Tag Archives: grace

What Words Won’t Do

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This August, I’m writing. I’m writing four papers (none of them terribly long), a first novel chapter, whatever bedraggled poems come begging at my door, many, many to-do lists, and now this blog entry. Hello.

Not to bore you by belaboring the obvious, but I love to write. I do not always find it easy and I rarely find it simple, but it has become to me itself a way of loving. When I see something or someone, really see properly, my first instinct is to write, to conjure out of that spot of time the requisite words, then to order and reorder them till they say the true thing and the beloved sits shining before me in verbs and vowels. Words for me, one who struggles to throw away even the most decrepit of old flannel shirts, are a means of well-ordered, small-s salvation. (You see why I’m attached.)

But, to my continual frustration, I have not been able to explain in words the sort of summer it’s really been. I’ve tried to explain: to others, to God, most often to myself. Yet I cannot, no matter my angle of attack, capture the sort of creeping growth crawling through me as of late. If I look at it, try to catch it in the act, it stops.

So I’m endeavoring to settle in and accept that. Just because I can’t articulate in words what I’ve gained in the last few months doesn’t mean I haven’t learned. (I mean sure, if I can’t properly describe such things, then clearly I’ve failed to fulfill the learning objectives as stated in the syllabus, but, lest we forget, life is not an academic exercise. Thank God.)

Though I cannot draw any succinct conclusions, and words are not arriving on their cues, I can offer a few small tokens: pictures and sounds, things you could hold in your hand for a moment or two.

There has been Pomp and Circumstance playing in a big North Carolina sanctuary and me in a soft brown dress and tired eyes stepping into the line of processing faculty as if I’d been there all along, and there has been a week or more of tires on the asphalt of the interstate: spinning round and round and round but also moving forward.

There has been that ferry ride back from Victoria in the afternoon sunshine with my mother in the seat beside me, while I clutched tight a children’s book I’ve never read before, leaning in to its last melancholy pages with every ounce I had, and there has been the trick pilot who dove and danced and generally defied death in the blue sky above English Bay a couple weeks ago, and the looks of dumb, gentle awe on the faces of the watching crowds at Kits Beach.

But most, there has been this intermittent and wandering sound of my keyboard while the traffic hums soft outside, and there has been a jar of bright, fresh-cut, wild-ish flowers bought for $5 from a homemade stand outside a quiet house on 14th Street.

There have been these things.

Learning Tears

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I thought I would wait until I was in the right mood to write this one, but it has finally occurred to me that I wouldn’t know “the mood” if it marched into my room and smacked me up side the head. So here I am. Still full from lunch, in a little bit of a hurry, and writing.

I’ve always been a crier. I am not, on average, sadder than most, and I’ve certainly been given a very good life—the deeper parts of me are just constantly in touch with the surface parts, and that’s all there is to it. Many people who read this blog know that already. A close friend once told me cheerfully that she would be surprised to have a conversation of any great length with me in which I didn’t tear up at some point. I know I’ve found a true friend when I can begin to cry in their presence and absolutely nothing in their manner toward me changes. And as with any activity one participates in with frequency, I’ve tried to become good at crying. I mix tears liberally with self-effacing laughter, I almost never ruin my make-up, and I rarely sniffle.

But a change has come over my weeping in the last year or so. Perhaps it is the release of no longer teaching and needing to hold the feelings in all day, or the occasionally overwhelming changes wrought by my move to Vancouver, but ultimately I think it may be evidence of a more gut-level shift. Whatever the case, my tears are more and more often mixed nowadays. They are no longer merely sad or hurt or tired. There is often a piece of them, sometimes a sizable piece, which I might call awe. And several times in the last year, I can remember crying for joy.

I did not fully admit this change to myself until this summer, I think. In both of the classes I took earlier in the summer (on the Psalms and on George Herbert) I found myself moved to tears, spoken to, intruded upon by Love. I’m taking a class this week on the theology of desire and it will very probably happen again. The crying may get in the way of taking notes.

Tears have been a part of my rhythm of life for so long, but it never occurred to me that they could be part of learning, that they were complex or strong enough to bear connections not only to my own sticky inward minutiae, but to whole sunny shafts of the hope of glory. But, of course, it seems inappropriate, unseemly to cry during a lecture. Tears make others worried and uncomfortable. People so often feel pressure to do or console or fix. They are unlikely to understand my act of crying simply as evidence of my tuition dollars at work, that it means I am being educated. 

But I must rely on the well-practiced silence of my tears, and not allow myself to be waylaid or cowed by the potential concern of others. The tears which leave that tough, tangible residue on my cheekbones are busy teaching impossibilities, and often Gospel ones. They gather up and weave close the threads of things I once presumed to be far distant from each other: sadness and joy, discipline and gentleness, need and abundance, and my slow-beating heart and the God-made-man who came here, close enough to touch, and died for it.

Promises

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This entry is about two entirely separate things. Please do not try to draw any sort of philosophical, metaphysical, or, least of all, theological connection between the two. Failure to comply may result in misery and confusion. (Exceptions will, as always, be made for literary connections.) Thank you for your cooperation. 

Last week I took a class on the Psalms, and all week they felt very near. This is perhaps a bit inevitable when you listen to someone lecture on a single topic for six hours a day, five days in a row, but nevertheless, the intimacy of those ancient poems, even the ones I’d heard and read dozens and dozens of times before, was startling. Then, as I walked home from church the other night, past the large, still houses and moss-grown trees of Shaughnessy, I realized why that might be. 

I’ve always been hyper-conscious of my good fortune in terms of Christian community: I was born to parents who loved the Lord and displayed that well, and have spent literally the entirety of my life up to my neck in Christian education. I’ve always had more Godly potential role models than you can shake a stick at. Many people may assume that the danger of such a saturated environment might be complacency, or a resentment and restlessness that leads to rebellion, and that’s true for some. But I think that my problem, though I’m still overwhelmingly grateful for what I’ve been given, is that I was so aware of God’s grace towards and concern for the little and large worlds around me that I never, for more than isolated split seconds at a time, took a chance to comprehend His grace towards and concern for me.

But the Psalms blow all this out of the water. They’re full of thoughts of the community (and the nations at large), but they’re also brimming with the voices of individual psalmists claiming God’s promises for themselves–promises of justice, of salvation, of forgiveness, of wisdom, of provision, of mercy, and of righteous, shot-through-with-holy-light love, all for the poet and his singular heart. Not once, not twice, but probably dozens of times as I sat in room 100 last week I found myself thinking, “But has this always been true? Has it always been possible to be alone in a room with God in this way without a chorus of other voices? Has Psalm 103 always had those words in it–confidently declaring that he knows us and understands our human dustliness? Has Psalm 139 always announced with such great firmness that the God of the universe holds the author in His own right hand? And why does this make me weep? Has He promised something to me as well?”

But now for something completely different.

Yesterday, for no particularly constructive reason, I thought through my whole history as a writer. What sorts of things I’ve written at various periods in my life and what I learned about writing as I went. For the first four or five years that I wrote, from the ages of about thirteen to seventeen, while I cared that I was good, I didn’t really care about getting better, perhaps because, with some teenage combination of naivete and arrogance, I didn’t know that was possible. And strangely, I find myself enormously grateful for that, because in those formative years I was motivated only by the joy of the thing. In the years since, as I’ve encountered my own limitations and struggled to stretch beyond them, that joy of the thing has perpetually hovered in the periphery of my vision. I have never once ceased to see words as friends. Thus they began, and thus they will remain.

They are my friends even now in graduate school as I have been tying myself in little mental knots trying to prematurely decide on a direction for my final creative project. And, as often happens, I’ve landed back where I began. I’m going to write a novel, a story which is at gut-level far more important to me than the one I wrote as my honors project at Grove City. 

I have a (very new) theory, that when you get a good idea for a piece of fiction, to help it come to fruition you have to hover over it like an egg that needs a mother or a warm incubator to hatch. You trust the mysterious natural process, and eventually something living will burst forth. And as of last week I have an idea, an idea that I’m fairly certain of, so from here on out if you’re trying to find me I’ll be busy hovering. If I am patient and keep a steady hand, one day there will be words on a page to show for it. And that’s a promise.

The Things We Carry

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I was just scrolling back through the folder where I keep copies of all these blog entries along with the unfinished little runts that never make it out into the light of public consumption, and found a document from late 2017 titled “The Lost Year and Moving Forward.” The only thing it says is “Feb 22.” Its brevity seems much more melodramatic than it actually is, I promise. What follows is the story I know I meant to tell back then (though I think I have a better ending now).

My sophomore year of college, I began a little journaling exercise in which, each day, I would write two lines about what I had done: who I saw, what was significant, how I felt. I didn’t keep on top of it as I could have, and was often doing two or three days at once, but I liked reading back over and knowing what I had been doing a month or, eventually, a year or more before. My love of writing is many things, but it’s partly always just been a very simple inclination towards record-keeping. I like to mark down and remember. I kept this day journal up for years, but then, in February of 2017 I had worn a bit too thin. I was feeling lost and heavy. I had a just made the decision to come to Regent, but was deferring for a year, so while change was on its way it was still a while down the road. I kept finding myself getting weeks behind in my journaling endeavor, and then struggling with the unsavory task of remembering what now-forgotten stresses last Thursday had held. So I gave up. And wrote in large letters after my last entry, “And then a respite.”

But, with the notable exception of a week roaming in Wales with my family, what followed did not feel like rest. I continued lost and heavy. And now also unrecorded. What I did and experienced each day, good or ill, was no longer stored away in ink, so most of it slipped out of my head at some point or another to be lost in the ether, as if it had no value at all.

And then came the making of the very short document which I mentioned at the beginning. I think I planned to announce to the world that I had wandered but all was not lost, that I was picking the journaling habit back up with great ceremony, exactly a year after I had left off. This felt poetic, and I love trying to force my life into stanzas. But then I didn’t do it. January of 2018, when I wrote this entry, was particularly painful for many people around me, and I spent the rest of my time in Greensboro living in acceptance of the fact that I was standing on a precipice, held only by the steadfast grace of God. All else was clearly tenuous. And my days continued to pass undiarized, uncared-for.

Then, at the end of last summer, I got on a plane with two suitcases and myself. And after I finally made it here to the green and the August smoke, I had a good cry, opened to a fresh page in the long-abandoned journal, and at last began again. And fall semester was that fresh page: smooth and unsullied. I was in a new place, light and empty, no real responsibilities, nothing tied to my heels any longer. Most days, my feet did not touch the ground. But winter term was markedly different. It was in many ways richer, but also more complex and prickly. Somewhere in my short months in Vancouver, I had sunk in to the happy mud of this place and rooted there. So by February, or maybe sooner, I knew that my emotional vacation was over. I carried things now: people and words and hopes and promises. I look over the little journal entries of my time here and I can see how the place has grabbed on, in a thousand little moments burrowing into a thousand different parts of me. Quicker than I had ever planned, I was back to bearing burdens.

A couple weeks ago, when I walked along Cannon Beach in Oregon with my friend Becky, she teased me about my childlike tendency to grab some large piece of driftwood by its end and pull it behind me, like a silent, reliant beast, drawing a long, long line in the sand which stretched back and back through our footprints. But dragging a stick, sharing its weight with the earth for a while, felt very important to me that day, like walking along a stone wall does when you’re a child. I thought of this moment again recently as I was reading a book by my new friend Robert Farrar Capon, in which he talks about picking a huge marsh reed while on a walk and attempting to bring it back for his children:

To grasp it with one hand and use it in your walking only turns you from a king into an apostle; to try to make light of it by holding it upside-down is to become a deacon carrying the inverted crozier at an archbishop’s requiem. Do you see what you have discovered? There is no way of bearing the thing home without becoming an august and sacred figure–without being yourself carried back to Adam, the first King and Priest.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in which I have at times felt a bit stretched and overcommitted with the responsibilities in which I’ve wrapped myself, but when I read that on the bus on Monday, the disordered cogs inside me seemed to fall into place and tick contentedly. A couple years ago, I stopped recording my days because there was too much to bear, because I was in rebellion against it all. And when I final began to journal again it was because I felt feather-light, unbound. But now, I feel heavy again, and I know that feeling is here to stay. But though I am heavy, I am no longer lost. I am bearing joys and weights on purpose now–the difference is in intent. I must carry my sticks and marsh reeds not as if I am a slave, but as if I am a solemn child, as if I am royalty holding in my hands what is sacred. And at the end of each day I will add them to the growing stores of my journal–a chronicle of the piercing and persistent grace of God.

 

Hevel and Home

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I left Vancouver this past weekend(!!!). I went to the States and walked around little towns which have their streets all named after U.S. presidents in neat chronological order. I feel as if I should now recount for you the complex history of how this came to be and how I got there, but that story, if it is a story, would take too long to tell. Suffice to say, I rode in my friend Becky’s car. We took I-5 into Oregon.

On Saturday I had a bit of a white night and sat alone in the attic room of our little Airbnb next to a truly enormous fern and asked God lots of big questions about why he loved me. And then I read the end of The Four Loves for perhaps the fifth time and remembered Christina Rossetti’s poem about the prodigal son, which begins this way:

Does that lamp still burn in my Father’s house,

 Which he kindled the night I went away?

I turned once beneath the cedar boughs,

 And marked it gleam with a golden ray;

 Did he think to light me home some day?

I woke up with puffy eyes the next morning and that afternoon we drove up the coast from Corvallis to Cape Lookout State Park. I read aloud from Wind in the Willows and in between times I looked out the window and said perhaps five times, “I really like fields. I love fields so much. Fields are underrated.” Becky asked me if they made me think of North Carolina and I said no, I just liked them wherever they were in the world. And I do. I like seeing land stretch and duck and roll as far as my near-sighted eyes can reach.

We got to the campground and after pitching the tent we walked out along the beach. To our left the brilliant sun, too bright to look at, eased itself casually down to the horizon over the waves, as if it did it every day. The ocean purred and lapped, loud and jubilant, and the divots our feet made in the sand cast tiny bright blue shadows all up and down the beach like other-worldly beauty-marks. The cool wind blew so full against me, it made me want to pick up and fly. That night as I dozed in and out of sleep, I forgot my clever metaphor of the ocean as some great cat and kept thinking that its roaring must be a train that never got any closer and never got any farther, but stayed by your side always.

Yesterday we went up to Cannon Beach, where a concrete wall facing out over the lowering tides read “ALL is HEVEL” in green chalk. I liked that. I led my willing friend on an expedition over to the far sandbar and on the way found a tiny daisy which was white on top, but magenta on its underside, like brazen petticoats. The sandbar, when we reached it, was like another planet, smooth and white and quiet, on and on and out. We walked and walked. My unwashed hair gusted around my face, and I stored all this away as happiness. When we reached one of the rock formations, we climbed it, scaling the salt-encrusted base and scrambling up and up towards where twisted trees and brave grasses clung, balancing, for the time being, between brown gravel and blue sky. We stood in wind which is much stronger than I am.

And now I am home, in my familiar bedroom, looking out my window at the well-known pine branches against this blue sky, which looks wonderfully like the one I saw yesterday, almost as if it were the same.

Your sure provisions gracious God

Attend me all my days;

Oh, may your house be my abode,

And all my work be praise.

Here would I find a settled rest,

While others go and come;

No more a stranger, nor a guest,

But like a child at home.

Embodiment and All That Jazz

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You will be pleased to know that I went to the doctor today. (Or maybe you don’t care. I suppose that’s up to you.)

I was nervous beforehand. I don’t like going to the doctor. I’ve always been healthy, so I haven’t had to go often, and when I do I feel exposed. My exhilarating trip to the ER at the tail-end of last year was an exception because I felt so ill for a short space of time that I was only slightly bemused to find a strange male nurse’s aide helping me take my bra off. Nothing much mattered at that minute except that someone was there in the moment to fix whatever was wrong.

Yet going to the doctor when I am fully sentient feels enormously vulnerable. I have to get undressed and talk about why I am the way I am with someone who only just walked into the little sterile room which has laminated posters in bold fonts. And also sometimes procedures hurt or are confusing. I’m a bit of a child, perhaps.

But I’m also, frankly, not terribly connected to my body. I don’t pay much attention to what’s going on with it, and tend to assume it doesn’t pay that much attention to what’s going on with me. I clothe it, I wash it, I’m trying to be better about feeding it and sleeping it. Here our relationship begins and ends. A couple weeks ago a classmate asked what sports I played and was a little incredulous that the answer was nothing. But it never has been anything. I can’t touch my toes, and I never really worry about trying.

This trip to the doctor, however, was a quiet triumph. She asked questions and I found myself having to confess the embarrassing eating habits I’ve had for years and struggling to recount exactly how my symptoms felt when I blacked out in December, but also re-iterating what I’ve known for a long time and am getting better about reminding myself of at appropriate intervals: that my emotional and mental state holds sway over the functions of my physical body, and perhaps vice-versa.

Our embodiment  as humans is a Regent pet topic, all wrapped up with our happy fixations on the Incarnation and creation, but as I’ve heard people wax eloquent the last few months, I’ve wondered. I have a body. Am I…supposed to be doing something with it? Is it supposed to be participating in my life somehow?

After I got back from the doctor’s I made my way to the Regent library and sat in a chair in the sun and began to do a little reading and poking for the last paper I have this term. In the process, I pulled up a little essay I’d never read before by Dylan Thomas, called “The Reminiscences of Childhood” and as I read and stepped with mind and heart into the ever-familiar world of well-handled words to see what it had for me today, an actual involuntary warmth washed over my real, physical shoulders, the thin, bony ones God gave me which are currently shrouded in a black sweater. And though I never really had before, I paused in my reading for a moment and thought about that feeling, those muscles unclenching and singing a little song of praise, and I thought to myself, “I have felt this actual, visceral, synapses-firing feeling in just this way thousands of times before, every time I read anything I love, every time I find anything true and potent. This feeling means home to me. It’s perhaps the primary way I know beauty. And it’s physical. My body has been engaging in my deepest loves all along. I just never acknowledged it.”

And then I came here to tell you.

A Spring Story

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Spring is here with warmth and bright greens and blues.

And this weekend I wrote a paper on Christina Rossetti. That’s pretty much all I did. I’d already spent much of my week immersed in reading and outlining, and late Friday night I sat on my bed and cried because Christina existed and I exist and in one of her favorite of her own poems Jesus says, “Come and see.” Then I told myself it was probably time for bed, but instead kept writing and messing and poking at research for another two hours. I worked and worked through Saturday and much of Sunday as the sun appeared and came rushing through my window. This morning I woke up and finished the last couple pages. I went to start my laundry then rushed back to read it over again and again and twice more, prodding at sentences as I went. And, though I could have read it five more times, I stopped myself and turned it in. And took a walk to London Drugs.

There has never been such a walk to London Drugs. There were tiny blossoms coming out on the trees which had already begun to float to the ground. I smiled at unsuspecting passers by, a few of whom were even emboldened by the sunshine to smile back. I saw children with muddy bare feet and old people basking in sunbeams on benches like cats. The smell of fresh manure—like spring in Pennsylvania—became the smell of flowers by the time I got to 12th.

A couple hours ago I took the compost out with my own feet bare on the warm ground. So that’s how things are here today.

The Indigestible Portions

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I’m probably about to get all kinds of poetry on you. (But please don’t go away just yet. Hear me out.)

I am tired and achy at the moment. We could blame it somewhat fairly on last night’s restless sleep, but at the core is the fact that I’ve had an anxious week and my body knows it. Some days the sky is blue and I wear sparkly shoes because I like them, but other days, though the sky is still blue, I wear sparkly shoes because I need them and much of my energy goes into managing and dismantling my fear, trying to move past it so I can function. More than ever recently, I’ve become aware of the myriad of coping strategies I’ve developed to deal with everyday anxieties.

When I was eleven I made up a trick I sometimes still use. When I felt overwhelmed I would take a piece of paper and draw and label a little cloud for each of my worries–size and darkness corresponding to the intensity of each. I found that when I did this, put them out on paper visually, there were always fewer of them than I had assumed.

In college, to get out of bed on hard days I would promise myself that I could wear an oversized flannel, that I could put no effort into my appearance and play-act as the Invisible Girl, if only I would get up and go to class.

Even this past Fall, when I first moved to Vancouver, I was still adding strategies to my arsenal. I was irrationally nervous about riding the city bus, and so for the first few days, every time I waited at a bus stop I took a picture of my feet, so that my camera roll would fill up with growing evidence that I had done this before and I could do it again.

Every one of the aforementioned strategies have worked and still work when I need them. I am oddly proud of all the little ways I’ve come up with to chant to myself, “Be brave, be brave, and be brave.” It’s quite possible you have a similar list yourself.

But.

It is Lent now. We are in a season in which we are supposed to remember our own mortality, to feel death in our bones and pray to understand what that means. So I have found myself thinking that while bravery is good and well, it is perhaps also good and well to sit and learn from my own frailty. When my hands begin to shake, as they have a couple times this week, perhaps instead of sitting on them so they will stop and no one will notice, I can look at them and remember the dust from whence they were formed. In the stillness of the weeks leading up to our celebration of Christ’s deafening acts of redemption and renewal, maybe this magnified anxiety is not a curse, but an appropriate reminder of my need.

In my Christian Imagination class a couple days ago we read Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” He is mournful and acutely aware of his limits, his lack of answers, his lack of any sufficient words at all. The liturgy of any traditional Ash Wednesday service is full of the same heavy truths Eliot has felt all his life, full of the angst of Prufrock’s “overwhelming question” from fifteen years earlier in his career. Yet in this first long poem after his conversion, everything is different because while Eliot sits in the void within himself, he knows the Word has come to fill it. The Gospel gives context to the weakness he has always known so intimately. And conversely, Eliot’s long fixation with human lack and the inadequacy of his own speech has fit him with ears to hear the words of Him who is greater.

So sure, those pictures of my feet back in August bear witness that I have done this before, that riding the bus is really not such a big deal, but if I am being honest, perhaps even more importantly, they bear witness to the truth that I was afraid. I was foolishly afraid of something I could not name, which never came to fruition. Those pictures chronicle how I am riddled with sin, riddled with holes, ultimately unable, despite all my little tricks, to cope with the “indigestible portions” of my human soul.

And last night I read the end of Revelation, full of lines which deserve to be shouted, which have been and will be, all about newness, over and over. He is making all things new. Those words are always true whoever and wherever you are, but it is the infirm sinner, silent and barren, who really feels their power.

Empowerment, Selfishness, and Loneliness

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We live in funny times. Several years ago I was in a school library when an older woman came in, and I overheard her adamantly announce to the librarian that she wanted to donate books with a specific message: empowerment for women. I remember thinking that books with a “message” sounded boring. Who would read them?

But I must have been wrong, because the narrative has grown and become ingrained. We’ve been told to break the last of the ties that bind us, to have it all, to say yes, to say no, to change the world, to lean in. We’ve been told that we can. And, of course, because we can we should.

We do not need anyone else but ourselves to succeed, because You is kind, you is smart, you is important. Follow your heart and go with your gut. And so, wherever we are and whatever we want, we are true to ourselves, following the dubious wisdom of a Shakespearean lord who gets murdered through a curtain. We dig deep, find hidden reserves, and realize that we’re capable of much more than we ever knew. On our own strength, which is at times considerable, we rise.

We’re not cruel, of course. We don’t step on others’ faces as we climb past them—we’re not willing for their heads to bruise our heels—but we do leave them behind. This is our journey, not theirs, this journey further up and further out, where no one has ever been before. We’re not making decisions based on what others want anymore—we’re basing our decisions on what we want! This makes us feel powerful. We begin to glow.

And then one day we wake up to find ourselves alone. Even if the dream we were chasing was in service of others, we have not wanted to rely on their help to get there. To accept, or—God forbid—ask for help would have disproved all the stories we’re only just now managing to believe about our own capability. So it is just us here now. To be our brother or sister’s keeper would have gotten in the way of our hard-won self-sufficiency. Particularly when some brother or sister is not particularly kind or smart we have been trained, in self-preservation, to ignore the fact that they are still painfully, wretchedly important.

We’ve cut ourselves off and, in doing so, imbued ourselves with a loneliness that feels nearly impossible to recover from. It’s not just lonely at the top—it’s lonely to be a human with skin on. Hollywood makes movies about this. We are empowered, sure. But to reduce ourselves to bundles of self-made desires and shining abilities to fulfill those desires is just another funny roundabout way to dehumanization. Our deepest level of personhood does not exist in self-reliance, but in belonging.

I’ve made more generalities here than I know what to do with, and they’re all centrally based on the only subject I really have for study: myself. I’m thinking mainly about women because I am a woman, and I’m thinking mainly about millennials because, for better or for worse, I’m one of those too. But as usual, my driving purpose in writing all this is much the same as Ralph Ellison’s, something which is both a fear and a hope, cautious and bold: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

The Power and the Pity

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Today I was riding the bus and it occurred to me that I am much more comfortable with God’s power than with his love. This was a large realization, but then my stop came and I had to get off and go to tutorial.

And now I am back home and I have a little time to think about that thunderbolt.

I thought of the countless times I’ve been told that the Lord loves me, not from the pulpit, not in song, not in a book that’s sold millions of copies, but by someone sitting next to me, who actually knows me, earnest in conversation. And whenever I hear it in that intimate context, some surge of frank disbelief rises up in my gut, and usually shows itself in my face. Sometimes the kind friend then tries to argue for the truth of the statement (“He does, Alice!”), but more often than not they already have their head bowed in the act of praying for me, so they don’t notice, and I just sit, weltering in discomfort over what the deepest part of me actually believes to be their poor theology. God would not love me, I think. He’s God. He knows better. Why spend your love on someone or something who so obviously, particularly from an Almighty vantage point, really has nothing to offer? Someone who takes up so little space and will inevitably fail at all the important bits? Why bother?

I’ve never said any of this aloud before, of course, and there’s a reason for that. I’ve never said it aloud before because it’s actual bad theology. The worst. It thumbs its nose at something utterly central to God’s character: it denies his pity. His love is not built out of particular affinities for certain people or some set of utilitarian desires like ours too often is. His love is built out of pity: pity that looks down from an Almighty, holy vantage point, sees his people whom he formed out of dust, and is moved, moved to crack open his ribcage and pour out everything within. And to be clear, though something within me still pushes back at writing this, or maybe because something within me still pushes back at writing this, God pities not just his people at large, or us, or you. All of those things are true, but more astounding, God looks down, sees me existing in my little self-made space, failing at all the important bits, offering nothing, and finds himself awash in his own love. And he breaks open his chest for me, a sheep without a shepherd.

Last week I sat in Old Testament during a lecture on the Psalms, and when Iain got to the concept of lament he used Psalm 22 as an example. He pointed out verse six which begins, “But I am a worm and not a man.” He said the Psalmist feels that his own suffering has degraded him, has made him less than human, something vile. Then he added gently, “But, of course, that’s not the truth of the matter.” And sitting in the third row, I started to cry–I guess because I’ve always thought it was.