what it was about

But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand. 

Mary did not always understand.  But one does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding -- that intellectual understanding, which we are so fond of -- there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which we are not yet able to understand. 

A young woman said to me, during the question-and-answer period after a lecture, "I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eight or nine. I didn't understand it, but I knew what it was about." 

As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.

-Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

action that has ripened in our hearts

When I was young, my best friend once told me she wished I'd have more words for her. She wanted a verbal response when she shared things with me to demonstrate that I was really listening. We'd been friends more than ten years at the point, since we were five. I tried to explain to her that I did hear her, but just didn't have anything to say in response. What I didn't know how to communicate is that I was learning to hold what she shared -- whether it was the new alternative rock song she played for me on her tape player, the recent conversation with her crush that she analyzed, her dreams for the future. I heard it all. I just didn't have words, not yet anyway.

I've been thinking about this exchange a lot lately. It was a passing interaction, a conversation I remember having only once, and yet it marked our friendship because of what we were expressing to each other: the desire to be heard, loved, understood and supported. I've been thinking about it because of how I'm feeling about the world right now and what the events of each new day demand of me. People want words. Many others have words, or feel the need to have them, and share them on social media or in seemingly never-ending conversations at coffee shops and over text messages. Just today, my sister and I went to a coffee shop where we shared a table with two other women. As they scooched their things to offer space for us, they warned us that we'd be subjected to their political conversation. We laughed but also knew they were very earnest, because how can we not talk about what's going on?

I had the same feeling over the summer. It was the weekend after a few more black people were killed at the hands of white police officers, and just before I was to leave for two weeks in Kenya. I didn't know how to respond in my own heart, let alone on social media, where likes and comments might judge how well I was doing at this whole responding thing. As I scrolled through Facebook, feeling my lack of words, one friend shared a response from one of his friends, introducing it as "the perfect response" to what was happening. And that's when I began to wonder, are all these responses coming from our hearts, or are we putting on a show, all trying to have what someone else will call "the prefect response"?

Prayer yesterday morning led me to Isaiah 30, where a disobedient people are told that strength will come in their learning to be quiet. And again, in Psalm 46, where I have been stationing myself with hope and prayer, we are told to be still. Pay attention is what it says in another version of that psalm, know that God is God. And now I can't get away from wondering if the first response isn't a reactionary declaration or a search for who we can align ourselves with on social media, but is rather stillness. Quietness. Holding the pain, listening to our friends, and searching our hearts for what we are called to do or say.

Henri Nouwen says it this way:

It is not so difficult to see how "reactionary" we tend to be: that is, how often our lives become a series of nervous and often anxious reactions to the stimuli of our surroundings... we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center. ... It seems of great importance to know with an experiential knowledge the difference between an action that is triggered by a change in the surrounding scene and an action that has ripened in our hearts through careful listening to the world in which we live.

And so I am content to pray and trust that meaningful sentiments, compassionate actions and deepened relationships will be nurtured in my heart through knowing that God is still God.

our own inner mystery

When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love. An intimate relationship between people not only asks for mutual openness but also for mutual respectful protection of each other’s uniqueness.

-Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out 

***
(photo: reflection at st. james episcopal, lancaster, pa)

what love longs to be

In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of meaningful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

-Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak

***
(photo: late afternoon light in pittsburgh)

it just takes a little effort

I am a comfort person... But I don't want to rest on something just because I have in the past. I really enjoy challenging myself, I really enjoy being in new places. It just takes a little effort for me to keep putting myself in those new places.

- musician Sara Watkins via here.

Glad I have some company on this (thinking of this recent blog post...).

PS Sara Watkins has a new album out today! and my earliest Sara Watkins love when Nickel Creek was still a thing (RIP).

***
(photo: city lights from a new-to-me rooftop restaurant.)

i want to give you something

For all sorts of mistakes are possible when you are dealing with Him. Long ago, before we were married, H. was haunted all one morning as she went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) 'at her elbow,' demanding her attention. And of course not being a perfected saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in -- I know how one pulls it off -- and faced Him. But the message was, 'I want to give you something,' and instantly she entered into joy.

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I could tell you a few different stories about this book: how I started reading it after looking for a different book but finding this one instead, how the text on the cover intrigued me. How I found the receipt still stuck inside, telling me I bought it in 2012 but not telling me why. How, halfway through reading, I shoved it into a canvas bag to take it with me to read at the pool over Memorial Day Weekend and found the bag minutes later on the counter where I left it, swimming in the pool of water from my water bottle leaking everywhere. Now its pages are crumpled and stained.

But here's what I will tell you instead: you don't have to have experienced the loss of a wife (or a husband or a child or a parent or a friend) to find Lewis asking questions you have at some point wondered about. Lewis's nonfiction writing is decidedly philosophical, apologetic, heady. But this book, taken from a few moleskine journals he wrote in during the weeks or months following his wife's death, is much more reflective and raw.

I found myself reading the first half as a kind of observer. It's much more focused on the experience of losing his wife. At some point, Lewis notes a shift in his experience where the fog of grief lifts and he's able to experience his wife's presence in a much more clear way. It's at this point where he starts asking questions about his experience of God. His idea of God, shattered by the experience of his wife's death, has to be shattered again and again, he says. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand the least. He writes of being utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in, and always understands God as being more generous, more loving, more present than the person thinks. The mistake is to think Him absent, inattentive, unwilling.

[On a writerly side note: I have heard so many times how good prose writing is built on the foundation of good sentences. I would always nod my head. Yes, intuitively that made sense. But Lewis's sentences are good. Their length, their feel, their shape lends a kind of subdued intensity.]

***
(photo: book on table, before the water incident)

literary, lately: june edition

Unlike fiction, nonfiction is not a genre. It's a headache. An explanation for why The Sixth Extinction was number one on a list of the top 100 books of English-language nonfiction (chronological, working backwards), this piece also forced me to look up the word vituperative and made me feel, once again, hopelessly under-read -- a feeling I am trying to make a joyful one (so many books to read, yay!).

In the end, the trials of their relationship are worth bearing, because Frog and Toad are most content when they're together. Loved reading more about these beloved stories, though the speculation that they were actually gay lovers felt disappointing and maybe unnecessary. These days, friendship is so easily confused for romance or cheapened by sex. I think the boundary lines of friendship are incredibly sheltering, not restrictive.

One day you will hear a physicist say we are all made from the bodies of dead stars, and it will feel as if you've known it all along. A powerhouse of a story, and short, which is good because you might hold your breath the whole way through.

Like the first man / I was cut so deep by heaven's knife. One of my favorite stories, in song form.

No words, just these photos. Kenya, I'm coming for you.

***
(photo: writing, the view from above)

give this book the attention it deserves

Sometimes, it's hard for me to separate my experience of a book from the circumstances of my life while reading it. If you've read any of my read2016 posts this year, you might have gathered that much already.

So here's the thing with Tinkers: I was prepared to really like it, but I got distracted. I read it when I was tired, I read it on the train, I read it at a coffee shop when I got interrupted by a good looking stranger who asked if he could sit with me and talk (and I said yes), I read it on a Sunday afternoon when I was determined to finish it so I could start another book before travel a few days later. The conditions were not ideal, especially considering the kind of book Tinkers is -- not much plot, sprawling poetic sentences attempting to describe ineffable feelings, strange switches in point of view and time and generation that can disorient the reader if she's not paying enough attention.

Still, I liked it. I dog-eared pages that I am now transcribing into a document of bright passages from books I read. Even as I do this, I find myself drawn in again by the beautiful language -- poetic, and also terribly precise and physical and surprising. I keep reading past the sentence I meant to transcribe, forgetting what's happening in that part of the story but just wanting to follow his trail of words.

One of my favorite passages comes early on:

There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode in the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy. 

The sign of a good book (and perhaps the nerdiness of the person reading it) is that she will bring it up in a conversation with friends over drinks, which is what I did with this passage, with a doctor friend, because it was the most wonderful and felt description of disease in fiction that I think I've ever read. No technical jargon until the very end, when Harding names it: epilepsy. But before he gets there, he wants the reader to feel it as the character does.

I was tempted to make this post a long list of the passages I love, but I leave you with that one, and with the recommendation that if you read this book, give it the attention it deserves. Drink some coffee, take your time, and resist good looking strangers (but only for this book).

you can just feel God shining through

I think poetry is the mind of God. All the great poems that I love seem to me to all have that little ingredient. You feel like you’re in the presence of the mind of God... Take Rilke, I mean, you can’t just live and come to the conclusions he came to. I think his mission was to learn to get out of the way so that something bigger could speak through him. Emily Dickinson, my God, she’s full of the mind of God. You can just feel God shining through those poems, darkly. So it was her, but it wasn’t. ... There’s something unaccountable that happened to her. And it’s that unaccountable thing that I love.

-poet Li-Young Lee via here.

(more of my own words, soon...)

after reading ongoingness

What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.

          -Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness

***

(photo: selfie with niece)

the story behind the stories

"You ask me questions I like to answer."
              - Kurt Vonnegut to wife Jane

Loved reading this little love-story-behind-the-stories about Kurt Vonnegut and his wife. Writers' lives are pretty fascinating to me, knowing they're what feeds the books we read. I like how we get to see Jane in this recount, if only as a shadow. (We can conclude that, in reality, she was so much more.)

(And that quote - yes.)

get gripped

“I could either shut up, that’s the end, get on with dying. Or, get gripped, which is what happened.” 

-Jenny Diski, on the decision to keep writing after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

This quote really spoke to me this morning. Though Diski is speaking of death quite immediately, I'm thinking of it in more generally - like, isn't that one of two choices we face? The other, I think, is living with desire - or getting gripped, as Diski says it. Facing obstacles or impossibilities - that vast roiling sea on the shores of which we either die or find a way to the other side - forces the choice of allowing the end to come or finding the way forward. The problem with desire is that, often, it feels like it is bringing us to the end, too. Do you jump in the sea and swim? And even if the waters are parted for you to walk across on dry ground, the columns of water at your sides could crash in on you at any moment. But then there is what's on the other side that keeps calling to your heart, gripping you, and you keep walking.

the echo that did not die away

Loving this:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. ... All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeads, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. 

...Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you... Your place in heaven will seem made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

-C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain

books as friends, and a city that gives you space

If books were my friends (which, um, they are), I'd probably categorize them the same way I do my friends. I hope that doesn't sound overly utilitarian, but let's face it: hopefully we love our friends as wholly as we're able, but we often appreciate them for those one or two unique and complex qualities that sets them apart from others we know. It's what appeals to us in them, what draws us in. For example, I have this friend at work who is endlessly bubbly and enthusiastic and loves frappuccinos (with lots of whipped cream, of course), and she also has this incredibly smart, analytic take on things. I especially love to be around her when I want dessert, need a pep talk, or feel like my brain is failing me. And because of her, I just bought a girlie dress that I wouldn't say is "me," but that I love.

The same with books. I'm not looking to each book I read to bring the same kind of experience. I guess this is pretty obvious, especially when it comes to choosing different genres. But even when I read, say, two different books of narrative nonfiction, the author's voice and spin and language and images all work together to create a unique feel. What I'm getting at is that, reading Meghan Daum's newest book of essays, The Unspeakable, made me feel like I was with a friend (and actually reminded me of one of my closest friends). Daum's book is interesting, and heartfelt but not overly emotional. She said a lot of things that question the way I usually think about the world around me, which got me thinking. And I didn't always agree with her, but I trusted her enough to keep going along with her.

I came to this book and author through an essay published in The New Yorker a few months back, which is also part of this collection. It's called Difference Maker, and in it, she writes about her desire to remain childless. As she digs through her experiences and relationships to help the reader understand her path to this decision, she remains balanced (not sentimental at all, a leaning that the subject could lend itself to pretty easily) and yet uncovers what she called the Central Sadness (what a universal name!) in her marriage during one season of recognizing what remaining childless might mean for her and her husband. When I first read this essay back in the fall, I sat on my couch for a while afterward, thinking about it - about her process and how I could relate to that Central Sadness she described, and also about how she was able to achieve what she did with her writing.

One of my favorite essays in Daum's new collection is about Los Angeles, called Invisible City. If you're a reader of this blog, you probably know that I have my issues with LA (the traffic! the incessant sun! the fake green! and the metaphor that is!). Daum doesn't so much rant about LA* as see it with clear eyes and describe what she sees. Her premise is that, even though LA is a place where people come to be seen (or known - like, become famous), it's also a place where you can be invisible. She writes:

Now I just think that LA is a place that's hard to see close up. You can't capture it from the street. It's an aerial-view kind of city, best photographed from a helicopter or hillside. There are people everywhere, but they are hidden in their cars or houses, or they are tiny specks hiking on canyon trails, their dogs even tinier specks beside them, the wildlife crouched in the sagebrush unnoticed. LA is a place that will leave you alone if you need it to. It will let you cry in your car. It will give you your space. (emphasis mine, because exactly.)

It might be weird of me to say, but Daum's essay made me a little more sympathetic toward LA. As if I never thought that some of its flaws weren't its intentional doing, but rather just a result of how people have people the place. That is one of the best qualities that a friend can have, isn't it - to help others see more clearly, and as a result, find it in themselves to forgive. To act with grace toward the world around them.

*Ok but she does rant just a little bit, with such fresh imagery: "The surreal effects of watching these [obvious LA] cliches play out before you in real life and in real time can make your head spin. They can make you feel like the one live person in an animated children's show."

essential

For me, finding stories is all about taking the time to stop and follow your curiosity whenever something sparks it. That’s sometimes harder to do than it sounds (you’re busy, you’re tired, you’re doing something else, etc.), but it’s so essential.

Rebecca Skloot, via here

reading strengthens the soul

Because they can be consumed in a sitting, we tend to think of short stories as the equivalent of literary bonbons, small bites to satisfy a small craving or to fill a little space in the day. Short they may be, and yet the work of digesting a good story is anything but quick... The best short stories I've read over these years have seemed to require nearly as much of me, the reader, as of the writer, a kind of passionate engagement that challenges not only my intellect but my humanity. Reading, reading actively, strengthens the soul.

-Katrina Kenison, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006

the God of small things

I was getting a snack from the vending machine at work and happened to glance at the table of books. It is usually stacked with those small thick mass market paperbacks with the author's name in huge block, books that I imagine someone bought for the beach and cleared out of their house when they moved a few summers later. And I usually ignore these. But sitting there like it knew I'd be looking for it was a book with a title that I needed to understand. I picked it up and turned it around to read the back cover. And here is a confession: I stole it. I bargained that I had a few books I'd drop off in exchange for this one (which, another confession, I haven't done yet).

Then a few days later I was at a bookstore, in line to buy some used books (I can't be helped), and I saw a coffee table book that featured authors' bookshelves. The name of one of my favorites caught my eye, and what else was on his bookshelf but the book I had recently stolen from the work breakroom. I took it as a sign (the God of small things indeed) and started reading it a few days later.

Reading this book required a change of pace from the previous few books I'd read, which were nonfiction narrative and moved fairly quickly. This novel is full of imagery and poetic language, and its structure is complicated, jumping from the present to the past to the further past as memories are evoked. The beginning was slow for me as I adjusted to the depth of concentration I needed to grasp this book. The action picks up at the end, and so did my focus, so I read the second half within a few days.

Something I really loved about this book is that it took trips into the past to tell the beginnings of each character's story and how they fit into the Story this book tells. The author is particular about when she gives you these bits of information, inviting you to deeper feeling and opinion about characters at specific, strategic points in the Story. She also spends a lot of time with scene-setting, making some of the places in the Story (a house, a river) into characters, too.

There are so many beautiful passages that, if given time, I could sit and read over and over. Here is one that I earmarked:

Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them -- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.   

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

the home of the word

Silence is the home of the word. Silence give strength and fruitfulness to the word. We can even say that words are meant to disclose the mystery of the silence from which they come.

- Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

in the desert: on the need for solitude

But soon [St. Anthony] realized that more was required of him. He had to... let himself be totally transformed into a new being. His old, false self had to die and a new self had to be born. For this Anthony withdrew into the complete solitude of the desert.

-Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

Last week tailspin came unexpectedly, like it always does. My friend cancelled dinner out and my internal balance got thrown. She hates spending time with me, I am a loser, I will be alone forever. The emptiness of that night loomed like a dark oblivion ready to swallow me up. I thought about making plans S. or N. or SOMEONE so that my night would be filled again. So that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life alone.

But the thing is, I sometimes really enjoy time alone. And - the next day I'd be going away for the long weekend, so the extra time was actually sorta needed to pack and prepare. I know something isn't right when I respond so dramatically. I resisted those sneaky solutions to just make new plans and forced myself to face me Empty Thursday Night.

It was then, in the middle of this past week, that I was absolutely convinced that this weekend away was necessary, and that I had some inner work to do while here. Not coincidentally we are in the desert, the same terrain where Jesus himself was tested and emerged prepared for ministry. I will admit, this desert is probably quite different from the one where Jesus went, or the one where the Desert Fathers fled. Here there are manicured landscapes (and greenery!) and golf courses and swimming pools. Tonight we are headed to a Purple Rain tribute concert and I'm hoping to get a cocktail.

But here I am with Nouwen and my journal and some coffee, wondering about how to create some internal solitude. How not to despise time alone in my apartment. How to not fill up every night of my week with new and old friends to somehow guarantee that I'll never have to live alone.

Here are a few ideas from The Way of the Heart that I'm trying to allow to sink in:

Changing my thinking about my apartment and my time living alone
We say to each other that we need some solitude in our lives. What we really are thinking of, however, is a time and a place for ourselves in which we are not bothered by other people, can think our own thoughts, express our own complaints, and do our own thing, whatever that may be... We have come to the dubious conviction that we all have a right to privacy... solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion... the place where the emergence of the new woman occurs.

On solitude as a discipline
We have, indeed, to fashion our own desert where we can withdraw every day, shake off our compulsions and dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord.

What we can expect in the desert of solitude
It is the struggle to die to the false self... The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Why solitude is important to cultivating compassion for people in my life
Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it... It is in solitude that this compassionate solidarity grows... In solitude our heart of stone can be turned into a heart of flesh.

surviving without romance

My best friend Heather lived in Kenya for seven months after she graduated from high school, so I was especially excited to tell her my news. She wondered where I'll be staying and if I would be close to the village where she lived. Then she told me about a book that she had picked off of the shelf in her childhood bedroom the last time she visited home. Our friend Lara had given it to Heather before she left for her trip because it was full of stories of women living in Kenya and a few other East African countries.

I'd been looking for stories and fiction by and about people living in Kenya in making a syllabus to prepare for my trip this summer, so I got off the phone and ordered the book. 

It's called Surviving Without Romance - a slightly misleading, overly dramatic title that, in my opinion, doesn't quite get at what the book is about. But I'm guessing the author was purposeful in wanting the title to be dramatic, in order to draw people in. She explains the title in the prologue:

It is hard for us to understand women who survive, and do so quite happily, without romance. We tend to feel pity or superiority. Our culture tells us, quite insistently, that to be whole a woman needs a lover - and one who will truly understand her, at that.

That explanation makes sense to me. But the women in these stories are doing more than "surviving," they are living. And stating that they are doing so without romance seems to neglect all that they are living with - community, and joy gained through struggles and, for most of them, the love of God.

Here are are a few things this book reinforced for me:

Faith looks a lot of different ways. For one women, it meant leaving her husband, to whom she was a second wife, because she felt that her faith wouldn't allow her to practice or condone polygamy. This meant accepting a life without a husband or children (and so also without a regular form of income, value in the eyes of the community, and family to take care of you in old age). For another woman, faithfulness meant staying with her husband despite feeling betrayed, hurt and neglected when he took on additional wives and abandoned her and her children.

Stories are important. This goes back to the Nouwen quote I shared earlier this month. Each of these women shared stories that were truly theirs, and so very different from mine. And yet they shared things that I could relate to. Their stories each revealed something that is universally experienced. Even though I haven't yet traveled to Kenya or met any of these women face to face, I felt connected to them because of those commonalities.

Africa is diverse and dynamic. These is a struggle to maintain traditional tribal values while adopting the influence of Western culture. Understanding this struggle was timely, given the news about the girls kidnapped in Nigeria.

There's more I could write, but it's getting late and I want to get this post up tonight. On that note, thanks for reading along as I publish some pretty unpolished writing here this month. I don't know if you can tell just from reading, but it's helping me. And I've enjoyed opening up my life a little more readily.