for your consideration

(cf II Corinthians 2:14--"We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word...")

"As peddlers, we may tell stories about ourselves as well as about other people, but not, for the most part, our real stories, not stories about what lies beneath all our other problems, which is the problem of being human, the problem of trying to hold fast somehow to Christ when much of the time, both in ourselves and in our world, it is as if Christ had never existed. Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare. So in one way or another we are all of us peddlers of God's word. And so it's to all of us that Paul speaks. 'We are not,' he says, 'we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God we speak in Christ.' That's the whole point of it, he says: to speak in Christ, which means among other things, I assume, to speak of Christ. And when it comes to storytelling, that is of course the crux of it. If we are to speak, as he says, with sincerity--speak as we have been commissioned by God to speak, and with our hearts as well as our lips--then this is the one story above all others that we have in us to tell, you and I. It is his story.

"The story of Christ is where we all started from, though we've come so far since then that there are times when you'd hardly know it to listen to us and when we hardly know it ourselves. ... The story of Jesus is home nonetheless. You belong to it. It belongs to you. ... It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it, yet is by no means a pretty story, though that is the way we are apt to peddle it much of the time. ... We are apt to tell his story when we tell it at all, to sell his story, for the poetry and panacea of it. But 'we are the aroma of Christ,' Paul says, and the story we are given to tell is a story that smells of his life in all its aliveness, and our commission is to tell it in a way that makes it come alive as a story in all its aliveness and to make those who hear it come alive and God knows to make ourselves come alive too. ... You and I are here in this place now because of what little life this story dealt us, because each of our stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course, is the other story we have in us to remember and tell. Our own story.

"We are commissioned by God to speak in Christ, and to speak in Christ is to speak truth and there is no story whose truth we are closer to than our own, than the story of what it's like to live inside ourselves. The trouble is that, like Christ's story, this too is apt to be the last we tell, partly because we have half forgotten it, pand partly because we are uncomfortable with it and afraid of sincerity. But tell it we must and, before we tell it to anybody else, tell it first of all to ourselves and keep on telling it, because unless we do, unless we live with, and out of, the story of who we are inside ourselves, we lose track of who we are. We live so much on the outer surface and seeming of our lives and our faith that we lose touch with the deep places that they both come from. We have the story of our own baptism, for one--if not by water, in a river, then by fire God knows where, because there isn't one of us whose life hasn't flamed up into moments when a door opened somewhere that let the future in, moments when we moved through that door as Jesus moved out of Jordan, not perfectly cleansed but cleansed enough, with the past behind us, we hoped, and a new sense of what at its most oultandish and holiest the future might become. And God knows we have all had our wilderness temptations too--not the temptation to work evil, probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one, to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead for truth.

"Two stories then--our own story and Jesus' story, and in the end, perhaps, they are the same story. ...We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too--that's what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another's pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another's joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God's mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and his story will come true in us at last.

"And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all."

excerpts: "The Two Stories", Fredrich Buechner

wise as serpents; harmless as doves

I have been identifying with Lucy Honeychurch of A Room With A View in much the same way that I identified with Lily Briscoe of To The Lighthouse and Katherine Forrester of A Small Rain. Unraveling her character as I turn the pages is an exercise of self discovery as much as entertainment or diversion. Through all of these women, all the characters that I have known over the years, I recieve an ever expanding sense of what it means to be a human and a woman. This sense is invaluable, but I also wonder sometimes if it is misguiding. How true do these characters ring, that I should feel such kinship? What if I "cleverly am being altered" after false images--images that cater to my idea of how things "should" be, rather than how things are? It is so tempting to regard Forster, Woolf, and L'Engle as infallable in their depiction of human beings, and so convenient. If they pen the human nature perfectly, I have a reliable source of information to consult and draw conclusions from. If not, then I must entertain the idea that perhaps my perceptions about humankind, and consequently my perceptions about myself in relation to humankind, are flawed. Of course, they are flawed.

I do believe that the insights I gain through my readings far outweigh the errors I acquire. I would never ever consider reading a step away from the straight and narrow, or a useless empty pursuit.

I would consider it a dangerous one. An occasional reality check into the finitude and fallability of the prophets I so admire is necessary to keep me from a mind unguarded. The act of reading is that of judging (charitably, humbly) and reorganizing one's perspective around the truths that emerge.

Usually my thirst is for an open heart, a pliant mind. My upbringing has conditioned me to be too judgmental and unyielding. However, in my struggle for a teachable spirit I must not forget to discern. And this is yet another tension in a world of checks and balances.

Look: it's spring

I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

excerpt, "A Settlement"
Mary Oliver

meditations

Did you know that Buddhist monks have the enviable reputation of being the happiest people in the world?

This may not surprise you. It didn't surprise me, when my housemate informed me of it several weeks ago. I recieved the information with a nod.

"I guess that makes sense...I mean, simplicity is supposed to make you happier, and so is charity, and passionate devotion to a higher calling. Aren't those things what being a monk is all about?"

Aubrey had agreed, adding, "They meditate, too. Cultivate self-control and tranquility." She poured herself some coffee and stated, "If I wasn't a Christian, I think I'd be a Buddhist monk."

I considered this. "Me too." And I thought no more about it, until last evening. I had returned to a cup of chamomile tea and a house hallowed by rainfall after watching "Confessions of a Shopaholic" at the cheap theatre. The movie had been utterly worthless but amusing: poorly written, unrealistic, forgettable, lacking even the saving grace of a satisfyingly escapist romance, but featuring beautiful people, delightful fashions, and a few humorous scenes. Even so, I felt relieved to be cozily home in my pajamas under my blankets, listening to the small rain in the fresh-scented dark. After a day so fastpaced, I had expected to find sleep within moments, and was surprised to find my mind still on the near shore a half-hour later.

I was thinking the sort of thoughts people think at 11 pm as they wait for the slumber bus: a fairly unregulated gush of memories from the day's thousands episodes, analyzed and overanalyzed, reenvisioned and wished into more favorable but (alas!) only ever imaginary outcomes. In the midst of this exercise, I had the sudden realization of how many hours of my life I spend absorbed in this futile accounting! Evening after evening for most of the years of my life I waste in naval-gazing. Alongside this rather depressing angel of a thought sidled a second angel, resembling a grinning Buddhist monk. The question bobbed into my brain whether Happy Monks ever indulge in such rehashing, and he seemed to shake his shiny bald head.

So I tried an experiment. I relaxed and began to breathe deep cleansing breaths. My mind began to clear. I let go of the cares of my little life: the irretractable moments of self-absorption and immaturity, the burden of being responsible for the images of a thousand selves in a thousands lightings at a thousand angles in a thousand mirrors, the blind reaching forward and obsessive glancing back. In the relieved quiet that remained, I felt my heart beating ahead into a wide and spacious future, my lungs pumping abundant clean air, and my entire body filling with a free and easy peace. It pleased me to think of my mind, well-equipped and with room to grow, and of my personality in all its individuality and sacredness, and of my body in its strength and its capabilities. I laid on my bed and devoted my time to being content and grateful: to praise.

Happiness is really so easy to find, and so freely obtained, if you can keep a strong enough grasp on the perspective that matters. In this distorted world, that is the hard part.

fretting

Ever since 11 a.m., my heart has been rolling its ankles every so often on the pothole that the morning's news chipped into my memory. A cherished coworker recieved some frightening medical news, as yet inconclusive, but loaded with potential sufficient to lay a weight upon all of our spirits.

Isn't it strange how a handful of words can sorcerize the honey and light from summer's first expressions? And also strange how the honey and light can extinguish the dreaded fascination of those words for thoughtless hours at a time? I want to hold it all at once, the bitter and the sweet, and feel perhaps some measure of proportion, but I lack focus, and I lack distance, and I'm feeling both the blessing and the curse of that as I grapple with my own attention span.

Mostly I feel human right now, and out of practice. But perhaps that's one of the most signature elements of the human condition: this perpetual state of unpreparedness, Woolf's "leaping from the pinnacle of the tower into the air ; ...startling, unexpected, unknown."

I am going to savor these gentle opening bars of summer, because refusing to do so brings unnecessary darkness into this world, and such a penance solves nothing. I am going to be hopeful, because uncertainty, like most things in life, has both positive and negative angles, and I have been set free to "hope all things, believe all things." I will be joyful, too, because my joy is a birthright that cannot be stolen. I will be prayerful, because prayer reassures me of my need and its perfect fulfillment. And I can be sad, even as I feel all this, without fretting and without doubting.

A soul is an extraordinary possession.

"A Large Number"

Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is the way it's always been:
bad with large numbers.
It is still moved by particularity.
It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,
disclosing only random faces,
while the rest go blindly by,
unthought of, unpitied.
Not even a Dante could have stopped that.
So what do you do when you're not,
even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar—a premature worry.
Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?
It never has been, and even less so now.
I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,
but what I reject, is more numerous,
more dense, more intrusive than ever.
At the cost of untold losses—a poem, a sigh.
I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.
How much I am silent about I can't say.
A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.

My dreams—even they are not as populous as they should be.
There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.
Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.
A single hand turns a knob.
Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.
I run from the threshold down into the quiet
valley seemingly no one's—an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from—
that I don't know.

Wyslawa Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

A headache can be a very clarifying thing.

For instance, last weekend. I don't believe I've ever really experienced a true headache before last Thursday, when I suffered my first migraine. The pain clouded everything around me, making only the knot of tortured nerve endings just behind my left eyeball feel real. That and, every fifteen minutes or so, the rush of nausea that sent me staggering over to my little trashbin in the E.R.

I'm remembering a quote, from Maryanne Wiggins' "Evidence of Things Unseen," when she describes pain as a purifying element, burning away all but the essential nature of its host. My "essential nature" was cowardly. I did not take courage, cling to faith, or find some other positive outlet for my suffering. I just curled up and waited for it to end, so my life could resume. So much for "in every disability lies a vocation," or any other noble sentiment that I had convinced myself I believed.

If my roots are so fragile as to be this easily unearthed, if "just getting through the pain" is all that is sustaining me through any trial, I need to take serious stock of my life's purpose. I need to remind myself that I am not here to have the smoothest, happiest, most pleasant life possible. Indeed, if I am fitting too snugly in those grooves, I probably could do with a bit of shaking up.

It was just a migraine, of course. It hurt, and then it receded, and now I'm living my life again. But if I'm blowing the headache out of proportion, I know at least that the lesson it taught me cannot be blown too big.

I need to live a purpose so vast and all-encompassing that no amount of suffering or sadness can rob it of its joy and satisfaction. A purpose that calls me to sacrifice, and sustains me with the assurance that any losses I count now will be rewarded a thousandfold and forever in heaven.

superstitious

This morning, I'm glad that I don't believe in omens.

It is the 7th of April, season of blossoms and birdsong, and yet when I opened my front door to let Janie outside this morning, the porch was coated in downy white...as was my longsuffering LeBaron, which took a good ten minutes to heat up when I at last mustered the courage to sprint outside and start the engine. Now snow in April could be considered a happy omen, but only when classes are cancelled, and today they were not.

Speaking of birdsong, I almost squished a robin as I walked up to work at 7 o'clock. The air was still inky and distractingly cold, and I didn't see the poor creature on the walk until it stirred and flailed out of my way before stiffening again into immobility at the base of a snowy tree.

An hour later, I drove home to pick up my housemates. On the side of the road, a raven stood perched over the limp carcass of a hare. I've been searching for a happy way to interpret that chilling sight ever since.

I remind myself again that I do not live in a Flannery O'Conner novel, that omens do not carry any inherent meaning but rather acquire the meanings we assign. And yet I know that, should anything ill-fortuned occur today, the superstitious crone that haunts the swampiest areas of my brain will start her vindictive cackling.

how good it is

Tonight the air smells of cut grass.
Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is
a place mislaid between expectation and memory.

This has been a summer of moths.
Their moment of truth comes well after dark.
Then they reveal themselves at our window-
ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.

The books I look up about them are full of legends:
Ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.
Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by
the moon.

The moon is up. The black windows are wide open.
Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the
hedge.

Once again they are near the windowsill--
fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,
which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them

they will fall down without knowing how
or why what they steered by became, suddenly,
what they crackled and burned around. They will perish--

I am perishing--on the edge and at the threshold of
the moment all nature fears and tends towards:
The stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.

And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes
My child's shadow longer than my own.

["Moths", Eavan Boland]

I've just discovered Eavan Boland, and am on that delicious first reading of a book of poetry: feeling the language and rhythms and images without too much intellectual probing, intuiting the meanings.

I can't wait to go back and read through it again, this time word by word, line by line, section by section, pen viscerally in hand.

I can't wait to apply what I've read, to reach the point where the words have been absorbed into my psyche and into my heart, have become channels through which new thoughts and emotions can pour.

I delight in the knowledge that when I've exhausted all these steps, I can start all over again on the same book and emerge with new channels carved into my soul, old channels deepened and broadened.

Joy, joy, joy. I'm off to read some more.

Were there but one deep, holy spell, whereby
Always I should remember thee--some mode
Of feeling the pure heart-throb momently
Of the spirit-fire still uttering this I!
Lord, see thou to it, take thou remembrance' load:
Only when I bethink me can I cry;
Remember thou, and prick me with love's goad.

[Diary of an Old Soul, George McDonald]

ODE TO AMERICAN ENGLISH
(Barbara Hamby)

I was missing English one day, American, really
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano's on the Avenue de l'Opera
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their dahlias, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood's everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, "you know" used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the present perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battle cry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy. "Whoa, I was toasted." Yes, ma'am,
I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird
resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent
of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist
euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.
On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny
Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johhny B. Goode,
and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,
finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,
Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,
sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne
verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping
in my head like Corvettes on Dexedrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.

me too

"I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe that there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it."

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

This past summer a Yo-Yo Ma CD reduced me to tears in a Barnes & Noble audio department

My most vulnerable memories usually involve public musical experiences, like that one. I'm settled quite snugly behind my intellectual armaments when from beneath my feet a geyser erupts and propels me fifty feet up, over the wall, and out to sea. Suddenly my sister is eyeing me in confusion from the church pew as the deacons march down the aisles during a moving offertory solo. My piano teacher is patting my quivering shoulder in bewilderment, having just demonstrated how you're supposed to play that intermediate Arabasque. The Barnes & Noble clerk politely averts his eyes as I hang up the headphones and blinkingly step around the shelf towards the exit.

Usually I manage to be just tense enough or studiously flippant enough to avoid triggering that geyser. I keep my vision idly trained on the stained glass windows in church, or on the distractingly cute child three pews up. I fiddle with my earrings or trace my collarbone in chapel, keeping my eyes moving across the numerous polite faces surrounding me. I avoid audio departments on principle. I keep my heart sealed in the vacuum-wrap of intellectual distance.

And that makes me wonder about all those other faces around me, so relaxed and vacant, so gently focused. Are they feeling as vulnerable as I am beneath their quiet restraint? Do evoked memories and hopes and fears heap like casualties of war against those careful battlements, to be buried once the song recedes?

Do they yearn, as I do, for the frankness of isolation? Or do they long, even more secretly, for kinship in their emotion--a sympathetic hand to squeeze in fellowship of feeling?

Are we all gingerly seated atop the same geyser, without realizing it?

(What would happen, do you think, if we all surrendered at once? Where would it take us?)

April in February

The roofs are shining from the rain,

The sparrows twitter as they fly,

And with a windy April grace

The little clouds go by.

Yet the back-yards are bare and brown

With only one unchanging tree--

I could not be so sure of Spring

Save that it sings in me.

[Sara Teasdale]

Are we human? Or are we dancer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mendaceous moments

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

[Cat on a Hot Tin Roof]

Thank you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Dickinson had banal moments, too.

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

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

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

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

Swish.

truth, beauty, memory

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

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

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

Truth is what God does.

Beauty is what that looks like.

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

a thought

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

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

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

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