against procrastination: of time and space

They say the devil fell because he could not imagine so monstrous a thing as God made flesh.

There’s something about particularity that offends us, too, throwing our hopes and daydreamed plans into a second remove from the world we walk in. Next year, after college, after grad school, once I get that job, once I meet him, after I finish that book, sometime between the cap-and-gown of this unattained accomplishment and the evening of my existence, my life will begin. No theater of human triumph, surely, this faded thrift-store table, this dusty shelf of half-read books, this dying houseplant and heap of unanswered letters.

All our tomorrows glitter with the old lie, the promise of impending revelation: an Elysium for our shadow-selves, sons of our fond delusion, far from the vexation of the present. Uneasy dwellers in approximation, we reject the troubling immediate, sidling into the haven of what may be. (As though it were hope, to despair of all our nows.)

We profess the Incarnation; and doubt that God may work (as He was born) between the ticks of the second hand.

It’s hard to face up to common things: to bear the weight of definition, the unspeakable marvel of the infinitely articulate Word. The charity of God, shining in familiar eyes—playing across faces that we know? Can it be? (A cry, from somewhere in space and time; the filth of a stable, the nail-dented hammer poised in a calloused hand. Can it be otherwise?) Not the vague ideal, tomorrow’s friend or insight or advantageous circumstance, but this: here, now, this brain, this body, this self and those nicknamed idiosyncrasies (annoying, sometimes, and hurtful; moody, and full of laughter) we call our fellow men. We are bombarded by the familiar, the terrifyingly particular, demanding no less of us than that we face it and find our God.

And mercy courses through all things. What but these hands and eyes and timespent words shall be avenues of grace and glory?

So He comes. So he redeems, not a dream—what we wish we were, and the world was; but us. So the eternal takes flesh again, in the stable of our worn-out souls, and sows our seconds with hope.

In His hands, at last, our Nows may be the mustard-seeds of an infinite tomorrow.

snapshot

Today is the feast of the Annunciation. One of those gems of the low-church calendar, a sung communion: at 8 a.m., acapella voices rise together in the little chapel before the startling white—a sudden change from yesterday’s startling red—of the altar.

Afterwards, at the Starbucks down the alley from church, I feasted (as one ought) on a venti Earl Grey (well-endowed with a sufficiently celebratory quantity of half-and-half), and an apple bran muffin.

I love a quiet spot in a busy place: all the bustle of humanity going on around me, while I nestle in a little pool of silence. The groups gathering, one by one, around outdoor tables—that coterie of friends lapping up the thick bar of shade on the patio, while others bask in the sun; the puppy, big-footed and oblivious, no great discriminator of sidewalk trash (leaves, he learns, are acceptable to chew on; cigarettes are not), tangling all possible chairs and limbs in his leash. The middle-aged woman, sitting quietly at one of the outlying tables, taking notes on the Bible in her lap; the guy with the Hawaiian shorts and casual cigarette, slouching unconcernedly over his cell phone and iced coffee at the ‘bar seating’ along the railing. The little girl, sparkle-shoed and stripe-shirted, shepherded along with some difficulty (she likes the dog) by her mother. The young man in sunglasses, a little bounce in his stride, sauntering out with two or three caramel frappucinos in a cardboard holder: a Monday celebration (ridiculous, and lovely) of sugar, and whipped cream, and not much coffee at all. (Who cares?)

Across the street–behind the furniture store which (to my delight) advertises many unusual quiddities on its alleyside brick wall–bright green leaves flutter in the breeze, sporting freely in the bird-woven world between city and sky. Spring has crept into creation. Leaves and flowers, bursting from wood and earth (little universes long perplexed by the shape and color growing within them), discover their true dimension, and are glad. New life shoots through nature, uncontrollable, as fierce and sudden as blood, and fire; red, and white; passion, and innocence.

(Bread on the altar, waiting in the darkness to be made Christ for us. And there we kneel, hands outstretched—what other posture is there?—to receive our God. Be it unto me O Lord according to thy word. Feed on Him in thy heart by faith: till the Eucharist sprouts in our veins, and we are changed. Someday we, too, will burst from this bark of space and time, and laugh as we spring from earthbound exile to the free air of our homing: the atmosphere of infinite grace.)

Stillness. In all this glorious hum and flutter of existence, I am struck by stillness. For nothing moves, unless there is somewhere (at the heart of all things): peace. The stillness of the earth, of gravity–so that the blackbirds may curve, elegantly, against that perpetual attraction. The stillness of the branch, shooting all its leaves into a shimmer of whisper-winded song. The stillness of Christ, around which our days (and all time) dance to their ending.

Earl Grey tea gone, sun still sparkling over the gentle hubbub of the city, I meander home again—resisting the urge to leap out of my car at a stoplight, and caper about in the street with one of those brilliantly orange traffic cones (splendidly adorned with reflectors) on my head. So many prayers and spring leaves later, I almost sense—for an instant—why David danced before his God.

Greetings, favored one: the Lord is with you.

God with us. The fabric of all our joy. The rhythm of all our dancing. The meaning of green, and red, and white, and the world.

Springtime in our souls.

and it was good

One of the advantages of procrastination is: midnight. Dutiful students are sleeping.

They have missed the miracle.

The change to morning happens silently, and still. The last day (unrepeatable) curves away in pearl-like perfection, touching–for an instant–the edge of a new and darkness-swaddled splendor: and joins the jeweled yesterdays (reaching back, unbroken, to the first) that we call the past.

There are stories—old stories, stories of people who slept when the sun did, and were simple enough for wonder—that animals speak and dead men wander at this secret birth of dawn. More sophisticated, we; now, not even the living notice the pledge of the sun’s return. Lamps measure time into artificial spaces. Minds busy with tomorrow forget to totter (breathless) at the brink of today.

And mystery burgeons at our windows and doors.

No burst of light; not yet the revelation of whatever Name was whispered, when the clocks threw up their hands and all creation hung on the split-second hope that the world might not end tonight.

Darkness is over all: darkness woven together, yet not without seam. The chord shifts on the silent instrument of the world. Minor to major. And all space is changed, ready to twirl the hours into unimaginable day.

(Lazarus, three days dead; yet death became sleep when Christ turned His steps to the tomb. What animal spoke then? What lion-throated majesty or descending dove found tongue, when the man (his Marys all unknowing) rounded the short curve of his departure, and began walking back through death to the Savior?)

Precipice before us; time and space spun out to the fringes. The edge and the end of all we have known. Night too long to endure.

Unfelt, suddenly, the world turns over. And we’re halfway to the sun again.

Good morning.

thanks. a Sunday litany.

Long streets that fork into new highways with numbered names, leading me to friends and back again: confusion half sanctified by the destination.

Squirrels. I learned the word for squirrel in Spanish today, in a parking lot smelling of tar and afternoon sun and freshly measured out in bright, uncompromising lines like a geometrical zebra. I have forgotten it; but then it is something to have been such a self—a gratuitous I—in such a place, and to have learned the syllables for a prodigious piece of fluffiness, and to have forgotten them again.

(I like the lines. I am always tempted to hop from one to the next, in gleeful homage to their white edges ordering the swath of black: a mathematical dance, like the planets—only on the perpendicular.)

Kindness, flickering in an eye or a familiar voice. Charity–the mystery of God, exploding all our Ecclesiastian assumptions–is born in places as common as the stable, among styrofoam cups and chicken lo mein and an alleyway shortcut to coffee.

Wood floors and bare feet, cookies and Corona, and old windows in the evening sun. Music in the souls and fingers of friends: time, of a different order than that of our clocks, patterning the air with grace. (Black Cat—so named, and aptly—strolls, with the inscrutable silence of cats, through the same air, over the same floors, and naps amid laughter and song. Can his yellow eyes trace, as ours cannot, our interwoven gladness? What idiosyncrasy of God is he, prowling among us?)

1:26 a.m. on a Monday morning. Each second, irretrievable, the ‘now’ we all share, like a cliff edge (what? Are you here, too?) between future and past. Time, though it slips by and breaks our hearts and makes us old with its passing, and for all that is such a thing–that no gratitude could be enough.

This moment, as much an utterance of the eternal Word as the instant of creation.

pray for us now and at the hour of our death

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To redeemed from fire by fire.

 

Who then devised the torment?—Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

~TS Eliot, Little Gidding

 Lent is drawing near—which, for liturgical Christianity, means a season of denial; an official recognition of that uncomfortable command to take up our cross and follow Christ. Nor need your coming weeks be scattered with ashes and litanies and purple cloth for that command (and, I hope, these thoughts) to apply; because we are all wanderers in a broken land, and what Lent observes with a season is a truth of the human soul.

If you’ve gotten this far, chances are you might agree—yes, we sagely nod, Reason has spoken, Reason tells us that we are sinful and broken and lost. But when it comes right down to it, there’s something in us that revolts against Lent as the solution. Sure, we haven’t quite gotten it all figured out, but can’t we come to God rather more comfortably? I, for one, am as selfish as the next child of Eve, and though all reason screams otherwise I cannot help but balk at the Wilderness. “Follow me” is all fine and good, but “take up your cross”—that strikes us at the heart. Fear shoots through our veins: the fear of possession, of being asked to do and to bear things we could so easily avoid if only we followed at a distance. Thy will be done is a terrifying prayer, because we have a suspicion that His will might break us, might shatter our joy or our lives or our bodies and leave us a sort of latter-day Job on the ashes of our lesser loves.

And we can reject the terror of that submission. We can follow at a distance, foisting His banner over the comfort of our unregenerate lives, and sticking to those portions of Scripture which do not ask quite so much of us. When so much good is given us in this life, why seek out pain? Why put our hearts in the hands of One who might, for His own inscrutable purposes, see fit to break them? Why run after sorrow when all our natural soul cries out that it is not desirable?

Because our choice, ultimately, is not between sorrow and comfort. It is between sorrow and despair. In Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper defines acedia, the sin of sloth, as the unwillingness to be what one is—the rejection of one’s proper self. It is darkness, solitude, the final horror of a world without hope; it is what happens when a being rips up its teleology by the roots and consigns itself to the void.

And that, without Lent, is where we are. The comfort that we cling to will, in the end, pierce us more fiercely and more terribly than the cross which we denied; and it will pierce us for all eternity. To take up, though trembling, all that this season means, is no more than to assent to our true nature as humans, as images and children of God. It is to reject things which (though good in themselves) turn to shadows when we try to hang our souls upon them; to reject them, yes, for darkness, a darkness even unto that in the second Garden when the iron entered into the soul of God. But the darkness, unlike the perpetual twilight of our ‘comfort,’ will turn to day. There is no Truth, Beauty, or Goodness without the blood of Christ, the Passion, the Lenten sacrifice. Behold, He maketh all things new. That is the incredible hope, the regeneration of all things, the remaking of the world and of our hearts by a charity beyond all time and reason; a charity made available to us through His death, and forged in us only through ours—our death to the world and to self. For us, as for Dante, the path back to Eden is only through purgatory. We who thirst for Being must be remade, renewed, redeemed from vanity by following in the blessed footsteps of Him who did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped (and we think our lives are “comfortable”?), but was obedient unto death, even death on a cross. We can never be more broken in our nature than we are now, without Him. And we have been promised that no matter what He asks of us, He will give us grace and strength to see it through.

And joy will come in the morning.

of oak trees and eschatology

(what more could one want?)

I have been thinking, lately, of Light.

Because I have been reading Shakespeare, you shall have a prologue. (Because I am not Shakespeare, it will be irrelevant. One might even say tangential; though one wouldn’t, because only mathematicians say that sort of thing. Besides, it might inspire in one the sudden urge to cry out “partial vectors!” or “cosine!!!” or “parallelogram!” (being in the same general vein) in a loud voice, which—if one is indoors, or has neighbors—is not an advisable circumstance).

 Recently, in an excess of back-to-Dallas fervor, I persuaded myself to arise to the delicate chirpings of my alarm (actually, it does not chirp. It vibrates with the zeal of an enraged robotic hamster.) for one of the only things that can drag me forth from blissful slumbers at 7:00 in the morning: a picnic. Having scuffled about gathering requisite things like coffee and blankets and bell peppers (you try being a grad student and having suitable breakfast-picnic-food to hand!), I lumbered off to the nearest park, where, defying the clammy morn in my hobo coat (a relic of the 60’s and the Rummage Sale, sporting obnoxious brassy buttons and a lining tattered to bits), I curled up on a nice patch of fossilized grass and commenced the festivities.

Sometime during this sleepy interlude of caffeine and gnarled branches and dubious neighborhood dogs, a thought fluttered rather unexpectedly by. It’s an old thought, which has visited me in other forms throughout the years, but it came in a new form; having caught it with cold fingers on a colder page, I bring it hither.

(So ends the prologue.)

Tree, bark, morning light. Does the light come that we may understand the tree, or are all the ripples and ridges and odd edges just so—that we may learn the light?

I’m reminded of the storm that hit Hillsdale last February, when ice descended on the trees and every angle of their massive, cracking forms sent back reflections of the sun. Even at night, branches usually thick with darkness now sparkled with light, crystalizing the orange glow of street lamps into little rivulets of Fairyland exploding against the sky. But for the ice, we would never have known the beauty hidden in that artificial twilight, the dull haze that pervaded campus night after night. It made me wonder whether grace isn’t a little like that: God’s grace, everywhere, the essential atmosphere of the universe—yet we who have not the eyes of angels or the dispensation of prophets would miss it, were it not gathered (suddenly, unexpectedly) into shapes, forms that astonish us when we seem them clear. O!—a stone! There! Grass!—A tree!—one of the words of God (and it was good) made tangible before us. Is this what benediction looks like? (And the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep, and brought forth visible graces.)

And just as common things are incarnations of mystery, so they (like Mary, like us) are bearers of light. For light is a thing that touches us—not just instrumental, “that by which we see,” but an adornment, a glory fingering surfaces, flowing upon our faces. Essential, illuminating, invisible: we don’t learn it by looking at the sun or the air, but at bark and icicles and the westering hills; wherever some thing, by merely being, catches up the glory—and renders back, in its own idiom, one of the Names of light.

The sun peeps through the mists on a Texas morning, streaming along the edges of oaks, gilding their slanted branches–and suddenly the relationship reverses, equalizes, shoots in both directions. For the tree (the seeming subject of the scene) is no sooner illuminated, than it proves itself a herald or interpreter of that greater subject, the sun. Perhaps this is the purpose of its existence, here, on this damp, tawny slope in the suburbs—not to be revealed, but to reveal. Or both: bearer and borne manifested at once, glorifier and glorified united in harmony. Like the quiet “yes” after the annunciation. Like Creation in the last day, dancing before its God.

Glory. One of those little words that rolls off the tongue, whose meaning neither the mind nor the heart of man has conceived. But perhaps this exact coincidence of light and lit, the object illuminated and bodying forth its illuminator in one and the same event, is something akin to that mystery. His glory upon us is the means of our being; and we are, only so far as we glorify Him. Cause and effect, means and end, subject and object, break down and run together. Like the trees at dawn, we are drawn from darkness—the abyss of the uncreated, the sin of our nature—by bearing His light; and in our completion, we give utterance to His universal grace.

We look on Him, because He looks on us; and our faces are ours, only when they mirror His.

Even dead grass and oak trees may be a revelation of the sun.

apologia pro Bloggia sua

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. 

{Annie Dillard}

Because I am often astonished. Astonished by birds, and the elegant arc of branches, and the Distance between trees and the sky; by Existence, which thunders inconsolably through the veins of creation, surprising us at the edges of things, intense and inexplicable: the whole world afire with Being but (somehow) unconsumed.

Because I am often complacent. Self-absorbed, floating unconcernedly through a splendor of numbered days and immortal souls, taking common things in stride as though the impossible (made familiar by repetition) was my unmiraculous birthright.

(Perhaps the first is not for me alone. Perhaps the second can only be rooted out by realizing this; by reaching out to you with one hand, as I do now, and pointing with the other to some vision or absurdity and saying–Behold! Do you see it too? Shall we take this way together?)

Because pilgrimage need not be solitary.