Names for a "Knowing"

I'm brooding on a book idea today and I need your input. I'm supposed to be organizing my life and packing for the summer, but in my head, I'm composing the opening chapters to a book about the truth that beauty tells us. What does it mean to know what is Real through an experience? What is it that we touch in music, breathe in the atmospheres of some great stories, see, as if suddenly healed from blindness, in some of the world's great paintings? Can we call it truth, even if it comes in a language without words? And what of creation itself, that great masterpiece that ceaselessly breathes, and I believe, means around us every day. What does it mean to know what is true through something that speaks without words?

These are the questions forming the next book I want to write. Of course, I'm pretty much going to college to answer all those questions and answer them in an expert way. But there is still much even now that I want to tell, explore, remember. In some ways, I want to capture the immediacy of what I experienced as a child before study sets it at an analytical distance. I want to trace the presence of Beauty throughout my life, recall the stories, the walks, the songs, the moments that irrevocably shaped my soul and faith. When I was a little girl I called those moments of insight simply "a knowing." I knew that I knew something absolutely true even if the truth came somehow, without language. Those are the moments I want to remember. So this book won't be a work of expertise, rather of exploration. Of memory. But also of discovery.

The movie version of C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands) says that "we read to know we're not alone." And one of the great joys of reading throughout my life has been my discovery that countless other authors experienced those "knowings." I've taken great delight in finding the names that different writers put to those moments of insight via experience. I want to include such passages in the book, present a feast of ideas to my readers. And this is where I need your help.

I'm compiling lots of quotes, poems, and passages to consider in this book, and I'd love to know if you have any favorites that add insight or further naming to the experience of beauty and the insight that it brings. I've included a few of my favorite passages below, but if you have more, please post them in the comments. I'll consider each one a gift indeed. Here's a few to get you thinking:

Lucy Maud Montgomery, beloved author of the Anne series, called her knowings "the flash":

It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside--but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond--only a glimpse--and heard a note of unearthly music. This moment came rarely--went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it--never summon it--never pretend it; but the wonder of it stayed with her for days. It never came twice with the same thing. To-night the dark boughs against that far-off sky had given it. It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a greybird lighting on her window-sill in a storm, with the singing of "Holy, holy, holy" in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a felicitous new word when she was writing down a "description" of something. And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty.

C.S. Lewis called it simply "joy":

“I call it Joy. 'Animal-Land' was not imaginative. But certain other experiences were... The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult or find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased... In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else... The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.”

Wordsworth describes it as "a presence that disturbs me with its joy":

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

Tennyson (in Ulysses) described it as a world beyond his touch:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move...

And... go!

God Gives His Own Words Meaning

Even after all these years of loving God, I still sometimes stumble over His words. Two left spiritual feet and all that. I'm better than I used to be. I went through a phase in my life when I almost dreaded opening my Bible for devotions because I was so afraid of the fear I found in verses about God's anger, or judgment, or some mystery too slippery for my frail thought to grasp. In those days, I thought it was God I stumbled over. Now, I know its just me. I've learned my frailty profoundly in the last few years, and that includes a comprehension of my own flawed understanding, my own limitation when it comes even to words and their meanings. One of the gifts of the literary study I've done this year is the way it has taught me to contemplate language. Words are living things. They gesture to Reality but do not contain it. They change with time and alter with the histories that form them. Learning this has helped me to read the Bible with greater grace . Take, for example, the passage I read in Genesis this morning.

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

I'm admitting my own stubborn-eyed, Jacob-of-heartness when I confess that in the midst of this magnificent commissioning of Adam and Eve, I tripped over the words "rule" and "subdue." While not bad concepts in and of themselves, those terms, in this day and age, often connote harshness, hardness, domination, demand. I am such a golden-eyed idealist that those harsh terms seemed foreign to my image of the new born earth, so ripe and fresh, so delicate. Those words seemed to open up the possibility of an earth exploited, ruled, overworked; it was as if a bar of iron suddenly appeared in Eden, and the iron was a word.

But I drew back. I remembered all that I have learned about language, the way meanings change from generation to generation. I asked myself, what did those words mean when God spoke them, living ideas unmarred by sin, into his new-made Adam and Eve? And I realized something that has profoundly shaped my reading of Scripture.

The only reference point for those words is the action and person of God himself. No human ruling had yet taken place. Submission was a concept we could only taste in reference to our Maker. God's actions in the sight of Adam and Eve were the reference points they were to look to in understanding how to carry out how commands. For in the beginning, we were children, meant to copy our Father. Thus, to subdue and rule is to do what we have just seen God do in the previous chapter. In the image of God we create, we name, we organize or partition for greater beauty, we cultivate the earth into its fullest expression of beauty and growth, we bless. And it is entirely good.

I realized that my contemporary understanding of those two powerful words, rule and subdue, is skewed by millenia of men's actions instead of God's. I bring the negative image of sinful men ruling harshly, breaking, subduing with force instead of cultivation to my reading of the creation story. To how many other words in the Bible do I bring my broken concepts? Perhaps God's actions and emotions?

When I struggled so deeply with a fear of God's anger, I realized one day that my concept of God's anger was modeled on the anger I felt myself. And since my anger is rarely righteous, almost never fully justified, and generally vindictive (even if unexpressed), I considered God's anger to be the same. But of course, it's not. How could it ever be? How could God, a self-giving Trinity whose very being is a circle of ceaselessly-given love be angry in the isolated outrage of a fallen human being?

These days, I seek to read with eyes renewed. To seek for that Spirit-fresehned insight that cleanses God's words of the sin I bring to them and sets them, fresh and free, in my thought. The prophets speak so often of the Messiah opening the eyes of the blind. I think I begin to see.

Riverside Thoughts

Last week, when we students spent five days at an inn just on the edge of the Thames, we took a Sunday ramble. We ended along the river just at dusk. As the others wandered nearer the water, I set off for a moment alone. A fat, lordly moon climbed the sky as I slushed through muddy grass. His buttery glow mingled with the last pink of the sun. The mesh of their light was a faint brush over the wet blue of sky that comes at the end of a warm winter's day. I came to a one-railed bridge over a streamlet of the Thames and stopped. A tough, tiny tree canopied the bridge. Moss velveted its trunk and its branches curled into the dusk like wisps of smoke. The stream beneath me brought a slow, langorous movement to the night, its surface a mirror to the sky with the braid of the river reeds as its frame.

I knew, as I held my body still and honed my mind and sight and thought to a full perception of all before me, that I was attended by Beauty. Not merely beautiful things, but rather a gathering of beauties whose sum created a single, powerful presence. Beauty like that is, I believe, a spiritual presence demanding a response from my soul. It is one facet of God's incarnational presence in the world, drawing me back to his reality, his ever-with-me attention. To encounter it, is to encounter truth; the fact of it requires some turning from me, I cannot be neutral in my response. Either I deny its power, or I allow myself to be reoriented by its grace.

I have always known that beauty had the power to drive me to holiness. For me, the ache for what is transcendent, the hunger spurred in me by art, literature, music, nature, has always been a guide that turned me back from distraction, from hurry, even from sin, to the grace of my ever-present God.

I am more aware of Beauty here in England than I have been for awhile. The change of scene, the sharpness with which new impressions and places hit my senses livens me to watch, to listen, to simply be aware. I have lived much of my last year in a hurry of mind, a distraction of spirit that has been entertaining, but left me disoriented in my walk with God. I have needed to be silent, to watch, to come up against minutes of great, demanding Beauty such as I found the other night.

May Beauty find you today as well.

Call Me Jacob

Cross-posted at The Rabbit Room. You can call me Jacob today, for I intend to wrestle with God. Sometimes, there is no other way to know him. Sometimes I must grip him with the hands of grief or I will not be able to grasp him at all. This fight has brooded long in my soul, this struggle has grown like a storm on my horizon, for I have had a year of hard struggle. This has been one of those seasons in which every thing I thought God gave me to do fell through. The doors I thought he opened slammed shut. The grace I thought God gave me turned to grief.

Today, after a week in which three specific, long-held prayers were flatly denied, I have come to my quiet time with fight in every atom of my soul. God seems to have fooled me and left me in a bitter cold and I want to know why. How, I sputter as I settled into my quiet time chair, can God claim to love me and then abandon me to this desert?

I open my Bible and turn to the story I have claimed as my own these days; the tale of Jacob's fight with God. There is something about Jacob's life, his grapple for favor and love, his frailty, his bargaining with the Almighty that reminds me of myself. I don't find this flattering, but it is an odd comfort. Despite all Jacob's foibles, despite his fight and fear, God stuck with this stubborn man. That gives me hope and sets my face, because today, I have no choice but to wrestle with my God.

Like Jacob, I am at an impasse, stuck in a desert of circumstance with fear and confusion crouching in wait for me just as Esau camped on the desert horizon the night that Jacob fought God. Jacob went out into the desert that night to plead with God, to beg his help and rail at his absence and he ended up in the arms of God himself, pounding out his anger, his fear, his need for God to hold him. Well, here I am to do the same. I close my eyes and open my heart. Let the battle begin.

I fight my own self first, there in God's arms. Dry as the bottom of the ocean drained of all its water, the desert of my life stretches around me. Is it of my own making? It could be. I have a trickster's soul, like Jacob, a heart that thinks it can outrun pain and outwit the upshot of all my fearful and faithless hours. Maybe it is my pride that moors me in this dry, dark place. The brave choices I would not make, the love I would not give. I know my decisions are often faulty, my schemes for friendship or finances full of holes. Frailty runs in my blood, the awful inheritance that none can stem, and I feel it as I writhe in God's hands. Is all this my fault?

Then I wrestle pain. For I know this night is not of my making alone. I am imperfect, but I am persistent, and I have loved God and made his ways my own with every ounce of resolve I could muster. My wisdom may be scant, but my choices have been made in prayer. Knowing this, my fight is anguished and my hands come down harder on God's silent arms. I am suddenly Eve as well as Jacob; Eve when the world was stripped of beauty, when the first stab of grief rent the air. What is this pain? Where is my God? My heart has never acclimated to sorrow, I still feel shocked when I am broken. Surely it wasn't supposed to be like this, surely loving God should protect me. I wasn't made for this disappointment,  this loneliness, for prayers that seem to die like mist in the great, broad air of God's silence.

Finally, I wrestle with God. My existence is his fault. He said he loved me and I believed him. Now I strike him with my pain as hard as I dare, trying to reconcile his love with the fact of a world still broken. I stretch and strain in the darkness, trying to grasp some sense of his care, something to help me believe he is the father I so need him to be. His hushed holding of me as I struggle is a strangeness I almost cannot bear. I long to escape him, to finish this fight, yet I know that he is the cause, the opponent, the peace I need all in one. Every question, every strike is to and for him, no part of this darkness can be explained apart from his troublesome existence. The only thing I hope to win is the working of his hand. He is my opponent, and he is my prize. My enemy, and the lover I yearn for with all of my soul. Whatever shall I do?

If I follow Jacob's story, then I will cling to God until I am blessed. I will clutch at his arms until he claims me as his own and gives me a name as his child. But I am afraid to end like Jacob, for the tale of his fight is a strange one, and the ending of it, more than I understand. Of course, God won. Jacob could not out-wrestle the one who made his own muscles, nor out-argue the one who gave him speech. God lamed Jacob in the end and perhaps the laming was mercy. For I think that Jacob might have struggled to death in his anger and fear. But Jacob clung even beyond that breaking, clung until God himself yielded a curious prize.

The prize was a name. God's trophy to his child, his challenger, was a new identity. The trickster Jacob, even with all his lies, his stealing of birthrights and striving for everything beyond his reach, would become the first of a mighty and holy people. God knew this; God did not disqualify Jacob for his gritty fight, nor condemn him for his wrestling. Instead, God confirmed Jacob as the father of Israel by giving him the name that would define the nation. If I were God, naming the people who would reveal me to all the earth (and I had just finished wrestling a particularly stubborn one), I think I'd give them an identity laced with command. I'd call them simply "faithful people," or "humble ones," or "those who do everything God asks," or maybe even "the perfectly obedient followers of Yahweh."

But out there in that wild desert night with the stars in a whirl and the air thrumming with Jacob's savage fury, God named his people something entirely different. God's blessing to Jacob, and through him an entire people, was a name that meant "those who struggle with God." The name "Israel" basically means "those who fight." Those who struggle and strive. Why would God call such trouble on his poor, holy head by giving his people the identity of scrappers? Why, I ask myself today, as I grapple with the hard way God leads me, would God want me to be a struggler?

The name does ring true. My life since the day I "asked Jesus into my heart," has been one long battle. Oh there is brightness to hearten me, and beauty to keep me in hope, but it's been one long fight. Against sin and self, against the niggling of daily life on a broken earth, against the times, like this, when God is maddeningly silent. Yet every bit of it has been my offering of love to this God who saved me. And suddenly, as I look at the story of Jacob, look at the fight in my own life, I see something I never did before. God blessed Jacob for his struggle. He was proud of Jacob's penchant to fight. God's naming of Jacob smacks almost of a fatherly pride; "look at him go, he's definitely mine." Never did God condemn or disqualify Jacob for being a fighter; instead, God passed on that scrapper's spirit to an entire nation of holy people. Finally, I begin to see.

God loves those who struggle with him. God loves the fighters, the ones who grapple with faith and refuse to give up. When I struggle, my heart is alive. If I truly accepted God's absence, acquiesced to pain, and decided that darkness was all I could ever expect, then I would have no reason to wrestle with grief. To wrestle is to run after faith. God loves those who will not settle until they touch his goodness. He delights in those who hold fast through every doubt, cling harder with every seeming evidence of abandonment. Why? Because every lover of God must fight. I just never understood that before.

I was blind when I began; I thought that loving God meant an end to all my troubles. What I have had to learn is that this is the broken place, a world scarred by sin and grief and from it, there is no instant escape. God's love is absolutely true, his grace ever-present. But I will experience it in what C.S. Lewis called "the shadowlands." I will be disappointed. Life will let me down, pain will pock my way until I am finally safe in the new heavens and earth.

God acknowledged this reality when he gave Jacob, and through him, all God-followers, the name of "strugglers." To accept that identity is to understand that no one is exempt from fallenness or pain, from the ravages of sin in this world. But it is also to hold, with tears, yes, with a wrestling of heart, the belief that somehow God triumphs in the midst of it.

Have you ever noticed how many times the word "overcome" is mentioned in the New Testament? Jesus, on the night before his death, told his disciples outright that they would have lots of trouble. "But take courage," said Jesus, "I have overcome the world." John heartens his readers over and over again with the promise that our faith overcomes the darkness. And in Revelation there is that haunting promise "to him who overcomes, I will give the kingdom." God would not have called us to a fight he did not intend to win. I think the greatest wrestler in the world was Jesus. He came down into the gritty pain of our fight, he fought beside us, and he was the one who finally overcame the darkness by laying down his life.

This is the hope to which we cling and this is what redemption really is. Redemption is not the zapping away of all that's wrong, it's grace turning all pain backwards into joy. In our struggle to hold, to know, the stay with God, we enter God's grand, slow battle to win all things back to wholeness. The triumph may be slow, a gradual turning of all things to good, but the promise of God is that nothing is outside the realm of redemption. All things work together for good. Many things may hurt us here in the broken place, but evil may never overcome us, and in the end, even evil will be turned backward into good.

Because of that, our fight becomes part of our redemption. As God lovers, we struggle toward light. We fight to keep faith alive. We don't curse a faceless universe and stay alive out of spite, we have a goal, a marvelous light, an unceasing love that exists beyond the touch of any darkness. Toward that, we fight. For that good, we will grapple. For the proclamation of that reality, we will fling the whole of ourselves into the furious struggle to believe in the goodness of God. We will believe in a kind, laughing face whose gaze is fixed upon us, whose kindness holds us through the darkness and leads us, finally, beyond it.

So call me Jacob. Call me "the one who struggles with God." It's not the name I would have chosen, but it's the identity I'll accept and the fight I'll join. And with the help of that great wrestler Jesus, I believe I will finally overcome.

Aptin's Feast

Cross posted at The Rabbit Room. From the minute I stepped off the plane that brought me home to Colorado from Hutchmoot, I've had this post in my head. "Better late than never," is an adage I am coming to embrace as a writer, because I never get things written as quickly as I think I will. But Hutchmoot has followed me. The stories told and people met have stayed with me in so fresh a way that I have decided to write about it no matter how late. So this is my delayed, but heartfelt tribute to Hutchmoot. I must begin it by saying that one of the best parts of Hutchmoot to me was the feasting. Evie's meals have now become the stuff of legend. I love this, because the meals we ate became a metaphor for what was offered to our souls in the sessions and dinner-table conversation. But I also love it because it put me in mind of another feast I experienced, a feast that changed my life. And a feast that will help me explain why I feel that Hutchmoot was a time of such grace.

It all began several years back, when I spent a summer as a ministry intern in England. I worked with a group intent on changing culture and having the right theology and worldview. I did it because, well, it was England after all. It was C.S. Lewis country. It was faith and academics and pubs and tea. I thought it seemed a worthy sort of work. Deep down, secret in my heart though, I also yearned to know God. Though I believed in him, he felt distant and vague to me, and I thought working with theological experts might finally answer my hunger to truly know his love. Oh, but I was starry eyed.

After two months of hearing everything there was to know about God, after sitting in two or three dozen lectures on Scripture, poring over worldview books, writing papers, and talking about God round the clock, I woke one morning and realized that I felt farther from him than I ever had. The realization was so stark, my soul so barren, I barely knew if I could finish my internship. Later that day, I heard a lecture on the six interpretations of the word "hell" and the fate of the people sent there. When the lecturer stated that he knew for sure that only one of them was true (the cruelest, I thought), something in me snapped. I didn't even want to know so awful a God in so dark a world anymore. I finished my work and nearly ran the cobblestone streets back to the refuge of my attic room. But that's where the grand bit of the story begins, because right then, when I was close to throwing my faith out the window, a man named Aptin was ready to save my faith with an offering of grace.

My home that summer was a rambly old manor house made over as student lodging. Good bones kept it standing, but its joints were all out of place in odd staircases and tipsy attic rooms. A narrow, homey little kitchen glowed at its heart though, crammed with mismatched teacups and a window that let in the sunset light as I cooked. This became my place of refuge in the evenings, and most days, Aptin cooked with me.

Aptin was a professor of something or other who commuted to London. He was from Iran, and had escaped with his parents when the Shah was overthrown. I'm sure he had a somewhat glamorous story, but I knew him mostly for his gourmet cooking, his friendly demeanor, and the snatched talks we had about life and travel. We both got home late most nights, and while he grilled salmon or concocted a souffle, we talked. I loved his stories and he distracted me from the bland monotony of my student's fare of eggs and toast. On this particular night though, my budget and soul were both so tight, I made plain oatmeal and ended up just passing him as I headed upstairs with my dinner tray.

"Wait," he said, in his high voice with its British accent, "I have found a new place in London, so I'm moving. I'm throwing myself a going away party in the garden tomorrow night - I'd be so happy if you could come." I nodded my acceptance. I had two days off, and even if I intended to spend them having a spiritual nervous breakdown, I couldn't offend my friend.

The morrow found me mad. Furious with myself for being the sort of person that struggled in her faith. Furious with the teachers I had trusted to lead me closer to God, and who, I felt, had shoved me away from any sense of his love. Furious, I must admit, with God himself who had left me to bumble about in a lonely darkness. By evening, I was fit company for no one, but I forced myself downstairs, eyes down, heart in my toes.

One step outside, I looked up, and I could not help it; I smiled. The garden had been transformed into the site of a fairy tale feast. The prim, green squares of English lawn were ranked by tables heaped with food like plunder. Aptin must have raided every grocer in town to fill the first with thirty different cheeses that sat amidst mounded breads, olive pates, and cracker stacks. Three giant bowls of fruit graced the next, full of grapes, pineapple, and tiny English strawberries, leaves and stems intact. The last was the crown, two or three dozen bottles of wine, among them the elderflower cordial I had come to crave during my English sojourn. As my feet sank into the grass, Aptin hurried over from the rounds he was making, shaking hands, laughing.

"Oh, I am so glad you came! It's a perfect night for a feast - fill as many plates as you can."

I obeyed. I sighed for the sheer relief of distraction, and somewhere between the brie and the cordial, I forgot to stew on my crisis. There was simply too much to enjoy. Plate filled, I found a seat under a gnarled old apple tree. The light was honey and gold and it fell on my head through the green apples and heat-struck leaves. The setting sun dyed the garden gold, and everything in it glowed; poppies and roses, the red stone walls, the rich, worn wood of the tables. A merry group of housemates soon joined me, and an air undeniably hobbit-like descended upon our feast.

For almost the first time that summer, I talked with my neighbors. I shared internship woes with Andrea, a German student. I asked Debbie, a doctoral candidate in theology, all about her studies. And I finally worked up the courage to talk to Ged, our housemother, a former nun who had left a strict, secluded convent to run the house for the summer. I questioned her about a life of contemplation and prayer, and in her gentle, reticent way, she told me her tale. "But I needed to be with people again," she ended. I simply nodded, knowing the truth of that need as I basked in the friendly presence of the woman beside me and the other friends round me. Night grew up as we lingered, a warm, hushed darkness that slowed our breath and rested our bodies. Bugs chirruped. Stars blinked. We chatted to the clink of plates refilled and glasses brimmed again. When sleepiness finally came, I climbed slowly to bed.

The minute I opened the door, my earlier struggle sprang, catlike, from the shadows. I clearly remember the way I tensed, and even clearer, I remember the peace that came and relaxed my fear. Darkness passed me by and I sat down on the edge of the bed, shocked at my lightened heart. The silver light of the moon fell full on my face and out of the blue, I know God loved me. I knew he was with me. A calm warmth filled every nook of my soul and I knew that I was held, kept, loved just as much as I had hoped. Grace cradled my heart and doubt seemed like a ghost. And it was all because that night, I had finally touched something real.

God, I finally realized, is not merely a thought I must think, or a proposition I must know. For the first time in weeks, I had tasted good food and rested. I had spent time in the fresh, green glory of the garden, seen the myriad colors, tasted the fresh, fresh air. For almost the first time that summer, I'd had a personal conversation, I had exchanged stories, doubts even, with a friend. And I'd been still. Quiet finally had a chance to still the frenzy of my thoughts. Sitting there in the moonlight, I came to the knowledge I had so hungered to find. God is the lover and maker, the friend and creator. He reveals his goodness in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world. His love is felt in the fellowship of his people. His joy is what sings in the wind and spices the best wine, and glimmers in the gold of sunset. In the savor of feasts, the cadence of seasons, in apples crunched and friends touched, God is known for the eternal Good that he is.

But I had lived apart from that goodness all summer. I had tried to know God by thinking about him. By working for him. By saying the right things about him. All the while, I ignored the earth and people God made so that I might know his soul. To grasp truth is vital, and I know it is something that must be taught in an age of such spiritual confusion. But truth must be enfleshed by love and beauty, or it will ring empty to the soul. Beauty known and people loved are the great ways that God offers his hands to us while we sojourn here in the earth. By loving, by feasting, by touching his beauty, we grasp him back and let him fill our hearts with joy. Two months of study couldn't give me what one night of feasting could, because I was made to touch and taste and see the goodness of God. I don't even know if Aptin had my faith, but somehow, he had grasped a heart of celebration. He understood the grace that beauty and friendship bring, and through the gift of his feast, he saved my faith.

The reason I tell this story here is because, for me, The Rabbit Room is that feast continued.  I discovered the Rabbit Room the same year I went to England, and as I grew, slowly, in trusting a God of beauty, it became a refuge for my heart. The Rabbit Room community sheltered me as I learned to let stories, music, and nature bring God close to my heart. In the daily creativity and fellowship of this place, I experienced that sense of God being not just a thought to be known, but a song to be sung, a story told, a friendship sealed by love of the same good things. Then I went to Hutchmoot and felt that I had stepped into Aptin's garden all over again.

Taste and see that God is good, says David in the Psalms. And at Hutchmoot, we did. We sipped wine and gobbled up spiced rice and roasted chicken made by the matchless Chef Evie, and we knew that God is good. We lingered at conversations that rambled onto holy ground, sat and marveled at songs that sang out the hungers in our souls. We watched light drip through a stained glass window onto the heads of a band of musicians merrily re-enacting the Last Supper, and we knew that God is a God who has laughter every day.

And the laughter continues here, now, in the Rabbit Room. To stumble into a feast is one thing, to have a daily bit of savory bread served to me through this place is another level of grace altogether. So this is my roundabout and heartfelt tribute to Hutchmoot, and really, to the whole Rabbit Room. It is my thanks to all you feasting folk who make this a place where God is touched as well as talked about. To me, the Rabbit Room is Aptin's feast continued every day. Since that feast restored my faith, I can think of no more heartfelt compliment. God bless you Aptin, wherever you are. God bless the Rabbit Room, and all of us here as we strive to taste and see his goodness. And Hutchmoot 2011, here I come.

Know Thyself

Dappled the sky and sylph-like the sway of candles on our table here at the Broadmoor. The wild west seems an unlikely place, but someone had the idea to nestle a five-star hotel here, right against the southernmost mountain in town. I am eternally grateful. When all the family is home and we'd like to pretend we are somewhere in Europe as we discuss ourselves to death, we head down here, split omelets, drink a thousand and one cups of coffee and act as if we own the place. After a feast of a breakfast this morning, we've all taken a few minutes now to write, or read, or stare over the lake. I've turned here because my mind churns with the topic just debated and I want to write it out and find out what you think. It's been on my mind all this summer and it came to a head today. What is the truth about personality? Is there value in understanding the quirks of my (or anyone elses's) particular mode of being? The last night our friends were here, we threw a personality party. Now, my family are all amateur psychologists because of my parents involvement with the "MBTI," otherwise known as the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator.  This is a system of personality based on Jungian archetypes and worked out into sixteen distinctive personality "types" by a brilliant woman named Isabel Briggs Meyers. My dad is actually trained to administer the tests, and we kids have been conversant in the intricacies of extrovert/introvert, intuitive/sensate, etc. for years. (I'm an INFJ for the initiated.) Not a friend can come for an extended stay at Chez Clarkson without the lot of us raring to enlighten them as to their particular MBTI profile. We're all out-of-the-box thinkers, but in this one area we love to define our friends and ourselves. This view of personhood has averted much conflict and birthed much compassion in our otherwise opinionated family.

It's also freedom. Amidst the other night's hilarious uproar of discussion, I saw what relief it is to know yourself. The introverts twitted the extroverts who roared back in playful mockery of the dreamers, who looked down dramatic noses at the doers. All in good fun, all in a sudden buoyancy of acceptance. To discover that at least a few of your quirks are not due to inadequacy or sin, but to the whimsy of God's own creativity is intensely liberating. It frees you to love yourself and the other quirky people near you.

It's not as if we can help it - we burst from the womb with a compact, yet entirely unique soul in place. From infancy it drives the way we relate, learn, and grow. We are defined by our personalities. This morning, my mom told how each of us kids loved certain things from the time we were babies: Joel, my composer brother, could sing his own harmonies at three. I read voraciously from tiny girlhood. Nate, my actor brother, charmed and performed and created all manner of things. Joy, actress, designed costumes and wrote scripts and considered herself in charge of the world from babyhood. Born with those loves, we lived out the selves God knit when we were yet cloistered in the womb.

It is God who has made me and not me myself. That's the kernel of truth at the heart of personality study. It's why there's worth in looking deeper into the foibles of how you exist. Before you can do this though, you have to fully accept that who you are is a good thing created by a loving God. To believe this, I've had to think long, long thoughts this summer, question my assumptions, and my struggle to accept my own personality. I live in a culture, and carry an inner pressure, that tells me there are only a few right ways of being. Personally, I think culture is weighted toward the talkative and practical. The confident and daring. From parties to church work, I have been in a thousand places where I felt hounded by the push to be something other than my quiet, bookish, softspoken self. The danger came when I began to believe that God too, wished I would be something other than what I was. After the heartfelt comments from many introverts on the last post, I think I'm not alone.

This summer, for me, has been a recovery of the self God made me and I almost lost. For years I have tried hard to fit in and be funny and personable and find community and be productive in ministry. It's not been easy. The harder loneliness pushed, the harder I pushed myself to be and do what would win me approval. Until I burned out. At a ripe 26 years of age, I feel God saying, "my goodness you try hard to do things I never asked of you." Honesty has hounded me until I must admit, exhaustedly, that I'm not good at details, not great at leading groups, not made for routine life, and I freeze up at big parties. I am though, good at writing and words, I'm good at seeing what is beautiful, and I love my dear ones with a depth I cannot articulate.

This morning in my quiet time, I found this quote by St. Teresa of Avila: What a shame that through our own unconsciousness we do not know ourselves. Wouldn't a person look foolish, friends, if you asked him who he was and he didn't know, had no idea who his father and mother were or what country he came from? If this seems stupid to you, know that our own stupidity is incomparably greater when we do not strive to know who we are. What transcends the body? We have heard that we have souls and our faith compels us to believe that is true. But we rarely consider the soul's excellent qualities or who it is that dwells within her or how precious she really is. And so we don't bother to tend her beauty. All our attention is focused on the rough matrix of the diamond, the outer walls of the castle, which are non other than these bodies of ours.

Know yourself. Know your own soul. Like the crack of thunder and the ring of bells to me, those words. Explore the contours of spirit that shape the face and heart you turn to the world, and you will be more able to know the God who formed them. If you read farther in St. Teresa's The Interior Castle, you will find that she likens the soul to a grand mansion, innumerable rooms waiting for exploration, and one, jeweled keep at the heart of it. There dwells the Beloved. You must journey through your soul so that you may find God where He dwells at the very core of the heart he has created.

There's the worth in personality. Know yourself, and you will know the God who made you. Yes, sin enters into selfhood and must be daily combated, yet I am now convicted that this self I bear is crafted by God. He is the infinite Beauty, the soul of unnumbered facets, and I believe each human born uniquely glimmers Him forth. The worth in figuring out your personality is the worth of holy discovery. It is a quest into the intricacies of what God has designed and what he desires to reveal of Himself.

So. I want to write on this further, little by little. For now, what do you think? What marks your own personality? Any MBTI enthusiasts out there and what "type" are you? Oh, and extroverts? I love you too. My family is split in half right down the introvert/extrovert divide. I am daily, vastly aware of how I have blossomed in the sunlight of my extroverted loved ones. My rising hope for us all is that we will be free to work and create with joy from the selves God made us to be. That comparison and pressure will no hinder the beauty God made in us all. Cheers.

Ordinary Saint

I sat on a porch swing last week and read these lines: Grandfather was very good at saying his prayers. He could become so absorbed in them that he would forget all about what there was for dinner, his income tax, his rheumatics, slugs and moles making havoc in the garden, and all the things that continue to occupy the minds of most people even while their lips are moving. He could go on for a long time and not know until afterwards that he was tired... -from The Blue Hills, by Elizabeth Goudge

Each word struck a pang of hunger in me. I pictured that portly, humble-hearted little man and it seemed to me that he was the picture of an ordinary mystic, a workaday saint as he prayed for "the devil himself to be turned back from his evil." The picture of it made me ache. I want to be that sort of soul.

I have long been drawn to the writing of the Christian mystics. I finished Evelyn Underhill's definitive tome on the movement about a year ago, but I'm raring to start it afresh because it chronicles the way some people cast heart, soul, mind, and body into a single-willed determination to know their God. And they succeeded. The theme of their words, however disparate their experience, is simply this: God yearns to be known, and if we will love him with a single will, all Love, all Holiness, all Beauty is ready for our friendship.

The picture of "Grandfather," wakened me back up yet again to that possibility. I came spluttering to life with frustration though. I have yearned to know God so many times in my life, promised stricter prayer times, or vowed that I would not sin for a day. Hah. I want God, the real, living breath of Him present in a tangible way in my life. Of course, I'd love to be smacked with the miraculous, but even more, I'd like the chastening of my heart, the clearing out of sin in my spirit to make God real as sunlight. But what does this look like for me? How should it shape my days when I am a young woman, with no choice but to work and earn, no escape from the maze of ordinary existence? I won't be running off to a convent any time soon, but I still yearn to love God with the same will as St. Teresa of Avila herself.

I think there's an answer in that bit about the Grandfather. Ordinary mystic. Single-hearted even in the clatter of normal life. He shut out all the chattering thoughts because God was the one thought he must think or die. I am woefully inept at shutting out distractions. The minute I kneel to pray, I swanee and swear a beehive gets loose in my brain. But that picture of the little old man, with a hundred worries he could consider but didn't, and the long practice of that choice, is a comfort to me. It was the middle of the day when I read that, but it made me want to go get on my knees straight way, and start the minute-by-minute work of what Thomas Dubay calls "heroic virtue." It's one little prayer at a time that makes a saint. And I'm determined to try. Workaday saint. Grandfather wrapped up in his prayers instead of the income tax. That's my goal.

When Jesus asks a question...

I think it's usually a challenge. I saw this clearly today as I rocked on a porch swing high up in the mountains and read the story of the woman who snuck up on Jesus and touched his cloak. Scripture says she had a hemorrhage that would not heal. It is so easy to picture her, this woman, bent double, ashamed of the broken body she lugged into every situation. Fully aware that if anyone knew of her illness, bumped up against her in the crowd, her very sickness would make them unclean and they would curse her.

Yet see Jesus she must. She was sure of healing, sure. That's what the passage says about her conviction and I love this. There was no doubt in her though in twelve years no other cure had worked. Sometimes suffering entirely sloughs away timidity, knocks off all the rough edges of hesitation in prayer. Pain clears your vision because faith becomes your only hope. So she approached Jesus, so furtively she was not seen, yet with a grit that propelled her through a thick, excited crowd. Her fingers clawed the hem of his dusty, trodden cloak and in that instant there was a clean light that pulsed through her and she knew, right there in the midday sun, that she was healed.

Then came that terrifying question from Jesus. "Who touched me?"

I think it was a dare. I think he knew exactly who touched him. It's not as if God is really at a loss. I think Jesus was simply determined to look this woman straight in her eyes with his love. I think he felt the soul of her trying to slip away from him in the crowd, and he would not have it. His question was an invitation, a dare to step forward, not for censure, but for praise. Jesus wanted life to burgeon in her heart as well as her body. He wanted her to know that her faith, the clear-sighted grit, the hope she had held fast though she "suffered much at the hands of physicians and lost all she had," was a beautiful thing in her Savior's eyes.

I think, perhaps, that challenge rings true to me this morning as well.

Sometimes, in following God, I study Scripture and do what is right, and ask for healing for my sickness and help for my needs... but I do it with eyes on the ground. I ask as if I were one of his millions. I have faith, but it's a timid one that withdraws once I have what I need. In reading this passage, my heart begins to ache. I think God longs to see my eyes. He is the livest soul and softest heart in creation. He desires a face-to-face friendship with the heart he has healed, the soul he has made whole. Yet how often, even in my quiet times, I keep my eyes averted from his face. I am challenged now, to look up, to see the breathtaking ownership of his love for me. I am invited, just like that woman, to know and be known.

The woman could not refuse. She rushed trembling to his feet, and "told him all." Imagine the difference in her life between merely slipping away, healed, but unknown, and what ended up happening; Jesus ringing affirmation that "her faith had made her well." And then the tender words with, I imagine, a gentle touch, "go in peace." She was altered, I'm sure of it. In my heart, I know that Jesus' eyes upon her, his insistence upon knowing her, speaking with just her out of the thousands fired a love in her that did not die.

Today, I want to look up and know Christ as well so that love will be strong in me.