Free Rose Light , livre ebook

University of Akron Press - Mary O'Connor

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132 pages

English

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Free Rose Light is the wide-ranging story of the people and community of South Street Ministries, in Akron, Ohio, told in the style of the ministry-improvisational, risky, and present. As much as this is the story of South Street through O'Connor's experience of the organization, it is also an invitation to the reader by example. There is no set of conclusions or directions provided in this work, save for one: don't let anyone define your story. You claim your own story.

Sujets

LGBTQ+

Sociologie, société et politique

Christian Church

History of religions

Informations

Publié par	University of Akron Press
Date de parution	28 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781629221298
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Free Rose Light
SERIES ON OHIO HISTORY AND CULTURE
Series on Ohio History and Culture Kevin Kern, Editor
Heinz Poll, edited by Barbara Schubert, A Time to Dance: The Life of Heinz Poll
Mark D. Bowles, Chains of Opportunity: The University of Akron and the Emergence of the Polymer Age, 1909–2007
Russ Vernon, West Point Market Cookbook
Stan Purdum, Pedaling to Lunch: Bike Rides and Bites in Northeastern Ohio
Joyce Dyer, Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood
Steve Love, The Indomitable Don Plusquellic: How a Controversial Mayor Quarterbacked Akron’s Comeback
Robert J. Roman, Ohio State Football: The Forgotten Dawn
Timothy H. H. Thoresen, River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio’s Mad River Valley, 1795–1885
Mark Auburn, In the President’s Home: Memories of the Akron Auburns
Brian G. Redmond, Bret J. Ruby, and Jarrod Burks, eds., Encountering Hopewell in the Twenty-first Century, Ohio and Beyond. Volume 1: Monuments and Ceremony
Brian G. Redmond, Bret J. Ruby, and Jarrod Burks, eds., Encountering Hopewell in the Twenty-first Century, Ohio and Beyond. Volume 2: Settlements, Foodways, and Interaction
Jen Hirt, Hear Me Ohio
Ray Greene, Coach of a Different Color: One Man’s Story of Breaking Barriers in Football
S. Victor Fleisher, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company: A Photographic History, 1898–1951
John Tully, Labor in Akron, 1825–1945
Deb Van Tassel Warner and Stuart Warner, eds., Akron’s Daily Miracle: Reporting the News in the Rubber City
Mary O’Connor, Free Rose Light: Stories around South Street
For a complete listing of titles published in the series, go to www.uakron.edu/uapress .
Free Rose Light
Stories around South Street
Mary O’Connor
All new material copyright © 2021 by the University of Akron Press.
All rights reserved • First Edition 2021 • Manufactured in the United States of America.
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher,
The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
ISBN : 978-1-62922-127-4 (paper) ISBN : 978-1-62922-128-1 (ePDF) ISBN : 978-1-62922-129-8 (ePub)
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Cover art: The Front Porch by Nadia Alnashar, www.nadia-alnashar.com .
Cover design by Amy Freels.
Free Rose Light was designed and typeset in Garamond by Thea Ledendecker and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.

Produced in conjunction with the University of Akron Affordable Learning Initiative. More information is available at www.uakron.edu/affordablelearning/
Contents
Introduction
I
The Holy See
The Speed of Memory
II
The Holy See
Creation Groans
A Bed in Sheol
The Arc of Cool
Akron Blues: White Picket Fence
Akron Blues: Patrick Armour
The Coast of Tyre
The Price
Light Glass Block
Radiance
III
The Holy See
Old South Main Street
Snap
Margins
Notes
Map of Summit Lake neighborhood. Illustration by Mary O’Connor.
Introduction
When Duane Crabbs asked me to write the history of the ministry he co-founded with his wife, Lisa, it seemed a strange, though flattering, invitation to extend to a fifty-eight-year-old architect. Duane and I had only known each other for seven months. My focus at the time was helping South Street Ministries renovate the building they had accepted as a gift. It needed a lot of attention.
I have plenty of entries in the yet-to-do category, but writing a book was not among them. In one of those sad, sobering moments in my mid-thirties, I realized at the rate I was reading, there was no way on earth I would read all the books I thought I would read in my lifetime. That realization was so deflating, any idea of writing a book never occurred to me.
Before I came to Akron, Ohio, my architectural practice was focused on public assembly spaces. I transformed a lot of dusty neglect into performance venues, into theaters. While I was designing a theater on the east end of Long Island, I stumbled on a story in an attic. It would not let me alone, that story. Given the circumstances of its discovery, I thought it should be told as a play.
Within the small attic bedroom of a once-grand summer home lay the undisturbed artifacts and evidence of a search for identity on a global scale. Within the confines of a room undisturbed for over thirty years, the unfinished legacy of one life called out for completion. In addition to finding the family to whom the artifacts belonged, they approved my request to write the story of their mother, a story that straddled two world wars and several continents.
I started writing the play determined to stick to the facts of the discovered story. Eventually, it dawned on me that a play can never be a work of nonfiction. Writing a play is a creating a set of instructions for others. How did I miss that? The truth of the story is in the performance, not in the lines of text on a page. The writing is a map for collaboration at every step of the life of a play. My words were clues for the visual, structural, spiritual. It was just like architecture. I was painting a picture meant to be seen in three-dimensional space.
I improved the play over time and a few staged readings, but I still had my play rattling around in my collection of unfinished business when I moved to Akron from New York City. At the time, in my own personal life script, I cast myself as a kind of architectural hero. I came to Akron’s South Street Ministries to renovate their building. Usually the client makes that decision, but I decided they needed me and—like some architectural savior on a bender—I uprooted myself from New York to Akron. Based on my recent experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was excited about pursuing an ideal that “everybody deserves good design.”
Thinking the project might take two years, I saw it as a temporary move.
Shortly after I arrived in the fall of 2012, a group of us from South Street Ministries went to hear Anne Lamott speak to a standing room only crowd at the Akron Public Library. She spoke about the value of writing our stories, encouraging the audience to start it up and stay with it. It was a message delivered with humor, urgency, and inclusion. Ann Lamott made us feel like we could do what she did. I thought about my play. Before our group left the lobby of the library, I asked if anyone would be interested in starting up a writing group. Duane loved the idea. Gratefully, since I had only moved to Akron, he put together the group of five. We met every other week in the library of a church in West Akron. My goal was to finish the final draft of that play. By that point, I had been working on it for over ten years. During the five months the writing group met, I worked through the difficult sections of the play. I often asked my fellow writers to take on the characters, to read the dialogue aloud. The discoveries in the emotion evoked in hearing the words guided me to a deeper truth underneath the discovered attic story. By the time we finished our workshop, the play was complete on the page. It was so satisfying, that feeling of knowing the stack of pages honored both the original intention and all of what the ten years had to teach about how to tell the story. I could take my bow and walk off the stage.
Duane has a profound gift with words. He is a writer on his feet, spoken, passionate, and direct. But he discovered that the pencil-and-paper version of the ministry he and his wife Lisa created was not a story he could tell.
Then something unexpected happened. Duane asked me to tell the story of South Street.
For several years before our writing workshop, he and Lisa wanted to find a way to set down their experiences. There were some beginnings, but nothing had advanced. Though they barely knew me, the two of them trusted me with their story.
I told Duane I would think about it. It was a well-considered decision. I had enough sense to know that it would not be easy, that it would probably take more time than I imagined, and that I would need as much help as I could get. It was not something natural to me, a visual person trending to verbal brevity. Perhaps by birth order, as the youngest of five in a very talkative family, my tendency is to speak fast and skip to the end, lest someone snatch the floor before I can finish.
The acceptance of Duane’s challenge came on a day when I was in a strange panic state. I was back in New York, my home of thirty-six years. I came for the memorial service of my dearest friend, a man I loved from the day we met in high school in his gymnasium at Chanel High School in Garfield Heights, Ohio.
I was on my way to Tom’s memorial and felt terribly alone. The feeling kept growing—the kind of pushy, underlying desperation that drives addicts to use, alcoholics to seek the closest bar, anything to avoid what we cannot face. I did not use those escapes anymore, but I had the sweaty panic of need. I had to escape the murky threat, the impossible feelings.
My friend Tom had died in June, and I was now standing on a corner in the city of our youthful promise, and he was not there. Tom was the writer in our magical coterie of friends. He was the brilliant and handsome guy with a mess of problems he could never overcome. It was closing in on me, the agonized sadness of Tom Piechowski and its threat to awaken the deeper, scary spots inside. I was afraid I would not make it to the memorial.
My answer was to grab a distraction, quick, to get busy. To reach out for something to fill up every space and blot out the pain. It was my habit. I was good at it. And there it was, the invitation to write a book, right in front of me. Saying yes then and there seemed rational. I had been thinking about it, after all. It straightened me up out of the panic, erased the intolerable.
I called Duane and told him