pearls

            This evening someone wondered to me why pearls are valuable.  I tried to answer him: “Because they can only be found inside oysters on the bottom of the sea.”

            “But oysters can only be found on the bottom of the sea.”

            “Yes, but pearls are beautiful.  You wouldn’t wear a necklace of oysters.”        

            “Wouldn’t you?” (mischievous smile)

            “Maybe you would. . . I wonder why people have always placed value on rare things – it’s strange. Or maybe it isn’t strange.”

            ”It is strange.”

 

            They are beautiful.  They are hard to get.  Therefore they are precious.  That doesn’t quite satisfy.  Or does it?  I cannot explain that side of human nature.  But I know it exists. 

            “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate . . . “ (Genesis 3:6)  Hard-to-get comes into the equation when we consider that it was forbidden to her.  And in the eating, she made many other beautiful things hard to get.  Life, for instance.  Food.  Salvation.  Some things became impossible. 
            ”Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it ” (Matthew 13:45, 46).  

            But all that we have is not enough to buy it.  We can only obtain it as a gift, bought with the all of the One who had enough.  It is beautiful.  Rare.  Precious.  Like a pearl.  

            And so I have come full circle, without really answering the pearl question. 
           

           

belonging

      “It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
      ” ‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helplessly.
      “I told him.  And as I walked on I was lonely no longer.  I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I find myself in a somewhat analogous situation as a college senior.  This is why I love to be asked the way to various campus locations or library shelves.  This is why I love to teach what I have learned.  It does give me a sense of ownership and belonging to a place, to a classification.  “This is where I live; this is who I am; this is my proof.” 

Is this, perhaps, part of why sharing the gospel is so emphasized as a part of being in Christ – to help us take ownership of what has been given to us?  To help us be more than intellectually aware that we belong to Him?

Just some thoughts.

alone, with rain

“I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days.”   Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

One of the grand things about being alone on a college campus is the ever-elusive possibility that someone might come to be alone with me.  It keeps me somehow wistful and contented all at once, nearly satisfying my perpetual and contradictory longings for solitude and company. 

Among my favorite solitudinous spots is a seat with my back to the white columns of an arch beside which water shoots in rhythmic jets and falls in sparkling cascades.  We call this place a pavilion.  Most people meet in or under pavilions, but we meet on our pavilion, as it has no roof.  We also call it ”the new fountain,” because it is new, unlike the old fountain. This fountain dances on cement slab, while the other pours into a pool.  Whatever it may be in actuality, I find a it a soothing place in which to exist, to think, to, write and to smile at passers-by.

Nonetheless, it seems a trifle redundant that the dancing fountains should be dancing when rain comes slanting across the campus and everyone had perhaps more of water than they wanted.  It is a dance defeated by the wind.  Each jet of water leaps up only to be rudely dashed to the ground by invisible, ungentle hands.  Millions of falling drops make these unnecessary.  Why bother, when this is the pattern?

There is hope.  There is disappointment.  There is hope again.  And there is the certainty that wind and rain must have their end.  To borrow again from Marilynne Robinson’s book:
“Hope deferred is still hope.”

smile

“Yes’m, old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.”
~Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs

Suffice to say, I’ve caught a few. 

And I like Sarah Orne Jewett.

almost

I’ve realized that most of the exciting things in my life are things that almost happen rather than things that actually do happen.  Exciting external things, anyway.  I almost fell flat in the mud in our vegetable garden this summer.  My favorite professor almost ran me over with her bicycle this morning which caused me to almost spill tea all over my khaki capris, which would have almost ruined them.  More than once I’ve almost collided with speeding cars changing lanes on the highway.   And these are only the almosts that I know about. 

My life grows much more exciting when I think of all the things that may have almost happened to me without my being aware of them.  Perhaps I have almost been captured by a shining dragon to be kept atop a hoard of treasure in a secret cave until I was almost rescued by a handsome knight.  (Who, by the by, may almost be ugly, but you can’t tell it because of the shining armor.)  Perhaps I have almost stumbled into the Wood Between the Worlds.  Almost inherited a fabulous fortune from some childless miser.  Almost been engulfed by a man-eating tree.  (One of the stately live oaks that populate my college campus, of course.  Who could have a guessed the malignant powers lurking among those dignified limbs?)

But in all seriousness, it is astonishing to consider the number of things that haven’t happened to me.  It sends me off on the related speculation of why the few, specific events of my life have occurred rather than the multitude of other specific things.  Why these details, rather than those?  And why in this specific order?  The mere absense of collisions, in a world which is moving toward disorder, suggests that something more than natural causes governs my life.  Which brings to mind another almost.  And another query of “Why?” 

I, who might have been blind, have been allowed to see.  I, who might have spent my life roaming for answers, have been given the Truth.  I do not think this is a mere accident of particles in motion; I believe it to be part of a specific design.  And that design is good.

A beginning.

T. S. Eliot has it that “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning.”  And so I wonder, what I am ending in this first post?  And is it a worthwhile ending, that this beginning should be made?  Eliot continues, “The end is where we start from.”  To what end, then, do I start here?  To say something?  To say what?  And why must it be said in typed lines on a computer screen rather than in ink on a journal page?  Presumably, it must be said here so that you may read it.  But who are you?  And will you read it?

A friend of mine says that he writes better in letters.  It helps to have a person to whom he is writing.  My journal entries, whether they begin that way or not, generally end up as prayers.  People are designed to communicate to others.  I write best when I imagine that someone will read what I have written, even if I imagine that reading being after I die.  So this is a place where I can write to people.  Perhaps I will write better because of it.  I will have to weigh my words, to ask if they are worth anyone reading.  Which is worthwhile, even if no one reads them.  And so, with that thought, I begin.  And end.