Not Just a Laundry List

All who read scriptures know this story well...Absalom instigated a palace coup and David fled for his life to the wilderness. Civil war followed, father fighting son, son fighting father. David won back his throne at a terrible cost, the death of his son, over which he mourned magnificently. The life of David is full of incidents like this. Everyone’s life is. Not a palace coup for most of us and, hopefully, not the treachery of a son, but conflict and failure and fear, love and betrayal, loss and salvation. Every day is a story, a morning and evening ending that are boundaries for people who go about their tasks with more or less purpose, go to war, make love, earn a living, scheme and sin and believe. Everything is connected. Meaning is everywhere. The days add up to a life that is a story...We are not always aware that we are living a story; often it seems more like a laundry list. But story it is.

- Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall

A Poem Can Be Like

A poem can be like two hands that lift you up and put you down in a new place. You look back with astonishment and find that because you have read a few lines on a printed page, or listened for a couple of minutes to a voice speaking, you have arrived at somewhere quite different.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Towers in the Mist, 212.

Even Rocks

There’s an organic interconnectedness in the comprehensive totality of creation, visible and invisible, “heavens and earth,” by which everything seen and heard, tasted, touched and experienced, if only followed far enough and deep enough, brings us into the presence of God. Even rocks.

-Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 207.

The Devil's Work is Abstraction

The Devil’s work is abstraction—not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities—which, of course, is why “David’s heart smote him after he had numbered the people” (2 Samuel 24:10). It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the “acceptability” of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield. The true lover of material things does not think in this way, but is answerable instead to the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep: that each is more precious than all.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, 279.

Things Must Be Met for Themselves

But if man’s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults: it is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 19-20

Peevish

The Dean was sorry for his disappointment but the peevishness added to his joy, for a man is only peevish to his friends.

-Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch, 177.

An Unanswerable Objection to John Locke

It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near to it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection, (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.

- Thomas De Quincy, "On Murder", 19 (Quoted by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Footnote 68)

Happier

I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses,” he added, with a smile, “I must endavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”

-Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter 23

"Lord, I Thank Thee - "

IF IT were not for the war,
This war
Would suit me down to the ground.
There are things about it which pander to my worst instincts,
Flatter my weak points,
And make me a prig and a Pharisee.

I have always detested travelling,
And now there is no travelling to do.
I need not feel that I ought to be improving my mind
By a visit to Rome, the Pyramids, the Pyrenees,
New York or New Guinea,
Or even Moscow;
I have never really panted to contemplate Fuji-Yama,
And now I need not bother about it;
I need not feel abashed by people who take their holidays on the Mattherhorn
Or navigating the Fiords;
I can sit quietly in Essex and feel superior
When my friends complain
That they cannot get on with a sea-voyage or sea-bathing,
(I abominate cold water),
That they feel stifled
Without a breath of mountain air.

I was born in a hollow
At a confluence of rivers,
I was brought up in a swamp
Carved, caged, counter-checked like a chessboard
By dyke and drain,
Running from the Great Ouse to the Wash,
Where the wind never stops blowing;
I know all about the smell that comes off the drowned land
When the waters turn home in the spring
(A peculiar smell - and I have encountered something like it
In Venice
In the piccoli canali in the moonlight,
Where it is considered highly romantic);
I can say to the gadabouts:
"If you must have dank smells, you can get them in the Fens of East Anglia;
If you must break your necks on a precipice You can do it with perfect discomfort
In Cumberland;
And there are apple blossoms in Kent,

Blue seas on the Cornish coast,
Conifers in Scotland;
But I shall stay at home,
Indulging my natural laziness,
And save petrol and coal for my country;
And if anybody requests me
To deliver unnecessary speeches in remote parts of the country,
I can plead the difficulties of war-time travel,
And suffer no pangs of conscience.

I detest bananas,
A smug fruit, designed to be eaten in railway carriages
On Bank Holidays,
With a complexion like yellow wax
And a texture like new putty
Flavoured with nail polish.
Yes, we have no bananas,
Glory be!
And the hygenic people
Who eat prunes and grape-fruit for breakfast
Are cast out into outer darkness
Gnashing their dentures.
Why should anybody eat breakfast
For its edifying qualities,
Or its slimming properties,
Or its improving influence
Upon the skin and the bowels?
Behold, the moral has put on immortality,
And the last shall be first
In the economy of managed consumption.
I do not take sugar
In tea or coffee (even black coffee);
I can give it away to my neighbours,
Purchasing their grateful affection
At no cost to myself—
If everybody was made like me
The Ministry of Food would rejoice.
I need not buy new clothes,
Or change for dinner,
Or bother to make up my face—
It is virtuous to refrain from these things,
I need not shiver in silk stockings;—
I had a hunch about wool before it was rationed;
Now I have knitted myself woollen stockings
That come a long way up.
They are warm and admirable,
They do not ladder or go into holes suddenly.
I can boast quietly about them
And smirk while others admire my industry;
As it happens, I like knitting
And nothing gratifies one more
Than to be admired for doing what one likes.
In London there are still shops
With silk stockins in the windows
("Positively the last release");
I see the women and the girls
Check in their stride, stop, gaze in hungrily,
Fumbling with handbags, calculating coupons,
Yielding to temptation.
Poor souls!
They will never be able to walk through the rose-garden
Or play with the kitten
But anxiety will gnaw at their hearts like a demon rat;
The crack of a snapping stitch
Will sound in their ears like the crack of doom.
But I shall walk cheerfully in woollen
This winter, and the next, and the next,
Hand-knitted without coupons;
And the old lisle stockings will do for the summer—
If there is any summer.

It is jolly to take up a newspaper
And find it so thin!
The ruthless restriction of twaddle
Is a rare, refreshing fruit
Better than many bananas.
The Woman's Page,
The Sports Page,
The Feature Page,
The Page of Bathing Beauties,
Are clipped as close as Samson's skull,
Together with the Comic Strip
And the God-wottery Corner for Garden-lovers.
The blare of the advertisements,
Imploring, cajoling, stimulating, menacing, terrifying
An apathetic public
Into buying what it neither needs nor desires,
Has dwindled into an apologetic murmur.
Regretting the shortage of supplies,
Whispering pathetically, "Forget-me-not,
Forget me not when good times come again!"
We are not electrified every other day
By the bursting into the world,
With the accomplishments suitable to the advent of a long-promised Messiah
Of a new soap.
Soap is rationed.
(I always thought we washed far too much anyhow—
Animals do not wear out their skins
And destroy their natural oils
With perpetual washing;
Even the cat despises soap,
And whoever heard of a cow washing behind the ear?)
There is very little room these days
For the misreporting of my public utterances;
Soon they will not be reported at all,
Thank goodness!
And, curiously enough, books and plays seem to do better
When nobody reviews them.
Also, owing to the lack of paper
The demand for books exceeds the supply—
A thing that has not been known
Since they started all this popular education and cheap printing.
Nobody ever wants a thing
Until it is taken away—
We used to have far too much of everything.

I can now enjoy a more glorious victory,
More exultation of spirit,
By capturing a twopenny tin of mustard
Or a packet of hairpins
And bearing it home in triumph
Than I could have achieved before the war
By securing a First Folio of Shakespeare
At vast trouble and expense
In the sale-room [.]
The local chimney sweep
Keeps hens.
He takes the scraps from my table, the kitchen scraps,
And the hen returns them to me,
By a beautiful economy of nature,
In the likeness of eggs.
A new-laid egg
Will bind a friendship
Faster than it binds a cake;
A string of onions
Is a gift more gracious
Than a string of pearls;
I am better off with vegetables
At the bottom of my garden
Than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.
If it were not for the war,
This war
Would suit me down to the ground.

- Dorothy Sayers

Suffer Fools Gladly

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word ‘suffer,’ and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word ‘gladly,’ and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

-G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, H/T Austin Kleon

John 3:16

And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 254.

Prayer

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

But sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it. Sometimes you just trustfully and easily pass into the other world of sleep. Sometimes the bird finds that what looks like an opening is an opening, and it flies away. Sometimes the shut door opens and you go through it into the same world you were in before, in which you belong as you did not before.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 253.

Very Lucky

If I die tonight, and I don’t see why I should, I shall have been sorry to have missed the finish, but I shall still count myself very lucky to have seen so much... What a period! What an age to have been alive in! Oh, thank God I was born when I was.

-Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart, 307-308

Past and Present

You work your way down, or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present, until finally you come to that beginning in which all things, the world and the light itself, at a word welled up into being out of their absence. And nothing is here that we are beyond the reach of merely because we do not know about it. It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself.

-Wendell Berry, Fidelity, 4-5. 

Knowing the Worst

Why, he wondered, swerving in the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on the side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere peoples so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

-Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, 25

A Call to Arms

It is St. John’s Spirit-appointed task to supplement the work of St. Matthew and St. Luke so that the nativity cannot be sentimentalized into coziness, nor domesticated into drabness, nor commercialized into worldliness. He makes explicit what is implicit in the Gospel stories. The messianic birth takes place out of the womb of God‘s people in a cosmos resplendent with wonder. The entire creation is clothing for God’s people who are, Eve and Mary, mother to Messiah. The visibilities of creation and the invisibilities of salvation cohere in the action. The splendors of creation and the agonies of redemption combine in this event, the center where God in Christ invaded existence with redeeming life and decisively defeats evil. It is St. John’s genius to take Jesus in a manger attended by shepherds and wisemen and put him in the cosmos attacked by a dragon. The consequence to our faith is that we are fortified against intimidation. Our response to the nativity cannot be reduced to shutting the doors against a wintry world, drinking hot chocolate, and singing carols. Rather, we are ready to walk out the door with, as one psalmist put it, high praises of God in our throats and two-edged swords in our hands (Ps. 149:6).

-Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder, 122.

The Risen Christ

In every visit, every meeting I attend, every appointment I keep, I have been anticipated. The risen Christ is in that room already. What is he doing? What is he saying? What is going on?

- Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, 127.

House Love

How can we help loving houses when they stand to us for so much...Warmth and protection and a means of expressing ourselves. You love a new house because it stands there waiting to be good to human beings and an old one because it has been.

-Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells, 68.

Tsundoku

The Japanese have a word for this affliction: tsundoku. It means those piles of books that you buy, but haven’t yet found time to read; those books that you know you simply can’t live without, which then just stack up, month after month.

-Huw Lewis-Jones, “Mapping Memories” from The Writer’s Map

Alien Abduction

Alien abduction is part of the American poetry of loneliness.

-M. T. Anderson, He Laughed With His Other Mouths, 50.