While the earth remains

Autumn in Michigan: has it truly been five years since I last experienced this?  Trudging the familiar shortcut to the library across the Freshman Campus and hearing tennis shoes squeak and scuffle from behind the heavy gym doors, my heart is simmering with a nostalgia as piquant as the chili I lunched on before I left.  My decision to leave my iPod at home is validated by the sounds that brighten the cold air: traffic whooshing along Chicago Drive, acorns crunching beneath my boots, and especially the rowdy voices of happy children shrieking from nearby yards. 

The journey is the span of a city block, but my stride has a noticeable spring in it by the time I'm pulling open the heavy glass doors to immerse myself in the heated fragrance of the library.  Running through my mind as I unshoulder my knapsack and dump my books into the return bin are those words of Emily Dickinson: "How much can come, and much can go, and yet remain the world." 

The theology of that phrase strikes me, caught as I am in life's pattern of births and deaths, beginnings and endings, advents and leave-takings.  How much can come and much can go.  Yet "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." (Gen. 8:22)  Whatever else happens, the world yet remains, hinged on a promise as beautiful and otherworldly as a rainbow. 

Implicit in this verse, however, is the truth that this world will not always remain.  Ultimately, even this world of coming and going will go.  Oneday it will be swept up into a state of completion: the state for which it groans, awaiting deliverance from the One who was from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.    

How much can come and much can go--even this world itself, and certainly my own small life which it encompasses--and yet remains that world.  What consolation for my pilgrim soul.

whiffs

"I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry--in any form of art at all.  Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt."

"I suppose you mean communion with God."

He gave such a snort of laughter that his madeira went the wrong way.

"What on earth did I say that was funny?" I asked, while he was mopping his eyes.

"It was the utter blankness of your tone.  God might have been a long, wet week--which He's certainly treating us to."  He glanced at the window.  The rain had started again, so heavily that the garden beyond the streaming panes was just a blur of green.  "How the intelligent young do fight shy of the mention of God!  It makes them feel both bored and superior."

I tried to explain: "Well, once you stop believing in an old gentleman with a beard...It's only the word God, you know--it makes such a conventional noise."

"It's merely shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about."

"And do religious people find out what it's all about?  Do they really get the answer to the riddle?"

"They get just a whiff of an answer sometimes. ...  If one ever has any luck, one will know with all one's senses--and none of them."

"But haven't you already?"

He sighed and said the whiffs were few and far between.  "But the memory of them everlasting," he added softly."

excerpts, I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith

When I can make my thoughts come forth

To walk like ladies up and down,

Each one puts on before the glass

Her most becoming hat and gown.

But oh, the shy and eager thoughts

That hide and will not get them dressed,

Why is it that they always seem

So much more lovely than the rest?

Sara Teasdale, "Thoughts"