On Brideshead Revisited

A couple of weekends ago, as a reward for grading research essays, I allowed myself to begin Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh). The one chapter per graded essay quickly turned into two, three, four, and I inhaled the novel over the course of two days. (Yes, I finished grading the essays, too; it did take two days instead of one.) I am now re-reading it, a little more slowly, and will laze my way through it with pen in hand this summer. It is worthy of many readings, and I only regret it has taken me this long to discover Waugh.

It is a framed narrative; the first-person narrator opens with a scene from his Army days in which he finds that his unit is being billeted at Brideshead, a family estate where he spent much time with his friend Sebastian as a young man and where he fell in love with Sebastian's sister Julia. This makes the novel one of my favorite types -- he goes back in time to his first visit to Brideshead and narrates the story chronologically from there, but comments on it from the later perspective as he does so.

The writing is of course superb. The story is poignant and breathtaking. It reminds me of Graham Greene and perhaps others I've read. They are Catholic writers exploring the place of Catholicism in the lives of their characters, and doing so without glibness or falsity. We are a fallen race, and this they show clearly. We fail, often spectacularly; we are frail, often beyond hope of improvement; but we cannot escape, if we are honest, our need for something beyond ourselves. And the fact that God is, that He is the Heavenly Hound seeking us, seeking us, that we cannot finally escape Him, that His grace is greater than our frailty . . . this informs the narratives in such a compelling manner that any thinking reader must be drawn to consider whether this be truth.

I have read some spectacularly good novels by Protestant evangelical writers. However, for the most part, novels from that perspective tend to present faith as the end of the matter. Like a Harlequin romance, but with the lover being Jesus, everyone lives happily ever after once they have "gotten saved." I suppose this is fine as far as it goes -- but for me that is not far enough. It leaves one with the idea that faith is about me and its object is to make me happy. Oh, and it automatically makes me good, of course.

But faith is about its object -- the triune God of the universe. And this God is not just a sentimental lover who wants us to be happy. He is a just and righteous God who wants us to be like Him. And this is what the Catholic characters in Greene's novels, and those in Brideshead Revisited, struggle with. They know they have a responsibility to God, they are well aware of what that responsibility entails, which is often a painful decision that does not necessarily make them happy -- and they cannot just throw it off and live as they wish.

And yet, when they accept that responsibility, whether it brings them some kind of temporal happiness or not, whether it looks like what others expect it to or meets the approval of others, there is a sense of "rightness" in their lives that confirms that acceptance. I am not saying this well, I'm afraid, but what I see again and again in these books is that the end of faith is not righteousness in itself (though of course we should strive to be righteous) but rather is desire for the God who is righteous.

I have heard many criticisms about placing too much emphasis on obedience, and I have seen crippling guilt and fear in people who do so. However, I am also sceptical about a total emphasis on grace, in the sense of "you don't have to worry about anything; God is gracious." Well, yes, He is, but He is also righteous and just, and the believer is not exempt from His discipline -- which means that He notices and cares when we are disobedient. So there must be a balance. Some guilt is a good thing: it makes us desire to do better. Understanding His grace is freeing; it allows us to fail without believing we are unloved.

What I love about Greene and now Waugh is that they do not gloss over this tension, nor present glib responses to the complexity of human nature in relation to the One who created us and loves us despite our fallen choices. They make me think, and they make me desire to be compassionate instead of judgmental and at the same time demanding instead of complacent. They make me want to be more like the God that glimmers through the pages of their texts.

The Cross Point

"At the cross point, everything is retrieved from the past and everything is anticipated from the future, and the cross is the point of entry to the heart of God from whom and for whom, quite simply, everything is."

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Virginia Tech Massacre

Virginia Tech is in our athletic conference. Please pray for the college community and the families of the murdered and injured.

God have mercy.

Gems of Joy

Sometimes life is hard. We get lonely or depressed or overwhelmed with grief or work, and we just don't want to keep going. It's hard to focus on anything but the self and its pain and questions and frustration. But then we find a way to just get on with it, to do our best with what we've got.

And sometimes, then, God drops a gem of joy into our lives, just a little reminder. It may be a CD from an old friend you haven't talked to in years but who knew you'd like the music and the message. It may be a decorated balloon tied to your office door, bouncing a cheery face up and down in greeting from a beloved student. It may be the news that your son is returning from wherever he's been on a six-month deployment. It may be finding that one of your two best friends, someone you haven't seen in 15 years, is coming your way in just a few weeks.

It may even be all those things in a 2-week window, the last three just yesterday and today.

I need to stop complaining and do more dancing in the delight of His love.

Good Friday Sonnets

At Mere Comments, Tony Esolen has been posting some sonnets on the stations of the cross written by William A. Donaghy sometime in the mid-20th century. Here is what Tony says about the poems, a few of which were sent to him by a friend: "Touchstone reader Fr. David Standen put me on to a few of them, then the archivists at Holy Cross forwarded to him the entire set, which can be viewed here [look for "Stations of the Cross" posted 30 March, 2007, if they are not at the top of the page]. They were published in what I think was the college literary magazine, Spirit, though I'll have to check on that detail."

Tony's meditations on the ones he's posted are well worth looking for at Mere Comments; he is as eloquent as the poet and challenges us to make the poet's insights ours. Here are two that especially struck me; I offer them as meditative reading for Good Friday coming up.


XI. He Is Nailed to the Cross

This sound had echoed back in Nazareth,
The thudding hammer on the singing nails,
When Mary hastened off in flying veils,
With eyes like violets, and quickened breath,
Her Babe within her, to Elizabeth.
Now Mary winces, clenches hands, and pales,
Her dauntless spirit cringes, twists and quails,
And at each jolt she dies a double death.

The soldiers need not force Him for He lies
Patient beneath them; as the nails tear through,
His shining prayer is piercing inky skies,
"Forgive them; for they know not what they do."
And even now the arms which they transfix
Would guard them as a mother bird her chicks.


XIV. He Is Buried

The mourners slowly bring Him through the gloom,
The valiant women, and three faithful men;
Her shoulders shaking, stormy Magdalen
Is weeping as in Simon's dining room;
But she who felt Him moving in her womb,
Who wrapped and laid Him in a manger then
Is still His handmaid, ready once again
To wrap Him up and lay Him in His tomb.

Once Delphi was the navel of the earth,
But now this sepulchre, which blackly yawns,
Becomes the point and center of all worth,
The focus of all sunsets and all dawns;
Within this cavern, could the world but see,
Mythology yields place to mystery.

A Lesson in Contrasts

With last night's storm clouds still darkening the early morning sky, Phoebe's dim haze-covered glow behind the trees startled me on the drive down the old ferry road. At the stoplight, waiting for traffic to clear, I glanced back over my shoulder to see a single ragged black cloud precisely covering her, the halo she created about it suddenly almost brilliant with the contrast. As the cloud slid away, her glow diminished again in the grey-white fog.

Lessons to be learned; lessons to be learned.

Aeolian Carpings

Some quotes from an underground newsletter of the English graduate students at a university which will remain nameless in order to protect the guilty:

Random Aphorism: You can lead a horse to water, give him lots of handouts on thirst and dehydration, present examples of quaffing in class, e-mail him reminders to imbibe, post notes and drinking assignments on Blackboard, call him in for one-on-one conferences on the shoreline, and send him to the Drinking Center for every assignment, but you can't make him drink.

Found: one medium-sized brain, gray, filled with facts about Victorian literature. Please claim in the faculty lounge refrigerator.

TA an Expert in Margin Manipulation Detection: "It's a gift,"he says.

Frustrated Instructor Resorts to Using Taser in Class: Says "Students are responding well to technology."

Emergency "Staple Requisition Route" Maps to be Posted in Every Classroom: TA says, "It's about time!"

Title of the annual interdisciplinary conference: "([Dis]Mi/ys)teyr (Post [Dis]Course(s) (?): (Un[Dis{P(Re)}])Establishing (!) ([Anti[De])flection(s) on [sic] His/Her(story/i)cal (Post[colon{:}]ial) (Hyper)Text(ual) Margin([al]s) :-)"


The long articles are even better, but I'd best be careful not to tempt the copyright fates, as someone I know is responsible for the publication . . . :) I just wish I could write this kind of thing myself; it makes me so jealous when I read it!

Bursting into Bloom

Another lovely spring surrounds us here. Last year the forsythia blinded us with its sun-like brilliance. This year it seems subdued beside the richness of the redbuds.

Saturday when I went to check the mail, the gentle white of the thickly flowered dogwood overwhelmed our front yard with beauty. A little later, my husband came into the study and wandered over to the window.

"When did that happen?" he asked in surprise.

"When did what happen?" I replied with my usual astuteness, swimming up to consciousness from Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth.

"When did the dogwood bloom? I've never seen it that full. It wasn't like that when I went out this morning."

A few moments later he remembered that he had watered it while caring for the lawn in the unusual dry spell we've been enduring. "It must have needed just that little bit of moisture for the buds to burst open."

Amazing things happen when one simply goes about doing one's job.

On Being Somewhere

Thoughts after a conversation, but preaching to myself . . .

One has to be somewhere. And that somewhere, as a general rule, has to include other people. People are, of course, imperfect by definition, so this means our "somewhere" will often be uncomfortable and unsatisfactory.

This is called "life."

God calls us to live this life as well as we can, in His strength and by His grace, extending forgiveness and love and compassion and acceptance to others, as we desire these for ourselves -- and, not incidentally, as we have received them from Him. This is how we learn to be like Him.

May we learn to make our "somewheres" better places for our having been there.

Neuhaus on Suffering

Some quotes from Chapter 5 of Death on a Friday Afternoon (on "I thirst"):

"The way of the Christian life is cruciform. Jesus did not suffer and die in order that we need not suffer and die, but in order that our suffering and death might be joined to His in redemptive victory."

"The Christian way is not one of avoidance but of participation in the suffering of Christ, which encompasses not only our own suffering, but the suffering of the whole world."

He quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "When Jesus calls a man, He calls him to come and die."

And Neuhaus again: "Avoiding the cross makes very good sense, if we do not know the One whom we join, the One who joins us, on the cross that is the world's redemption. The victory of Christ is not a way of avoidance but the way of solidarity in suffering. [. . .] We will die anyway. The question is whether we will die senselessly or as companions and coworkers of the crucified and risen Lord."

Quiet Companion

I regularly read a number of posts at a Christian college blogring. A few are genuinely, deeply thoughtful and I appreciate and learn from them. They mostly depress me, however, just because so many tend to be completely superficial -- "so I got up and had breakfast and skipped class and went to lunch . . ." -- you know the type. But of course others are more serious, young people writing about what they hope and dream and seek for. Some of these disturb me because they reveal the completely worldly values of folk who should be moving out of these into Christ's values. Others disturb me because the writers simply seem so lost and confused.

This morning I finally realized the main feature that bothers me about so many of these -- the absolute focus on self. Even when writing about a desire for the spiritual, it is a desire for spiritual emotion: I want to feel this, feel that, feel the other; I want God to show me this, give me that. It's all about me.

That, of course, is human nature in a nutshell, exacerbated by the self-absorbed culture that surrounds us. I've been there, still go there far too often. But if we want to know Him, then we need to seek Him -- Him, not some experience we want Him to give us. We need to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength -- and I no longer believe that has anything to do with how we feel at any given moment. Rather, it is a decision to walk in the Truth of His nature, of His salvation, of His Lordship, whether we feel anything in particular or not. (Of course, it is best to do this cheerfully and willingly, not begrudgingly. But, despite the many people I admire who say the opposite, I think it better to do the right thing out of obligation rather than excuse sin because I don't feel like being righteous. At the least, it builds good habits.)

Oh, I long to feel good, too! I can't say how many times I've begged for just a taste of that abundant life He promises. But I think I am beginning to understand that, as C. S. Lewis demonstrates in Surprised by Joy, we can't find some kind of emotional experience by seeking it out and focusing on it. Rather, the knowledge of joy comes as a complete and marvelous surprise when we are absorbed in simply living our lives in His Truth -- absorbed not in ourselves but in Him, the world He created, the others He places in our path.

I used to beg, to plead, for a taste of joy. I am now often startled to find joy a quiet companion along the way, most noticeable when I seek it the least.

In Christ

In Chapter 4 of Death on a Friday Afternoon, Neuhaus explores the Lord’s words “Why hast thou forsaken me?” There’s much here; I keep re-reading it. One of the truths he emphasizes is our identity, who we are. I am not a person in my own right; I have been bought with a price. And that doesn’t mean that I am merely under obligation to the One who bought me; it means that I am in Him, that my life is not mine, but His in me.

Neuhaus explains that the essence – he calls it telos, and I think it is what Hopkins calls inscape – of our being is not something that we choose for ourselves, but something already existent that we discover. In Christ, we already are what we are meant, created, to be. This essence is not “determined by what [we] want to do” but given to us by our identity in Christ. Of course, because we have not yet been perfected, because we live still in a fallen world and in fleshly bodies, “[w]hat [we] want and what [we] choose,” he says, “may be in conflict with who [we are], who [we] really [are].” But if we have been baptized with Christ into His death, then the objective self to be discovered is the self who is in Christ, who is Christ: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” Paul reminds us.

This is the one truth I would pray to remember at all times. My life is not mine to choose; I was bought with a price and I am in Him; He is my identity. This doesn’t mean I am not a unique individual; He has created only unique individuals. But it is only when I discover my identity in His that He can give me the unique self He intended me to be. All the rest is a striving for the spurious right to name, to create, my self – and thus fall farther and farther away from His glorious desire for me.

Polycarp, in his extreme old age, was told to deny Christ or die. He said that it was not possible to deny the One whom he had served for 80-some years. He would no longer be Polycarp if he were to deny Christ: because he is in Christ, because his identity is Christ’s identity, for Polycarp to deny Christ would be for Christ to deny Christ, an impossibility. “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

I will not likely be asked to deny Christ or die anytime soon. But there are so many little opportunities every day to deny Him: to be irritable or angry; to snip at (or about) people who annoy me; to watch a show or a movie I know is not healthy for me; to put off work I’ve promised to do . . . . Who will I be each day? The woman God created me to be, that woman who is in Christ, or a false woman I name and create for myself in opposition to Him?

I pray that I might learn to make every choice freely bathed in humility and gratefulness before the One who bought me with a price and placed me in Himself, to be the woman He created me to be.

"He Has Befriended Us"

Neuhaus writes about our restlessness and dissatisfaction with life:

"Now we need faith, for the truth is not transparent; now we need hope, for we know we are not what we were meant to be."

Then he writes, continuing with the theme I wrote about yesterday:

We are His friends, not because we have befriended Him, but because He has befriended us. [. . .] Look at Him who is ever looking at you. With whatever faith you have, however feeble and flickering and mixed with doubt, look at Him. Look at Him with whatever faith you have and know that your worry about your lack of faith is itself a sign of faith. Do not look at your faith. Look at Him. Keep looking, and faith will take care of itself.

When I look at Him, I have no time left to look at myself and my pathetic worries and failures. When I look at Him, He can make me what He created me to be. Lord, help me look at You and leave off the maunderings of my foolish self-centeredness.

Only His Merit

The second chapter of Death on a Friday Afternoon is on the words of Jesus to the thief: "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise." It has much food for thought, much to help me understand and appreciate certain Catholic ways of thinking I'd only known as caricatures before.

What all of us can agree on is worth quoting at some length; Neuhaus says it far better than I ever could. (I've added caps for pronouns referring to God because I find them helpful.)

When our faith is weak, when we are assailed by contradictions and doubts, we are tempted to look at our faith, to worry about our faith, to try to work up more faith. At such times, however, we must not look to our faith but look to Him. Look to Him, listen to Him, and faith will take care of itself. Keep looking. Keep listening. (my emphasis)

And later:

When I come before the judgment throne, I will plead the promise of God in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. I will not plead any work that I have done, although I will thank God that He has enabled me to do some good. I will plead no merits other than the merits of Christ, [. . .]. I will not plead that I had faith, for sometimes I was unsure of my faith, and in any event that would be to turn faith into a meritorious work of my own. I will not plead that I held the correct understanding of "justification by faith alone," although I will thank God that He led me to know ever more fully the great truth [which] much misunderstood formulation was intended to protect. Whatever little growth in holiness I have experienced [. . .], whatever understanding I have attained of God and His ways -- these and all other gifts received I will bring gratefully to the throne. But in seeking entry to that heavenly kingdom, I will, with [the thief on the cross], look to Christ and Him alone. (my emphasis again)

I have left out what applies particularly to a Catholic understanding of the saints, which all do not agree about. What I have quoted from the passage is certainly the common belief of all Christians, though I often do not live as though it is. I think that if I really grasped this, with more than the mind, I would live in so much more freedom than I often allow myself. Because if I'm looking to Him, I don't need to worry and fret over whether I'm "good enough" for Him -- how arrogant to think I ever could be! I am only "good enough" because He has placed me in Himself, the only Good who exists.

Cheap Grace: Worth What It Costs?

Death on a Friday Afternoon is Neuhaus's meditations on the final seven "words" of Christ on the cross. The first -- on the statement "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" -- begins by urging us, in Neuhaus's gently eloquent way, not to leap forward to Easter but to "stay awhile" at Good Friday, reflecting on the fallen Lord and our complicity in His death.

He writes, "after such a separation [ours willfully from God] there can be no easy reunion. [. . .] Spare me a gospel of easy love that makes of my life a thing without consequence."

I had not, I think, considered reconciliation in quite this way. I have intellectually understood that there needs to be payment for "that which has gone wrong" and that Christ could make that payment because He was the only one who had not gone wrong Himself.

And I have intellectually understood that my going wrong -- my sin -- was the problem that I could not fix myself, requiring that I make the ultimate payment, death, or that another, who was able, pay for me.

But I hadn't thought about how "cheap grace" makes my life of no value. Sin cannot be merely overlooked as if it had not occurred; a penalty commensurate to the sin must be paid; it must cost someone something to fix the problem.

"If bad things don't matter," Neuhaus writes, "then good things don't matter, and then nothing matters and the meaning of everything lies shattered like the cookie jar on the kitchen floor." And earlier, "Spare me the sentimental love that tells me what I do and what I am does not matter."

And so with all of life. When I shrug and ignore the violation of rules I have created for the good of my children or of my students, I am telling them, "What you do is not really that important." And when they accept my cheap grace, they have accepted a lie about themselves -- that they are not worthy -- and a truth about me -- that I do not care enough about them to show them their worth.

Food for thought. As God has cared for me, may I discipline myself to care enough for those He has placed under my stewardship to show them His love in His ways.

Simplicity

The only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.


(Richard John Neuhaus, in Death on a Friday Afternoon, tells us that Alfred North Whitehead said this. I'll have more on this remarkable book in days to come, but this thought struck me forcefully today.)

Empathy

My favorite television show (Criminal Minds) has succeeded in fascinating me again with last night’s episode, which explored the concept of empathy. The more I think about the show, the more amazed I am at the depths of what they did in this episode; it is not the norm, at least in today’s visual media, to explore any abstraction so significantly.

Last week, in a two-part episode, Reid was kidnapped and tortured before being rescued by the team. The genius of the group, he is a logic machine who relies almost entirely on his mind and struggles with emotion and relationship. During his ordeal, Hotch remarks to Gideon that he has failed in helping Reid learn to deal with the job emotionally, and he is concerned this may now be a problem. Reid’s kidnapper injects him with a psychotic drug several times, and at the end, Reid steals two vials of the drug before rejoining the team, leaving us to wonder if he will turn to drugs to stop the pain that has now been stirred up, both from his past and from the effects of the torture.

As the episode last night began, Morgan greets the new woman on the team, Emily Prentiss, and asks how her weekend was. She is reluctant to answer and Morgan casually gives her the freedom not to – at which she spills out the story of a bad date and they find a connection in their mutual enjoyment of Kurt Vonnegut’s literature. It is Morgan’s ability to allow her to speak or not, and his attentiveness and empathy when she does, that allow her to finally begin revealing herself so that she can become more than just professionally a part of the team.

The team is called in to help find a serial killer targeting black high school girls who like to sing. Their profile says that the killer is a black man, and the town mayor goes ballistic, fearful of rousing further racial hatred in a town that already thinks the killings are racially motivated. The black detective running the local investigation decides to make the profile public over the mayor’s objections, and he and Morgan (who is mixed race) go out on patrol together.

During this scene we see Morgan again practicing empathy – with the detective’s position of having to make a decision against his employer’s wishes, with the detective’s frustration that it should matter to anyone what race a profile gives, with the detective’s desire to do his job well but have dignity. Morgan shows his understanding of these frustrations and talks about accepting reality as it is and doing the job one is given the best way possible, without worrying oneself over the politics of others. It’s a clear and realistic picture of one person reaching out to another from his own experiences to help the other come to grips with his circumstances.

Reid, meanwhile, is having flashbacks when he looks at the pictures of the murdered girls lying in the leaves. (He was digging his own grave in a small cemetery in the woods when the team rescued him.) At one point, he locks himself into a men’s room and takes out the – as yet still unopened – vials of the drug, but Gideon yells for him and he returns to the investigation. He does his job, helps the team solve the case and save a girl’s life, but his fear and confusion are frequently evident.

On the plane ride home, Morgan asks Reid if he’s all right; he’s clearly concerned about him and becomes more so as Reid uncharacteristically lashes back at him. He doesn’t walk away as he started to with Prentiss earlier; he has an established relationship with Reid and knows him well enough to know that he needs to talk. Instead, he reminds Reid that anything he says will stay confidential, and presses him to speak his mind.

Reid finally tells him about the effect of the photos and says, “It’s that now I know – I mean, I really know – what they were going through, what they were thinking and feeling, right before . . .”

“It’s called empathy,” Morgan tells him gently.

“So what do I do about it?” Reid answers. “It makes me not focus; it makes me not do my job as well.”

Morgan says, “You use it. You use it to be a better profiler, and to be a better person.”

The episode ends with Reid staring at Morgan and saying, “A better person?”

I am not sure where this will go, of course, but from what I’ve seen of the characters, I think Reid is asking how he can possibly be a better person if he now has emotional responses to his work. And I hope we are in for a “course” in how to control and use emotion in conjunction with reason to be fully human. There’s great potential here – and I salute the writers of this show for their insight and talent in bringing such depth to it. And, by the way, Shemar Moore is a really good actor, as is Matthew Gray Gubler. Wow. Anyone would have to love having the talent on this show collected in one place.

Escape

Yesterday, as my husband drove me to work, three deer leaped across the drive between us and the chapel and away into the grassy bowl. The first, already in the darkness of the bowl, I barely glimpsed. The second bounded almost leisurely a fair way ahead of us. The third, several paces behind, extended herself low to the ground, seeming to know she had but little time to escape the chortling beast with monstrously bright eyes hurtling towards her.

Revealing, Concealing

I am to introduce myself to a stranger. One wishes to be honest; that stranger will be my teacher and mentor for the next two years. Yet one wishes to be cautious as well. What does he need to know? What is unimportant? How does one reveal enough without revealing too much, conceal appropriately without concealing that which helps him to instruct me?

I don't mind revealing my writing skills. Unlike a fair number of our students, who try to conceal their ignorance and thus cannot learn from us, I am quite ready to reveal my weaknesses in the craft. (Yes, I will cry in humiliation when they are confirmed, but that is the beauty of correspondence courses. One may react in private, get over it, and respond like a mature adult the next day. One hopes.)

But writing is not merely a skill, of course. What makes it weak or strong is often that which underlies the process. And that is where I find myself hesitant, unsure. How much of the self that creates my writing do I, can I, reveal without crossing a line I'll later regret?

The last piece of writing I did nearly killed me. I spent weeks writing, throwing out, writing again, over and over. And it finally came down to this: I either told my own story or I told a lie. Not a lie in the sense of factual untruth, but a dancing about the subject that could not possibly convey its depths and would not have moved a single heart.

I'm glad I bowed to truth. But it was the hardest thing I've yet done in my life, I think. And, surprisingly to me, it hasn't made it any easier to consider doing it again.

Revealing, concealing. We must do both while avoiding both narcissism and dishonesty. A challenge once again. I like this kind of challenge. It reminds me that I'm alive -- and that life matters.

Books, Books, Books

Hooray for amazon and Eighth Day Books and school funding and a wonderful husband who rolls his eyes and makes remarks on having to add structural support to the house to hold all the shelves but lets me buy books anyway! I now get to anticipate for the next several weeks the arrival of the following, probably in several different and exciting shipments:

1. George MacDonald, The Complete Fairy Tales, including his essay on fairy tales and both "The Wise Woman" and "The Light Princess."

2. George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind, which I've read somewhere but never owned and must, must have on my shelf!

3. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. I've been feeling obligated to find out about Waugh, and everyone says this is his best.

4. Eragon. We got Eldest at the used bookstore, and the YM loved it; read it in a matter of hours, I think. So now he gets to find out what happened first, and I get to read them both as a reward for letting him have the books for his own.

5. Dante: I'm finally getting Tony Esolen's translations of all three volumes -- Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. I know the translation will be eloquent and accurate, and I'm looking forward to the introductions, too, which will be eloquent and brilliant.

6. Mary Oliver's Blue Iris, because LuCindy mentioned it, and because Oliver is surely one of the best of contemporary poets.

7. Donald Hall's Claims for Poetry because I want to see what another great poet says about poetry.

8. Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, because it's Merton.

9. Wendell Berry's Standing by Words, because Berry either makes me very happy or very angry, both in good ways.

10. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Victor, on reading well, and, to help with it,

11. Ivan Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text, a commentary on Didascalicon.

12. Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology; we read Amusing Ourselves to Death last semester, and this one sounds good.

13. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. I haven't read anything else by Sven Birkerts, but this is a topic constantly before me as I try to teach attention to the word in a technological age.

14. The Myth of Certainty: The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment, by Daniel Taylor. Another unfamiliar author to me, but highly recommended by a colleague when we were discussing the dangers of dogmatism but the need for absolutes.

15. The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination, by Caroline J. Simon. Any reader of literature should think about the place of imagination in faith. This looked like a good help toward reflection.

16. Gregory Wolfe (editor of Image, a journal of Christian art), The New Religious Humanists. I read his collection of editorials from Image recently, and the one on religious humanism fascinated me. I'm really looking forward to seeing how he fleshes out the idea.

17. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross. Neuhaus is an eloquent writer who loves the Lord. I hope this one arrives well before Easter for Lenten reading.

18. Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I'm always encountering saints and references to church icons in the works I read, so this color-illustrated book looks like it will be a pleasant education and resource.

and, finally,

19. the texts and workbooks associated with the LongRidge Writers Group Advanced Writing Program: Shape, Write and Sell Your Novel. I did their correspondence course in short fiction some years ago, and my instructor recommended I try this one. (I was always trying to write novels instead of short stories, anyway!) This is a 2-year (or so) course which takes you through the elements of fiction-writing (characterization, plotting, setting, dialogue, etc.), the first three chapters of a novel (including revision), how to query agents and publishers, and the business end of novel writing, all with a published novelist as your teacher and mentor.

So, time to brush the dust off some old files, decide which one to follow (or a new idea, maybe!) and have some fun seeing if I can craft something decent. If I finally decide this isn't my niche, it will still teach me a great deal which will help in teaching literature and maybe leading writing workshops if we ever get to create our creative writing minor.