Alexander Levering Kern is a Somerville-based poet, educator, organizer, and Quaker chaplain who directs the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service at Northeastern University in Boston. He is completing a book manuscript of poems based on twenty years living in Somerville, celebrating the city's extraordinary diversity, strength, history, and character. Alex's poems and nonfiction have been published widely and he is editor of the anthology, Becoming Fire. He co-edits the new interfaith/intercultural publication, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, which is currently seeking submissions.
You
are a Quaker chaplain. How would a Quaker chaplain approach things
differently from a Catholic or Protestant one?
Excellent question, Doug. Thank you.
First off, Quaker chaplaincy has nothing to do with oats! Secondly, I suspect
there are as many different approaches to chaplaincy as there are chaplains. I
happen to be a Quaker who serves an interfaith community of people from all major
religious, spiritual, and humanist worldviews - people of all faiths and none.
Quakers tend to approach ministry from a place of "answering that of God
in everyone," that is, recognizing and reverencing the divine Light and
Life in each person. Quaker chaplaincy emphasizes the value of deep listening
and expectant silence as the rich soil from which words spring and wisdom
grows.
Quaker chaplaincy also foregrounds
the communal and socially-engaged role of faith, drawing upon the historic
Quaker testimonies of peace, equality, simplicity, integrity, and community. By
developing programs of dialogue and civic engagement, Quaker chaplains strive
to promote wellness and wholeness in wider society, what our Jewish friends
call tikkun olam, or repairing the
world in the direction of shalom, a
more just, sustainable, peaceable "kin-dom" of God on earth, or what
Dr. King called the Beloved Community, extended to all living things. The field
of chaplaincy varies across traditions, but most of us who've been to seminary
or completed Clinical Pastoral Education internships in hospitals see the heart
of chaplaincy as "spiritual accompaniment" and providing "a non-anxious
relational presence," at least in one-on-one pastoral care.
In the University setting,
chaplaincy involves not only support for individuals in times of need,
struggle, or celebration, but also serving as the "public face" of
religion and spirituality on campus - facilitating vigils and memorial
services, offering inclusive interfaith prayer at commencements, responding to
crises such as the Boston Marathon bombing or the current coronavirus/COVID-19
pandemic. A Quaker University chaplain educates students about world faiths and
the ways they shape culture and current affairs. As educators, Quaker chaplains
invite learners to look within to discover the "Inward Teacher," and
look beyond the classroom to experiential learning settings as disparate as
Boston's homeless shelters, the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, or the streets of
Selma and Ferguson, Missouri. At our best, chaplains build structures of
interfaith understanding and cooperation, challenge religious bigotry,
encourage vocational discernment and deep ethical reflection, and tend to the
soul of the University and the heart of a hurting planet.
You
have lived in Somerville for twenty years--how does Somerville differ from
other places that you have lived? What makes it unique?
Place
is extremely important to me as a poet and writer, a neighbor, a citizen of
this bioregion/ watershed and of the wider global village. I grew up in Washington,
DC, with six generations of family roots there, and other roots in my
grandparents’ orchard in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I’ve studied and
lived in Poughkeepsie, Atlanta, Greensboro, and Philadelphia, and traveled,
studied, and served on five continents. Somerville is distinct from each of these
places, with echoes of many of them (we even have hills here, if not
necessarily mountains!) What distinguishes Somerville is its extraordinary
diversity, with 80,000 people packed into four square miles and many circles
that for some reason are called squares! We are a microcosm – quite literally a
“little world”- mirroring wider society, coexisting in generally symbiotic
ways. While we have a long way to go to address challenges such as affordable
housing and climate change, Somerville is a wonderful place to live, to learn,
and to write.
I
would think that a sense of spirituality would be essential now during this pandemic.
Absolutely.
Early on in the pandemic, I wrote a piece called “Caring for Self and Others in
Times of Trouble: Some Spiritual Tools and Tips,” which is widely available
online. At a time when our very life and breath is threatened, spirituality
reminds us to pause and breathe. Indeed, the word “spirituality” comes from the
Latin for breath, wind, or spirit. Anyone who breathes has access to the
spirituality. Whether one chooses prayer, mindfulness, yoga, creative writing,
congregational worship, walking in the woods, or any range of other spiritual
practices, there is a grounding and centering available through spirituality
that offers comfort, courage, hope, and healing connection.
Tell
us about the online journal you co-edit, Pensive: A Global Journal of
Spirituality and the Arts.
It’s super exciting. I am working with an editorial
board of students, sniffing out the finest spiritual writing and art we can
find. Already we have submissions from some of the best known spiritual writers
in the US, and from exciting voices from around the world. In a time when
religion so often is a catalyst of conflict, it is gratifying to discover artistic
expression that promotes the best in our shared humanity. The arts are good
medicine, especially now.
Tell us a bit about the process you
used to develop your manuscript about Somerville?
It’s
been an amazing journey, sixteen years in the making. Honestly, I did not begin
to feel fully at home in Somerville until our son Elias was born and I began to
see the city through his wide-open imaginative eyes: its playgrounds,
playgroups, buses, trains, and firetrucks. Writing poems about Somerville has
helped me experience the city more deeply – the beautiful, the wild, the
surreal, the sacred. The book is a product of contemplation and action, sitting
still and taking walks, sheltering in place and sometimes, when needed,
marching on Boston. Sitting on my front porch, I’ve found myself listening to
the world of Somerville – the language of its streets, the distant highway, the
bagpiper who plays at dusk. Taking a walk on any given day, I encounter Irish
and Italian-American old timers, Sikh gentlemen chatting in Union Square, new
immigrant schoolkids from across the planet, homeless street vendors, artists
and creatives of every stripe, and Steampunk young people riding tall bikes in top
hats! The book is as much about people as place, and often it is about people
standing up for their neighbors in our city and around the world. I can’t wait
to share this love song to Somerville, my adopted home, a place of many hills
and squares!
You are an accomplished poet--what
was the germ of the idea that led you to poetry?
I began writing poetry early on
during the second Iraq war, to make sense of the world and my place in it. I
was auditing a course at a seminary on the Hebrew prophets and modern poetry.
Our professor encouraged us to keep a notebook and to notice our lives – the strange,
the awful, the sublime. At the same time, my son Elias was just learning to
speak, discovering the power of language. While being with him, I found myself
falling in love with poetry, reading and writing it, telling fanciful bedtime
stories, developing new ways to speak about war, parenting, the natural world,
and this wondrous, fraught business of being alive.
88 Belmont Street
- after Gerald Stern’s “96 Vandam”
I will cast my nets into Somerville tonight
beside dangling hooks and nautical maps,
then launch my body across three dark seas
and sing along quietly under the bridge
of my bald neighbor’s whispering dreams.
I’ll keep my telescope near so I won’t be alone
when I watch for magicians and the accordion man,
the raccoons and toddlers on the lamb.
I’ll stay close to my compass and mind my lamp
in case a traveler or orphan should pass.
I’ll peer from the crow’s nest of our three story world
leaning into Spring Hill as church bells ring.
I’ll call out to the night, dazed and joyous, waving
my last loaf of bread at the tin can collectors
in the streets below, and when the wolf moon rises,
I’ll inhale the lilacs of the lostsoul collector
who sings in the burnt turret above.
No comments:
Post a Comment