The clearing rests in song and shade.
It is a creature made
By old light held in soil and leaf,
By human joy and grief,
By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.We join our work to Heaven’s gift,
Our hope to what is left,
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy
Of widest worth.
High Heaven’s Kingdom come on earth.
Imagine Paradise.
O Dust, arise!
Planted about 70 nasturtium seeds around the backyard. I’m very late getting them into dirt, but it’s a small investment for a possibly great payoff. (If they bloom, photos to follow in the next couple of months.)
Sabbaths 1979 | Wendell Berry
V
How many have relinquished
Breath, in grief or rage,
The victor and the vanquished
Named on the bitter pageAlike, or indifferently
Forgot–all that they did
Undone entirely.
The dust they stirred has hidTheir faces and their works,
Has settled, and lies still.
Nobody rests or shirks
Who must turn in time’s mill.They wind the turns of the mill
In house and field and town;
As grist is ground to meal
The grinders are ground down.
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry "hello there, Anne" each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning. All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds. So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken. The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.
One-hundred thirty-three years ago today, my dear grandmother was born. In 10 days, we’ll celebrate our dear granddaughter’s first birthday. The blessings roll down the generations.
… we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us … – Wendell Berry (h/t @jabel)
If you want to jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how to live up to his or her social role.
Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated …
We live in a world where violating taboos is monetizable and confers enviable status. I like taboos— not all of them, of course. But I respect the role of taboos in society. Good taboos are the guardians of settled questions. They sit like gargoyles at the mouth of dangerous caves and warn against spelunking in dark and dangerous places. …
The riot of taboo-violating and dogma-disinterring is an invitation to consequences few have the courage or the basic knowledge to apprehend.
If … you conjure a world where there is no external truth, only a riot of competing, equally valid perspectives, then you create a Nietzschean world where the only arbiter of “truth” is the one with the will and the power to impose their truth on everyone else.
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
I was going to say that my faith, like my doubt, mostly involves my mind and not my stomach. Basically that’s true. I can’t really imagine what it would be like to behold the Lord and not as a stranger. I’m not a saint, so I haven’t had that experience. And yet, even as a not-saint, I get glimpses. I think we all have, and may there be many more of them for all of us.
The Remarkable Ordinary (2017)
… the stars shone in their watches, and were glad;
he called them, and they said, ‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for him who made them.
King Rinkitink of Gilgad, by John R. Neill, from Rinkitink in Oz, by Frank L. Baum, 1916
From The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner:
For reasons that I can only guess at now, no one I came to know during that first year in Oz left a deeper mark on me than a plump, ebullient king named Rinkitink. He was a foolish man in many ways who laughed too much and talked too much and at moments of stress was apt to burst into unkingly tears; but beneath all that, he gave the impression of remarkable strength and resilience and courage even…
Rinkitink was a very vulnerable man, silly and unstable in numberless ways, but in his fatness he seemed also somehow solid and substantial, eccentric and yet reliable with his slippered feet planted heavily on the ground and his heart in the right place. Like a tree that has been blown for years from so many directions by so many winds that none of them can ever quite blow it down, he seemed strong in his very vulnerability. In his capacity to laugh and weep at the drop of a hat and in general to make a fool of himself, he seemed wise with the wisdom of a child who sees better than his elders that the world is indeed something to laugh and weep about and who, more realistically than the rest of us, accepts his own foolishness as part of the givenness of things. Frightening and terrible adventures befall him in the course of Baum’s book, but somehow he always manages to come riding out of them on the back of his faithful goat Bilbil. The world can wound him and scare the daylights out of him, but never, you feel, can it destroy him. It is only the world of the fairy tale to be sure, but nonetheless he has overcome that world, and I have remembered him with admiration and love ever since.
In different guises (though always fat) and under different names, Rinkitink has haunted me always…
… these books were all childhood or early boyhood reading – but certain patterns were set, certain rooms were made ready, so that when, years later, I came upon Saint Paul for the first time and heard him say, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,” I had the feeling that I knew something of what he was talking about. Something of the divine comedy that we are all of us involved in. Something of grace.
It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity–happy times and sad times, the time the rabbit bit your finger, the time you had your first taste of bananas and cream, the time you were crying yourself to sleep when somebody came and lay down beside you in the dark for comfort. Childhood’s time is Adam and Eve’s time before they left the garden for good and from that time on divided everything into before and after.
St. John’s Park Slope: wonderful! Alleluia! The Lord is risen!
Malcolm Guite:
Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus So close the candles flare with their soft breath And kindle heart and soul to flame within us Lit by these mysteries of life and death. For beauty now begins the final movement In quietness and intimate encounter The alabaster jar of precious ointment Is broken open for the world’s true lover, The whole room richly fills to feast the senses With all the yearning such a fragrance brings, The heart is mourning but the spirit dances, Here at the very centre of all things, Here at the meeting place of love and loss We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.
Six years after my dad died, three after my mom died, and this year, when my first two grandchildren are born, this resonates. Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart.
Each time members of the tribe die, the self we were with them dies too, which is to say that the kind of words we spoke only to them, were only to them, and the kind they spoke only to us are spoken no longer. But if outwardly our language is thus impoverished, inwardly it is enriched because when members of the tribe die, the words they were are added to the vocabulary of the heart, where we have more than just ears for hearing them. And each time a member of the tribe is born, a new word comes into being, and nothing is ever the same again.
I planted 200 of these suckers last November, and am so glad to see them coming up. God grew ‘em, not me. But I did participate in the project.
“Anora” – a movie about a sex worker and her client – won a bunch of Oscars this year. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment on the movie. But it struck me that both the lead actress and the writer/director made a point to express solidarity with sex workers. What might they have been trying to convey? And what did they convey without trying? As with almost all human endeavors, I suspect there were a bunch of motivations, some of which contradict each other.
First, they seem to have been holding up the truth that prostitutes are, indeed, real human beings, not types, and therefore are worthy of respect as humans. Excellent. Count me in.
They may also have been endorsing the idea that prostitution should be freed from old, outworn stigmas that a repressive society traditionally associates with the oldest profession. Maybe they think women and men should be free to provide sex (safely) in exchange for money, especially if the money translates to power that’s traditionally inaccessible to sex workers. This notion views sex as a good or service tradeable for money (aka power), the same as any other commodity.
Here, we part ways, because this misunderstands the right purpose of sex. My understanding that there even is a right purpose of sex necessarily arises from the notion that God, as the giver of the gift that is sex, attaches an intent to it. I hold that God’s intent for sex is to nurture intimacy between the lovers. Undoubtedly, God has additional intentions, such as the gift of children; but here I’m concerned with intimacy. Also, I quite understand that sex certainly can be used as a means to an end, and that’s a very old story (see, e.g., Lysistrata). But that’s not OK in my book. Also, it can be just plain fun. But, it’s meant to be fun that’s shared, ideally with someone you care about.
It’s no accident that at its best, sex is something we do naked. Nakedness is a stripping away of pretense as a way to truly see and be seen by the one you love. Opening our bodies to each other is emphatically not intended as a tool to wield power or extract payment. Using sex for those purposes instrumentalizes sex and commodifies one’s self and one’s partner. It’s the antithesis of nurtured intimacy. (For the same reasons, I don’t like “using” as a verb in this context.)
The “Sex-as-ATM” idea is a manifestation of what Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) calls “Metaphysical Capitalism,” which treats all creation and the entire human condition as elements of a vast market. (See, the discussion of Kant’s view of sex and marriage in this post.)
What’s particularly poignant about viewing sex in this way is that it subverts the humane and tender motivation to understand prostitutes as human beings deserving of respect. I don’t know that many in the “pro-sex-worker” cohort see it, but the idea that our bodies and our intimacies are tradeable commodities is truly, sadly, deeply inhuman.
Faith is not the absence of uncertainty. I’m a person of Christian faith, but I admit I’m not certain of anything – God’s existence, Jesus' resurrection, the presence of the Holy Ghost. Yet, I have [uncertain] faith in all these things. That faith – together with the evidence of my own experience and, more importantly, what I’ve seen in other faithful people – means my uncertainty doesn’t cause anxiety. *
When Hebrews says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” the author may seem to speak of certainties; “assurance,” “conviction” – those are certainty words. But, there’s also uncertainty in “things hoped for” and in “things not seen.” I feel that tension. And yet, even in the face of uncertainty, I’m not anxious about these things. Perhaps, that’s a gift that Hebrews speaks of as “assurance” and “conviction.”
*I reckon that like St. Paul (in the KJV), I am persuaded of the truth of the Gospel. “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
From Canon Victoria Heard of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas:
As I walked down the hall, I found myself, by chance, behind a nurse with beautiful braided gray hair that tumbled down her back like a waterfall. I told her it was beautiful. She was startled, and smiled, and ever so slightly straightened her shoulders. I was intentional. I meant to give her a blessing.
@ayjay, quoting Ross Douthat on Paul Kingsnorth’s coming to Christian belief:
… he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, by ideas and arguments, and by … stark mystical experiences
@ayjay, again, contrasting the homo religiosus “seeker” with the Christian:
We Christians don’t seek, we are found by the One who seeks us.
Exactly. And it seems to me that Kingsnorth’s coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments, and stark mystical experiences are God’s drawing Kingsnorth to Him; of, as Edwin Muir beautifully writes, his being found.
From a trip to Half-Price Books.
Russell Moore (italics mine):
On the other side of the sword that cuts through Mary’s heart at the cross (or those that cut off the martyr’s heads in first-century Rome), there’s a weight of glory that cannot be described adequately with words. We can free ourselves to risk heartbrokenness because a broken heart is the beginning of the story, not the end.
Robert Herrick:
The darling of the world is come,
And, fit it is, we find a room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart …
Merry Christmas!
