Poetry

It is as though poetry laid a hand on our arm and said, "Now steady. You are missing this in your prosaic dash past experience, and it is worth not missing."

...

This is part of the business of poetry, from the nursery rhyme to the Divine Comedy. It addresses our imagination and, with everything that is at its service, it tries to beguile us into the intense awareness of experience. It knows that our attention is cudgeled by functional concerns morning, noon, and night, and it suspects that this not the desideratum. But it does not call us away from the "real" world of function into a garden of fancy that never existed anywhere. Rather, its high office is to ransom us from thrall to the deadly myth that life is cluttered and obstructed by necessity, and to return us to life with the awareness that is packed with glory.

-Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, 72-73.

Totally Hosed

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannopt exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

-David Foster Wallace, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 85.

That Eye-on-the-Object Look

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

-W. H. Auden, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 87.

Watching Part 2

The doctor had given him a few books to bring away with him, and lying in his hammock at night, he would try and shut out the den and stench of the lower cockpit and read. He did not take in very much, but every now and then some lovely phrase would shine up at him from the page, as though it were a pin prick in a dark curtain, letting in the light. When vile things happened outside himself, he now always managed to find something to pay attention to besides the vileness–the flash of fine anger in one man's eyes when another was flogged at the gangway, the sudden gleam of moonlight through a rent torn in the clouds by the frenzy of a storm...

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill,206.

Watching Part 1

For a moment or two they enjoyed the delicate innuendo and elegant reparatee of the art of conversation in which they had been trained, meanwhile watching, without appearing to do so, the gradual unfolding of this hour placed like a flower in their hands. For such was unconsciously the attitude of both of them towards the new phase of each day – it was not unimportant, it had some new discovery hidden within it for the finding. It was the attitude of the trained mind collecting the evidence, in their case for the Christian thesis that all things, somehow, work together for good.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill, 196

Fellow Priests

The approach of man to man is precisely a dance, and a courting dance at that. None of my meetings with another man is a mere event, either in his life or mine. Every introduction is an invitation into each other's meaning, a terrible opening of one history to another. In friendship, love or alliance we enter inexporable exchanges, rendering death and forever at each breathing.

Needless to say, we do not commonly see the kind of care we should expect in such meetings. Even in the most deliberate invitations—when we invite love, when we propose marriage—we act frighteningly off the cuff. We come at each other as casually as we approach watermelons. We hold each other in careless, calloused hands. We see those we should offer only as beings to be used. We grasp them, but we watch ourselves.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 113.

What to Do with Bits of String

We are expert at extraction, making
something out of something else;
a cat's cradle for the kids. A rag rug.
A torn loaf for turkey stuffing, or Eucharist.
We take traces of a fractured dream
and fashion a plot for a new novel.
Old tires make for resilient highways.
My friend rips out worn sweaters
for new scarves. Women in Africa
roll old magazine pages into beads,
varnishing them for sale in other worlds,
jewels from junk. I rescue river stones
and beach shells for ornaments
along my window sill. They cost nothing.

Try it yourself. See what lovely new thing
God can make from what is common
and discarded. Including your own life.
Call it recycling. Call it renewal
and you're getting at the heart of it.

-Luci Shaw

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

Vocation

Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing.

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

Peel an Orange

...Peel an orange. Do it lovingly—in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap. That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God’s chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers, and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men.

-Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 4-5.

Amateur Lovers

The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers—amateurs—it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral—it is the fertilizing principal of unloveliness.

-Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 3-4.

Broken Things

There aren't too many things around that are whole, you know. You look hard at most anything, and it's probably beat up somewhere or other. Beat up, or dinged up, or missing a piece, or tattoed. Or maybe something starts out whole and then it turns into junk, like Joe Pepitone's cap getting rained on in a gutter somewhere. Probably you can't even tell it's a cap anymore. Probably you wouldn't even want to pick it up if you saw it. But it didn't start that way. It started as Joe Pepitone's cap, and when he was out in the field, the sun was beating down on it from above the stands of Yankee Stadium and he could smell the grass and the dirt and the infield beneath its brim.

When you find something that's whole, you do what you can to keep it that way.

And when you find something that isn't, then maybe it's not a bad idea to try to make it whole again. Maybe.

-Gary Schmidt, Okay for Now

Fairer than Florence

If men loved Pimlico, as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

-G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Joey Pensak in a recent newsletter

Kuyper on Calvinism

Thus it is shown that Calvinism has a sharply defined starting point of its own...for our relation to the world: the recognition that in the whole world the curse is restrained by grace, that the life of the world is to be honored in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life.

-Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism

***

I've been doing some haphazard on-line research on vocation recently. I'm especially interested in what the reformers (Luther & Calvin) had to say about this topic, and so one of the sources I've been dipping into is Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism.

In the quote above, Kuyper is talking about our relation to the world. He puts a strong emphasis on common grace - we engage with the world, knowing that God is active in it, although his activity may be concealed. And so we are treasure seekers - working to discover and develop the good work that God has begun.

Three applications to my own vocation: (1) I am an actuary (a pricer of insurance). I observe patterns in data, and interpret and present those patterns to other people in a way that helps them make business decisions. What does Kuyper's quote have to do with pricing insurance? Well. Why does data behave predictably? Why do my statistical tools work? Because I live in an ordered universe. Even though the effects of the Fall are widespread - after all, there wasn't much of a demand for insurance in Eden - the world still operates in a predictable, orderly way. That is common grace. And I am literally a pattern seeker (a treasure seeker) in my day to day work.

(2) I am also a youth group leader. And this is a different type of treasure seeking. I work with youth from 7th grade to 12th grade, which means I get to see them grow up A LOT. And it is amazing to watch. Amazing to look at a 7th grader, and think THIS person will be one of my best friends in six years.

(3) Thirdly, and just a whim - not quite vocation or even avocation - I am also a collector of beach stones. I usually visit beaches that have more rocks than shells, and I am fascinated by the shapes, patterns, sizes, the feel of a stone in my hand. I always bring home a few, and my favorite rocks are pretty liberally scattered around my apartment. I love discovering an unusual stone, knowing that other people may have passed by without noting it, and that in a few hours or minutes it might be buried in a sandbar or washed back out to sea. Treasure seeking again, and a nice metaphor for what I am up to when I sift through data or plan a youth retreat.

Looking vs Seeing

To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing, and one does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Mermaids in the Plumbing

I know a boy (we’ll call him Horbert, though that isn’t his name, thank goodness), and for years he lived in a house where the bathtub had a magical drainpipe that led straight to the lost city of Atlantis! But Horbert was always in such a hurry to get where he was going that he never lingered in the bath. Whenever he got really filthy, and his mother nagged him to wash, he just jumped in and briefly splashed at himself. Then he’d spring right from the tub, and out the door he’d fly, afraid that his older brother Noah was beating his high score on Super-Space-Zombie-4000, his very favorite video game. Though mermaids sang in the plumbing, he never heard their call.

-Laurel Snyder, Any Which Wall, 1-2.

Mooreeffoc

And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkien Miscellany, 129-130.

Discovering England

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas...There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?...What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 9-10.