The Wrong Things

If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

Heartless

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all.

-Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, 4.

Handle With Care

What you don’t hold you can’t spill.

-Van Reid, Mollie Peer, 205.

Fragile Things

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

-Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things, xii.

Psalm 119

I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.

-Psalm 119:32 (NIV)

My Portion

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

-Psalm 73:25-26

No Safe Investment

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 121.

Untitled

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst find
Thirst's all-in-all in a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Quiet Chamber: Part IV

There, shedding a dim and varied light, was the Christmas tree my father had decorated alone, every single strand of tinsel hanging straight down of its own slim weight, since he hung them individually, patiently, and would not hasten the duty by tossing them in fistfuls (tradition!)—the tree he had hidden three days ago behind a knobless door.

There, in various places about the room, were seven piles of gifts, a pile for each of us.

There, in the midst of them, my mother sat smiling on the floor, her skirts encircling her, her own radiance smiting my eyes, for she verged on laughter. My mother always laughed when she gave presents, however long the day had been before, however crazy she had almost gone. I began to blink rapidly.

But there, unaccountably, was my father, standing center in the room and gazing straight at me. At me. And this is the wonder fixed in my memory: that the man himself was filled with a yearning, painful expectation; but that he, like me, was withholding still his own excitement—on account of me.

Everything else in this room was just as it had been the year before, and the year before that. But this was new. This thing I had never seen before: that my father, too, had passed his day in the hope that risks a violent hurt. My father, too, had had to trust the promises against their disappointments. So said his steady eyes on me. But among the promises to which my father had committed his soul, his hope and his faith, the most important one was this: that his eldest son should soften and be glad.

If I had grown adult in 1954, then lo, how like a child my father had become! The colored lights painted the side of his face. He gazed at me, waiting, waiting for me, waiting for his Christmas to be received by his son and returned to him again.

And I began to cry. O my father!

Silently, merely spilling the tears and staring straight back at him, defenseless because there was no need for defenses, I cried—glad and unashamed. Because what was this room, for so long locked, which I was entering? Why, it was my own heart. And why had I been afraid? Because I thought I’d find it empty, a hard, unfeeling thing.

But there, in the room, was my father.

And there, in my father, was the love that had furnished this room, preparing it for us no differently than he had last year prepared it, yet trusting and yearning, desiring our joy.

And what else could such a love be, but my Jesus drawing near?

Look, then, what I have found in my father’s room, in my heart after all: the dearest Lord Jesus, holy child—

The nativity of our Lord.

I leaned my cheek against the doorjamb and grinned like a grown-up ten years old, and sobbed as if I were two. And my father moved from the middle of the room and walked toward me, still empty-handed; but he spread his hands and gathered me to himself. And I put my arms around his harder body. And so we, both of us, were full.

This is the way that it was in the olden days.

-Walter Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 64-66.

Batter My Heart

Batter my heart, three personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new,
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but, oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend;
But is captive and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain;
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

-John Donne

Not Some Stupid Ostentatious House

...And I realized that I was bugged for a metaphorical reason.

Cause I realized that I started to get bugged when I read that little plaque all about Vanderbilt and what he did in the house. He was alone a lot. Awww...I mean, you can just imagine him coming down to breakfast...in his bathrobe, he's got his cornflakes, he's reading his paper.

Now it's one thing to be alone, but sitting at a table that'll seat 350 people, now why rub it in? We get enough of that, right, cause hearts are made that way. We have hearts that are just huge, they'll hold a tremendous amount of fullness. Which is great if there's that much fullness to find, but man, it leaves us a lot of room for empty.

And then I realized, well, relax Dave, because the reason why you're bugged is cause you're worried that your heart is a bad design. It's not. It's not some stupid ostentatious house. It's the design of your heart, come on. There's a lot of fullness to find. Maybe it's only the empty that could keep us looking long enough to find it.

The depth of your dreams
The height of your wishes
The length of your vision to see
The hope of your heart
Is much bigger than this
For it's made out of what might be

So now picture your hope,
Your heart's desire
As a castle that you must keep
In all of its splendor
It's drafty with lonely
This heart is too hard to heat

When I get lonely
Now that's only my sign
That some room is empty in me
And that room is there by design
If I feel hollow
That's just my proof there's more
I need to follow
That's what the lonely is for

-Dave Wilcox, "Metaphorical Reasons" and "That's What the Lonely is For"

Our Hearts Are Restless Until They Rest in Thee

“Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and infinite is thy wisdom.” And man desires to praise thee, for he is a part of thy creation; he bears his mortality about with him and carries the evidence of his sin and the proof that thou dost resist the proud. Still he desires to praise thee, this man who is only a small part of thy creation. Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.

-Saint Augustine, Confessions

Restless

God did not lead me here to abandon me
He did not leave me to drown in my own tears
The day is darker now, I can barely see
The road is longer, and the stones hurt my feet

I have sung my songs of mirth
I have hung head and cried
You have been ever faithful
I’m the one that left your side

All the days I have wasted
Chasing down the winds of empty praise
And all the times I have lost
Searching for riches in abandoned mines

My heart is restless
It finds no peace
I was made for you

I have bargained with my future
I have wrestled with my past
Like a drunk man trying to be sober
Every day I face the empty glass

My heart is restless
It finds no peace
I was made for you

I am restless, oh so restless
Until I come to rest in you

Some days my faith is a mighty river
Some days my faith is a barren land
Oh lord please tell me why
Maybe then I would understand

My heart is restless
It finds no peace
My heart is restless
It finds no peace
I was made for you

-Brooks Williams