a little less sanguine these days

Last night I drove my roommate to a little place in Chattanooga, where we lounged in comfort and alternated watching a bottle fill up with our plasma and the evening's feature film, "Casino Royale." Thereafter, we exited the building with weighted pockets and lightened veins.

The only negative side to this little arrangement is the rather tender bruise that has taken up residence in the crook of my arm. A small price to pay. I haven't noticed if my humors have come unbalanced, but I've always had a surplus of sanguinity...a reduction this paltry would hardly be noticed.

I have recieved a significant amount of light-hearted criticism for "selling my plasma" (the center prefers to refer to it as a "donation"), but I cannot regard it as detrimental in any way. I get a free movie, an hour of condoned relaxation, and a small sum of money. And somewhere out there, children get vaccinated and burn victims get cured. My plasma is given opportunities that would never have been available to it during its placid existence in my own rather redundant circulatory system.

At the very least, it gives me a new thing to wonder about during the mundane routine of my day.

"Where might my plasma be at this very moment?" I muse, as I swipe off a bathroom counter or pull a bag of trash from a lobby.

How many people in the history of this good earth have ever been able to ask that question with such philosophical detachment?

_________________________________________________

*For the curious...the inscription on the illustration reads thus:

(http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/MT_files/Humor-Sanguine.jpg)

The Aierie Sanguine, in whose youthfull cheeke

The (?) Rose, and Lilly doe contend:

By Nature is benigne, and gentlie meeke,

To Musick, and all merriment a friend;

As seemeth by his flowers, and girlondes gay,

Wherewith he deligtes him, all the merry May.

And by him browzing, of the climbing vine,

The lustful Goate is seene, which may import,

His pronenes both to Women and to wine,

Bold, bouteous, frend unto the learned sort;

For studies fit, bestloving, and belov'd,

Faire-spoken, bashfull, seld in anger moov'd.

thoughts on fundamentalism

The term "fundamentalist" triggers viscerally negative reactions in most Western pluralistic contexts, connoting ignorance, fanaticism, hypocrisy, and hatred. It evokes images of suicide bombers, televangelists, and crooked politicians. Ammerman’s article, The Nurture and Admonition of the Lord, explored a fundamentalist community’s approach towards rearing its children. Her portrayal of Southside absorbed me because it resembled my own Dutch Midwestern community. Reading this article challenged me to evaluate my experience against the Southside model, and to fashion a personal understanding of Christian fundamentalism from this evaluation.

My home community stresses literal interpretation of the set of basic principles outlined by the Bible. Like the children of the Southside community, I matured in a vigilantly monitored environment.

At home, my parents carefully screened my interaction with the world, whether through media, friends, family, or just day-to-day activities. They encouraged immersion in Biblical principles by including prayer and Bible reading at every family meal. My childhood games regularly featured “playing church.” I loved to read, and I can still remember feeling physically jolted when I came across “bad words” or evolutionistic references, or “bad situations” in books. The Elsie Dinsmore series thrilled me with legalistic but fervent enthusiasm for Christ. My definitions of “good” and “bad” came directly from my community, and were reassuringly black and white. We did not say “crap” or “shut up,” and we never watched movies with such swear words, or New Age ideology, or too much age-inappropriate romance. I also loved to write, and I remember struggling with whether or not to include family prayers or references to church in my stories, because even when I was in third or fourth grade, I felt that doing so somehow detracted from the integrity and value of my writing, but not doing so betrayed my religious commitments. I grew up absorbing theology, especially through my extended family, when all the aunts and uncles would congregate at my Oma and Opa’s house every Sunday or for any birthday or holiday, and talk about religion over mugs of coffee and trays of windmill cookies. Although all too frequently laced with arrogance and scandal, these arguments deeply impressed upon me the significance of religion, and of living according to the Bible.

At church, I attended services twice every day, and always had Sunday school or Catechism lessons after the morning service. I remember growing increasingly frustrated with the irrelevancy of my church’s attempts to relate to the youth, displaying a rueful attitude toward Christianity, or sending out a weak “Hey, we’re cool too!” message that seemed to only underscore that the world’s standards counted above all. I received a conflicting message at church: I need to be faithful to the Bible as the only standard—but I have to establish that that standard can measure up to the world’s standards. Pipe organs and superbowl parties still exasperate me.

After being home-schooled for first grade, I attended a Netherlands Reformed denominational school that required girls to wear dresses or skirts and to take home economics classes, and taught only the KJV. My parents chose this school in order to err on the side of caution, viewing it as the “safest” option available, but it created a great deal of confusion for me. Many of my friends regarded my family with suspicion because we owned a television, attended a church that used the NIV, wore slacks, shorts, and tank tops, and purchased Christmas trees. When my parents would explain the reasons behind these differences, I began to develop a sense of superiority. My experience at Plymouth made me something of a hybrid: legalistic, sheltered, but also oddly proud of my Christian freedoms. By the time I transferred to a fledgling high school in ninth grade, I had embraced the mindset that women should only have careers if they are unwed, and that the purpose of education for women was either as a backup plan, or to equip women to be good mothers and wives, as enriched as the flour with which they bake their wholesome homemade treats. My new high school was a breath of fresh air because of its focus on freedom in Christ. Looking back, I see that many of the lessons I learned at Zion were still extremely conservative: vote Republican, make sure you take classical courses like Latin and Logic, be wary of songs not in the Trinity Hymnal, never ever read The Message, etc. However, I also learned about the complexity of life, about bias and common grace, and I started to develop a sense of the need for discernment, for critical thinking instead of blind fidelity. Zion equipped me to think, and, most importantly, it emphasized the importance of grace in relationships.

Did my experiences fashion a narrow-minded bigot out of me? I actually struggle with that question. I have learned to flinch whenever the “gender” question is broached, to cringe away from taking a stand on anything short of “do not murder.” In many ways, I have lapsed into apathy. My convictions frequently take a back seat to my desire to be winsome and charitable—to the point that I cannot confront my loved ones when they fall into very real and destructive vices, because I am so aware of my own failings and inadequacies, and so afraid of driving them away by fundamentalist hypocrisy. And in my ambivalence and confusion, I am on the “faithful” end of most of my age group! Many of my friends have reacted against my community and adopted lifestyles that deeply grieve and baffle the older generation: drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, drug use, eating disorders, and otherwise irresponsible living. At home I cannot engage with my friends because they sense my disapproval, but I also disapprove with the way that my community handles their disobedience, because it strikes me as ungracious and unfeeling.

How do I feel about Christian fundamentalism? I find that it is courageous and well-meaning, but inconsistent and inadequate—in short, it is good but fallen, like all other brands of Christianity.

While I am so grateful for the heritage that I have been given, and the way that God has used my community to lead me to salvation, I nevertheless feel handicapped to relate to both the world and the church because of the confusion it engendered in my heart. During these three years at Covenant, my focus has shifted from an attempt to reconcile my upbringing with Covenant’s teaching, to an attempt to discover whether the Bible teaches what I believe. I am clinging to grace, and striving above all to love and know my God. In so doing, I pray that my actions are faithful to the Truth.

Our only hope: to leap into the Word/ That opens a shuttered Universe

We live half our lives
in fantasy, and words.

["Interrupted Meditation", Robert Hass]

For instance, this morning: I looked at the sunrise behind Brock Hall and suddenly the words "the steeples swum in amethyst" wafted through my consciousness with that familiar shiver of delight. And later, walking with my mug of very bad coffee to my office, I saw the arbitrary gentle fall of snow and heard again a wisp of Dickinson, something about "sifting from leaden sieves."

How impoverished my life would be without its cargo of plundered ideas and phrases and metaphors! Despite my yearning for freshness and originality, I cannot imagine an existence unadulterated by the words of Dickinson, Oliver, Buechner... an existence lived outside of fantasy, and words.

I know that this attitude towards life seems naive and idealistic at best, escapist at worst. I do not deny that evil is uglier than I know, and that a time may come when I look at a sunrise or a leaden flurry, catch the familiar murmur of poetry, and feel the urge to shrug it away with a cynicism borne from acquaintance with the harsher realities of life.

I hope that when that time comes I will remember that fantasy and words are realities of life, too. I hope I will still believe that "language is responsible to being."

And that, miraculously, "there is a Word / at the end that explains."

empty

"What is lacking cannot be counted." Ecclesiastes 2:15b



I peered into my character, and those words sprang to mind. Whereupon my heart heaved a sigh and my will soldered another link into my rusted, chipped, dented, imperfectly mended chain of resolutions.

Sometimes life makes me very weary.

joys of courtship

The "wind is like a whetted knife" out there, and I am grateful for even the institutional cell-like shelter (say that five times fast) of my little office this morning.

Yesterday I took Janie out to the cross-country trails for a run. It was a glowery earthy sort of afternoon, and I felt restive from the day's thousand small vexations as I pumped my knees and started for the path in the woods...little suspecting the gift that lay in store.

Moments after we had lost sight of the trail entrance, the wind sharpened and the sky darkened, even as the air took on an odd lightness and began to prickle with thousands of sharp white flakes of hail.

The whole experience--the subtle sifting noises the hail made as it rained down on the husks of leaves, the bright sting as it barbed my face, and the sight of it twinkling white and lively in the drab and dormant woods--was both surreal and infinitely peaceful. I felt pleasantly bewitched, detached somehow from the ache in my chest and the burning in my throat, my thoughts disembodied from my earthbound self.

All that to say: Here is my answer to your question, Mary Oliver*

(*See January 10 post)

Every day I sense an enigmatic smile, a generous hand flinging riddles into my path that glint with their invisible meanings.

There is joy in knowing that the answers are there, and that they are true.

There is joy in the quest, admiring the craftmanship and masterful creativity invested in the fashioning of those intricate labrynths, seeking the answers through the clever trickery. Knowing that each time I reach in and grasp a glinting truth, I come a step closer to solving the Great Riddle of life itself.

There is deep satisfaction and delight in knowing that each puzzle is a personal gift from a wooing Lover, fashioned with ardent care, evidence of His love and desire. He watches me as I meet them and wrestle with them and react to them. He cares about my response. He is ever at hand to give me hints and encouragement.

And someday, with grand laughter, when He knows that I am ready, He will bestow upon me the Answer in its naked beauty and power. And it will be Himself.

What joy.

the obligatory New Year post, belated

I have been listening to my life, exercising my memory like an atrophied muscle, gently but consistently. It's hard to play your own personal pyschiatric physical therapist, but worthwhile. Buried in my ordinary life is a supernatural love story, and in reading the past like a love letter I am romanced all over again, and acutely aware of how I have used the mundane as a shield against my Lover, betrayed Him by forgetting our history and thinking only on the here and now.

Let me touched by the alien hands of love forever, that this eye be not folly's loophole, but giver of due regard.

I love that phrase, "the alien hands of love." Forever alien, forever reaching for me. Folly peers out of my eyes as often as I forget that I have been touched by Love, that I am being touched by Love. In 2009, my prayer is that these eyes may indeed be givers of due regard, through love's transforming touch.

It is our nature not only to see
That the world is beautiful

But to stand in the dark, under the stars,
Or at noon, in the rainfall of light,

Frenzied,
Wringing our hands,

Half-mad, saying over and over:

What does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
What does it mean?

Mary Oliver: The Leaf and the Cloud

Sea-Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

[John Masefield]

never fails to sober me

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins]

confession

I think I need to break my ee cummings habit.

Mary Oliver is much, much safer. She anthems her heart out to an egalitarian classless world, surpassing the provincialism of cummings' seductive old-fashioned thous. Reading Oliver, I participate indiscriminately in loving Earth: owls, lilies, trees. This love is safe because it is not too deeply personal. I don't say this to belittle my enthusiasm for the "orange sticks of the sun," the "heaped ashes of the night," and the "dark hug of time," subjects so deftly illuminated when Oliver strikes her worded matches over them! But that enthusiasm is untainted by the longing that ee cummings stirs deep in my stomach with his language-powered emotional blender--longing for more than the fellowship of "the hummingbird in the summer rain shaking the water-sparks from its wings." Longing to possess the "fragile lips" that "usher the sweet small clumsy feet of April" into the "ragged meadows" of someone's soul. Longing for wooing and kisses and above all never to be a "deadfromtheneckup graduate" or a "Cambridge lady who lives in a furnished soul."

Both poets inspire me, but in different directions. I read Oliver and am inflamed with a zest to live a high life of wonder and witness. I read cummings and suddenly remember the becalmed seas of emotion residing within me, and this awareness alarms me into believing that a life bereft of a human love story cannot be complete.

To Oliver belongs the chanting of high priestesses, chaste and precious. To cummings, all the greed and ardor of an addict, grasping for experiences of deeper intensity.

Perhaps one day cummings will be safe for me. But for now, I think I'd best break the habit.

In Defense of Babel

Our situation is becoming dire. The Deconstructionists have pulled the rug from beneath the canon, and our tower is wrenching its underdeveloped torso toward heaven even as it fragments beneath the roar of a dreadful clamor. We hoped to make a name for ourselves by building this tower. We hoped to reach to heaven. We hoped that these turrets would at long last arrive at TRUTH, and our identities would be secured on the face of the earth.

Instead, we have reaped chaos and estrangement. But can we be blamed? We used the latest technology available, far superior to the ambiguous drawings sketched on ancient caves! Is it our fault that the words that we stacked upon each other were inadequate, despite our careful craftsmanship? We did what we could with what we had. It was a glorious effort.

Of course we know that words are mere symbols, pointing to their subjects in the tradition of cave drawings, incapable of conveying the essence of things, prey to the associations and perspectives of their handlers. One needs only consider the act of storytelling to prove this. Ask five eyewitnesses to describe one event, and see what a variety of soups emerge as the storytellers season the water of the event with their own contextual piquancy. Yet--what a feat!--out of these nuanced, imprecise stories we fashioned the stories of our tower. What else could we use? What other medium could bridge that terrible void?

No wonder our quest for heaven and a name is foundering. Bereft of a cornerstone, fashioned in ignorance and out of a desperate bravado, it was only a matter of time before this tower began to falter. I suppose we've felt premonitions of our demise for centuries. But isn't it marvelous, how far we got? This vast, aspiring, flawed monolith: what a tribute to the human spirit!

(We won't voice our terror. We won't express our suspicion that heaven and a name is more than a handful of atmospheric layers beyond our grasp. Too late now, as the tower crumbles, to wonder if some other way exists to bridge the terrible gap between earth and heaven, chaos and order, the name of a thing and its essence. We have come so far: we won't desert.)

"The person who would do great things well must practice daily on little ones; and she who would have the assistance of the Almighty in important acts, must be daily and hourly accustomed to consult His will in the minor affairs of life." -Emily Judson

I am wasting my life waiting in idleness for some great, important task. How encouraging to remember that the business of living well is reserved for all followers of Christ, and is significant and useful in its own right, even as it prepares me for the "greater" moments that may eventually confront me.

Obedience to the will of God brings satisfaction always, to all of my desires, be they deep or shallow, noble or mean. And a life of obedience is never insignificant.

Janie

4 am, Monday morning. The dark house hunkers down on the mountain beneath a cold drizzle. Inside, it still smells faintly like the mulled cider candle that had been extinguished five hours before by the person who now sleeps deeply in the cozy queen bed. She is so warm, in her oversized long-sleeved T-shirt and her fuzzy pajama pants, beneath the heavy blankets. Another hour of bliss awaits her before the cellphone charging on the floor will call her to the things of this world.

She probably is having a delightful dream.

A tremendous THUNK from the vicinity of her closet reverberates through the stillness. She twitches, but does not stir until a second cringe-inducing CRASH booms out, followed by a stream of whimpering half-barks and the scrabbling of little paws on linoleum. As she staggers to a sitting position, the barks escalate to full scale woofs, a shrill whine providing a backdrop for them like the drone of a bagpipe.

The erstwhile sleeper falls back onto the pillow with a groan expressive of all the weariness in the world, but the occupant of the back room has no sympathy.

That is how I found myself shivering out in the front yard at 4:05 am while raindrops dotted the air around me, cajoling little Janie to please please please find a spot and pee on it. Of course, once she had obliged me at last and we were back inside, I found that I could not endure her maladorous pelt. And that is how I found myself stooping over our bathtub and lathering Janie's fur to a fragrant shine, towelling her dry before jumping into the shower myself.

A pot of coffee worked its usual miracle on the atmosphere, and my spirits began to rise as I threw on my clothes and whipped my hair into a towel, rounding the corner to where Janie bounded over and did her prancing happy-dance around my bare feet.

And THAT is how I found myself snuggled onto the living room couch with a sweet-smelling, silky-furred, snoring puppy burrowed into my lap and a mug of coffee in the cup of my palm, my face a study in satisfaction.

Now I call that a happy ending.

Stereotypes make the world a sillier place

As I walk out of Mac Lobby into the frosty air, two grounds work study students stand with leafblowers at the ready. Dressed in camo coats, denim, heavy work gloves, and scuffed-up work boots, with their red noses and disheveled hair, they present a rugged vision of blue collar hardiness.

As I scurry past, I catch a phrase from their gruff conversation. "I was aghast!" one of them is exclaiming, in injured tones.

Bless you, Wielder of the Leafblower, for reminding me that the most enjoyable function of stereotypes is to prime us for such delightful surprises.

I could not have defined the change--
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul--
Is witnessed--not explained--

E. Dickinson, of course.

"Pious girls have tender hearts...They are brought up to think someone ought to love them for that sort of thing..."

I'm in the midst of Marianne Robinson's excellent new novel, Home, which develops the Boughton family storyline from her former novel, Gilead. Robinson has the knack of rendering little scenes so unexpectedly poignant that tears frequently take me by surprise. An EKG of my heart would probably reveal frequent surges during my reading, as my spirit reacts to the truth of the language.

The story has me thinking, with mingled fondness and regret, of my past. Like Gilead, Hudsonville offered an insidiously tame backdrop for the forging of my character, ripe for the fostering of hypocrisy. My Christian upbringing resembled Glory's: allegorical; Right and Wrong so concrete that I barely recognized them when they encountered me on the street. As a result, I grew up divorcing my attitude from my actions, and seeing no harm in it. I used Submission as a barrier to relationships--my posture always giving ground while my inner self remained intact and inflexible. It's incredible how successfully a facade of mildness can safeguard an arrogant spirit from detection...even self-detection! They call that passive-aggression, and I still battle it daily. Hypocrisy and passive aggression. Mix in a cloud of self-deception, and my idyllic childhood unfolds. And none to blame but Human Nature.

It has me wondering what new realizations will emerge as these days fade into perspective. It has me clinging to Grace. It has me saying, with a weary Jack Boughton at his kitchen table, "I am so tired of myself."

feelin' callow

Today is the sort of day that makes me realize that I should've paid more attention to high school politics. I feel naive and unsure of my footing in relational terrain that most normal people regard with world-weary yawns (having discovered years ago that those mountains really are molehills). And if the veterans continue to tell me that, it must be true. But I don't see that clearly enough yet to react to those molehills in any other manner than the alarm I feel.

That does not prevent me from feeling silly about how I've handled things. I wish I had the detachment to care less...but pity has a way of muddying my perspective and compromising my poise.

All in all, I definitely feel my immaturity more keenly than I have in awhile. It's unsettling to realize that the woman I thought I was chatting with in my brain is still in the most awkward stage of her social adolescence.

Funny that I managed to decieve myself about her for so long.

The world is not designed for keepsake

My oldest memories of Thanksgiving are pseudo-memories, stolen from the dusty home videos that now litter the basement junkroom at my house and ratty packs of photos in our kitchen cabinet. In the earliest of these, Hannah and I are two bonnetted and befrippered babydolls with complacent looks being handed and jostled about by the then-strangers whose faces now hold such dearness and meaning for us: aunts, uncles, older cousins, and most of all the freshfaced woman who beams all her mother pride into the camcorder--and at the man behind it. It's strange for me to think of them then. Of course, it's strange to think of my own foreign little mind then, acquiring a new idea that would inscrutably begin to insinuate itself into the other concepts that were gradually coming into focus: sister, mom, dad, family, smells, lights, color, temperature. A specific blend of all of these: Thanksgiving.

I cherish most the memories of the Thanksgiving family reunions that my dad's side of the family began to hold yearly in Camp Dogwood or Camp Lookout in Georgia. Hannah, Daniel, and I would plan ahead for weeks, making detailed lists of items to bring, packing and repacking, fighting over the best suitcases, and regaling the littler children with stories of the years before. Events like these loomed large in my mind because they were so rare. Cramming eight children into a large van and driving for 12 hours was hardly an experience my haggard parents wished to repeat too often. And, as I recall the year that infant Willem bawled for a marathon three hours through the darkness on the way to Lookout Mountain, I have to commiserate.

Of course, once we arrived all I remember was the rampant fun to be enjoyed. Bunkbeds, fooseball, watching "While You Were Sleeping" and "Much Ado About Nothing," triumphing in multiple games of Boggle, suffering in multiple games of Ping-Pong, preparing and consuming lavish meals, decorating cookies, collecting leaves and berries for the Thanksgiving banquet garnishes, exploring the surrounding woods, bonfires to the choral accompaniment of John Denver and Christmas Carols, prank warfare between the cousins, and talent shows in the chapel. I loved to wander out by myself in the cold, especially at dusk, and tell myself stories...although I felt guilty preferring my own company to the rowdy carousing of my cousins. Half of the enjoyment in those solitary hours was in knowing that steamy fragrance and cheery clamor would greet me the moment I stepped back into the lodge.

Thanksgivings have changed as my generation has grown. We no longer reunite each November. Weddings, which occur at least once a year, have assumed that position. Since attending Covenant, I have not yet celebrated the occasion at home. Although I've never been one to get homesick or depressed, I do feel melancholy as I compare the carefree enjoyment of my childhood to my seasoned appreciation for Thanksgiving now.

It's the heedlessness that I miss most, the assumption of wellbeing. The ability to step out of the toasty lodge into an icy twilight and wander, thinking big thoughts uninterruptedly, free to return when I please to an environment that has remained reassuringly unaltered.

As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored... [Nabakov, Speak, Memory]

"People legislate continually by means of talk." Herzog, Saul Bellow

I have an uneasy feeling about the decrees my legislature has pronounced in recent conversation.

Oh the tongue, that rogue member, constantly compromising my better self!

"A cup of sweetness cannot spill one bitter drop, no matter how badly jarred."

[Amy Carmichael]

the heart-shackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain,

unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,

selfishness

---

When I first found you I was

filled with light, now the darkness grows

and it is filled with crooked things, bitter

and weak, each one bearing my name.

---

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

---

Lord, I will learn also to kneel down

into the world of the invisible,

the inscrutable and the everlasting.

---

I had such a longing for virtue, for company.

I wanted Christ to be as close as the cross I wear. ...

...I prayed, oh Lord, let me be something

useful and unpretentious...

Lord, let me be the flower, even a tare; or a sparrow.

Or the smallest bright stone in a ring worn by someone

brave and kind, whose name I will never know.

---

Help me to hear and to hold

in all dearness those exacting and wonderful

words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:

Follow me.

---

God, once he is in your heart,

is everywhere--

---

Everywhere I go I am

treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and

am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given

the white lilies on the black water. My heart

sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey

half what it feels and means.

I always find my own soul looking up at me when I read Mary Oliver. I always leave with deep breathing and squared shoulders and eager eyes.

regret

(Oh, heart, I would not dangle you down into
the sorry places,
but there are things there as well,
to see, to imagine.)

[Mary Oliver]

...and to learn from...

mustard

On the Parable of the Mustard Seed

Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.

No, He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,

was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.

Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique—
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,

as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom
a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.
The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.
[Denise Levertov]

Mustard Seeds and Miracles

What human being can refuse to invest thoughtful consideration in a poem as carefully crafted as Denise Levertov’s On the Parable of the Mustard Seed? Fashioned around a borrowed simile, Levertov’s poem contains allusions to biblical narrative and teachings, demonstrating its author’s exposure to ancient literature, as well as her boldness in tackling a subject so controversial and cherished. Its musicality invites the reader to linger, relishing the artistry that produced alliterative phrases like “wayside weed,” “west wind,” “mistake the metaphor,” “wind brings,” and “wheatstems to glean.” The intellect delights in catching the clever verb structure in a story that includes a figure “who walked the field paths, / running His hand along wheatstems.” Levertov’s beautiful use of synecdoche freshens the paint on images that the reader might otherwise pass over. Branches and birds become “a treeful of shade and nest and song,” while a field of prosaic mustard instead manifests itself in “acres of yellow.” Birds coyly invite notice as the subtle stirring of “wings among yellow flowers.” All of these elements join around one central metaphor: the image of a magical tree in which roosts a “great concourse of birds.” Any message, so gloriously housed, invites sensitive contemplation.

Levertov’s theme, which ultimately expresses, through the person of Christ, an affirmation of a miraculous Truth surpassing the legality of the natural world, does not disappoint.

She opens her poem with a question. “Who ever saw the mustard-plant…grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree?” Assuming a Christian readership versed in the parables of Christ and their traditional interpretations, this question smacks the turf before them like a gauntlet. What then of Christ, who declares, “[The Kingdom of God] is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (ESV, Mark 4:31-32) Assuming a skeptical readership, it fans the fires of convicted suspicion in their hearts, and evokes a hearty assent. After all, any observer would verify her description of a mustard-seeded field: “Acres of yellow, / not a bird in sight.” But what observer can substantiate Christ’s description of a mustard tree, which more echoes the image Levertov debunks in her opening question: a “treeful of shade and nests and songs”?

Levertov answers the rhetorical opening question with the expected “no.” Yet in taking this stance she sides neither with the skeptic nor the “glib” believer that she will later berate. Rather, she asserts that this Christ, who “knew / the west wind brings / the rain, the south wind / thunder” was no simpleton. He, too, experienced the physical reality of a nature bound by laws, and personally “walked the field-paths / running His hand along wheatstems.” Aware of these laws, aware even that the wheatstems contained “intimate milky kernels, good / to break on the tongue” for gleaning, Christ could not have been deceived about the properties of lowly mustard. No, she says, her tone faintly condescending in the manner of one who gently states the obvious: No. This forward-looking Christ “was talking of miracle, the seed within us.”

The timbre of the discussion alters: Nature, emphatically affirmed, is then surpassed by Super-nature, by Christ Who is the Great Progressive, the Super-man. That “seed / within us, so small / we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust, / nothing” is not, as “glib generations” traditionally have asserted, an ordinary mustard seed with earthbound limits. It is miracle. Those who deny this phenomenon “mistake the metaphor” because they focus so intently on blindly believing Christ’s literal word that they deny the paradox it presents to a mind open to the real world. And so “mountains / remain unmoved.” The faith that Christ describes in Matthew 17:20 as being as little as “a grain of a mustard seed” moves mountains, not because of its size, but because it is itself a miracle. To deny its supernatural property is to deny its existence, and to deny the possibility of impossibility.

“Faith is rare, He must have been saying,” Levertov explains. Even more: it is “prodigious,” a word that connotes not only vastness of size but also wonderfulness, unnaturalness. It is “unique— / one infinitesimal grain divided / like loaves and fishes.” In this simile, Levertov alludes to one of Christ’s miracles of augmentation, wherein he fed a multitude from a paltry meal of loaves and fishes. That miraculous augmentation is faith: “as if from a mustard-seed / a great shade-tree grew. That rare, / that strange: the kingdom / a tree.” And Christ, in carrying it out, transcends ironclad nature.

But to what end? Assuming that Christ has indeed planted a minutely prodigious miracle in our hearts, assuming that the kingdom tree does, in fact, sprout from the lowly mustard seed, the audience must still question Christ’s purpose in upsetting nature so. Levertov concludes her poem with a breathtaking image of the result of Christ’s miraculous action: “The kingdom / a tree. The soul / a bird. A great concourse of birds / at home there, wings among yellow flowers.” The kingdom, sown in this earth, exceeds its possibilities and blossoms into a tree of yellow flowers, the habitation of souls. Thus Christ fashions a wonderful tree of life from the meager earthly plant. This is the kingdom: glorious beauty wrought of the unextraordinary.

Even as this vision delights our minds, Levertov alters her tone yet again, crafting within it the plaintive unresolved note of expectancy as she concludes with the words, “The waiting / kingdom of faith, the seed /waiting to be sown.” Sealing the poem, these phrases remind her readers that the kingdom has not yet arrived. It is waiting to be sown.

This poem, like the parable to which it alludes, speaks the Gospel. It affirms the natural world in all its order and legality, and the limitations that such laws entail. But into this order walks the character of Christ, bringing revolution, establishing a new order. For those who recognize that the seed within them is miracle, He has planted a dwelling of prodigious life: the kingdom tree awaits their coming. However, before they may roost, another call rests upon these seeded souls. As earthly birds are agents of seeding, so Levertov’s bird-souls are Christ’s agents, used to spread the seed that is waiting to be sown.

In crafting this poem, Levertov responds to this call and seeds the world with miraculous mustard. In barren meadows she sows Christ’s kernels, affirming the mystery of the Gospel. And as she sows, she no doubt anticipates the yellow embrace of “shade and nest and birdsong” that awaits her.

But what is it then that sits in my heart,
that breathes so quietly, and without lungs--
that is here, here in this world, and yet not here?

------------------------------------

If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves.
If you are in the sea I will slide into that
smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt.
But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation.
I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster.
And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with
some small and easy story.

Promises, promises, promises! The tongue jabbers, the heart
strives, fails, strives again. The world is perfect.
Love, however, is an opera, a history, a long walk, that
includes falling and rising, falling and rising, while
the heart stays as sweet as a peach, as radiant and
grateful as the deep-leaved hills.

[Mary Oliver: "Rhapsody": The Leaf and the Cloud]

penitence

5:42 am-

The coffee is chuckling to fragrant life on my countertop, and I have just removed my seething bowl of oatmeal from the microwave. A few lights are on, but the living room is dim and chilly.

I am thinking about how frighteningly easy it is to be false. How I speak the language of faith constantly, and yet my inner woman paints her face and wears scarlet. How even my purest thoughts and gestures bear the stain of hypocrisy and guilt.

I am thinking about the blood of Jesus, and how I manipulate and abuse it.

I'm thinking about how I need to be cleansed at every moment, and how exhausting it is to be holy from the inside out, and how impossible.

But my feet are planted on a Rock, and my heart is filled with the renewing Spirit. I know that I cannot slip back into the crevice of complacency while I walk this straight and narrow path: my eyes must watch my feet and ponder their Word-lit way. Courage and fortitude and patience are not only called for but also supplied when I request them. His yoke is easy; His burden is light.

"He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as He hears it He will answer you. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide Himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. ...You shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept, and gladness of heart, as when one sets out to the sound of the flute to go to the mountain of the Lord, the Rock of Israel." Isaiah 30:19-20, 29

good thoughts

"The invisible manifests itself in the visible. I think of the alphabet, of letters literally--A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all twenty-six of them. I think of how poetry, history, the wisdom of the sages and the holiness of the saints, all of this invisible comes down to us dressed out in their visible, alphabetic drab. H and I and J, and K, L, M, N are the mold that our innermost thoughts must be pressed into finally if we are to share them; O, P, Q, R, S, T, U is the wooden tongue that we must speak if we are ever to make ourselves known, that must be spoken to us if we are ever to know. V, W, X, Y, Z. ... I am thinking of incarnation, breath becoming speech through teeth and tongue, spirit becoming word, silence becoming prayer, the holy dream becoming the holy face. I am speaking of the humdrum events of our lives as an alphabet. I am thinking of grace. I am thinking of the power beyond all power, the power that holds all things in manifestation, and I am thinking of this power as ultimately a Christ-making power, which is to say a power that makes Christs, which is to say a power that works through the drab and hubbub of our lives to make Christs of us before we're done or else, for our sakes, graciously to destroy us. In neither case, needless to say, is the process to be thought of as painless. I am thinking of salvation."

-The Alphabet of Grace: "Gutturals"--Frederich Buechner

I am grieving. My friends are grieving. A dear man has exchanged the corruptible for the incorruptible, and left us reeling.

Positive though we may be that he now dwells in that "species beyond", nevertheless our finite minds stubbornly refuse to adapt. We constantly slip into believing that he is here...and constantly feel that sick jolt of re-knowing his absence.

There's no describing the weight of feelings, except to note that they are mostly poignant gladnesses for his sake. And burdened fears for the sakes of those who relied on him.

"And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." Isaiah 35:10

21

A Traveler

If it's chariots or sandals,
I'll take sandals.
I like the high prow of the chariot,
the daredevil speed, the wind
a quick tune you can't
quite catch
but I want to go
a long way
and I want to follow
paths where wheels deadlock.
And I don't want always
to be among gear and horses,
blood, foam, dust. I'd like
to wean myself from their strange allure.
I'll chance
the pilgrim sandals.

-Denise Levertov-

spoiled

Last year at this time, I would never have predicted the blessings that would come my way and culminate in a snug, sprawly house buried in a woodsy area of Lookout Mountain. After a summer in which my soul gained a precious sense of firm footing, and my mind burned through book after inspiring book, and my heart revelled in the embrace of home and family...after that foundation was restablized, I landed here: on this couch in a spotless living room, listening to Roxette and the bustle of my beautiful housemates, sipping coffee, my mind still returning every now and then to the words of life that thrilled my spirit this morning.

I feel so sure, so blazingly certain, that all my roads are leading to God these days--my physical, intellectual, emotional, relational roads all, each day, draw me nearer and deeper into the Truth. The Spirit dwells within me, despite my weakness, despite my many failures, and He is purifying me. The promises of the Bible dizzy me. I love my Savior more than I ever have.

"If He is the truth and the life, we will find it out soon enough for ourselves, you can be sure of that. If we want to find it out, if we are willing to draw near in whatever idiotic way we can, all our reservations and doubts notwithstanding, because little by little we find out then that to be where HE is, to go where HE goes, to see through eyes and work with hands like HIS is to feel ourselves at last, is to become fully ourselves at last and fully each other's at last, and to become finally more even than that: to become fully HIS at last." (!) -Buechner, "The Sign by the Highway"

I've just returned from an evening jog, and imprinted forever on my memory is the sight of several dozen Canadian geese sillhouettes darkening the border of moonlit Elmwood lake like so many silent sentries, motionless, absurdly majestic.

Fourteen days remaining, and Hannah and I have mapped out an event for each of them, to be photographed and compiled into a pre-wedding album.

I anticipate mountain vistas and renewed purpose, although the prospect of leaving these vast skies and indolent hours sometimes pulls a stitch out of the seam around my heart.

Daughter of Laughter

I've just completed Frederich Buechner's latest novel, The Son of Laughter, which retells the story of Jacob. I percieve anew the reality of the Old Testament as a state of pregnancy: the sickness of doubt, kickings of promise, fear, joy, longing. I see Christ as the fulfillment of those groaning years. I inherit the legacy, I belong to that seed; I, too, yearn and groan for a future, sustained by Faith in the promises and the heritage of those who have preceeded me. The Blessing runs off with me. "It is beautiful and it is appalling. It races through the barren hills to an end of its own." I am the daughter of the Son of Laughter, and my name has its own humble niche in the glorious geneology of the Promise.

How wonderful are the ways of God.

on my mind

"Christianity has the ring, the feel, of unique truth. Of essential truth. By it, life is made full instead of meaningless. Cosmos becomes beuaitful at the Centre, instead of chillingly ugly beneath the lovely pathos of spring. But the emptiness, the meaninglessness, and the ugliness can only be seen, I think, when one has glimpsed the fullness, the meaning, and the beauty. It is when heaven and hell have both been glimpsed that going back is impossible."

"Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe."

"It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christinaity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming firsts but many balances."

"If God is to be, in truth, sought first, He must be seen as heart's desire."

"Secretly we are all perhaps the Questing Knight. And yet, whatever the object of our quest, we learn when we find it that it does not ever contain the joy that broke our heart with longing. Thus, Lewis says, 'if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.' "

"We have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. ...We were created for eternity."

"[Christ] must often seem to us to be playing fast and loose with us. The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything."

"Love is the final reality, and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom."

"Love not only begets love, it transmits strength."

"Every disability conceals a vocation, if onyl we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.'"

--Sheldon VanAuken: A Severe Mercy

"So every day"; "Of Goodness": Mary Oliver

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,

one of which was you.

---

How good
that the clouds travel, as they do,
like the long dresses of the angels
of our imagination,

or gather in the storm masses, then break
with their gifts of replenishment,
and how good
that the trees shelter the patient birds

in their thick leaves,
and how good that in the field
the next morning
red bird frolics again, his throat full of song,

and how good
that the dark ponds, refreshed,
are holding the white cups of the lilies
so that each is an eye that can look upward,

and how good that the little blue-winged teal
comes paddling among them, as cheerful as ever,

and so on, and so on.

O for a thousand tongues to sing...

It was still dark when I got out of bed this morning (after a scuffle with my cell phone alarm and my sleep-drugged wits that was infuriating but is, in retrospect, quite comical)...and the sum of the matter is that I witnessed the most inspiring sunrise while I feasted on coffee and pancakes. It began as a rich rosy pink that contained all of the light pouring over the horizon, so that the rest of the world around me was dim and shadowed. Then the light strengthened and began to dilute the bold colors into first a creamy blush of pink, and then peach, and then brassy gold. All the while, the air around me tingled with a sort of stained-glass radiance, which ignited the leaves and fence tips and grassblades into mystical detail.

It reminded me of Proverbs 4:18: "But the path of the righteous is like the dawning light, that shines more and more until the perfect day."

The entire experience was like a golden benediction on my day, and set metaphors germinating with joy in my brain. I'd share them, but this post already contains schmaltziness enough. I'm finding that I traffic in cliches a great deal--foundational realities that strike me with excitement and joy as they have stricken hundreds of thousands before me, since the world began. And I want to share them...but everyone has heard them, and unless you experience the feel of the moment, you'll never understand. Sunrises, for example. Description utterly robs such a vision of any potency, because it attempts to translate a moment's heart-thrilling splendor into a paragraph of cumbersome tired phrases. But when I look back on my description, what revisits me is a vision of that glorious morning, and even now I'm smiling.

I am so grateful for the instrument of my physical body: my eyes, my ears, my nose, my tastebuds, my Meisner's corpuscles. And for the glorious creation: air, light, color, substance, motion, music, words, words, words. And for a mind attuned and attuning to the physical experience of living, an imagination enriching it, a spirit luxuriating in it and opening to its Designer in soulish response. And most of all, for the Author of it all--that great Creator Ex Nihilo, Alchemist, Artist, Author, Maestro, Composer, Conductor, Physician, Metallurgist, Father, Friend, Lover, Savior... ... ... ... ...

See what I mean about the cliches?

I am liking life. (Perhaps understatement will lend a little balance to this entry.)

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.

Let go the wrists of idleness!

"The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action." (Daniel)

It's so difficult for me to adopt an active, leaderlike mindset...even when situations urgently require such an attitude. I have been gifted naturally, in some sense, with the "meek quiet submissive" spirit, and it's difficult for me to recognize that a life of righteous integrity often requires zealous and even aggressive pursuit of what is right. This presbyterian culture in which I have been steeped for my entire life makes it all too easy for me to "cop out" and hide behind my feminine submissiveness (aka, passivity?) when people call on me to take a stand or express an opinion. Being an instinctive pleaser only compounds the difficulty of such situations for me. More and more, however, as I read the Bible and books like Captivating and Lost Women of the Bible, God is revealing to me how important it is for me to actively hound down the truth, and then, firmly rooted in it, live out its implications for my life in whatever capacity God requires...even if that means that I must confront a friend or speak up in a heated conversation. One of the most important lessons that I have learned this past semester is that humility does not excluse righteous passion--and that a spirit of gentleness can all too quickly transform into a spirit of fear. God has liberated me to know Him and walk in His ways, and He sees me and loves me. That knowledge insulates my fearful heart from its nightmares (both real and imagined), while at the same time widening it to embrace a calling that is much greater and more beautiful than anything it has yet imagined.

I'm looking forward to standing firm and taking action in the coming days, weeks, and years.

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond—

Invisible, as Music—

But positive, as Sound—

It beckons, and it baffles—

Philosophy—don't know—

And through a Riddle, at the last—

Sagacity, must go—

To guess it, puzzles scholars—

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown—

Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—

Blushes, if any see—

Plucks at a twig of Evidence—

And asks a Vane, the way—

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—

Strong Hallelujahs roll—

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul—

[emily dickinson]

ADDENDUM:

The previous post is a paper that I wrote for British Novel--one that has been on my heart, really, since Christmas and the fading of some precious beautiful relationships, and my own anguished soul-searching about the impossibility of knowing, really knowing anyone. I remember that while I was in the throes of this crisis, feeling alone, inadequate, and ashamed, I stumbled across Matthew Arnold's The Buried Life in my quote book (an inevitable recourse during such moments). It hardly encouraged me. (Here's an excerpt:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
...Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!)

I read those words, and despaired. I know I sound melodramatic, but if you think really hard about those words, and apply them to your own situation, I think you'll find yourself despairing as well.

Thankfully I have a God who knows my needs. The Holy Spirit guided me to Psalm 139 in my quest for comfort, and there I read these words:

O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying downand are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;it is high; I cannot attain it.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morningand dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me,and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,and the light about me be night,”even the darkness is not dark to you;the night is bright as the day,for darkness is as light with you.
For you formed my inward parts;you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;my soul knows it very well.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.I awake, and I am still with you.
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me!

Someday (this summer?) I want to write more fully about the indescribable comfort of knowing that I have been known by God. Ponder it for yourself! I assure you that only by realizing this, and by seeking to know Him in return through His Word and Spirit, will you ever experience true communion with anyone. And that is not something you want to miss.

A frustrating paradox

Because every reader bears his or her own exclusive cargo of self into the reading experience, individual reader response criticism has arisen as a resolution to the subjective nature of the enterprise. In this form of analysis, evaluation depends upon a particular individual’s reaction to reading a particular piece of literature. By supplementing to it his or her own distinct perspective, the reader deepens the inherent meaning of the text, while simultaneously allowing the text to reshape the original perspective. Every single act of reading contains a dimension inimitable to the isolated event.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse lends itself to a reader response approach to criticism. It enters the individual psyches of several characters, tests their reactions to the reality that encompasses them, and extracts from these separate samples a shared essence. Critiquing this book from an individual reader response approach parallels the thrust of the book itself, which reveals that the selfhood of each character results in singular reactions to identical circumstances. Such an analysis has worth for everybody, in that it appeals to an experience common to all: the struggle to mine reality for meaning and fellowship. Because of this, my response to To the Lighthouse, although exclusive, can still profit others by appealing to the humanity (or, in Christian terms, the image of God) in all of us.

I choose to dwell upon the theme of this text that most impressed me: the paradox of the self, which craves and requires interaction with others, and yet cannot achieve true fellowship because of the very structures created to facilitate it.

Woolf creates a small society to people her novel, and, from the perspective of various individuals, records the efforts of the various members to connect to each other. The movement of the novel is primarily associative, tracing an emotional chain of reaction between the characters that is fashioned out of both verbal and physical communication. Mrs. Ramsay occupies a pivotal role in this mystical chemistry experiment: she is a catalyst for many of the reactions that take place, including those between James and Mr. Ramsay, Lily and Mr. Bankes, and Minta and Paul. Lily depicts “Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (Woolf 50). Her life is a battle to connect people, to assert “their common cause against that fluidity out there” (Woolf 97).

The dinner party scene illustrates this most clearly. As Mrs. Ramsay approaches the simple act of hosting a meal, she feels that “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (Woolf 83). Throughout the entire dinner scene, she forces people to connect, even against their wills. Bankes must be her guest and sample the Boeuf en Daube. Lily must succumb to Mrs. Ramsay’s pressure and speak kindly to Tansley. At the close of the meal, Paul and Minta enter, engaged as a result of Mrs. Ramsay’s influence. Lily describes her hostess’ powers thus: “She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end…. She put a spell on them all, by wishing” (Woolf 101). Even Mr. Carmichael, the man over whom Mrs. Ramsay exerts the least control, shares a moment of unity with her as they both admire the platter of fruit. “Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit,” Mrs. Ramsay notices, remarking that, although “his way of looking” was “different from hers”, nevertheless “looking together united them” (Woolf 97). At the close of the meal, when her husband begins to recite the poem, she takes delight in the fact that “every one at the table was listening to the voice…with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking” (Woolf 111). From the moment that she enters the scene until the moment she leaves, Mrs. Ramsay unites her guests—achieving, at the very end, a sense that this joint listening, this participation in the lone voice, was natural, and expressive of their own individual selves. Thus far, society and fellowship, communion of souls.

And yet, this unity that Mrs. Ramsay achieves is ultimately both superficial and fleeting. She, the binding force, must conquer her own desire to remain “out of the eddy” of interaction, to sink into herself and find “rest on the floor of the sea” (Woolf 84). Her first address to Mr. Bankes reveals that she really isn’t connecting with him: she pities him out of “one of those misjudgments…that arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s” (Woolf 84). In the same way, all of the characters interact with each other in order to fulfill their own private needs, or out of a code of behavior that determines the roles that men and women must assume. Tansley speaks in order to “assert himself.” Lily at last succumbs to the pressure to “go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve…his urgent desire to assert himself” (Woolf 91). In so doing, she makes sure that they will never know each other—which, after all, is true fellowship. Thus, in forcing them to connect, Mrs. Ramsay actually ensures that true connection can never take place. Throughout the evening, the characters suppress their true selves in order to interact with each other. In the midst of the conversation, every participant feels that “something [is] lacking,” and worries lest their boredom be exposed (Woolf 94). Mr. Ramsay’s inability to conceal his genuine displeasure at Mr. Carmichael’s second helping of soup bothers his wife. When the candles are lit and “some change” passes through the party that makes them “conscious of making a party together” (Woolf 97), attention nevertheless is given to the “mask-like look of faces by candlelight” (Woolf 98). Mrs. Ramsay contemplates her children with puzzlement, wondering what was “hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces,” and noting that “they did not join easily” (Woolf 109). The party ends with the triumphant unity of the guests in Mr. Ramsay’s recitation…and then fades into the past. Even such unity as was achieved is only temporary, for it is always necessary “to carry everything a step further” (Woolf 111).

The dinner scene illustrates this paradox of the self. Lily describes the dilemma of living with the Ramsays (and, one might extrapolate, participating in society), as that of being “made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other” (Woolf 102). Lily reflects on the “extreme obscurity of human relationships” with the despairing question, “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy?” (Woolf 171) She expresses the act of relating in these terms: “Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface, and that is what you see us by.” For all of Mrs. Ramsay’s efforts to create fellowship between people, she regards her own life as “something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband” (Woolf 59).

Despite this frustration with the inadequacy of human interactions, the various characters seek each other’s company. The motives for this are, at a first glance, selfish: to fulfill some inner craving, to puzzle out meaning in a life that seems chaotic, or to fashion permanence out of fluidity. Yet these selfish motivations do not take into account that without society the self would perish, because it would have no way to access its potential, no standard against which to measure itself. All the characters in this novel crave fellowship, strive to know and be known by others, even when they feel the futility of such a quest and dislike being forced to compromise their inner self in order to attain even the superficial bonds they create. The entire novel hangs upon this tension, between the private selfhood of each person, and the inescapable necessity of interacting with other private and alien Selves.

How then, Woolf seems to ask, does one live? Out of this tension emerges the task of reconciling our Selves to living in a world that seems indifferent, that will not last…and perhaps, even through the hopeless incoherence of our relationships with other Selves, attaining something meaningful and lasting.

As an individual responding to Woolf’s novel, seeking to express the ways that it has impacted my Self, I engage the world. Accepting that this blundering medium, language, has clouded as much as it has distilled, I yet maintain the importance of striving for community through such arts. I know that without such relationships, without engaging the world and others through art, my Self would die. This knowledge leaves me with a challenge: to pursue integrity relentlessly, so that the relationships that connect my Self with the universe will harbor Truth.

Like Lily Briscoe, I have had my vision.

the quote of the year!

"There is an age of aesthetic accountability that you eventually reach."
-Adam Carter, responding to the question of whether or not shoddy art can be glorifying to God.

yummy

...Every day
I see or hear

something

that

more or less

kills me

with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light...

["Mindful," Mary Oliver]

For all of its misty moistiness, this day turned out deliciously! And even despite being overwhelmed and dog tired (like everyone else on this feverish campus), I am happy as I look forward to an evening of paper writing and laundry. Lately, my heart has been unaccountably exultant—I cannot count the number of times that a slant of light or a friend’s smile has sent it crackling and fizzing with inner delight. I think it must be Spring.

(Is your heart bursting yet?)

Was there no safety? No learning by heart the ways of the wolrd? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown? [virginia woolf]

...To tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain... [mary oliver]

All that is glorious around us
is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled
overlooks, towering clouds, but doing errands on a day
of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car,
160,000 miles, still running just fine. Or later,
sitting in a café warmed by the steam
from white chicken chili, two cups of dark coffee,
watching the red and gold leaves race down the street,
confetti from autumn’s bright parade. And I think
of how my mother struggles to breathe, how few good days
she has now, how we never think about the glories
of breath, oxygen cascading down our throats to the lungs,
simple as the journey of water over a rock. It is the nature
of stone / to be satisfied / writes Mary Oliver, It is the nature
of water / to want to be somewhere else, rushing down
boundless behind it. But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain’s
bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world. [barbara crooker]

(Mine is.)

one has need of fifty eyes

Why do I love To The Lighthouse so much?

One reason is its beauty. I love Woolf’s word usage: “fringed with joy,” “sunk in a green-grey somnolence,” “in a vast and benevolent lethargy of well-wishing,” “torches lolloping red and gold,” etc. Really: lolloping torches! That phrase struck me like so many Emily Dickinson images have, because of its freshness and aptness. I savored the lusciousness of Woolf’s prose to the last punctuation mark.

I also love it because it resonates poignantly with my own experiences. I can empathize with insufferable Tansley, who longs to “assert himself,” who is so prickly and lonesome and unhappy. I too battle with the destructive urges that compel him to disagreeable behaviors. I can relate to Lily, striving for integrity and wholeness in the midst of a thousand expectations that she fears she’ll never live up to (and perhaps does not desire to live up to). I also feel uncomfortably akin with Mr. Ramsey, his egoism and hunger for validation, his lack of humanity, and his blindness to the riches right at his fingertips. Mrs. Ramsey’s character allures me: her efforts against the inexorable fragmenting forces of life, her mission to thrust fellowship and meaning into interactions (even at the cost of her own need of privacy), her selfless energy. I cannot dislike any one character, not even Tansley, not even Mr. Ramsey, because I connect strongly with all of them. Nor can I overwhelmingly like any character—not Lily, not Mr. Bankes or Mrs. Ramsey—because they are depicted as human: flawed, petty, isolated.

I love how Woolf infuses the idea of what it means to be a woman into this novel: the incredible reserves of resilience, physical and emotional stamina, love, patience, and selflessness that are required of a wife or mother; the inescapable expectations that are held up to a woman in any phase of life; the difficulty of forging an inimitable self, beyond the roles that so easily engulf a woman’s personality. Even more, I found her depiction of humanity compelling: the inconsistency between ideals and realities that torments and baffles us, and our quest for ultimate meaning, validation, and love. To The Lighthouse made my heart ache, while at the same time making me giddily aware of the glory and intricacy of this complicated world. It filled me with a strong impulse to express grace in every way imaginable to all the people I encounter. I think it made me fall in love with the world and everyone in it, all over again.

...Another reason I love Mary Oliver...

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --
so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

snow?!

I awoke at 7:30 this morning, and flipped the switch on my lamp immediately so that I wouldn't drift back off to sleep...I sensed that I was at that perfect stage of rest when any more would've made me sluggish, and any less would've been inadequate. Delicious! After laying back on my pillow and allowing the world to gradually pour into my senses, I leaned over the edge of my bed to grab my Bible--and glanced out the window--at the flurrying SNOWFLAKES turning their faces at me as they petaled down! Even now, as I sit here typing, the snow continues its silent barrage, coating the rooftops and treelimbs and sidewalk edgings with a slick white paste. I'll not even bring up the fact that a mere two days ago I was off gallivanting in shorts and a T-shirt through the cross country trails. Weird, weird.

Last day of break today: I hope to squander it away at Amy Buck's house, because my dorm is beginning to depress me, and (I balk to confess it) coffee can only provide so much companionship. I've become quite a social creature, for all my professed independance. And that's not a bad thing.

Resurrection Sunday

I love Easter. I love the word, "Easter," the echo of "eastern" that it hints at, the connotation of sunrise and newness. I love how ungainly it sounds, and how earnest.

I've just returned from my church service at Cornerstone OPC. Today is colder than yesterday or the day before, and I'm less tempted to hike about in the sunshine, as glinting and joyous as it is. If I were home, I'd be at Oma's house, a mug of coffee cupped against my palms, listening to the aunts and uncles chatter. I'd also have trudged over there in knee-deep drifts of snow. I'm happy to be here.

Last Easter I was in Salzburg, traipsing through the Sound of Music gardens, stretching out on the banks of a Danube tributary, photographing the castle and the spectular views, revelling in the bells tolling out over the Franciscan cemetery, or sipping beer at the Italian restaurant.

Tonight will be eventful, though. I'm going to Will and Manda's home, to paint Easter eggs and play games and indulge in homemade treats.

Until then, I think I'll go upstairs and fix a pot of coffee to have with my apple, and perhaps pore over a book (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel?) as the afternoon wanes.

He is risen!

Spring:

Well: here I am, the second day into my all-too-brief Easter break, and nothing accomplished, excepting a gorgeous three-hour hike on the cross-country trails and a book pleasure-read and savored to the last punctuation mark. All the portentous goals I so studiously mapped out on the m&m "to do" list notepad on my refrigerator...alas, remain there. But I have had a lovely time.

Spring is here! And, as Mary Oliver would chant, "There rises up from the earth such blazing sweetness/ It fills you, thank God, with disorder." I love that. As I wandered through the trails yesterday, I thought about that poem, and how perfectly apt those words were: blazing sweetness. And I thought about that passage in Job, "These are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of Him," as I studied the mosquitoes in the mud puddles and heard the percussion of the bare tree limbs in the breeze. How small a whisper do we hear of Him...and yet that whisper in my ears is so thunderous and so majestic that I cannot comprehend it. It smites me. If these are but the outskirts...I tremble to think about Heaven.

Always when I seek to express the weight of glory that bears down on me, I feel only an aching inadequacy. These trite rhapsodies will never do justice to the reality that so moves me.

My journal is full, and it has been four days since I've last sought to translate my experience into a tangible form. I have to purchase a new one, but I haven't a penny: so online blogging will have to suffice.

Now, I have a paper to write, and coffee to slurp, and a friend to visit.
Tomorrow is Easter!

i will live here someday

october!

In all my affairs
may I distinguish between
DUTY and ANXIETY,
and may my CHARACTER and not my CIRCUMSTANCES chiefly engage me...

--Valley of Vision: "Contrition"

October already! I love it when the first day of the month coincides with a Monday...it lends the illusion of order and "rightness" to my week.

It's been a good morning so far...I slept soundly enough to dream last night, and when I awoke I felt rested and very snug in my quilt, with the autumn (!) wind gusting through the open windows and rustling the open notebooks on my desk (newly crowned with a medium-sized rotund pumpkin). My morning jog felt marvelous--and I pushed myself harder than usual, which always helps encourage my timid little self-worth-ometer. Now I've just emerged from sipping coffee and smuggling hot cocoa packs in the Great Hall. I love me my hot beverages!

Today I have three classes: Anatomy, Shakespeare, and History. After work study, I plan on completing as much homework as possible in order to free up my Wednesday for shopping with Vowsh and Melody! Time to invest in some new sweaters!

Happy October, folks...

"the cradle rocks above the abyss..."

It's my birthday!

Today I turn 20 years old. As a symbol of my newly acquired maturity (at least chronologically), I recieved a Motorolla Tracfone in the mail. My friends need no longer complain of my inaccessability...or of their thankless status as my secretaries. Calling home (and recieving calls therefrom) will no longer require a landline. The world just got that much smaller, my friends and family that much closer. Welcome, Abby, to the 21st century.

Even better, Dad sent me the final installment of the Thursday Next series--a hardcover copy with additional online features! I eagerly await the "brainy silliness" and bibliophiliac abandon to come! Vowsha, knowing my passion for Annie Dillard, purchased Living by Fiction for me--I book I've already come to love. With it, she wrapped up a bright navy mug with a graceful flowery painting on it. It fits quite nicely in my hand.

Tonight, Melody is escorting me to Starbucks--after which we will repair to the Kulick resident to pay our respects to its latest member: Chrissy! She arrived via c-section in the early hours of the eleventh, and already has made her debut in a Facebook album.

I'm finishing my conquest of Nabakov's memoir Speak, Memory...and noticing butterflies and various other lepidopteral creatures everywhere I go. Literature truly does give me fresh eyes and heightened joy.

Well--dinner awaits. Au revoir.

keep in mind:

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
[marilynne robinson]