I have discovered that my friends and I are the only persons who may reasonably be excused for making noise in the library.  Of course, in conjunction with this, I have discovered that we are the only people acquainted with this rule.

“And every evening would bring its familiar strangeness, and crickets would sing the whole night long, under her windows and in every part of the black wilderness that stretched away from Fingerbone on every side.  And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child.  It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.  Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.”
~Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

I delight in well-expressed truth.  Never have I been able to describe that slowing of clocks and distancing of voices, but I have experienced it often.  Marilynne Robinson’s books – the two I have sampled – are beautiful.  You should read them.

What is your only comfort … ?

“What is your only comfort in life and in death?

“That I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”
~The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1

Strange irony, that often the times I feel most in need of comfort are the times that I have run headlong into the fact that I am not my own.  That most of the wounds I receive come of wanting to be my own.  And that for those wounds, the only comfort is that I belong to Another. 

But such Another.  The God who has afflicted me with his Ownership is amply able to comfort me in my affliction.  If I belong to Him, so also do my troubles.   And so I  run to Him, throw my troubles angrily at His feet, stamp my impotent foot, and shout “Deal with them; they don’t belong to me anyway!”  And in my temper tantrum, He has me exactly where I ought to have been all along, giving up. 

I am comforted.

amused

When I search for books in my college library computer system, sometimes the search engine simply says “Catastrophic failure.”  Which is not extremely helpful, but is amusing.  And I wonder what makes this failure catastrophic.  In my view, a catastrophic failure would involve my computer exploding, or the library collapsing in upon me, or all of the books being raptured toward heaven while I was left behind with the naked library stacks.  In this case, however, the books remain, the library still stands, and my computer continues to work.  And, moreover, I am still mostly sourceless, scraping onto the second of nearly ten pages, and wasting time writing other things.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints,
for those who fear him have no lack!
The young lions suffer want and hunger;
but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
~Psalm 34:8-10

“Grace has a grand laughter in it.”
~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Discipline”

Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath;
                  O my God,
Take the gentle path.

For my heart’s desire
Unto thine is bent;
                  I aspire
To a full consent.

Not a word or look
I affect to own,
                  But by book,
And thy book alone.

Though I fail, I weep;
Though I halt in pace,
                  Yet I creep
To the throne of grace.

Then let wrath remove;
Love will do the deed;
                  For with love
Stony hearts will bleed.

Love is swift of foot;
Love’s a man of war,
                  And can shoot,
And can hit from far.

Who can scape his bow?
That which wrought on thee,
                  Brought thee low,
Needs must work on me.

Throw away thy rod;
Though man frailties hath,
                  Thou art God.
Throw away thy wrath.
~George Herbert

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“Heaven-Haven: A nun takes the veil”

But it is not quiet, not still.  The sea swings, and I am out in the green swell.  And I fancy that no cloister or veil could keep out the storms.  And yet.

I was reminded last night that my citizenship is not here.  That in a very real way, I am already “where springs not fail.”  That the Dayspring is coming; I shall awaken to see His face. 

“[The doctrine of the resurrection] promises that we will get the life we most longed for, but it will be an infinitely more glorious world than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifce, or salvation.” ~Tim Keller, The Reason for God

 I still desire to go.

 

still

“Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, we have the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.  Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.”
~C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

And so, while I ought to be studying the sonnets which Astrophil (star-lover) wrote to Stella (star), I am thinking about this.  Lewis actually was writing about such fellows as Astrophil when he penned the above.  His argument is that however far removed we may feel from the stockinged, velveted and curled courtiers who likened Stella’s face to red and white marble, we still, in some sense, partake of their experience and are influenced by their affectations.  Thus, he opines that the study of such as Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, and Sir Philip Sidney, will help us to better “understand our present, and perhaps even our future.”  Funny, though, that in the study of this past which, evidentally, is not past – that is why, after all, we say it is valuable to study - we should spend so much time dividing it into phases through which, for study’s sake, we say humanity has passed. 

But I find Lewis’ statements to be applicable – and slightly more interesting – to my own life.  “Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.”  My life has felt, more or less, like a train passing through stations for as long as I can remember.  A quick succession of greetings and farewells, each weighted with those that came before.   Once I was leaving an old white house in Alabama, saying goodbye to dear people in a parking lot outside a stone church in Tennessee, driving for the last time out through the gate of a Naval Air Station in Georgia.  And still I am.  Going away down the long Mississippi driveway, though I know I’ll be back again, I feel the weight of other leavings.  And today in the midst of adult introductions I find myself a small girl wondering if children playing chase under the Catawba trees would be my friends, staring at the suede shoes of a strange red-haired boy in a church in Texas, or watching an unfamiliar dark girl come downstairs while her mother says “This is Elizabeth.”
And somehow, it is a comfort.