"World without Event"

It was said, Gerard Manley Hopkins told his friend Robert Bridges, that Alphonsus Rodriguez, porter in a Majorcan monastery, was "bedeviled by evil spirits" throughout his life, but also "much favored by God" with visions of heavenly light.  For the saint's feast day, Hopkins wrote the following sonnet.

In Honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

Glory is a flame off exploit, so we say,

And those fell strokes that once scarred flesh, scored shield,

Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,

Record, and on the fighter forge the day.

On Christ they do, they on the martyr may;

But where war is within, what sword we wield

Not seen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,

Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.

Yet, he that hews out mountain, continent,

Earth, all, at last; who with fine increment

Trickling, veins violets and tall trees makes more

Could crowd career with conquest while there went

Those years and years by of world without event

That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

We crave glory in action – to be seen as victors, awarded the laurel or the oak and hailed in the streets (or on the Internet).  If we die for a cause, we hope to be immortalized in song and story. It’s human nature, to want to do brave deeds and to be rewarded for our doing.

Hopkins recognizes this in the first five lines of the sonnet: it’s the warrior’s exploits that we say give off the fire of glory; his “scarred flesh” and “scored shield” should record his deeds and keep them in memory.  However, he seems to be not completely confident, the phrase “so we say” suggesting that perhaps the assertion is at least open to question:  we say that glory “flames off exploit,” but is this always the case?  Yes, he asserts with confidence, the scars of Christ do indeed bring Him glory, but the scars of the martyrs only “may” do so – and glory from literal war is perhaps even less sure.  

Why his hesitancy to assign glory to the exploits of literal battle? Because there is another kind of battle men engage in that no one sees but that is no less important – and perhaps more so.  “The war within” is unseen and unsung by other men, no matter how intense it may be.  This warrior of the heart carries no tangible sword, wears no steel armor, makes no resounding battle-cry, even  in the “fiercest fray.”  Certainly the world neither sees his scars nor rewards his victories.

But God sees.  The God who created the earth itself with its most magnificent features – mountains, continents; the God who created the most delicate details of nature – the growth of trees, the veins of a violet . . . this God sees the inner conflict.  And He cares: He “crowds career with conquest”; He gives victory in these battles, even when they last a lifetime, “years and years” while little else goes on in the world and the warrior merely watches a door which is never challenged.

Hope should spring from this realization.  Few of us, in the end, will do great deeds to be memorialized in song; few of us will become well-known martyrs for the faith.  But all of us will battle inner demons: sinful thoughts and desires, discouragement and despair.  While Satan himself may well torment us, even without his harassment there will be plenty to battle.  I find myself so easily leaping to anger, unjustified criticism, guilt true or false, loss of hope.  It is all too easy to give in to these enemies, to dwell on them.

But this is not who I am.  It is who I was, and the patterns reassert themselves when I lose sight of my real identity: a daughter of the King, a servant of the Lord God.  In Him, I am the one who can repent of my sin and seek reconciliation with God and man; I am the one who can offer patient love to one who irritates me; I am the one who sees beauty everywhere, who finds joy in the darkest hours.  I am the one who wakes in the middle of the night with the words “I love you, Father,” inexplicably echoing in my mind and heart, and who understands that Christ in me speaks those words – and because I am hidden in Him, cloaked in His love, they are my honest words as well.  

Certainly, until He returns or I am removed to His presence through death, I will struggle with the sinful and dispiriting patterns of the old man.  But I will struggle:  I will fight the battle and know that victory is already mine – I am made new in Christ who lives in me, and however fiercely the battle rages at times, He is my Champion, and even in this life I may at least begin to see the fruit of refusing to lay down my arms in despair.  No matter what others see or know, I can know that He sees it all, and upholds and strengthens me, and will give me whatever due reward He Himself has earned for me. 

Matt 6:6 But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Cliffs of Fall: Remembering Christopher

(Christopher left us on 9 February 2018; this is how I was at Easter.)

Cliffs of Fall

On a rainy Saturday morning in early February, I decided to take just a quick glance at my college email.  Moments later my husband appeared at the door of my study, concerned, and I realized my repeated refrain – “no, no, no” – had raised from a bare whisper to an outraged cry.

“It can’t be true,” I managed to tell him.  “They say Christopher’s killed himself.”

Christopher:  my advisee, my friend, just a few weeks from graduation with highest honors, one of those few students genuinely loved by all on campus.  It wasn’t until I encountered his absence from the hallways on Monday morning and his empty seat in my Hopkins class that afternoon that I really believed I wasn’t trapped in a nightmare.

The beret, the bowties: eccentricities to be sure, but not, it became clear, for the purpose of garnering attention – it was just a style he enjoyed.  (And still my fingers want to type “is” and “enjoys.”)  A committed student:  if I arrived at my office by 7:00 or even earlier, Christopher was sure to be somewhere about, reading, writing, preparing for his day, often greeting me with a new book or a new insight.  Brilliant:  already on his way to seminal work in ancient philosophy in both his senior theses (a double major, of course, in classical studies and philosophy).  Curious and eager: I had to order him to stop reading so that he would have time to actually write and edit his thesis on Heraclitus before term’s end in the fall.  Caring: “how are you?” meant he really wanted to know, and his popularity rose no more from his quirky, fun-loving ways than from his ability to listen, to encourage, to speak truth.

He came to our small Christian college a believer, but not fully satisfied.  My course on Gerard Manley Hopkins played into his seeking, and he converted to Catholicism during that first semester of his sophomore year.  He loved the Church as he loved his Lord, and he taught us much about his new-found home – which he was studying and living with typical whole-hearted enthusiasm – and reveled in filling the gaps in our Protestant-driven ignorance as we tried to understand the theology that drove Hopkins’ life and work.  He had been retaking the class as an audit in this senior year, for fun as well as to deepen his understanding of the poetry, and I had been relying on his articulate explanations of Catholic theology and life.

We knew he struggled with depression.  He knew our hearts, and our time, were always open to him.  Yet none of us had any idea how deep the darkness lay, and on Monday the campus itself felt heavy with sorrow, anger, and confusion, as we met each other in hallways and classrooms with aching hearts and weeping.  My own frustration turned from Christopher (why did you do this!) to those who seemed to demand that there be a specific, clear, easy-to-articulate answer to that very question, wanting to blame his circumstances or his pride.  “I’ve been there,” I kept telling them; “there is no answer that will satisfy you.”  And I quoted Hopkins again and again:  

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap 

May who ne'er hung there. 

And inside I was crying out, O Christopher, why couldn’t you hold to the hope that your beloved poet showed you even in his own darkest moments!

In chapel, the gospel was preached alongside the memories.  There, thankfully, no one tried to explain, only to offer hope, for Christopher, for us all.  At some now-forgotten word spoken by one of his other faculty mentors, I doubled over in near-physical pain – because in that moment, I suddenly realized the awful pain we were feeling as only the tiniest pang of all the pain of all the world, and images flooded my mind: the horrific torture and killing of believers in the Middle East; the degrading enslavement of women and children to the lust of evil men; abortion and the genocide of those with Down’s Syndrome; murders on the streets, and in hospitals where the elderly and the infirm are discarded like so much trash; the suffering and death of multitudes from disease and injuries; destroyed marriages, rebellious children, abusive or absent parents; the suffering of those like Christopher – so many, too many – trying to find peace and somehow missing it . . .

I literally could not breathe. 

The moment passed, but I have held to it since, wanting always to know that the brokenness I see is the barest image of the brokenness that is.  One can’t think of it too often, much less feel it – we mortal beings aren’t made to bear the whole world’s burdens – but it was good to catch that tiny glimpse of what our Lord sees and bears every moment of every day, the brokenness we have brought on ourselves in our demand to be like Him.  In some manner that I cannot explain, that moment of horrific darkness strengthened my hope in His light to illumine our way.  If He died for all that, if He carries all that every day . . . then He must love us indeed.

And yet, despite that hope, the rain continues to dog us even as April begins with its Easter resurrection.  And that empty chair in my Hopkins class . . . that chair is so empty. 

photo credit:  Celeste Damiani at Flickr, Creative Commons licensing

A Blessed New Year to All

A simple prayer as 2014 rapidly arrives:

Whatever suffering -- small or great -- may come our way in this broken world, may we always be alert to the beauty that God places in our way to remind us of His continual love and grace.  

Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.

"Dearest freshness deep down things . . ."

It’s one of those mornings.  Gloomy, rainy, cold for the second week in a row, exacerbating the fibromyalgia and arthritis.  Too little sleep.  Many people I love dearly facing deep, life-challenging problems and nothing one can do to help but cry with, pray for, let the heart ache. 

Then, coming up the drive to campus, movement in front of the chapel.  Odd, at first, coming out of shadow and fog, but resolving into the graceful form of a doe leading her yearling fawn, stretching to full speed to make it across the road and into the grassy field before the beast with the too-bright eyes could cause them harm. 

Beauty, beauty, beauty.

In all our brokenness and despair, He keeps giving us beauty to remind us of His presence and His care for this world He created.  Hopkins says it best, as always:

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.


It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;


It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil


Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?


Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;


And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;


And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil


Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.



And for all this, nature is never spent;


There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;


And though the last lights off the black West went


Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --


Because the Holy Ghost over the bent


World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Lord, may we always cling to Your Truth and be open to Your beauty in this world, broken though it is, allowing You to remind us of Your great love for us, whatever appearances may be at any given time. 

Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever will be, world without end.  Amen.

Glory

Yesterday:  fog and clouds and I never even thought of Phoebe until I reached the stop sign and looked west to check for traffic -- and there she sailed, only slightly past the full, lighting the grey morning and lifting the heart.

This morning:  a denser fog and deeper darkness, as the days grow shorter, gave little hope, but there she was, haloed in gleaming pearl within a sepia frame, obediently shining beauty into the mists of early morning long before dawn.

Last night:  a decent sleep for the first time in weeks (and I know who prayed and am thankful); so much easier to face the draining needs of the week's final days.

There is always good if we remember to look for it, always beauty, always the Son's light reflected into the brokenness.

Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Living Reality in Light of Eternity

“The people of our time are helpless, distracted, and rebellious, unable to interpret that which is happening, and full of apprehension about that which is to come, largely because they have lost this sure hold on the eternal which gives to each life meaning and direction, and with meaning and direction gives steadiness. I do not mean by this a mere escape from our problems and dangers, a slinking away from the actual to enjoy the eternal. I mean an acceptance and living out of the actual, in its homeliest details and its utmost demands, in the light of the eternal, and with that peculiar sense of ultimate security which only a hold on the eternal brings. When the vivid reality which is meant by these rather abstract words is truly possessed by us, when that which is unchanging in ourselves is given its chance, and emerges from the stream of succession to recognize its true home and goal, which is God – then though much suffering may, indeed will remain, apprehension, confusion, instability, despair will cease.”

When I read this passage from Evelyn Underhill’s Radiance, I was struck by the way it echoes what I have been saying about literature (good literature, true literature) for a very long time. We are not healed or helped or eased by escape from reality, whether into the worlds of literature or into a world of esoteric contemplation. The saint cannot very well be a saint if he does not live in reality, after all. We are not saints for God’s sake; we are saints for the sake of our neighbor. God pours Himself into us to make us saints, of course – we can hardly be saints on our own power – but He doesn’t do this because He has some personal need for our patience, our endurance, our joy, our love. He surely desires these things of us, and offers them to us for our growth and strength, but He is all this and all else that is Good, so when we offer Him these we offer Him nothing He doesn’t already have.

Rather, it is our neighbors who need us to be saints. We need to be saints in the midst of the reality of this broken world in order to serve our neighbors. We need to offer them the fruit of the joy, the faithfulness, the compassion, the diligence that He has poured out and wrought in us, to draw them to the only real Hope offered to any of us. We need to find the eternal, to turn to the eternal, to rejoice in the eternal and find our strength there in order to live well here, in, as Underhill calls it, the “actual.”

And while the road of the mystic, the road of contemplation, is one way into the eternal which informs our life in the actual, another road is that of literature, the words of the wise from all of time gathered in the soul to remind us of, of course, the eternal in the actual. I have said that literature shows us the ideal, the way the world ought to be. Not, if it is true, ideal in the sense of unfallen – we have no idea what an unfallen world would be – but ideal in demonstrating to us the way to live well in the midst of that fallenness, to demonstrate courage and compassion and forgiveness and gratitude, and to bear witness to their Source.

Morning Star

The empty sky turned from black to indigo as I drove to work this morning, a bare tinge of pastel orange rising on the eastern horizon. As I started from the car to my office building, I finally saw the morning star above the crenellations on the entrance tower, and thought of Keats' "bright star" "stedfast" in the heavens. And I thought of Alisa, our own bright star with her steadfast love, and her parents waiting to know what will happen, partial healing here for a time and our continued joy in her loving presence, or complete healing in heaven which is yet a loss for us that seems too hard to bear. And I thought of the star above Mordor that Sam saw, above the shadows of fear and hatred and violence and death, the star that reminded him that truth and beauty and love and goodness are always there and will always, in the end, overpower the brokenness.

Alisa, our lovely star, be well. We love you, and we pray for you to stay with us if your all-loving, all-knowing, and all-seeing Creator allows, but if you must go, if it is time for you to leave the valley and soar with Him, we will see you every morning in the stars and rejoice through our tears at your healing.

Scars and Destiny

Criminal Minds impressed me yet again last night. Last season ended with a serial killer who had escaped from prison finding Hotch (the team had put him into prison in the first place) and stabbing him multiple times, but deliberately not killing him, even taking him to the hospital emergency room to be treated in time to live. When they found that he had Hayley's address, his intent became clear: his goal was to destroy Hotch by destroying all that he loved. (Hayley was Hotch's estranged wife, whom he still loved deeply, and who had custody of their young son, Jack.) So Hayley and Jack were sent into protective custody, unable to have any contact with Hotch.

So this season they've been hunting the killer while dealing with other cases, and finally the killer, in the last episode, found Hayley's FBI protection agent, tortured him, got Hayley's phone number from his phone, and left him to die after calling her and telling her that her agent and Hotch were dead, he was her new agent, and she needed to meet him at her old home so he could take her to a new safe house.

Hotch is talking to her on the phone (the killer, to further his mental torture of both of them, calls him after getting control of Hayley and Jack), and tells her to be strong, not to let the killer make her beg, and so on, then tells Jack that he needs to "help Daddy with the case," code for hiding in a trunk near Hotch's desk. Hayley holds up her courage to avoid distressing Jack into giving away or leaving his hiding place, and Hotch (along with the rest of the team, patched into his phone) hears the two gunshots that kill her. He arrives in time to save Jack, and Morgan, arriving with the team shortly after him, has to pull him off the killer as he continues to pound his face in fury and in terror -- if he stops, and the killer is not dead, he could still harm Jack.

In this week's episode, the team was called away after Hayley's funeral to a case in Nashville. Before they go, Rossi talks with Hotch about his future: will he continue with the BAU, resign, what? It seems clear that he needs to continue using his gift by "catching the bad guys," as Rossi says, but he is broken and scarred, both literally and figuratively. Rossi, without pressuring him in either direction, says to him, "Scars remind us where we've been; they don't have to dictate where we're going." Later, when Hotch indicates his feeling of helplessness before single fatherhood, Rossi says, "You need to decide what kind of father you want to be, then you'll know what to do."

The episode takes us back and forth between the team's work and Hotch as he moves into a new home, comforts his son, and tries to understand his next step. One especially poignant scene: Jack is lying on the couch watching a video taken on his recent third birthday, a time Hotch couldn't share with them because they were under protection. Hotch enters the room, watches until the video is coming to a close, then says, "Time for pjs." Jack, staring at his mother and himself blowing kisses to his daddy, says sadly, "I want to wait a little longer for Mommy."

Hotch's big decision now is whether to remain in the BAU. Jack needs him, and he needs his work. Hayley's sister has been helping with Jack and the household work, and she tells Hotch that if he chooses to stay with the Bureau, she will care for Jack when he has to be gone. "Please let me do this," she says, ". . . for Hayley." Finally, the Chief -- who has been trying to get rid of Hotch forever because his skill and ambition pose a threat to her own ambitions -- brings him an offer for retirement with full pension and benefits. She is startled when Hotch asks for time to consider instead of accepting it immediately.

When the team returns to D.C., Rossi finds Hotch at Hayley's grave. He asks, nodding to the grave, "Have you told her yet?" "Told her what?" Hotch replies. "That you aren't leaving the BAU?" "Oh, I don't need to tell her that," Hotch says; "she already knows."

The voice-over at the end is from Emerson: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Scarred and broken people still have the opportunity and the responsibility to live well, to use their gifts in service.

It is Good to Give Thanks

Today was our Thanksgiving chapel. Psalm 145 was the text we followed, and several people shared meditations on various sections of the chapter, with songs between the meditations. It was most well-organized and edifying. I had been asked to do a meditation on verses 13-16. Much of what follows has been gleaned from other Inscapes posts, but some is new and all edited for today. It is indeed good to meditate on the lovingkindness of the Lord.

Psalm 145:13b-16

"The LORD is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works.
 The LORD upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.
 The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.
 You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing."

It is all too easy to look about this broken world and despair. Where is the Lord? How is His faithfulness and kindness displayed when all around we see the horrors of war and famine and poverty; families devastated by divorce and abuse; illness and death robbing us of those we love; unborn babies ripped from the womb. And too often weariness sets in and makes all the foolish little everyday annoyances seem almost unbearable as well – the printer that won’t work, a thoughtlessly flippant word, piled-up traffic making us late to an appointment.

I am far too prone to focus on the brokenness that surrounds me, to succumb to irritation that sees only imperfections in myself and others. And then God hands me a gem of joy, a reminder that love and beauty and kindness are all around me even in the midst of the brokenness of this world we've tried so hard to destroy. There is still "the dearest freshness deep down things" and God keeps bringing beauty to the surface to delight my heart, if I will be still long enough to see.

A few gems I’ve been given over the last couple of years, that come immediately to mind:

A music CD from an old friend, an office mate from graduate school, whom I haven't talked to in years but who knew I’d like the music and the message.

A decorated balloon tied to my office door, bouncing a cheery face up and down in greeting from a beloved student.

News that my oldest son was returning from his latest six-month deployment in Afghanistan.

Simple Christmas lights in someone's yard -- cheery color leaping out from the gloom of a foggy evening to lift the spirit.

Notes of thanks and encouragement from former students that make it possible to keep going when weariness threatens to overwhelm my sense of duty.

A trip to Knoxville that cemented an already lovely friendship as my writer friend and I shared our passion for books and for family and for the God who has made our love strong and true.

A birthday lunch at Red Lobster, a necklace to match my anniversary earrings, conversation both funny and serious – a relaxing and enjoyable day with my beloved husband of 35 years.

A hand-painted ceramic unicorn whose rainbow colors will forever remind me of a young woman who entered my life unexpectedly to become a cherished treasure.

A cup of hot tea and a shoulder to cry on from a former student become a colleague and now a dear friend and confidant.

Precious hugs and teasing laughter from my youngest, so close to leaving home, giving me memories to light my heart on the days to come when the house will be at times all too quiet.

* * * * * * *

Oh, yes, the brokenness is here, it surrounds us and we have to be blind to deny its devastation in our lives. Even our “happy endings” in this world – graduation, marriage, retirement – will always be tinged with some edge of sadness.

And yet – there is an ultimate happy ending where all tears, all sorrow will be washed away forever, and even now “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World bends with [. . ] bright wings.” In light of this, I desire to seek out, to learn to recognize, the gems of joy that strew my path, and dance in the delight of His always-giving, ever-faithful love.

Pray for Rifqa Bary

I copied this from my friend Lydia McGrew's FB status:

"Praying for Rifqa Bary, Christian convert from Islam. Now returned to Ohio, to foster care; doesn't look good. Ohio judge has ordered her held incommunicado: No phone or Internet. Cut off from Christian friends and Christian lawyer. A real danger of being returned to her parents and dragged to Sri Lanka to be (parents' quote) 'dealt with.' Jesus said he will never leave nor forsake his own. May Rifqa be very conscious of that now."

Please, please pray for Rifqa to have the comfort of the Lord she has sacrificed so much for, and that He will release her from the martyrdom that begins to look inevitable. No matter what happens, may she stand firm in His love and power, and may He be mightily glorified in her. She is, remember, 17 years old and facing possible torture and execution for her faith.

On The End of Suffering

"How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights!

Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters,

on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon

in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions!

We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,

hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they’re really

our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one

of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only

season —: they’re site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode."

This is a passage from a new translation of Rilke’s poetry, which Mike Potemra posted this morning at The Corner at NRO. It reminded me of the last line of Scott Cairns’ meditation The End of Suffering: “May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.”

Scott graciously sent me The End of Suffering when he read a post in which I’d quoted one of his poems. I’ve been taking my time reading through it and savoring both the style (a poet writing reflective prose: only the poetry itself can be better) and the thought. For the most part, it didn’t hold a great many new-to-me thoughts about suffering – I’ve filled the margins with names of other writers and thinkers his words bring to mind – but his unique approach and stories challenged me to think deeply again, to revisit the subject thoughtfully, to re-see it and be encouraged to press on in my own trials. The Eastern Orthodox vocabulary and perspective deepened my thinking, and the final chapter offers a discussion of wholeness that fascinates me – that was new.

The title is of course a play on words. Someday our sufferings will end – “every tear shall be dried” – but until then we need to understand the end – the purpose – of suffering. Suffering is inevitable, and Cairns reminds us that one of its immediate purposes is to “drag us – more or less kicking – into a fresh and vivid awareness that we are not in control of our circumstances, that we are not quite whole [. . .] .” This in turn leads (or can lead) to the stripping away of self so that we can have fellowship with God – our purpose as created beings.

Cairns writes of the need to rid ourselves of pride, of that modern curse of “self-esteem,” and how suffering, if we respond wisely to it, helps us to do this by bringing us face-to-face with our own weakness and sin: writing of people he has known for whom this was true when they were diagnosed with a terminal disease, he says, ‘It was as if their imminent deaths freed them from petty, distracted lives and freed them into greater, genuine living [. . .] .”

Suffering, Cairns says, “may also provide to us a glimpse of what actual virtue might require.” He writes of how we are united to the body of Christ, and the sacrifices and blessings of understanding what that unity means as we learn to love one another as He loves us. Drawing on his pilgrimages to Mount Athos, he describes how the monks who live there love each other and God, how they take on each other’s sufferings and pray sacrificially for all of us who are struggling together to play our part in this spiritual body – and this is what we are called to in our various places in life.

He writes of how each of us, by virtue of our own sinful nature and actions, is complicit in all the suffering of the world, including the suffering of the innocents. Because no man is an island, as Donne puts it, each individual’s connection to the rest is “absolute.” If an innocent child suffers, it is because “[e]very choice in our lives that separates us from communion with God, and every decision that clouds our awareness of His presence or erodes our relationships with one another has a profound and expanding effect – as the proverbial ripples in a pool.” The striving for autonomy is great evil, and leads to great evil not only for ourselves but for others. Realizing this – taking responsibility for the evil that happens throughout the world – should humble us into a desire to live righteously, to leave sin behind.

But to begin “fixing” this state, it is not enough to merely decide not to sin. “It is not our finally turning away from sin that frees us from sin’s recurrence,” Cairns writes; “rather it is our turning toward Christ – and the mystery of our continuing to turn into Him – that puts sin behind us.” I kept being reminded of Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell, the message of which is essentially that every choice we makes sets us on either the road to heaven or the road to hell – and enough choices in one direction will eventually make the end of that road our inevitable end. “We acquire our salvation through partaking of that body [of Christ]” – we must be a part of the body, the church, making choices to live as a member of the body. I especially love the story Cairns tells of the monk who answered the question “Is Jesus Christ your personal savior?” with a smile and no hesitation: “No, I like to share him.”

Cairns quotes a Russian priest: “’And when one member suffers, all the members suffer with it’ is said of the Church. If we do not feel this, we are not within the Church.” The life of the body of Christ is essential for us to learn to live well, to understand suffering, to share the suffering of others, to know God’s love in fellowship with Him, to reach out to a suffering world. It is only here that we can understand suffering as purposeful – that it is “remedial”; it is “grace.”

And so in one sense we are being saved continually. Cairns writes, “I want to be saved from what passes for myself. This is because what passes for myself does not always feel quite like the self that is framed in the image of God and is thus united with those around me and is, allegedly, growing with them into His likeness.” Amen to that.

The book’s final chapter is one I need to mull over a great deal. It is about becoming whole, the reuniting of nous and kardia – what most of our translations render as mind and heart, but Cairns explains is so much more. I’m not going to pretend to “get” this yet; the phrase he quotes from another writer – “the intellective aptitude of the heart” – intrigues me, but I shall leave it for now simply saying that we must watch and pray, we must suffer in the garden with our suffering Lord, in the journey to wholeness. Perhaps I’ll be able to revisit the concept of wholeness as Cairns develops it here after I’ve had time to begin integrating it into my own thinking.

For my literary friends -- Cairns discusses art earlier in the book and its potentially redemptive purpose for its maker and its receiver, a discussion you will find encouraging and profitable.

Scott sent me this book because I had revealed some of the suffering I happened to be seeing and living. The book has certainly been a strong encouragement to keep going, to remain vulnerable, to embrace the purpose of suffering, for which I am grateful. The act of giving, accompanied with his prayers offered up for this complete stranger, has in itself been a reminder of the purpose of the body to be united in loving each other. He wrote on the title page, “for my sister along the way.” May we all remember that we are brothers and sisters along the way and exercise grace and love, lifting each other up in prayer and practical helps as we seek to learn the lessons of suffering.

Unintended Consequences

The catering service at my college decided last year to eliminate the use of trays. You can still get them if you are arthritic, say (or even just cantankerous), and if you know where the small stash is set aside or are willing to ask for one. But they are no longer available in the regular line and only a few of us use them.

The decision was based on research that shows much less food waste when customers don't have trays on which to stack multiple plates or multiple rolls, brownies, and so on. I applaud this; food is a valuable resource and I am glad our caterers desire to steward it well -- not to mention that it helps keep the cost down for the students. It's also a good thing, I believe, for students to see stewardship in action and learn to be more moderate in what they take.

Some negative consequences were, I'm sure, considered, such as the need to make multiple trips to get silverware and a drink. For some of us, this is a genuine difficulty because of health problems (or even time constraints between classes at times); but the trays are available if one is really needed. And for everyone else, it's one of those minor annoyances that it's not that difficult to become used to. New students may never even notice it.

But there has been a negative consequence that I'm sure was unintended. I won't claim that it outweighs the savings on food and food costs, but I do think it's worth noting: the lack of trays has made it more difficult for us to serve each other during a meal.

For example, a colleague returning to the line to get a cup of coffee and a dessert can no longer offer to get something for two or three or four others, because he can't carry the cups or plates. This was always a boon to conversation and often an important service to someone with a health problem. It's harder to let someone serve you if he has to make multiple trips to do so, after all, and so you do it yourself or say you don't want anything, even if you do.

And this is even more noticeable when people are finishing up a meal. With trays, one or two people who didn't have classes coming up, or one or two of the men when it was a mixed group, would gather all the plates and cups and glasses and silverware and return them to the kitchen for the rest of us. Over and over I was benefited by this service and was glad when I could offer it to someone else, and I was often surprised at who offered it -- not infrequently a student from the next table over would swoop in on us and take our dishes.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with getting one's own after-dinner coffee or taking care of one's own dishes after finishing a meal. But the giving and receiving of service teaches us humility and reminds us of the bond we share with each other in this community; it helps to develop fellowship and Christian charity. I miss its easy availability.

Again, I am not opposed to our caterer's decision; I think it is a good one. But I think it is also a good example of how choices have consequences that are not always directly related to the reasons for making them. No one, after all, would deny that serving each other is a good thing; no one wanted to end or make more difficult our service to each other. Yet it has happened, and it has reminded me once again of the fact that in a fallen world, we cannot "solve" problems; we can only make trade-offs. Every choice we make that ameliorates some difficulty will have some unintended consequences that create or exacerbate other difficulties. If we see it in such a simple thing as whether or not to use trays in a cafeteria, how much more so in the political and social decisions that affect entire communities and nations?

God help us to take seriously the fact of unintended consequences, to consider carefully what they might be, and make our choices with wisdom and understanding, realizing the fallenness of this world.

Seeking Peace . . .

This world is certainly broken. Sometimes this is evidenced in minor irritations and annoyances, or what one reads in the papers that doesn't touch one directly. Those days it's easy to shrug and coast a little, maybe rest a little.

But then the brokenness overwhelms. I know four people who have lost a parent in the last two weeks. Illness -- a student with a spinal tumor; the recurrence of bleeding in my daughter's angioma, causing seizures; my own chronic pain suddenly increasing by a hundred-fold or so . . . People I love losing homes, jobs, families . . .

What is one to do in the face of overwhelming brokenness? Pray, I suppose. But I haven't the least idea how to pray. Who am I to presume to know what to ask God in the midst of all this sorrow and pain? He didn't send His Son to die so we could all be happy and well in the darkness of a broken world. But neither, in the face of His sacrifice, is despair an option.

So I turn to Scott Cairns again:

Hesychia*
Stillness occurs with the shedding of thoughts. - St. John Klimakos

Of course the mind is more often a roar,
within whose din one is hard pressed to hear
so much as a single word clearly. Prayer?

Not likely. Unless you concede the blur
of confused, compelled, competing desires
the mind brings forth in the posture of prayer.

So, I found myself typically torn,
if lately delivered, brow to the floor,
pressing as far as I could into prayer,

pressing beneath or beyond the roar
that had so long served only to wear
away all good intentions, baffling prayer.

Polished hardwood proves its own kind of mirror,
revealing little, but bringing one near
the margin where one hopes to find prayer --

though even one's weeping is mostly obscured
by the very fact and effect of one's tears,
which, for the time being, must serve.


*"hesychia" means "peace"
Update: Scott Cairns, in a comment below, graciously tells me that "'hesychia' is more nearly translated as 'stillness,' indicating a deep quiet, of body, mind, and spirit."

More Neuhaus

Some quotations from Chapter 1 of Death on a Friday Afternoon, which will have to stand on their own. They are making me think, but not necessarily coherently enough to articulate anything worth adding to them.

On our tending to ignore Good Friday (and indeed all suffering) and "hurry on" to Easter (and any good news that sets aside pain): "But we will not know what to do with Easter's light if we shun the friendship of the darkness that is wisdom's way to light."

On our sin: "This is the awful truth: that we made necessary the baby crying in the cradle to become the derelict crying from the cross" (emphasis added).

On forgiveness: "Love does not say to the beloved that it [the beloved's sin] does not matter, for the beloved matters."

On sin and our identity: "Our lives are measured by who we are created and called to be, and the measuring is done by the One who creates and calls. [. . .] The judgment that matters is the judgment of God, who alone judges justly. In the cross we see the rendering of the verdict on the gravity of our sin. [. . .] None of our sins are small or of little account. To belittle our sins is to belittle ourselves, to belittle who it is that God creates and calls us to be." This called to mind Pauline in Descent into Hell: her terrible fear of her doppleganger, whom she believes to be some harbinger of evil, yet is in reality that astoundingly glorious being that God had intended her to be -- and only in learning to see and acknowledge her sins, and then to lean, to trust, and to sacrificially love others, is she at last able to see that glory and embrace it as her own created identity.

A bit further, Neuhaus writes of being our brother's keeper: "[W]e know we are [our brother's keeper]. We don't know what to do about it, but we know that if we lose our hold on that impossible truth, we have lost everything." As, indeed, Wentworth does in his demand to be enough in and for himself: to hell with the rest of the world, he says -- and yet he is the one descending into that terrible place of judgment.

And finally for today, on the cross: "The perfect self-surrender of the cross is, from eternity and to eternity, at the heart of what it means to say that God is love." All praise to Him.

New Year's Resolutions

This morning as I’ve browsed the web I’ve of course run across numerous references to the ending of one year and the beginning of the next. “Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet?” (of course not; the moment after I make one I’ll break it, so why bother?). “Highlights of 2008” (more depressing than encouraging to me, as a rule – what many people seem to think of as a “highlight” often strikes me as a new low). “How to make your dreams come true in 2009” (sure; it’s all so simple and will certainly happen this time).

Then I came to one of my favorite sites – Touchstone’s Mere Comments – and found what I wanted: a post by my favorite contemporary writer, Tony Esolen, which offers true wisdom and food for thought – “Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot?” he asks, and answers, of course, “by no means, and here’s why.”

The comments are worth reading, as well, and led me to some thinking about time and how it is described in one of my favorite plays, A Raisin in the Sun. Walter has lost his father’s life insurance money on a scam, and Beneatha, having counted on part of it to help her through medical school, is in the depths of despair. Her suitor Asagai, a Nigerian who plans to return to his country to help free it from Britain’s rule, challenges her. I don’t have the text with me, so what follows is from memory.

Beneatha tells Asagai that man never changes, and simply walks the pointless circle of time, repeating evil again and again. Asagai says no, time is a line whose end you cannot see and thus cannot despair of. Man marches forward, doing what he can in his own day to reach the unrealized dream of a better future, which does exist.

I was trying to explain the difference to my class last semester, and found that I couldn’t show Asagai’s concept as a simple straight line, as he initially states it: he goes on to say that if his country is liberated there will of course be upheaval again, and he may even become a martyr because of new persecutions by different people, but that liberty and peace will still come in some unseeable future if people like him continue to work for that dream. And so I found that my picture on the board became a series of Beneatha’s circles moving across the board in a kind of helix toward the future.

Beneatha’s circle by itself holds a certain appeal as a description of truth – doesn’t it often seem that “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” that “nothing new under the sun” means mainly that life is made up of evil and despair? Asagai’s line seems so much more optimistic, more hopeful: it is going somewhere, not merely repeating itself, even if it contains repetition within it.

And yet . . . there is nothing – nothing – in Asagai’s philosophy which justifies optimism. He envisions a future of freedom and prosperity for his people, and he is pursuing the means (education, medical care, political action) that he believes will bring about such a future – yet with no actual foundation for that belief. Education, for example, may bring about better health conditions and greater political involvement, yes, but it may also bring seeds of greater discontentment and ideas which will be just as destructive as those which he sees as now holding his people down. What kind of education is the key to a better future . . . and nowhere does Asagai seem to see the need to consider this key question. It is mere “education” in itself, mere “political action” in itself, which will somehow bring about the bright future he envisions.

So I was encouraged in reading Tony’s post and the comments on it to consider time in both its repetitive cycles (for Beneatha is not entirely wrong) and its movement to somewhere – but not an abstract movement to a merely hoped-for earthly end (as Asagai would have it). Rather, this journey through the cycles of time is a journey to a very specific destination: an eternal life either in the presence of God or separated from His love, either in the presence of those who have gone before or separated forever from human love as well. (C. S. Lewis reminds us somewhere that we have never met a mere mortal.) That destination should determine what means we use to move closer to it -- not just any kind of education, for example, but education which gives us a true image of who and what we are so that we will choose our course wisely.

Several of the images various commenters brought up following Tony’s post bring out time's dual nature as both cycle and line: “a continually widening upward spiral toward God,” one called it, or another suggested that “from another angle, the spiral could be seen as ever-narrowing”; another gave the picture of Abba Dositheus: “a movement inward along the spokes of a wheel: we all begin on the rim, and as we move in towards Christ, who is the hub, we move closer to Him and to each other.” I like these; they help me to see the concept and understand all the better this journey we are on.

And that perspective of time, a journey with its cycles and its known end, reminds me of the only resolution that’s important each new year, each new day: to live well within time’s possibilities, loving God and my neighbor, for God’s glory and my neighbor’s welfare.

Not Quite Christmas

I’ve been trying all day to think of a happy Christmas message to write, but I don’t seem to have one this year. It’s been an odd break, not Christmas-like – I’m used to being with my parents this time of year, and I haven’t had the energy or inclination (hooray for end-of-semester exhaustion, plus toothaches, plus medication that adds headaches as a final insult) to be the least bit festive. Not that I’m especially able at creating that mood even at my best.

So it’s been a quiet day at home, nothing very special except for the phone calls to and from family members elsewhere. I’ve mainly spent the break, including today, sleeping and working on prep for next semester’s classes; we ordered books for the YM’s spring classes today and a few for me. And part of me has struggled with feeling sad and lonely and generally in a the-world’s-not-fair mood.

But one of my tasks has been re-reading Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell, prepping to teach it next semester. And so I am reminded that I am not here to feel good. I am here to love God and my neighbor, to take joy not in circumstances but in Him and in His people, to bear the burdens of others as others have so often borne mine, to recognize His love in all the wild and quiet, wonderful and quotidian ways that it is manifest in this world He created, marred though it has become. Under the Mercy, as Peter Stanhope would say.

So . . . my youngest turns 18 in two days – that’s something to celebrate. We drove around town and enjoyed Christmas lights tonight – what beauty God allows us to create.* My oldest son and his family sacrificed his leave time to make the long drive to visit my parents – how God manifests His love in His children. I have a husband who loves me and does so many lovely sweet things to show it – not every wife is so blessed. I sit here surrounded by books – and how less rich my life would be without those many voices that challenge and comfort and bless me. Tomorrow, then, I shall try to remember His blessings, and not allow the inevitable sorrows of a broken world to negate His beauty that still shines forth in it. Under the Mercy . . .

* (You can see the YM’s excellent photographs from the drive, along with many others, at Vesta Photography. He’s good – really good. And I don’t think I’m overly biased . . .)

Happy Endings

Last week on Criminal Minds, the team searched for a missing child, finding out in the course of the search that she had been abused by her uncle. The quotation at the end was from G.K. Chesterton: "Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed."

I was thinking about this yesterday morning while reflecting on why I write. Generally speaking, children's literature does have happy endings, because we know that children need to believe in hope. And I am always seeking a vision, an ideal, hope, when I write. And so I wrote:

"I am, then, seeking happy endings when I write. Not sappy, unrealistic, 'perfect' endings, but ones that are possible in a broken world which has been entered by redemptive power, ones that are possible because brokenness is not all there is. The flawed beauty we see all around us, the flawed goodness of people we meet on our way, tells us this -- so much of beauty and goodness within the brokenness, if we look for it, tells us this, tells us that the world is indeed still 'charged with the grandeur of God,' that 'there lives the dearest freshness deep down things' even in a world 'seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.'

"I write to find and articulate gems of joy, glimpses of the ideal, prisms of hope. I only know that my world is flawed because I know there is an ideal by which to judge it. And without this ideal, if we reject the vision of an ideal, there is only despair. We must offer hope by offering the ideal we glimpse, the vision shimmering always on the edge of sight."

I have never been ashamed of happy endings, of beauty, of hope. I am grieved that so many in the past century have found it more likely that life doesn't offer these, that so many have turned from the search and offered the lies of despair in the name of realism. Because, as I also wrote:

"I read for the same reason: I read to find the ideal. Not to avoid reality, but to see that reality is not the mere observable broken world that drowns me every morning when I wake, that drowns me when I wake from a literary world that has drawn me into its beauty, when I wake from a rare immersion in the reality of God's love. Reality is not brokenness and despair; reality is redemption with all its hope in the midst of the brokenness and despair."

Our happy endings here will always be tinged with some edge of sadness. And yet -- there is an ultimate happy ending where all tears, all sorrow will be washed away forever. How, otherwise, can one find courage to live?