Monday, Monday . . .

Unusual traffic -- four vehicles on the steep curves of the ferry road (three more than usual) -- kept my eyes busy as I left for work this morning.  Still, I couldn't help but catch the cirrus clouds painted pink across a postcard blue sky, burning into white on the eastern horizon where the sun announced its rising, wisps of fog swirling across the pasture valley, even the rust-brown seed pods on the golden rain tree lovely in the early morning light; and on my door when I arrived a heart-encouraging letter from a beloved former student.  I'll take this Monday with its love and light.



Photo credit:  http://www.pbase.com/hjsteed/image/49077673

Beauty, Beauty, Beauty . . .

Driving to work this morning, I watched ghost ponies graze in the soft white fog nestled in the hollows of a neighbor's pasture.  My swollen eyes even haloed beauty into the traffic lights and street lamps.  Last Sunday I threw open the curtains from the bedroom window and brilliant gold rained upward as the finches startled from the echinacea and flew into the surrounding trees.  That afternoon, my mother, her voice hushed with the glory of it, told of standing in her driveway in the early morning awed by a crescent moon sailing in the star-studded sky.  The crimson crepe myrtle blooms at my study window, determined despite the assault of pruning shears to pour joy into the world.  

Beauty, beauty, beauty . . . gems of joy everywhere to the seeing eye.

Poems by Christina Rossetti

I love Christina Rossetti's work, and I have revisited it a bit lately.  Here are some of my favorites; some of the line formatting I have trouble reproducing (she typically indents middle lines of sonnet quatrains, for example).

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for awhile

And afterwards remember, do not grieve;

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

If Only

If I might only love my God and die!

But now He bids me love Him and live on,

Now when the bloom of all my life is gone,

The pleasant half of life has quite gone by.

My tree of hope is lopped that spread so high;

And I forget how Summer glowed and shone,

While Autumn grips me with its fingers wan,

And frets me with its fitful windy sigh.

When Autumn passes then must Winter numb,

And Winter may not pass a weary while,

But when it passes Spring shall flower again:

And in that Spring who weepeth now shall smile,

Yea, they shall wax who now are on the wane,

Yea, they shall sing for love when Christ shall come.

Weary in Well-Doing

I would have gone; God bade me stay:

I would have worked; God bade me rest.

He broke my will from day to day,

He read my yearnings unexpressed

And said them nay.

Now I would stay; God bids me go:

Now I would rest; God bids me work.

He breaks my heart tossed to and fro,

My soul is wrung with doubts that lurk

And vex it so.

I go, Lord, where Thou sendest me;

Day after day I plod and moil:

But, Christ my God, when will it be

That I may let alone my toil

And rest with Thee?

Does Thou Not Care?

I love and love not: Lord, it breaks my heart

To love and not to love.

Thou veiled within Thy glory, gone apart

Into Thy shrine, which is above,

Dost Thou not love me, Lord, or care

For this mine ill? –

I will love thee here or there,

I will accept thy broken heart, lie still.

Lord, it was well with me in time gone by

That cometh not again,

When I was fresh and cheerful, who but I?

I fresh, I cheerful: worn with pain

Now, out of sight and out of heart;

O, Lord, how long? –

I watch thee as thou art,

I will accept thy fainting heart, be strong.

“Lie still,” “be strong,” today; but, Lord, tomorrow,

What of tomorrow, Lord?

Shall there be rest from toil, be truce from sorrow,

Be living green upon the sward

Now but a barren grave to me,

Be joy for sorrow? –

Did I not die for thee?

Do I not live for thee?  leave Me tomorrow.

Who Shall Deliver Me?

God strengthen me to bear myself;

That heaviest weight of all to bear,

Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself;

I lock my door and bar them out,

The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,

And bar them out; but who shall wall

Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,

And start self-purged upon the race

That all must run!  Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,

And start with lightened heart upon

The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,

This coward with pathetic voice

Who craves for ease and rest and joys.

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;

My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,

My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,

Can roll the strangling load from me,

Break off the yoke and set me free.

Some of my favorites are too long to reproduce here, but Monna Innominata is a sonnet of sonnets compelling in its beauty and truth; An Old-World Thicket I merely have "wow" written beside in my collection, and Books in the Running Brooks is a beautiful piece that addresses the (limited) value of nature.

Roger Kimball and Culture

I am reading Roger Kimball’s 2012 book of essays, The Fortunes of Permanence.  I’ve barely begun – just the preface (“Mostly About Relativism”) and the first essay, which is the title essay, so far – and I am as strongly impressed as I thought I would be.  (I have always enjoyed and appreciated Kimball’s work.)  I would like to write a thoughtful essay about his essay, but shall have to be content with lots of quotations for now.  So, from “The Fortunes of Permanence,” several quotations that probably won’t add up to his main point, but that particularly caught my attention as worth repeating.

Kimball writes about the sense in which culture is that which must be cultivated, but warns, in a paraphrase of Cicero:  “[E]ven the best care [. . .] does not inevitably bring good results [. . .].  The results of cultivation depend not only on the quality of the care but the inherent nature of the thing being cultivated.”

“Culture in the evaluative sense does not merely admit, it requires judgment as a kind of coefficient or auxiliary: comparison, discrimination, evaluation are its lifeblood.”  Here he quotes

Henry James:  “We never really get near a book [. . .] save on the question of its being good or bad, of its really treating, that is, or not treating, its subject.”  And Matthew Arnold:  criticism is “the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”

“The point is that culture has roots," Kimball writes.  "It limns the future through its implications with the past.  Moving the reader or spectator over the centuries, in [Hannah] Arendt’s phrase, the monuments of culture transcend the local imperatives of the present.  They escape the obsolescence that fashion demands, the predictability that planning requires.  They speak of love and hatred, honor and shame, beauty and courage and cowardice – permanent realities of the human situation insofar as it remains human.”

Writing about Huxley’s Brave New World, Kimball quotes a section in which the Controller tells the Savage that reading old works, such as those of Shakespeare, is prohibited merely because they are old.  And if they are beautiful, it is even more important that they not be read:  “Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things.  We want them to like the new ones.”

Why?  “Huxley’s brave new world is above all a superficial world." Kimball explains.  "People are encouraged to like what is new, to live in the moment, because that makes them less complicated and more pliable.”  Sensation is important, not substance (Dillard addresses this in The Writing Life:  “the life of sensation demands more and more”), and “experience is increasingly vivid but decreasingly real.  The question of meaning is deliberately short-circuited.”  As the Controller explains, “They [experiences] mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.”

“In part,” Kimball writes, “the attack on permanence is an attack on the idea that anything possesses inherent value.”

On the increasingly profane and crude displays in much of what passes for art these days, Kimball notes, “Hardly anyone is shocked anymore, but that is a testament not to public enlightenment but to widespread moral anesthesia.”  (He also quotes Chesterton as one of his chapter epigraphs:  “Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. . . . It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.”)

On technology:  “Welcome to the information age.  Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.”  Information is not knowledge.  We might be able to find information at the click of a mouse, but this comes with “a great temptation”:  “to confuse an excellent means of communication with communication that is excellent.  We confuse, that is to say, process with product.  As the critic David Guaspari memorably put it, ‘comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter’s rule.’  Oops.”

“The problem with computers is not the worlds they give us instant access to but the world they encourage us to neglect.”  The issue is not so much the developments of the “digital revolution” as “the effect of such developments on our moral and imaginative life, and even our cognitive and political life.”  (Note, please, he does not say technology is evil!)

On close and careful reading:  why memorize when quotations are instantly available?  “One reason, of course, is that a passage memorized is a passage internalized:  it becomes part of the mental sustenance of the soul.” 

He quotes Henry Kissinger at length:  “Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships.  You have to come to grips with who you are.  A leader needs these qualities.  But now we learn from fragments of facts.  A book is a large intellectual construction.  You have to struggle mentally to internalize it.  Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up on the computer. There is no context, no motive.  Information is not knowledge.  People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface.  This new thinking erases context.”

Artists, your work is important, now, today, despite the chaos that threatens.  Kimball quotes from C. S. Lewis on the idea that we must wait for “normal” life to engage in cultural pursuits:  “Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right.  But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons.  They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. [. . .]  They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopoylae.  This is not panache; this is our nature.”

“Lewis’s meditation,” Kimball writes, “reminds us that culture, and the humanity that defines it, is constantly under threat.  No achievement may be taken for granted; yesterday’s gain may be tomorrow’s loss; permanent values require permanent vigilance and permanent renewal.”

Final Update

I've been home since Saturday night and feeling a bit better each day.  There's no place like your own for recuperating.

I spoke with the doctor this morning and the pathology report shows there is no invasion of the cancer beyond the tumor, which means no further treatment will be necessary.  There will be frequent checks, of course, because one bout may often lead to another, but as of now it is safe to say that I am cancer-free.

It's all been an odd ride in many ways, but the one important thing I take from it all is the loving care of our God and His people who have carried me through it with complete confidence in that care, no matter what the outcome may have been.  

Thank you again to all who have prayed and emailed and helped in so many ways.  God bless you all.

Update 3

Tuesday's surgery was about 3 hours.  The doctor is pretty sure he got everything and the cancer hasn't spread -- but this is nothing that can be known definitively until the pathologist's report comes back, we hope by Monday.

It looks like classes are out of the question for this next week, though I'll try to teach Friday if I possibly can.  My wonderful colleagues are going out of their way to help me out so the students don't get too far behind.  

I am feeling pretty wretched right now, as one might imagine -- but it's so much better to feel wretched at home than in a hospital!  An hour's sleep here is like a night's sleep there, and the freedom to do as I please whenI please is amazingly helpful. 

Thanks to all who have prayed!

Update 2

The surgery has been rescheduled for Tuesday at 1:00.  This was upsetting at first, because I would like to have the entire break for recovery, but God's timing has been perfect with everything thus far, so I will trust that this, too, is perfect timing.

Request
Again, please don't post replies to this here or at FB.  Also, I will probably prefer not to have visits and phone calls in the hospital (I don't even know yet how long I'll be in), except from immediate family.  If you feel called to pray for us, thank you so much.  I love and appreciate my family in the Lord and could not make it through a day without you all.

Update

I was told mid-week that the biopsy confirmed colon cancer, and we set surgery for this coming Monday.  Then one of the scans that had been done revealed a spot on one lung which was considered to be “suspicious.”  This led to a scramble for another scan to find out if it might be another cancer, which would have meant a totally different, and very aggressive, treatment strategy.  There was an opening to do the scan this morning, they rushed the results, and they showed that the only cancer is the small tumor in the lining of the colon.  This means that I will be having surgery on Monday as planned, for the removal of the colon tumor, and it is even possible that no further treatment will be necessary, though this will probably not be determined until after the surgery.

Thank you, more than I can say, to all of you who have prayed for me and those who have sent me good wishes and encouraging words.  It has been a roller coaster two weeks, but I am grateful for all the support I’ve had and for the remarkable timing of each event.  There’s still much ahead, of course, but I’m confident in God’s grace and the love and prayers of His family.

Request

Again, please don’t post replies to this here or at FB, as I don’t wish to be drawn into public discussion, and please don’t accost me in the hallways asking for updates (private communications are of course welcome).  I’ll post any relevant information here at Inscapes when it becomes available.  If you feel called to pray for us, thank you so much.  I love and appreciate my extended family and could not make it through a day without you all. 

Solely To Stop Speculation

I feel the need to explain why I’ve been out of classes a couple of days recently, since there have been some questions and concerns, and I don’t want rumors going about.  I am not posting this because I want lots of public sympathetic responses; in fact, I am requesting that no one reply to this, here or at Facebook.  I know some will feel called to pray, and I appreciate it more than I could say; the love of God’s family is amazing and encouraging.  However, I do not wish to have public conversations either on social media or in the hallways about my health.  (Emails and private conversations are different.)  When there is further information, I’ll post an update for those who care to know.  Please don’t misunderstand; I’m just not able to “chat” about this informally and constantly – thank you.

The Problem

I went to see my doctor for a minor problem, and he decided to do some blood tests.  He found that I had been losing blood to the point of needing a transfusion, which was done a week and a half ago.  Of course the next important thing is to find out the source of the bleeding, and I am now waiting for test results to find out if the cause is colon cancer.  If so, I will need surgery, hopefully during Spring Break, and the hope is that no further treatment will be needed after that. 

How I’m Doing

I’m fine; I’m really not worried over this at all.  We’ll do what needs to be done and take each step as it comes.  I am concerned about avoiding over-aggressive treatment, which can create problems where none were.  And I am concerned for my mom, who understands that this may be nothing too severe, but who has lost four family members, including her husband and son (my only sibling) in the past two and a half years.  I’m her only immediate family left, and I’m half the country away, so of course she’s struggling a bit to maintain her usual optimism.

Request

Again, please don’t post replies to this here or at FB, as I don’t wish to be drawn into public discussion, and please don’t accost me in the hallways asking for updates (private communications are of course welcome).  I’ll post any relevant information here when it becomes available.  If you feel called to pray for us, thank you so much.  I love and appreciate my extended family and could not make it through a day without you all.

"Dearest freshness deep down things . . ."

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

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

Beauty, beauty, beauty.

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

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.


It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;


It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil


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


Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;


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


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


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



And for all this, nature is never spent;


There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;


And though the last lights off the black West went


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


Because the Holy Ghost over the bent


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

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

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

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.

On Style

One of the books I'm perusing this break is Richard Weaver's Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, a book which is third in a trilogy about culture along with Ideas Have Consequences and Language is Sermonic.  Visions is his last work, published after his death in 1963.  It is, as the subtitle suggests, a definition of culture, an exploration of what has gone wrong in 20th century America, and how we can pursue the resurrection of a true culture.  The following passage, however, is a sort of side trip (to the point but not straight on it) having to do with style -- an issue writers and readers discuss and debate continually.  (I have added boldface.)

"True style displays itself in elaboration, rhythm, and distance, which demand activity of the imagination and play of the spirit.  Elaboration means going beyond what is useful to produce what is engaging to contemplation.  Rhythm is a marking of beginnings and endings.  In place of a meaningless continuum, rhythm provides intelligibility and the sense that the material has been handled in a subjective interest.  It is human to dislike mere lapse.  When one sees things in rhythmical configuration, he feels they have been brought into the realm of the spirit.  Rhythm is thus a way of breaking up nihilistic monotony and of proclaiming that there is a world of value.  Distance is what preserves us from the vulgarity of immediacy.  Extension and proportion in space, as in architecture, and extension in time, as in manners and deportment, help to give gratifying form to these creations.  All style has an element of ritual, which signifies steps which cannot be passed over.

"Today, these factors of style, which is of the essence of culture, are regarded as if they were mere persiflage.  Elaboration is suspected of spending too much time on nonutilitarian needs, and the limited ends of engineering efficiency take precedence.  Rhythm suffers because one cannot wait for the period to come around.  In regard to distance, there is felt that there should be nothing between man and what he wants; distance is a kind of prohibition; and the new man sees no sanction in arrangements that stand in the way of immediate gratification.  He has not been taught the subtlety to perceive that what one gains by immediate seizure one pays for by more serious losses.  Impatience with space and time seems to be driving the modern to an increasing surrender of all ideas of order.  Everywhere there is reversion to the plain and the casual, and style itself takes on an obsolescent look, as it belonged to some era destined never again to appear."

The Christendom Review: New Issue

The Christendom Review has released its newest issue, which is (if I do say so myself) worth some time to peruse.

Lydia McGrew does her usual excellent work on pro-life issues in an essay on human exceptionalism.

Thomas DeFreitas and Lee Evans offer delightful poetry.

Millie Sweeney reflects on her first year of marriage and the beauty of children.

And, yes, I have an essay on the value of close reading.

Please visit, and don't forget to look them up and "like" them on Facebook!

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.

RIP: H. Michael Blitch 1948-2012

For my brother (18 March 1948 – 10 November 2012)

When our parents brought me home from the hospital, Mike – then four-and-a-half – wanted to take me for a ride in his wagon.  On being told I was too little, he retorted, “Well, what’s she any good for, anyway, if I can’t even play with her?”  Later, when colic kept me screaming for hours on end, he suggested that they send me back wherever I’d come from . . . 

Four-and-a-half years between Mars and Venus ensured we’d never be extremely close, but our parents’ sacrificial and unconditional love ensured that we grew into a tolerant and eventually a genuine affection, because we always knew that we belonged to a family, a bond that could be distressed and cracked, but never really broken.

Family put us together for camping trips, Christmas Eve candlelight services, regular visits to and from grandparents, birthdays, and Sunday night popcorn during Walt Disney.  We decorated cookies together for Santa’s Cookie Tree, an evergreen beside our driveway which we made into a community tradition.  We went to musicals every summer at the Swope Park outdoor live theatre; we learned to ice skate together on the flooded garden in the back yard and to shoot with bows behind the old barn that served as our garage.  We chased fireflies on summer evenings to put in jars for nightlights and kept a pet turtle in the front yard under the sassafras tree.  I loved curling up on his bedroom carpet to read the stories in his Boys’ Life magazines while he read or studied.

The 60s took their toll, and, perhaps inevitably, came the years of distress when the family structure seemed broken beyond repair.  But the foundation laid in those childhood years held, and, a welder by trade, Mike chose to begin repairing the cracks, restoring love and laughter.  How grateful I was to know that he was there to help – gladly and not from mere duty – when our daddy’s health began to decline and I was half the country away.  How glad to know of Daddy’s delight when his son entered the room, to know that Mother had only to call and he was on his way.  How refreshing to see his smile again when I was able to visit, to put up again with “baby sister” and “kiddo.”  How lovely to have his children and their families in our lives now.

And how good to know that, in the end, love is indeed stronger than death.  Missing him now, we are grateful to have had the years of his life framed in the unity of family.

Glory

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

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

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

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

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

"The Teaching of Fiction"

Notes on Flannery O’Connor – “The Teaching of Fiction” in Mystery and Manners:  Occasional Prose.

As I don’t have time for serious reading of and thinking about new ideas at the start of a semester with 55 writing students in four classes (how do high school teachers survive?!), I took O’Connor’s book with me while one group was working on an in-class exercise, and re-read this marvelous chapter in which O’Connor explores some of the issues teachers of literature face.  She was not a teacher herself, but she was of course a student of literature and one of the best writers of literature of the Southern Renaissance. 

“I find,” O’Connor writes, “that everyone approaches the novel according to his particular interest – the doctor looks for a disease, the minister looks for a sermon, the poor look for money, and the rich look for justification; and if they find what they want, or at least what they can recognize, then they judge the piece of fiction to be superior.

“In the standing dispute between the novelist and the public, the teacher of English is a sort of middle-man, and I have occasionally come to think about what really happens when a piece of fiction is set before students.  I suppose this is a terrifying experience for the teacher.”

No kidding!  And for so many reasons.  Some don’t know how to read literature themselves, never having been taught; some know the lack of ability of students and don’t wish to face it; sometimes we fear what inexperienced readers will make of our favorite and beloved works.  It is a tremendous responsibility to try to draw others into the world of mystery.

She writes about some of the ways teachers avoid teaching fiction – substituting literary history for the study of actual literary works, or the study of the author’s psychology, or sociology . . .  And she tells us why these are useless approaches:  “[A] work of art exists without its author from the moment the words are on paper, and the more complete the work, the less important it is who wrote it or why.  If you’re studying literature, the intentions of the writer have to be found in the work itself, and not in his life.” 

The teacher’s “first obligation,” O’Connor writes, “is to the truth of the subject he is teaching,” and he must remember that “for the reading of literature ever to become a habit and a pleasure, it must first be a discipline.  The student has to have tools to understand a story or a novel, and these are tools proper to the structure of the work, tools proper to the craft.  They are tools that operate inside the work and not outside it; they are concerned with how this story is made and with what makes it work as story.” 

There’s much more in this short chapter (the book’s title comes from it), but these were good affirmations for today – it’s right to insist on discipline from our students, because only through it will they come to know the pleasure of learning, whether literature or writing or anything else.  And so, marching forward through the homework and the essays – for the hope of opening minds and hearts to love.

Into Great Silence

I have wanted to watch this film since I first heard about it a year or two ago.  Recently I bought the DVD and have awaited an appropriate time for its viewing.  That time came when I was alone in the house this morning, a time when the neighborhood is quiet.

Into Great Silence is a film of the daily life of the Carthusian monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery.  The filmmaker, Philip Gröning of Zeitgeist Films, requested permission to do the filming and was told to wait; fifteen years later they contacted him to tell him now was the time.  Their conditions were ones he had already laid on himself:  only he would do the filming, there would be no extra lighting, the rules and routine would continue uninterrupted.  He lived in the monastery for six months, and the result is 162 minutes of some of the most powerful film I’ve ever seen.

Warnings:  You cannot watch this film in bits and pieces if you wish to understand and benefit from it.  You cannot watch it while conversing with a companion or surfing the web or reading or chatting on Google or talking/texting on the phone.  It’s not a popcorn-and-coke sort of film.  You should not watch it if you are inclined to be cynical and judgmental about others’ chosen ways of life, or if you are inclined to mock austerity and ritual.  (It would help, if you are unaware, to learn a little about the purposes of monastic life before watching it.)  And if you cannot bear silence – it might behoove you to try, and to work up to watching it in its entirety, so that you can come to understand the beauty and the value of silence and contemplation. 

The Grande Chartreuse is considered the most austere of all monasteries today.  The monks live by a rule of silence, broken only by prayers, chants, bells, readings at meals, certain rituals such as the welcoming of novices to the order, and on their weekly day for walking outdoors in informal companionship, where they talk however they wish with one another.  The days are strictly regimented, following the traditional hours of worship, with work and study delineated between the times of private and public prayer.  When two or more are together during the day, fixing a meal or giving and receiving haircuts or chopping wood, they do not speak, but give and accept service with a silent and companionable grace. 

I was afraid that even I, who desire and value silence, solitude, and contemplation, would not be able to watch it through quietly – but before the end of the first half-hour my mind had come almost to complete rest within the beauty before me.  The smallest sounds became a symphony of life – chopping celery, a spoon lifting soup from a bowl, rain dropping into a pool, footsteps echoing in a cloistered walk, a chair scraping across the floor, a page turning, a pen scratching across paper.  Important sounds, the sounds of life being lived, sounds we never hear for our incessant music and television and talk, talk, talk.  And when they do converse freely, as on their weekly walks, the conversation is seasoned with salt – serious doctrinal debates salted with grace and jokes and enjoyment of fellowship, a sledding competition which leads to admiration of skill and fun-filled laughter for its lack – and surely all of it all the more a joy because not constantly indulged, and all the more gracious because who wants to waste precious limited time together on foolish talk or unworthy conflict. 

And time and space to see, as well.  Instead of barely noticing our environment, silence opens us to the time and inclination to see the shape of a leaf, a drop of water falling from an icicle, the pattern of sun on wood flooring, the peace in a brother’s eyes.  Inscape, Hopkins would tell us, Christ poured out into His creation and especially “lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not His / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

Just the faces of the monks moved me to tears more than once.  Gröning occasionally focuses on just one face for an intense few seconds; peace is what we see in each one, and while most are solemn at this scrutiny, most also begin to offer a hint of a smile that suggests a great joy sparkling beneath the quiet exterior.  The elderly blind brother who gave the only interview recorded in the film spoke with such deep love of the Savior, such trust and confidence, such acceptance of all that comes as intended to bless our lives; what joy silence and contemplation and thoughtful relationship with God and others has brought to him. 

On the case for the DVD is written “This transcendent, closely observed film seeks to embody a monastery, rather than simply depict one – it has no score, no voiceover [. . .].  What remains is stunningly elemental:  time, space and light. [. . .]  More meditation than documentary, it’s a rare, transformative experience [. . .].”  I can only say “amen,” with the hope and prayer that some of that experience will stay with me as I keep trying to learn how to love my Lord more truly.