Act III, Scene ii

Someone has altered the script.
My lines have been changed.
The other actors are shifting roles.
They don't come on when they're expected to,
and they don't say the lines I've written
and I'm being upstaged.
I thought I was writing this play
with a rather nice role for myself,
small, but juicy
and some excellent lines.
But nobody gives me my cues
and the scenery has been replaced.
I don't recognize the new sets.
This isn't the script I was writing.
I don't understand this plot at all.

To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in this extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.

-Madeleine L'Engle-

Fall Breakfast

The omelette sunrise soaks
fall-toasted fields in golden yolk.
Geese vees move above trees
and chimney smoke.

Let's bring our slippered feet,
our steaming mugs of whetted heat,
out to the wind-chilled wicker.
Let's take a seat.

And feast.

"So we live here, forever taking leave..."

Every so often, four or five times a year, for no reason that I can yet put my finger on, I will find myself inexplicably awake and usually bubbling with happiness at some pre-dawn hour. This was one of those mornings. I woke at 4 am, three hours before my alarm, and my heart was jumping with excitement. After scrambling into my running clothes and snatching up my iPOD, I tiptoed up the stairs and crept out the front door, where an icy breeze kept me company as I ran up the little hill in front of my apartment to the gravelly trail, and then started towards Scenic Highway. The sky was a rimy landscape of clouds and constellations, and spun just enough ghost gray light to assure my footing and to bleach the outcroppings of boulder and bluff to my right. Chattanooga's lights jewelled the air between the bare branches of trees on my left.

I've been reading Rilke recently, trying to understand him, and these words from his "Duino Elegies" were on my mind as I returned home, muting my music and just feeling the beat of my shoes on gravel, the air rushing in and out of my lungs.

"...Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission:
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)"

I love the way he speaks of taking notice of the world as mission, one that is too vast for me to accomplish. However, I get the feeling that desire, for Rilke, is a limiting thing, a thing that sours any experience of beauty, that distracts us from taking due notice of what we've been given. I prefer to side with Lewis on the topic of desire: that it is a proof that we were made for a different world. My expectations, far from distracting me from my mission, instead make me aware that deeper meaning underlies each event. In that sense, each event does announce a Beloved. And praise, while still a mission, is also (more Lewis) "appointed consummation." ("I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." C.S. Lewis)

So I can "begin again and again the never-attainable praising" as Rilke urges, while not feeling the least bit diminished by my lack of attainment.

catfish and code blues

I am enjoying my new job, now that my grasp on its demands is sure and my acquaintanceship with coworkers and employees is strengthening. In what context other than the serving line (dishing hot food onto customers' plates) is "Catfish!" an acceptable and even sensible response to "Hello!"?

I'm even learning a little bit about the culinary arts. For example, adding hot water and stirring it into hours-old creamed potatoes and vegetables will work a temporary miracle of revivication. Nothing can make a pot of greens look appetizing. Catfish is edible!--a fact that still makes me shudder, linked as it is in my brain with memories of a friend's aquarium of bewhiskered mottled slimy catfish, and also rumors (urban myths?) of Volkswagon-sized catfish snuffling over river bottoms.

Then I get to enjoy the immortal flirtatious teasing of aged men, the sweet precocity of children. Who knew I'd be able to dramatically beg people not to "shoot the messenger" as often as I do when, seated behind the register, I am compelled to extort $4 plus tax for three measly chicken tenders, $3 plus tax for a limp slice of day-old cheese pizza.

It can be a sad place to work. A hospital cafeteria is hardly most people's fine dining choice. Every so often someone will share a grief with me: a mother dying, a husband with kidney failure discovering he also is riddled with cancer, a 25-year-old man losing his battle with brain tumors after three years of struggling. In the context of such heartache, I find it it easy to forgive a petty complaint, an impatient demeanor, a sharp retort. In some ways, I am glad for these reactions, glad to offer some sort of outlet for bitterness or grief.

A chill always passes over me when I hear a "Code Blue" announced over the speaker system: adult heart failure: an infrequent but sobering interruption to the day's work. It's a reminder that all around my insulated hub of commerce, lives are being handled with both care and perfunctoriness. My heart flings a prayer heavenward, and then I keep dishing out food, wiping down tables, refilling plastic silverware, taking people's money.

With care, but also perfunctorily.

Learning to love Rilke...

"To Music"

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distanced, as the other
side of air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

--Rainer Maria Rilke--
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

It's a grubby sort of morning. Puddles swirl with the dye of leaf juices, which stain the windshield of my car and paint the roads in orange and yellow oils. My wooden balcony is slick and dark as I step out onto it with my mug of coffee to survey the view of tattered branches panning mist. After a moment, I turn back inside to lamplight and comfort, radiating gratitude and feeling sure that just that--standing all alone in my little house overspilling with giddy thanks --is useful, is worthy. That sensation is the root of singing, clapping, kissing, embracing, all gestures of excitement and love. My heart was created to do that, to gather in all the gifts my senses can hold and to translate them into the thing I call praise, to add my little heartful to what the world has to offer.

"So", as Mary Oliver says, "every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God."

Because I was missing Janie something fierce this morning, I browsed through my collection of Mary Oliver's Percy poems. This one in particular had me laughing, for I have had this very conversation with Janie on several occasions. My copies of Buechner's "A Sacred Journey," Shakespeare's Complete Works (Norton edition), and the Bible will all ruefully back Janie's dismissive claim. You have to give that brazen darling some credit: she has, all too literally, good literary taste.

Percy And Books (Eight)

Percy does not like it when I read a book.
He puts his face over the top of it and moans.
He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.
The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.
The tide is out and the neighbors' dogs are playing.
But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!
The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories
that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.
Let's go.

[Mary Oliver, Red Bird]

"Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World"

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathng;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

[Richard Wilbur]

I am unsettled by how easy it is for me to live an intransitive life: one that has lost sight of its direct object, with verbs flying everywhere, anchoring themselves to an assortment of indirect objects rather than devoting themselves to their true object. Or getting caught up in adjectives, the aesthetics of my living, or adverbs, the way I appear as I do things.

Of course I know that it is impossible to live life with incessant unwavering focus on the reason I believe I am here. Part of life's wonderousness is that it is teeming with adjectives and adverbs. When used properly, these add richness and texture to my story--to a large extent, they are its glory, and often they surprise me with glimpses into its meaning. To refuse to let them divert me would be to blind myself to that richness, those glimpses. But to get carried away with them, to devote myself to them, is tantamount to making my life a frivolity, and I do not want to do that.

A life well lived is like a story well written. A well written story is built by well written sentences: sentences that are focused on the greater plot. A life well lived is built by well-lived moments: moments that are focused on the greater purpose of it all.

Half the time I don't have the vision to see how many of my experiences will matter, ultimately. But I believe that if I live like they DO (because I believe that they do)...then one day I will look over my shoulder and see that they HAVE mattered. I will see how they have made a difference.

That is how I want to live my life: open to surprises, receptive to aesthetics, thoughtful about my own presence within it, but always all this in light of eternity and the meaning it casts on each passing moment.

I am sitting at my little wooden desk in my bedroom, listening to the birds sing, surrounded by graces: animal voices, sunlight, colors, scents; the refreshment of clean skin and teeth and hair, of comfortable garments and a tidy room. My appetite is taking a satisfied nap after a breakfast of yogurt and peaches, washed down with a mug of rich black coffee.

It is delicious, at moments like these, to inhabit a body: head, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes ears, mouth, and nose. My lungs inflate with healthy air: steamy, fragranced with ginseng from the shampoo and conditioner I lathered into my hair during my morning shower. My heart's steady beat fills my veins and arteries with coursing life, rich streams that water the fertile acreage of my brain. Nerves run their twinkling races. DNA strands fulfill their wyrd.

I know that my body will not always give me cause for such celebration. This lesson has been reinforced in the past months as I watched a friend's body confront the mortality that it had housed for over fifty years. It is a guest that dwells within everyone.

I wonder if the angels see it, that death that we carry, when they look upon us. If so, I wonder what they see when they look at me.

The idea that one day my breath will fail is as imponderable to me as it was propesterous to Macbeth that Birnam Wood could one day march on Dunsinane. But my Birnam Wood will march, nonetheless, as my friend's did, and the battle will take place, and my body will fall.

Sitting here at my desk, my happy heart keeping my spirit company, I am grateful for three things.

I am grateful that I know that I will meet my death one day.

I am grateful I do not know when that day will be, or what that death will look like. It is enough simply to know that we will meet.

Most of all, I am grateful that I must only meet him once. This knowledge gives me courage. It consoles me when I think about my friend, whose great ordeal is over, who has gone through the last riddle, and who will live the rest of her days in that species that stands beyond, beckoning and baffling, a species that is as invisible to me as music, but positive, as sound.

"I know that my Redeemer lives, that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him, with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!" (Job 19:25-27)

sweet reminder

The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light
in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of
right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's
plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily
bread are the sweetest things in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

"a sky, air, light: / a being..."

My housemate and I have determined that I suffer from the direct opposite of seasonal depression. It makes me happy when skies are gray. Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul--I am alight. The North Wind doth blow, and we will have snow, and the very thought if it makes my heart sing.

Needless to say, then, I am relishing these wind-beaten mornings, the kitchen spell they make possible: a spell of warmth and wellbeing spun out of gentle indoor lights and the throaty conversation of the coffee maker, underscored by the framed square of bruised autumn day visible above the sink.

I was browsing through my Levertov collection as I sipped my coffee this particular morning, and this poem captured perfectly the way I feel about today. Or rather, after I read this poem, I looked out the window and the day did indeed wring me with the feelings the poem describes. I can't tell you now, in hindsight, if the day made the poem resonate so powerfully, or if the poem made the day resonate so powerfully.

All I know is that they partnered together, and my heart is still, even now, dancing their choreography.

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or was it I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov: "Variation on a Theme by Rilke" (The Book of Hours, Book 1, Poem 1, Stanza 1)

(the fruits of a little wordplay on a quiet afternoon)

The cranberry red minivan had acquired a shimmy in recent years--a fact that its driver, Abraham, regarded in much the same way he regarded his own receding hairline: with outer good nature and private interior squirms.

It was barely four in the morning. Abraham's vision was limited to the penumbra of cloudy light cast by his headlights into the inky void. They hadn't passed another automobile since the semi truck twenty minutes back, and after a day of work followed by six sleepless hours behind the wheel, Abraham grew increasingly disoriented. The radio, with its unvaried assortment of jingly Christmas carols, had long ceased to entertain him. He had turned it off as soon as his children were asleep.

He gripped the wheel, squared his shoulders, and reached to the dash to turn off the heat. Perhaps the frigid November air would keep him alert.

His wife stirred in the passenger seat, jogged awake by the sudden drop in white noise. Elisabeth was a light sleeper under normal conditions; much more so in the jouncing minivan. She squirmed to an upright posture, inhaling deeply as she always did upon waking.

"You still doing okay, Abe?" she whispered after finding her bearings.

Abraham nodded, relieved at the clarifying effect of her voice, so familiar to him that it felt a part of his mind's most rational workings.

"Want me to take a turn?"

He shook his head. "Maybe in an hour or so. I'll be okay for now."

She relaxed back into her seat and turned her head to squint out the misted window. The atmosphere of the van settled again into quiet. The absence of the heater's harsh blare and the sharpened edge in the cooling air give this new silence a palpable weight. Abraham indulged the childish fancy that this prosaic minivan was a rocket ship, bearing them through space and time to another planet. He smiled to himself at the aptness of the analogy as he thought of their destination: Elisabeth's childhood home in Iowa, its dust mote laden air, its elongated sense of time and space.

Abraham's thoughts turned to his children as naturally and unremarkably as a washing machine changes cycles. Lizzie, Robbie, Esther, and Henry: he ticked them off mentally, oldest to youngest: a habit of his. Twelve, nine, six, and four.

Glancing into the rearview mirror, he glimpsed their dark shapes heaped like dirty laundry across the benches. The brothers were in the rear. Henry's pale elfish face nuzzled against Robbie's shoulder in a breach of their brotherly code that Robbie would never have permitted were he awake. Robbie's posture was an enlarged iteration, his forehead bumping against the window and his mouth hanging ajar. In the front bench were the girls. Esther's fuzzy curls clung to the pillow she had propped against the armrest. Her wee feet peeked from beneath the hem of her princess nightgown and poked against Lizzie's leg.

Lizzie.

As he looked at her, a semi truck barreled past, its lights illuminating her face for a brief and shocking span. She was awake and staring out the window, unaware of his attention. Something in her expression at that moment pinioned Abraham's heart in his chest. He felt it flapping, frantic, against that keen lance of emotion innocently inflicted by his daughter's transfiguration.

She sat in her usual place in the minivan, unmasked. In her expression dwelt emotions that looked so at home there he marveled that he hadn't seen them before: yearning and faith, a sense of breath bated. These inhabited her countenance with the candor that is the soul of privacy, all considerations of civility and shyness clearly forgotten.

Abraham was startled to find that until now he hadn't believed she had a private self detached from his own--one that glowed beneath the good manners of her upbringing and the instinctive theatricality of her public interactions. With his realization arrived a sick pang of apprehension: the knowledge that his daughter's precious form housed a treasury of vulnerabilities that he was powerless to defend.

His eyes double checked the road and then returned to her face, and this time they encountered her direct gaze: mild again, masked. She smiled sweetly.

"Much longer, Dad?" she whispered.

He cleared his throat. "About three hours left, darling."

"I guess I'll try to sleep some more then," she sighed. He heard her shift position, causing Esther to grunt in her sleep and Elisabeth to awaken with her usual sharp inhalation, look around, and sink back into rest.

Abraham took several deep stabilizing breaths and reached across the armrest to hold his wife's hand. Again he counted off his children. Lizzie, Robbie, Esther, Henry. Burning with love, he chanted their names in his heart again and again, like the rosary, like a prayer.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Today's state of mind...

Barbara Crooker, "October":
Chill in the air, the leaves go up
in flame, then all fall down
in litter and mulch. The blue
chrome dome of the sky
clamps tight over our heads.
Trees write in their spiral
notebooks: good year,
lots of rain, let's put
a ring on it.
There's only one note
on the wind chimes:
gold gold gold
---
From the Book of Common Prayer:
"Prayer For Those We Love"
Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy never-failing care and love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that thou art doing for them better things than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
---
From Isaiah 45:3:
"I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name."
---
Dorothy Sayers:
"Where Christ is, cheerfulness will keep breaking in..."

bookfast

This morning as I microwaved another cup of coffee for myself and listened halfheartedly to Raising Sand while my eyes trailed my neighbor to her car, I caught a glimpse of myself in my own mind's eye: a smoky phantom superimposed over a vivid kaleidescope of images from the books I'd immersed myself in. Last week, I read a thrilling fantasy adventure story (The Blue Sword), a heartbreakingly epic family saga (East of Eden), and a terse memoir of grief (The Year of Magical Thinking). The week before, it was a sweet nosegay of a novel (The Enchanted April), a dark romance (The House of the Seven Gables), a stark and sorrowful tale of a dying small town (The Plague of Doves), a humorously poignant love story (Lives of the Saints) and a delightfully absorbing satiric fantasy (Going Postal). I could go on. Another series of weeks like the ones I've just experienced, and I'll be donning my armor and setting forth in search of windmills to joust.

When I speak with friends about the delights of reading, I always mention that books have the power to deepen and enrich one's quality of life...but I must confess that of late that has not been true for me. Rather, I have engaged in a parisitic relationship with the books I've been reading by permitting them to sap the vast majority of my time and energy. I've grown dependent on books, have been using them as a means to escape my life rather than a means to understand my life better.

For this reason, I am imposing some limitations on my literary consumption. I am going to let my reading affect my life by having a life that is subject to being affected...which means doing less reading and more living. One hour a day of pleasure reading is plenty, and leaves me (factoring in eight hours of sleep) thirteen hours in which to be present, three-dimensional, and mutable in this three-dimensional mutable beautiful earth.

Already I'm beginning to feel more substantial.

Scrap looked up at the pine trees motionless among stars. Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful...

She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn't want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here: the marvellous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings--feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities.

excerpt, The Enchanted April (Elizabeth Von Arnim)

presence of mind

The ferns outside my window are spreading their green vertebrae out towards the sun-gilded breeze this morning, looking as beautific as ferns are capable of looking. This day is beautific. I am sitting at my kitchen table and soaking up the mingled accords of cleanliness (bleach and Windex), sumptuousness (coffee in the pot and an apple cinnamon coffee cake cooling on the counter), and clean mountain air. My dishwasher is running, I'm eyeing one of the peaches nestled in a bowl on my kitchen table with undisguised intent, and Rosie Thomas is singing about October.

Earlier today, I visited the grocery store and stocked my refrigerator and cupboards with abundant food in eager anticipation of the advent of two very dear friends, who arrive tomorrow for a small reunion. Later on, I'll finish my preparations by running a few loads of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and readying the spare mattress. For now, though, I'm pausing to be still and attentive in this gentle light.

I was listening to NPR yesterday while I fixed myself a pizza after church. Every Sunday afternoon the station has a show about some aspect of spirituality, which involves interviewing spiritual people and asking them to divulge their secrets. Of late the majority of these interviews have focused on the Buddhist path to enlightenment, and I am enjoying learning more about this particular approach to life. The most valuable concept that I have taken from these interviews is the concept of being present to your own life.

My inclination is to withdraw into my own consciousness and live a shadow life, in my brain and imagination. I'm particularly prone to this brand of escapism when I am feeling pressured or upset, but it also strikes when I'm simply bored with my routines. Thanks to NPR and a few wonderful books (as always, Mary Oliver, along with Robert Hass, Kathleen Norris, and Thoreau) I have realized that in so doing I am despising the day of small things and cheating myself of a rich life: a life in the body as well as the spirit, in time as well as eternity.

I really don't know how best to hold myself at bay, so to speak, and live a physically present life while also managing to live a metaphysically present life. By nature I veer into extremes. But I know things that help me. I know that certain activities stimulate both my body and spirit at once. Beautiful mountain jogs come to mind most powerfully. Also: listening to the radio while fixing food, running through my Italian CDs while cleaning house, holding a cup of coffee while reading a good book. Blogging while savoring a tidy fragrant kitchen.

L'Engle talks about being ontological, how impossible it is, and yet how fleetingly ineffable those moments of near-ontology are. Mary Oliver talks about being attentive and corporeal as a sort of prayer. I don't know how to be ontological, I don't really know how to be a prayer, but I am willing to try to be present in body and mind. I'm willing to try to love this life.

On a beautific day like today, it seems almost easy.

Friday afternoon, September

Autumn approaches. (Delicious autumn, to thee my very soul is wed!)

Although daytime temperatures still leap towards 100 degrees they rarely make it past 95. I think the mornings (lovely, cool, sixty-degree mornings) are holding them back. On my runs, I encounter trees garlanded with crimson poison ivy. Up by the Craven House one flirtatious maple has already turned a becomingly rusty shade of red.

My thoughts often turn singsong to the cadence of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall, to a Young Child." Margaret, are you grieving over golden-grove unleaving? Death, that blight man was born for, has come again to court someone near to me, as he did almost two years ago this season. I find myself gathering all of the emptiness in my heart and kindling it with prayer, watching the bitter incense waft heavenward. It's a miracle, in a way: something so dense and acrid curling from an altar heaped with all my vacancy. Afterwards I feel listerine relief, bracing and mentholated, rush through me for awhile.

I am not necessarily immersed in sadness, as the above paragraph perhaps may suggest. Rather, I feel like sorrow has been a sort of lens slipped over my perspective, sharpening everything to a degree of poignancy that I haven't felt for awhile. I am even grateful for the new keenness it has given me.

This sorrow was written, too. Now as it is unfolding, I am given my usual under-appreciated freedom, that gift that I constantly forget that I possess: to choose how to respond.

Thoughts about community:

(or, how my mind has changed)

For at least the past year my lifestyle has demonstrated an increasingly individualistic bent. I have subconsciously tried to cut myself off from my communities, both here in Chattanooga and at home in Michigan, by consistently rating my desire for autonomy and independance ahead of my relationships. The idea of being accountable to or beholden to others, the fear of drama, of the messy obligations that go with the territory of a community, these things have motivated my retreat into myself, a retreat so gradual and tame that I've had plenty of opportunities to rationalize it, to distract myself from the outrageous selfishness that it displays. Only recently have I begun to question my attitude, and seen how radically false it is. Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk helped open my eyes. Through her, I was able to see how my individualism reflected one of the worst aspects of American culture: one that elevates self-reliance to an ultimate virtue, that encourages people to look out for themselves first and foremost.

I diagnosed myself as inhospitable at the soul level. My refusal to be vulnerable expresses itself in a staunch closed-heart policy--toxic and flagrantly unloving. It denies my need (yes: need) for community and fellowship. It makes true, powerful, transformative love impossible.

I am so tired of prideful possessiveness, of love limited by self-aggrandizing paranoia. Miserly habits of soul.

I came across this poem by Madeleine L'Engle that expressed the way I feel quite aptly.

Pride is heavy.
It weighs.
It is a fatness of spirit,
an overindulgence in self.
This gluttony is earthbound
Cannot be lifted up.
Help me to fast,
to lose this weight!
Otherwise, O Light One,
how can I rejoice in your
Ascension?
[Ascension, 1969]

Self-absorbed individualism is just that: overindulgence in self, fatness of spirit, spiritual gluttony. Indeed, help me to shed these earthbound pounds, O Light One.

Help me to, in those difficult but transforming words of Scripture, take up my cross daily, die to myself, follow Christ.

after reading "Night"

A friend of mine has been urging me to read "Night" by Elie Wiesel since freshman year of college--five years later, having finally complied, I understand why. It's the sort of book that compels you to write about it, if only to process it, to exorcise some of the horror that soaks into your heart during the brief hour and a half that elapses as you read through it. After I finished it and sat in my living room with a cup of tea, enfolded in the creature comforts of my happy golden life, I sought to come to grips with the truth that those pages had revealed: that to be a human being means to have within me the hideous potential that created Auschwitz. Somewhere amidst the qualities in my heart that Christians label "the image of God"--creativity, rationality, volitionality, morality, community--is this nightmare, this evil, waiting to be unleashed. It's chilling indeed to come to grips with the fact that I also, in my fallen humanity, have Satanic likeness, a resemblance to that brightest star of the morning whose fall introduced evil into the cosmos.

It is important for me to reflect on this, from time to time, because it's so easy otherwise for me to think that life is about being comfortable and on good terms with everyone, or achieving certain goals. It is too easy for me to forget that there is a deeper narrative beneath the surface and seeming of things, that each ostensibly minor choice I make has powerful implications in that supernatural realm, which is more real and true than the one that I so often delude myself into regarding as "reality."

"Night" took my hand and led me through the world as I so rarely allow myself to look at it: a wasteland of sin and despair and torment and night. It left my heart gasping for Light, and made me realize that, were it not for the presence of that Light pouring through me, igniting my heart, being breathed to flame by the wind of the Spirit, my existence would be that hell.

I am about to make some coffee this morning, about to venture into another routine day of three square meals, of familiar tasks and familiar faces, of comfortable comforts and comfortable discomforts. But I know that, at least for a time, I will be conscious of how precarious my little world is as I do these things. And I hope that this change in perspective will bolster my faith and remind me of how great my salvation is...and will help me be a light no matter my circumstances.