal-burning steam train. Purchased a guitar there, found work cleaning houses and providing child care for the wealthy.
From family’s archives, we’ve learned she had a stint with a handsome, well-to-do businessman in California. He had an alcohol problem. A subsequent journey led her to Michigan. Employed by the family of a well-known business tycoon, she traveled, on occasion, to Mackinac Island. As part of the house help, her responsibilities, most certainly, included cleaning oil lamps. In her later years, my grandmother visited our family in North Minneapolis on special occasions. She was the one who first taught me, as a young boy, how to pray.
Another connection. In the mountains of Nepal where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer, there was no electricity. For two years, on a weekly basis, I cleaned the glass of a similar oil lamp. Evenings, it was the only light available.
A hundred years ago, lamps and lanterns marked train crossings, illuminated underground mines. In my grandmother’s days on the Kansas prairie, oil lamps allowed food preparation, provided light to repair farm equipment, write hand-written letters delivered by horseback, clean rifles, read Psalms from leather-bound Bibles during storms and in times of illness. In remote villages of Nepal, even tonight, they are still being used to bring light.
Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest, was devoted to integrating psychology and theology. His journey was an interesting one, leading him to serve as chaplain at Yale, then traveling summers with circuses as a priest and laborer. Nouwen spent his last years living in a community of marginalized adults who were physically and developmentally challenged. He followed his own light. In one of his writings, he suggests how to follow our own.
Initially, he cautions us: Watch out for idolatries, traps that popular culture seductively dangles in front of us. Discernment, skepticism, is essential. Ask questions: “What’s real? What’s not?”
Second, build in rituals of gratitude each day. Search out, connect with the Good in life. Learn to fnd it in darkness. Seek out a community to help you do this.
Third, hold a circle of close friends with whom you can be honest, who will call your bluff when you fall out of balance, hold you up when you stumble.
Darkness haunts us: Politically. Spiritually. Emotionally. Cleaning this fragile, worn lamp reminds me the kind of light Nouwen refers to shines like no other. We need to follow some light. But wisely, courageously choose ones that will lead us home to our deeper selves. And the best of our world’s future.
-Jon Magnuson
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