Fragments
Perhaps reading Crime and Punishment leaves one thinking in fragments, but I don't believe I can really blame Dostoevsky for this. After all, a number of my posts are fragmentary. This one will be so too.
I've been exploring grad school seriously for the first time in my life, partly because it is one of several options for 2010, partly because the Master of Fine Arts/Master of Letters program at Mary Baldwin is utterly enticing (who wouldn't want to go to school down the street from the world's only replica of Shakespeare's private theater, especially if "school" meant spending all one's time learning to direct his plays?), and partly just for the sake of giving my mind a new toy.
This morning, Danya asked me to sum up 1300 years (500-1800 AD) in three words. I told him that "Age of Christendom" was the only thing that struck me as even remotely appropriate, and suddenly found myself blinking in the jeweled dazzle of stained-glass images on his computer screen. I had forgotten, so very much forgotten, about the glory of cathedral windows. It took me backward to a quiet afternoon at the National Cathedral, so I let the sweet lovely memory have its way with me. I thought how there is nothing on earth quite like the silent passion of the glass, telling stories without words and speaking volumes without sound and bleeding . . . not heart's blood, but sun's blood: light. If I had to give a name and a picture to human worship, I would call it colored light and say that it is like a stained-glass window of the Gospel.
Reading, reading, reading... I read two books in the last two days, and that was just during my free time. One I found immensely disappointing: I should have known better than to give a Jane Austen rip-off a chance. The other was moderately encouraging: a Christian novel not devoid of power and artistry, though---alas---still pasty to my mind and feelings. Why do we Christians find it so difficult to write our own most passionate beliefs in a way that makes the truth appear at least a particle as startling and heavy as it in fact is? Why are our words so often cardboard rather than stained glass? Is it because we plunge in too far... or not far enough?
Jeff Purswell's chapter on loving the world (the final chapter in C.J.'s new book Worldliness) is such an important reminder, and so helpful in the way it laces together elements which seem to me to be very rarely grouped under that heading. Loving work, loving the world around us, loving evangelism, loving life, loving the grand story of the Bible... in a book on worldliness? It goes to a deep place in my soul and unseals a fountain of delight. Gaudeo!
After almost a year of barely-contained unhappiness, I am surprised to find myself deeply happy. My circumstances have not changed, but I have changed. I told God, "Let me skip the road with you. Look, I'll put a pebble in my shoe! Watch me walk. I can walk and walk." And I have walked with a pebble in my shoe, and when it galled me, He carried me, and I grew strong, and I can walk much better now. I don't know whether that has made me happy, but I am grateful to be released from the low ceilings and narrow rooms of the mind, that I lived in for many months. I am grateful to see blue sky again.
It is winter; it is cold; every day I am cold because I live in the basement. I love the cold. It goes through and through me---I welcome it with singing. I feel clean and renewed. My head is clearing at last. The pale sunsets at this time of year are gold and lavender; I want to drink them. Ah, joy, is it you? Welcome, old friend! Too long have you been away, and it is all my own fault, because I forgot, I forgot to preach the Gospel to myself. But now I do, and all the colors come flaming back.
Flames. The hearth in this house, upstairs, leaps most evenings with real fire. I embrace it as readily as I do the cold air. Am I not a creature of air and fire and water, as well as earth? Water, too---Sarah gave me water-star lanterns for my birthday: star-shaped lamps made of brass plates and blue-green bottle-glass. I have filled them with sea glass; I have put a white candle in each of them; when I touch flame to the candle, the light dances out through watery glass and there I have fire and water together. It is a stained-glass lamp. So few people have water-star eyes, but those who do, their eyes are like my lamps, shining and blue-green and starry. Danya has eyes like that; Casey sometimes has eyes like that. They are my water-star friends.
Dear God, thank you for making words and voices and language and song, and the long fluid motions of dance, and the sonorous violins, and the poems, and the stories. Thank you for the trees and the quivering sunlit waters. Thank you for bright eyes and rubies and silver cups. Thank you for fur and laughter. Thank you for my soul---and for saving it.
Te adoro.
I've been exploring grad school seriously for the first time in my life, partly because it is one of several options for 2010, partly because the Master of Fine Arts/Master of Letters program at Mary Baldwin is utterly enticing (who wouldn't want to go to school down the street from the world's only replica of Shakespeare's private theater, especially if "school" meant spending all one's time learning to direct his plays?), and partly just for the sake of giving my mind a new toy.
This morning, Danya asked me to sum up 1300 years (500-1800 AD) in three words. I told him that "Age of Christendom" was the only thing that struck me as even remotely appropriate, and suddenly found myself blinking in the jeweled dazzle of stained-glass images on his computer screen. I had forgotten, so very much forgotten, about the glory of cathedral windows. It took me backward to a quiet afternoon at the National Cathedral, so I let the sweet lovely memory have its way with me. I thought how there is nothing on earth quite like the silent passion of the glass, telling stories without words and speaking volumes without sound and bleeding . . . not heart's blood, but sun's blood: light. If I had to give a name and a picture to human worship, I would call it colored light and say that it is like a stained-glass window of the Gospel.
Reading, reading, reading... I read two books in the last two days, and that was just during my free time. One I found immensely disappointing: I should have known better than to give a Jane Austen rip-off a chance. The other was moderately encouraging: a Christian novel not devoid of power and artistry, though---alas---still pasty to my mind and feelings. Why do we Christians find it so difficult to write our own most passionate beliefs in a way that makes the truth appear at least a particle as startling and heavy as it in fact is? Why are our words so often cardboard rather than stained glass? Is it because we plunge in too far... or not far enough?
Jeff Purswell's chapter on loving the world (the final chapter in C.J.'s new book Worldliness) is such an important reminder, and so helpful in the way it laces together elements which seem to me to be very rarely grouped under that heading. Loving work, loving the world around us, loving evangelism, loving life, loving the grand story of the Bible... in a book on worldliness? It goes to a deep place in my soul and unseals a fountain of delight. Gaudeo!
After almost a year of barely-contained unhappiness, I am surprised to find myself deeply happy. My circumstances have not changed, but I have changed. I told God, "Let me skip the road with you. Look, I'll put a pebble in my shoe! Watch me walk. I can walk and walk." And I have walked with a pebble in my shoe, and when it galled me, He carried me, and I grew strong, and I can walk much better now. I don't know whether that has made me happy, but I am grateful to be released from the low ceilings and narrow rooms of the mind, that I lived in for many months. I am grateful to see blue sky again.
It is winter; it is cold; every day I am cold because I live in the basement. I love the cold. It goes through and through me---I welcome it with singing. I feel clean and renewed. My head is clearing at last. The pale sunsets at this time of year are gold and lavender; I want to drink them. Ah, joy, is it you? Welcome, old friend! Too long have you been away, and it is all my own fault, because I forgot, I forgot to preach the Gospel to myself. But now I do, and all the colors come flaming back.
Flames. The hearth in this house, upstairs, leaps most evenings with real fire. I embrace it as readily as I do the cold air. Am I not a creature of air and fire and water, as well as earth? Water, too---Sarah gave me water-star lanterns for my birthday: star-shaped lamps made of brass plates and blue-green bottle-glass. I have filled them with sea glass; I have put a white candle in each of them; when I touch flame to the candle, the light dances out through watery glass and there I have fire and water together. It is a stained-glass lamp. So few people have water-star eyes, but those who do, their eyes are like my lamps, shining and blue-green and starry. Danya has eyes like that; Casey sometimes has eyes like that. They are my water-star friends.
Dear God, thank you for making words and voices and language and song, and the long fluid motions of dance, and the sonorous violins, and the poems, and the stories. Thank you for the trees and the quivering sunlit waters. Thank you for bright eyes and rubies and silver cups. Thank you for fur and laughter. Thank you for my soul---and for saving it.
Te adoro.
posted by Praelucor at 10:28 PM
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