Fresh Air

I have discovered something about myself—that one of my biggest faults is self-deprecation.  It’s a nasty thing, surely.  Yet, this bit from Zephaniah keeps coming back to me: “Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak. The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”

I tend to demean myself—to make myself so small and little that it feels like I could creep into insignificance and oblivion, and remain there, and perhaps be happy, because no one would come into contact with me, and no one would be injured by me.  (T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and bad dreams about emotionally injuring many people have not helped matters much.)  But to live in seclusion is to live in fear—to live in fear of myself, and of the world.

And what have I always desired?  Bravery, I suppose, though I didn’t know it.  I always desired to be strong enough to be brave.  And I kept thinking today, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

I embarrass myself perpetually.  I am so cognizant of all my mistakes.  And I just now read in a Wendell Berry book: “What has been done needs undoing, and cannot be undone. As many times before, it is not the present that surprises him but the past, the present slipped away into irrevocability.  As many times before, he would like to turn away, find an opening, get out.  He feels his own history crowding him, as near to him in that heat as his clinging shirt, as his flesh itself. He feels the weight of the history of flesh.  He feels tired.” I feel like it was written for me, for me alone.  And then I realized, it was written for every human being on the face of the planet.

Which brought me to another realization.  That self-deprecation is at the heart of selfishness.  So what I have really struggled with is selfishness.

I have a need.  An inborn desire, and a strength and hopefully a capacity (by God’s grace) to fulfill that need.  This need is to look beyond the confines of my taut comfort zone, and to gaze freshly upon the world, and to ask, “How may I be of service?”

And I cannot be specific about this one, about a way to serve.  I must be open and available to every situation, especially the ones I feel less and less inclined towards.  Self deprecation is not humility—but sacrifice leads to humility, and that is what I desire.

The odd thing, though, is that I’ll never know if I am humble, because the truly humble person doesn’t know that he or she is being humble.

I have a habit of going out of myself, and looking at me from a different perspective.  That version of me shakes its head, looks up to God and says: “Keep chiseling, please.”

Please be patient with me.  My desire is to sink back from everything—blog, facebook, twitter—whatever I have an account with.  To wipe myself completely off the internet, and to settle down and read a book.  But I’m not going to do that.  I was considering giving up blogging.  Partly because I had hoped that this blog would be entirely objective.  It’s been anything except that, I believe. I’m not going to give it up.  If you don’t like it, please don’t read it.  I can’t think that I have anything of worth to say, but if there ever is anything that speaks to you, please take it and be blessed.

He rejoices over us with loud singing.  He loves us.  Can’t I rejoice in that? Jesus is enough.

“The benefits that in this life accompany or flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification are assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, increase of grace, and perseverance therein to the end.” – Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Rant – Creative Writing | not depicted but revealed

I don’t usually make a habit of posting my creative work.  I have tried, a few times, and 56 Stories (which most of you may remember) I keep public only because it was a “public exercise” so to speak.  One reason I feel very strongly about not posting any poetry/fiction or any of my personal ideas for those two genres in the way of inspiration is because I feel like both these things are a very private, very personal.  As Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a type writer and bleed.”  Now who wants to see my blood all over the screen?

I thought so.

But I’m going to break out of this routine—not completely.  You’re not going to get any original work, I promise, but I did have an inspiring thought, which I am writing out here because I think people will find it interesting, perhaps.

I like to be organized in the way I lay out a poem (or at least I like to imagine that I’m organized).  I like to have a firm idea of the thought I want to convey, the atmosphere I want to create, the kind of language I want to use.  It all sounds very simple when you write it out like that, but thinking abstractly about how to use very concrete images… that’s a challenge.  It’s almost like you have all these concrete images, and then you look at them from an abstract viewpoint, but then come out of the abstract viewpoint with different images that relate to the first…. As I read in a review of a movie recently that something was… “not depicted but revealed.”  The hope of poetry isn’t to merely convey a feeling, or a thought, or to create an atmosphere—though I would say that all these are goals.  Something would only be depicted if you used the images you wanted to reveal, and there’s something dead about that.  Part of the wonder of poetry is its mystery.  ”What… does he mean?” I think that the real hope is to reveal something, without saying: “This is what I want to reveal.”

My hope this Easter was to write a poem that talked about the atmosphere on Good Friday.  During Easter weekend I wonder how many people realize that after Jesus died… saints were raised from the dead, and walked, and lived, their tombs broken open because the earth was twisting and trembling and there was uncanny darkness and the ripping of the temple curtain and—God.  To me this is an amazing thought and my mind runs with it.  This was an astronomical point in history, it was a writhing, twisting point, and what was happening metaphysically became manifest in the physical world.  Not even the earth could calmly bear the crucified Lord.  And at that moment, that one moment, when he died, and there was blood and vinegar and darkness coming on, chinking of dice… and he cried out again in a loud voice and yielded up his spirit… yielded up his spirit… that was the moment, wasn’t it—when sins were forgiven and there was direct access to God, and we were atoned for.  It was the final sacrifice, the perfect sacrifice, something that humans hadn’t even considered on their own—that the Son of God would descend from heaven in the form of a man, and in that mystical wholeness of “fully God, fully man” put himself on the altar, and only He knew the depth of the matter, the importance, I think.

The fact about the saints rising and appearing to many in different cities is very interesting.  I haven’t explored it in depth, but it happened after Christ’s death—he didn’t have to be there to say something along the lines of, “Lazarus, Lazarus…”  The power of God was enough to raise the dead without Jesus even being there.  Even at the resurrection of Lazarus, there must have been an air of expectancy, a certain apprehension as Jesus stood in front of the tomb.  But imagine if you randomly saw people coming out of their graves—not in zombie fashion, but perfectly normal, in their grave clothes, on their way to appear to people.  People would have known that Christ had raised people from the dead before—but now that Christ was dead, even more people were coming alive—he may have been dead, but his power was not dead.

But I’m not ready to write this poem about the broken tombs and graves, and the terrifying thought of direct “access” to God, and the death of Christ, and his blood.  I’m not ready to write about how people wear pastels on Easter, and I’m not ready to contrast the happy behavior of today with the dread of the future when the Lord was crucified, and the terror-like joy of his resurrection.  It takes more than just lists of images, though those count too.  Yet this thought is so fresh poignant to me right now—I had to say something before Easter was over.

Happy Resurrection Day!

Tend

Words, single words, their singular shapes, lines, curves; their meanings that splatter themselves on the window of your soul like a raindrops, exploding.  With multiple words we draw up a sentence that conveys a feeling, produces a spark, spurs an emotion, ignites a flaming soul.  But one word—say one word, and what do you see? what do you think?

Say one word to me, and an image is drawn up in my head, the same image for the same word, and then thoughts come, and more images, and they play off each other, streaming seamlessly like a movie.  It’s like watching a movie.  And all because of a single word.  I hear one word, and I might know its literal denotative meaning, but what leaps into the face of my mind and imbeds itself in my soul is the connotative meaning.

Tend.

I tend to things.  Things tend to me.  I am tended. Things are tended.  Tend.  I tend, because he tends.

My soul is being nurtured, honed, beautified.  And through this glorious, painful, burning process of sanctification, a broken, shattered, rotten garden is reviving, the stream is flowing, and there is holiness in this place.  This is the nature of tending. Where there was fear is reconciliation, total unity, and we abide.

Abide.

To not only live, inhabit, be in a place, but to thrive there.  To rest there, to gather strength and sustenance.

Sustenance.

Feeding on grace.

The mental images come up, the movie plays, fast-forward smooth, because my mind moves like the wind.

…Time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of toast and tea. (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

This is how fast we think.  That in one minute I can explore the logistics of a decision, and decide for it, and also decide against it after weighing the pros and cons again.  Every second is filled with images, with thoughts moving thousands of miles per hour across a limitless landscape, gathering and reaping.

Tend.

Allow myself to be tended; allow the hand to lay heavy on my shoulders; allow my body to bow before holiness; allow my soul to be nurtured toward holiness.  Thigmotropism—an organism’s growth response towards touch.  Phototropism.  An organism’s growth response towards light.  God’s touch, and his emanating light. I feel it, see it, and my soul is enlarged to receive more love, more joy, more spiritual gifts, to empty more and to fill more. I grow to conform to his image (Romans 8:29).

He is tending me.  Taking care of me, and using sandpaper to smooth the rough surface, rounding the corners.  Being tended is being sanctified.  We are not allowed to rot away and wallow in our blood (Ezekiel 16:6).

Tend.

Compelled

Here we are at the end of February—Leap Day, it is, and there are changes in the air.  For one thing, the wind isn’t so bitingly cold, and even if it is, it smells like Spring.  Like dirt, and roots reaching down deep in the earth, and molding leaves.  There are snowdrops blooming in abundance in various patches all over the woods, and little flocks of daffodils pushing up towards the sun, which seems to be growing bigger and nearer.  And here I am, enjoying it, and thinking of the irresistible call of God.

Today, as I was reading parts of Genesis 3, I forced myself to think through something that has been lingering at the back of my mind for quite a few years.  And it’s simply this.  I was struck by the fact that though Adam and Eve hid themselves from God when they knew their nakedness and his presence, they spoke and answered him truthfully when he asked them: “Where are you?” and “What have you done?”  Coming into the knowledge of sin and misery, beginning the sharp descent from the state of perfection to this must have been shocking and grieving enough.  But then to know, “God is here;” must have produced the greatest feeling of fear and shame.  What I found amazing, then, is that even in these new feelings of shame and fear, Adam and Eve both answered God when he spoke to them, and they both told the truth.

Now, Adam did lay the blame on Eve, and Eve did lay the blame on the Serpent.  But the point is, they both confessed essentially what had been done: they had given in to temptation and had eaten the forbidden fruit.  And here is the thought I came up with.

God is compelling.  When he speaks to us, we have no choice except to answer.  We could be hiding in the depths of the sea.  We could be ignoring him with all the concentration of our minds.  And yet, if he spoke to us, like he did to Adam and Eve in the garden—if he said, “Where are you?” What choice would we have but to say: “Here I am, Lord.”  Perhaps that the idea of God being compelling is a bit too… hard? Too much force and pressure involved? Think of it this way.  No matter what the situation, God elicits a response from whomever he’s speaking to.

This idea then of God compelling man to answer him also relates to the Calvinistic view of irresistible grace.  I do believe that of all the five points, this is the most interesting.  Just as God compels Adam to speak when he confronts him, he compels us to accept him when he presents us with his saving grace.  In our feeble human life, we are so weak and cannot even resist our own nature sometimes.  How, then, can we resist God when he says— “I have called you by name, you are mine;”? (Isaiah 43: 1)

The blood is on the lintels.  Around my left wrist I have a red ribbon tied, to remind me of the blood that was spilled.  It is folly to some, and a stumbling block to others.  For me? It is my salvation and my deliverance.  Since I have felt this call of God, I have had no choice (and neither have I desired one) but to say: “Save me, O God!” (Psalm 69:1)

No, I’m not saying that God’s grace is irresistible or that his call is compelling because that is simply what I have gathered from what I have heard and read.  It’s what I truly believe, because I have felt it.  I feel it day after day.  Looking back, I see that there was no other option but to follow him.  There was nothing else I could have possible done, other than follow God, and submit my whole self to Christianity, to turn myself inside out so that the soul is on the outside, not hidden away with secret desires and ambitions in the crevices of my mind and heart.  We dream of hearing the voice of God, but I don’t think we know truly how compelling it is that it makes Adam and Eve, in the depths of their shame, to speak.  He has called us in the uttermost parts of our wickedness and our misery, so that we feel we cannot lift up our faces, but he says: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Psalm 51, over and over again.  ”The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O Lord, you will not despise.” “Purge me with hyssop…” “Restore to me the joy of your salvation…”

“Did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery?”
“God having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer.” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 20)

So by his blood we are healed.  ”Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” (Hebrews 9:22)

And he sheds his blood why? “…I have called you by name, you are mine… Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you…” (Isaiah 43:1, 4)
“…Sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy, but real love has always ended in bloodshed.” – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

This grace poured out for us, we can’t resist. We are brought into his call, into his love, drawn there by grace and by a love so powerful and mighty and tender that it is beyond our comprehension.  This time of Lent and approaching Easter—for Christ, was not a time of peace.  It was a time of violence.  His death was not something brought about with tranquility.  It was terrible, so that even the earth quaked with the mightiness.  Even the earth could not bear up this great, terrible, wonderful thing that had happened. It was too much for human capability, for mortality, you might say.  And all because of grace.

And in my little Lent devotional book is a quote that stared up at me just now as I read it, relating to all of this. “When we speak of grace, we think of the fact that [God's] favorable inclination towards the creature does not allow itself to be soured and frustrated by the resistance of the latter.” (Karl Barth)

Pre-Moving Thoughts

God’s victory means our defeat, means our humiliation; it means God’s mocking anger at all human arrogance, being puffed up, trying to be important in our own right. It means reducing the world and its clamor to silence; it means the crossing through of all our ideas and plans, it means the Cross. The Cross above the World. It means that man, even the noblest, must, whether he likes it or not, fall in the dust and with him all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The Cross of Jesus Christ, that means the bitter scorn of God in all human depths, the rule of God over the whole world.
The people came to victorious Gideon; it is the final clamor and the final temptation: ‘rule thou over us!’ But Gideon does not forget his history or the history of his nation… ‘God shall rule over you, and you shall have no other Lord.’ At these words the altars of the gods and the idols are cast down, all worship of man is cast down, all apotheosis of man by himself, they are judged, condemned, crossed out, they are all crucified and flung down into the dust by him who alone is Lord. And beside us kneels Gideon, the man who has been brought to faith out of the midst of fears and doubts, kneels before the altar of the one God, and with us Gideon prays: ‘Lord on the Cross, be thou alone our Lord. Amen.’ – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1933

I was sitting alone in Panera bread around 7:30 AM when I read this.  I had left the house an hour before to have study time.  In this tortuous storm of moving, I needed the quiet.  The morning air, the grogginess, even the cheap, bad tasting caramel latte. But it was all worth it.  This time was spent writing a letter to a dear friend, studying the Bible, and reading Bonhoeffer’s biography.  I knew I needed to wake up early this morning, even though it will be the first of two of the busiest days of this year.  Not to run away from what needed to be done, but to grab some time and in it, revert into peace and calm and good cheer.
I’ll be leaving the home I’ve lived in for ten years, and the area that I’ve lived my whole life in.  But strangely, I don’t feel nostalgic or anything.  I feel excited, eager, ready for a challenge and ready for an opportunity to embrace my challenge.  ”But for those who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.” – Malachi 4:2.  I feel like those fresh cows now, leaping with the vitality of life.  I was particularly encouraged by that passage of Bonhoeffer’s sermon up there.  To just be reminded: “It’s not about you.  Nothing is about you.  It’s all about God.  He is not only the reason everything is here, but the reason that everything is happening, and to him belongs the glory,” is not only convicting, but a great relief.  To keep things God-focused is hard at first, but after awhile, it becomes joy and relief.  To know that my sinful human self will not conquer.  It won’t conquer in the short run or in the long run.  I have given myself up to God once, but I do it again over and over, every day.  To say, Lord, lead us, guide us, be our God and our one Lord.   I have been encouraged to know that my strength is crushed, and that I must depend entirely upon God.  Even this knowledge strengthens me.
I will miss things about this house (mainly all the built in bookshelves) but it is amazing to me to see how at first I didn’t want to move, and now, because it is God’s will, he has brought my mind and my heart about face, and has confronted me, and graciously made me ready.

Another thing, before I close.  I was reading about Gideon today in Judges, and I noticed that when he’s getting ready to go down and defeat the Midianites & Amalekites, God commands him to go at once, but then says: “But if you are too afraid… go down to the camp tonight and listen to what they say.”  He knows Gideon’s weaknesses, and takes care of him.  He knows my weaknesses, and is compassionate and kind as he takes care of me and guides me.  He will do the same for you, if you trust in him.

Now, I tell myself, more than ever, seize the day!

P.S. If you haven’t noticed, please read the text below the header (Carpe Diem.)  It used to be a quote by C.S. Lewis— “Reason is the natural order of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning”—but I changed it to something more fitting for the purpose of this blog.

2012: Forty Books (And Their Reason…)

While I love reading, I tend to be sporadic in my choices of books to read. Some are easier for me to read than others.  I may love reading history, but it takes me a longer amount of time to read a biography than it does to read a general work of fiction.  Because of this I often end up with a “currently reading” list of about twenty books.  Not only do I want to knock off some of these books I’ve been “currently reading” for about three years (i.e. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens) but I want to read books that have been on my “to read” list for ages.  One of my goals for 2012 was to fix this.  So I picked four categories, Philosophy/Theology/Inspirational (that’s a bit of a wide range), Fiction, Literature, and History.  Into these four categories I put ten books, and I will read one book from each category each week.  Not only will it balance my mind and the information I’m taking in, but the fact that I know: “This week I’m reading this book,” will help me to focus on that specific book.

My book choices were not necessarily random.  In the first category, I chose books that I’ve been meaning to read for awhile.Those might be a bit random. I also possess a great love for both C.S. Lewis and (especially) G.K. Chesterton.  The Puritans have been a heavy influence on my life, and A Practical View of Christianity by William Wilberforce I’ve been reading for two years now.  Every time I pick it up, I wonder why I don’t read it more consistently.  After two pages I know.  As beautiful as the writing of 18th century writers is, it can be a bit, just a bit, heavy at times.  But this book truly is wonderful. I can’t say how many things I have written down from it, and it’s inspired a few blog posts.

In the Fiction section are books whose style I would like to imitate (Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen) and for study on techniques (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.)

In literature I basically just picked one novel I hadn’t read from ten famous writers living before the 20th century. Each one of these authors, though, has been inspiring to me in different ways. Tolstoy is obvious. I love Russian literature. Anthony Trollope interests me, and while I’ve never read He Knew He Was Right, I know the story and the psychological part of it (something Trollope liked to toy with in Can You Forgive Her?) is intriguing, however frustrating.  I never read Wuthering Heights before, because I knew how it ended and it struck me as depressing.  Time to put that aside and enjoy the literature.

As far as history goes, I’m generally interested in WWII for different reasons.  Mein Kampf is something I’ve been reading for about a year now, but I’d really love to finish it up. Anne Frank I find to be an inspiring character in history, though she may not have known it.  I love history; I like to know people’s stories, why the do things, what caused them to get off on the wrong foot, or what inspired them to do the right thing.  To see the evolution of politics, the introduction of a new idea or concept for worldwide living, socialism, and the rush for it, and then its downfall, is amazing.  To be able to see how an entire country filled with millions can pick itself up and recover from a horrible war… it’s a gift to be able to learn these things.  But most of all I love stories of individual people.  The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Mary Bosanquet, has sat on the bookshelf in my parents living room for years.  I used to look at it when I was younger, turn it over in my hands.  The bold writing on the front—even that intimidating German name, Dietrich Bonhoeffer—awed me and I was, actually, scared.  How did he die? I kept asking myself. It said death right on the front.  I knew he died.  I found out later the reason, but it only intrigued me more. I always meant to read it, but it was only in October that I actually took it up to my room along with some other WWII books, and determined in my mind to start it. (But that didn’t happen till 2012…)

So far, I have found this this plan of mine, to read systematically and in an organized fashion, has worked.  I’ve only read Run (Ann Patchett), The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis), and The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Mary Bosanquet), but I find my appetite for always starting something new and not finishing a certain book has been curbed.  I think I can safely recommend it.

Philosophy/Theology/Inspirational

1. The Everlasting Man – G.K. Chesterton
2. The Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis
3. Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis – Michael Ward
4. A Body of Divinity – Thomas Watson
5. The Bondage of the Will – Martin Luther
6. A Practical View of Christianity – William Wilberforce
7. One Thousand Gifts – Ann Voskamp
8. The Mystery of Providence – John Flavel
9. Ezekiel (An Exposition) – William Greenhill (Let’s specify… only parts of it!)
10. All Things For Good – Thomas Watson

Fiction

1. Run – Ann Patchett
2. Bel Canto – Ann Patchett
3. The Summer of the Bear – Bella Pollen
4. Possession – A.S. Byatt
5. Gilead – Marilyn Robinson
6. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
7. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
8. This Side of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. The Red Pony – John Steinbeck
10. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse

Literature

1. Middlemarch – George Eliot
2. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
3. Onegin – Pushkin
4. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
5. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
6. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
7. He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
8. Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
9. Vilette – Charlotte Brontë
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

History

1. Schindler’s List – Thomas Keneally
2. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
3. A Woman in Berlin – Anonymous
4. The Long Walk – Sławomir Rawicz
5. The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Mary Bosanquet
6. Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
7. Le Morte d’Arthur – Sir Thomas Malory
8. The Birth of Britain – Winston Churchill
9. How Should We Then Live? – Francis Schaeffer
10. Lark Rise to Candleford – Flora Thompson

2011 Favorite Books

Unfortunately, I didn’t do as much reading in 2011 as I hoped to do.  Or rather, I did a lot of reading, but only in the beginnings of books.  Hence, the list I have to put up are only the books that I finished completely.

Reading is a gift.  And when I say that, I don’t mean that it’s a talent.  It is a gift to be able to read the books we have access to.  It’s a gift to have access to them! I was thinking the other day, what if Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) came true? What if books were outlawed and people went around burning your house up if you had one? Would you really have the stamina to memorize the books you love, so that they never cease to be a part of you?  I like to think about this a lot.  A poem is much easier to memorize because you can quite easily follow the themes of the writer, the different patterns (especially in rhyming poems.) But books? If I were to memorize my favorite book? It would take five years to complete The Idiot (Fydor Dostoevsky).  So then I look on all those shelves of books, books holding stories, ideas, philosophies, saving grace, wars, policies, catharsis all in their strong straight arms, and I think: “This is all a gift.”  Please, appreciate this gift while you can.  Read books, but read the good books.  And I don’t mean the ones whose ideas agree with yours, or the ones that only have things you like in them.  I mean books that are well written.  Books that consciously present paradoxes, relevant in our cultures or past cultures, that are worthy of notice.  Books that tell the heart of the author.

I’m done talking about reading.  Here’s my top… well, I’m not sure how many there are yet, but my top favorite books from 2011.

Can You Forgive Her?

Save all the depressing elements of Anthony Trollope’s plots (especially He Knew He Was Right and The way We Live Now) I actually rather enjoyed this dusty, dry novel.  Can You Forgive Her? explores the mental confusion that can come from never really deciding on one thing or another (in this case, for the heroine Alice, a husband.)  In the midst of her going back and forth, telling one man yes and another no and then switching soon after, people are always trying to influence, are looking down on her, and controlling her.  The title was a bit deceiving.  I really thought it was going to be some Gothic novel like Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier) and the main character (a woman) runs around melodramatically ruining everybody else’s lives. But it wasn’t like that at all.  It deals much more with mental strain and confusion than anything else.  All in all, it was a pretty satisfying read.  I knew I had to schedule myself in order to get through it, so I forced myself to read two chapters every day and I finished it in a month and a half. (That schedule didn’t work with Don Quixote, but I would recommend something like it if you’re having trouble getting through a 19th century novel.)

 

Mere Christianity

Ah, C.S. Lewis.  I do love you.  Not much to say here about this book except that I love reading apologetic type things, especially from 20th century thinkers.  C.S. Lewis fascinates me.  Although I disagreed with some of the theological principles in Mere Christianity (only slightly disagreed) I would say that it remains, to me, one of the clearest cut pictures of the doctrine of Christianity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Narcissus and Goldmund 

Please welcome Narcissus and Goldmund to the front.  By far, this was one of my favorite books this year.  I really liked this book simply for its comparison on the spiritual passions versus the physical passions, and what it meant for Narcissus (the more cynical, stern, ascetic man) and Goldmund (the beautiful, passionate, wandering man).

Besides being an excellent writer, Hermann Hesse is a great thinker.  I appreciate literature written by deep thinkers because I think they combine so much of their own personal mental thought process and struggle in their books. (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky… Hesse.)  It makes it so much more interesting to read a book when you know it’s written with the mind and soul of the author all through it’s pages.

 

 

Hannah Coulter 

Wendell Berry is an excellent writer.  He’s real. When you read him, you feel like he’s tangible, like he’s been sitting next to you the entire time, telling you the whole story. (Except for maybe Remembering, which had some different writing techniques that made it seem a bit abstract.)  Hannah Coulter tells her whole story in the first chapter.  You know everything.  Who dies, who lives.  But you keep reading on because there’s something so beautiful about the way she thinks, about the way she remembers things.  And you know, you just know, that there has to be something she hasn’t told.  Some little secret, something that redeems all her troubles.  It’s a story rich in real, genuine love, between husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister, etc.  Wendell Berry loves the idea of unity.  He writes about it everywhere.  Keeping the family together.  Being close knit even when the birds grow up and leave the nest.   If you enjoy his fiction, read his poetry.

 

Cyrano de Bergerac 

Well, I rather liked his nose.

I forced myself to read Cyrano de Bergerac in a moment when I thought I wasn’t appreciating tragic writing very much.  (Well, after all, I was studying Bolshevism, and Marxism, reading Mein Kampf and Macbeth at the time…) But Cyrano de Bergerac is a wonderful story.  I yelled at Roxanne quite a bit.  She annoyed me with her sentimentality. Yet, Cyrano was deceptive.  Even though he wrote letters to her in Christian’s name, it probably gave him some self-satisfaction.  And Christian.  If you love the woman, say so, and woo her for yourself. And if she can’t see beyond your inability to make up poetic lines, then maybe she isn’t worth it after all.  (How quickly she loved Cyrano at the end when she discovered it was him all along!) Roxanne was only in love with words, not an actual person.

And after that little rant, here we are.  I love plays. This year I read about ten or twelve plays.  It was a very interesting experience.

Much Ado About Nothing

Oh, if you ever wanted me to recite something all day long over and over again it would be this play.  Shakespeare was a genius.  In this particular play he presents the comparison of courtships, the comparison of deception and honesty, and so many other things.  It’s important to note about the title, that in Shakespeare’s day, the word “nothing” would have been “noting,” which meant eavesdropping.  Also, nothing, in its literal sense, refers to that which does not happen, but which might.  In other words, you have a circle and inside of it are all the things that did, do, or will happen.  But outside that circle are all the possibilities of what might have happened, in other words, Nothing.  Both possibilities are relevant to the play. My favorite line from this play?

“Shall these quips and sentences and paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor? No! The world must be peopled! When I said that I should die a bachelor, I did not think that I should live to be married.” – Benedick

 

A Room With  A View

This was such a delightful novel.  I read somewhere else that it has to do with the enchantment of Italy and how it can affect even the most sensible of people.  I think it’s very true. But I haven’t been to Italy so I would exactly know.  I think there are several odd things in this novel, but none the less, it’s wonderfully written and for once things really do end up right in the end.  E.M. Forester has such quirky characters. (These things I’m writing really aren’t intended to be in depth reviews… I’m just observing.)

 

 

 

The Great Gatsby 

I have nothing to say to F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I admire him too much.

Things do not “end up right” in this book.  That’s no secret. I can’t imagine, though, a book plainer or truer to the drama of life than this.  And yet, you wouldn’t even say that the style is dramatic.  But it is.  In the midst of a fight between a husband and his wife who’s trying to leave him for another man (this is a big fight…) the narrator suddenly says: “I’ve just remembered it’s my birthday. I’m thirty.” And it’s funny, because I don’t find that strange.  I would probably say something like that too, if there was a fight like that going on.  But writers these days don’t think to make their characters go off on these weird trains of thought, and then, without relating what the train of thought is, have them say something they ended up at, just out of the blue. Somehow, it all makes sense.

 

 

Screwtape Letters

Oh, C.S. Lewis again.  I would read this book a hundred times over and again.  I’ve never seen the spiritual battle depicted so neatly and truthfully.  I knew it was true because I had experienced some of the exact things described in here.  Everyone should read it.  Twice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s it.  Can you believe it?  Once I get one book up there, I remember all the other books I’ve read.  I want to bring them all up, and talk about them all.  But I can’t.  These are just nine books from 2011 I thoroughly enjoyed.  Next post I’ll give my 2012 to read list.

Marrow

I’m always thinking about education, what it really means to be educated and learned.  I’d love to call myself that, but I constantly become confused by the standards of today’s society.  If I measured myself against them, I would most certainly be uneducated.  I like to face the facts.  It makes everything so much simpler.  So here’s me facing the facts.  No, I’m not as learned as everyone I meet—not by the measures and standards of today’s culture.  But what am I? What makes me feel that perhaps it’s alright?

A heritage.  I consider myself to be peculiarly blessed.  In my head are stories, thoughts, ideas.  In my soul there’s fire and passion, the will to live a good life.  And in my hands there is a yearning to work, change, create.  An artist’s urge, perhaps; but then, man was created an artist, by an Artist.  We all create.  We all feel the urge, the call to build something, paint something, write something, to get what we feel is inexpressible to be, in some way, expressed.

In a previous blogpost I demonstrated the longing I felt to climb a certain hill.  And I don’t know why, because the way was right in front of me and the means to do it obvious, but I only just climbed that hill the other day.  Less than a week before I was scheduled to leave St. Andrews.  And as soon as I reached the top, I wondered why I had never done it before.  My lungs were stretching to suck in all the air they could, and my heart was opening up, expanding, enlarging to receive gifts and be blessed.  There were gifts all around me.  It amazed me that my eye could see so far, and so many details.  The town was below me, small, like I could pick it up in my hand and crumble its ancient stone cathedral between my human fingers.  But I had no desire to.  My desire was to stretch myself, body, mind, and spirit, and hold fast to all that is good in life.  Again and again I find myself astounded by beauty, engrossed in this unity with God that gives me eyes of a different nature.  All because of him I can truly say, whenever I am overwhelmed by the glory of the earth, “God, oh God, your work is too wonderful for me!”  And I do say it.  I try to delve into the mind of God.  He talks about drawing circles on the face of the deep, laying the foundations of the world.  But it was never as simple as legos or building blocks.  These mysteries of gravity, the earth’s pull, the structure of a tree, the structure of a blade of grass, its roots, the peaty earth—no, I may understand how, but I can never understand why. Only speculate.  But then there’s that aching wonder, that bliss that comes from just letting yourself be astounded, by forgetting everything that you want to learn, and to confess: I don’t know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Oh, Scotland I love you.)

Sometimes that bliss makes me feel that perhaps I have not missed out on education.  That bliss makes me feel like there is something more important in life, something deeper than this stereotypical education, like the expressing of these thoughts and ideas, finding the root of them.  Whenever I go out into the fields and listen to “the beauty that discharges itself again and again” (Anne Frank) I feel that I am finding something really important, something that is meant to be discovered, loved, appreciated.

I walk home from church every Sunday night, and I feel blessed and invigorated for life.  I am ready to live, ready to die to self, ready to do the work of Christ.  And I look up, and stop, and I see things that astound me again.  The sky is deep blue, dark, and the stars are singular and bright.  I walk with my head up, and maybe I walk into things, but I don’t really care because what is above is too beautiful to ignore. Astounded by beauty.  Plunged into unity.

The winter wind goes clean through me, purging as it goes.  I breathe in December air, and as I exhale, I exhale all the bad feeling, all the dirtiness and filth and grime.  And I become refreshed and strengthened.  Ready.

I’m ready to live my life now.  I know that I may not know as much as everybody else, but I have a passion for living and for living well.  I know what it is I want to do.  ”I enter the world, as every person born enters it: with clenched fists.” (Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts).

If you’re in a boat with me—you know, the boat with people who haven’t written very many essays, didn’t complete a math course, dropped a language—then don’t feel overwhelmed or dumbed down.  The important thing about life is knowing how to live it.  I am open to the fact that some day, perhaps, I might go to school.  Very well.  But for now, I have ideas and things I want to try, things I feel called to do.  And I love my life because I know that it is the life I am supposed to be living.  Half the adventure is not knowing where God is going to call me, or what I’m going to do exactly; but it’s my job to find out.  And it’s the finding out part that excites me because really, from my perspective, anything could happen.

A Eucharist: Feasting

I love being in the kitchen, knitting molecules of food together, feeling the sense of wholeness that it brings to me to prepare a full feast with someone I love, my sister, and laughing and consulting and feeling everything become whole and warm inside.  Everything is transfused—the chicken broth seeps into every unseen crevice of the carrot, and what was sweet becomes unbearably savoury.  That’s what we do.  We mix and match, throw a little of this in, a little more of that, and every scent and smell and texture that is different in every way fuses together and changes completely.  A chemical change.  We create a feast.  We use every dish in the house, even though none of them match.   Every dish is laid out, all the varieties of colors, everything we’ve made from scratch (and perhaps one or two things not made from scratch).  And we thank God for the feast, the fellowship.  We eat.  Breaking the molecules apart, and suddenly I feel broken, especially the next day when it’s all over.

But then I have heard since my earliest days a story floating around like the whisper of something great that’s going to happen.  It has passed from the lips of Christians in the church, passed with a smile of relief, and an absent-minded look, as if the speaker isn’t entirely there.  A continual feast.  No brokenness, no end.  Everything is whole, all the time.  Feasting on joy, feasting on wholeness that remains whole, feasting on gratitude and love.  This is what was in our food, and yet, these things when they’re on earth, they disappear.  Love disappears so quickly, and is replaced with lust and passion. Gratefulness sinks into criticism.  Joy slowly digresses and is replaced with discontentment.  These things are gifts, and we fail to retain them all the time.

The wind blew cold today, and it blew freshness into my hot soul, and a new kind of life into my lungs.  The slap of the waves on the sea as they rush up to wash around my boots, and I leave my hands open and free, seeing how long I can go with them cold, how long before I must tuck them into the warmth of my wool sweater.  The cathedral, every single grave is bathed in a flitting sunlight that flashes here and there, but through the dark clouds above, warms me, and makes even death seem golden.  To the North, the hills are capped in snow.  Winter is coming fast, I sense it in the wind as I sit in its breath writing my gifts.

Can I think of one thousand gifts? Can I even think of one gift?  During Thanksgiving season, all over Facebook, all over blogs, I see people being thankful for one gift every day.  And after Thanksgiving—are we done being grateful? Why is it so important only during this season? I wish we could spend all the time in the kitchen, stealing time to take a walk above the fields and stopping for a moment to write down a thought, a story, but returning to the kitchen, always, making feasts every day, washing the dishes every day, baking again, knitting molecules again, creating wholeness.  I wish we could do it every day, and I wish that every day we could celebrate this Eucharist, even without the food.  Why are we so quick to overlook the opportunities for joy now, here? Why are we so eager to accept brokenness and depression? And finally, what does it mean to live a good life?

I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy. – Anne Frank

I wake up smiling, thinking of gifts now, because I feel like I should.  A good life.  Living a good life.  Being grateful, truly grateful, and living out thankfulness.  That quote up there—I am convicted about it, and feel myself wanting to weep.  That I should be unhappy and ungrateful when I have a life with no misery, while Anne Frank who lived a hunted life filled with horror and blood should be grateful, and happy!

Embrace your life.  Live your thankfulness, not only during November, but every day, all day.  Live slowly, purely, live well.  We always talk about this—about living thankful lives.  But don’t just say: “I’m thankful.” Think of what you’re grateful for.  Think of your gifts—gifts that have been given to you.  Material and immaterial.  Individual things.  On one piece of paper, on a chalk board, or on your heart write one gift—only one.  And then, continue writing.  Write these gifts for the rest of your life, and live the thankfulness you feel for them, and for the One who gave them to you.

In heaven there’s a feast for the saints, a feast that will not end, and there will be no end to our thankfulness.

Scotland | Journal Excerpts |

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.  The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote.  It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every other book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.  It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth.  I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills.  It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hillside like the colors and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which was too large, and too close to be seen.  - The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, Introduction

Stories—that is how a reader is able to look at and analyze his or her life.  It is how I cope with mine.  That all this—the gypsy man on the street with the accordion—it’s all part of something bigger.  That the slightest thought is not without meaning or consequence.  Material things spark the train of the immaterial—the train of thought, the stretching line of feeling, and even those material things, like the man who made music, that tangible things has been inspired by an immaterial feeling. These are intricate parts of a story.  Looking at my own life teaches me how to write a story.  Let’s start at a new, important period of my life.  Okay.  Going to Scotland for seven weeks.  So that is the beginning of my story.  That is where I begin. Later we find out why, what brought it about.  Throughout the story we learn what we don’t know in the beginning—how this trip affects my life when it’s done.  How I change.  And thinking of that makes me aware of everything around me.  The people I meet.  The strange coincidences that urge me to record them, for reasons of their own.

I wonder how many “red herrings” I will write down. Probably none, because whatever I write I feel called to write.  Whatever the object it has struck me in a singular and subjective way, and that in and of itself makes it interesting and important, at least to me.

When I come out of the town’s center and start down the hill—which will eventually lead me up another hill—towards home, I can see yet another hill, higher than all the rest.  The very top of it is green, and its slope is brown—long, deep, furrows of brown that the tractor has been making all day.  And there is a group of trees that I can see beyond the roofs of the houses.  Their branches are dark against the misty ground and the cloud-swollen sky.  It’s November.  I want to climb that hill, and I almost don’t care that there’s a fence on it, marking it as someone’s property.  I have a desire in me and an urge to climb.  I feel it when I stand on my chair every morning to look out the window towards the North and see jagged, low mountains.  This thought in particular has been with me ever since I got here, and yet I don’t know what significance it has.  Maybe it doesn’t hold any significance, except as a defining point of my personality. But that’s the exciting things.  I’m going to find out, sooner or later.  And maybe when I do I won’t care anymore, but maybe it will bring on something exciting.  That’s how it happens in stories.  One thing leads to another.  And those are the things we tell about, so that when you think about it, nothing that happens in life is without importance.  We all have about one huge plot, and ten thousand subplots. A lot goes on that we don’t even think about. And all of it is flowing into the throbbing, pulsing blood of history.