The Giving Tree

Listening to the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack at the day's end with my hairpins removed makes me feel so spiritual. I'm sitting here, trying to write honestly. Right now,  I feel the lack of God's presence in my life. This week I've felt so. . .heavy laden. My soul feels as though it has been tied up in knots, twisted and gnarled, my psyche is suffering from Indian burn.

In moments like these, days like these, I see how hard it is for me to be even superficially pleasant. I don't know what makes me feel so badly, and I am aware, almost every moment, of my own inability to live a life of love. At work, one of the instructors read the book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. She asked all of the students, and some of the staff, to choose one thing they would like to give others throughout the school year. I decided that I would give love, because that is the best gift I could think of, and the most costly. That gift mocks me every day, as I sit in my classroom looking at the Mother Theresa prayer for those serving the sick pinned to the bottom left corner of my bulletin board. It's hard to love, I tell you! But sometimes it's hard merely to want to love.

Today I feel full of despair again. It's so hard, sometimes, to believe that righteousness is possible. It's very easy to believe that the road to happiness is getting my own way, or the removal of every difficulty: it isn't though. When I pray, it feels like I'm begging an indifferent passerby on the street for sacks of gems. I don't expect anything, because I feel like a) I don't deserve it, and b) giving is not in the nature of the one I am beseeching. This is a lie of course, well, not the first part. I don't deserve anything beautiful, true, or good, but I'm expected to expect these things anyway. It's so hard to pray for joy when I feel like it never comes. It's so hard to pray for faith when you don't believe anything. It's impossible to believe that God is happy when I am so miserable. Or is it?

I need to be re-taught that God is a giving tree, that he hears us, hears me, when we pray, that he gives benevolently out of the overflowing goodness of his own excellent nature. But I doubt it; I doubt.

God is a giving tree. He gives conditionally, in that he gives us what is good even when this is not what we have desired. He gives conditionally, in that he gives when he ask according to his will. Is God deaf to my prayers? Have I sinned against him in a way that would cause him to stop-up his ears? Oh, God, grant what you command, and command what you will.

I have been thinking a lot about St. Augustine, Dante, George MacDonald, John Donne, Plato--everyone who writes about ordinate love and the beatific vision. It is so easy to love inordinately. 

"If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee." 

It's hard to be good. Part of the difficulty of being good is believing that God will make you good when you ask.

But God is a giving tree, he loves to give, to bless. He gives pain and he gives great joy.

Oh, I wanted to relate this back to George MacDonald. I'm re-reading At the Back of the North Wind, and I'm re-remembering (again) all that MacDonald says about being at the still point. Do you remember the still point? The still point harkens back to Boethius, to Dante, to lots of people. The point is this: at the center of the universe is God, a Being supremely perfect and happy. Evil happens around him, and he uses the good and the bad to shape human events while he himself remains wholly uncontaminated and unchanged. If I keep myself at the still point, where God is, I will not be shaken by the things in this life, small or great, that threaten to tie knots in my soul. I need to understand this because it is so easy to tie a knot in my soul. I am derailed by weather changes.

But God is a giving tree. He is a giving tree, and he loves us. He loves us. O! How he loves us!




Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

Lent: Bad at it

To know you only
my soul disappears.
I tire of glimpsing you
in dusty mirrors.
The beauty in the world I know
is only ugliness to me
if you I cannot see.
pregnant with your love,
I climb.
But on this narrow stair,
I recall how fair,
the vanities of this world are.
And I find the path too steep,
the pain too deep—
to keep on looking for you.
I tear my hands—clutching
at blossoms—truly,
only—thorns in my side.
My pride
woos me to stay,
while fears
—heavy iron spurs—
slacken my steps,
protecting me from truth,
making my cup—a pulsing star—
overflowing with your joys,
bitter and black,
—gall and tar.
Drop!
Drop!
Your blood in my cup.
Shine
Shine
(your light in my eyes).
The water of life rushing
in my ears
the currents rise,
and carry me along,
so strong your rivers are.
Your song now
palatable—I float
my ascent, swallowing
mouthfuls of your words.
As the earth revolves
so I spin, turned by you
the One who moves.
Sugar and sadness in
my hymn, I begin to tune
my lips to your unchanging
symphony.
Clutching to the drifting sun,
I wash up on your
golden shore—
and I can't remember anymore
anything brighter than your face.

In search of some water that isn't so smeary

One of the worst things about living with 7 women in a cramped house is never having space to reflect. Even when I have room in my schedule for being time, which is not very often, I must war against the forces of chaos in my own home. There is no place in my home where I can hide from the world. Living in the midst of so many people is a little like living in a bus terminal. It isn't a place to dwell, but rather an in-between-place. It's a shooting-off point for going or coming, never for being. I love all the women I live with, but, there are really, very, many of them. This means that contemplative time becomes media time. Instead of reading or writing or merely sitting in silence, I watch Gilmore Girls or crack jokes about our Landlord and The Poolboy . I enjoy these things, but when they are over, and I take myself to bed, I find that I am missing something. I'm missing peace. In order to find peace and rhythm and balance in the midst of a hectic life, I need time to be. I used to run away to coffee shops for this, because it is possible to shut out the world if you don't know the world by name and it isn't asking you to have in-depth conversations about racism or tell you a funny anecdote from its day.
I want peace. I can do the busy, crazy, hectic, frantic chaos that is daily life only if I stop in-between-times to be and to create cosmos for myself. So I'm taking this moment, the few brief minutes between class and work, to stop and reflect on my internal state. I feel crowded. Not merely hedged in on every side by living partners, but also crowded with things, with noise, with bustle. I think I'd like to spend some time on top of a mountain, just for the sake of sitting in open air and silence--not surrounded by possessions, not distracted by disorder, just given the chance to be.
It's Lent, and I'm hardly aware of it because the chaos that is around me is entering my soul. I can't hear the voice of God over the screechings of audible and visible clutter. I often wonder what it would be like to live with all of my possessions on my back. Like a fairy tale character, my kerchief tied to a stick, holding within it every thing on this earth I call mine. It sounds so sweet and free sometimes, to live this way. I would often like to have no blanket but the stars, no pillow but the earth, no lullaby but the dance of the planets. I've been thinking so much about eternity and the weight of the world. I don't believe the body is bad, as Plato does, but the body is so prone to gathering things about itself, things that weigh it down and prevent it from glimpsing what is meant foremost to be seen.
Lent, when I remember it's Lent because someone offers me a cookie--reminds me of the cumbersome nature of possessions. Giving up "pleasure foods" in some ways isn't even hard, because I'm still surrounded by so much real, natural, healthy food. Abundance is with us still. I think it's the abundance that bothers me, that hinders my being, because it's of the wrong sort. It isn't the abundance of charity, of peace, or of beauty; it's the abundance of worthless items crowding the vision of my heart, body, and brain.

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways.

"You're glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed!
No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed.
So I'm sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary.
They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary
in search of some water that isn't so smeary."