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February

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This blog entry started in a funny way. I saw this commercial, and it was weirdly affecting. It made me feel a little less lonely and a little more lonely, and a little more cold and a little more warm…it also made me realize that I’ve begun to massively overthink small bits of media.

In fact, it sent me to Wikipedia to look up the month of February. The root word is Latin: februum. It means purification. Ouch. Other historical names for it include the Finnish helmikuu, meaning “month of the pearl,” and two Old English terms, Kalemonath, after cabbage, and Solmonath, meaning “mud month.”

A couple weeks ago in Am Lit we read a Robert Frost poem called “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” We’ve had a mild winter here, so in some ways, it is already mud time. And though I love to quote Hopkins’ line about “dearest freshness deep down things,” I’m having a hard time seeing the life beneath. There are nights when the mudflats of my heart are interminable, refusing to even end at some horizon.

(I’m floundering safely in imagery. I can’t even express myself without borrowing a whole month to lean upon. Sometimes I just can’t find the words—I was reprimanded in class the other day for describing a love story as “nice.” Oh, how the little writer in me has fallen…)

I hope, I believe, that I simply can’t see the end of it because I’m underneath it right now. This bloated February is my ceiling.

Yeats, who is, perhaps, not the ideal poet to cling to in my distress, says that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”–truer word was never spoken, but for this: “The parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water; in the habitation of jackals, where each lay, there shall be grass with reeds and rushes.” (Isaiah 35:7)

There are times when that is easy to believe, and then there are times when just the suggestion, applied to my heart, is incredible. Why is abundance so hard? Isaiah 55:1 calls “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Why is it so difficult to come?

Emily lent me a book the other day called One Thousand Gifts, of which some of you have probably heard. In the very first chapter the author remembers the nation of Israel, wandering in the desert. “For forty long years, God’s people daily eat manna—a substance whose name literally means ‘What is it?’ Hungry, they choose to gather up that which is baffling. They fill on that which has no meaning. More than 14,600 days they take their daily nourishment from that which they don’t comprehend. They find soul filling in the inexplicable. They eat the mystery.”

Yesterday, I went to church twice, and took communion twice. I ate the mystery in the morning, and again in the evening. It was wonderful. I filled my soul with “the inexplicable.” And I simply don’t understand. His death for my life. My life. And what is that, pray tell?

On Wednesday, I got a bit of news which forced me to let go of my last shred of self-assurance, my last sacred imaginative territory. Which was good. I was unexpectedly relieved. It’s gone. I’ve been holding onto it for years, and more suddenly than I’d expected, it’s simply no longer allowed me. Oh, but it’s frightening. I’m left alone with only me. February, my blank mudflat heart, and me, awash in freedom.

So here, a prayer for my muddy heart and for yours, is a devotion by Charles Spurgeon that my 12th grade English teacher once read to us: “Come in, O strong and deep love of Jesus, like the sea at the flood in spring tides, cover all my powers, drown all my sins, wash out all my cares, lift up my earth-bound soul, and float it right up to my Lord’s feet, and there let me lie, a poor broken shell, washed up by His love, having no virtue or value; and only venturing to whisper to Him that if He will put His ear to me, He will hear within my heart faint echoes of the vast waves of His own love which have brought me where it is my delight to lie, even at His feet forever.”

Weather and The Woman Question

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Today is the first day of spring, and here at Grove City we believe that. We really, really believe that. On Thursday I wore shorts (!!!) and Liesel and Jackie and I took obligatory pictures with the statue of J Howard Pew. On Friday, I wore a dress, had Renaissance Lit in the (dry) fountain in the courtyard, and received an ecstatic voicemail from Laura saying we needed to take a walk. So we did. Barefoot. We love sun here. Anytime it is out, the boys take off their shirts for their frisbee games, and the girls sunbathe in the inner quad. It is essential to absorb every drop through every pore, and save for a rainy day. Really.

And now for something completely different. The fact is, though Grove City has been wonderful for me in many ways, I have one particular weakness which it continues to  exacerbate. That is, as curious as it may sound, my womanhood. Suffice to say, the other day I read Genesis 3:16 with painfully open eyes. “To the woman He said:   ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;  In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband,  And he shall rule over you.'” That curse explains a lot of things. Not to you, the reader, probably, but to me, as me. In any case there are a lot of things wrong with me. As I’ve said to a few friends recently, I’m pretty screwed up.

Here is what I don’t want: I don’t want to believe that filling the culture’s expectations, and being bright and cute and well-dressed and size two is enough, or even worth anything.  I also don’t want to buy into the image being peddled by much of the Christian community. Last week there was a “women only” chapel on campus about balancing career and family. I didn’t go myself, but now I wish I had, so I could form my own opinion. There was an editorial about it in The Collegian, and this woman, Candice Watters, is quoted as saying “just settle–settle down with the first godly man you meet who wants to have babies with you.” My friend Laura told me she also mocked women who go to graduate school as only doing so because they don’t have a ring on their finger, and advised everyone to give hope of a guy who’s a ten, and just settle for an eight. Her point was obvious: Stay barefoot and in the kitchen–anything else is compensation for your failure to catch a man. I cannot express how angry this makes me. This is absolutely  the last thing Grove City girls need to hear. We already have ring by spring, engagement posters galore, and an unhealthy obsession with babies. Our babies. The ones that won’t be born for years. It’s frightening if I think about it. “Your desire shall be for your husband, and [that desire] shall rule over you.”

I want none of that. None. But I don’t know what it is I do want. I want to know God’s current purpose for my femininity. I read Proverbs 31 the other day, and all I got out of it was that that lady was super busy. I can’t dye cloth, I don’t have money to buy land, and I certainly don’t have children to call me blessed. I’m just not at that place in my life yet. What does radical, countercultural womanhood look like for an eighteen-year-old lover of dresses and books and nutella? (When I google it, all I find are blogs that want me to buy books that bash physical beauty, then give you no solutions.) How can I love others not only as myself, but as a woman? How can I love Jesus as a woman? He made me a girl, now what does He want me to do with it? In the Bible, godly women were either saving their people or, in the case of Ruth, finding a husband! Again, not what I’m being called to right now. (Besides, I think Ruth was the exception–in most cases he finds you.) In any case, I don’t know where to look for answers. What did God intend when he created women? Our role is to support men, but there must be more to it than that. In Perelandra, Ransom tells the King and Queen, “I have never before seen a man or a woman. I have lived all my life among shadows and broken images.”

I am at a loss.  All I know is that my version of womanhood is wrong and desperately needs redemption. The Deceiver has twisted and marred God’s creation till we cease to recognize ourselves. Yet there is a promise in Romans 16:20, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” Pray for me. Pray for answers. I don’t know where to turn.

A Haphazard Winter Tears Christmas Entry

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This morning I woke up to go to my eight-o-clock and looked outside to find that it was snowing heavy and windy. Tramping through dry, slippery winter without a hat sounded unappealing, as did Civilization class, so I stayed in bed. Already you and my day have been properly introduced. Isn’t she lovely? At nine I went to Brit Lit where I blinked my way through “Gray’s Elegy” and Christopher Smart’s cat. As I was walking out, Dr. Brown stopped me, and said that I’d seemed so tired lately, was taking fewer notes, and did not seem to be concentrating very well. Was I getting enough sleep? I said I was just ready for the semester to be over. Then I hurried away and tears sprung from some hitherto unknown reservoir of weariness.

I called my mother just to ask about a novel and she heard my panic. I did my French homework, and began to calm down. I walked over to the SAC to pick up a package from home. On the outside was written in sharpie “Dear Alice, Don’t cry in the mailroom. Mom.” I was startled. How had she known? It wasn’t as if she’d sent the package in the last twenty minutes, and all of this fatigue had only hit me today. As I walked back to MEP I wondered, was there something inside so touching, so personal…? That wasn’t like my mommy. Then I remembered something she’d mentioned several days before. She was only joking, saying that now I wouldn’t feel left out while all my friends were opening their big fat care package ordered by their parents for a campus fundraiser. Of course. She did not expect tears and melodrama, she expected laughter and good sense. That was the mother I knew and loved.

This afternoon I sat in the lobby with friends, and just happened to look up my house on google maps. Then I looked up my grandparents’ house,  then Karen’s, then Caldwell… I gave myself a virtual tour of home. In fact, I even tried to drive home from school using street view, but the going was a little slow. So I just switched back to my house and stood in the middle of Scott Avenue, spinning in circles, watching the summer leaves shading my front porch race by again and again. It was almost as good as the real thing. Well, not almost. Just sort of.

As everyone else is beginning their Christmas season, we here at Grove City are entering our stress season. I already have friends studying behind locked doors, and I myself am contemplating who exactly would be a good jailer for my computer. Maybe Katie? Anyhow, true to form, I’m not worried about exams, but I hate them just as much as everyone else. They haven’t begun yet, though… On Saturday night I went to a lovely Christmas party with lots of families. There were about seven different kinds of soup for supper. Then we went caroling and had a gingerbread house competition. I wished I was nine years old again, sliding around in sock feet with a sparkly Christmas sweater and my hair falling into excited, sweaty wisps about my face.

Then last night were the candlelight services at the chapel which are famous, and rightly so. Lots of people from the community come, touring choir sings, the Christmas story is recited, and then everyone lights their candle and Harbison Chapel’s sanctity seems to be consummated yet again as the organ swells and we all sing Silent Night. At “Christ, the Saviour is born; Christ, the Saviour is born” as everyone lifted their candles in solemn unison, and Liesel and I snorted back laughter, I forgot my constant wish that Christmas would arrive faster. Why wish for something you already have?

So to summarize this jumbled entry: Don’t cry in the mailroom, Alice, because in eight days you will be on a plane zooming toward the dear sister you haven’t seen since August, your tall baby brother, your parents, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Also, go ahead, be nine years old with pink cheeks and a sugar high, for “Christ, the Saviour is born!” Happy Christmas, goober. Study hard.

December

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All day fat snow has been falling–the kind that frosts my coat, clogs my eyelashes and makes me feel quite Puckish. This afternoon, friends and I are walking to Salvation Army to buy sweaters and flannel and Christmas presents. There is absolutely nothing I would rather be doing this particular Friday than tramping through northeast-midwest snow in a hat and red peacoat with the FamPan.

When I woke up on the first of December to see the world white-washed, I groaned. “A great, suffocating blanket of ugh has descended,” I told myself, “not to rise again for months on end.” But I put on a sweater-dress and marched out to face it. Then came a peacoat in the mail. And boots out of my closet. And finally Christmas wormed into my soul, (“Well, in Whoville they say the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day!”) and, also, the flakes gained weight. Really, who can resist a pudgy snowflake? It’s even more adorable than  pudgy baby! Dozens of them nestle in hair, looking for all the world like Titania’s Cobweb and Moth. When I open my mouth to speak, they wander right in tasting of Christmas and glitter. I catch them, and they melt, but while they last they look ever so cuddly. How could George Bailey have jumped off a bridge on a snowy night?

To me, until I tire of it, this snow is useless, glorious manna inspiring my most dire creativity. I will skip my way to Salvo, and buy the biggest sweaters, the brightest flannel, and the most devilishly perfect presents. If only this particular snowfall will keep up I, myself, may demand to carve the roast beast.