Through-lines of a Life and Career: An Editor’s Reflection

For my own part, I know I must keep alive in myself what I have once known and grown into.
—Thomas Merton¹

 My wide-ranging but low-built apartment complex, constructed before I was born, values its old maples and oaks, though time has reduced their coverage. Staking a personal claim on my small yard, I planted a fig sapling, propagated at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. In eight years, the tree has exponentially flourished upward and outward. I’ve trimmed to engender growth. In season and out, I marvel at the twists and turns of the branches, sprouting from the trunk and ancillary leaders—new growth every year, but all tethered to the main.

The tree reminds me of Lilias Trotter’s observation that life is not like a manmade ladder “wherein one step follows another in a stiff and regular formality” but like a tree “wherein one step of progress grows out of another in life and freedom”² —each tree, each soul unique.

Each tree or soul is unique in its freedom, but they also require connections. The pattern of a tree exhibits a reasonable progression in which the ending builds on the beginning, in which the twig connects to the limb, to the trunk.

I’ve recently identified and come to appreciate various through-lines of my life. Now toward the end of my editorial career, I am drawing a flowchart of my extensive list of clients over the decades. The poster-sized page plotted professional connections—what relationship led to another then another?—all the way back to my first full-time job. From that focal point, the flowchart spread tall and wide, like Abraham’s famed oak.

Flow-charting one’s career in gratitude for networking connections might be a once-in-a-decade exercise. I think of the prophet Samuel’s proclamation, “Hitherto hath the Lord”—and a host of aides—“helped us” (1 Sam. 7:12 kjv), and of Handley Moule’s commentary: To Samuel “the help of the ‘Hitherto’ was a guarantee for the ‘Henceforth.’”³

I have to dig deeper to see and draw connections between more personal past and recent life experiences. For one client, I pored over dozens of manuscripts written by experts in the field of developmental disabilities, not because I had much interest; they paid well and promptly.

Ten years later, a seven-year-old neighbor with special needs insinuated herself into my life, banging on my door, peeping through my mail slot, peeing on my sidewalk, snapping off my daffodils. Why? I’m not sure—maybe her persistence and inquisitive brown eyes, maybe the tomes I’d edited—but I opened my heart to her and walked her toward sociability. The connections to my readings about developmental disabilities now clear.

Today at age twenty, she calls me her “extra grandma.” Her questions are keen: does God lie? Her observations, perceptive. She will describe one setting, then another, and happily exclaim, “See, there’s a connection!” Sometimes it is obvious, like a dozen eggs alongside a dozen cupcakes. Sometimes not so, like a paperclip and a belt. She set me on this quest for life connections.

For another employer, I “punched up” stories of convicted offenders who had heard Jesus’s “follow me,” assessed their life decisions, and turned over a new leaf. I rarely conducted interviews but worked with someone else’s transcript. As a young professional, I sat at a desk far removed from the harsh realities of the justice system.

But in the past six months, I’ve accompanied two neighborhood families to court—once sitting behind the prosecutor, once behind the defense—the parent’s son/daughter trembling, awaiting the witness stand, then a jury’s decision.

I can connect other branches back to their early origins. I’ve recently volunteered to arrange altar flowers. What prompted the push? Watching my dad tend his rose garden? Both my arranging and his tending inform each other, connecting my beginnings and endings.

Looking for and discovering more commonplace connections expands my appreciation for God’s mysterious ways, as expressed in the faith-ful poetry of an emotionally tormented William Cowper (1731–1800), “God is his own interpreter, / and he will make it plain.”⁴

You can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending⁵

Last Sunday, out walking, I happened upon a young immigrant selling flowers, a dollar each. The thin-faced preschool daughter at her side—or maybe the woman’s dental needs—drew me in. I stopped and asked for two roses, both past their prime. “Purple,” I said, smiling at the child. She picked two stems from the nearby bucket. “This okay. Yes?” Her eagerness inspired me to point to a third. “And also one red.” She offered no cellophane. I didn’t ask for a bag.

Sobered, I stepped away from the curb, suddenly connecting this encounter to a dormant memory of an on-stage street-vendor moment. In my one and only school play—sixth grade, A Christmas Carol—my solitary line personally introduced me to territory outside my suburban childhood. “Buy an apple from a poor old woman, Sir?” The street setting placed me in the Dickensian past. The sidelined role transported me to the future that is my present—characterized by white hair and weathered skin. Mr. Scrooge walked by, as I have on numerous occasions, now that I’ve lived for decades in a needy urban neighborhood.

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. Maybe so, but I counter that with St. Paul’s admonition, “Now is the acceptable time” (2 Cor. 6:2 kjv): for me, time to connect the experiences of younger days with present opportunities for growth, sometimes living out the roles like a straight branch, sometimes redemptively reimagining the lines.

In any case, I lay the seasons, the twists and turns, of my life in God’s hands.

The tortured gestures of the apple trees have become part of my prayer.
—Thomas Merton⁶

1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, Image, 1968), 187.
2. Lilias Trotter, The Way of the Sevenfold Secret (1926; reprt., Mt. Dora, Fla.: Lilias Trotter Legacy, 2023), 54.
3. Handley C.G. Moule, “Hitherto: Henceforth,” in The Sacred Seasons (New York: Dutton, 1893), 33.
4. William Cowper, “Light Shining out of Darkness,” ca. 1773, cited in Ian Bradley, The Book of Hymns (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1989), 143.
5. Often miscredited to C. S. Lewis. This is a slight paraphrase of James R. Sherman, Rejection (Pathway Books, 1982): “You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.” See David Sivak, “Fact Check: Did CS Lewis Give This Advice on Starting Over?” July 26, 2019, at checkyourfact.com/2019/07/26/fact-check-cs-lewis-cant-go-back-change-beginning-start-ending/.
6. Thomas P. McDonnell, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, Image, 1974), 207.