Two Weeks

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I am a first year teacher, and all year I’ve struggled with how to write on this blog–how to tell the truth, but tell it slant. There have been discarded entries (which I never had in the past) and few which did not really come out how I intended them to. There has also been a lot of staring at the blank page. I want so much to give a clear picture though, because writing helps me understand. The past two weeks have been strange and full and often strangely, fully good, and I want to tell you about them, but even these 336 hours have seemed to contain a lifetime.

I went to play practice for hours every afternoon and night and decorated the set with my favorite books stacked along the back wall.

As part of their prank, the seniors built a ball pit in the room I teach in. So I taught about Imperialism for a few minutes, but then I let my students sit in it and play with all the bright colors, while they wrote letters to someone they were thankful for. And I got to wear a princess crown all that day.

We prayed together during the junior girls’ Bible study and as a faculty at lunch one day–for those who are sick and those who are scared. (Those people are sometimes us.)

Lauren Robinson and I both graded all 44 senior thesis papers in a week and a half. I sat on the floor behind her desk on Wednesday afternoon madly calculating final grades, while the freshmen giggled their way through speech presentations. Late that night the two of us painted the rock, barefoot, with Paul Simon on full volume in her truck. They all passed.

My front tire got slashed by some unknown enemy.

I went down to the gym for a few minutes to watch the juniors and seniors have their last dance lesson. I was charmed by what a good time most of them seemed to be having, but was also deeply grateful that I was no longer out there on the floor.

I ate brunch with Sarah Moon, and we talked about things that were not students and teaching, and it all felt very surreal.

I averaged about four hours of sleep each night.

Students brought me food and Starbucks unbidden and I didn’t know what to do with myself.

It briefly seemed as if my social security number had been stolen by someone in Vermont, and I laughed very hard and happily at the prospect of someone wanting my identity. (It turned out to be a clerical error.)

I got tired of giving critical notes to the students at the end of rehearsal, and just decided they were all cute and could act however they wanted. (Thank God for multiple directors.) Instead, I wandered around Target and Walmart trying to find all the shades of foundation that our supply boxes were running out of and wished I knew something, anything about make-up.

While walking back in from letting my chaotic sixth period do their reading questions outside, I tripped and dropped my large stack of grading all down the stairs. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I sat down and just looked pathetically back at my students, and they picked it all up in a stunned silence.

I watched our pride and joy, You Can’t Take It With You, from the audience each night and it was still funny every time, even when the fireworks didn’t go off. I laughed and I grinned and sometimes I felt very, very sleepy

And then I turned twenty-three, which is simultaneously much older and much younger than I feel.

 

Sometimes, in these past two weeks, I have felt blessed and unaccountably successful. At other times, I have wanted to find a small, cozy hole, crawl into it until we reach July, and then bring the calendar to a full stop, preferably for quite some time. But after oversleeping this morning and then cleaning the bathroom while listening to Andrew Peterson, I feel smaller, more on kilter, as if I can fit comfortably into my skin again–I think I had been leaking out of it for a while.

When I write I try to organize and find meaning between all the little things, but it is not always easy. Sometimes I must be content to believe that the truth is somewhere between “Life is pain, highness,” and “Love is all we have left in this world, Grandpa.” I must trust, trust, trust, that my God knows the substance of all this: the bungled works cited pages, the loudly laughing teenagers, the spray paint that took days to wear out of the creases of my fingernails, the chai tea lattes on my desk. He knows what all these little shadows mean.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

Martha, Mary, and Food

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Mary and Martha. A couples weeks ago I had some discussions with my juniors about a woman’s place in society, and there are so many things I wish I had said. I wish I had reminded them that the woman’s primary calling (like the man’s) is to sit at Christ’s feet, and hear his words, and that any structure that hinders her from “choosing the good part” is wrong. I wish I had reminded them that regardless of what I tell them, this “nearness-to-Jesus,” this is the litmus test.

And then this week I left school and my students to go up to Grove City for a C.S. Lewis and Inklings Conference, with Martha and Mary still whispering in my head. Martha, the teacher, the keeper of the full agenda and the red and blue pens. Mary, the student, jubilant to let down her inky guard for a long weekend, jubilant to listen.

I drove up for the conference in my grandma’s Buick, which only plays cassette tapes, and listened to the same Mark Heard album over and over and over. It’s called Ashes to Light, and you should hear it: “He looks at their faces and loves them in spite of his grief.”

I had a lot of conversations this weekend, personal conversations with close friends, and heard some good talks, very good talks. Papers on catechisms and incarnation and pedagogy, and keynote addresses on images and humility and honesty. On Friday night at the banquet Diana Glyer spoke on artistic collaboration and creating alongside one another for balance, for accountability, for prayer. Afterwards I walked up to her to tell her how encouraging it had been, and to thank her, and immediately burst into tears. Oops. She took me by the hand, and said “Tell me about yourself.” “This is my first year of teaching,” I said, “And I haven’t gotten a chance to think about these things for a long time and–thank you.”

All weekend I tried to balance Mary and Martha and failed. I made the mistake of checking my email on Saturday and immediately spiraled into a foul mood, though it only contained run-of-the-mill announcements and student requests. Then I drove home today and listened to Mark Heard over and over and over again. I have come to the point in teaching where I have stopped worrying so much about what my students think of me and have started worrying about them–so the songs reminded me of my teenagers. “Feet of clay and an inner light, they were given everything.” I thought again about how I wanted them to “choose the good part,” to accept the good gifts. I thought about Mary and Martha, and then I thought about food.

The paper I gave on Friday morning was about food in Narnia, the way its goodness depends on the giver. And the difference between Martha and Mary is the difference between feeding and being fed. The hostess cannot go hungry. If we have not first eaten the bread which means his body, the we cannot possibly be his hands and feet. If I try to teach my students what tastes sweet and what will make them strong, without first sitting at my Lord’s table, I will fail.

There is even more to it than that, though. I am now able to hesitantly believe that I am meant to be a teacher, but before that I was, am, and will be his. I am his, and there is only “one thing needed”: I must sit and hear his word.

If you’re interested, below is said paper, devoid of parenthetical citations because they look weird on a blog. I promise they were there.

The Mysterious Workings of Food in Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles

George Sayer, with whom C.S. Lewis often stayed while on holiday, describes his taste in food as “plain, solid, and traditional…roast meat of any sort.” He had no appreciation for “subtle French recipes” or even “for puddings or for fruit.” Yet the food which Lewis did love he treated with whole-hearted devotion, and since children were the original audience the Narnia books, within the Chronicles he regularly approaches the subject of food and drink with the appropriate seriousness and urgency of a child of seven. In imagining Narnia, Alan Jacobs writes, “What [Lewis] has to do…is trust the images that come into his mind–or, more accurately, trust that he is being formed as a Christian in such a way that the images that come to his mind are authentic ones, ones that lie at, or at least near, the center of his soul.” So Lewis uses the food which his characters naturally eat: Puddleglum’s eels and the feasts at Cair Paravel, to tell the goodness and mystery of gifts. The food in Lewis’s Chronicles, whether of deep magical importance or a simple symbol of good fellowship, is nearly always given and ultimately reflects the character of its giver.

Jacobs tells a story about an American named Firor who sent Lewis multiple hams in the late 1940’s, while food was still scarce in Britain. “Lewis and friends started calling him ‘Firor-of-the-Hams,’ and on one occasion a dozen or so of the Inklings signed a collective letter of gratitude to him.” It turned out that this same Firor was a doctor and a great hero who had rescued a colleague’s wife from behind the Iron Curtain, so a real generosity and solidity was reflected in his gift. Lewis implicitly trusted those who relished food as much as he did. Around the same time Nathan Starr sent Lewis bacon, along with a passage of his own Chaucerian-style verse to recommend the meat, and almost immediately received an invitation to visit Lewis’s rooms at the college. Lewis considered the right sort of food an indication of good character

So, when an outsider first enters Narnia, if he is able to fall into the right company, he is immediately fed well, signifying the virtues of Narnian culture and fellowship as a whole. When a bewildered and delighted Prince Caspian enters into the heart of Old Narnia for the first time and is led around to meet all the creatures who live in hiding, Pattertwig the squirrel offers him a nut and the bears are eager to feed him their messy honey. Lewis tells the entire episode like a travel story, with scores of new introductions, and these gifts of food are each beast’s way of making his mark on both Caspian and the reader’s imaginations throughout the ongoing procession. Even before that, when Lucy herself first enters Narnia, she understands Tumnus’s core good-heartedness not merely by his welcoming words (which turn out to be false) but by his hospitality: “a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake.” Moreover, the Pevensie children know they have found good friends in the Beavers when they see cozy smoke rising from Mr. Beaver’s dam and realize they are being brought home as dinner guests. In fact, though the Beavers are virtuous in many ways, to Lewis their most important quality may be their abundant and generous hospitality, considering Mrs. Beaver’s response when the company realizes they must run for their lives: “Now, Mr. Beaver, just reach down that ham. And here’s a packet of tea, and there’s sugar…And if someone will get two or three loaves out of that crock…You didn’t think we’d set out on a journey with nothing to eat, did you?”

In fact, one of the ways in which Lewis expresses celebration, especially after his characters have passed through great trials, is in jubilant descriptions of good (and often very British) food. When Jill and company escape from the Underworld, they are treated to the most comfortable and fulsome fare by the good dwarves, just to prove that they are home: “Not wretched sausages half-full of bread and soya bean either, but real, meaty spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt.  And great mugs of frothy chocolate, and roast potatoes and roast chestnuts, and baked apples with raisins stuck in where the cores had been.” Jill and the reader are both starved for warmth after all the grey time underground, and here at long last it comes to them by way of the dwarves’ cast iron breakfast skillets.

Narnian tradition itself centers around not just these individual exchanges of food, but a great and full tradition of feeding the multitudes. Eustace and Jill enter Narnia and within hours of being recognized as friends of the king are settled at his table for the “serious eating and drinking.”

…though Eustace had been in that world before, he had spent his whole visit at sea and knew nothing of the glory and courtesy of Narnians at home in their own land …each course came in with trumpeters and kettledrums. There were soups that would make your mouth water to think of, and the lovely fishes called pavenders, and venison and peacock and pies, and ices and jellies and fruit and nuts, and all manner of wines and fruit drinks.

Lewis’s lavish description of the banquet demonstrates not only his love for a full plate but his glowing vision for complex and purposeful fellowship between countrymen. The fanfares of the trumpets call forth the food of hard-won (rather medieval) merriment.

But beyond the solidity of Narnian fare itself, the souls of many individual characters are reflected in that which they offer their guests. As Christ himself says, “ye shall know them by their fruits.” The Scrubbs can be immediately discounted as people of worth in Lewis’s world because of their vegetarian diet, while vain, air-headed Lasaraleen serves Aravis a meal “chiefly of the whipped cream and jelly and fruit and ice sort.” However, something more unpleasant than mere empty-headedness is hinted at when Puddleglum and the children are taken captive by pale, still little Earthmen, and are given only “flat, flabby cakes of some sort which had hardly any taste.” Though Puddleglum and company do not know it, these creature are captives as well, empty and stale and sad. They are incapable of offering good sustenance in their current mind-numbed state.

On the other hand, Puddleglum himself serves Jill and Eustace eel stew, of which he himself is very disparaging, but which is ultimately “delicious…the children [have] two large helpings each. This uncomely but ultimately excellent first meal with their new friend establishes the marshwiggle and his golden, despondent soul immediately and irrevocably in the affections of children and readers alike. Likewise, when Father Christmas returns to Narnia after his long, involuntary absence, the tea he presents to the Pevensies and the Beavers wonderfully “sizzling and piping hot” imparts all the warmth and goodwill of the promise of his season. Of course, Father Christmas’s power is not really his own, but instead his good gifts of food are born from the same source which brings spring back to Narnia at long last.

This land of Narnia itself has its own mysterious reserves of good food to offer. Late in the first day of the new world’s existence, after Aslan has sent Polly and Diggory and Fledge halfway across Narnia on an important errand, and the children find the have nothing to eat, Polly finds an old bag of toffees in her pocket and Diggory cleverly buries the last one in the new Narnian earth by the side of the lake. The next morning when they wake, a toffee tree has grown up. “Loaded with little brown fruits that looked rather like dates…The fruit was delicious: not exactly like toffee–softer for one thing, and juicy–but like fruit which reminded one of toffee.” This reminding of something just out of the mind’s reach is a constant of Narnia’s character. For every true disciple, Narnia always carries the distinct flavor of home, and, ultimately, Aslan’s Country. The best and most truly homely places in Lewis’s world produce the most wonderful and mystical food for their people. The Earthmen, once free from the witch’s enchantments, are ecstatic to return to Bism, their homeland deep beneath the earth’s crust, because of the fresh precious stones it provides for them to eat like ripe fruit: “bunches of rubies…cupful[s] of diamond juice.” These worlds contain an unavoidably inherent magic.

Yet, as is clear from the reader’s first introduction to Narnia, not all the magic there is good magic, just as not all food which fills a belly fills it with good things. At first the turkish delight the witch feeds Edmund seems very good: “each piece was sweet and light to the very center…[he] had never tasted anything more delicious.” Yet  Wayne Martindale writes that “An authentic pleasure is one we love to recall and rejoice to share,” so though Edmund thinks he has relished the White Witch’s food, there is nothing he wants less than for his siblings to have a taste of it. His greed for it only grows until he will do nearly anything to have more of it, until he desires nothing else. As Lewis points out sharply, “there’s nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magical food.” The false queen has literally but subtly let Edmund pick his own poison, demonstrating the sharp, fast-acting venom of her own evil motives. When the boy later obeys her summons and asks for more sweets, she gives him only bread and water, cruelly understanding that he now hungers only for turkish delight.

And food in Narnia can contain not just bad and deceitful magic but ultimate betrayal. Perhaps the most horrifying episode in all of Lewis’s Chronicles centers around preparations for the giants’ Autumn feast at Harfang. The children and Puddleglum are betrayed by the Green Lady’s sweet words and her promises of soft beds. From the beginning of their visit the refreshments and edibles given to the guests seem false and evil. The giants give Puddleglum a liquor so strong that it immediately intoxicates him and makes him unable to help and protect Jill and Eustace. Later the three discover with revulsion that they have been tricked into eating talking stag, and are consuming the flesh of a Narnian. Thus the stage is set for the final terrifying revelation as Jill comes upon the giants’ cookery book. The Green Lady has described to the hungry travellers the wonders of a place where “the roast and the baked and the sweet and the strong will be on the table four times a day.” As Jill reads the recipes for “Man: [an] elegant little biped” and “Marshwiggle:[of] stringy consistency and muddy flavor” she understands that they are to be the “roast and the baked and the sweet and the strong.” The witch has committed an act of deep treachery in giving them over into the hands of those who will devour them. At Harfang food signifies not a gift of grace and fullness but a taking of innocence and of life.

Yet the meaning of a meal depends upon the character of the host, the provider of the feast. Aslan often invites his people in with same welcoming words the Green Lady used to lure Puddleglum and the children to Harfang, yet he means them truly. Martindale states, “Feasting is a common motif in Narnia when Aslan has finished some great work…Feasting is associated both with life, as a necessity, and with joyful celebration in peace and plenty.” Therefore Aslan’s full table not only represents good fellowship as opposed to ill, but a kind of solemn mercy. Lewis well understands the sanctity of the Eucharist and is eager and willing to write some of that same significance into the bread and wine Aslan serves to his Narnians. As the Dawn Treader’s travelers near the end of the world they come upon an extravagant feast of just this import:

There were turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boars’ heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail or like dragons and elephants, there were ice puddings and bright lobsters and gleaming salmon, there were nuts and grapes, pineapples and peaches, pomegranates and melons and tomatoes…the smell of the fruit and the wine blew toward them like a promise of all happiness.

The feast is gorgeous and hearty and good and yet the sailors claim there is “too much magic about here.” If they imbibe Aslan’s food, they will imbibe his great and terrible grace. At last, following the example of Reepicheep, (always the most courageous in his trust of Aslan,) they eat. Ramandu’s daughter tells them that the banquet is renewed each day, and they watch as what they have not consumed nourishes great flocks of birds. The great lion feeds even the “birds of the air.”

But of course, when faced with a mysterious banquet, not all are Reepicheep, willing and able to believe that good givers give good gifts. Aslan gives Diggory the simple instruction to “Pluck an apple from the tree, and bring it back to me.” Diggory obeys, but once there he encounters Jadis who, in sharp rebellion against the command on the gate, has taken the fruit for herself and stained her mouth nastily with it. She has made herself her own giver, her own god. She then tries to  convince Diggory to do likewise, to take for his own ends, to be savior to his dying mother: “We are here by ourselves and the Lion is far away. Use your magic and go back to your own world. A minute later, you can be at your Mother’s bedside, giving her the fruit.” The witch tempts Diggory to be the giver himself, not to trust and obey the ultimate and good giver of the food. Yet a refusal to trust the giver of a good meal will ultimately lead only to bondage. The stubborn dwarves in The Last Battle refuse to believe there is a world beyond the stable door though they sit in the midst of it. Aslan lays a great feast in front of them but they will not accept that they are eating anything but hay and refuse, and end by brawling over the imagined scraps. They do not trust the food because they do not trust Aslan. “Their only prison is in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.” Jadis is destined for the same fate: ultimately the good and healing fruit becomes a “horror” to her, because she would not trust and ate it “at the wrong time and in the wrong way.”

However, Diggory does not follow the witch’s example, but instead brings the apple back to Aslan, trusting the giver for the way through to life. The Lion then makes good on that trust, in glorious fashion. He offers the boy an apple off of the new tree, grown to protect Narnia. “What I give you now will bring joy. It will not, in your world, give endless life, but it will heal. Go. Pluck her an apple.” So Diggory brings the apple of healing and youth home to his mother, not as the giver, but as merely the agent of her recovery. As his mother at last falls into a “real, natural and gentle” sleep it is the peace and rest of Aslan, the giver of the fruit, reflected in her eyes, which Diggory dares to hope will bring her new life.

Years before Narnia really came to be, Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.” Lewis has crafted characters who, in consuming the food laid before them, the bread or the wine or the meat, accept also the inherent virtues and evils of the hands that have provided it, and are often changed by them. Edmund and Lucy and Eustace perhaps see this best, as they approach the end of the world, hand-in-hand, and come upon the clearest and brightest giver of all: a white Lamb, who has prepared a meal before them. “They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted.”

Christian Bookstores and the Joy That Keeps Me Awake

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Last week one of my students asked me to lead a Bible study. There was one particular book which she wanted to go through, written by a local youth pastor’s wife. With play rehearsals on top of senior thesis grading on top of the rest of my job, it wasn’t until today that I got around to finding a copy to read. First I went to Barnes and Nobles, but they didn’t have it in stock, so I called my dad. I asked him what other big bookstores there were in town. He told me none. So then I asked him where that Christian bookstore was, and let him tell me, although I already knew. And then I went.

From the moment I pulled up, I was, as my pastor during college would have said, profoundly uncomfortable. I am a follower of Christ and I have spent my whole life in Christian community. I love walking into churches. I love books. Quite obviously, I think it is a good thing to read and write about Jesus, and I know full well that if the contents of this blog were ever to be really published, that is the sort of store that would sell them. And yet.

There were posters of smiling women all inside the display windows, and when I walked in it smelled like potpourri and both cashiers shouted hello.  But potpourri doesn’t bother me, and I am definitively in favor of smiles and people who give them to me.

I was probably inside for a total of three or four minutes. I can find books very fast when I want to, and they had the one I needed. It was just past the Christian board books section, in the women’s section, where most of the covers were pink or had pictures of rushing water on them.

When the lady rung me up she asked for my phone number, my full name, my mailing address. I wanted to say, Please don’t send me things. I don’t want your things. You have an entire wall devoted to Beth Moore, Karen Kingsbury is displayed with your “Best New Reads,” and your open sign is shaped like an ichthys. Why can’t it just be shaped like an open sign?!? But instead I told her my phone number, my full name, my mailing address. Then I walked out with a bag which said “Biblical Solutions to Life” on the side. I drove away and tried to figure out why that had been such an unpleasant experience.

Sometimes I lie awake at night because I have too many thoughts. They don’t  have time to be thought of during the day, so once I turn out my light they tumble around and around in my head, delighted to have my attention at long last. Sometimes they are angry and bitter thoughts. More than once this year I have decided with great certainty that whoever dreamed up the idea of teaching as an actual career is a sadist, on level with Rasputin or Iago, and ought to be taken out and shot.

But other nights are different. Other nights joy keeps me awake. Joy that I bought stickers at Target to put on a rough batch of tests, joy that high schoolers like to laugh and like to laugh at themselves, joy that I have people I love enough to miss, joy, to be honest, that students want me to lead a Bible study. This is the sort of joy that makes me feel very small. Small and loved and promised and clean. The greatest lesson I have learned in teaching is the hugeness of my own inadequacy and and the irrelevance of that inadequacy in the face of God’s abundant grace.

I think that there are fair and wise criticisms to be made of the idea of a Christian bookstore or of a Christian culture in general. But I don’t think I am the person to make them. I walked into that place this evening as a female teacher at a Christian school with plans to lead a Bible study for teenage girls. I knew I was their ideal demographic and I resented it. I did not want to think they might have anything to teach me. I wanted Jesus to reassure me that no, of course, he would never have come to a place like this. I was prepared to remind myself that he was my God and not theirs.

But the God of small joys, who pries open my fingers and teaches me to hold my palms out empty before him, is far wiser than I. If he can change me through cheap princess stickers and flubbed blocking in a high school drama rehearsal, it is faithless of me to claim he cannot be present in books that cry out his name on every page. Perhaps I will lie awake tonight thinking about that.

You will show me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy.

Permission to Fear

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I am home for a snow day today and absurdly grateful for it.

I have been thinking quite a lot about fear lately, and but I am having a very difficult time marshaling my thoughts. I don’t know why fear is so hard to talk about, because everybody is afraid. Fear is probably the most universal emotion–even those who’ve hardened themselves to love and to hate still know fear. Almost every bad and sinful choice any of us ever make is a result of letting fear rule us.

Maybe the reason I don’t like to talk about fear is that I know that I shouldn’t live in it, and I am ashamed that I do. I am ashamed that I am frightened to say certain things or to talk to certain people. I am ashamed that I let others’ opinions matter so much, even when I know they are wrong. I am ashamed that sometimes today and its small, assorted burdens terrify me like nothing else. “You are too intelligent and privileged to be afraid.” I tell myself. “If TSwift and Florence can shake it off, then so can you.”

But sometimes I can’t. More often than not it seems the walls of my heart are eggshell thin and the weighty little fears of the day crush in through them and paralyze and panic me. And then there I am, along with Paul, not doing what I will to do, but instead doing what I hate.

So I’ve decided that I’m just going to be scared. I’m giving myself permission to be afraid, for my face to blanch and my mouth to get dry. When fear shows up I will not try to push him out. Instead, I will send him to sit in the back corner, and speak to him often. I’ll say to him, “I will let you stay, but you must know that while you have the power to make my knees shake and my voice stutter, you have no power over my will. Do your worst. Smash my heart all the way down into my stomach. Force me to taste my own bitterness all night long. You are mortal and weak. And when I hold you up to the light of the Gospel I can see right through you.”

And then, with fear sitting on a straight-backed chair in the corner of my chest, I will go on doing. To be frightened is to have the opportunity to be exhilaratingly brave, so with a fist-sized lump in my throat I will go on speaking. When I become too scared, I will laugh. We are told that perfect love casts out fear, so while I wait for perfect Love to do just that, I will serve Him who gives me “that grace to begin.”

Three Memories for the Mid-Way Point

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My junior year of high school we took U.S. History. One day at lunch, part-way through the year, I found a classmate crying in the hallway. She told me she had failed the last few history tests and she was too intimidated to ask the teacher and she was just so, so lost. We were not particularly friends, but I politely offered to help and I remember being surprised when she was eager to take me up on it. So she came over a couple nights later and we sat at my dining room table and ate brownies and talked about tariffs. After we got our next test back, she wrote me a profusely sweet little note, “ALICE! Thank you so, so much for helping me! I got an 84!” An 84, I thought, That’s good? I would hate an 84. And every time I remember that I thought that, I am ashamed. I want to go back and grab my sixteen-year-old self by the lapels of her worn-out uniform sweater and shake her. I want to tell her that in six years’ time she will not remember a single one of her own silly test grades but she will remember that beautiful, hard-won B-. She will remember the smiley-faces that were drawn all over that note, and she will be humbled by them.

This Christmas my family flew up to Minnesota, and en route we had what became an eight-hour layover in the Atlanta airport. We sat and we sat and I watched the people. There were a lot of servicemen and women–lots of Marines especially–some hurrying to catch a flight and some just waiting. As one after another went by and I hoped for each one that he was going home, I realized that though the women in uniform looked like women, the men mostly looked like boys. I did the math in my head, and realized that most of them were probably closer in age to my students than they were to me. Then they looked very young indeed. In the midst of all of that sitting and watching, I wrote this in my prayer journal, about my students: “I must keep repeating my mantra from earlier in the year, before I cared about them so much: You love them far more than I ever will and You do it better. There is nothing I can break down that You cannot build back up and stronger. I will trust in Your love for them.”

My sophomore year of college was my hardest. Everything looked very grey to me and I felt grainy and sad. If you have been reading this blog long enough you may remember. That March, at the tail end of my spring break, my mom and George came up to visit me. I remember running out into the ice and snow to meet them when the car pulled up. My mom got out to hug me, and then she said, “Oh, I brought you something.” She leaned into the car and turned back around holding a mason jar full of bright yellow daffodils from home. Just last night I remembered all this rather suddenly and for reasons I still cannot articulate, I cried while remembering. The snow, and the slate-colored sky, and the weary brick of my dorm building, and then my mother’s familiar hands, holding daffodils which she had carried over nearly five hundred miles of highway.

On Listening

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Recently I have been remembering that January can be hard. For a month that supposed is about beginnings, it feels awfully in between.

For the past several New Year’s Eves I have stayed in with my family, (by past several, of course, I mean every single one of my life,) but this year I went to the Avett Brothers’ concert in Raleigh. We sat way up in the nosebleeds in the PNC arena, about level with the balloons hoisted up in nets, ready to be dropped at the stroke of 2015. Karen and I propped our feet up and watched. I was delighted to remember what it is to be an observer, someone with the luxury of seeing and hearing and thinking to oneself. I rediscovered the occasional joy I find in listening.

Sometimes I am a good listener and sometimes I am not. Sometimes I am listened to and sometimes I am not. Listening, of course is more than just waiting politely while somebody talks, trying to digest what they say so that the next thing out of your mouth sounds relevant. Truly good listening involves care not just for our own words, but for the speaker’s: what did they mean by what they said, and what did they mean us to hear? Is there truth in this, or if there are lies, where are they coming from, and why?

I decided the other day that there are times in our lives (say through our twenties or so) when we should not be allowed to speak quite as much: we girls especially. When a friend is glad or sad we have such a tendency to try to paste over our obligations of affection to them by saying that we love them or that we’re so very, very happy, and then doing nothing more. When we do not know how to care for people, we claim that our care is floating around in the feelings in the air, and then we move along. We try to convince them of our love instead of actually loving.

Listening can teach us out of that, I think. If we listen well and constantly, we might learn so much: pain, patience, loyalty, sorrow, joy, the mutability of the human heart, and its simultaneous mysterious eternity. At long last, listening might teach how to manifest that love we only feel or the love we outright lack. I suspect that, at times, listening is the manifestation of love.

So the beginning of the new year for me was an exercise in attentiveness and remembering how to do it. I came to a new place in my old boots with old friends, and at midnight the balloons and confetti rained down on those below and for the rest of the concert I could hear latex popping in the quiet between songs. The little pear-shaped old man on the next row down bobbed his head to the music, as he had all night, and I only sang along when I knew the words. My best friend informed me that “auld lang syne” meant “times long past,” and I decided I’d rather not forget them.

The Christmas in Minnesota

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I have a week before I go back to teaching and there is so, so much to do (most of it having nothing to do with school.) But before I do all of the so, so much I need to keep up a tradition. Every year on this blog I have written about Christmas, with the exception of last year, when I must have been too busy with my novel to do anything here except whine about how tired I was. Oops. But anyway, this year there is no frantic writing independent study, only a surprisingly well-rested Alice, too distracted to take on her real to-do list.

This Christmas was quietly different from all the others (related here, here, and here.) It was both more joyful and more painful. As I get older such feelings are more keen, but more often than I used to, I know what they mean and I know what to do with them. I do not, however, always know how to express them.

I thought that I would tell you about the week in the old way, beginning to end, like a story, but it does not have enough narrative thread for that. It has a setting, of course: a Bible camp up in the Iron Range of Minnesota, where the camp director has raised his seven children, and has recently moved his quickly aging parents. Because it is Christmastime children, grandchildren, husbands, wives, and two little boys named after the same great-grandfather have converged upon the camp, where the ground is slushy, but still a bit slick. With them, they bring chocolate and the old family Christmas songbooks. They plan to stay for four or five days.

So that is the stage set, but beyond that, there is no plot, one event does not lead to another, so if I told it like that, it would make no sense. That is was not what it was. The week was not a story in itself, but merely an infinitesimal part of a great and large story, a moment about the length of a heartbeat.

My grandparents are near the end of that story. My grandma is confused and sad and only partly herself. She tries to introduce her grandchildren to one another, but remembers the taste of the orange balls she used to make. My frail grandpa is contemplative and eager for coherent company. While the girls organized a game of cousin knockout on Christmas Eve he stood bent over in the corner of the gym and enthusiastically dribbled a basketball till it bounced out of reach. He stands up in Sunday meeting and says that we are greatly blessed by Christ’s coming. And he asks, again and again, that we all sing “Come Let Us Adore Him.” (That’s his preferred title for the carol, I think, because he does not consider himself particularly “faithful,” but he does know Jesus to be worthy of adoration.)

My mother and her siblings are at another part of the story. A part which is harder and less certain than they anticipated, I think. They take charge and they clean and they cook and they delegate and they worry. They find perhaps that, more than before, they have no one older and wiser to pass their worries along to, save passing them around in a circle to one another. They must go straight back to the Source with it all, give every bit of it up in prayer. Then when next their hands are free on Christmas Eve some one of us bestows upon them a child to hold: a quiet, solemn little gift-baby, theirs for a few minutes, who will nestle his head into their shoulder and rest.

Then there are the grandchildren. (That’s us.) We are at the part of the story in which we have come into our own, some of us without noticing. I can only speak for myself, but the old excitement for Christmas has been replaced by a certain sober joy. My cousins sat on the couch and helped grade the fill-in-the-blanks on the last test I gave, and I remembered sprawling on the end-room bed with them, summers before, reading To Kill a Mockingbird. On the 23rd we dragged down the tree from the attic, set it up with great care, and literally festooned the rafters with lights. On Christmas Eve night, we had a dance party (inspired by Sally’s cautious hip-hop moves.) When we are together now, we want to be together. We don’t care if we dance like Peanuts characters. We are not forgetting ourselves, but deliberately setting ourselves aside. We are slowly, at our own paces and in our own ways, learning the value of what has been given to us: the old summers in the above-ground pool, Proverbs read at breakfast-time, full couches and long legs, parents who name their daughters Hope.

Earliest in the story are Billy and Liam. Small lap-sitters, futures unseen, no worries beyond whether they too are allowed to have some of that candy they see everyone else has got. It is for them that Christmas is intended first and foremost. Jesus’s beginning as infant was his loud, clear announcement of his intentions: that since he was coming as the least of these, he meant to love and save the least of these.

And so, if we follow the story, beginning to end (or end to beginning, as it were,) we find the Son of God at its core: the adored gift-child, bearing in his tiny frame all the fearful hope and promise of his death for our redemption.

Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee. Israel’s strength and consolation, hope of all the earth thou art; dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.

Christmas and Awe of a Small Kind

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Last night, I was having trouble sleeping because my head was so stuffy and my room was chilly, so I wrapped myself in a warm blanket and curled up on the chair in the upstairs hallway. All the lights were out and I watched the gas heater flickering in front of me. Inside the blacked windows on the front of the heater, there is a cracked and crusted latticework, and behind that burns a tall, orange flame. Last night I turned it up so I could hear the gas softly roaring and ticking, and all around the foot of the lone tongue of fire, dozens of tiny blue flames sprung up. I stared at the impressive shadows the fire cast through the latticework into the darkness, and pitifully wished that I could still breathe through my nose.

When I was a little girl, I used to turn up those flames just to watch them burn. I would crouch on the floor, pressed against the little factory-printed placard which read, “Keep children, clothing, and furniture away,” and I would imagine that the inside of that heater was a small cathedral. The shapes of the lattice pointed heavenward like church windows, and the tall flame was a preacher, praising his God. All the little blue fires were his congregation, or sometimes even the choir, if I turned it up very high so that I could hear them singing hallelujah in a quick, clicking rhythm as gas was released. I thought it was the most beautiful little world in there. Sometimes, even at the wise old age of seven or eight, I had to restrain myself from prying the hot glass off the front to see if I could get inside, enter the cathedral, burn like a singing flame beneath the majesty of those arches.

Last night as I sat in the darkness and watched the tall flame rise and rise and rise I remembered all that. I wondered why I didn’t feel awe like that anymore, especially at Christmastime, the time of the lighted fir tree and the swelling choral arrangement. A couple months ago I told my students very certainly that if they ever found themselves in a place in life in which there were not awed, then they were in the wrong place. I burrowed deeper into my blanket and doubted my own words.

I do believe that awe is the response for which the Advent season begs. This is why we set children in the midst of it, hand them presents, watch their faces glow, and sentimentally compare them to the baby in the manger. Awe comes naturally when you are small and everything looks big, and it is for this reason that Christ bids us to “come as little children.”

But there are other sorts of Christmases, lest we forget. New life always arrives with the silent promise of eventual death. Two years ago I wrote this entry about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, and last night I could not stop thinking about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” “A cold coming we had of it,” the kingly speaker says “…A hard time we had of it…Sleeping in snatches, / With the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” The wise men reach the appointed place (there is no mention of a bright, guiding star, no room for awe,) and the wine is all drunk up, three trees grow close together in a meadow, and a white horse mysteriously gallops away as they approach. The speaker pronounces the wonder they have come to see to be “satisfactory.” Then, hesitantly, he continues,

I had seen birth and death,  

But had thought they were different; this Birth was 

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, 

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

I actually got up out of my warm chair last night and turned on the light so I could re-read that poem. And even now, a day later, I am still struggling to explain the solace it offered me. It seemed to say that the way birth pains mirror death pains is not coincidental, that sleeping only in snatches is better than not waking at all, that at times it is well to be unsatisfied with the “old dispensation.”

So, if the remembrance of Christ’s birth does not provide me with the feeling of awe which I’ve been demanding, at least it brings me a measure of certainty. Certainty that God made his promises with the purpose of fulfilling them, that that there is order in his plan, that Someone much greater than myself is at work far beyond my sight. (Someone greater than myself? Beyond my sight? Perhaps this is awe after all. Awe of a small kind.)

After I read the poem I turned off the light again and returned to my chair by the flickering heater. I pulled the blanket tight, tight around me and I prayed. I prayed for those magi, and their hard, cold journey towards the Savior. (Sometimes I figure that if eternity is eternity and God really is outside of time, I can pray for anyone anywhere in history, and my Lord will hear.) I prayed that my own heart would soften and rest. I prayed for my students to whom, I think, awe still comes naturally. I prayed and I watched the tall flame glimmer in the cathedral, and listened to the tick of the gas valve in the dark, warm room.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.” Isaiah 9:2

Thankfuls about Teaching

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I have just spent all afternoon grading a test on American Democracy and the West, and I am tired.

But on Friday, after my last class, during the peace of a seventh period planning hour, I was sorting through paper and books and I thought to myself, “Oh, I like my job.” Please note: that is the first time that thought has ever “risen unbidden,” in my mind, as they say. That is the first time this year that I have been able to be thankful for my circumstances without prompting.

Not that prompting is a bad thing. A prompting to be grateful is the conscience. A prompting to be grateful is the Holy Spirit. But when, every once in a while, thankfulness arises easily (as it should) then that is grace and I will celebrate.

So here I am, a few days later, trying with all my little might to catch the tail-end of that spontaneous gratitude. I am going to tell you what I love about teaching.

I am thankful for my students. I am thankful for the students who ask questions, especially those questions that begin with something other than “What do we need to know about…” or “Did we go over…” I am thankful for the students who take responsibility for their actions and attitudes. I am thankful for the students whose hands shoot up like air-propelled rockets during class discussion. I am thankful most of all, perhaps, for the students who work so hard that, no matter the final grade, I can feel the sheer effort and earnestness radiating off each page they write for me. I hope they know that I love them, and sometimes even admire them.

I am thankful for the people I teach with. I am thankful for their advice and trust and constant, present support. I am thankful for the pumpkin-shaped basket full of candy in the workroom. I am thankful to sit on roll-y chairs around a big table and eat lunch with them each day. Last week, when there was an open mic hour in forum to for students to thank the teachers, I wanted so badly to get in line with the rest of the kids who were waiting to speak. I am grateful for the sanity these men and women bring. But most of all I am grateful for—more than grateful for, awed by—their steadfast compassion and prayers both for my students and myself. I ceased to be their pupil years ago, but they are still teaching me so much.

And I am thankful for teaching itself. At its best, teaching is a little bit like writing in real-time. (I guess, at its worst, it’s like that too. Like a really poorly organized essay that doesn’t have a thesis statement or even a prompt…) I am thankful for test-writing, which I have quickly discovered is the secret glory of teaching. I am thankful to be pushed to study and then communicate history which I know is shaping me as I watch it shape my students. Stories, especially those that really happened, have the powerful effect of washing over in waves and re-shaping the clay of my soul.

At the core, I suppose I am most thankful to be part of something which is so much bigger than I. In the grand scheme of the educations of these forty-five people, I am the least important facet. Certainly for now, they rely on me, and because of that, as the apostle James says, I’ll be held to a higher standard, so I must give my utmost and beyond. But the responsibility for their minds and the “weight of their glory,” as Lewis would call it does not end with me. I am thankful that though the calling before me may sometimes feel like a burden laid upon my back, we are never asked to carry a burden any farther than Golgotha. At the foot of the Savior, we may drop our weights and duties, for they were His to begin with, and we may worship with empty hands.

A Couple Things I Miss

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I am home sick from work because my head feels like an over-inflated balloon, so clearly now is the time to write. There are many good things about teaching, (and I hereby pledge to write to you about them in a couple weeks, just in time for Thanksgiving,) but oh, how I miss writing.

The problem is not that I don’t have the time to write. I’ve never believed that as an excuse, anyway. I always managed to write when I was a student, both in high school and college. If there is time to breathe, there is time to write.

The problem, I think, is that I haven’t yet learned how to let teaching act as a catalyst for writing. Writing is never really born out of itself, you know. You see something or read something or hear something, E.B. Browning writes of the “gold and purple” of her husband’s heart or Don Draper takes his kids back to see his childhood home, and suddenly a wonderfully itchy little ball begins to form in your midsection, and you’re off. It’s that little outside idea which ignites the whole wonderful Rube Goldberg process of getting words onto paper. Unfortunately, I have yet to learn how, as a teacher, to pick up on those little hints to kick-start the machine, and right now my life has time for precious few other sources of inspiration.

I come home, want to write, and review my options: I could begin work on a fourth draft of novel #1, but really I should wait for an agent to help me do that. Right? Right. That’s what they tell me. Well, to attract that agent I should get a few stories published in reputable magazines. This means I should I actually write a few stories. But the only idea I currently have is for a little Flannery O’Connor knock-off, which would probably turn out to be pretty useless. I could work on organizing chapters and scenes for novel #2…But does my room really need that clutter of scribbly index cards when novel #1 still requires so much ripping apart and pasting back together? So I come sidling back to my blog for the first time in almost a month. Hello. I’m rusty with my words, but I’m making an effort.

There is something else I miss. Besides the writing. Something more basic and more valuable. A couple weeks ago I was talking to one of my best friends from college and she mentioned that she might have a family wedding down in my area next fall, and would come and see me. “Jacks, really? Please come.” I said, “I would cry.” I meant it as a joke, I really did, but then there were tears on my cheeks. I miss my friends. I have good ones.

I don’t just mean the girls I went through college with. I mean my sister in Tennessee and my Karen in Madrid. I mean so many of you. Friendship is a wonderfully incomprehensible thing. One can pick up friends in the strangest and most sudden ways, lose them states away, and then find them again years later like the missing right half of your favorite pair of socks. How did this happen? I wonder sometimes. How do you and I find so much to say to one another? And why is it that we would rather be silent together than apart?

Lewis, who I rather think knew a lot about friendship, wrote this:

“In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”

This idea that God meant us for one anothers’ lives, to stretch and grow and comfort each other in our own certain ways brings me a particular quiet delight. He knew our friendships would extend over miles and months, that our worries and prayers for one another would form fine threads connecting us from here to there to the next place, elongating till their length could wrap round the whole world. Those continuing threads of affection are what He intended. I am so thankful.

Oh, look… Somehow my God has given me a small, but perceptible, path from discontent to gratitude. How good it is to miss things. How near to nostalgia lies joy.