"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

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Saturday.  Sunday.  Monday.  Tuesday.  Rain, rain, rain, rain.  Day and night.  Light rain, heavy rain, misting rain, dripping rain.  Rain.  

Rain is necessary for growth, yes.  But so is sun.  So weary of the rain.  Thanksgiving, but willed against the wet grey of the world.

Wednesday dawned.  Or at least one had to assume it dawned.  Still grey, dreary.  But -- hope: no actual rain.  A slightly lighter tint to the clouds.  A chill wind and the ground still sopping.

Finally, sunlight competing with the rain clouds, visible at last behind them, and spirits lifting a bit.  Maybe it wouldn't really rain forever.

Wednesday night, midnight.  Almost in bed, but seeing light through the curtain.  Pulling it back and there she was -- Phoebe lighting up the cloudless sky and bringing the landscape to life.  Reflected light promising the sunlight to come.

Thanksgiving from the heart instead of the will.

And finally Thursday waking to a clear sky, a visible sunrise, the clarity of hope made real.

Beauty, beauty, beauty . . .

The last few days:  clouds and dark fog, clouds and mist, clouds and rain -- mirrors to my sad-weary heart.  But this morning:  a crescent moon shining joy into the early-morning, still-night sky, lifting the weight from my soul and making another day seem possible.  Thankfulness for beauty and eyes to see.

Dr. Richard Cornelius, RIP

When Dr. Richard Cornelius announced his retirement, I was the one privileged to find myself with a position in the English Department at Bryan College.  I did not take his place:  no one possibly could have.  He had been the Department chair for 30 years; he was a treasure, an icon.  

My seniors that first semester did not want me as their teacher.  A fierce love of and loyalty to Dr. Cornelius kept them from allowing themselves, for awhile, to warm to a stranger; they had wanted him to teach their final classes in the major.  Over the last 15 years, I've heard from so many graduates before my time who loved him, as a teacher, a mentor, a friend.

I know him as a gracious and witty Southern gentleman who gave me all his course handouts and syllabi, and who, with good will, wished us success even when we changed some age-old academic traditions of the department.  I too have watched things that I established and directed change under new leadership, and it can be hard to let go.  If it was for Dr. Cornelius, he never let on to us.

I will let others tell the stories of his teaching and his attention to detail and his unique ways of challenging his students.  I've heard so many of them, but I never experienced them.  I can only say that he was a brilliant, humble, and kind man who made me feel that I had found a home and was welcome in it, even as he was moving toward its edges.  While I did not have a great deal of interaction with him, I always felt his friendship and lovingkindness; I always knew I had only to ask and he would offer advice and wisdom.

His legacy permeates our department even now.  His name comes up regularly within the department and from our alumni.  We may do some things differently on the surface (no more MEG test!), but we do all things with the heart and vision of Richard Cornelius:  love for our students, love for our Lord, and the instilling of a desire for excellence at every level.  

I am grateful for his influence, much greater than it seems on the surface.  I am sad for his loss and glad that I will see him again someday and know him better than I had the opportunity to in this world.  May the Lord comfort his family and friends with many lovely memories and with eternal hope, and may we never forget to live his vision.

Blessed Christmas

Brokenness sometimes overwhelms me at Christmas, the fog rolling in tonight a stealthy reminder despite its soft beauty.  When I was a freshman in college, we opened our gifts on Christmas Eve to accommodate my brother’s stepson and his other grandparents.  On Christmas morning, my mother’s birthday, her father died at 3:00 a.m.  We’ve opened gifts on Christmas Eve ever since.

Two years ago was the first Christmas without my daddy.  One year ago was the first Christmas without his sister.  This is the first Christmas without my brother, the last of the immediate family.  And here I am in Tennessee, while my mother celebrates Christmas without family. 

Yet we celebrate, because the Babe came to bring hope, to bring light, to offer the star that ever shines above our Mordor, no matter how impenetrable the clouds of sin and sorrow may seem.  On this foggy Christmas Eve, I have our own unique Christmas tree to remind me.

The jade is an offshoot of the one my daddy grew at the University of Kansas; his was quite a large tree when it finally died long after his retirement.  But he had given me a shoot from it when I got married – “it’s the only thing I know you won’t kill,” he teased me, knowing I never remember to water plants.  We lost the original, I fear, to the abuse of some move or other, but this is its descendent.  We never got a “real” Christmas tree, because we always traveled to my parents’ home, where a tree and wreaths and lights and cookies waited, when the kids were growing up – but I love the little blue lights in the glossy green of the jade leaves, and the simple crèche at its foot. 

As this jade with its tiny lights comes from my father’s better-cared-for and massive plant, I am reminded that hope comes from my heavenly Father’s gift – and however much I and the rest of the world may try to darken and twist and destroy that gift, we cannot.  His light will always be shining, always be waiting, anticipating our upturned eyes to see.  And even the tiniest light will penetrate the darkness if we only look.

A blessed Christmas to all, especially to those who suffer loneliness, loss, sorrow this season.  May His light brighten even the darkest moments with His hope.

Gratitude

photo courtesy of Public Domain Pictures     

This morning moonlight radiated through hazy clouds as Phoebe hung at the tip of new-growth twigs on a winter-bare tree.  The clouds dissipated, her light growing stronger as I drove the old ferry road to work, until she shone unswathed by the time I walked from car to building.

Earlier, making my stumbling way through the dark house to the garage, I had been thinking about the beauty of the plants the college sent to my brother’s memorial service.  Mother called last night, and after we chatted about nothing and everything, she suddenly said, “You should see the plants your friends sent!”  After she had liberated them from the lovely basket the florist had used to send them, they now fill the entire house with beauty and hope.

The white kalanchoe, its waxy blossoms like stars among its greenery, sits on the bureau in the living room, across from her usual chair, where she sees them each time she looks up from her book.  The ivies and ferns liven the hallway and bedroom windows.  And the plant with the glossy deep-green leaves, whose name we sadly do not know but whose beauty captured us from the moment we saw it, holds pride of place on the dining room table. 

Mother has lost three close family members in three years:  her husband of 67 years (my beloved daddy) two years ago September; his sister (the last of their generation) last year September; her only son (my only sibling) this November.  Between the deaths of her husband and her sister-in-law came the death of her great-granddaughter, my middle son’s 17-year-old severely handicapped child.  Many would droop into discouragement or worse, but she learned through a difficult childhood in the Great Depression to simply do the next thing, serve and love where she is, leaving what cannot be understood or accepted in merely human terms to her Lord, whom she loves and knows she is loved by.  Time will not take away sorrow, but it will heal the bruised spirit; and serving others aids its process and grows the soul closer to Christ's.  

Oh, there are no doubt tears in the night, and all the human regrets and frustrations alongside the sorrow of loss.  But these are not what define her.  Rather, the plants that now bring their physical beauty into her home – sent by deeply caring brothers and sisters she has never met but who have prayed for her and her family again and again over these last years – these remind her of the beauty of the hope which does define her, the Lord and His family who sustain her day by day, moment by moment.  Her gratitude is never-ending.

And this morning, as the moonlight mirrored the radiance of the kalanchoe flowers, reiterating the hope they represent, my own heart opened in a psalm of praise.

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.

Light Beyond the Clouds

The morning after the full moon, which I had missed in the evening, I was driving along without thought of anything but the classes coming up, when I rounded the curve on the ferry road -- and there she was, Phoebe in all her harvest-moon glory, brilliant gold-orange, shining hugely behind the tree line. For a moment I literally couldn't breathe.

That was it. I couldn't see her any longer behind the trees, she was nowhere to be found when I reached the highway or the school. I wondered if I'd really seen her or she had sprung only to my imagination.
Later, K told me he'd seen her that morning, too, and she had disappeared almost instantly behind the horizon. I felt a little better about the state of my mind.

Yesterday, I glanced for her as I drove, hoping for a glimpse of her in her still near-full phase -- but the sky was cloudy and there was no sign. Nothing -- until I got out of the car in the parking lot and looked again, able now to concentrate on the sky, and there was her tell-tale glow beneath a raft of clouds. They passed and she came into full view, soft white lighting the clouds. I watched her as I walked to the building and then stood on the patio for several minutes, marveling at the way she seemed to sail through the sky and the clouds to be still. At last, black clouds obscured her again and I forced myself through the doors to work.

Light above and beyond the clouds, always.

Choosing His Light

I’ve been dragging myself about all the summer thus far, weary and wearier, longing for sleep (except even good sleep doesn’t help), just wanting to feel half-way normal and genuinely rested. I spend a lot of time tired even at my best; I have never had much energy, even when I was young. But this has been extraordinarily severe.

So I took stock the other day and decided I should be grateful that I’m on my feet at all. (My partial stock-taking list is below if you’re really interested. I’m selfish enough to post it, but you needn’t be so masochistic as to pay it any heed.)

I know that everyone is busy, and to many I’m sure my list would look small enough and I seem quite sluggish to find it too much. But combine it all with chronic pain and difficulty sleeping (and exhausted, burning eyes), and for me and the level of energy I am endowed with . . . . well, it is too much and I begin to feel hopelessly overwhelmed.

I’ve just finished Paul Mariani’s biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poor man was responsible for grading thousands of exams every year in classical languages for university entrance, on top of his teaching. He was always exhausted; of course, he may have been ill with Crohn’s disease, unknown in his day – that, combined with typhoid, probably caused his death at 44. But what struck me in the biography (so much of which makes remarkable use of Hopkins’ own words) was this sense of never-ending exhaustion. A holiday – a genuine holiday of no work at his schoolmaster’s tasks – would revive him remarkably, but within a week or two of return to exams and classes he would be worn down again.

And this weariness and overwhelming work kept him from the writing he loved; he seems to have had far more unfinished projects and ideas for projects in his 44 years than the hundreds that languish in my own drawers and the corners of my mind with over a decade more to concoct them. Of course, he was a genius, and his genius seemed to be slowly wasted away in grading schoolboys’ Latin translations.

He complained of this at times to dear friends. But they and all others who knew him spoke of him invariably as a man who loved life, who laughed, who gave generously and kindly of his time and his mind, who lifted the spirits of those around him. His poetry, of course, explains why: even in the very darkest of the Terrible Sonnets, he cannot waver in his knowledge of God’s love for him; he cannot waver from his obedience no matter how onerous and purposeless it might seem. And he keeps coming back, in his yearly meditations and in his sermons and in his poetry, to this: it is not I who name myself and choose my work, it is God.

Some say of Hopkins – certainly his friend Bridges did, and I’ve read contemporary critics who agree – that he was indeed wasted by the Jesuits, his genius destroyed in make-work, his life itself cut short by their not understanding who and what he was. How much more he could have given us, they say, had he lived in honored ease and into old age. Perhaps. But the poems that mean the most to us were wrought of great weariness of body and soul, out of despair that arose directly from his circumstances. Would some larger body of work created in an easier life carry as much value for us today, would he speak to us as he does if he had never known despair and weariness and yet clung to his Lord in faith and hope?

Well, he is my hero, all the more so now that I know yet more of his life. I pray to struggle on with the burning eyes and the weariness and the chronic pain and, yes, the all-too-often despair, to struggle on, as Mother Teresa prayed, with “a hearty Yes to God and a big smile for all.” If life seems hard to me, how much harder for such as these and for so many, many others – and surely I can find the strength in His strength for the simple yes and the heartfelt smile in the midst of my own such lesser trials. I fall so short: I am part of a broken humanity in a broken world and I demand to name myself. Yet His name for me, the story He has written for me, is enough, if I find the faith to live that truth and not merely know it. "Come be My light," Mother Teresa heard Jesus call to her; I long to desire that call, to desire to be His reflected light in the darkness of this world, no matter what of light or dark may be mine.

_____________________

(for those who might care: what taking stock reminded me of)

* I haven’t had a break from work since last August: Fall Break and Christmas break I spent developing the online course of the second semester of freshman composition; Spring Break I spent developing the online course of Intro to Lit.

* I taught the online comp course in the spring, as an overload above my four regular courses – the first time I’d ever taught online. The learning curve and the time investment in discussions and feedback was far more time- and energy-intensive than just a normal overload, even though the class number was small. And I was involved in intense committee work and department changes which took both time and emotional energy. (Same committee work in the fall; I don’t remember much else from that semester except that it was harried, very harried.)

* Spring semester I became very ill from an infected tooth; lost two weeks of teaching that had to be made up for and didn’t feel physically recovered for a month or more.

* My daddy went into hospice care in March. I reworked all my classes to complete them before finals week so we could leave as early as possible to visit with him.

* We drove to Texas and back, gone for only a little over a week – exhausting physically and emotionally. I worked every day during that time on finishing up the development of the Intro to Lit, and got home the day before the course actually began. I’ve been working on it hours a day every day since, with two more weeks to go.

* I’m also reading new texts for preparation of one completely new course, one nearly completely new course, and one old course with almost completely new books, all of which spin in the mind constantly. I’ve created the tentative schedule for one of these (the two sections of our new freshman comp I’ll be teaching in my 5-course load). I’ve exchanged innumerable emails over departmental business because of the changes made last spring.

* I ought to be hemming our curtains and doing some legal research and editing a colleague’s dissertation. Because I’m not, these weigh on the mind and create the weariness of guilt. And I’m obligated to revise the online comp course for the fall semester and I wonder if I will get so much as one full week of not working before the new round – 5 classes! – begins again in August. After all, July is almost here.

Writing is Survival

Deciding to eat breakfast in the cafeteria today, I caught up Ray Bradury's Zen in the Art of Writing to take with me, as I am teaching Fahrenheit 451 again next semester. The preface reminded me of the need for writers to write: "[W]riting is survival," Bradbury writes. "Any art, any good work, of course, is that."

Restlessness sets in when a writer fails to write for any length of time. And so, a few minutes this morning to exercise the writer's means of knowing the world.

Life is, of course, too busy. Urgency upon urgency demands moment after moment until one's days are filled with a frantic attempt to get it all done while perhaps failing to ever approach the truly important. In light of this reality, Thanksgiving break was a true break for me this year. Tuesday after collecting the last essays due, I went shopping for a turkey and all the "fixins," as my grandmother always said. Wednesday I thought to do some grading but ended up taking off altogether, reading, napping, surfing my favorite websites to catch up on the reflections of writers I've come to know and appreciate. The Young Man had declared his intention to cook for the holiday meal, so I took the turkey from the fridge before I went to bed so it would finish thawing overnight and went to sleep without a thought to the next day's work.

I woke Thanksgiving morning to the enticing odors of cornbread, sauteeing onion and celery, pumpkin pie -- and the lovely feeling that there was no rush ahead of me. It was only the three of us; we could eat any time. I ensconced myself in the living room LazyBoy with my laptop and notes for the online course I'm designing, dispensed a bit of requested advice about the cranberry-apple dessert, and got a couple of hours of relaxed work done. Once the dessert was out of the oven, I did my bit -- put the turkey in and washed and sliced the sweet potatoes to boil and mash just before time to eat. The next four hours I worked a bit, watched UP and cried like a baby -- and simply relaxed. Dinner was a delight (except for the occasional infelicity resulting from my failure to be a sufficient civilizing influence on my barbarians' dinner conversation), the men cleaned up the kitchen, and I got some more work done during the evening after a nap.

Friday was another lovely day, waking when I was ready, working on the online course, napping, a trip downtown to the antique store where K. bought me a set of rings (finally I can wear a wedding band that fits again!) and a necklace, Thanksgiving leftovers. Saturday was more of a strain, simply because commenting on freshman essays took longer than I had anticipated. But Sunday morning I was able to finish them, and, surprisingly, completed the advanced comp essays before dinner time with the evening to work on the online course again.

Five days, almost all my planned work completed, and completely relaxed except for a panicked hour Saturday evening when I knew I wouldn't finish the freshman essays and despaired of having time for any rest on Sunday. But the rest was provided, the panic unnecessary.

The details aren't what's important, of course. It was the taste of a few days of the way I think life should be. Accomplishing work but without the constant sense of harried desperation that permeates our culture. Resting without a frantic need to do something and the sense of real leisure for reflection. Surely this is something, however remotely, like what we were designed for?

Last night, K. took me out for a hamburger after work. As we walked to the car from the restaurant, I looked into cold and threatening clouds, darkening into late evening, to be greeted with the nearly full moon faithfully lighting the sky. Hope to hold on to.

On Being Right vs. Loving

Our pastor this morning preached on I Corinthians 13. As he talked about the pre-eminence of love in the Christian life, I was reminded of a conversation I was privy to many years ago.

Two of the tutors in the writing center I directed at the time were both Christians of the same denomination. One -- I'll call him Larry -- planned to become a pastor, and was looking forward to seminary the following year. He dressed neatly, wore his dark hair in a respectable mature cut, always arrived on time and remembered to do the paperwork. He was a good tutor.

The other -- I'll call him Steve -- was also a good tutor. He tended at times to forget things, like what time he was supposed to arrive for his consultations or to fill out the paperwork at the end of a session. His blond hair was shaggy, his clothes poor-student-eclectic. I don't think he yet knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. But the students he worked with always asked for him on repeat visits.

Larry and Steve often argued theology when there were no clients, until I'd set them about other tasks. One Friday evening, waiting for the day to officially end and knowing full well no one would walk in at that hour for help, I let them go at it for their last half hour. I don't recall the subject of the argument -- some important, though I think not essential, point of theology.

Larry was indisputably right. From both Scripture and his church tradition, his argument was accurate and well-reasoned. Steve's rebuttals were so wrong-headed they made me cringe a little. But I walked home that evening knowing that if I were in trouble, I'd far prefer to have Steve, along with his error-filled theology, by my side, than Larry with his indisputable truth.

The reason is simple: Steve loved people. His resistance came from a misunderstanding of the Scripture that made him think Larry's interpretation was harsh and cold and uncaring. And Larry couldn't convince him otherwise -- because Larry couldn't understand Steve's care for people and therefore couldn't address it, couldn't explain his argument so that Steve could see that it didn't mean what he thought. Larry cared only, in the end, about being right -- and so could not frame an argument that showed the mercy and love of the doctrine about which they argued, because he himself had no understanding of mercy and love.

I've often wondered what became of Larry. I hope that he learned love, and that the lesson wasn't too crushing. I hope that he didn't finish seminary and take a parish to be a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal, a man who has all knowledge but no love. I worry less about Steve, despite his lack of purpose. I hope he came to understand how the Lord's infinite love is demonstrated in that and other doctrines he struggled with; I hope he found out what he wanted to be and became it. But I'm as sure as one can be that at least he's given hope to others along his way.

Spring Hope

I went out just as night descended this evening to find Phoebe in a lovely amber dress floating among clouds dark against the newly night sky. Just now I went out again to enjoy the spring air and found her changed to her brightest pure white, holding the floating clouds at bay with her brilliant beams. I can barely breathe, my eyes are on fire, but I cannot resist spring, the new life, the abundance, the color bursting into view . . . the hope of beauty everlasting.

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.

Autumn Life

The baby gingko lifts its glossy leaves to the sun they mirror; the elder dogwood’s stately rust-covered branches greet their young neighbor in a bowing dance. In back of the house, the burning bush’s fiery finery bursts on the eye, and the maple next door announces the joy of burnished copper. It’s been a lovely autumn, with summer flowers still parading lavender and coral among the colors of the dying year. The breeze rises, cold now as it presages winter, but the dance of leaves and flowers it conjures is a dance of life, life that is, life that lies beneath the earth awaiting spring, the cycle that reassures us of our Father’s loving presence.

"Thanks, Robert Frost"

Thanks to my dear friend Pamela, who yesterday handed me a copy of a poem by David Ray which gives a lovely and needed perspective on hope.

Thanks, Robert Frost

Do you have hope for the future?

someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.

Yes, and even for the past, he replied,

that it will turn out to have been all right

for what it was, something we can accept,

mistakes made by the selves we had to be,

not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,

or what looking back half the time it seems

we could so easily have been, or ought . . .

The future, yes, and even for the past,

that it will become something we can bear.

And I too, and my children, so I hope,

will recall as not too heavy the tug

of those albatrosses I sadly placed 

upon their tender necks.  Hope for the past,

yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage, 

and it brings strange peace that itself passes

into past, easier to bear because

you said it, rather casually, as snow

went on falling in Vermont years ago.

Hoping for Hope

Somewhere the other day I saw a rainbow of light reflected wanly from some unknown source onto a bleak off-white wall. I stared at it a long time, unthinking.

When I got home, I told K. I want to find some clear faceted balls like the ones in Mom's kitchen window. I want to see prisms of light brilliant against the walls of our home. I want to see her in the light she so loved.

I miss her. And I fear the deeper aches to come. On days like this, hope is merely a word; the future is too far away to comprehend. Yet one can always hope for hope.