Sometimes I think about how much nicer life would be if feelings did not exist. When I wake up tired and sluggish and perhaps a wee bit grumpy, for example. What is the use of feeling those things? They are like that obnoxious person who is bound to point out the obvious reasons for the things that ail you, without offering any solution. "You should not have gone to bed so late last night," your heavy eyelids admonish. "Nor should you have had so many sugary things," your puffy face avers, while your aching muscles demand, "What were you thinking, drinking all that coffee?" They have no bearing on the fact that I am nevertheless required to get out of bed, shower, dress, glug a mug of coffee, and go to work. They just make it more difficult to do so with cheer.

Of course, experience has taught me that the best way to deal with such unsolicited and unhelpful input is simply to nod my head in agreement and then count my blessings and focus on the hours ahead. No use letting them get on my nerves. No use arguing. They are right--they are oh so right--but that's all behind me, and today is a completely different matter.

I'm going to go find some pleasant feelings to keep me company.

I have a dream.

The dream is Italy.

Everyone falls in love with Italy, to some extent. For some it is a fleeting and faraway crush, a brief fascination. For many the fall is irrevocable and enduring. I have yet to meet a single person who was not at one time intrigued by some aspect of this peerless nation.

Even before the few thrilling days I spent there, I was being primed. I was learning about the Roman Empire and the days of the early church, about the Roman Catholic Church and the Renaissance. I was reading Mandie and the Catacombs, Quo Vadis, An Echo in the Darkness. Middlemarch and A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread. Under The Tuscan Sun and The Age of Innocence. Roderick Hudson and The Marble Faun. I was watching While You were Sleeping and Return To Me and Gladiator. I was spending my afternoons after school poring over art books in the library: DaVinci and Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Bellini and Caravaggio, Donatello and Giotto and Fra Fillippo Lippi, Titian and Veronese. I was acquiring an idea of Italy.

Then I was there. I only spent a week there, but it was long enough to understand that this was a place I wanted to know, to befriend. It was like meeting a famous person, a person I'd heard of but never met, and feeling an affinity...a sense that, under other circumstances, we would become kindred spirits. She would tell me all her secrets, and they would help me understand things about her. I would love her for them. Our friendship would help me understand myself better. It would transform me.

I am determined to live there. It doesn't have to be soon, nor does it have to be forever. But somehow I need to be a part of Italy's story. Italy is already a part of mine.

hidden will of iron

I am always thrown when relatives express any unsolicited interest in my plans, despite the uncontestable truth that my upbringing should have prepared to me to expect such involvement.

Why do I find it so hard to imagine that my aunts, uncles, cousins, and even siblings, do actually care about me? Why is it so difficult for me to take my family members at face value, rather than reading motivations like pity and a sense of duty into their kindly questions and gentle advice? I guess I am more suspicious and guarded than I give myself credit. And that is saying a lot.

Also, I am private to a fault, particularly in areas of my life where I am unsure of myself. If I am going to go out on a limb, there is no way I'm going to let anyone in on it until I've attained a measure of success. Probably not even then.

Perhaps I've convinced myself that my family truly doesn't care a great deal about the actions I take because I fear the prospect of being a disappointment more than I fear the prospect of being a failure.

Last year I took a personality test in the book Wired That Way and came out very strongly in the "peaceful phlegmatic" camp. One phrase they used to describe this personality group has lingered in my memory. While asserting that peaceful phlegmatics place a high priority on making sure everyone is happy, the book also warned that these outwardly pliable individuals happen to possess a "hidden will of iron."

In a nutshell, this describes my approach to life. I hate when people are unhappy with me, I hate the prospect of disappointing anyone, but there are certain areas of my life where I am brutally inflexible. I will pursue my own dreams. I will try to make these dreams appear as innocuous and palatable as possible in order to make others as happy about them as I am. Or I will simply not share them if I am sure that they will offend. But I will persist in them.

I guess it is this fiercely guarded will of iron that I am nursing when I persuade myself that my family is not truly interested in my plans. I am afraid that if they are truly interested, that if for some reason they are opposed to my will, I will be forced to disappoint them. Much easier to pretend that they are just being polite, and therefore it is okay for me to be casual and evasive in my response.

The book didn't mention cowardice as a side effect of pleaceful phlegmaticism.

Notice, too, the questions I leave pointedly unaddressed. (For example: Am I afraid of talking things out because such discussions might reveal me to be in the wrong? Should I even be pursuing a path that I feel positive my loving devoted family would oppose? Didn't God write a lot about the folly of ignoring advice...of leaning on one's own understanding? Aren't relationships more important than agendas?) Listen to these questions clang against the iron vault of my hidden will.

let this eye be not folly's loophole

I've been re-reading Marilynne Robinson's Home, and feeling that something about this book is special. For some reason it moves me more deeply than usual.

When I actually took a moment to analyze why this is, I had a revelation. I realized that the difference is not so much in the book itself as it is in my attitude towards it.

Usually when I read a book, my attitude is one of conquest, of entitlement. I'm the conquistador blazing through foreign terrain and seeking to understand it only for my own personal profit. It can be easy for me to emerge from a book having made very little connection with the characters, caring very little about how they end up (or caring only from a scientific distance), and feeling strongly only about how beautifully the author managed to render the scenery. I can draw from it a sense of the picturesque, and perhaps a sweeping overview of the themes that I can, if I desire, apply sweepingly to myself. I can walk away more experienced, perhaps, smarter...but essentially unchanged.

With this book, however, I quickly discover that I am on native soil. It doesn't take long for me to recognize these faces. I am one of them, and that makes all the difference to my posture. I pay each scene, each character, each event the sort of attention (critical and loving) that an insider pays to each landmark or passerby or local occurance. I'm no tourist here, rushing through the highlights of the Baedecker and going my way with only a blur of faces and places lingering in my memory. Rather, these pages turn my gaze both backward and inward, prompt me to pause over memories of the people and places that produced me, and to reflect on my motivations and behavior in both the past and the present.

Embedded in the fictional setting of Gilead, Iowa is a truth I can identify because I have experienced it. And I can let it effect me deeply.

This whole line of thought has me reevaluating the sort of attention I pay to other books. I want to read in order to become a better human--not in order to be regarded as cultured or well-educated. Not to take a little vacation from reality. Not for my own glory or because it simply is the thing to do or because I feel that it will strengthen my morals or broaden my experience. I don't want to be a Cortez of literary frontiers; I don't even want to be a Miss Lavish or an Innocent Abroad.

Books are another sphere in which I can "see in all bodies the beat of spirit," an arena where the "alien hands of love" can touch me if, I let them. Reading opens up yet another place in which I can love my neighbor as myself--where I can learn to be "giver of due regard."

So no more arrogance, entitlement, patronization, generalization as I open each new book.

Instead: humility, teachability, attention, gratitude.

Maundy Thursday

I love the religious calendar. It is as though a bunch of alarm clocks were smuggled into the year, strategically timed to rouse my heart from slumber and open my eyes to the full meaning of my experience.

With every passing year, this song means more for me. Incarnation, Epiphany, Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and Advent again. This cycle, Christ's cycle, is my cycle, too. Each milestone reminds me of my own experience: new creation, death to self, resurrection, ascension, life eternal. The pattern contains revelation to assure me, promise to thrill me, mystery to keep me reaching.

I look into my heart and count the rings, read the weathers of each particular season: sunshine and rain, draught and flood, harvests abundant and scant. I am consoled to see that, even without my knowledge or desire, each ring came to completion. Each new ring grew wider than the one before.

I think: You are growing.

I may at times feel vulnerable to the elements, at the mercy of the weathers of the world. But then I am reminded that I am a sacred tree, planted beside the living water. My roots tighten their grip. My branches curve up and spread out.

I photosynthesize with zeal.