The Sun is Still Shining

"I've been thinking of a story from the Old Testament: Moses stood all day and all night with outstretched arms, praying to God for victory. And whenever he let down his arms, the enemy prevailed over the children of Israel. Are there still people today who never weary of directing all their thinking and all their energy, single-heartedly, to one cause?" So said Sophie Scholl, a young German woman whose valiant story I have come to know through one of the classes here at Semester. A student, a nurse, she was a member of  "The White Rose," a group of students and intellectuals dedicated to opposing Nazi ideals during the years of WWII. Sophie (and her brother Hans) wrote and distributed pamphlets exposing the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, contradicting Nazi propaganda. Of a strong, thoughtful faith, and from a family already known for its moral integrity in the face of Nazi persecution, Sophie was arrested when she was caught distributing "treasonous" material at the University of Munich.

I learned a good bit about her in a lecture on culture by John Stonestreet, one of my favorites of the semester. A lot of what we discuss here is how to live out faith in Christ in a such a way that we embody the gospel, incarnating the very life of God into the culture and world around us. For me, them's fighting thoughts. The more I learn, the more I understand that something is being asked of me, some offering of myself is required to live this love to the full. Sophie's story has haunted me in the last weeks. She wasn't all that different from me, a simple student, a young girl from a Christian family who suddenly became a martyr because she lived her love of Christ to the zenith, and not that many years ago. Her life is my challenge. How, I ask myself, may I so live out my love of God?

The day after we discussed the Scholl siblings in class, we watched the movie based on their story: The Last Days of Sophie Scholl. The film is remarkable on many levels. Based primarily on the actual interrogation transcripts following their arrest, the film presents the Scholl siblings as they were; young, in love with life,  passionate in their idealistic defense of human dignity and value. Step-by-step, word-by-word, we watch them as they are forced to decide whether their passion is something to be held in silence, or robustly lived. We watch as they decide to live it out, and thus, to die. Convicted of treason, they lost their lives to their cause. Or rather, they gave their lives to something that they believed was far greater than themselves.

The movie ends with Sophie, face luminous, looking back as she is led away to die saying "the sun is still shining." That picture was a quiet theme playing throughout the imagery of the film - the sun still shining, slipping through prison bars, falling on the faces of enemies... and friends. A light undimmed by the turmoil in which Sophie herself was caught. And, as she went to die, a light that beckoned her beyond the confines of the tragedy that was all, for the moment, that she could see.

Wedged between two of my girls, I sat in the dark of the after-movie moment, crying hard. It is rare for me to cry hard at anything, but in the past years, I find that I am deeply undone by stories about those who face death... with light in their eyes. I knew that in Sophie's story I had touched something living, the vein of something golden running through the great mountain of human history.

And the gold was that fire-tempered, flint-faced, tender, set-heart resolve to give and be all that holiness requires. It was Sophie's understanding that her great idea (so called in the movie), her belief in a law of love giving order and meaning to the world, was greater even than herself, a thing so awe-full, so demandingly beautiful that she flung her whole life to the affirmation of its reality. In her story I touched the strange exultation that comes when love defies death, stares that "last enemy" in the face and declares it to be a feeble, passing thing in the face of the sun that shines beyond the edges of time. What I found in her was, to pare down the words that cluster and push so urgently in my mind, an encounter with the Cross, most grievous and most golden of truths.

I think we speak rarely, these days, of the Cross when it comes to living the Christian life. It is easy to think of it as something past, the means by which my happiness and redemption is assured, something Jesus did. Yet, "take up your Cross and follow Me," is the call given to all who look for salvation in Jesus. Take up the cross that is the grief of trying to live Love in a broken world. Carry the shame, the struggle, the rejection. That is what I am called to do. That is what Sophie Scholl did.

But the reason that Sophie's story so stabs and challenges me is that, in watching the movie, I saw her gradual embrace of the Cross. The slow, sure process by which she was transformed from someone who held an ideal, to one who was held by an ideal, not merely owning it but being formed by it to a courage beyond her own original resources.

Sophie was no drawn-faced martyr. She was young and vibrant, engaged to be married, articulate, lively. And when she was first caught, she spent a whole day defending herself against the charges, striving to protect the others in the White Rose, denying her involvement. But there came a point when she was confronted with signing a "confession" in which she repudiated the ideals held by her brother and the rest of the society.

"Your brother has confessed," she is told, "you can sign this and absolve yourself." And she couldn't. Faced with the denial of what she held to be the truest thing she knew, she openly owned her part.

There was, I think, a certain recklessness to her idealism (oh how well I know it) in the beginning. It was partly what got her caught, a last-minute impulse to push the dissenting pamphlets off a university balcony so that they fluttered down over the heads of the students below. She was young, impassioned with a sense of justice betrayed and her own stewardship to set it right. Life was strong in her. She had no wish to die and I think there was something within her that fought that end.

And until that moment of truth-telling, the ideals had required nothing of her. Oh, the passion was real in her mind, faith and justice and courage, all blazing concepts that burned in her head and heart. Just as they do in mine. Yet they required nothing, until her arrest, but daring. And that, for an idealist, isn't the hardest of tasks.

But when the fatal moment came, when she knew that profession of those ideals would set her feet on the road to an early death, she made a remarkable choice. Throughout the interrogation that followed her confession, she articulated, defended, and owned the ideals that were the bedrock of her life and would bring about her death. The conversations with her interrogator are remarkable. Her firm articulation, her reason, her calm reveal her absolute belief in the ideals she held. She carried her faith unflinchingly up the hill toward death, and it turned her idealism into a Christ-like passion.

"The sun is still shining," she said, and it was not merely the end remark, it was the core assumption of her whole life. Word by word in the days before her death, she made her confession to herself, to God, to the Germans, that the ideals she espoused had the right to require her whole life, for they had made her, not she them. There was a great light, beyond the touch of human corruption, that called her to itself, claimed her fidelity, and gave her courage to follow it beyond the confines of a broken earth.

Ah Sophie, teach me. For when I first truly claimed the Christian faith, I did not realize that I was called to die. Not only to suffer the death of sin within myself, but also to walk a slow dying through this broken world. To struggle with health. To yearn for friendship and rarely find it. To be sometimes grievously hurt. I am still learning to understand that Christ's life in me is one that brings me safe through death. His grace gives me the strength to live Love in the midst of a broken and dying world, but it does not exempt me from it. How little we speak of the Cross.

A couple of years ago, after a summer in which my grandmother had died, my car was totalled, my health declined, and three colleges rejected me, I sat on a mountaintop on a dusky, starlit autumn evening and cringed as I tried to lift my face to God. How can loving You mean such pain? What does it mean to have your life? Am I protected at all? I thought loving you meant life and happiness and safety. All I seem to find is grief.

But "take up your cross," was the whisper I heard. And though at first it frightened me, I began to ponder it, to seek its truth in Scripture, to own it in my thought.  "Take up your cross." As Jesus did. Jesus, sweet, unblemished, holy God who bore the grief and suffering and shatteredness of the world upon his own back. Carried it to the utter end, to the death that assured our salvation. To walk with Christ then, is to imitate his own slow journey through a broken world, bearing the pain, the grief.

And yet, my walk is different from Christ's. Jesus carried his cross to death so that I (and Sophie and countless other glad-eyed lovers) may carry mine to life.  Death would have the final word if Life himself hadn't died to defeat it.

The sun is still shining.

Sophie might just as well have said the Son. For the Morning Star glimmers on the edges of the world, having leapt from the grave and conquered all darkness. He beckons to us from just beyond the touch of time and his life gives us the courage to carry our cross and die to death.

With all of my being, I want to live in that light. I crave the tempered steel of that resolve to live in light of eternity. I want to demand of myself all that must be given in Love, hold nothing back, neither kindness nor conviction nor tears spent nor love given. Or even my life. I may not die swiftly as Sophie. My death may be the longer one of sin conquered within myself, of grief borne in peace, of sickness faithfully suffered. But if I am willing, as Sophie was, to die for what I hold to be truest in this world, I will follow Christ, and I will follow him beyond death into life.

The sun is still shining. Sophie called that to her brother as she walked to her death.

The deathless light reaches out to all of us with the offer of eternity and the challenge of a bravely lived death. Today, are you ready to die? Am I? I want to answer "yes" to Sophie's question, I want to follow her in affirming that there are those in this world who will offer their lives in a white-hot love to a great cause.

For beyond the small horrors of the dead hearts and dark souls around Sophie, beyond the decay of this world, beyond the struggles and despairs we encounter daily or their power to take life away, there burns a high and untouchable beauty. Sam Gamgee's "light and high beauty," a love which does not cease, a peace which never has, and never shall, be disturbed.

With Sophie, I think I am learning to die.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

I Shall

Someday, when I am ready to rest from adventuring, I shall live in a cabin next to a stream. Like this one. Mountains shall ring it with quiet, starlight guard it, and the wind freely wander through the open door. I shall go barefoot. I shall have a garden, a cottage sort. I shall wander the afternoon hours away and get gloriously sunburnt. I shall learn the oldest tunes of the water, and sip my tea to their singing. I shall watch, just watch, for many hours, until I am still as the mountains. I shall listen, just listen, for many days, until the birds and the wind and the swift-tongued water teach my their symphony. I shall pick blackberries by the stream and gather apples in wild orchards. I shall dry herbs and weave baskets. I shall speak not a word for days.

And I shall be wildly happy...

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.

A bonny day at Loch Lomond

Oh, you'll take the high roadAnd I'll take the low road, And I'll be in Scotland before you. For me and my true love, Will never meet again, On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond.

Early Friday morning, with rain pelting my umbrella-less head and the sky in a grey-faced snit, I set out for the long-imagined banks of Loch Lomond. With cup of hot chocolate in hand, I curled in a train-seat as far back in the carriage as I could, and watched the miles slip by until I arrived at the station for Balloch, and made my way down to where a little boat waited to carry me up the Loch.

When first we sailed, the storm sank down to the surface of the water in a dance and lilt of mist. Nothing could be seen more than a few feet off and I began to despair of getting my fill of the scenery with which I long to shape my story. But half way to our landing point of Luss, a thin, pearled light began to dissolve the darkness and soon, the storm withdrew its brooding face. Slopes of startling green blinked through the fog and a high, sapphire sky sliced through the rain.

I left the cabin on the boat and perched against the rails in the prow of the boat, loving the cut of it through the rippled, inky water, the sting and spice of the cold wind, and the slow, but constant widening of the air as the storm withdrew in ponderous dignity. I began to write feverishly, for the landscape around me was just what I had come to Scotland to find. A sense of place is vital to any good novel to me. In my story, the earth itself is as much a character as the human souls rumbling about in my head, and it was to meet this land, to touch and taste and hear the great heart of this place, that I have come my long way from home.

To give you an idea of what I saw, I'll just record the jottings I scribbled in my notebook. Haphazard, unedited, but what I snatched in the moment.

"Remember," I wrote, and proceeded to list:

-deep, undulous charcoal of the water

-hills like a curious face behind the veil of mist

-the vibrancy of the green fields and the navy swathes of fir forests slashing up the hills

-the way the land advances and retreats through the mists, seems to speak, then lapse into silence, so that you feel enclosed in an echoing world of faces and voices you tilt forward to hear, but can't quite catch.

-the rain like a force of assimilation, so steady, determined, soaking, as if to make you one with the lake and sopping ground around you.

-the fresh green right next to the hoary brown patches of rock or the velvet deep of heather - like a child head and an old man's  bent next to each other.

-the sense that the land is never wholly to be known because it is so swift to change and always seems partly hidden. When the mist dips and lifts, what you see is always changed. No wonder this is a land full of folklore about slipping into different worlds!

-the lilt of the Scottish accent - such wonderful trills.

I finally arrived in the tiny village of Luss, with curved streets crowded with grey stone cottages all with riotous gardens and walls and windowboxes and beds of flowers. I found one of those red Scottish roses and remembered the old poem, "o my luv is like a red, red rose..."

After a ramble, I found a tea room where they served me "Edinburgh Royal Blend" black tea in a pot with heather and green plaid stripes. With sandwich in hand and an hour to write, I set to work. There's so much to be written when one has such scenes to fill with stories.

When the last sip was snatched, I ran for my boat, for the day was coming to a close, a ship had to be caught and a train after that. I am housed with the loveliest hostess in the world, and she had a dinner of fish and chips and veg, and yes, strawberries and cream on the table when I stumbled in after my venturesome day. May I just say that Venetia is one of the dearest people in the world, and I will treasure every minute I have in her home.

And now, I'm off for a cup of  tea, and another writing hour.

You take the high road, and I'll take the low...

If you'll tell me your favorite novel...

I'll tell you mine, because I really want some new stories these days. On the bus ride out to class this morning, a friend asked me how I choose the next book I will read. This became a discussion on the various book lists we both always have running of "read," "to read," or for me, simply "best beloved in all the world." Right before I left for Oxford, I jotted out a list of my favorite books at the request of the Summit students I mentored. I meant to post it then, but forgot. Jetlag and all.

I'm posting it now because I'm hoping it will encourage you to post a few of your favorites in return. I greatly enjoyed the writing of this list because it was an informal, books that I love, read before you die sort of thing. There's no rhyme or reason to this list beside love. That's probably why it starts with stories. (I'll post the nonfiction half later.)

So please, I need some new gems at the moment, novels in particular. If I share mine... drop me a comment with your best beloveds?

Fiction

1. Peace Like A River by Leif Enger. Some of the best and quirkiest wordcraft I have read. Characters who are frail, tough, and funny all at once, and a story that wrestles with sin and grace. Also modern. I tend to like authors whom I could only meet in heaven so its nice that this one is actually alive.
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Human nature in all its darkness, in all its yearning, and the way that grace is always enough to meet it. A world of a book with whole sections that read as the deepest, hungriest thoughts of devotion.
3. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. Last in the Ransom Trilogy (I was recently lectured by my tutor on why this ought never to be called "The Space Trilogy"). I like the strangeness of this book, and the invasion of the ordinary by the planetary powers, each embodying some aspect of power or beauty. Also, a story with elements just bizarre enough to stab you awake to the way modernism can put your heart to sleep.
4. Island of the World by Michael O’Brien. One of the most beautiful books I have ever, ever read. I’ll warn you – not for the faint of heart. The story of a boy in the Balkans at the end of WWII. This is the story of how love grips us, and if we will let it, turns all things to beauty in even the worst times of grief. It is also that rare book that follows a life from opening all the way to its close in old age. The arc of innocence lost and regained is part of the power of this story.
5. Pilgrim's Inn by Elizabeth Goudge. One of the goals of my life is to make a Pilgrim's Inn - an actual house where the hungry and hurting, the exhausted and yearning, can rest and be restored by beauty on the high road journey toward God. This story pictures that shelter.
6. Lilith and At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald – both of these are a little strange – they are fairytales, with all the wildness of fairy tale imagery, but George MacDonald’s worlds are always spiritual truth enfleshed. These two are my favorite.
7. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. An aching book. A true book. A humble book. Just the life of a Kentucky housewife. The cultivation of land, and soul, and community. But a book to make you realize the things that you have lost. When I went to read this a friend cautioned me not to start it casually. It was, she said, too precious. I agree.
8. King Lear, and Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare  - Everyone needs some Shakespeare. Read Much Ado aloud with a friend (especially if that friend is in love). The language of Shakespeare is so crammed with whimsy, so woven and twined with meaning and image. Just reading a bit changes the way you view language.
9. The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. Myth. This is an epic - epic beauty, epic journey, epic grief. An epic in the oldest sense of embodying eternally true things in a single story. A book to which I will return the rest of my life for my love of its characters, its lands, its story.
10.  David Copperfield by Dickens.
11.  Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. A father searches for his lost son in South Africa. One of the best stories I have encountered in which irreversible grief and a brokenness that cannot be healed is met by Christian grace. There is nothing trite here.
12.  The Chronicles of Narnia. Required reading. That's all.
13. The Wind in the Willows. Described to me recently as the perfect children's book, but just a golden tale of friendship, belonging, nature, and the importance of loving your corner on earth. So lovely.
14. Middlemarch, by George Eliot. I say it's like the Bible because of the heights and depths of human nature it presents within a village life in England.

Beauty Never Lies

Cross-posted at The Rabbit Room. One great delight of having a composer for a brother is the fact that he passes the best of his studies on to me. Joel explores reams of classical music that I could never find on my own, and every time he's home from school he loads my iPod with a few of his newest-found gems. At Christmas this past year, he gave me hours of music, as glad to pass on his beauties as I was to get them. But the rush of winter and spring swept my listening hours away, and it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that I finally managed to taste the new songs. I was on a road trip through Texas, adrift amidst endless miles of flatland with my sister driving, so I stuck in my earphones. Night was just coming on as I relaxed, started the first song and closed my eyes, expecting to snatch some sleep along with the music.

But the first notes struck me wide awake. Like sunlight on closed eyes, the music glimmered into my sleepy mind, blazed into my ears. First the throaty hum of a cello and its rise into a chorus of violins. Like open hands lifted to catch the sunlight, the instruments formed a cup into which a choir poured its song. A simple choral piece was all it was (I later noted that it was Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna: Introitus), but to me the music was light, it was hope. The song was one of those beauties that arrest you with a clear wordless truth; God is real, grace is a hand that holds you through every change, goodness follows all of your days. I could hear it in the music. A great relief came to my soul, as if I had been holding my breath through the work of months, striving to endure the battle of life. The fear that is always with me, of failure, of pain, fell away before the song just as the night flees, grieved and dark, at the onslaught of dawn. In that odd Texas moment, just for an instant, I was smacked with the full joy of heaven and it was real as the breath in my throat and beat of my heart.

But then I opened my eyes. It was an accident, a reflexive blink, but what should I see but a chain of billboards for a famous outlet mall. Gaudy letters blazing an invitation to get vast amounts of new somethings for nothing. I glanced beyond the boards and the glare of a dozen fast food signs met my shrinking eyes. Cars whizzed by, frantic, red-eyed machines in the brooding dusk with frenzied humans at their wheels. And the hope I knew in the music was shattered. The song seemed actually to fade in my ears as the sight of concrete, commerce, and human striving met my eyes. I thought of the million and one tasks I needed to do, the money to be made, the deadlines met. Something like grief grew in my throat and the old fear came back. My brain filled with the incontrovertible fact of daily need, of machines and commercialism and a world that never slows down.

It was one a moment of hopeless juxtaposition; the whisper of a transcendent beauty against the pragmatic chorus of survival.  My whole life seemed torn between those two realities. I felt again the heat of all my deadlines, and with it the fear that I could not do enough, be enough, make enough. The old doubts I bear about my life as a writer joined swiftly in. The old wrangle my heart carries on with my head, "what good is beauty?" began again. In the face of need and sickness and the demands of a fast-paced society, what good is the making of one little story, the writing of a poem? Why hunger after dreams when money must be made, bodies fed, and futures built? Surely God himself scoffs at the little dream worlds in which I live.

But then, as if my own soul shouted down my brain, a thought came, crisp and commanding to my mind: "None of that craziness is an ounce as real as your music. Grace is the real thing." I was astounded at the thought. I sat up straighter, ready to consider this claim of my heart. I closed my eyes and the music roared back to life in my ears, filling my brain so that the strife of the outer world seemed, in its turn, flimsy as child's dream. Which world was true? I stared ahead into the Texas sunset, thinking hard until I suddenly remembered something I knew as a child and almost forgot. Beauty tells the truth.

Since I was a tiny lass, I have called my experiences of beauty "knowings," because I felt that those encounters communicated something true about the world. I first discovered this in Celtic music; I remember one particular song I heard as a child when I tasted an exultation beyond anything I had ever known. Amidst the rise of a fiddle, the keen of a penny whistle, and a beat like that of many hearts throbbing together, I was filled with an image of all the world in a dance, of many peoples joined in one great movement of joy. And I knew that it was true, that someday just such a dance would happen when all the struggle of earth was ended and the feast of heaven had begun. I am convinced that somehow, in that music, I was able to grasp a picture of the someday world to be.

I think most of us have these "knowings." C.S. Lewis called them "joy," the great gladness that startled him into his faith. L.M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) call such them "the flash." Tolkien called them "eucatastrophe," the unexpected grace of a happy ending. But all of them mean the same; the taste, in an instant of beauty, of a joy beyond anything we know in this world. A certainty of some good that dwells beyond the limits of what we can see. We know, bone deep, even if only for the instant of song or sight, that there is a joy to outlast all sorrow, a grace that justifies our fight to overcome the darkness in which we all strive.

Beauty really is truth and that was what my heart was telling my brain in that odd Texas moment. To dwell in an instant of beauty is to stumble into a pocket of eternity as it bubbles up in time. A song like the one I heard that Texas night exists half here, half in the realm of the eternal. Time is suspended because that one sustained note, or a leaf in a crimson-edged turn, or the happy ending of a story bears a truth that will live beyond the moment in which you taste it. The knowledge that comes to me in a moment of art or song is a truth from outside the circles of time and decay. This is why I hunger for beauty, why I sense it to be a "realer" thing than much of the hurry of modern, daily life.

This is also why I write. To capture even a hint of that sure loveliness, to embody that illusive, certain grace in what I create, this is my work. To present the beauty I have found in a story of my own is to offer my time and people the most precious thing I have ever found. This is no waste, no child's dream. This is a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven as it invades the world. I suspect most artists sense this as they work; a hint of redemption seeps into what they create, God speaks into their work from outside the circles of pain, striving, and blindness. My own "knowings," are just one glimpse of God's far country. But to listen, to picture, to tell of that world beyond this earth is the work of God's own kingdom, because the beauty is his. The joy is his love. The life is his own holy self, throbbing through all of creation, calling us back to the wholeness for which we were made.

I finished my song that night. Savored the last of the notes and opened my eyes. This time I didn't panic. I looked out on the frenzied twilight world of the Dallas suburbs and knew that the beauty I had tasted both transcended it all, and yet was also the promise of its redemption. The song was not a dream of hope that would fade, it was the promise of a hope that never ends because beauty tells the truth. And I believe it.

This good day

Today, there is air like cold water and sun like gold dust amidst it. Today, the leaves reveal their fiery hearts and line the trees like soldiers ready to fight the wind, and die.

Today, music is a lilting cry that sings what I can't speak.

Today, the twist of branch and gem of berries twine round a fat candle that tilts and gutters next to the open window.

Today, the world outside is a jewel-bescattered kingdom and my walk amidst it is a hunting of treasure.

Today, the rule of living is hot drinks unnumbered and long books begun and joy picked up like a penny from the sidewalk of these autumn days.

Today, I will start The Lord of the Rings all over again.

Today, I know that God is present before me to be taken in my hands. Decisions are illusive - they can always flit one more day ahead.  But the grace of today can make me strong. I am shored up by awareness of this settling season, as people and trees buckle down to face winter but do it with bright eyes and laughing hearts. Sometimes warmth is the sweeter because you have to fight the cold.

Today, I realize that beauty is the way I take hold of God. These small, strange gifts of leaf and flame and tea and story and sky, are the literal, physical hands God reaches down for me to hold. And I do. I put my small hand into their cupped, protective grace. And even amidst this unsure time, with shadow obscuring the road ahead, for now, I rest. And I am held.

A week in the Alps