Tag Archives: thankfulness

A Weekend

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On Friday night I went to a big basketball game in the Caldwell gym. I’d forgotten how those things go to the core of me—the rumble of the crowd and its rising yells, the sharpness of the whistle and the basketball shoes squeaking on the floor, the smell of popcorn and heat and the hundreds of faces and the youth and intensity of it all and the sound of the buzzer. But most, I am taken by those kids on the court who struggle and slouch in my class, but who spring and leap and even fly with a ball in their hands. I’d forgotten how moved I am watching my students do what matters to them. I like to see them capable and eager and playing confidently to a packed house—it’s fuller than the version of them I usually get. I like being reminded. (I also like it when we win, which we did.)

Then yesterday afternoon I went to Walmart, which is notorious as place where one can observe a subset of humans who seem unable to fit into their clothes, read a price sticker, wash themselves, or exist appropriately within the world (or so that blog that used to circulate, “The People of Walmart,” would have us believe.) But as I navigated past little befuddled-looking family clumps in the home goods aisles on my way to buy curtain rods, we spoke gently and politely to one another, squeezing our carts through, despite the blasphemy of our ill-fitting sweats and unkempt hair. And I thought to myself—”We’re all the people of Walmart on the inside, aren’t we?” I mostly thought it because it made me laugh, but it’s softened my vision ever since. 

And then last night I went to the homecoming dance for a bit. I pinned my hair up like I used to do in college and wore my charity shop coat. We ended up having to turn off nearly all the lights to get the kids to actually dance, because with them on they just milled awkwardly in groups. But in the dimness, they finally loosened up and cheered and jumped and acted like teenagers. We threw glow sticks down on them during “Party Rock,” and they lost their minds as we intended. I got out there and danced a little with a few of the other teachers. I felt full. I turned to Leslie at one point and said, “You know, in high school, I would have been glued to a chair at something like this.” A student cheekily asked me earlier in the week if everything good happens before you’re twenty-five, but I’ve rarely been more glad to be thirty and not sixteen. If only they knew.

I’m grateful that things are not always as they seem they ought to be, grateful that I am frequently wrong, grateful that God comes riding in on his donkey with his bruisable body and his broken bread and his empty tomb and says, “No, actually, child, it’s entirely different than that.”

A Fall Teaching Entry

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Here’s a thing I’d forgotten about my job before I came back to it. As much as I aspire to be (and usually am) in control of my classroom, hiding in its corners and quiet moments are delights and strange kernels of time which I could never plan, could never make, can only notice if I’m looking at them in just the right slant of light. They’re the oddities, the unclassifiable outliers, the secret gifts of teaching.

For example:

-The moment when we read Blake’s “I Saw a Chapel” and my group of boys actually listened to it. I asked them what they thought, and one of them said, “It’s weird.” I smiled because he meant it and also because he was right.

-Students who come and sit on my tall, soft stool to spin idly round on it between class times, sometimes to talk to me but more often to talk to each other. Sometimes I tell them to get off, but then bite my tongue and wish I hadn’t.

-How I passed out “Dream of the Rood” in translation from the Old English and had them read it in pairs with no outside guidance then watched, touched, as they drew bright pictures of the paradox of Christ’s cross, encrusted in both blood and jewels.

-The afternoon a junior came in and as he passed my desk ran his fingers absently over a turtle candle-holder I keep there, a gift from a student my first year. That turtle is even more beloved than it once was for having come such a long way.

-The map of Huck and Jim’s journey carefully traced onto butcher paper on my back wall, with a bright orange carrot drawn next to Cairo, IL, because the artist thought Cairo looked like “carrot” which it definitely doesn’t. 

-The desire to laugh and cry and burst with pride at the absurdity of it all while listening to a roomful of fourteen-year-olds stumbling in unison through the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hathe perced to the roote…”

-Two boys who spent their mid-morning break in my room with heads down on the desks, covered by sweatshirt hoods, sleeping slumped right up against each other’s shoulders.

The thing is, the end of the first quarter has come, and with it, the love has hit. I hadn’t forgotten that the love for my students would come, but I’d forgotten the force with which this seemingly mild affection would barrel into my chest. This love, this concern for adolescent welfare, this enjoyment of the utter weirdness of their particular youth expands me and makes me grateful for things well outside its scope. I am grateful this week for voice messages, for Little Free Libraries, for Peter, Paul, and Mary, for counters to sit on, for crockpots and for sidewalks. I am grateful for that which gets us from place: for conversations, for seasons, for weeks and weekends, for growth which comes step by unusual step.

Wayfaring in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

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I have a lot to say.

I had my last day of work on a Tuesday and by Thursday I was on a plane heading across an ocean for the first time in years. The man in my row didn’t have much English, but smilingly offered me biscuits over and over throughout the flight, and solicitously slipped an extra pillow under my knees when I curled them up onto the empty seat between us. When my client Bonnie had said goodbye, she worried aloud that no one was looking out for me. I thought of this, tucked up in that tight plane seat, and smiled.

My sister picked me up at London Heathrow on Friday morning, and, driving with aggressive delight in her little Honda Jazz, brought me back to her place for a shower. Then, within an hour I was with her and friends in the park in Southall doing book table, and a few hours later at youth club: eating pizza in a church basement, then sitting under a tree by a water cooler dreamily watching teenagers play a frisbee game that was slowly devolving, and thinking that these kids were so nice and funny and going back into teaching sounded not so bad after all. I slept very well that night, suddenly in a different place.

Mary took me out into the countryside the next day, to the Royal Standard, supposedly the oldest pub in Britain. I had pickled kidneys for lunch, and then we went on an idyllic walk over rolling hills while I chattered on to her about my uncertain plans for the future. That evening back in Southall her friend made us biryani. I realized that it had been a long time since I had seen Mary in her place—this bright, noisy, curry-scented corner of England—and it had sunk its roots deep into her. In response, she stepped into every room she entered with loud, dependable confidence.

By Sunday evening, my family had all arrived and we went to my sister’s church, Masih Ghar, and then to the back garden at the local pub to celebrate Father’s Day. It was one of only two dinners the five of us had together over the course of the week. It was good and easy and certain. 

Over the next few days I climbed St. Paul’s with George (where I found out that my brother—who for decades has given the impression that he can leap tall mountains in a single bound—does not much like heights) and went to a traveling circus with my family (where we clapped and laughed and gasped while women hung by their hair, and men hung by their chins, and a human pyramid of acrobats jumped rope together). I found myself at the kids club and the parent-toddler group my sister runs and having huge dosas for lunch, sitting in red booths. I’ve spent the last year or two pulling the shutters of myself closed—metaphorically, physically, even metaphysically—but nothing here would let me do that. Something was always in the way. The latch was broken.

*

By Wednesday afternoon, I was walking along the river in Cambridge with my brother and mom, brightly painted canal boats on our left and a park full of lolling students on our right. I wore a long skirt and sandals, like summer. The conference on George Herbert that my dad had planned began the next morning and I gave my paper very first, on a panel which included one of my professors from undergrad as well as a nice man who remembered me from a conference ten years previous. But the whole weekend was full of odd-but-good connections like that: ties to Vancouver and Pennsylvania and Madison and home. Herbert people, like Herbert himself, are gentle and warm and humble, and I liked talking to them, appreciated that they were always eager to remember my name, though when they realized my family connections, they would say, “So your whole family’s at this conference? I’ve never seen that before…” And I’d laugh and say, “I know. Neither have I. Don’t worry about it.”

Throughout the week, anxiety was sometimes still gnawing at my belly, but slowly, cracks began to form, letting the light in. The first night we sat in Little Saint Mary’s for a poetry reading. I had been, more than I think I understood, wrestling with the place of writing in my life—with what seat to give it at the table, with how to keep it from becoming a bugbear—and my heart slowed its irregularities, felt healthy and hungry again, as I listened to people faithfully present the words they had strung together. One poem was called “Reading the Desert Fathers While Eating a Donut.” The audience knew what she meant.

Then there was the banquet in the great hall at Trinity College—ornate wood paneling reached all around us and hands reached over our shoulders to refill wine glasses again and again, and I think I might have had duck five different ways. Afterwards we sat in Trinity Chapel while a vocal ensemble sang baroque arrangements of Herbert’s poems, harmonies rising over us into high stone space like a woven canopy. They were accompanied by a lute player who just looked like a lute player. I could’ve picked her out if I saw her on the street in Kansas.

And on Sunday, Malcolm Guite led us in a Eucharist service at Clare College Chapel, and the words of the Anglican liturgy tumbled around in my head, where they’ve been nesting for more than a decade now—Ye that intend to lead a new life, they say. There was one more keynote talk that afternoon at a church in the countryside where we were greeted with change-ringing from the bell-tower. As I sat on a centuries-old wooden pew, I watched the leaves behind the leaded glass at the far end of the chancel bobbing their heads in the breeze. Yes, they said, new life, yes, yes.

After that we went to Little Gidding where we were served cake and tea in the garden and one of the poets who is also a latinist read T.S. Eliot’s poem in the place of its birth—because what else could we do? “We shall not cease from exploration,” he read, projecting over the windy blusters which shook the tent and made the tent poles creak. That evening a friend I hadn’t seen since 2020 picked me up in Cambridge and we drove through the night up to Edinburgh. I sometimes slept and sometimes talked and was content without pretense.

*

After a negligible amount of sleep in Edinburgh, Tze and I were on the road again by midday, this time in a 20-year-old Land Rover Defender with another artist in tow. I listened to the tick of the windshield wipers and looked out the window. I realized that over the last couple years as I’ve been busy latching the shutter of myself—I know I have—I may have been missing some things. It was as if there had been a rush of water—a rush of newness—over old glass, and now it was time to look out again and see how the views had shifted. So as we traveled north and north, I paid attention.

There are so many blues and greens and browns and greys and purples in the world—more than I ever knew. Gorse and heather grew up over the country, which was sparsely populated by sturdy buildings with little rows of chimney pots. For the last hour of the drive there were constant vistas to our right hand side: wide, slow hills crested by winding stone walls that did not seem to know they weren’t there to crown a king. Beyond that lay the blanket of the sea, striped with sand, and above that the clouds, a landscape unto themselves. 

We talked most of the time, too. I pulled out my clothing interview questions from my project last spring and we all three went through them as we sped past legions of sheep and cows who were living in glory and didn’t even know it. 

We arrived at Freswick Castle, up north of Wick, in time for dinner, a place where they take in artists and strays and seem determined to leave the latchstring out. So I spent the next few days with warm people, people who tell you encouragingly that you seem so comfortable and confident without realizing this is due to their kindlinesses. Our wine glasses were refilled constantly at dinner. I felt more “looked out for” than Bonnie sitting worrying in her chair back in Madison could have imagined, and was often on the verge of tears. It was a combined sense, I think, of inadequacy and gratefulness. It didn’t get all the way dark there, even at midnight. On clear nights in midsummer, the sky just gets drowsy blue-gold-pink and hangs like that for a few hours before the sun comes up again. Murray, who owns the place, gave us a tour and spoke confidently about where the theater and the film studio and the pool would go. In the midst of all that cloudy diffusion of light, it was hard not to believe him.

In the mornings, I sat in the window in my room and attempted writing exercises and struggled over the skeletons of poems—unsure where to direct all my words and thoughts. And one day, using spotty wifi, I managed to obtain an apartment back in Greensboro (a place all my own) and a job (teaching literature back at Caldwell—And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we first started…) The castle is large, but also small, and everyone there had a front-row seat to the tumult of my transition. My friend was filming a video for Wayfarer Trust, which operates out of the castle, and I shot some moody b-roll and a less moody interview with him and continued to wonder where writing would fit for me now. I watched candles reflected in the mirror each night while we drank whiskey by the fire, noticed how the old hearthstones lay flush with restored floors, and took deep breaths.

I took walks, of course—with others at Duncansby Head, where we saw a puffin, and along the cliffs on my own, clammy with clear sweat. In that part of the world, the wind was such an active participant that it was visible in all things, like the Spirit. The grasses bow to it, the water ruffles under its touch, and the birds—hundreds of them—coast trustingly on its back.

*

I was tired by Friday, when I left Freswick. But it was the tiredness of progress. The pages of my journal were beginning to feel safe again, not like a wilderness. Tze and I dropped off one friend in Inverness and immediately picked up three more and headed west to the Isle of Skye.

While we drove and chatted I watched the highlands outside becoming more and more themselves, and thought of too many ways to describe the hills: the lines of the slopes rise like Icarus climbing into the late-day sun…wrinkled knees under sheets in the lamp light…mountain peaks are arms reaching up side by side like Moses at the battle against the Amalekites. 

We did a far-too-large grocery shop before crossing onto Skye, and then the back of the Defender was so crowded that I spent the last hour with a lap full of raw poultry and a bottle of wine in my skirt. Even so, when we got to the cottage we realized we’d forgotten butter, so half-hysterical, and with varying amounts of encouragement from friends, I beat heavy cream till we had enough for the next morning’s toast.

We spent the next couple days scrambling around the island. I liked seeing friends dotted into the muddy creases of a steep green hillside as we climbed, and I didn’t mind it when I stepped in a bog, went in up to my calf, and almost lost a shoe. The sludge that was left on my leg was green at its top edge, like the earth itself. Hiking there was much more about making your own way than following a path, and as we traced along the side of the mountain at Quiraing I always found my feet drifting up and up, unconsciously choosing the high road. At Fairy Glens there were loud American voices that made me smile. “You’re makin’ me nervous and I don’t even know you!” one woman shouted to a Scot high on the rocks, who immediately shot her a look of disdain. Another repeated over and over and over to Lord-only-knows-who, “Lookit the dog working the sheep across the valley!” 

I carried my journal with me everywhere and squinted as the sun reflected off its pages, managing to scribble anyway about the benches cleft of mud and grass, the plush black moss at the tops of things and the ankle-deep mounds of springy orange growth on the descent. My hair whipped all the time into my peripheral vision, so I could only see what was just below my feet. 

At the Old Man of Storr, it was gusty and threatening and while the rest hiked I stayed tucked in my seat in the back of the car and re-read my journal. I found I’d used the word “visceral,” over and over to describe the trip, as if it were a brand new discovery each time—that goodness could be real, that I could taste it. I heard a passerby say loudly to her boyfriend, “You think she looks sad back there?” But all I was thinking was, What a funny place for flowers to grow—in wind and rain and chill.

The last day we left Skye slowly—on the way I bought a very nice felt hat and a sheepskin hot water bottle cover. We stopped at a distillery where they made storm-matured whiskey, a phrase I loved. We stopped for photos by a bridge and by a castle and by a valley and by a beach, and got caught in the rain again and again. Back on the mainland I made them listen to me read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever aloud, even though it was July. We drove along Loch Lomond, which is very long, and listened to sad Scottish songs, and then eventually to James Taylor as well as Peter, Paul and Mary, because it was, after all, American Independence Day.

*

I slept extra the next morning, back at Tze’s house. Then he showed me bits of Edinburgh—from low tide and from a high hill—and we bought pasties at the train station and he saw me off.

I was sad on the train back to London. So I listened to a Kate Atkinson novel and then saw a pure white horse in the middle of a sheep field, which made me feel hopeful I was T.S. Eliot, on the verge of something great and somber. “Costing not less than everything,” I thought (lines from “Little Gidding” kept coming back to me with dramatic import.)

Then the last day I put on a crop-top, a white linen skirt, and the new hat itself, and went into central London alone. I wandered around the V&A, going up stairs and more stairs till I’d climbed out of the way of most of the other people. I looked at tiles and stained glass and golden miniatures and modern furniture design till I was all full up and warm. I got lunch in Hyde Park, and took the tube to Hampstead Heath where I meandered around for a while, ineffectually but peaceably. Then I came back and had dinner in Southall with Mary and some of the short term teams there for the week, scooping up butter chicken and paneer and dal with pieces of naan till I was satisfied, my fingers oily, but clean.

On my travels home, I made friends—on the plane, in the customs line, on the bus—or rather they made me, drawn by my cool new hat or maybe just their own anxieties. And I thought a lot about the Luci Shaw poem “The chair without distinction,” about just sitting on the edge of things, windows and doors wide open, available to be walked into, to be leaned on for a moment. I had walked into the kind doors of so many other people in the past few weeks, more than I could count.

The point is, this trip gave me much. That’s what I’m trying to say with all these too many words. But the thing it did most is it busted me open, cracked through dry skin, and began what may be a long process of cleaning me out. It told me that I must and can write and that I must and can love. I’m already doing them both anyway and I was made for them. So best not hold them in. Christ walks on the water, the wind, the seemingly impossible, and he’s calling me to meet him there, holding out open hands, always open.

As it says over the door of the Royal Standard when you cross the threshold, “Go gently, pilgrim” (but, by all means, go.)

Thanksgiving Coming

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I’m sitting in my bed (my favorite place for writing, no matter how I try to create another one) looking out the two large panes of my window, through which I can see bare trees and blue sky and the neighbor’s roof bathed in late afternoon sun.

Writing has been a struggle recently. The blog has not come easy because, though many things in my life have seemed good, not many things have seemed urgent, as if I must run and tell them right away. And as for the novel draft, in its final chapters it has become a millstone around my neck. I mean, that’s a dramatic metaphor, sure, but please believe me when I say that it’s been FAR too long since it’s had anyone else’s eyes on it. After this week, though, the draft will be finished and I will take seventeen big breaths in a row and start writing my pitch letter for agents. 

But the real drama of my life recently has been car trouble. My little silver Kia had already been in and out of the shop a couple weeks ago for an engine issue, and then the battery started dying on me. The second time it happened was this past Tuesday as I was leaving my client’s house in the evening after making her dinner. When the car wouldn’t start, I went back inside to ask her if she thought any of her neighbors could give me a jump.

After she had made about four phone calls (one of which was to her son, who lives twenty minutes away), and had also offered to let me just take her car (I told her “No, Bonnie”), and three different people had asked if I had AAA, and various neighbors, roused from their evenings, had run across the street to knock on more doors, I ended up with the help of two women: Paula, who’s a divorce lawyer, and Marilyn, whose husband Allen drives trucks for a living.

We huddled in the driveway under the floodlights and Marilyn gave Paula and me a thorough tutorial in how to jump a car. The Kia started and then immediately died again. So Marilyn gave me a ride all the way home to Fitchburg, and spent the drive telling me about her stroke a few years ago and about the paper route she used to do with her son and also giving me her husband’s number because he would be home on Saturday and could help. My car stayed in Bonnie’s driveway.

The next day I was off work. I called the shop about getting the car towed. And then, since Abby had a Bible study she wanted to go to, and Taylor was working, I watched Calvin. Our neighbor texted asking if we wanted a walk, so we set off towards the marsh with her and her baby, a folding stroller in tow, in case Cal’s little legs got tired. They did eventually. We went a ways. As I pushed him on the long path around the lake, he stared up at the tallest trees and commented occasionally on “the forest” while Sally and I chatted about moving to a place and how long you decide to stay there.

On Thursday I had a morning shift at Bonnie’s again, and I borrowed my housemates’ car. I took Bonnie to run some errands and when we arrived back at the house, I was helping her out of the car before pulling it into the garage, and Paula from next door (remember, the lawyer?) ran up and not so much requested as demanded that she be allowed to gift me a AAA membership. I said, yes, sure, of course, that was very kind of her.

The problem with my car turned out to just be a dead battery, not the alternator, thank God. It’s back with me now, safe, sound, and covered by AAA.

Some of this was stressful, sure, particularly the cost of repairs, but Abby and I were talking about it a little later, and I said, “You know, I chose this.” I meant that I could have made much different plans for this year. I could have gone back into teaching or some other job with a salary, I could be working from home doing freelance writing so that I’m not so dependent on a car, I could’ve even stayed in Vancouver where a car is hardly necessary. I had the luxury of choice, and I chose this.

I chose this, but I did not really understand the good I was choosing. I did not really understand the way I was laying myself bare to the generosity of the people around me: my friends and my boss and my mechanic and my neighbors and my clients and their neighbors. I did not really understand that in deciding to move to a new city in the wintry midwest and work twenty hours a week so I could write, I was choosing to accept the expansiveness of divine generosity. I was choosing the bright tightrope of God’s provision.

A Child at the Ocean

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I went to Galiano Island with a couple sweet friends for a few days over the weekend and stayed one day longer than they did. First thing Sunday morning, I dropped them off at the ferry, then drove back to the cabin, took a bath, and climbed down the rocks to the water in my bare feet and big orange sweater.

I felt sad—sad that my friends were gone, sad about everything—but I was grateful to be sad. I am beginning to think of sadness as a privilege. Pain and fear are universal, but sadness can only be where happiness has been first. More and more I think the two are near cousins.

It was chilly on the rock. The tide was low and fog mixed with smoke from the fires in Washington sat on the water, painting all things a thick, soft grey. As I sat three otters swam up right beneath me, slithering and dunking in and out of the water, then when they reached the shore, shaking the wet out of their eyes like dogs, and gleefully crunching up some kind of snack they had found on the rocks just below. The mother caught sight of me almost immediately, kept an intent watch on me for about thirty seconds and then decided I was too close for comfort and led her little ones away. They went with her, happily jumping on her back and somersaulting and sliding back into the water again.

I thought about how little I knew about these creatures—the only vocabulary I had to describe them was hackneyed and uncertain—how little I knew about any of this. I didn’t even know how the tide worked. I felt like a child come to the ocean for the first time, but with no parent by my side to turn to and pepper with questions: why does the tide ebb away like it does? And more importantly, where does it go when it leaves? Does all the water that was here just tip over to the other side of the ocean—as the water pulls back from us, it rises on some distant beach in Asia? I imagined the Pacific like a bowl, a cradle, rocked daily back and forth by the hand of God, salt and water and life sloshing up first on one side and then the other. What lullaby did he sing over us? Was it the plaintive seagull cries wheeling above me or something even beyond that?

Part of me felt I should rein in my flight of imagination—how could I not know the science behind the tides, and who was I to make up fairy tales in their place? But I couldn’t help myself. Crouching there on that great grey rock, just above where the barnacles began, I was the youngest I had been in a long time—the saddest and the least certain and the most content. It occurred to me that I hadn’t known that I would have to become younger to grow up—but I ought to have known. I was told all along, unless you become like little children…

Selfish Art

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I’ve just got back from a walk in the rain—real rain, not Vancouver’s usual lazy drizzling nonsense. I am damp and happy. I am happy about the wet rivulets which poured off of my umbrella, and I am happy about the squishing sound my boots made in the grassy mud as I crossed the school field. 

I am also two-thirds of the way through a first novel draft. It’s been a push. It feels like work, because it is work. And yet. I’ve been reminded lately that it’s going to be worth it. It’s going to be worth it because when I’m finished, I get to read it. I can talk all day long about writing as communication to others, as taking the pictures and ideas and worlds inside my head and putting them in someone else’s using only the magic of words on a page, and I believe in all that, I do. But ultimately, in the moment, in the midst of the act of creation, I am nearly always writing for myself.

I create to respond to the truth and beauty I see, to call to it across the void, to expand upon it with words, not primarily so that others can understand it, but so that I can. I’ve written here before about how when I reread my own work, I often find that I’m preaching to myself, particularly if I’m coming back to it after some time. I only really know my own process, of course, but  if I had to guess, I’d say most art that is actually worthwhile is made with this self-guided focus, because such singularity of purpose is able to fully serve the art itself, and treat the outside audience as a peripheral, secondary concern. When you are in the midst of making, the fact that others may get to enjoy what you’ve made is just a happy byproduct. In that instant, you need no audience but yourself.

To consult your own instincts and pleasure so centrally as you create seems like a foolishly selfish approach, and I would be tempted to dismiss it as that, except that this is exactly how God created. He made a world and a people diverse, interesting, strange, and beautiful not because this was correct or necessary but because he knew that to do so was good. Really, I suspect he made his creation good partially just so that he could have the joyful experience of calling it so, over and over. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton imagines that every day when the sun rises, God claps his hands and cries, “Do it again! Do it again!” No one takes more delight in his own art than God.

So I will allow myself to be happy about my own words on a page in the same way I am happy about a long-awaited sloppy rain, because I can receive them and because they are good. A couple months after moving to Vancouver I wrote a little note for myself and put it on my wall. I no longer have any idea what it was originally in response to, and I sometimes forget about it for weeks at a time, but every time I do reread it, it feels more necessarily true than the time before. 

It says, You no longer need to be your own maker and taskmaster. Jesus has stepped in. You are free of the tyranny of self. The Lord has an infinitely better plan, and, moreover, he is gracious. Your only call is to wrap his gifts in rejoicing and offer them back.

Gentlenesses

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I’ve slowed down a lot in the last week or so. I’m still plugging away at schoolwork and even turned in a couple assignments today (!!!) but many things are an effort. They’re an effort I am willing to make, but now—like perhaps many of you—I am encased in molasses rather than air. I’ve gone into half-hibernation.

On Saturday I read some Wendell Berry stories for a class. I hadn’t read any of his fiction in years, though I’ve gone around enthusiastically criticizing it to many people, so this was a humbling experience. I still think his work is far from perfect: he rambles, he tells rather than shows, he moralizes too obviously, and yet in each of the four stories there was some moment at which I caught my breath, at which he whispered something obvious and gentle and I ached for it. Funnily, this softness had always been the reason for my disdain. I am, deep within myself, decidedly sharp-tongued and in literature have always taken pleasure in the absurd, in the uncomfortable, in the narrator who’s just a bit biting and takes no prisoners. Yet the gooey corners of Berry’s limping stories kept wandering into my heart and giving it rest in a way it hadn’t had in weeks.

I’ve recently begun to notice this gentleness everywhere I can possibly encounter it: in the patient calm of other customers at the grocery store, in softly querying texts from friends, in the easy quiet of my housemates, in sun on pavement just beginning to be dappled with spring leaves. I subsist on it, I breathe it in.

A rare sincerity seems to permeate so much of our culture right now because of shared crisis. It’s a quality which has the potential too easily to become saccharine or shrill or moralizing, but which also presents us with perhaps more opportunity than we’ve ever had to become the meek and the pure in heart, to inherit the earth and see God.

I am often nowadays uncertain about what to do, what should be done, what can be done. I hate being uncertain. But I am reminded by Berry—and by others who are perhaps nearer and dearer—that gentleness is within all of our capacity. So be gentle in thought, in word, in deed. Be gentle in prayer. Be gentle when you see your own unaccountably tired eyes in the mirror, when you see loved faces pixelated on a screen, when your newsfeed fills with fright and noise. Be gentle. Other efforts we make may fade, but this will last. Gentleness takes pause, biting your tongue, backing up and trying again, but I sometimes think it is the greatest power we have at our disposal, right now and always.

Perhaps gentleness—steadfast, unyielding tenderness—is one of the strongest forces we have against evil, against pain, against hysteria, against fear itself. It does not defeat these things, rather it dissolves them. It simply makes weapons drop when it appears on a battlefield.

I became convinced during my years teaching (and have occasionally been reminded during my time at Regent) that it is not the gentle who need gentleness the most. It is the sharp and recalcitrant, the ones who have forgotten that it is possible to speak or be spoken to with mercy, the ones with the sometime hearts of stone. In other words, it’s each of us.

Darkness and the Coming of the Light

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When I was seventeen years old I wrote and presented a final thesis paper before graduating from high school. It was on happy endings in children’s literature. My eyes were so wide and so bright. I had a theory, a theory much older than I was, that I touted proudly: “Darkness declares the glory of light.” (That’s T.S. Eliot.) All these stories, I said, all the aching and groaning to be made new of the old fairy tales, was evidence of the coming of newness. It promised that goodness existed, and was on its way to save the day, that there would be some big old thunderclap of what Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe,” a good catastrophe, and everything would come right again.

But it’s been a decade now, and even in your twenties, ten years can plumb wear you out. I have had enough seasons in my life at this point in which mere mental and emotional survival were the name of the game, that I have stopped thinking so much about happy endings. In fact, I hardly think about them at all. Instead I think about balance and kindness and repentance and making the best of things and getting up and trying again tomorrow. That’s what we all think about.

Yet it has occurred to me in the last day or two that while none of the things I focus on now are bad—in fact all are quite good—they’re all a little shabby and mortal in comparison to the golden language I dreamed in at seventeen.

Advent began on Sunday. And in Advent, we think about waiting. We step into the darkness and we sit there. We sit in the depths and we call out to God for newness, for the coming King, for a hundred promises fulfilled, and it is in this practice that I have remembered.

On Monday afternoon, I spent a lot of time wrestling with Christmas lights in the atrium at school. I didn’t ask for enough help in finishing up decorations, and then once all of them were finally up, strung back and forth above everyone’s heads, a little fuse inside one of the plugs, a thing no longer than my pinky nail, blew out and they all went dark. The thing which was supposed to do nothing but provide light and joy instead hung heavy and dead. We replaced the fuse. It blew again. We bought more. Another one blew. I replaced that one. I cried once and laughed more than once and gained a new electrical skill. Finally someone brightly suggested we use an extension cord to split the lights up between more than one power source. Fighting against darkness is hard, particularly on your own. I’m being a bit facetious, but I’m somehow also in danger of sounding trite. I am grateful for help.

Then yesterday was Regent’s Advent chapel service. It’s an entire liturgy of songs and poems and scripture, and we do most of it in the dark, with the exception of a few candles at the front. Throughout the last song they bring up all the lights in the room one by one, and you can begin to see the faces around you lit, emerging out of quiet gloom (glory! glory!)

After the service was over, a staff member came up to me, in front of several friends as we were sitting down to lunch, to say that he too had been watching everyone else when the lights came up, and that I had been beaming. I know, I said, I know. I did know. But I was also a little embarrassed at my joy. My friends laughed gently. I felt like a child.

I felt like a child.

And on that mountain men will forge                                                                      

From cruel implements of war

The tools to till and garden soil:

The rose will bloom and faces shine with gladdening oil.

 

Seer and Seen

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I have been working in little fits and starts and pokes over the last week or so on an entry about God’s gentleness, and how it has been especially evident to me in this season of my life, but it has occurred to me that just recently, I have not necessarily been behaving gentle myself or as if I believe God is gentle with me. So perhaps if I were to post that a few people in my life might feel it was tinged with hypocrisy… Thus there has been a change of plans. Instead I am going to tell you about something which seems to me simpler, but just as true, and just as difficult to believe.

For the last few days I have been fiddling around with a little what-could-one-day-be-a-poem. If it were ever to be born properly, it would be called “Seer,” but I don’t think it will ever emerge into the light of any one else’s eyes, because I think Luci Shaw has already written it several times over. Instead, I will just tell you here what it was wanting to say: God is much more busy seeing me than I usually give him credit for.

He is seeing me when I leave half-finished blog entries and poems scattered at my feet.

He is seeing the cinnamon I put in my oatmeal.

He is seeing me parking my car in the same spot every weekday.

He is seeing me run my fingers along the top of the circulation desk at the library as I move to help a waiting patron.

He is seeing me arrange books in leaning piles on my bed to write first one paper then another.

He is seeing me sitting on the floor of the entryway of my house talking to my mother on the phone.

He is seeing me shuffling through old fall leaves which I hope will not stick to my boots.

He is seeing me remind myself about dinner.

He is seeing me drive late past the huge glowing Christmas tree on Valley.

He is seeing me lose track of the conversation my friends are having and look instead out the window into the dark.

He is seeing me going through the familiar motions of digging for words and setting them up next to each other, teaching them to be friends.

He is seeing me fall asleep, later than I should, curled tight into a comfortered ball.

He is seeing me.

He is seeing.

And—if I may end where I began—he is gentle.

This Too Shall Pass

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My time at Regent is starting to feel short, which is funny because if all goes according to my (current) plan, I’m still less than halfway through it.

Nearly everything in the here and now feels like gift: shiny shoes, tired eyes, slim volumes of poetry, sky that turns to gloom so early we are left reading in glow of lamplight at five pm, the walk through UBC to see my favorite books, a friend waving at me two-handed in the library, and the pattering sound of the people of God in Korean-style prayer yesterday, speaking to our Lord separately but also all together.

And I am most particularly aware in the last few days of the small acts of love offered by those around me. Over a year ago, as I was settling in to Regent, I wrote an entry about receiving the kindness of others and how it was a difficult, but needed, transition for me after teaching. But the goodness so often given to me now has a different, deeper flavor to it, because now, these people offering their hands to me in ways I do not deserve, they’re no longer nearly-strangers. They’re friends. They know what I need and I know what it costs them to give it. And yet, I am inundated here by unsought gentlenesses: a letter in my box, thoughtful suggestions of what particular courses I would love next term or next summer, food shared without ceremony, immediate patience and forgiveness when I am suddenly reactive or awkward, or simply someone who is inexplicably pleased to see me. 

Once I would have seen these unmerited offerings and kindnesses only as damning evidence of my own need and failure, reminders of my capacity to fumble with what I’ve been given so that others are regularly having to come in and pick up the pieces. But gradually I am learning to see them as more, much more. These, too, I am learning to see as gift, heavy in their humility and their glory.

Yet, like I said, my time here already seems marked with an expiration date, and even these acts of love and the bright eyes that offer them seem ephemeral and fast-moving. I’m having to learn these enormous lessons on the fly. I will not always be here in this place, slogging through this exegesis book, wearing this green velvet vest, walking on these autumn leaves, supported by this stubbornly present community. All these things will pass.

But I will walk away into the rest of my years bearing a hundred messy thumbprints of now. And I have a hunch that with time, they will not fade, but instead deepen and multiply, an ever-accumulating revelation that grace endures. Grace endures and burns bright. My eyes can handle a little more of the light today.