Saturday 31 December 2011

The Best Books of 2011: as told by Me

Please note that these books are arranged in no important order, and that exactly 0 of them were published in 2011. Well, ahem:

Best Books of 2011
Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner
Autobiography of a Reformed Jewish girl turned Orthodox Jew turned Episcopalian. It's beautifully written, intelligent, meaningful, and hilarious. As a friend described it, "I kind of hate her. It's like, I love her, but I want to be her at the same time".

Operating Instructions, Traveling Mercies, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
All of these are autobiographical non-fiction. These books I group together because it took reading through the first two of them before I loved Anne Lamott. At first, I passionately hated her. Though I disagree with some of the things she says, I've ultimately learned a lot from her. Anne Lamott stretched my understanding of sin, love, and faith. She's also hilarious and a very good writer. The third book, Bird by Bird, is primarily advice for beginning writers.

Housekeeping and Home by Marilynne Robinson
Two lovely texts by the patron saint of creative writing. I love this woman. The only problem with her writing is that I love all of it completely. It's a mystical experience every time. Her stories are all slow moving, and I love this, because she writes at the pace of my own soul. Home is the sequel to Gilead, an epistolary novel and one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. I cried through both of them. Housekeeping is a simply exquisite work of fiction. It's beautiful language, image, and narrative.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
This fall I tried to read more plays and this is what came of it. I mean, this is my favorite out of the dozen or so that I read. This is the play from which we get the more familiar film, My Fair Lady. I have to say that George Bernard Shaw is generally heavily political and long-winded. I liked Pygmalion because I think he was more focused on real human interaction: Eliza, Prof. Higgins, and the relationship between them. It was entirely enjoyable, if enjoyable includes both the hilarious and the heart-wrenching.

Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
Another epistolary novel. It's perfect fall reading, as it's a book about school. Everybody knows that books about school and orphans make for good reading. It's humorous, sweet and makes me want to go to an all-girls college.

Phantastes and At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
George MacDonald is the patron saint of everything. I love this man. This year, I re-read Phantastes after reading At the Back of the North Wind. He's just so good at what he does. What does he do? He takes gigantic, universal themes and gives them to you in beautiful, gloriously-simple fairy tales. He's bursting with truth, light, and beauty. It's like carrying a star in your pocket. It's wonderful.

Mystery and Manners by Flannery O' Connor
Another book largely about writing. I have a secret delight in reading writers talking about the craft of writing. It makes me feel better about my own lack of discipline in that area. In this book, Flannery mockingly and helpfully presents the writing life and the purpose of writing.

Revelation by St. John & the Holy Spirit
Not a first read, but this year Revelation suddenly made sense. I think I made it past all of the bewildering discussions of "pre vs. post-trib" and finally came to see the drama of the book itself. I love it; it's well written, mystical, prophetic, and, as I've recently discovered, unbelievably straightforward. God wins! Revelation is a new favorite.

Pensées by Pascal
Read this for school, back in the early days of 2011 when I was still a student. I loved this because it's like philosophy for the literary. It is beautifully written and has a heart. I don't know how else to say it.

Emma by Jane Austen
Of course I've seen the movies 12,000 times. But, I've somehow never made it through the book before. I'm amazed upon this read to see aspects of myself in Emma Woodhouse. I, too, fall prey to my own imaginative speculations. Shocking, I know.

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

I didn't like Henry James before I read it, and I didn't even like this work until I was about 150 pages in, but I did really enjoy it. I was surprised, which is the main thing. The characters feel like real people. Good work, Henry.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Hard to categorize, but harder to read. Boethius sort of socks you in the belly and makes you consider life's hardest questions. Why is there suffering? Boethius can tell you. Read him.

I don't generally like "best of" lists. But now I've posted for the last time in 2011. Ha!
Let's all choose to believe that I'll post more frequently in 2012. Bonne Année!

Saturday 30 July 2011

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.

Saturday 9 July 2011

Portrait of a. . .?

Don't read Henry James. There are better things to do with one's time. However, I'm reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady just now, and his writing style does begin to grow on one. This is still not an excuse for you to read Henry James. It isn't that I don't love to picture sun-warmed stone benches and tangled rose vines in Florence, don't misunderstand me. I'd just rather fill in the details for myself and skip the pages where he tries to bend my imaginative faculty to his too-vigorous descriptions.

I'm thinking, as usual, about my life. I'm bored. I find that in trying to carefully keep the balance between prudential living and passionate adventurism I continually manage to do nothing at all. This is a problem because, like I said, I'm bored. I always admire the friends who pursue what sounds good to them--the ones who seem to discredit all the reasons against adventure. I apparently ought to marry the reasons against adventure because I love them so much. Sometimes I ask myself what I'd do if I could do whatever my heart desired. The answer doesn't seem to be so different than what I'm preparing to do: go to grad school, become fluent in French, and live abroad. But, I'd do it more carelessly perhaps. With a truer zest for life, with more expectation of goodness.

The future has almost ceased to interest me. That is, except for those moments when I'm still curious about how I'll "turn out". At 25, am I finally nearing the point when I can no longer ask such questions? At which point, exactly, will I be turned? At 30? I feel that the older I get, the more my possibilities diminish, yet I don't know what the possibilities have been or are currently. But I am getting sidetracked.

I do not like regret. I do not like it, because I believe it has no cure. In college, I denied myself many pleasures for the greater pleasure of being a good student. Do not ask me what it means to be a good student. I have asked myself that question so many times I couldn't make you a decent answer. However, the point remains. I pursued (and I'm glad of it still) academic rigor at the expense of having a good time. Well, now my academic rigors have subsided, at least for a while, and I am still not having a good time. I'm working full-time again, as I do every summer, and finding it delightful in many ways. The great difference between this year and last is that I'm not frantically reading ahead--or generally angsty about the duration of my degree.I'm finished now. This is a glorious truth which I frequently turn to ponder in my soul. It maketh the heart glad.

But, the point. I expected greater responsibilities after college. I expected to have to act like a grown-up. Although, as I've been paying for most of the costs of my maintenance for years not much has changed there.

The thing I also expected, which has turned out to be a grave disappointment, was to find waiting for me the pleasures I disdained to get all of those books read.

It isn't here. Here is a 40-hour work week and aimless free time after hours. Here are friends who live too far away or who are too busy with their marriages or careers to indulge in the pleasures of the life I've so long postponed.

Here, now, with wings finally unfurled, I find that I've not escaped the cage. It was a different place, with my wings submissively folded in, but now they are open and restless for wind. They scrape the prison bars and a few feathers are torn loose and drift to the floor.

I made a rule before graduating against parenthetical living. Parenthetical living being, of course, my only skill and glory. So I ask myself, am I waiting in vain for a time when life will be more accessible? I hope not, because that time will not come, I'm certain of this now.

A friend of mine once remarked, after spontaneously piercing her eyebrow at 25, that if you miss youthful folly when you're young, you mayn't make up for it later. It's too late then. Is it too late now?

I so want to enjoy myself. I have known keen intellectual pleasures over the past seven years, yes, but other avenues of existence have been wanting. It is time to turn down other lanes if I have not lost the way.

I want to fly.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

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."

Sunday 13 March 2011

Streams of Lenten Conciousness. . .

I'm keeping Lent this year. Really keeping it. Not in the usual sense where I think vaguely pious thoughts to myself about the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.


Two years ago, when I was in England, I went to a truly beautiful Ash Wednesday service in the chapel at Magdalen College. I'll confess that it was beautiful to the point of being distracting and disorienting, but the memory of that night serves me well. I must say that it was an achingly beautiful service. Candlelight, incense, a boys choir, stained glass and statues of saints, British people, liturgy, participation, religious vestments--all things I love. I heard sung for the first time the Allegri Miserere, which has become one of my favorite musical pieces. It's Psalm 51, sung in Latin, which is currently my favorite psalm for Lectio. I love this Psalm and the Miserere because they make me feel like it's OK to stop and simply recognize my sinfulness. I spend most days concealing sins or trying to immediately fix them. I love the darkness because my deeds are evil. These songs help me see the value of sitting with my transgressions in full awareness of my own wretchedness. It's freeing I think, and the first step to genuine repentance. I remember how later that night I returned to study at the Bodleian, the wispy grey cross on my studious brow as I researched rewarded virtue in the fairy tales of George MacDonald. What a beautiful life.

This Lent, I've decided to give up all food that I eat only for the sake of pleasure. So dessert, eating out, and sugar are off the list. Not just for the sake of foregoing pleasures, but for the pursuit of greater ones. Giving up "pleasure foods" for Lent mentally reinforces that Jesus is the source of happiness. It's an idea worth thinking about. If I reward myself in the midst of reading Hume or memorizing French vocabulary with a pan au chocolat, or grab Thai food with a roommate after church, I am easily satisfied. This isn't bad. But it's another matter after a long day of researching a paper on cross-cultural literacy development or preparing grad school applications to simply sit back and not attempt to satisfy my desire for reward. It's good sometimes to simply feel the lack of something.

Self-denial really is it's own pleasure. It slows one down and allows for the space to reflect. If, as Pascal says, all men are distracting themselves because what we most fear is being alone with ourselves in a quiet room, then it's good for me to brave the simplicity of emptiness. It's good to shake off the noisy demands of the body in order to hear the quiet, pensive pleas of the soul.

Generally, I love having the space and time to reflect. But it's easy to forget to do this in the midst of finishing up my last semester of college, straining with all my might to run with elegance the last leg of a difficult race.

I want Lent this year to be about feeling the lack. I think I've forgotten the good in feeling that I'm missing something. It's amazing how possible it is to live with unsatisfied desires. This has become especially important because my biggest fears right now are concerned with being able to make ends meet after college. I'm fearing only the things Jesus commands me not to fear. To feel, even in a small way, that I can be OK without is a great boon to my soul.

I'm also trying to be unselfish. I'm so morbidly selfish it's a wonder anyone wants to be friends with me. The practice of going without for Lent is meaningful then, because it reminds me that my primary goal shouldn't be my own comfort. I always provide rationale for self-centeredness, claiming that I must ensure my own needs are met because no one else will do so. But again, if God is our Father and if he bid even Jesus to wander in the desert with him for 40 days, then I can trust him to care for me while I seek to love others first.

All this because I'm not eating pancakes for breakfast? Yes. I think so.

I want truth for food.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Today

Today I'm sitting in an armchair listening to the wind blow through the weeds in the driveway. It's nice, sitting here, momentarily believing that nothing I do matters. Right now I don't want anything but to be here, in this room, in this house, wearing these clothes, and enjoying this weather. I am content just now; but in about five minutes I will be grumpy again.

Sometimes I wish I could be free of all desire. Sometimes I think living would be better if I didn't have any vested interest in my own existence. I've been thinking about the verse that says "and this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ who you have sent". It's hard to think about life in terms of relationship with a person, especially with the Poet of the Cosmos. I want to pursue real life and seek after real love, and live with a full awareness of the glorious inheritance that is mine in Jesus. I want to enjoy what is temporal and tangible, but I want to love and recognize with my whole self what is eternal and invisible.

I learned to pray in French class two days ago. I'm realizing that what's important for me in language learning is developing early on a spiritual/emotive/religious vocabulary. It's all well and good to memorize the words to "La Vie en Rose", but it's better to be able to speak to God straight from the heart in another tongue. The most beautiful thing I learned about speaking to God in French is that when we pray we use the informal second person "tu" as opposed to the more respectful but distant "vous". This is lovely because it means that when I speak with God, I speak with him as someone close beside me, not far away.

Notre Père Céleste,

Nous te remercions
pour ta grâce,
pour ta bonté, et
pour ta fidélité.

Nous prions,
pour la joie
et la paix dans le monde

Nous prions ceci au nom de Jésus.
Amen!



O Lord, open thou our lips
and our mouths shall show forth thy praise.