Time

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Time has become my ultimate enemy. Not the great hooded figure whom Shakespeare fears, standing and cradling his massive scythe, but instead his nasty, pockmarked little cousin who crouches on the floor and counts out the hours like currency. He carries a scythe too: it’s small and sharp and with it he kills sleep and he kills joy.

Okay. Well then. Now that that ponderous metaphor is out of my system, we can move along.

Really, though, I am staging a rebellion against minutes and deadlines and ticking second hands. Or trying to, at least. This semester has been too much for me in some ways. I was secretly triumphant last week when my alarm clock gave up the ghost and I blissfully slept an extra hour and a half.

I’ve just had a nice long car ride full of no obligations (i.e. a little computer that will no longer hold a charge) and friendly company, so in the spirit of my revolution against the pressure of the hours, I’d like to propose the following amendments to my own manifesto.

-Don’t antagonize sleep. When you go to bed in the wee hours and are still not able to rest, don’t pull out your computer again to do a little more. Be patient. Wait.

-When the number and scale of responsibilities frighten you, pray over your hours.

-Eat meals at the table. Try not to bring your work with you.

-Remember it’s only little old you and your little old worries. And God is very great.

-Take long baths.

-Place diligence over deadlines. Think of whatever your mother would say.

-Remember that you love to write and read and talk. Don’t let yourself twist God’s blessings into burdens.

-Wage war on the passive voice with courage. Go forth and do. Do the next thing.

The notes above are obviously intended for time immemorial, but it’s also worth pointing out that this is Holy Week. The hours of this week have great import for life and death and death-in-life and life-in-death. So I will pause, and worship, and remember Him who is eternal, who created time and came down to enter it Himself, who knows that it too may be redeemed.

 

Rest

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I don’t remember when I made this decision, but I decided not to do any work this weekend. I decided, instead, to rest. I had a sleepover with one of my best friends, I made myself eggs at midnight, I had a date with a four-year-old, I watched The Descendants, I began to make color-coded revision plans, I talked to my sister, I drove down I-80 to pick up another close friend, I went to church, and I had people over for dinner and made grits and green beans. It has been good, but I have discovered that rest takes quite a lot more effort than I’d thought.

I was not happy all weekend. I may even have cried and whined more than usual. I worried about my undone work and occasionally wondered if every hated me. I didn’t even have any good hair days. But I was unable to hide, to push my fears off till later. When you choose rest, you rather frighteningly give leave for the important things to become important, and for the urgent and its ilk to fade into the background. I was forced to admit the futility of my own action and inaction in the face of my God’s dying and rising.

I had to really listen to my friends, because there was nothing else to do. I had to listen to the spaces between their words, to feel their fears in my own gut. I had to sit alone in my own silence. I had to pray. It is easy to write, but I find it so hard to pray. When I pray there is no chance of impressing my audience, no chance for applause, only a dreadful promise that I will be loved, and I will be changed. This ripping feeling in my chest, I think, is resting in the Lord.

On Saturday I sat behind the pulpit in the chapel with little Tamagn, and read Dr. Seuss to him, he told me that he did not like “this house.” He was frightened that the robed figures in the stained glass windows would come alive and speak to him, and he was frightened of the sounds which he knew might swell from the pipes of the organ. I am sometimes afraid in God’s house too. I am afraid of the One who made me, who loves me though I betray Him. Such power and faithfulness is more than I can comprehend, so I busy myself with all other things. I pretend that the noise with which I surround myself keeps me from Him, when really it is my heart, sodden in its own fear.

But Jesus is awake and Jesus is alive. When I am silent, He shouts and it hurts. Those pipes and those bright figures in glass will not remain always still. The “great sloth heart” is moving. It knows it will find rest only in its Maker, and that “all else is trifling,” as the puritans pray. Because of Him, I write to you tonight with still hands and with raw newness in my heart.

Meaning What I Say

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I feel as if this blog has turned into a rather haphazard space over the past few months and for that I apologize. If you want to know what I’ve been busy doing, particularly for the past couple weeks, my main occupation has been going around and telling people how tired I am. I have quite a nice little speech about it now: I begin by talking about emotional exhaustion and end with a few glistening little tears. Very affecting, I’m sure. And it is true. I do always strive to mean what I say. If I tell someone that I am tired, or I say that I am alright in that staunch, plaintive way, I will feel tired and alright for the rest of that day and possibly most of the next, because I have said that it is so.

But I am other things besides tired. Tired is not the only thing. So I will tell you the rest of those things now. I will say them, and help myself along the road to meaning them.

I am amused. I am amused by this semester’s eclectic “Things Done” list. I am amused by Dr. Brown’s excitement that she knows someone who has seen T.S. Eliot. I am amused by the inexplicable ways some people indent their emails. I am amused that last night at two o’clock I found myself sitting on our table complacently eating sweet potato and rutabaga because I could not sleep.

I am hopeful. I am hopeful for my little novel. I am hopeful for the midterm essays I have due tomorrow and that perhaps I will do laundry soon. I am hopeful for my friends, for their courage and their patience. I am hopeful for coming spring.

I am awed. I am awed to write and to breathe and to sometimes sing. I am awed not only to have found a friend in Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Conner, but in Ralph Ellison and even occasionally William Faulkner. I am awed that sometime recently I seem to have stumbled into a venerability which allows me to call myself a woman, and not merely a girl.

And I am certain. I am certain that my God is good. I am certain that I am His. I am certain that He means all this: the long cold spells, the singing birds in the still-bare trees, the rising sun in the clouded sky. I am certain that my God always and eternally means what He says.

Community

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I am home for a whole week of break. Yesterday afternoon I took a walk with my dad and it was sunny and balmy. This afternoon I took a walk with my mom and it was bitter and rainy. (No reflection on respective parents, I’m sure.) My plans for this week include seeing people I love, doing a very small amount of homework, applying for a couple more jobs, writing things which are not my novel, and reading about Christianity and fiction. Also a lot of sleep.

This is a funny place to be, in my last semester. I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of the world, and that in May I’ll fall into it head-long for the first time, but of course that is silly. I’ve been in the world all along. I was born into it.

I am frightened about next year’s changes, though. I am not worried about a job or a home or a car (though I’m sure I ought to be sometimes.) Instead, I am rather predictably worried about being lonely. I am terrified to step out of the tight knit little college atmosphere, well-insulated with people who love me deep and well, into a looser sort of place where, though I will have support, there will not always be a hand to hold within arm’s length, or a smiling face directly when I look over my shoulder.

In college, I have gratefully stumbled into friendships with interesting, valuable, layered people. I’ve become an aficionado of the one-on-one friendship, of the tea date, of laughter and the well-placed, comfortable bit of sass. I have collected friends who don’t mind my camping out on their couches when they’re not home, who remember my aunts and cousins though they’ve never met them, who dutifully read this little blog.

I love these people dearly and I intend to absolutely hold onto them for quite a long time, but I am realizing more and more that what I will need when I graduate (and what I have perhaps missed, sometimes rather keenly, throughout college) is community. A common group with common loves.

Dr. Messer asked me the other day if I had any friends or peers who were as invested in writing as I was—people I could really get into it with. I don’t and I never really have. It is also true that, though it takes more courage than I would like to admit to say so, I still find it much easier to write about my God than to talk about Him with friends. It is not that they don’t love Him too, but that we’ve been shy to build our friendships on Him, shy to say His name.

I am indeed shy to write this because I am not ready to step away from the people I consider to be my best friends. I do not intend to ever be ready. I will always love them as I do now, except someday hopefully a little better. I am, however, longing for this community of which I still maintain only the vaguest idea.

I sent out the second draft of my novel to quite a few people last week, and that has, unexpectedly, (though why I wouldn’t expect it, I have no idea) been quite a start. For the first time all these people have the opportunity to read the pages onto which I’ve strained my pale little soul for the last two semesters. It makes me wonder how it would be to sit down and wholesale read the draft of someone else’s novel, someone else’s carefully strung words. How it would be to sit down and say, what do you think a Christian novel might be in the twenty-first century? Do you think it can exist? Do you think you or I might write one? Perhaps we ought to pray and then begin.

Seeing To It

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Last night I went to the grocery store for milk and bread and things, left the milk behind at the cash register, and did not even miss it till about eleven this morning. I worked on revising my novel for nearly four hours, then walked up to campus this afternoon to see friends and thought about how glad I will be not only for the snow to melt but for the spring rains to come along and wash all the salt and grime away and give the earth’s face a good washing.

A couple weeks ago I was reading Matthew for my New Testament class and I came across Judas.

Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”

‘And they said, “What is that to us? You see to it!” Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself.

The chief priests buy a field with the money and name it after blood, then Matthew moves the narrative back to Christ facing Pilate. Pilate washes his hands, because he cannot handle the crisis in front of him. So Jesus carries the cross and “sees to it.” Jesus and Judas both die.

So when I read that passage above, I wanted Judas to turn around before he ran to the temple with his tainted silver. I wanted him to look once more at the condemned Man, I wanted the betrayer to look at the One he had betrayed, and perhaps see the way innocent blood might save a sinner. Instead he spattered his corrupt blood over his sins to try to pay, because paying was all he knew, and left behind the legacy of a field fit only for strangers’ bones. The chief priests gathered up the price of their own long-awaited Messiah’s life off the floor of a temple that was meant for Him.

Judas tried to “see to” his guilt himself, because he saw only himself. He looked at his Lord’s impending death upon the cross and saw only his own sinful actions. He did not see Christ sweating blood in the garden because He already knew what lay ahead. He did not see Christ cry to his Father, “Why have You forsaken Me?” or announce what He had finished. Judas looked only at himself, and did not understand the way Jesus meant His death, meant the spilling of His blood, meant the saving of His people.

On Sunday, Judas had begun to rot and Jesus had risen and told His friends to rejoice. He told them not to be afraid, that He was with them always. Judas thought that his traitorous kiss meant a grim and dismal end, but my God, the God whose “unoffending feet” I have determined to look to instead of my own, carried the mark of that betrayal through crushing death into new life and victory. He shall see to it that Fields of Blood and stony hearts are made new.

One Hundred

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This is my hundredth entry.

I remember when I first started college and my mom told me I should start a blog. I knew about mommy blogs and food blogs and fashion blogs and celebrity blogs and look-I’m-adventurous-and-studying-abroad blogs. But I was only going to college, and most people I know do that. Sure, I liked to write, but I did not think I would have anything very out-of-the-way to say. I told her ‘No.’

Then one day that first fall semester, I was bored, and I made a wordpress account. A few days later I nervously posted this. And it stuck. The feeling of writing and having others read it stuck to my ribs.

Within months it became indispensable to me. I got used to the feeling of an idea growing in the back of my mind, of catching the little bugger and slapping it down on paper, poking and prodding and stretching its edges till it was just as I wanted.

I have written about my small travels, about sitting home, about my friends, about my classes, about my writings and my readings, and a great deal about my family. I have learned to write about my God in a way of which I never used to be capable. I am beginning to know him. This blog has caught much of the excess that often overflows my edges.

I often like to pretend that writing here is more than that, though. I like to pretend that writing an entry about a fear or a frustration will simply quench it. That just bringing it out of the darkness and showing it to the internet will kill it swiftly and thoroughly, and I can march forward in triumph without ever looking back. But it never does work like that. It usually takes much more prayer and patience than 600 words can carry until my fears are driven out into the swine.

But while writing will not heal me, it has taught me that I am not alone. My ugly ingrown fears and sins are wonderfully unoriginal and shared by many of the people who surround me. I know because they have told me so. Many of you have told me so, have reminded me that I am one saved wretch among many others.

I may very well have been right freshman year in thinking that I don’t have anything very out-of-the-way to say, but I’ve had the joy of saying it anyway, of being listened to, of crying and laughing at myself, of coming back again and again to pour myself out in convoluted words. I am tremendously grateful. Hooray, little one hundred.

A Pilgrimage in Cold

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I’m writing while travelling, which is a good place for it because you have time to write, and, ostensibly, there are things to write about. (We shall see.)

For the last two weeks of my break I taught a little extracurricular class at a classical school in Durham on performing Shakespeare. I had four girls and on Saturday night they’ll be doing Ophelia’s mad scene at the school’s Arts Festival, and I will be just offstage with my massive Shakespeare book, ready to prompt and grinning when the one playing Laertes bursts out with “to HELL allegiance!” Getting myself home has been a hassle, but being there will be worth it.

Also, of course, the air down south will not be so debilitatingly bitter. It was so cold in Grove City this afternoon that I saw one of the maintenance guys out waiting for a ride in his thick, dark work khaki, deigning to do an undignified little cold-dance.

I have learned things about winter since coming to school up here, things they neglect to tell you in books. I have learned the way snow creaks beneath your feet like old, shifting floorboards, I have learned the way the black top takes on a ghastly spotted grey, and how hands turn an angry, dry pink. I’ve come to love the pain of a good, itching ear-thaw.

I am a deep, soulful lover of spring and so winter here has been a lesson in waiting, but not in waiting only. Crocus-time is quite a ways off, and though I’m already dreaming of it, in the meantime I have a chance to love pilgrimage. A pilgrimage which will continue to lead through that which is uninviting and icy and painfully sharp, through that which I must learn to love,.

So I have the opportunity in wintertime not just to find warmth, but to continue to diligently notice when the sun comes out. When I walk up to campus and back I try not to count my steps, not to hunch my shoulders so harshly against the wind. I try to watch the white out the window when I can, the patches and stretches of it, and remember that spring would be nothing without a long, frozen sleep. That winter is the world’s rest. When the snow melts the grass will be a wonderful green I still fail to comprehend.

But now winter has come in its good time. I shan’t hurry.

Highlights of 2014

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I’m not late, see? I’m just very, very early.

New Years’ evening George had been banned from the computer for something or other and Mary came upstairs and asked me if I smelled something burning. At first we thought it was the heater, but then we realized it was just a bored little brother burning “stuff” in the kitchen sink in his room. (My mom said “I thought he was scared of lighting matches!” We said, “Well, I guess he’s over that.”) So I brought him downstairs and gave him a cello lesson, and he happily plowed through an entirely unrecognizable version of “Twinkle Twinkle.”

The next night Mary and Karen and I played Explorers, quite possibly, as I kept reminded them, the worst card game in the universe. But for some reason, it was fun. Perhaps because we learned that Sir Francis Drake “enflamed the British Isles with desire for new lands,” or maybe because we were eating fresh guacamole, or just because they’re two of my favorite people. All games should be so poorly thought out.

Yesterday I took a walk in the woods with Elspeth which wasn’t long enough, because we never end up having enough time to say all the things we want to say. And whether she knows it or not, that was easily the cheeriest I was all day, because being home is hard sometimes and seems to fit poorly, but friendship has a bolstering effect on the soul.

This afternoon I got an email from Laura in response to something funny I sent her a week or two ago, so not only did I get to reread and reappreciate my own hilarity, but I got to be reminded that I’m not alone in my awkward, uncomfortable winter idleness and that I have a whole semester left with some very dear people before the world opens up at our feet.

And just about an hour ago I had this delightful exchange with my brother:

A: I’m going out.

G: Don’t die.                                                                                                                                          …Where are you going?

A: Oh! He cares! Look at that! I’m going for a walk.

G: No! I, um…yeah. (furiously reads newspaper)

So I walked a bit and came back by way of the Little Free Library around the corner from us where I picked out a memoir, and on my own block I was just cold enough to smell the winter in the air and the woodsmoke from our chimney, and I thought that there are few better feelings than a book under your arm. Here’s to actually reading it.

How to Write a Novel (Part I)

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-Be frightened underclassman.

-Decide to write novel so that will be person worth speaking to at parties and also to change world and self.

-Excitedly produce short prologue out of thin air.

-Realize have, as usual, given main characters awful names.

-Keep names out of cussedness.

-Hope am good enough writer to become famous anyway.

-Settle in gleefully for months of planning.

-Begin with one outline-ish word document.

-Assign pretentious title from Hopkins.

-Spend summer filling awkward orange notebook with disconnected paragraphs, most written by Tolkien, not self.

-Use special pen.

-Never mention to anyone.

-Make lists of books for character (not self) to read.

-Allow word document to spawn eighteen runty chapter babies.

-Eat M&M’s.

-Eventually mention to one friend, then two, then three.

-Refer to as “my story.”

-Become overwhelmed when friends speak confidently of future B&N author cardboard cutouts.

-Feel weird.

-Search internet for pictures which look like characters.

-Discover no one looks like characters.

-Wonder if characters are too ugly or too pretty or just too fictional.

-Encouraged by crazies of NaNoWriMo, write twenty actual pages in one year.

-Hide away in princess lounge to do so, usually wearing pajama pants and fuzzy blanket as cape.

-Pretend am doing something respectable and normal like biology.

-Feel covert and important.

-Watch Mad Men to inspire self.

-Realize have given self five seventeen year old boys to write about.

-Question own decision making skills.

-Tell more people.

-Continue to shyly use word “story.”

-Have brilliant idea to do independent study!

-Realize will have to begin saying word “novel” for clarity.

-Use “novel” in conversation, usually whispering and doing awkward side-eye to gage reaction.

-Promise to put new friends in as characters “just crossing the street or something.”

-Regret decision.

-Write syllabus for following semester, brazenly assigning self one hundred whole pages.

-Become horrified by others’ unconditional confidence in abilities.

-Decide everyone is possibly mentally deficient (including self, for trying.)

-While home for summer, read Thomas Wolfe for inspiration.

-Hate Thomas Wolfe.

-Continue to read Thomas Wolfe.

-Write another actual chapter.

-Regret hundred-page decision.

-Consider sending pathetic email to independent study professor.

-Give chapters to mother.

-Wait.

-Re-read Mennyms books and weep.

-Receive chapters back from mother, covered in red and “don’t be discouraged.”

-Take twelve deep breaths.

-Revise some.

-In first independent study meeting, when professor cheerfully asks about current progress, begin crying.

-Realize am safe from professor ever asking same question again.

-Continue to be terrified.

-Discover deadlines excellent for forcing courage.

-Create whole bookmarks folder of encouragement websites for writing.

-Become surprised by usefulness of internet.

-Put one word after another.

-Become suspicious when professor unequivocally likes new chapters.

-Wonder nervously if professor actually knows about novels.

-Begin to adjust to own use of word “novel.”

-Struggle, however, to adjust to friends’ use of word “book.”

-Become surprised by continual question, “What’s it about, or can I know?”

-Wonder if world, including own English professor’s wife, believe am hording magical personal secrets.

-Become embarrassed by own inability to summarize plot.

-Wish plot was full of magical personal secrets.

-Tell sassy close friend entire plot in detail.

-Allow friend to give character fatal illness.

-Refuse to allow friend to change first name of main protagonist.

-Become less afraid.

-Turn in self-assigned pages approximately 30 hours late on regular basis.

-Decide sleep is good reward for writing.

-Discover if keep self up writing too long, head will refuse to stop writing, even in bed.

-Decide writing will have to be its own reward.

-Send uncomfortable chapter to friend to avoid asking questions of delightfully awkward professor.

-Become pleased with own cleverness.

-Begin writing acknowledgements page.

-Go, go, go.

-Insert unplanned chapter in act of great daring.

-Decide to use as senior honor’s project so will never have to let go of baby.

-Become sloppy.

-Consolidate chapters into document called “A Draft for Word Count and Ego.”

-Long for revision.

-Dream about revision.

-Wish could time travel to next semester when am revising.

-Become alarmed by professor’s comments about narrative point of view.

-Wonder if POV is even important.

-Wonder what POV even is.

-Become reckless.

-Send apologetic late night emails to professor for incoherence of narrative.

-Drink Earl Grey.

-Cry nonsensically loud tears of joy.

-Nearly finish draft before bed.

-Wake up in elation.

-Actually finish draft!

-Post well-planned facebook status.

-Perform deeply private happy dance.

-Raise ire of entire TLC by printing 144 pages immediately before classtime.

-Use massive stapler.

-Carry around printed draft like newborn child.

-Become terrified by others’ eagerness to hold it.

-Email draft to family. (Change “Ego” to “Encouragement.”)

-Sit in bath planning eradication and merging of certain minor characters.

-Refuse to type or write single word in interest of “letting story breathe.”

-Read portions of draft aloud to self while roommate is away.

-Stab maliciously at embarrassing portions with finger.

-Send impossibly patient independent study professor messy thank you note.

-Consider studying for finals.

-Consider beginning new project.

-Continue instead to mentally smother current project with affection and abuse.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Why This Matters

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Yesterday I had my last CivArts and Dr. Munson talked about modernism and postmodernism, all crushed into one little class period. I love modernism, and I am not entirely sure why. I think it is because of the earnestness of self-critique and the push for excellence and the wholehearted love of a worthwhile thing. Nowadays we are rarely interested and earnest and willing, or, if we are, we try not to admit to it too much. No one would want to be our friend.

Of course what happens to modernism is that it is determined to find art only in introspective progress and is sometimes rather obsessed with obscurity. It digs and digs in the darkest recesses looking for new beauties, usually while hiding its eyes from revealed truth. It crouches and shrivels away from the light, until it collapses into a little dung-heap of postmodernism and self-referential irony.

To watch this happen over the course of an hour and half has made me so sad. It’s the terrible history of a people governed by fear.

I know fear. I am afraid. Throughout college I have become a much slower writer because of fear. I am afraid that I will say the wrong thing, that I will not say it well enough, and most of all, I am afraid that the things I write have no real meaning, that my words are just cheap, hollow ornaments which will shatter when dropped, to then be swept up, thrown away, and forgotten.

So, in my small grey puddle of fear, I sympathize with the modernists in their avant-garde tunnel vision. If it’s new, there’s a better chance of something worthwhile being accidentally dredged up in there somewhere, right? At my worst, I must even acknowledge a kinship with the deconstructionists. Some mornings, before I get up, I lie there, deeply afraid that there is nothing worth saying at all.

But I keep writing. I wrote papers this semester, kept up with my blog, edited two magazines, and drafted a novel. Why do I do that? Why do I spend hours of my life crouched on my desk chair, staring at a blinking cursor, hugging my knees, accidentally holding my breath while waiting for a word?

I do it because fear is mortal. I do it because fear pronounces my efforts dead and futile, but John Donne told me that death shall die. I do it because there are bloody hands stretched upon a cross, mighty and willing to save Prufrock from drowning. I do it because death has burst out of the grave and invited me to put my hand in his open side. I do it because a very long time ago, men followed a star in the eastern sky, where the sun rises, and found God incarnate. I do it because the Child who lies in the manger in Bethlehem is eternally stronger than the marked monstrosity which slouches towards it.

“For unto us a Child is born, / Unto us a Son is given.”