Good Constraints: The Department of Motor Vehicles, My Godmother, and My Intellectual Hero’s Elder Brother

Prayer at St. John Chrysostom Antiochian Orthodox Church (York, Pennsylvania)

This is a simple reflection on the goodness of constraints. A few years before we were married (and while we were living on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean), the woman who is now my wife sent me a collection of songs burned onto a compact disk. It was part of a lovely birthday gift to me, and one of the songs was “Stickshifts and Safetybelts” by the band Cake. This most inspiringly illustrated the goodness of removing restraints when your “baby seems so far” and “well, stickshifts and safety belts / bucket seats have all got to go.” In a contrasting vein, Josh Ritter’s song “When Will I Be Changed?” (sung as a raw duet with Bob Weir) upholds the hope “that all these ties will surely bind.” As I’ve noted before, Ritter gets a little too clever with all but one of the old church hymn lyrics that he echoes back over the course of this song. With his final hope, however, he makes no adjustment to the time-honored words and simply pleads for “ties that will surely bind and hold me tight.”

It’s embarrassing what a lucky guy I am, and the number of gentle and loving constraints that I have enjoyed over my lifetime is absurdly good with no indication of slowing down. Of late, my godmother encouraged me to write about one particular constraint that I was sharing with her and some friends. As a rule, I try to take such advice seriously and do what I can with it. As it happens, this suggestion from my godmother came around the same time as some gentle direction from a few others including the elder brother of my intellectual hero David Bentley Hart. (As an aside, I offer no apology for having intellectual heroes. I can’t think of what better purpose authentic scholarship might serve than to provide us with some heroes, and my own second great living hero of this kind is Wendell Berry.) So I was kindly informed a couple weeks ago by Addison Hodges Hart that he would be in my area and that he would be glad to see me. Addison was traveling back to the United States to visit his suffering brother David (or “Ben” as he calls him) followed by a stop in the York, Pennsylvania area (close to where I live) in order to see a childhood friend.

With this invitation, the three components of this reflection’s title converged. No, wait a moment. Actually, the final component is still unintroduced: Pennsylvania’s Department of Motor Vehicles. Other than the most oblique of foreshadowings with “stickshifts and safety belts” above, I have not yet noted the topic that I was talking about with my godmother that inspired her comment to me: how good it has been for me to be forced, by state regulatory requirements, to sit for 65 undistracted hours with my two oldest children as they logged the time needed to qualify for the state driver's license road test. Really, it’s humiliating to admit how much I have appreciated being required by law to spend this time with my children.

I was caught off guard by how strange it felt to have this opportunity for leisurely chatting. Evidently, my protection of such time in the lives of my children with me has been lacking. Another rather devastating part of the self-realization was how difficult it was for me, from time to time, to sit for that many hours focused on something with my child. However, of course, these shared and clear expectations on our time together were themselves a great part of the blessing. We had goals to be achieved together. Occasionally, we needed to interrupt our leisurely conversation to consider what we should practice next and where best to go for this kind of practice. Moreover, at all times, I was expected to pay close attention to my children and to everything in the world around us. My children wanted me to pause now and then in order to talk about a particular detail of our surroundings or to notice a lesson worth reinforcing. In short, our time together felt like an astonishing microcosm of what life is supposed to be. I was expected to provide instruction toward the mastery of something very real and very dangerous, but I was doing so with an investment of time that required long periods of utterly unassailable leisure with my own beloved children. In the close confines of these requirements upon us, we found a freedom to talk and laugh and share about a host of things that would not have so easily come to us in the normal course of our lives together within the same home.

Similarly, the coffee hour times that follow the liturgies of our church life remind me of this same kind of space. We are all there for a profoundly shared purpose but also for a purpose that is somehow greater than or beyond any one of us. This clears the air and slows us down so that—when we are virtually compelled to linger together afterward—the time feels set apart or unavoidable. It is a kind of second liturgy, a fellowship imposed upon us all and one that comes to be a joyous habit of its own filled with surprises that come only with expectations and attendance.

With that, I come back to the invitation from the elder brother of my intellectual hero. Addison Hart, is a good bit older than his somewhat famous younger brother David (or “Ben” as he is known to his family), and Addison was kind enough to have notified me twice of his being in my area. The first time, I was standing as a godfather with a family entering our parish in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and I could not visit our old parish in York, Pennsylvania where Addison was stopping by to see a childhood friend, Deacon Jerome Atherholt. However, this past weekend, as Addison again kindly offered to connect with me in person, I was able to worship at St. John Chrysostom Antiochian Orthodox Church in York and to chat with Addison during the coffee hour afterward. It was clear to me that Addison was—a little like the department of motor vehicles and my godmother—seeking to support me in maintaining some good constraints upon myself.

And I will say that his own example in accepting constraints with joy was most inspiring. Here he was, a catechumen himself after many decades of watching and loving much in the Orthodox Church. Addison is the author of many books and a churchman who is a retired Episcopal priest and who was a Roman Catholic priest for a few years before that. He is married to Solrunn Nes, an art historian, iconographer, and author who is in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet here Addison was standing in the front row as I walked with my son into our old parish for the Orthros prayers an hour before the Divine Liturgy would start. Over the next three hours, I sat down whenever it was generally acceptable to sit during the prayers and liturgies, but I never once noticed Addison sitting down. When all of the local catechumens came to the front for prayers on their behalf in the middle of the Divine Liturgy, Addison took a few steps away from his seat to join them. During the Eucharist, he came forward and asked for a blessing as catechumen are expected to wait for their chrismation and entry into the church before receiving the body and blood of Christ. After communing myself, I offered a piece of the church bread to Addison (which is shared with all), and he accepted it from me with a warm smile.

A few years earlier, I had shared one meal with Addison’s more famous younger brother David while filming an interview with him, and the family resemblances were strong and delightful as I sat down to have some coffee and crackers with Addison and a few others in the parish following the service. Deacon Jerome walked past at one point and pointed to Addison while telling me not to listen to a word that he said. Not long afterward, Deacon Jerome was able to sit down with the rest of us as well and to join in with the stories and the banter. I was treated to a few childhood stories from Addison and Jerome, heard some of Addison’s concern that practical Christian living and devotional life should always remain at the center of every Christian’s walk with Jesus Christ, and got some news of the suffering that David has been experiencing in recent months and that had brought Addison back to the United States to visit. It was heartening to hear of the love and care of David’s wife and son as well as the encouragement that he took from Addison and his son, but it was also heartbreaking to think of David in so much pain and unable to write while so many of his readers are so delighted to be making their way through a major book, All Things are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, that David has been working on, at some level, since 2015. A few more bits of the story of David and Addison’s lives were further outlined, and I heard about the many classics of children's literature that Addison read aloud to his brother David as a young boy. (Much of this has been shared recently by Addison in an interview available here as well.)

Finally, Addison spoke with great fondness of his home parish, saying that he took the average age of the congregation up from 25 to 26 years old with his entry as a catechumen. He clearly loves the people and the priest at The Annunciation of the Holy Virgin Mary Orthodox Mission Parish (Bergen, Norway). Addison also mentioned that Metropolitan John of Dubna (over the Archbishopric of the Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe which includes Addison’s home parish in Norway) sent an open letter to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow protesting the “bloodbath” with “consternation” and directly citing and critiquing a homily by Patriarch Kirill that had sought to justify the atrocities. In response to this homily, Metropolitan John wrote that “I cannot subscribe to such a reading of the Gospel” and argued that “nothing can ever justify that the ‘good shepherds’ that we must be” could “cease to be ‘peacemakers’, whatever the circumstances.”

As absurdly broken and torn apart as our world and our lives can be, while I watched the exchanges and the laughter between the two childhood friends, Addison and Jerome, and as I considered the kind invitation to me from Addison to say hello in person to me while he was in the area, I thought of the many ways in which the ties of life can, indeed, bind and hold us tight. I was reminded of my own two young adult children, and I said a quiet prayer of thanks for the DMV as well as my most wise and gracious godmother among a long list of other ties that bind.