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