A Vocation of One's Own

Sometimes I hate my job because it means that I am the only non-specialist in a world full of experts. I was not made to function as a maid of all work. I'm not a generalist by nature. I want to throw myself into some highly-specialized, creative and desperately needed, utterly meaningful work of my own. 

I've said it before and I've said it again: I want to be George MacDonald and Amy Carmichael smushed together into one person. This is who I am. You figure it out. 

She sees the realities of this world and alleviates human suffering with a sacrificial love. 

He sees the realities of the world to come and communicates them to others with the creative power of his soul. 

I need a vocation. 


This thought that is getting me through the desert of now:

"His Kingdom is Upside Down and in Him your part is large and lovely and needed and art."

Surely, I was created to be more than a Teacher's Assistant.

So Great a Cloud of Witnesses: Distracted Musings on All Saints' Day

 

“Around your throne the saints, our brothers and sisters,

sing your praise forever.

Their glory fills us with joy,

and their communion with us in your church

gives us inspiration and strength

as we hasten our pilgrimage of faith, eager to meet them.

With their great company and all the angels

we praise your glory as we cry out with one voice:

‘Holy, holy, holy…’ “

 

Thus ends Poetry Appreciation Month. It was good while it lasted. 

Today is All Saints' Day. I had so many ideas for this day. Alas, we went on a field trip. The truth is that field trips are always secretly exhausting. It's a wonder I can hold up my head right now. In other news, my best friend is getting married in 9 days. Yet another reason why I am feeling the rush of activity rather than the inner stirrings of quietude.

Last night, I read up on some saints, thought about Hebrews 11, and read bits of Revelation. I planned to watch Millions, read St. Joan, and think about people I admire: the George Muellers and the Amy Carmichaels. I wrote out a list of All Saints' Day worthy activities. Today I even wore a white dress, but forgot to feel significant feelings about it. I'm too tired to observe such a holy day.

What can I say about all of this? We know that righteousness is possible, and real. Not just for God, but for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

What we do know is that faith is the common factor in the lives of all these holy people. . .

Without faith, it is impossible to please God. 

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

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.

St. Joan

Keeping the Sabbath: The Infant Christ, Lemon Meringue Pie, and One Honorable Bird

I love Christian art. I love it the way I love monasticism, liturgy, and trees. Christian art helps me sense the reality of the depth of the faith I profess. It connects me to the Church throughout time and space. I love that I can say the words "Christian Art" and conjure up images rendered long before the advent of Thomas Kincaid. I love that people have long been using art to wrestle with and build their faith. I love that art can be prayer, worship, scholarship, and contemplation. I love that beauty and creative expression are long established components of Christian worship.

Today I stayed home from church for a solitary sabbath: I slept in, had pan au chocolat, tea, and strawberries for breakfast. I compared 4 different versions of Psalm 91: in the ESV, the Message,  the Book of Common Prayer, and the Louis Segond French translation. I re-read bits of Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God, read now in the solemn mindfulness of her latest work, Still. I tried to pray Psalm 91 for a few people I've been feeling worried about, and for myself. I asked for an increase of faith.

 "His huge outstretched arms protect you—
      under them you're perfectly safe;
      his arms fend off all harm."

"Il te couvrira de ses plumes, Et tu trouveras un refuge sous ses ailes."

"He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers." 

 "He will cover you with his pinions,
    and under his wings you will find refuge."

My faith is not what it ought to be. I often find it hard to pray. I often don't want to pray, and when I do pray, I find it overwhelming; I want to stop, because there are so many things to pray for.
I went to the Norton Simon, because it's only a 30 minute walk away (I took the bus) and because I imagine myself as a person who goes to art museums all the time. It involved strolling through the water lotus gardens, watching grey-green tadpoles flit and gold-orange dragonflies gleam. It involved the kid's meal: grilled cheese and a fruit salad. It involved sunshine and shady trees and lemon meringue pie. It involved trying to pick up snippets of conversation made by French tourists (vous connaissez?). It involved an attempt at deep contemplation of Christian art.
After walking the museum over, I returned to a few paintings that especially spoke to me. I realized today that I have an official favorite painting at the Norton Simon. It is "St. Joseph and the Infant Christ", by Giovanni Battista Gaulli. I think I love this painting because it radiates relationship. The whole painting is about the deep love which exists between the Christ-Child and St. Joseph, it's beautiful because St. Joseph manifests such tender love for his adopted son. It's meaningful because it reminds me of the Book of Ruth, of the Book of Revelation, of spiritual adoption, and of God's complete and substantial love for me, his adopted daughter.

But I love this painting in a sort of ironic contrast to the rest of Christian art. I realized that the most important thing about Christian art, about beholding a Christian painting, is being made to see what is not visible.
I spent a long time looking at Francesco Bissolo's "The Annunciation", a painting which depicts Mary receiving the angel Gabriel' s words into her heart, and the Christ-Child into her womb: the birth of our salvation and the Magnificat. It's a warm and lovely painting. I stared at it for a long time before realizing that the most important visible thing in that painting is an Honorable Bird: the Holy-Spirit-as-dove hovering---radiantly and slightly---at the top of the painting. The presence and power of God is often hard to see, it is even invisible sometimes, as was the unborn Christ dwelling within Mary.

This painting struck me because, as I gazed at it, I realized that the Dove of Primal Importance, the Honorable Bird, resides in me. I am the visible element in the painting, imbued with the often intangible presence of God. Wow.

But there is one more painting which today brought me closer to the contemplation of the invisible. It's "Madonna and Child with Book" by Raffaello Sanzio.

This one, while showing the incarnate body of Christ, actually points to the eternal, invisible reality of God. Mary and the Christ-Child sit reading a prayer book. Here is Christ, the one who created Mary and the entire landscape behind them, sitting in his incarnate form, reading about his future death and resurrection. Here is God, the God who always IS, rendered in the past as a child, contemplating his own future acts. At the time of the painting, all the work of redemption had been accomplished--Christ was seated on the throne in heaven, interceding for us: it is a meditation piece concerned with the constant presence, the constant being, of God. It is eternity past, present, and future all in one. Here is Mary, teaching her son about his own nature, as he sits in her arms, the arms that he himself created as the "Firstborn of all creation". God very God, here with us as creator, redeemer, and word. Here is the description given with the painting:

"The inscription in the book introduces the ninth hour, or Nones of the Canonical Offices, recited daily by all monastic communities. The Nones commemorates Christ's Crucifixion and Death. With eyes turned to heaven, the Christ Child contemplates His own sacrifice as man's Redeemer."

I need to see Christian art. I need to present my eyes with things that invite them to believe and worship: it's so good for my soul. So today church was held in an airy museum, and the Eucharist was a slice of lemon meringue pie, imbibed under the acrylic gazes of penitents St. Francis and St. Jerome.

Tea Time in the Interior Castle

Sometimes it's hard to write. I've been meaning to come back to this stupid blog, again and again, with book reviews or spiritual musings, but it's hard. The hardest thing about living life--real, deep, pure life--is stopping still--standing still--long enough to do so. I know that if I don't write I'll die, I know that for me writing is a form of prayer.

Sometimes life is difficult. Sometimes just doing the bare minimum takes all of my strength. What do I have to say tonight? I'm not sure I know. I've been mulling over the will of God, thinking about what it means to live as God means me to live. Sometimes, it seems simple. Sometimes, I know what I'm called to do. Sometimes, I can tell somehow that God is calling me, leading me deeper into him, and that deep inside his love I will be moved to live a wild and beautiful life.

O, how I want to be pulled into the deep, deep love of God! It's much easier, much safer, much more comfortable to live in the shallows--but I can't stay here forever, because I'll die of thirst. Today I read George Mueller's words about knowing God, about how increasing in the knowledge of God is synonymous with increasing in personal happiness. To the degree that I know God I am happy. To the degree that I doubt God, I am misery personified.

I want to know God. I want to live with him in his life and die with him in his death. But sometimes this feels impossible.

Last week, as I was contemplating life, happiness, and the love of God with a dear friend, she told me that I needed to get my act together because I was supposed to be her "spiritual and wise" friend. I know that I'm supposed to be spiritual and wise. I also know that I rarely live up to this calling. It's hard to live a life of being.

I ought to live deeply. My soul was made for depth, and not breadth, stillness, and not movement. I should dwell inside the sonnet, I should hear the breathy wailing of the wind, I should see every star. My heart would keep well in a cloister.

I'm sitting here, imbibing honeydew green tea and listening to music, because, tonight, this is the closest I can bring myself to stillness, to real life.

As I look around my bedroom, I see the proof, the evidence, of who God is calling me to be. Quotations from St. Julian of Norwich, Emily Dickinson, Brennan Manning, Rumi, Mahmoud Darwish, the Psalms, Sadhu Sundar Singh, and many others line my walls. Icon valentines of St. Brigid of Ireland and Mary the Mother of God are on my mantel. A watercolor portrait of my own face, encompassed by golden halo and wings of inspiration, hangs above a bookshelf.

Looking at all of these things--congregation of word & image, delicate, brightly bound, palm-sized volumes of The Imitation of Christ and The Book of Common Prayer--I see clearly that I am meant to live the life of a contemplative. God, help me to live this life. Imbued with your spirit, sensitive to your voice, obedient and faithful, keep me aware of mystery and beauty wherever it exists. Keep me close to Love, where you are, on the other side of silence.

Grace Wholly Gratuitous, I Mean Pictures

Badgers, Virgins, & Saints

Art, Books, &tc.

Bulletin: for important news, clearly.

Oxie: Magdalen College & New College, respectively.

I've been decorating.
Sorry the pictures are so fuzzy.

A Living, Rushing Wind: On Creativity

Even in California, it's springtime. Birds are singing from the depths of their quick-beating, tiny bird hearts.

I'm re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, and I'm discovering reality again. Why do I, a creative person, produce so little? Why isn't all of my free time given to writing diligently, like I ought to do? It's because I often choose to consume rather than to create.

Every day, every moment, I have to choose between consumption and creativity. I rarely choose creativity. In this materialistic world, it's really, really easy to waste your life consuming things instead of creating them.

When a person creates they are giving life, adding cosmos/truth/beauty to the world. When a person consumes they are using up resources--killing and destroying--ushering in a state of chaos. Cooking, reading, writing, loving, praying, worshiping--these create. Shopping, eating, Facebook, watching The Office, hating--these consume.

 Facebook and shopping are not evil, but they take away from the world. I am a consumer of life. Most of my existence has been spent taking.

Perhaps it's a question of balance. Consuming is all right, some forms of it are all right, if most of my life is spent creating. 

I think creativity is a way--a quite natural and simple way--to give to the world. The problem is that creativity is often difficult, exhausting, and frustrating, while consumption is easy and entertaining.

But, I would be a life-giver.

Creating is life giving, and holy, because it is an aspect of God's own Self. God benevolently gives. He lives. He creates life. If we are to reflect his nature, we too must create generously. Creation is an act of worship because to create is to imitate God's nature, and what is more worshipful than living in imitation of the One you adore?

It is much, much easier to consume when I come home tired at the end of a long day. To create I must be ready and attentive. It's hard to push past all of the noise and movement until I reach that still place, the still point, where creativity comes like a rushing wind.


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

LENT: I CHOOSE ALL!

Currently Reading:
Shirt of Flame: A year with St. Therese of Lisieux

Currently Mulling over:
T.S. Eliot, the Four Quartets

“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”

Currently Lectio-ing:
Psalm 119
Philippians

LENT.
It’s over now, and, as usual, I’m feeling dissatisfied with, as my friend Sara says, my ability to “inhabit the Lenten drama”. I’m not sure what the standard should be. I began Lent concerned with mindfulness, which then led to a desire for thankfulness, which has ended up with a deep desire for belonging and the ability to welcome suffering. I do feel that Lent has made me more mindful: more aware of God and the world, more present to the Great Realities of life. It’s also made me a better reader of the Bible, which was one of my most important Lenten goals. It’s also made me more aware of superficiality in my life. A friend told me last summer that she thought I wasn’t living the life I was meant to live. I see that clearly, after Lent.
In my head, I believe that it is possible to do Lent perfectly. What does that mean? I don’t know If Lent is a skill one develops, I don’t know if that should be my concern. I gave up reading and watching, because I wanted to embrace emptiness and be more aware of God than the world of invention.
It’s very hard to sit with emptiness, and there were many times when I distracted myself with things I had not declared anathema during this forty day fast. Lent was a struggle because I’m brawling with Calvinist doctrine: very few of the TULIP’s petals smell sweet to me these days. My church is studying 1 John, so I’m struggling with assurance, too. Do I feel certain right now that I’m saved? I don’t. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, they’ve told me. Well, I believe. The issue is a lack of fruit, fruit borne as proof of this salvation. . . . I haven’t written in so long it’s hard to retrieve the right words. . . . After Lent—a time when I should have embraced struggle—I’m struggling with one thing. I’m deathly afraid of suffering.

Embracing Jesus means embracing all he offers—every blessing—and suffering is a blessing, and don’t I know that already?

When I’m not fearfully running from suffering, I like to tentatively pat it on the head with one hand, an acknowledgement of its presence and worth, but not quite a hospitable embrace. I just can’t wrap my arms around it; it might bite my face off. Or, rather, it will bite my face off. How do you welcome pain?
I like to read Saints’ lives because they challenge my understanding of knowing God. For example, St. Therese of Lisieux is all about embracing suffering.

What true saint is not about embracing suffering?

I’m struck with St. Therese’s famous saying: “I choose all!”. Well, I like to choose all the parts of knowing God in Christ that are comfortable and obviously good, and leave all the suffering for more zealous Christians. But, I must be a zealous Christian; that’s the only option available. We only live, only suspire/consumed by either fire or fire.

From St. Therese’s, The Story of a Soul:

Later, when perfection made its appearance to me, I understood that in order to become a saint you have to suffer a lot, always be in search of what is most perfect, and forget yourself.

I don’t want to be a halfway saint. It doesn’t scare me to suffer for You; I’m afraid of only one thing, and that is to hold onto my will. Take it, because ‘I choose all,’ all that You want!

Divert my eyes from toys and trinkets; invigorate me on this pilgrim way.

Vision of The Grotesque & The Beautiful

I hate ugliness. I hate ugliness so much that I try not to see it, to hear it, to smell it, or to conceive of it in any way that reveals its presence to me. I look at the world through a lens that denies the presence of what is ugly. No, not a vision of denial, but a vision of discontent. I look at things only to wish them more beautiful. I see wilting roses and picture them whole, full, devoid of brownish edges or insect perforations. It extends to all my senses. I attempt to keep out of my ears the noises of the world--television, radio stations, muzak in grocery stores--noise being its own kind of ugliness. There is a large medical building in my city painted a tawdry muddy-orange color. It makes me angry, it might have been prettier.

This vision of discontent, of continual demand for perfection from an imperfect world, may be a gift. Otherwise, it is my own ugliness. An ugliness that wants always to deny the imperfections of real things. It's not a blindness, it's a judging vision. It's been said that prophets are afflicted with divine discontent, and I like to believe that it is this affliction I bear. This kind of affliction made people like Amy Carmichael and George Mueller take in hundreds of street children, it's the kind that fuels abolition movements and unreasonable demands for justice--because these people were dissatisfied with what is. Lately though, I am in doubt.

This week I finished Mystery and Manners, a posthumous collection of prose by Flannery O' Connor. I love St. Flannery for so many reasons. First, because she is an excellent writer. Second, because she is right about everything. Third, because her own spiritual and artistic vision is so perfectly shaped and presented. She has left nothing out. This being said, it is disconcerting to be at odds with Flannery in my own way of looking at the world. But then, maybe I am not. Flannery is all about observation: she is concerned with looking at and recognizing what is present in the natural world in order to faithfully reveal its link to supernature. Nature pairs with grace & mystery with manners, Flannery tells us. Thus, her vision of the world involves judgment, because she sees the ultimate reality of the Triune God making himself known to us. And, along with this, she sees the rebellion and misery of humanity in fighting against this, its own perfect end. But what strikes me most is that Flannery concerns herself so much with seeing what is there and presenting exactly this to the reader. Her characters are often people who are physically ugly, as well as being spiritually so. Perhaps this is where our vision differs. I see what is there and in my own mind's eye strive to correct, to improve, to soften it's garishness. Flannery even extols the benefits of drawing classes for young novelists, drawing being an activity that helps you to see what is there. Flannery's thorough perception recognizes what is there and serves it to you raw and unedited--grotesque humanity on a silver platter of truth.

Do I shun the grotesque? Or do I, like Flannery, see the world and human nature in it's impoverished state and yearn for what it ought to be? For what it may be? In my view of the world do I miss something? Am I ignoring the downtrodden? The broken-hearted? The least of these?

The smelly, filthy, homeless, disabled man on the bus is grotesque. I sit with him in a vehicle with large, glassy windows that let in the light. Together we travel, our lives drowned out under the roar of the engine. But I sit there because I can't escape. I politely breathe through my mouth instead of covering my nose so that he will not realize the smell of him makes me afraid. I look at him and think detached, philosophical thoughts about humanity and its depravity. Is that the way to look at the grotesque? I sit there with him and think about other things, with my nose stuck in a book, ignoring the present scents of disaster and decay to picture clean skin, beds of lavender, rain-washed air.

To see the grotesque do I have to love it? Or merely embrace its presence? Are loving and embracing one act?

Am I looking for the good beneath the ugliness? Or am I simply trying to recognize and greet the presence of the ugly?

I know it is wrong to only love what is beautiful. Or rather, is it wrong to love what only appears beautiful? Love is not concerned, perhaps, with the goodness of the thing loved; but with willing and bringing good to the object of the love.

And what am I to think of my own grotesqueness? God does not love me because I am beautiful. He loves me even though I am ugly. And in this love his beauty is communicated to me. If the call is merely to love, then my response ought to be constant, loving, attentiveness.

Yes! This is it, attention well paid, a certain homage performed. A recognition of presence. The presence of the grotesque.


and the real always trumps the imagined
as the invisible transcends the perceived


Are perfection, beauty, & goodness the result of that loving attentiveness? Do I look at what is and love it because it ought to be higher? Love it for what it could be? Love it to make it rise?

I am on a quest to use my imaginative faculty for good. I want to know how to see what is there, but not in a dull complacency that makes me wring my hands. Nor in a zeal for perfection that makes me sweep over any good concealed. Rather, I want to cultivate a welcoming attentiveness that helps me to see the good that is present--for what is good is better than what is beautiful. I think.


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