seek

This morning I woke early to see my dear sister off. She had spent six coffee-inundated days in my household, and I regretted the red glow of her receding taillights as I blew kisses from the front porch. Family is such a seething mixture of loving and taking for granted and missing.

The most frantic weeks of work culminate in the six days that pave my future from this deep breath doorstep of a Monday morning. I remind myself ceaselessly that life is NOT about pleasing me. That satisfaction and peace are byproducts of duties cheerfully rendered.

I was standing in my driveway, cupping my mug of coffee between my palms and feeling strangely abandoned, when a flashing white tail alerted me to the flight of a deer through the trees in my front yard.

I miss so much LIFE, merely by ceasing or forgetting to seek.

a bit of humor, from the archives...

I've just returned from my summer Hudsonville visit, during which I had the opportunity to sift through some writings from my middle school years. This poem had me crying with laughter, and recalled to me vividly the utter (if melodramatic) despair that mathematics invariably elicited from my poor unscientific soul. I remember composing it during Algebra I class with Mr. TenElshof, in Room 111 at Plymouth School.

The moment I walk

into Room 111,

the teacher's brisk talk

submerges my brain

in fetid, black water

that's numeral ridden

where every plain concept

seems murky and hidden.

I struggle to rise,

to breathe and break surface,

to open my eyes--

to understand Math.

But all is illusion,

vague, muddied confusion...

The water drifts endless

in directionless path.

-Abby Pettit, seventh grade, age 13

"We rarely consider the soul's excellent qualities or who it is that dwells within her or how precious she really is. And so we don't bother to tend her beauty. All our attention is focused on the rough matrix of the diamond, the outer walls of the castle, which are none other than these bodies of ours. Remember, this castle has many dwellings: some above, some below, others to either side. At the center is the most important dwelling of all where the most secret things unfold between the soul and her Beloved."

-Teresa d'Avila, The Interior Castle

for Hannah

You told me last night that you never leave the kitchen dirty before bed.

I recall marking the passing of time by the growth of clutter in our bedroom years ago.

Time-lapse those months, and behold a miracle:

inanimate objects being fruitful,

multiplying,

subduing our little earth.

Even after we parted

I would laugh,

comforted,

to hear Mom complain of your slovenly ways.

Oh how her eyebrows glowered

when your diamond twinkled in the grimy light

of quarters undomesticated.

Now within you ripens a natural life.

My heart stumbles at the sight of the ascetic sink,

the scoured counters.

"You wait! Your girl will be just like you!"

Your coffee sloshes over the brim

at the spasm of her willing limb.

Dear one!

My hopeful joke is no threat.

gleanings

The reason I cannot escape myself:

..."we continue to behave more or less like the people we are, even on a pilgrimage"...

The reason I cannot stop trying:

..."It is an open secret among pilgrims and other theoreticians of this traveling life that you become addicted to the horizon"...

So:

..."I will gaze at the moon / and cleanse my heart"...

---

I have not understood much of Anne Carson's pilgrim essay, Kinds of Water. There are snatches of Spanish flung in it, and unfinished ideas, and epigrams beyond my wit to concretely solve. But I think I take away the important things...or, at least, some of the important things.

Like life being a pilgrimage through apocalyptic beauty with strangers . One of those strangers being your own hungry bewildered self. The parasite Shame, and the pain you inflict upon yourself to unpry him. Never quite reaching the end. Mystery.

It helped.

Oliver

I feel like I have a disability when I read her poetry and compare my own blasted vision and dulled spirit to the persona in her words.

When she writes of this fat lean bleak beautiful world, stringing a taut grid of tensions across her canvas, my eyes are first opened to and then blinded by the intricacy and mystery that we all inhabit.

Her art drives readers to examine their lives, and does so beautifully with both candor and artistry.

Her words have been agents in my spiritual life, challenging my faith and stoking my zeal.

She has taught me to pay attention.

She asks me to contemplate the exhaustive sweeping world, that Great Engulfment of Time and Matter, and has taught me that the only possible response to this world is one of gratitude and praise.

She has taught me that sorrow is valuable. Without taking evil lightly, she has pointed me away from it, towards goodness, towards light.

Like the psalms, her poems stir within me desire and joy enriched by the reality of suffering and doubt, propelling me toward holiness.

Although her poems are pervaded with disquieted reservations, they yet have achieved greater fluency in the language of faith and worship than many who claim that language as their native tongue, and yet stammer and hesitate, or are silent.

"The day's crowding arrived / at this abundant stillness. ... / Gift after gift." (Levertov)

It has been a joyously productive morning in my house today. Our dogs are luxuriating in their fragrant glossy fur (Dove rejuvenating shampoo) after the usual wrestling bout that is bathtime. The kitchen gleams, the bathrooms sparkle, and the living room carpet is lined with vacuum marks. I've made a pot of coffee, and am allowing myself the special indulgence of a third cup as I sit here at the computer and watch the trees pan the sunlight through their branches.

I love these sated pauses for the luxury they are. It is so rarely that I truly lean back and blink the world into fresh focus, so rarely that I can fill my being with the bounty of it and translate that bounty into a yearning song of gratitude.

With Mary Oliver, this morning I am gushing, "Oh! / the sweetness of reality!"

It is a day when my hosannahs crackle with blinding alleluiahs.

I am letting my Self pollute my experience of life more than usual, lately.

Puppeteering my relationships so that I see only strings.
Hearing only the pitch of my voice when I sing.
Feeling only the unstirred beat of my heart when I pray.

I want to see people when I interact with them.
I want to listen to the entire choir.
I want another to stir my heart.

Self is a big mean ole bully, wrestling gentle Spirit to the ground, pretending to be unaware that he needs Spirit to be truly real, truly fulfilled...pretending not to know that he is weaker.

Please bear with my Buechner kick

Buechner writes that living right is living out of your own humanness and thereby awakening the humanness in others, as well as the humanness in yourself.

But what does that mean, "living out of your own humanness"?

When I consider "my own humanness", I consider my unfinishedness, the idea that as a human I am a work in progress. I am undergoing constant refinement and alteration. To "live out of this" is to live in a way that acknowledges that I am incomplete...or rather, that I am being completed. It is to be aware of the agents that are working to change me from without and within. It is to resist my inner default setting, a setting that I cannot quite seem to re-program, that tells me that I am, in and of myself, as good as I'll ever be.

Practically speaking, I live out of my humanness when I open my heart to the painful reality of my spiritual impoverishment, yet without despair. Pain of this sort is actually a symptom of growth, and should be celebrated as such.

It is vital that I keep in mind that living out of my humanness involves living, intentionally, judiciously. It is a state of being that demands more of me than the state of dreaming on autopilot, that opens me up to real challenges and real relationships and real vulnerability. It is a state that chooses to focus on pursuing Life: Abundant Life. It accepts nothing less.

I am so grateful for those in my life who live this way, and have at various times awakened within me (unbeknownst to myself, perhaps even unbeknownst to them) my own humanness.

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.

rediscovering an old flame

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like curves of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms to hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

---

Sara Teasdale, I cannot help myself: I love you.

Your worldview aligns with mine on only a few points, and your verse lacks the complexity and depth and mastery of greatness. But when I read of "children's faces looking up / holding wonder like a cup", "music like curves of gold", "holy thoughts that star the night", "hours that go by on broken wings", and "the unchanging ache of things"...the eyes of my soul brighten. This was true when I first selected you back in seventh grade: a faded green hardcover volume that has since, to my dismay, vanished. And, although I am often ashamed to confess it, I cannot read you without pleasure, even now that my ear catches flaws in meter and rhyme, and my mind cringes at every redundity, and my soul has grown callused against certain cliches.

The primary function of poetry in my life is that of awakening me to the world. George Cabot Lodge writes that "when you are accustomed to anything, you are estranged from it." Sara Teasdale has freshened the paint on my perceptions many, many times. And so I will continue to name her among my favorite poets, despite the snarkiness of those who desire to let her pages slip silently from the canon.

And when I get a chance, I intend to donate a book of her poems to my library, so that others can discover in her pages the sighing loveliness that so entranced me.

going green

In the square of my soul, throngs of vendors hawk their distractions. My desires are children hyped on sugar and afflicted with ADHD. They dash from one booth to the next, wasteful and heedless, caring only for gratification at whatever cost. Will and Conscience, their feckless chaperones, wait indolently for the inevitable crash and burn, too comfortable and lazy to exercise loving discipline.

The thing is. Those vendors should not even be there. I know the weakness of my executive branch. I know the terrible energy of my spendthrift desires. And yet I have distributed business permits for every entrepreneur that beats at my city gate.

I need a new foreign policy. My inner sanctum should not be a market. It should be a garden, painstakingly planned and tilled, irrigated by the fountain of living water, each plant selected for the fruit it will bear, seeded and tirelessly tended. What an outlet for the energies of my desires! And what a playground!

This is not to say that trading with the world is forbidden. Where else am I to find the materials for this garden? And, after all, half of the joy in a garden is that of inviting others to revel in its beauty and taste its bounty.

What I mean is that the soul should not be a center of commerce. It should be a place of beauty and joyous labor. Envoys should venture forth into the world to do business, rather than wait for the world to intrude. Invitations should be extended to other souls to rest awhile and find refreshment, an escape from gaudiness and artificiality.

The time has come to cast out the market, to begin this transformation.

"Superficiality is the curse of our age....The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people." [Richard J. Foster]

I want to be deep.
And clear all the way to the bottom.

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.