April in February

The roofs are shining from the rain,

The sparrows twitter as they fly,

And with a windy April grace

The little clouds go by.

Yet the back-yards are bare and brown

With only one unchanging tree--

I could not be so sure of Spring

Save that it sings in me.

[Sara Teasdale]

Are we human? Or are we dancer?

As I followed my housemate into our house the other day, our conversation laced with the usual lamentations regarding our chaotically mundane lives, she voiced the concern that has been pressing upon me lately. "Sometimes I just feel like I'm not living...I'm just going through the motions of life, accomplishing the next thing, checking it off, and moving on."

I feel the same way. In the midst of shrewdly managing my time and relationships, I am forgetting to be human. A mental review of my days leaves me flashing back to scavenged meals in my cluttered kitchen, shallow business-like meetings with friends, emailing and scheduling and walking the same halls over and over again. Squandered opportunities for betterment, because television is an easy escape, or because a mind-numbing jog with deafening earbuds appeals to me more than the mental burn and spiritual exercise of a good book.

I am copping out of my own life with the excuse, "I just don't have enough time": a phrase that covers all wrongs, that elicits sympathetic nods and sighs of commiseration. How often do I say that, apologetically, feeling utterly and helplessly vindicated?

Beneath that excuse lurks the assumption that I am allowed to alter my attitude depending upon the activity that I am engaging, that I am allowed to numb my spirit at work, or turn off my brain at play. How false.

Time, ultimately, is a shapeshifter, coming to me in many different guises. Worktime, playtime, sleeptime, mealtime, churchtime, familytime, friendstime. On and on. So, next time I clock into work, I need to view it as another of Time's guises. I work in this world, after all--the same world that I play in, and fellowship in. A world that pulsates with color and personality, that reflects that character of its Maker as much in the buckets of rainwater that leak into the Boiler Room as in the tree-thatched trails that greet my tennis shoes after work, or the endearingly wacky puppy who charms me in the evenings.

I think the key is to be found in regarding myself as a child again. When I think of my life only in terms of service, of performing each task with mechanical faithfulness, I lose the spirit of exploration and licensed delight and privileged ownership that should characterize the Christian child of God.

I am His daughter, and He has placed me on this earth to grow and thrive through an obedience that involves more than mere proper behavior...that involves loving Him. And I learn to do that by pondering His character. It is a character that shines out everywhere, if I'd just look up from the checklist. A character that is sacred (just look at the image radiating from each individual you encounter), that is beautiful (artistry, both human and divine, littering the world in spendthrift abandon), that is powerful (consider the tidal swells of emotion that rage even in one human soul), that is a thousand other attributes. I have a lifetime to devote to reveling in that character and responding to it.

So I'm respectfully ditching the checklist, and instead opening my hands, eyes, mind, and heart to the time that I've been given, regardless of the form it assumes.

mendaceous moments

This talk is like all the others. It gets nowhere, nowhere. And it's painful.

[Cat on a Hot Tin Roof]

Thank you?

The memory of my mother wielding the infamous pink wide-toothed comb on Saturday evenings still has the power to make me cringe. She'd set me down sideways on one of our yellow kitchen chairs, undo my damp terrycloth turban, and more often than not advise me of the necessity of this ritual and the futility of tears. "No crying, please--it doesn't help, and it only stresses me out. If you didn't get so many tangles, it wouldn't hurt so bad. Now let's just get this over with...and think how pretty your hair will be for church tomorrow!" Then she'd set to the task with ruthless, root-ravaging zeal, the pain so immediate and potent that I never suffered in silence for long.

From my perch in a future unclouded by the threat of that terrible comb I can see the humor in the situation, and even muster some empathy for the woman who faced the same thankless earpslitting ordeal with all of her young daughters each Saturday twilight. I can appreciate the devotion that inhabited her deed, the commitment to keeping us clean and beautiful, and see in it a motive akin to that which impelled her to launder our clothes and tidy our house and feed us beautifully crafted meals (oh, the scent of freshbaked bread on Monday afternoons!).

Only recently have I come to see how even in dragging that comb through my damp snarled locks, my mother was imaging, however feebly, her Creator.

At the end of time, when God takes the Truth like a comb to a world shampooed of evil, untangling however painfully all the lies that knot and disfigure it, His motive will be the truer, purer version of my mother's, and His results will be improvement far beyond the imagination of a world that has grown accustomed (as I did each week) to its own matted 'do.

Ridiculous analogy? Of course. But I have a feeling that even our most glorious metaphors will sound equally infantile when we see them enacted at last.

In closing, I think it appropriate that I credit my mother for imparting to me the compulsion to allegorize, however foolishly, every life experience.

The only time "Emily Dickinson" and "banal" will ever share one of my sentences

Emily Dickinson had banal moments, too.

I have to believe that sometimes she looked at the world about her and saw...nothing extraordinary. No leaping leopards hailed the sunrise. Not a strain of laughter could the rain tickle out of the silent gables. March days forgot their purple shoes, and slants of light bore no audible weight. Bluebirds left bucaneering to pirate lore.

Perhaps for hours at a time, Emily would allow the world to stand stripped of metaphor. She must have taken things for granted, on occasion.

I have to believe that she practiced. She rehearsed the art of seeing like Michael Jordan practiced freethrows: correcting the posture of her heart, bending her mind into the perfect angle, and focusing her sherry-in-the-glass eyes, until slipping into that higher vision felt natural and she could do it at will.

I have to believe these things, because if high vision can be trained, there is hope for my common soul yet. Maybe one of these days I'll hit the backboard. The rim. The net.

Swish.

truth, beauty, memory

"Listen back to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not and to those too that give no delight at all and hurt like Hell. Be not affeard. The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other--not a song with words but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is part.

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God's things because, of course, they are both things at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak--even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. ...To live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. 'Be not afraid,' says another, 'for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.' He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him."

I encountered this quote again last night as I reread Buechner's Sacred Journey at the plasma center. Earlier in the day, Dr. William Dyrness, the WIC lecturer this year at Covenant College, spoke about Truth and Beauty in chapel. He defined them thus:

Truth is what God does.

Beauty is what that looks like.

I like to ponder those statements as I obey Buechner and listen to the music of my own life.

a thought

"I will not offer burnt offerings to my God that cost me nothing." II Samuel 24:24

When I consider my attitude towards serving God, I am astounded by how capable I am of placating my conscience while still evading the cost. I am American! The idea of sacrificial sacrifice is utterly foreign. I exact very little of myself, leave huge reserves of my "devoted" being untouched, and yet feel that (perhaps because I am not actively pursuing evil) I am doing a pretty good job serving Christ.

Needless to say, when my fingers bolt this into the blue light of the computer screen, my miserliness stands stark and terrible.

I have youth, health, energy, and a quenchless fount of living water burbling inside of me. Holding back is not an option.

rediscovering an old flame

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like curves of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms to hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

---

Sara Teasdale, I cannot help myself: I love you.

Your worldview aligns with mine on only a few points, and your verse lacks the complexity and depth and mastery of greatness. But when I read of "children's faces looking up / holding wonder like a cup", "music like curves of gold", "holy thoughts that star the night", "hours that go by on broken wings", and "the unchanging ache of things"...the eyes of my soul brighten. This was true when I first selected you back in seventh grade: a faded green hardcover volume that has since, to my dismay, vanished. And, although I am often ashamed to confess it, I cannot read you without pleasure, even now that my ear catches flaws in meter and rhyme, and my mind cringes at every redundity, and my soul has grown callused against certain cliches.

The primary function of poetry in my life is that of awakening me to the world. George Cabot Lodge writes that "when you are accustomed to anything, you are estranged from it." Sara Teasdale has freshened the paint on my perceptions many, many times. And so I will continue to name her among my favorite poets, despite the snarkiness of those who desire to let her pages slip silently from the canon.

And when I get a chance, I intend to donate a book of her poems to my library, so that others can discover in her pages the sighing loveliness that so entranced me.

going green

In the square of my soul, throngs of vendors hawk their distractions. My desires are children hyped on sugar and afflicted with ADHD. They dash from one booth to the next, wasteful and heedless, caring only for gratification at whatever cost. Will and Conscience, their feckless chaperones, wait indolently for the inevitable crash and burn, too comfortable and lazy to exercise loving discipline.

The thing is. Those vendors should not even be there. I know the weakness of my executive branch. I know the terrible energy of my spendthrift desires. And yet I have distributed business permits for every entrepreneur that beats at my city gate.

I need a new foreign policy. My inner sanctum should not be a market. It should be a garden, painstakingly planned and tilled, irrigated by the fountain of living water, each plant selected for the fruit it will bear, seeded and tirelessly tended. What an outlet for the energies of my desires! And what a playground!

This is not to say that trading with the world is forbidden. Where else am I to find the materials for this garden? And, after all, half of the joy in a garden is that of inviting others to revel in its beauty and taste its bounty.

What I mean is that the soul should not be a center of commerce. It should be a place of beauty and joyous labor. Envoys should venture forth into the world to do business, rather than wait for the world to intrude. Invitations should be extended to other souls to rest awhile and find refreshment, an escape from gaudiness and artificiality.

The time has come to cast out the market, to begin this transformation.