Energy Boost

The other day I started down the stairs from my third-floor office, on my way to lunch in the cafeteria, moving slowly from fatigue and aching muscles, feeling a little sorry for myself to be working in the office in July. As I reached the the second floor, little N, the son of good friends, happened to be racing in my direction, laughing and squealing, his goal the next flight down; mom grabbed him up a few feet from his destination. He struggled happily in her arms, still laughing, happy as I've ever seen a kid just being a kid.

I walked up to them, grinning at N, and said to him, "Why don't you just give me one-tenth of that energy? You'd still have plenty left; come on, just a tenth?"

He laughed out loud and responded to my obviously facetious request for something or other with his favorite nearly-two word: "Noooo!!!" His face crinkled with the joy of being able to say that word without rebuke, with the sheer joys of being alive and a little boy with the affectionate and laughing attention of all the adults surrounding him and rejoicing with him.

I'd never be a kid again (because kids grow up and who would want to go through that more than once), but I wish I could recapture that sheer joy of living now and then.

Some Good News

Our daughter was able to get into the Chicago clinic this morning and get a referral. Now she is waiting to hear about an appointment time. Grateful to you all for your concern and prayers!

Update on My Daughter

See comments in the post below for an update. Thanks for prayer -- and continued prayer!

Saturday 17 July: Update to the update: DD plans to try to get into the clinic in Chicago Sunday morning to get a referral to a neurologist through them. She has not been feeling quite up to par. We would appreciate prayers that she would get in to see the specialist in a timely fashion -- thank you all so much.

Tracing the Essay

I have just finished reading G. Douglas Atkins’ history and description of the “fourth genre” – Tracing the Essay – and I hardly know where to begin. Certainly I won’t do it justice in this brief review, but I can at least offer you some of the ideas that most excited me. I selected it for a class in creative nonfiction after a quick skim; I knew it would be excellent because of the author.

Doug was the graduate coordinator in the English Department much of the time I was pursuing my M.A. and Ph.D. I never had the privilege of taking classes with him – at the time he mostly taught courses in areas I was not pursuing, such as literary theory. But he was a good advisor and I enjoyed the occasional conversation with him. On one of my return visits to KU, I stopped by his office for a few minutes to catch up, and he mentioned that he was no longer “doing theory” (he had written what I believe was the first “layman’s guide” to deconstruction in English), but had turned his attention to the essay. I knew that attention would be detailed and accurate and worthy.

I did not, however, come across any of his books when I first began teaching creative nonfiction – the essay. I found helpful texts and anthologies, and I loved the form and the class. Then I received the yearly department update last spring, and there was mention of a new book he'd written. I hit the web and found four on the essay, all of which I immediately ordered, two of which I then put on my course list for fall. I am joyfully making my way through them this summer. (Titles: Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth; Reading Essays: An Invitation; On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; and Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and E. B. White.)

I can’t begin to summarize Tracing the Essay, a book which you must read if you love this form. You will learn to value the essay all the more highly as you delve into its origins and its tensions and its potential, all explored and explained with a deep love and respect for the form that does not preclude criticism of its excesses and shortfalls. I fear that my underlining and marginalia are not as helpful as they might be: there is more marked than unmarked. Here is a taste of what Atkins explores about the essay (in a list of its qualities near the book’s end): it is “exploratory, experiential, ‘lay’ [amateur] in texture, un- (and even anti-) dogmatic, modest in approach, conversational in tone (and address), personal and brilliantly artful, deeply reflective and intensely moral, and celebratory of the via media [. . .].”

Atkins makes much of the need for contemplation, reflection – time. Time to observe, time to read, time to reflect, time to write. We live in a culture which prides itself on its efficiency, and we take in that world through sound-bytes and google searches and think we know it – and ourselves. Yet we cannot know without reflection. Against this frenetic pace of “efficiency” the essay works, both in the writing and the reading, because it demands that we slow down, attend, explore, listen. “In providing reflection,” Atkins writes, “essays remind us of the urgency to slow down and savor life, certainly, but also to measure and weigh it, to try it and test it. Understood this way, reflection comprises an essential aspect of our ordinary living, part of the whole rather than addendum or supplement, and an aspect without which our lives are sorely diminished.”

Tension is a byword of the book, and much of it is an exploration of how the tensions Atkins describes are resolved (or not) in many different essays. Neither merely personal nor academic, neither fiction nor philosophy, the essay “hangs between” such “sturdy poles.” Because the essay begins with experience, one danger of it is self-absorption; because it teaches, another is the complete loss of self and experience in abstract theory. The self, Atkins explains, becomes the mediator of experience, not the subject of experience. He most highly values the familiar essay, because it moves farther “away from the perceiving self and toward the perceived world” than today’s more celebrated personal essay. “The familiar form of the essay,” he writes, “edges more than the personal toward the meaning the writer extracts from experience. Because the focus rests ‘on’ books or morality or friendship, self-consciousness is tempered and the temptation toward self-centeredness is challenged.” Elsewhere he says that the essayist “becomes the crucible in which experience is tried and tested and meaning extracted. The essay’s subject is not, then, the self, contrary to popular opinion, although the essay’s soil, or laboratory, is nothing but the self.”

Another byword of the book is incarnation. The essay, Atkins explains, is incarnational in form. It embodies – incarnates – experience in order to offer meaning, and he notes often the connection between incarnation as a universal principle and the Incarnation which is its ultimate example. In the final chapter, he addresses the tension inherent in exploring and celebrating the Ordinary at the risk of idolatry, of beginning to worship the creation, the Ordinary, instead of its Creator. The Christian understands that “the Extraordinary [. . .] appears in the person of Jesus Christ, God become man.” This does not, however, make the Ordinary and the Extraordinary equivalent, he warns us, “[any] more than meaning is identical to (mere) experience. There is an extra dimension to which experience, including experience of the Ordinary, gives us access. The trouble is, essays often do not [. . .] reach for that dimension [. . .]. Essays derive meaning, all right, but it is that meaning that remains on the level of the Ordinary and so does not attain that transcendent level, meaning that, in other words, does not transcend the Ordinary. Meaning is, in such an instance, etiolated and falls short of its potential – it is reduced.” Later, he adds, “Through this world we are – or should be – led upward to God.”

If you love the essay, read this book. If you wonder why the rest of us love it, read this book. If you write the essay, let yourself be challenged by this book in matters of form and subject and purpose.

For Julie: Rest in Peace

I stood in the shabby third-floor corner office, the ill-fitting door creaking slowly shut, surrounded with boxes of books and file folders and office supplies, pretending to decide which books needed to be behind the desk for easy access, which could be nearer the door – and where any particular thing might be in the chaos. In reality, I was trying to calm a rapidly rising panic: new to the college, I had been hired as interim chair of the department, and had just found that the only continuing member had just bailed for another job, leaving me with four extra classes to fill, no network for adjuncts, and the only other department member, also new, not moving to town for another month.

But into that chaos stepped several junior and senior students to help us out, including a young woman with long fair hair and a welcoming smile. At every turn, Julie appeared: helping to move files from one office to another, explaining department policies and registrar’s rules, giving us inside scoops on colleagues and administrators, becoming a friendly and familiar face. She set a tone not always easy for older students with a new professor; they often feel they’ve been robbed of someone they’ve come to know and love, and, no matter what the reason for the change, that the new professor is a usurper, an interloper. And these young folk had lost not one but all the professors they had known; they had to become used to an entirely new department – and one run ragged with overloads and unfamiliar classes picked up at the last minute to fill the abandoned slots.

Julie did much to make that year bearable for us. I never knew her well, but I learned to depend on her wisdom and knowledge and smile, so freely offered to a stranger whom she had chosen to trust. I am sure she was in several of my classes that year, but the one I remember is creative writing – because she was an extraordinary poet for one so young. Her work was not pedestrian, not mere exercises; it was poetry born of a wisdom and maturity rarely seen in college students. I wish I had kept copies.

We didn’t stay in touch; I knew she had gone to another local college for graduate work, but nothing more. Yet when I heard that she was gone, I felt a void in my world, in the world at large. She has left behind an emptiness that cannot be filled – but she has also left behind a witness that cannot be erased. Rest in peace, Julie; you will rest in the hearts of your friends for all their lives.

Writer's Meme

Stolen from LuCindy

1. What's the last thing you wrote? A course syllabus, sad to say.

2. Is it any good? It has to be; it’s a contract.

3. What's the first thing you ever wrote that you still have? I still have a couple of pieces from grade school, for what it’s worth (which isn’t much). I have been a bit startled to see how many of the same themes have arisen in my work in later years that were there in my K-12 years.

4. Favorite genre of writing? Creative nonfiction.

5. How often do you get writer's block? It would be easier to tell you how often I don’t.

6. How do you fix it? Depends. Sometimes I just pretend that I don’t want to write anyway, which has the advantage of not having to fix the block. However, when I begin to go so insane that no one can stand to be around me, I will usually try to write a post for Inscapes that has at least some merit; sometimes just quoting someone else helps get the gears grinding. Of course, the main problem is time . . . or, rather, the lack thereof. One needs time to reflect to write anything truly meaningful, and that time is exceedingly hard to come by. There is also the most annoying phenomenon of being exceedingly busy and sitting in a meeting somewhere and the ideas suddenly flowing like lava . . .

7. Do you save everything you write? Unfortunately, yes. I fear dying before I’ve gone through it and gotten rid of at least the worst. LuCindy, I hereby appoint you my literary executor, with strict orders to get rid of at least 99% of it, and perfect freedom to get rid of 100%!

8. How do you feel about revision? “Writing is rewriting.” Getting words on the page is a great feeling and a good start, but if those words are not revised and edited with great care as many times and for however long it takes, then they are nothing more than that – words on a page, useless for any worthy purpose. Any writer who wants to make a mark takes the time to serve his readers by revising and revising and revising again, until he gets it as nearly right as is humanly possible.

9. What's your favorite thing that you've written? Probably my tenure essay, on the value of literature to life.

10. What's everyone else's favorite thing that you've written? I haven't a clue; not enough people read my work to get a take on it!

11. What writing projects are you working on right now? Course syllabi and comments on student essays and exams – ooh, lovely! A review of John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction for The Christendom Review (on spec). A book(let) for possible use in our composition classes on the writing process. Ongoing notes for a takeoff from the tenure essay.

12. What's one genre you have never written, and probably never will? The romance novel or its sanitized Christian version called “inspirational fiction.” It seems to me fundamentally untrue in its premises and conclusions and thus a disservice to readers. I love mystery novels, but haven't the mind to plot one out myself, as I lack the imagination to create a sci-fi world of the sort I also love.

Prayer, Please?

I don't often use this space for prayer requests and merely personal information. However, this is a gravely important situation, and I know that those few of you who read here regularly would want to know and to pray. Our older daughter has just discovered that the cavernous angioma in her brain has enlarged. She is seeking a neurologist to discuss whether surgery is necessary, which is obviously a sobering and frightening prospect. A cavernous angioma is a tangle of blood vessels, in her case almost certainly congenital, that causes seizures when it bleeds. It was first diagnosed 6-7 years ago; the last time it caused seizures was last summer and this MRI was a follow-up. There is no treatment for the angioma that I am aware of except surgery; the fear is that it will begin to hemorrhage at some point, but of course there are also tremendous risks to the surgery and the angioma is deep in the brain. Please pray for wisdom on the part of all, and grace and peace for our daughter and her three young children.

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.

On Moral Fiction

I'm revisiting John Gardner's On Moral Fiction this summer, thanks to the quotation from it which Bill Luse posted at Apologia, and -- since I seem incapable this week of formulating any thoughts other than those required for the class I'm teaching -- I thought I'd post some quotations that have intrigued me this time through, ones that caught my attention the first few times I read the book and have done so again because of their remarkable applicability today, over three decades after its publication.

On art as instructive:

"Moral action is action which affirms truth. [. . .] It was once a quite common assumption that good books incline the reader to [. . .] morality. It seems no longer a common or even defensible assumption, at least in literate circles, no doubt partly because the moral effect of art can so easily be gotten wrong, as Plato got it wrong in the Republic. To Plato it seemed that if a poet showed a good man performing a bad act, the poet's effect was corruption of the audience's morals. Aristotle agreed with Plato's notion that some things are moral and others not; agreed, too, that art should be moral; and went on to correct Plato's error. It's the total effect of an action that's moral or immoral, Aristotle pointed out. In other words, it's the energeia -- the actualization of the potential which exists in character and situation -- that gives us the poet's fix on good and evil; that is, dramatically demonstrates the moral laws, and the possibility of tragic waste, in the universe. It's a resoundingly clear answer, but it seems to have lost currency."

Later, there's this:

"In a democratic society, where every individual opinion counts and where nothing, finally, is left to some king or group of party elitists, art's incomparable ability to instruct, to make alternatives intellectually and emotionally clear, to spotlight falsehood, insincerity, foolishness -- art's incomparable ability, that is, to make us understand -- ought to be a force bringing people together, breaking down barriers of prejudice and ignorance, and holding up ideals worth pursuing." He indicts American literature of his day (the book was published in 1977) for largely not doing this well, of instead posting "cynical attacks on traditional values such as honesty, love of country, marital fidelity, work, and moral courage. This is not to imply that such values are absolutes, too holy to attack. But it is dangerous to raise a generation that smiles at such values, or has never heard of them, or dismisses them with indignation, as if they were not relative goods but absolute evils. The Jeffersonian assumption that truth will emerge where people are free to attack the false becomes empty theory if falsehood is suffered and obliged like an unwelcome -- or, worse, an invited -- guest. Yet to attack a work of fiction on moral grounds seems now almost unthinkable."

Learn it you will . . .

I knew K. was watching a John Wayne war movie involving fighter pilots. Not particularly interested, I went to the study to read, dozed off for a bit, and woke to this, ringing out in that familiar gruff voice:

Believe me, gentlemen, I take no pleasure in re-teaching you what you should have already learned -- but learn it you will!

Laughed so hard it was a good thing I was already sitting down.

Another New Love

I love finding new poets whose works I think I shall love.

My Paul Mariani biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived today. I have read the acknowledgments, the first paragraph of the first chapter, and a poem of Mariani's dedicated to Hopkins . . . and I've fallen in love with Mariani, who will, I have no doubt, make me fall in love with Hopkins all over again.

Kendall sent me a picture of a kingfisher ("As kingfishers catch fire") from the November 2009 National Geographic. Here a couple of links to the article and its photos. This is, of course, the "fisher" to which Mariani's poem below refers.

Here's the dedication poem by Mariani that opens the book (those who are familiar with Hopkins will especially appreciate it):

Hopkins in Ireland
for the Jesuit community at Boston College

Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers.
The priest notes the book upon the table, the lamp beside the book.
A towering Babel of papers still to grade, and that faraway look
as once more the mind begins to wander. Ah, to creep beneath the covers

of the belled bed beckoning across the room. He stops, recovers,
takes another sip of bitter tea, then winces as he takes another look
at the questions he has posed his students and the twists they took
to cover up their benighted sense of Latin. The fisher hovers

like a lit match closer to him. The windows have all been shut against
the damp black Dublin night. After all these years, his collar chokes
him still, in spite of which he wears it like some outmoded mark
of honor, remembering how his dear Ignatius must have sensed
the same landlocked frustrations. Again he lifts his pen. His strokes
lash out against the dragon din of error. The fisher incandesces in the dark.

God Is Still God

This is a piece I wrote in March for the women's ministry on our campus:

I’m a daddy’s girl. Even now I remember with longing the evenings when Daddy would come home from work, fix a daquiri for Mother and himself, and finally settle into an easy chair so that I could fling myself into the loving security of his lap as we all talked over the day. I knew that I was safe, that I could trust him, that I would always be loved and cared for.

Today, as he enters hospice care and we face the ending in this world of his long love for us, I struggle to trust the Father he emulated so well. The evil of death thrusts me back into questioning the goodness, the trustworthiness, the love of God. The irony that death itself was brought into the world by our refusal to trust Him seems lost on me.

My aunt called this afternoon. She’s facing the death of the last member of her extended family, a lonely reality. But she called to talk about my mother: “She’s a walking tower of strength,” she said; “I hope you appreciate her.”

And so I think about Mother’s life and all that she has endured: her own mother’s death when she was only six; raised by her widowed grandmother and various aunts while her father lived in a TB sanatorium for several years; getting by in the Great Depression; wondering on her intended wedding day if her fiancé – a WWII pilot – were even alive; her father’s death on her birthday one cold Christmas morning . . . and so much more, and now her husband of 67 years declining every day.

And she is indeed a tower of strength. Rather than dwell on suffering, she has set herself to serve and love others; service is the air she breathes. I have always known her to be a strong Christian, but it was only recently that she told me about having to move in high school when her father came out of the sanatorium, her resentment at being uprooted – and then two gifts: the three friends whom only death could separate, and the church where she found the love of God.

And so she learned what she has taught me every day of my life: look for the gifts and give of yourself. God never abandons us; He waits to meet us when we turn away from self to Him and to our neighbor. Suffering is merely the inevitable consequence of living; joy is what He makes of it all if we let Him. And so, as I have so many times over the years, I remind myself that – whatever of sadness and sorrow and evil may enter my life – my Father holds me in an even stronger love than that first fatherly love I knew, which, as strong as it has been, is only a shadow of its Giver’s.

Telling Tales

This morning Daddy and I got to talking about all the things he'd done over the years, and I commented that the more things you did the more stories you had to tell, and reminded him of what I've always said -- "You're the best story-teller in the world, Daddy." He thought that one over and said something like, "And the older you get, the better the stories are, because you can say anything!" We both started laughing and he laughed out loud and for so long that the whole lobby was laughing with us. It was a good morning.

Being with My Daddy

It’s been both hard and very gratifying to be here with my parents. Daddy has known me since I’ve arrived; there’s been no hesitation at all about that. Sometimes he has been so asleep that we can’t wake him enough to talk at all. When he is awake, he has trouble speaking clearly (we assume he is continuing to have small undiagnosed strokes), and it can be extremely frustrating for all of us to try to communicate. However, some of our times together he has been remarkably lucid and articulate (considering, of course, his overall condition with dementia and stroke). This afternoon was one of those times.

“I love you” are words he always says with crystal clarity; today he said them many times. When I told him that I think of him all the time, he said “I think of you all the time, too”; then, “I think of you in more ways than you can imagine.” As we continued to talk about our love for each other, he said, “I know you love me, and I love you, and Jesus loves us all, too.” And we talked about family – the love within a family – and he said, “good families are good people and raise good kids.”

I told him that he and Mother had certainly always loved us (my brother, Mike, and me) well, then teased a bit, saying I couldn’t say the same about Mike; big brothers and baby sisters don’t always get along. He said, “You’ll always be that.” “Mike’s baby sister?” I asked; “You’ll always be,” he said; “you can’t catch up with him.” (His “baby sister” is 81 and that’s what he still calls her, too.)

When I leaned down and hugged him, he said, “I appreciate that.” A little later, I leaned down again to put my head against his chest, and he lifted his hand and put it on my head, patting my hair with his fingertips; he didn’t want me to sit up and held my hand tightly for a long time after I did. Today (and a couple of days ago as well), he stared at me for a long time, silently, Mother saying he seemed to be memorizing my face; then he told me, “You’re pretty” – words no girl is ever too old to hear from her daddy.

A conversation about pictures came about because K had our camera with him and Daddy noticed it. Daddy talked about taking pictures (he and Mother took a lot over the years) and said something in question form about “where and why”; when I said, “why did you take so many pictures? So we can remember it all,” he grinned that same old grin that’s always characterized his happy, a bit mischievous mood.

When we left, he told us, “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Happiness

"Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." -- Helen Keller

This reminds me of Joshua Wolf Shenk's writing about Lincoln, and how one stage of learning to live with melancholy is finding a purpose for which to live, a purpose that takes one out of oneself to care about something much bigger and more important, that allows one to be part of something worthy enough to give one's life to and for. One can be in the midst of deep depression and yet know true happiness if this is the case.

Personal note for those who have been praying: we plan to leave for Texas Saturday, so may or may not be in touch for a while. Thanks so much for caring.

Set Down in a Miracle

My beloved daddy has gone into hospice care, which may mean anything or nothing. His health is declining rapidly since a recent bout of pneumonia, however, and I am praying that he will still know me in early May. This is a meditation set off by a comment my brother made the other day when we were talking about the wonder of our parents' 67 years of marriage and profound love.

Set Down in a Miracle

The essential trait of Daddy’s life is his ever-consistent love, all of it founded in his love for his Lord. Love of country led him to sacrifice his hearing in the cockpits of transport planes in World War II and spend his intended wedding day in a Brazilian jungle where he’d had to make an emergency landing. Love of community drew him into the devastation of Waco, Texas, after a tornado strike to search for survivors and to remove bodies from the rubble. Love of his church placed him on boards and committees and sent him to a sister church in Mexico to teach horticultural techniques and help with construction work.

But the heart of his love has always been family. He met the love of his life in college, and his love for her has only grown stronger and deeper in the 68 years since. Mike and I both recall very vividly learning at quite young ages that the one thing Daddy would never tolerate was sassing our mother. The only spankings my own children ever received from him sprang from the same source: “I’ll put up with a lot,” was the message, “but don’t sass my wife.”

Theirs was a match made in heaven, and I don’t say that as a cliché. No doubt there were occasional tensions we knew nothing of, and growth in those first years that all couples must experience, but mostly we saw two people who desired above all else to serve each other, not to be served. Daddy was perhaps rare among men in his generation in his willing help with child care, including diapers and drool. Each has said of the other so many times, meaning it fully, “What would I do without him, without her?”

Mike and I grew up bathed in this love. For years, of course, we were mainly aware of its benefits to us, of how we ourselves were loved. Daddy teased us, taught us, disciplined us, encouraged us, made us laugh. He and Mike hunted and fished and canoed and fixed cars and built a house. For me, his introverted and bookish child, Daddy listened with seriousness, gave me a horse and riding lessons, a correspondence course in writing, a college education with a trip to Spain thrown in, and simply showed me every day that I had a protector and advocate. I felt safe, always, no matter where I was. My gravest fear was to disappoint him.

But when we grew up, Mike and I began to realize that the reason Daddy loved us as he did, showed his love so richly, was because he loved our mother first. She truly has been the heart of our home, because she is the heart of Daddy’s love. He loves her so much that his love for her could do nothing but flow over to the children given them as a result of their love.

Because he has always put Mother first, we learned to respect as well as love her, our love enriched by being not merely sentimental. Because he has loved Mother first, we have seen sacrificial, unconditional love every day. And Mother’s return of that same sacrificial love, putting Daddy first, serving and loving him and therefore serving and loving us, the children of their love, strengthened the lesson into a compelling picture of how we should then live.

Mike and I were talking about all this on his recent birthday. Sixty-seven years of love lived out so beautifully, without regrets or acrimony of any sort, giving and giving to each other and all around them – a miracle, surely. So I said, “We’ve had the privilege of seeing that” – but Mike corrected me. “No,” he said, “We were set down right in the heart of it” – set down in a miracle that has sustained us all our lives, even in those moments – or years – when we’ve rejected or disbelieved its lessons for ourselves, always drawing us back and reminding us: love is real.

Daddy will be leaving this earth in the next months, but his love will never leave. It will live on in his family, from his beloved wife to his twenty great-grandchildren, who will know his love through their parents, the children of his children, whom he has also loved. Love is never lost, and I am eternally grateful to have been set down in the miracle of its reality for all of my life.

"Caged Bird" redux

I read Luci Shaw’s poem “Caged Bird” in a talk I gave on suffering recently. Unable to spread his wings to the sky, forced to “sort millet” instead of seeking and delighting in “the sun-filled / film and fire / of insect wings, / [or] worm's wry / juice,” his “trinity of claws” gripping the cage’s steel perch instead of tree’s rough bark, the bird still sings. In fact, he discovers how to

poem

his stunted

narrowness

in one long,

strong,

ascending,

airborne, sun-

colored wing

of song.

He creates beauty from his suffering – perhaps because of his suffering.

Someone asked if the poem wasn’t rather existential in nature, the song surely meaningless because it doesn’t liberate the bird from his cage – therefore it must be an exercise in futility, no matter how beautiful. I responded as best I could on the spot: the point isn’t to escape from suffering; we can’t escape suffering in this life. The point is what we do with the suffering: do we give in to it in bitterness or do we create beauty – allow God to create beauty in us – from it? Do we draw closer to Him and thus love others better; do we offer beauty to the world that invites them to look to our God in their own suffering?

A suitable response in the moment, and true. But as I reflected on the question later, I realized a more profound answer: the creation of beauty in suffering does indeed liberate us – it liberates us from the prison of self-pity and self-absorption. It cannot, however, liberate us from the cage of circumstances – of the suffering itself. Of course, particular occasions of suffering end; but they don’t end because we create beauty from them. After all, many occasions of suffering never end in this world; they only end when we come into Christ’s presence in the next. And suffering ends as often for those who hate God as for those who love Him. Yet extraordinary beauty is created by many who suffer continually until the freedom of their death. They create beauty not because they have been freed from suffering, but because they have been freed from self.

I keep thinking of my mother-in-law. The painting I chose to hang in my office tells her story: gloriously flaming canna lilies burst from swirled purple-black soil, as the painting itself was born from the twin sufferings of cancer and heartache. She suffered to the moment of her liberation in death. Yet she created profound beauty, in her art and in the art of her life, because of that suffering – not in spite of, but because of. Oh, it’s true she had always loved well, but in those last years her love became focused, poignant, every detail sharpened in a joy that attended to the littlest things – a loaf of just-baked bread, a glass of freshly squeezed juice – as cause for delight and care, that drew us to her as moths to the flame to be warmed and then invited, in our turn, to offer warmth to those around us.

Sonny, in James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues,” says of a street singer in Harlem, “It struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through – to sing like that. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much.” Yet he finds eventually that this is the calling of the artist – and, ultimately, of all of as we create, by the grace of God, the art of our lives. Suffering can’t be avoided, and it is indeed repulsive – it is a result of the Fall – but it won’t drown us if we step into it in faith and make something of it, something of beauty that touches the lives of all who experience it and reminds them that joy and triumph are realities, too, even within the suffering itself.

The cage of circumstance cannot be torn away; we cannot liberate ourselves from suffering. But we can – by God’s grace – be liberated from the prison of the self when we decide to create a psalm of praise.

Intellect and the Love of God

Dr. Anthony (Tony) Esolen visited the college for three days this week, speaking in chapel and classes, giving a poetry reading, and talking to many of us one on one. We have seen in him and his work the beauty of the intellect informed by devotion to Christ, and some of us will never be the same.

Tony’s first chapel talk challenged us to consider the loss of a true “popular culture” – one which emerges from the people themselves based on a common identity and values. Because entertainment today is done for and to us, we no longer know how to create such a culture, nor do most of us even believe that we should – like so many other things, entertainment – culture – should be left to the experts. Tony got at this concept through a discussion of the morality plays popular across Europe and Great Britain for three centuries – plays produced by the people of their own towns for the Christian festivals such as Corpus Christi. He narrated the “Second Shepherd’s Play” to show the depth of the people’s knowledge of human nature, its depravity and its possibility for redemption. He kept us laughing and in the midst of the laughter reminded us of the need for grace and compassion, forgiveness and love. It was challenging, compelling, true excellence in which love for the Lord and the people He has created shone.

The second chapel talk was brilliant. Tony drew us through The Tempest, Shakespeare’s lovely tale of betrayal, correction, redemption, and reconciliation, showing us how obedience and love are intertwined. I can’t summarize it at this point; so many images swirl in my mind: Caliban, who – though half-witch and hateful – can feel wonder and so has hope for redemption; Ferdinand and Miranda, whose love shows the spirit of self-abnegation and purity; Prospero in his God-like role of judge and profferer of the means of grace and forgiveness: repentance and obedience. All bound up in the capacity for wonder, for seeing that which is beyond and above ourselves – for without wonder there can be no acknowledgement of God, of love.

In the Renaissance Lit class, Tony discussed with the students the courtly love tradition through the story of Virgil’s proper response of instant obedience to the heavenly lady Beatrice, to carry out her wish that he guide a lost soul in the first stages of his journey back to truth – as contrasted to the improper story of the adulterous couple Paulo and Francesca, who fall in love at first sight and pursue their own desires. The second day, he took us through contrasts in the image of the journey: Dante sets off on a journey to find God; within the rings of hell are many who, because they refused to journey anywhere but for and to the self, are condemned to be always moving while going nowhere. Throughout the discussion both days, the contrast between love of God and love of self – the need to abandon ourselves completely to God in childlike trust, to practice the divine madness of love.

Tuesday night, Tony read poetry to us: Milton, Browning, Hopkins, Herbert. He blindfolded himself to play the part of the blind poet, and in some cases blind Satan, and quoted passage after passage from Paradise Lost. He recited Browning’s monologue “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” and Hopkins’ sonnets, and Herbert’s passionate poems about his journey with the Lord of life. After an hour and a half, which amazingly seemed like fifteen minutes to a group of college students in mid-term week, we knew that we had heard the gospel from someone who lived it, through the poets he loves. And we walked away desiring a better love for God and man alike.

I have known one other true genius in my life. He is a good man who practices the Christian virtues without knowing the One by whom they exist; he has that capacity rare among the truly intellectually brilliant of being able to articulate ideas at any level. This week I saw what that man would be if he turned to his Creator and embraced the One who makes his life, his love, his goodness possible. I saw the deepest devotion to Christ, flowing from a man who has given heart, mind, soul, and strength to love Him, and I was challenged as perhaps never before to make that kind of life mine.

And that is the most important thing that happened at our college this week. We saw that brilliant intellect can exist integrated with unabashed, flooding love for God. Praise Him for His work in Tony’s life so that ours might be challenged and changed to more and deeper love.