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The following passages are excerpted from Falling Toward Grace: Images of Faith and Culture in Indianapolis, edited by Susan Neville, J. Kent Calder, and Kim Charles Ferrill for The Polis Center. The book of essays and photographs was published in 1998 by Indiana University Press.*******
I�ve been thinking a lot about Eden. Perhaps because I�ve been reading the essays you�re about to read, and thinking about them in the context of Indiana literature. The story of the Fall is one that Midwestern writers tell again and again. But perhaps I�ve been thinking about Eden because the story is an end-of-an-era story, a story for the turn of a millennium. The Golden Age in Indiana literature, in itself a lost Eden about lost Edens, was a turn-of-the-century age, with one predictable concern: an ambivalence about the future expressed as the nostalgia for a more perfect past, an idealization of a perfect future, or an at times explicit wish for the new world to explode into this one. A revival or a rapture. Or, depending on your taste, maybe an angel or flying saucer that will usher us safely across to the new world we sense is waiting on the other side of the year 2000.
—Susan Neville
�An Introduction�
The Sisters of Providence were not looked to for advocacy or even empathy, but for rigor. There were sweet temperaments among them, and there were persimmons; but I don�t remember a single hug against those black folds, heavy as stage curtains. In fact, it was pretty much taboo to touch their person. In my early years of school, the Sisters of Providence wore cardboard cowls around their faces that eliminated peripheral vision and allowed your buddies to make faces right alongside a teacher who was lecturing you, while you fought desperately to suppress that fatal smile. Later, they shrank those to visor size in the evolution toward laymen�s dress. Sister Thomas, the principal, was bareheaded and wearing a business suit when I met her a quarter century after graduation, in St. Francis Hospital, where she was working as a chaplain and my father was dying. Impulsively, I framed her face with my hands as I joked about the old days, a stage of our lives that she seemed to have relegated far more neatly than I.
—Dan Carpenter
�Still Catholic�
In Indianapolis, I discovered the diaspora, and a sense of exile. But I also discovered a sense of tradition, which is to say that I met my ancestors for the first time. I am the country peddler come West on horseback. Or that cabinetmaker relocated to the Midwest in 1912 because the cosmopolitan cities of the East had all the cabinetmakers they needed. I can see them, or an exemplary one of them, satchel in hand, waiting for a friend of a friend of a relative, squinting upward at the front of Union Station, then turning to look at the uncomplicated and overwhelming Indiana sky, and the spiritual monochromacity of the life that bustled serenely underneath it, along Meridian, Washington, and Market. A Protestant sky, my exemplary cabinetmaker says to himself. How did they make the sky Protestant?
—Andrew Levy
�Crossed Roads�
�I know no truly happy people when winter comes to this city.� Our spiritual selves curl up like green leaves with the first real frost. We kick into the survival mode and survivors, by and large, have little energy for spiritual reflection, for praise or thanksgiving. In the Midwest we don�t have a landscape that inspires spiritual contemplation. We don�t have a desert landscape of solitude and renunciation here. We don�t have a mountain landscape that inspires ascent and aspiration. We don�t experience the primal tug of vast bodies of water. The spirituality of the woodlands, if there was one, has all but disappeared and Indianapolis, for all its wonderful attributes as a safe and clean city in which to raise a family etc., etc., is indistinguishable from most other urban centers. Let�s face it.
—Jeanette Vanausdall
�Seasons of the Spirit�
I could have gone to a Friends' Church in Indianapolis that Sunday morning, but I was in no mood to sit through anybody's program, no matter how artful or uplifting it might be. What I craved was silence�not absolute silence, for I welcomed the ruckus of doves and finches, but rather the absence of human noise. I spend nearly all of my waking hours immersed in language, bound to machines, following streets, obeying schedules, seeing and hearing and touching only what my clever species has made. I often yearn, as I did that morning, to withdraw from all our schemes and formulas, to escape from the obsessive human story, to slip out of my own small self and meet the great Self, the nameless mystery at the core of being. I had a better chance of doing that here among the silent Quakers, I felt, than anywhere else I might have gone.
—Scott Russell Sanders
�Silence�
