Dec. 16th High Plains Reader story

Jamie Parsley’s “Fargo, 1957: An Elegy”

By Dan Nygard
Contributing Writer
High Plains Reader

“I’m trying to capture the voices of people who can’t speak for themselves anymore. Poetry can do that.”—Jamie Parsley

While discussing his tenth book, Fargo, 1957: An Elegy, Fargo poet Jamie Parsley gave a statement I keep finding myself returning to: “I don’t think it’s really been explored so much, how important obsessions are to writers. You can use them creatively and positively.” Though a small part of a much-larger conversation, which ran the gamut from East Coast poets to the poetry of the Far East, this statement gives tremendous insight into the creation of Mr. Parsley’s latest collection, and to the way poetry can create meaning out of mystery.

When the tornado hit Fargo in 1957, Mr. Parsley was not yet born; however, the event would reverberate throughout his life, as his mother’s cousin, Betty Lou Titgen, and her husband, Don, were caught directly in the storm. Don was killed almost immediately; Betty’s injuries put her into a coma, and she died in January of 1960. “And this was one of those obsessions I grew up with,” Parsley explained. “The real key was how secretive it was. It was an open secret—we know they died—but nobody ever wanted to talk about it. So the more of a secret it was, the more I wanted to open it up and see.”

In Parsley’s case, obsession revolved around finding answers to the questions behind what had happened that day, not only to his family members, but to the entire community of Fargo. “This was a defining moment in our history,” Parsley said. “Almost everybody was affected in some way.”

The few stories he heard stayed with him. “I tried writing about it over the years,” Parsley said. “I wrote a play at one point, I wrote some fiction. Nothing really came of it. So I decided I would fully research it, just get it out of my system if nothing else.”

This research, a two-year process, involved trips to NDSU’s Institute for Regional Studies, The Red River Valley Genealogical Society, The Fargo Forum, and local libraries. In addition, Parsley conducted interviews with anyone who could tell his or her story. “It was amazing,” Parsley recalled. “Here in Fargo, you try one thing, and it opens up a whole other area.” However, the process was not easy because for many people the topic can be difficult to talk about, and very little physical evidence remains, a fact which is highlighted in a line from “Relics,” the last poem in the book: “Whatever they had was blown away or destroyed.” But what Parsley found proved incredibly powerful.

For example, during a visit to Betty and Don’s daughter, Lynn Brown, who was two years old when the tornado took the lives of her parents, he was shown a shoebox containing a 50’s style wallet, which Don carried the day of the tornado, with his driver’s license, a signed work card with the date 6-19-57, and a fishing license. “And all of a sudden, it was real,” Parsley said. “This wallet was on him when it happened.”

In addition, Parsley learned that there were two different stories about where Betty and Don were when the storm began. “The story she had been told was that they were at the movies. Later I hear that there is a story that they were at the bar—the Brass Rail. She had heard ‘at the movies,’ someone else had heard ‘at the bar.’” In this situation, with two conflicting stories, what became important wasn’t whether either story is ‘true’. In a poetic sense, both stories create a picture of life as it happened on that day. In this opening section of “O Salutaris,” written in the voice of Don, Parsley uses both stories to create a sense of two people whose lives were lost that day:

What did we ask for in our lives?
After weeks of work and toil and loss
all we needed was a break.

So what if we were at the Brass Rail
on Front Street?
Does anyone care?
And does it matter?

Or what if we were
at the movies with another couple?
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
had just opened that day
and promised us a glimpse of a glory
we rarely sawas it rose before us on the screen
in all its VistaVision splendor
at the Fargo Theatre.

Here, the details of a day spent downtown are all ‘true,’ as a young married couple emerges, weary from “work and toil and loss,” searching for something to do on a rare afternoon out, unaware as everyone else in Fargo that the storm is on its way. Living in Fargo, even fifty-some years after the fact, one knows these people. This sense of character exists throughout Parsley’s poems. “I try to do each person homage,” Parsley explained. “These people woke up that morning, and nobody would have guessed that something like this would happen. Who would?”
There is an emotional honesty apparent in each voice, a sense that the poet is letting these characters speak for themselves. “They came alive on their own,” Parsley said, “But I just had to give them enough room to do that.” And part of what makes Fargo, 1957: An Elegy so, well, elegiac, is Parsley’s willingness to present himself and his own obsession honestly—the process of discovering these people and what they have left behind is a story in itself. This appears most poignantly in “Ghostly,” which concludes with this acknowledgement of the beauty behind the questions that are still unanswered: “And, like ghosts, we grasp at each other/ across the abyss,/ our voices sounding to the other/ like the first rumble of approaching thunder.”

A Reading/Publication Party to celebrate Fargo, 1957: An Elegy will be held at 4:00 p.m. on December 18th at the Spirit Room, 111 Broadway.

In today's Fargo FORUM

Fargo priest, poet celebrates new book

A reading and publication party for the Rev. Jamie Parsley’s “Fargo, 1957: An Elegy” begins at 4 p.m. today in the Spirit Room, 111 Broadway, Fargo.

In this evocative and moving elegy of the devastating 1957 Fargo tornado and its victims, Parsley weaves a story of loss, poetry, pain, faith and ultimately renewal and gives voice to those victims who, before now, were unable to speak for themselves. “Fargo, 1957” is the story of the resilience and fortitude of the people who survived the storm and those who did not.

Parsley has been associate poet laureate of North Dakota since 2004. He serves as priest in charge of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in north Fargo and as executive assistant to the bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of North Dakota.

The publication party follows at 5 p.m. Call (701) 237-0230 for more information.

3 Advent

Gaudete Sunday
December 12, 2010

Isaiah 35.1-10; Canticle 3;


+ I feel the need to make a retraction. I don’t think I’ve ever ever had to make a retraction in a sermon. And even if I had before, I think my pride prevented from actually doing it. But I, humble priest that I am, must do so this week.

Last week I mentioned our own dear Joanne Droppers in my sermon. And I used a word in describing a comment she made to me the previous week that I used a bit too nonchalantly. That word was “curmudgeonly.” I believe I said that she made a “curmudgeonly comment” to me. I realize now—and I realized as I said it last Sunday—that it was the wrong word to use. Curmudgeon is really a kind of ugly word. It means “ill-tempered” or, worse yet, “joyless.”

Now, that definition “ill-tempered” doesn’t bother so much. I make ill-tempered comments all the time, as everywhere here no doubt knows. But joyless—that, for some reason, bothers me. Such a word doesn’t describe someone like Joanne. And it shouldn’t describe any of us who call ourselves “Christian.” And the whole concept of joylessness just runs counterculture to everything we are partaking in, especially today.

This Third Sunday of Advent is also known as Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete Sunday is the Sunday in Advent when we light the pink or rose candle on the Advent wreath. This pink candle is a sign to us that the shift has happened. Now there are more candles lit than are unlit. We are moving closer and closer to that dawn of Christ’s appearance among us. The feast of the Incarnation is upon us—that time in which we realize God and humanity meet. The light has won out and the darkness, we now realize, is not an eternal darkness.

Gaudete means “rejoice” and that is exactly what we should do on this Sunday. We should rejoice in the light that is winning out. We should rejoice in the fact that darkness has no lasting power over us. As the darkness fails, as the light brightens and shines upon us, we find an emotion coming up within us. It’s bubbling up within us. It’s building. And that emotion is…joy. And it is a glorious joy.

This Sunday sets a tone different than the one we’ve had so-far in Advent. We find that word—rejoice—is the “theme” of the day. Last Sunday I talked about hope—about the fact we don’t think about hope very often. We all hope, but we don’t necessarily articulate our hoping as hope per se. This week, it’s joy we are considering.

Unlike hope, which we have to stop and consider whether we are actually feeling it or not, joy is not an emotion we have to consider. Joy is something we either know we are feeling or not. It’s a lot like love. You know when you are in love. There’s no getting around love. It comes into your love, unasked for often, and disrupts everything. (or maybe that’s just me). Joy is a lot like love. It comes upon us, often unasked for, and drives all darkness away. And, in doing so, it sometimes disrupts everything. We don’t see things the way we did before. It is the emotion that permeates everything we hear in our scriptures this Sunday.

In our reading from the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah, we hear Isaiah say to us that even the wilderness, “will rejoice with joy and sing.” And in our canticle, we find that beautiful song of joy, the Magnificat—the Blessed Virgin Mary’s rapturous song of rejoicing.

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

This emotion of joy is something we oftentimes take for granted. Let’s face it, joy doesn’t happen often enough in our lives. It is a rare occurrence for the most part. And maybe it should be. It is certainly not something we want to take for granted. When joy comes to us, we want to let it flow through us. We want it to let it guide us and overwhelm us. But we often don’t think about how essential joy is to us.

Joy is essential to all of us as Christians. It is one of those marks that make us who we are as Christians. If we look closely at the lives of the saints, they are the ones who show us the way forward. And they are the ones who are marked—through and through—with joy. They are the ones who have let joy come upon them and transform them. They are the ones who, even in sometimes overwhelming and frightening times, when overcome by darkness and despair, have still let joy come to them and be present in them.

Gaudete Sunday always reminds me of Father Alfred Delp. Delp, as you’ve heard me talk about before, was a German Roman Catholic Jesuit priest. In 1944, he was arrested as a conspirator in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler. That Advent of 1944, was the last Advent he would observe. On February 2, 1945, within weeks, essentially, of the liberation, Alfred Delp was hanged by the Nazis.

Still, that final Advent of his life, as he sat in prison, was one that obviously was like none other in his life. Even in that prison, even knowing he would soon be facing a mock trial a kangaroo court that would almost surely find him guilty and would condemn him to death, Delp was able to find a glimmer of joy in that Advent season.

Delp wrote, “May the time never come when men forget about the good tidings and promises, when so immured within the four walls of their prison, they see nothing but gray days through barred windows placed too high to see out of.”
And later, he wrote, “There is so much despair that cries out for comfort; faint courage that needs to be reinforced; perplexity that yearns for meaning…. God’s messengers who have themselves reaped the fruits of Divine seeds, even in the darkest hours, know how to wait for the fullness of the harvest.”
This time of Advent is a time of waiting for us. We are waiting for the light. We are waiting for the fullness of the harvest that will come with that light.

I love that definition of joy. Sometimes, cultivating joy in the midst of overwhelming sorrow or pain or loneliness or depression can seem overwhelming and impossible. That’s why it is a discipline. When things like sorrow or pain or loneliness or depression descend upon—and they descend upon us all—we need to cling to joy. We need to search deep within us for that joy that we have as Christians. That joy comes when we put our pains into perspective. That joy comes when we recognize that these dark moments that happen in our lives are not eternal. They will not last forever. That, I think, is where we sometimes fail. When we are in the midst of those negative emotions in our lives, we often feel as though they will never end. We often feel as though we will always be lonely, we always be sad, we will always mourn. But as Christians, we can’t allow ourselves to be boxed in in such a way. As Christians, we are forced, again and again, to look at the larger picture. We are forced to see that joy is always there, just beyond our grasp, awaiting us. Joy is there when we realize that in the midst of our darkness, there is always light just beyond our reach.

Joy doesn’t mean walking around smiling all the time. It doesn’t mean that we have to force ourselves to be happy at all times in the face of every bad thing. If we do that, we become nothing more than a programmed robot or a trained puppy. True joy comes bubbling up from within us. It comes from a deep place and it permeates our whole being, no matter what else is going on in our lives or in the world around us.

As we know, the overriding “theme” for Advent—if there is such a thing as a “theme” for the season—is that cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.” That cry is a cry of truly holy impatience. Impatience is one of those things frowned upon by most people. But in this sense, impatience is not necessarily a bad thing. Impatience can drive us and motivate us. And the impatience that causes us to cry out, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus” is fueled by a deep and abiding joy. It is a joy that comes from deep within our very essence—from that place of our true selves. And it is a joy that allows us to say with humble confidence (and not with arrogance): let life throw at us what it will. Even in the face of everything terrible or sad, I will rejoice.

So, as we gather together this morning, to share in the Eucharist—that ultimate celebration of joy—let us not forget the joy we feel at seeing this pink candle lit. We have made it this far. The tide has shifted. The light is winning out. The dawn is about to break upon our long dark night.

As we ponder this, as we meditate on this, as we take this with us in our hearts, let us pay special attention to the emotion this causes within us. Embrace that welling up of joy from deep within. And as it wells up, as it bubbles forth, let us exclaim what is bursting like a fire in our hearts to say,

“Come, Lord Jesus! Come quickly!”

Fargo, 1957 reading Dec. 18th

I will be reading from my newly published book, Fargo, 1957: An Elegy at The Spirit Room, 111 Broadway, Fargo, on Sat. Dec, 18 at 4:00 pm. A publication party will follow at 5:00 pm.

Special music will be provided by oboist Justin Schwartz.

The book, which chronicles the June 20, 1957 tornado that struck Fargo, will be published Dec. 14 by The Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU.

Desembermånen 1969

by Jamie Parsley

On the night I was born
Olav Hauge,
there, in that distant land
of ancestors with faces like mine
and their snowy graves,
in that mythic far-off place
in which blood
like my blood flowed
through earth and granite
and run-off ice,
wrote,

Han løyner stålet
i ei slire av sylv.
Det er blod på eggi.

Is it steel it hides in—
that moon?
Does it come forth
from its silver sheath?
I did, it seems.
And always, on my edges,
there is blood.

Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994) Norwegian poet

2 Advent

December 5, 2010

Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

+ This past Wednesday—December 1—was World AIDS Day. At our 6:00 Mass that evening, I preached a short homily about how AIDS has affected the Episcopal Church. I shared stories from what I described as three of my “favorite” Episcopal Churches in the US—Advent of Christ the King in San Francisco, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hollywood and St. Luke’s-in-the-Field in Greenwich Village—were changed by the crisis and how they each responded. Now, of my “favorite” Episcopal Churches in the US, I didn’t even mention the others—such as St. Paul’s K Street in Washington DC, St. Clements in Philadelphia, Grace Church in Newark, New Jersey, to name just a few more.

Afterward, at supper, at my “favorite” restaurant—Wasabi—our own, dear Joanne Droppers said to me, “I don’t believe you anymore when you talk about things being your ‘favorite’ anything.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Joanne’s somewhat curmudgeonly exegesis of my homily.

“Well,” Joanne responded. “Everything’s your favorite!”

Fair enough. But, today, Joanne, you will hear me talk about a saint who I will be honest is not one of my favorites. And that is St. John the Baptist. For some reason, I just don’t like him. I don’t think I would’ve liked him if I was alive at that time. And I can definitely tell you I probably wouldn’t like him if he was alive right now.

In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with this formidable figure of John the Baptist. There is no getting around him. There he is—loud and, excuse me for saying, but he sounds a bit crazy to me and I’m sure to a few of the people who heard him. The impression we get from Matthew is of someone we probably wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He comes across to us through the ages as a kind of gnarled mountain man. He is dirty. He is not very well mannered. He is shouting strange words and prophecies. He is frightening. I would probably guess his hygiene wasn’t that great. And, no doubt, he may have smelled.

Certainly it would be difficult for any of us to take the words of a man like this seriously. Especially when he’s saying things like, “prepare, for the Kingdom of heaven draws near” “the axe is being laid to the root of the trees” and “the chaff will be burned in an unquenchable fire. “

Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims it, this is not so much hopeful as frightening. It is a message that startles us and jolts us at our very core. But this is the true message of Advent.

Like John the Baptist and those who eagerly awaited the Messiah, this time of waiting—this time of hope—can be almost painful. When we look at it from that perspective, we see that maybe John isn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially thought. Rather his message is one of almost excruciating expectation and hope.

Hope.

It’s something we all feel occasionally, but it’s something we very rarely ever discuss or personally examine. Hope. What is hope in our lives? What do we honestly hope for? Or do we? Do we hope anymore? I think we do. I don’t know if we necessarily name it as hope. I don’t know if we articulate it as such. But I think we all live with a certain hope. Because when we think for one moment about having no hope, everything suddenly seems bleak and horrendous.

Now to put it in its proper context, maybe the only thing we hope in anymore is God. Of course, if that’s all we hope in, I think we’re doing pretty well. But even then, I don’t think we ever really think about the hope we might feel.

Our Prayer Book, appropriately enough, does deal with hope. Let’s take out our Prayer Books and I want you this morning to walk with me, yet again, to the back of the Book. Please turn to page 861. There, in our trusty Catechism we find the question, “What is the Christian hope?”

The answer, “The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.”

Now, that is a good answer. Hope for us then, as Christians, is a matter of confidence. It is a matter of believing that no matter how fractured and crazy this life gets, there is the promise of newness and fullness to this life. And, as this season of Advent promises us, it is also a matter of waiting for Christ to come in glory.

Like John, we are waiting in joyful hope for our God to come to us, to appear to us as one of us in Jesus. As we know, waiting, in hope, can be excruciating. It can be more difficult than anything we can possibly imagine.

So, what do we, as Christians, do with this hopeful waiting? This season of Advent offers us a time to slow down a bit spiritually and too look long and hard at our lives as hopeful Christians. It is a time for us to prepare for the Incarnate God’s coming to us. It is a time for us to shed some of those things that separate us from God. It is a time for us to find a place in ourselves, if no where else, in which we can go off and be alone with God. A place in which we can wait for God longingly.

In Advent we can fully express our hope. Because, we are hoping. We are looking longingly for God to come to us. Those of us who dwell here in the darkness—in this life of uncertainly, of hectic day to day activity, of the struggles and problems of our own lives—find ourselves clinging to that blessed hope, looking longingly for the light to burn away that darkness.

That Light is, of course, Christ. That Light comes into our darkness in the form of a Child. And that Light can be frightening, because it reveals things to us we might not want revealed. It reveals to us aspects of ourselves we might not want revealed and it reveals things about our world that we don’t want to see. But by enlightening us and making us see fully and completely, we know that we are freed. We are freed from those things that keep us in the dark and we are freed to go forward into the Light and dwell there.

So, yes, John’s message in the wilderness is a frightening one at times. It is frightening because the Light he is telling us is coming to us can be frightening, especially when we’re used to the darkness. But it is also a message of hope and longing. It is a message meant to wake us from our slumbering complacency. His is a voice calling us to sit up and take notice.

The kingdom of heaven is near. In fact it’s nearer than we can probably ever hope or imagine. So, be prepared. Watch. Wait. Hope. For this anticipation—this wonderful and beautiful hope—is merely a pathway on which the Christ Child can come to us here in our darkness and appear before us as one of us.

World AIDS Day

December 1, 2010

Today is, of course, World AIDS Day. We tend to forget in the some ways how AIDS has affected us here in the US and how it is continuing to be a true plague in the rest of the world.

For us in the Episcopal Church, it has been particularly difficult. Three Episcopal congregations that I particularly love (and all are, by the way, progressive Anglo-Catholic congregations), have been affected by AIDS.

At the Church of Advent of Christ the King in San Francisco the AIDS crisis was particularly bad. This is from Advent’s parish profile:

“When the Rev'd William Rhodes came to Advent as its 27th rector in 1984, the illness that came to be known as AIDS was beginning to affect a number of parishioners. Over 100 members of the congregation died of AIDS-related illnesses over a ten-year period. The church was the site of 2-3 Requiem Masses per week, and many members had become too ill to carry on the running of parish affairs. It was during this dark period when the grace of the Holy Spirit sent women to join Advent in increasing numbers and take over responsibilities traditionally carried out only by men. Women served as senior and junior wardens and began to appear at the altar as acolytes. In addition, these women undertook the care and support of men who were ill and exhausted by grief.”

I never fully realized how bad it was at a place like St. Luke’s-in-the Fields in Greenwich Village in New York until I visited there a few years ago and, after Mass, took a look at their columbarium. There the ashes of young men who died in 1980s and 1990s was sobering. Nothing quite hit home for me like that columbarium.

St. Damien of Molokai, who we now commemorate in Holy Women, Holy Men, is the patron saint of those suffering from HIV/AIDS. For this very reason, St. Damien is commemorated at another one of my favorite congregations, St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Hollywood. This from an online source about St. Thomas:

“A gift from a parishioner provided a carved-in-Italy colossal figure of the Ascending Christ, around which the distinguished liturgical artist Rhett Judice designed and executed a new reredos over the main altar. This was in the midst of the AIDS epidemic and it was felt a symbol of hope and resurrection was needed. Later Rhett Judice built a new reredos for the Lady Chapel, also of his own design, and, an altar and reredos for the Damien Chapel in the east porch of the church, centring on the figure of Christ the King, flanked by Saint Thomas the Apostle and Blessed Father Damien, the leper priest of Molokai. In 1998 Rhett completed the ‘East Wall’ (liturgical east) and created the Stations of the Cross currently in use.

“After the death from AIDS of assistant priest Robert Kettelhack in 1989, the chapel in the east porch was designated the Diocesan AIDS Memorial Chapel, with a painting by Ian Faulkner of Father Damien over the altar, and a specially-designed AIDS Memorial Book listing persons who have succumbed to the disease. When it was decided to build an AIDS Chapel in the new Cathedral Center, Saint Thomas relinquished the furnishings. The altar is still used for the interment of remains. The chapel is now dedicated to Fr. Damien of Molokai. Fr. Damien is the 19th century priest who worked among the lepers of Molokai and has been adopted as the patron of people with AIDS. Rhett Judice designed the triptych replacing the Falkner painting. A copy of the Memorial Book remains. This chapel also serves as the parish shrine for Our Lady of Walsingham. The Holy Rosary is recited there every Sunday morning.”

Even though we are not commemorating him today, St. Damien is the saint we really find ourselves relating to on this World AIDS day. He’s truly a symbol for us of the care and the love we need to show for all people stricken with illnesses like AIDS.

In the collect we use for Damien (and his companion Marianne), we essentially ask God for the chance to challenge ourselves. We pray that we may be “bold and loving in confronting the incurable plagues of our time…”

That is the challenge for all of us on this World AIDS Day, that we may, like Damien and all those who have fought and helped and who suffered from the incurable plagues of this world, may truly be “bold and loving in confronting” this incurable plague that’s still wages.

And so, using the collect for St. Damien from Holy Women, Holy Men, let us pray:

God of compassion, we bless your Name for the ministries of Damien and Marianne, who ministered to the lepers abandoned on Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands. Help us, following their examples, to be bold and loving in confronting the incurable plagues of our time, that your people may live in health and hope; through Jesus Christ, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.