PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILY FRAZIER
Martha Park
Every now and then, when she was younger, Martha Park would find herself in one of her father’s sermons. “I’m using you in my sermon today,” the Rev. Don Park would tell her before the service. Martha would sit in a pew with her mother, “anxious to see how I’d show up, in what version of myself, in what ways he saw me.”
Park, who as a child in Memphis “never lived more than a parking lot away from a church,” tells the story in her new book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, which will be published in May by Hub City Press.
“I wonder how it changed me,” Park writes, “to know my father had his eyes on me, to know some vision of me might show up in a sermon on Sunday. I wonder how it changed him, to look down at the pews and see me there, notebook open on my lap, waiting for him to say what I’d been thinking all along.”
Park, now 36, has been sitting with her notebook open, writing and drawing, thinking and wondering about God and faith, the church and the world since she was a child in a pew.
Her book is more than a collection of essays and illustrations by a preacher’s kid. It’s the journal of an open-hearted, curious soul during a time of political turmoil and climate change in what Flannery O’Connor called “the Christ-haunted South.”
The book’s title is drawn from the Gloria Patri, also known simply as the doxology. It’s a 30-word declaration of faith sung during many mainline Christian worship services: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.”
Park grew up singing that tiny hymn every week in one of several United Methodist congregations her father served over the years, in and near Memphis. The words “world without end” are an affirmation of the eternal nature of the Trinity. For Park, they also are a declaration of her concern for — and hope in — the eternal nature of creation itself.
“This era of mass extinctions, biodiversity loss, and increasingly frequent and extreme natural disasters ... has driven the resurrection to the front of my mind,” Park writes in an essay on the search for the probably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker in the woods and marshes of eastern Arkansas.
Park is drawn to such topics and places where people “have sensed something sacred, where the space between heaven and earth — and time itself — seems to grow thin.” She wonders about creation and evolution as she tells the story of a preacher who claimed he found remnants of Noah’s Ark in northern Florida, and considers the plight of the Florida Torreya, one of the oldest and rarest tree species on earth.
She thinks about sin and repentance as she compares nineteenth-century watercolors of the “unknown and undocumented” frontier of the South to the rapidly changing landscapes of a “South plundered by extractive industry and exploitive labor.”
She ponders mortality and eternity, and care of body and soul, as she visits a growing number of conservation cemeteries across the South.
She considers her own responsibility and complicity as a person of faith in a fallen world, reflecting on “the summer I spent pregnant, in a global pandemic, in record heat, floating in my parents’ above-ground pool, while someone, somewhere — I knew with absolute certainty — was dying of thirst.”
Such are the faith-based thoughts of a young daughter, wife, and mother raised where “there was no separation from the church and our home, from faith and daily life.”
“It’s a different headspace, writing and drawing. Writing is my way of working through a lot of noise and trying to get to a quiet place. Making art is just quiet.” — Martha Park
For Park’s father, who retired in 2019 after four decades in the pulpit, faith “was about the inner and outer transformation, about resisting empire and oppression, and about prophetic imagination and building healthy communities,” she writes.
Her mother, Sherry Lear-Park, who worked for years in donor relations for ALSAC/St. Jude and also retired in 2019, “made life decisions based on whether they made her feel closer to God or farther away,” Park writes.
Martha inherited the “painstakingly moderate tradition” of her mainline Methodist parents. She also inherited her creative mother’s love for art, and her contemplative father’s love for words.
“Like Sherry, Martha has an element of the free spirit. They’ve both got this gentle laugh that puts others at ease,” says the Rev. Dr. Lee Ramsey, a retired seminary professor, United Methodist pastor, and a longtime family friend. “Like Don, Martha has a quiet, reflective side to her personality and her writing. She thinks deeply about life, God, her place in the world, and the inevitable tensions of life and faith.”
As an elementary school student, Park spent weeks learning about drawing, and campaigning to save the orca whale.
As a high school student, she won a national writing competition with a letter to novelist J.D. Salinger about her hometown’s lost innocence.
As a college student, she bypassed the beach to spend one spring break on a bus tour of civil rights landmarks in the South.
“I saw in her a rare maturity and awareness that all was not well with the world,” says Judy Kitts, who was Park’s ninth-grade CLUE English teacher at White Station High School. “She listened and observed more than she talked, and never drew attention to herself.”
Like many writers and observers, Park is uncomfortable talking or writing about herself. She began writing her book as a memoir, the story of a preacher’s daughter who left home and church to go to college, then returned a decade later to both, to witness her retiring father’s last year in the pulpit.
“I wanted to examine my own relationship with faith,” Park says. “But I realized I’m not a memoir writer. I have to sit and write to really think through something, but I need to be talking to other people to figure out what I’m actually thinking. I don’t feel like I’m a person with a lot of opinions or beliefs until I start talking to people and realize how I react.”
In her book, the would-be memoirist becomes a journalist. She interviews ministers and scientists, landowners and farmers, conservationists and creationists, and other mothers and daughters as she travels from one sacred Southern space to another.
Even the stories she tells about herself — stories about her parents and grandparents, her big sister, Courtney, her husband, Colin Lee, and his evangelical family, the complications of her first pregnancy — are means to larger ends.
Park is trying to make sense of the contradictions between the moderate, mainline Christianity she grew up in and the “end-times” evangelical Christian subculture that surrounds her.
“When I was growing up, I’d never heard of the rapture and would never have assumed an empty house meant I’d been abandoned, left behind, for God to judge or damn,” Park writes. “But the apocalypse is still a defining feature of evangelical theologies like the one my husband grew up with.”
Park’s husband, Colin, “my evangelical whisperer,” was raised in a nondenominational evangelical church in Kentucky. They met in a fiction class at Hollins University in Virginia, where Park earned an MFA. They were married in 2018. “Martha is a born artist. It’s impossible to tease apart Martha the person and Martha the writer,” says Colin, who works at ALSAC/St. Jude as a senior advisor of relational engagement.
Park the person can’t help but inhabit the work of Park the writer.
“Though all accounts of lynchings are horrific, there is something particularly, intimately painful about a lynching in one’s own hometown,” Park wrote in 2016 in an essay on the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons on the outskirts of Memphis.
That essay, published by the Memphis Flyer, became a source of support for the Rev. Randall Mullins, his wife Sharon Pavelda, and others who were organizing the Memphis Lynching Sites Project. Mullins, a poet and retired pastor, took Park to visit the site of Persons’ lynching near Summer Avenue and the Wolf River.
“I think of her first as she walked across the river bottom by the driving range just off Summer Avenue, traipsing through the trees and bushes, looking for signs, wanting to experience the reality of the tragedy as she planned to write about it,” says Mullins, who last year published Long Journey Home, a book of poetry. “Martha discovered, as we did on a similar walk, that there was little obvious evidence. But she kept looking.”
Park keeps looking. She realized at an early age that her father’s sermons were not about her or anyone else. He told stories to communicate larger, transcendent truths. His stories got her thinking.
“She’s so curious,” says her mother, Sherry. “When she notices something, she starts wondering about it and stays with it. She absorbs everything she can about it. Then she starts drawing and writing. Martha can’t not write.”
Or not draw. Her illustrations, which have graced the cover of this magazine, are as much a part of her creative process and her being as her essays.
Park majored in art and creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. As an undergrad, she spent parts of three summers at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, taking classes in embroidered maps, Indigo Shibori dyeing, and letterpress printmaking.
After graduate school, Park returned to Penland for a residency for writers and printmakers and another residency for winter writing. She also was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University in 2016.
“It’s a different headspace, writing and drawing,” Park says. “Writing is my way of working through a lot of noise and trying to get to a quiet place. Making art is just quiet.”
Quiet is more difficult for Park to find these days. She and Colin have two children, ages 5 and 1. “Our very small house is getting smaller by the day,” she says with a laugh. “My entire life takes place in the living room and dining room.”
And — the changing climate permitting — in the backyard, which connects to two other familiar and familial backyards. Her parents live next door, and her sister and brother-in-law live behind them. The proximity creates a network of support for three families and three generations.
“We see her in the daily frenzy of parenting young children and then are amazed when she shares her writing with us. Her writing, her faith, her curiosity, are gifts,” says Sherry.
“Martha says the same prayer every night with her child that I said every night with her,” says Don, who every now and then finds himself in one of his daughter’s stories. “It’s a little overwhelming at times,” he adds with a smile, “but I guess it’s her turn.”
World without end. Amen.
David Waters is associate director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis.
