Typical Monday:

...I wake, and, lo! I have forgot,
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity...

[George Mcdonald: "Diary of an Old Soul"]

After the transcendance of worship, how quickly my heart turns away.

I want to hold nothing back.

Anyone who knows me at all, either peripherally or intimately, will probably laugh incredulously at that statement--which attests to my success thus far in that regard.

By nature and (undoubtedly) nurture, I am an extremely inhibited person. I tremble at the idea of vulnerability. I carefully sequester my Self into padded security vaults, and trot out occasional carefully selected artifacts for sterile display to those who pay a certain fee. Thus, the self that others know is as lifeless and rigged as a window display. Such miserliness cannot other than poison me in the long run.

Self-hoarding is not loving, even when it is done out of a desire to shield others from the ugliness and brutality and shame that is as inherently me as my more lovable or acceptable qualities. And above all else, I yearn to love...as freely and loosely and vastly as I have been loved.

The Spirit, the Lover of my soul, is gently teaching me that in order to cease living for myself, I must stop covering my tracks, I must stop clenching my soul shut, and I must allow Him to use my entire Being (heart, soul, mind, and strenght) as His consecrated vessel.

And why would I want to seal away my being? Am I not placed here to fellowship with God and others and the world around me? Isn't withdrawal from that communion a sort of suicide? Ultimately, don't I long for intimacy?

It is not, after all, as though Selfhood can be sapped. My being is not crude oil. Rather, the more I give, the more I have. I've tasted this, and still I withhold. Human nature is a marvel.

I want to hold nothing back.

empathy with Ivan, from a baffled fellow Euclidian

"If God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind, with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry. They even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions. I have a Euclidian earthly mind and so how can I solve problems that are not of this world? ...And so I accept God and am glad to, and what's more I accept His wisdom, His purpose--which is completely beyond our knowledge. I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life. I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. ...I believe that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man. I believe that at the world's end, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the conforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that has been shed. I believe that it will not only be possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened." The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky.

How is it June?

It's already mid-June, and here I am in Hudsonville (the library--my oldest, dearest haunt), bereft of full time employment, my life a steady stream of literature interrupted on occasion by my part time cleaning and babysitting stints or a mug of Folgers with the family. It's been five weeks of indolence, five weeks of adjustment, five weeks of anxiety. Financially, I am drowning. In every other way, however, I feel restored and healed, as though the rest and reading and porch sitting and coffee-drinking are slowly rebuilding my spirit, fortifying it for the struggles that lie ahead. So, despite my fears about not being able to make ends meet, I am contented, and I feel primarily grateful and blessed to be home.

I am on a Madeleine L'Engle kick. Oh, I love her.