A Blue Day

Today is a blue day. I just woke up that way. It happens.

I was looking on facebook and saw that one of my college friends has been redecorating a room in her house to get ready for a baby. My throat catches as I click through pictures of a lovely country house, a real garden, smiling relatives...

Sometimes the pressure of all the millions of things I want to do and ought to be doing pushes down on my chest so hard and all I can do is cry and hope no one else sees how messed up I am.

But who the heck am I to be whining about my stillborn plans when the world is positively falling apart? People's hearts are disintegrating around me, and I'm upset because I want somebody else's white picket fence. I asked God a long time ago to use me however He saw fit.

A little over a year ago, I started following a blog written by a woman whose husband was in a terrible accident. Reading about all the challenges she faces as her husband slowly recovers from a brain injury, I am constantly awed by the strength and the grace and the wisdom that has grown in this woman's heart. But it scares me, because it reminds me how far God is willing to go, how much He will put us through, to grow good things in us. The things we cherish are not always valued in the same way by the One who views things from eternity. I can't cling to anything, anything at all, except Him.

What options do I have, really? I could try to run away, pretend it's not important, bury myself in the prettiest lies I can find--or spin some for myself. I could go watch tv. I suppose I could try to fight God... but that makes just about as much sense as shutting myself in the freezer.

Nope. The only thing to do now is to go ahead and have my little cry, and then take a deep breath and say, "Okay, what's next?"

And trust that this journey is worth the cost.

I have a feeling that the finished product is going to be beautiful.

Somebody has been reading too much poetry.

Sometimes I look up from my toil, sit back on my haunches, fix the Almighty with an exasperated eye, and say...

You know this isn't going to work. I can't do any of it. I am a square peg in a swiss-cheese world, an odd duck, a curious flower too strange to purchase and too alive to be happy on the shelf. And you send me out here like this in my weakness, like a butterfly in a hailstorm, like an ice cube in the Sahara, with no guarantee of success beyond the assurance that you will be with me as I melt. I'm just going to mess things up. Weakling that I am there will be destruction in my wake. Other souls will suffer for my sins.

So why even bother?

What could you possibly be getting at?

And wouldn't it be easier to get there without me?

My beautiful dissonance, my lovely jagged jewel. I put you in that smooth, flat world because some of my children have forgotten how to bleed.
As you hold each other's hearts, you'll find your own are lighter.
I sent you out into the storm, fragile bloom, my winsome butterfly, because I find your weakness beautiful,
and know that dying eyes will glimpse your
soft defiance
and find the will to look for me again.

two things...

Who's that woman putting blog posts all over this 'Thoughtful Spot'? Oh yeah, it's me...

I promise to add more after this weekend (Church Camp-out Yay!), but I needed to write down a thing or two before I forget.

First, after months of not knowing what to expect (and therefore expecting the worst), I received word last week that not only do I still have a job at Conway School, it is going to be a FULL TIME job (hooray for insurance! Now I can make that appointment with my dentist!). I may not be spending all that time teaching music, but it's a good sight better than going into retail to supplement my income. (Although, my brother and sister-in-law very nearly convinced me that a nice little job in a book store would not necessarily be a bad thing. In fact, a small part of my heart is disappointed that things didn't come to that. I could have been like Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail... ah well, c'est la vie.)

And second, this thought occurred to me during community group last night and I wanted to write it down before it slipped out of my brain. This is the thought: the gifts God gives us, things like Grace and Love and Existence, are not free, they are priceless. We are not asked to pay for them because we can not pay enough, not because they have no cost. They do have a cost, a steep one, one that reflects their inestimable value, but we can not pay it. So God pays, and in a sense we kind of help pay for each other*, and these things are given to us as gifts.

*I'm not quite sure where that thought might lead, but it wanted to come, so I let it.

Anyway, I'm off to rough it in the woods for a few days!

Happy Summer!

Spring Break, or A Sudden Onset of Industriousness

Today is the first day of Spring Break, so this morning, I sat down and wrote out a list of everything I need to do before the break is up. It is a long list. Three loads of laundry and two batches of cookies later*, it is still a long list. Here are some highlights:

-Write a Unit** on the concept of the Hero in fairy tales, folk tales, and myths. As part of my effort to be as employed as possible in the coming years of economic woe, I have been taking classes and jumping through hoops to become qualified to teach English Literature in addition to Music. This Unit is the last hoop. I'm kind of excited about it. I actually get to teach the Unit in May. To real kids.

-Write a short play for Grandparents' Tea. I've been looking forward to this one, too. Every year, I have to come up with some little drama that links together whatever interesting songs I can find in our curriculum (that haven't been used already), and fit it to the talents and desires of so many fourth graders in such a way that the fourth graders in one class can practice distinct portions of the play without having to join the other class until a few days before the performance. It's a bit like sudoku, only with people instead of numbers.

-Run at least two miles, at least four times during the week. My friend and I are just beginning to train for a half-marathon. We aren't officially training yet because we don't own any of those funky running tights you wear under your work-out short shorts.

-Get my tattoo. Yes, this is the week. I feel a lot like the poor kid on the high dive who's been standing there, shivering, for hours and hours but still can't quite drum up the courage to step off the edge. I keep looking at the spot where I plan to put it and wondering if I'll feel cheap for having my arm forever stained with words. They're good words. Nevertheless, I still wonder.

-Survive several long days of lonely freedom without reading or watching fiction. For Lent this year I gave up 'fiction in solitary.' I added the 'in solitary' part so that my friends would not be doomed to watching documentaries on our traditional Friday Night Movie nights. And actually, the ban includes all tv and movies, as well as fictional books and websites dealing with fictional material*** whenever I am by myself, which is a lot of the time. As you can imagine, my Saturdays have become very long. Some days I wonder why I didn't just give up cheeseburgers and leave it at that.
I am convinced, however, that since God put this on my heart, good will come out of it. I'll just hope that my idea of good isn't too far away from His idea of good. :)

-Visit Friends and Relations.

Whewh! If I get even half of the stuff done that I've set out to do, it will have been a week well spent.


*Baked, not eaten
**Theoretically, teachers teach in 'Units' comprised of individual 'Lessons' which can be further broken down into 'Learning Objectives,' 'Direct Instruction,' 'Guided Practice,' 'Formative or Summative Assessments,' and other such soul-sucking terminology. Realistically, teachers teach in a haze of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants improvisation that more closely resembles the mental contortions of a stand-up comedian who has just discovered that his audience is from another planet.
***I'm looking at you, imdb!

Rumors of my untimely demise have been greatly exaggerated.

In case you're wondering, I am not actually the consummate speller I appear to be. I write my entries (and emails, and comments on other blogs, and facebook updates) with an extra Firefox window devoted entirely to checking questionable spellings via the intarwebs. Case in point: I very nearly spelled 'exaggerated' with an h. In this, as in so many other areas of my life, the appearance of genius is actually an otherwise troublesome neurosis so channelled as to do some sort of good, however small that may be, in addition to keeping me up nights, causing premature baldness and ulcers.

As you can see, I am not dead. I did not suffer a blow to the head and spend the last three months slowly recovering from amnesia, nor do I work for the CIA (honest, I don't!). The simple fact is that I just stopped writing. I woke up, did things, ate food, showered, and went to bed over and over and over, without ever stopping to sit down and spend a few minutes letting you in on any of it. Poor readers. I do sincerely apologize. I guess I just forgot that any of it would be worth making a note of. Like that strange breed of single person who suddenly wakes up to find that he has no photographic evidence of his existance after college, I found myself looking at my own blog and thinking 'when is she going to post something new here?'

Well, today is only sort of that day. (Yay?) Unfortunately, all I have time for is a rather elaborate excuse, but hopefully every time I come to my blog to see what the people who follow me are up to on their blogs, this small note will weigh on my conscience, like a dirty pot on a stove top, until I can write again.

Until then, my friends, Happy Friday!

Just Thinking...

Well, the room is quiet and I am alone for the first time in almost two weeks. My parents came to my house for Christmas, which makes the first time ever that I should host our family celebrations of the Blessed Event. I feel strangely grown-up and established.

I think what I enjoyed most from this particular vacation is the time we had to talk to each other, and I mean really talk about deep and important stuff. Like ogres, and onions--and cake, and parfait--each of my parents is a layered and multifaceted personage. These last two weeks gave me time to get to know them and appreciate them in a way that few of my contemporaries, I suspect, get to know their own parents. How many times does a girl get her parents all to herself when she is old enough to talk to them as a grown-up and an equal?

Also, I have a new tv and all of the laundry has been washed. La dolce vida.

in honor of C.S. Lewis' 112th birthday...

Because I go to one of the coolest (read: nerdiest) churches ever, my pastor has organized a little quasi-'Inklings' gathering at a local pub and asked me to write something (!) about one of Lewis' most famous articles "the Weight of Glory." So I wrote the following (Warning: It's a little thick, and if you haven't read the article it might not make much sense):

“You have a twinkle in your eye!” says my friend, Teresa, as we meet on the sidewalk in front of my house, “Is there anything you should be telling me?” she asks with a grin. I know what she’s talking about. She and I share a common malady: singleness. She’s wondering if I’ve met someone, or been called out of the blue by a long-lost sweetheart, or if Prince Charming has stepped out of man-land and into my living room. “No,” I say, with a grin of my own, “I’ve just been writing.” And it’s true. I’ve been working on this very paper. But the funny thing is, I didn’t even realize I was so happy. The more I think about this, the more I see that C.S. Lewis got it right in his great sermon “the Weight of Glory.” Although Lewis’ words are more eloquent and incisive, the over-riding message is that all of the happiness implied by our most lavish ‘happily ever after’ stories is but a hint of the Real Joy that Christ offers us. This is a Joy so expansive that we literally cannot imagine it as we are in this present world, except as the stuff of which our seemingly bottomless need is but an inside-out reflection. It is a Joy so beyond our understanding that we must be taught to let go of the paper doll replicas we have fashioned for ourselves so that we can reach out and touch the living hands of Love Himself.

Lewis begins his sermon by arguing against the “negative” virtue of unselfishness (negative because it is defined by abstinence rather than substance, not necessarily bad) in favor of the positive virtue of “Love” (again, positive as in substantive rather than vaguely good) in order to bring to light the subtle but powerful difference between a devotional life characterized by rejected desires and one that abandons lesser goods in pursuit of greater ones. After all, what makes Christianity different from eastern religions and altruistic humanism, if not its explicit, almost ludicrous, appeals to our deepest desires—heaven, an intimate and personal relationship with God, miracles, forgiveness, etc? Our insatiable desire, then, is not a blight of the human condition, but its most precious asset. It is the first hint that our tawdry souls are meant for more than the richest pleasures our collective imaginations can make of this world, meant for divine communion with the One who literally sustains the universe with His very breath, the Mind who invented minds. “[I]f we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels,” Lewis writes, “it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak…We are far too easily pleased.”

But if the promises are true, then why do we insist on “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us”? In my heart, I long for adventure. I don’t want merely to shine; I want to blaze across the sky like an exploding star, to overwhelm this dark world with a searing and breath-taking brilliance! So why don’t I? Why don’t I live like my deepest dreams have come true? Well…I just don’t know how. I don’t yet know how to desire the greatest good because I have only just begun to scratch the surface of what goodness means. I suspect that this is why we populate our fictions with so many fascinating scoundrels and boring heroes. As long as we conceive of Good as simply the absence of Bad, we are bound to find the Phantom of the Opera far more interesting than that soppy Raoul fellow (am I right, ladies?). In our worldly culture, the human animal, with all its frailties and destructive tendencies, is the noblest creature imaginable, and a fictional character without these limitations, who does not deal with them, is not noble, he is strangely deficient. We do not yet have the imagination to become experts on the positively Good. Nevertheless, even in our limited and dingy materialism, the stories that mean the most to us are those that tap into our “inconsolable secret,” the yawning ache in our hearts for Goodness that is real, and true, and solid—the desire, in fact, to be more than we know, to be more than human.

As a Christian, I ought to rejoice in the promise of Christ’s redemption, and be content that although I am not whole today, I will be in eternity. But it’s hard not to wonder why the transformation from miserable sinner to glorified saint does not happen instantaneously. After all, is anything too hard for God? I think Lewis would say that on one level, and as far as eternity is concerned, the transformation is instantaneous. Certain parts of the Great Divorce seem to argue that redemption, once accepted, runs both forward and backward through time, so that the ugliness of the past is made beautiful in light of the eternal. Is it possible that our future glory might also reach back through time to transform us now? It might, and indeed does transform us now, or it begins to, for nothing is too hard for God. A great many things are too hard for us, however, and enduring in our present frailty the full power of our future glory is one of them. It seems to be God’s pleasure that we grow into our promised glory as we learn to desire Love for Love’s sake and see ourselves as He sees us. Perhaps He wants our love to grow naturally, like a seed grows into a tree. Perhaps, in this way, the willfulness and frailty that characterizes our humanity can be transformed into something incorruptibly beautiful, instead of being blown apart like shrapnel, in the face of instantaneous holiness. Is it possible that God refuses to force His will upon us, but instead waits, with a lover’s patience, for the gradual unfolding of His beloved’s heart? There can be no doubt that His patience is costly, both to Him and to all of us who must live with each other’s incompleteness, but the survival of the human race up to this point seems to argue that God believes that the glory of our ultimate completion is worth the struggle and the wait.

This is why, even though I am no closer to my childhood dream of playing first mate to the captain of my heart (jam jar opening, oil changing, philosophizing renaissance man that he is), I can still be seen grinning like a fool, humming to myself, and waving to strangers like the soprano lead in a broadway musical. I am convinced today that, regardless of my circumstances, I have something better than my dreams, certainly something more real. And then, as if it were not enough for Lewis to whisper in our ears: Courage, friends; someday, you will be more magnificent than you could possibly imagine, he has to go and give us something to turn our present dreariness into gold. I will not ruin the effect by paraphrasing. Just let me point out that the extent to which we understand and apply the following words to the people around us is the extent to which we actually live in the weight of glory which is to come, the glory we truly long for.

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations…There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours…Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”