Missing Out

"Let's see, I can fit you into my schedule next month." Yes, my neighbour actually said that to me. I smiled a little, since it was still early in the current month. Then I sighed inside. I used to be that person. Some seasons I still am, because friends are only in town at certain times and you make crazy work.

Summer is my losing-sanity season. I sweat at work for long summer days. I sweat on the hiking trail drinking in freshest mountain air. I sweat when I show visiting friends around town—somehow it's always sunny here when people want to amble downtown. I sweat most when someone asks me to get together—Um, no thanks. I'm physically exhausted, I can't people—is what my brain thinks. My mouth sometimes follows suit, declining as graciously as I can, or sometimes saying yes. I resent the event if I say yes and haven't had an evening or three for margin, so I try to learn the dance steps of balance.

Perhaps it is because Millennials crave experience that they1 are novice dancers of this balance. There is an intense fear of missing out on all kinds of experiences. If you don't believe me, try this: think of a time you were invited to an event you weren't too excited about attending. You decided not to go—then spent the entirety of an hour, or the evening, vacillating on whether or not you should have gone. Classic symptoms of the fear of missing out. It rears up in other forms, too. For example, always looking to what is coming next, rather than enjoying the present moment, day, or season. It is snowing? I wish it were summer. It is summer? It’s it far too hot to do anything. Too bad it's not autumn! And on it goes. Millennials or not, I think many of us wrestle with wanting something in the future, neglecting to enjoy what we have now. We're so afraid of missing what we might have that we, in essence, throw away what we do have.

After one particularly draining year and a very unbalanced summer, I began to purpose to miss out. Because Sundays were largely taken up with church and co-leading youth group, I began to make Saturdays my sabbath or solitude-day. Was it difficult to say no to events with friends on Saturdays? You bet. But, I needed a day not to have anything forcing me to be on schedule in some way. Even if I have a hike all planned out for a Saturday, alarm set for some golden hour of the morning, I am going because I want to and I know the drive and the hike will both recharge me. And if I don’t get up when the alarm sounds, it’s my own choice to sleep longer and hit the trail late. No one is going to call and ask where I am—you can’t “oversleep” if there is no timetable. I turn off my phone many Saturdays—one doesn’t always have to be available. I may write or reply to emails, not because I feel the pressure or demand to, but because I want to write. I will probably putter around my kitchen or do some housework, but I will also sit on my porch and watch the clouds sail along, turning all pink in the evening. I rest. I breathe. I perspire. I am inspired. All because I miss out.

By saying yes to a sabbath, I end up saying no to other things. However, I have learnt that missing out means having more depth and sanity in my life. Missing out often means I don't make room for shallow relationships. Staying to help a friend clean up after the party often leads to heart-to-heart conversations. Conversations that could not have happened during the ever-in-motion gathering. Missing out means hiking alone and praying—meditating on the things I haven't had enough thinking time in one stretch to ponder during the week. Missing out means some things get written that never would have, had I not purposed to be home a couple of evenings a week.

Missing out means I rarely get invited to social events anymore, so I stress less over how to say no. This is a relief, as I don't enjoy disappointing people. I no longer waver with guilt when I stay home from an event—especially if I never even knew the event was happening! I get invited to the important gatherings by the friends I know well—celebrations I want to say yes to anyway. I don't maintain too many surface friendships [acquaintanceships] when I get left off certain social lists. I have a lot of tea dates and let's-go-for-a-walk-and-talk dates with my friends. There are many small dinners in my even smaller cabin. I don't miss out on the conversations where we're laughing until we cry, and crying until someone offers a gentle look and the kleenex box.

I don't miss out too much, because I am learning to be present. Being present in the quiet evenings on my porch with a mug of tea. Present—just watching snow and silence swish down. Present in praying and looking and thinking and thanking on hiking trails, meeting friendly people and dogs as I go. Present in washing dishes with friends and in offering kleenex. Present in the laughter and the tears and the sane moments in between. Present to hear the ups and downs of the relationship all along, so that I can cry and squeal with delight when my friend calls to tell me she just got engaged. Present to the still, small voice, whispering through the pines, singing from the stars, holding out hope while I sit in the ashes, holding me up when I can't stand.

Miss out. Try it. Miss out on the surface stuff. Choose to have a solitude evening or day. Guard it—let me tell you, it is hard to guard my sabbath. Miss out sometimes on listening to music or podcasts or anything but the wind in the trees, just for an evening. Miss out on leaving one party for the next, so you can stay late to wash the dishes and talk. Miss out, so that you, too, can learn to be present.

__________

1. Though I technically fit in the Millennial bracket, the way I was raised—being born barely in the Millennial window, having much older siblings—places me in a different lifestyle than many of my peers.

Without Injuring Eternity

You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the concert and the opera,
And grace before the play and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.1 

―G.K. Chesterton

23 August

Yesterday I woke to a pink, cloud-studded sky. I smiled at the rose-grey dawn and pulled the blankets a little closer to enjoy the early morning from my bed. My smile grew as I realised that it was Saturday. Quite by plan, Saturdays are my "solitude days." As tourists crowd the sidewalks, crosswalks, pubs, and coffee shops in my little town, I pull away from the world for a day. There is no schedule for these days, nothing pulling or pushing me toward itself. I often bake or do housework, as there is joy and satisfaction in the work of one's hands. Usually I read, write, and and mute my phone.

This day I rose to read a bit over breakfast. As usual, my phone was on silent; when I looked at it for the time, I saw I had five or six missed calls and a couple of voicemails. A friend asking me a quick favour, no problem. Another friend in town, wanting to know what I was doing for the day. The morning calm, leisure, and quiet broke into feeling restless and harried. Just the day before, as I was about to eat brunch, a friend knocked on my door, coming by to chat for an hour. I had the sinking feeling that this was about to happen again and I wanted nothing more than an uninterrupted day of solitude. In that moment I decided to run away.

I let my friend know I was unavailable for the day, packed a lunch, grabbed my hiking shoes and keys, and drove off into the late Summer day. Thirty minutes later—and three thousand feet higher—I was ready for a hike in the mountains ending in a fen. I had no set course, thus general tromping employed me for a while. When my stomach complained that it was empty, I settled on a flat boulder in the side of the hill to eat and be still. The wind whirled up from the pines, tickling the hair around my neck; its river-rushing roar filled my ears, quickened my blood. A pair of rooks were rising on the same draft of air, coal-black against shining white clouds in the deep, dark blue sky. The warm odour of sunshine-infused pine filled my lungs. Ants crawled around me. When the wind broke its run, there was a silence at once full and empty. Empty of sound, yet expectant and weighty upon my soul.

Closing my eyes, I let the afternoon sunshine and stillness sweep over me to freckle my skin and quiet my heart. I left chronos* time, the time of ticking seconds, and entered into kairos, the time of eternity. Kairos, the time of being without feeling the constraint of time. I may have been on that rock for ten minutes or an hour, just listening to the silence. Before returning to the path, I read a few pages of Walden and was arrested by the line: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity!"2 Bubbling up within me was an exultant "yes!" to something that has vexed me for years. Like being "only human" or getting general studies "out of the way," the phrase "killing time" grates on my heart. God made us to be fully human. General studies are the strong foundation for a narrowed field. And time, time cannot be killed "without injuring eternity!" Though I disagreed with the next few pages of Thoreau's treatise, that little line rang a resounding bell of truth inside of me. 

We do injure eternity often, I realised as I rambled along the path. It is not that we must be employed in charitable deeds every waking moment, or that our leisure must be spent only in reading great literature, or some other legalism of that sort. No, we injure eternity more widely and subtly than  by outright sin. We live in fragments, sound bites, and megabytes. Our attention is constantly divided from one tab to the next, from a person's face to the screen of our "device", from our task at work or around the house to our e-mail. Whole software and websites exist to make sure we have constant variety in our music, going from slow to fast in the matter of three seconds, our moods changing just as rapidly. I am not a complete luddite, as I am typing these thoughts via my macbook. I have switched tabs to look up various things and even abandoned writing altogether several times since beginning. I am not free from this disintegration of thoughts and actions, but I am often repulsed by how technology supplants reality.

A question I once read has resurfaced in my thoughts many a time since its introduction: If you have fifteen free minutes how do you use them? Perhaps I would answer that I clean around my house, wash the dishes, read, sit on my porch, or say hullo to my neighbour... But more often, I flip open my computer to check my e-mail and the weather for the tenth time. I do not intend to write an e-mail to anyone, mind you, I simply want to see if anyone has written to me. I am decidedly the centre of my own universe in those fifteen minutes. If I choose to do a few chores or look at the sunlight on the leaves or greet my neighbour, I am often removed from myself into thinking of others, into thanking God for Beauty. I am forced out of chronos into kairos—out of the immediate, pressing time into the unhindered eternity. When my thoughts are scattered and disoriented, I do violence to eternity. Rather than bringing God's Kingdom (as Jesus exhorts in the Lord's Prayer), I seek only my own.

These thoughts were budding as I tramped on through filtered sunlight. I turned onto a loop never taken before, deciding to see new things. There was no spectacular view, though there was plenty of fuzzy green moss and a small rabbit with wide eyes. As I set one foot in front of the other, I realised that there is hope and abundant life ahead of me. There are the familiar ways and new paths to travel, much like my hike that very moment. Disappointed expectations sometimes derail me from this truth. Yet I am learning to lay down those dying expectations in order to pick up the gifts I have been given for this time, in this place. I am learning to give thanks in all things.3

When I reached the end of the circuit, I sat on a log looking out at the Pikes Peak mountain system. There are several smaller peaks and various rock formations within the one mountain, and I have yet to tire of the spectacular view. Pulling out my notebook and ink pen, I began listing the things I was thankful for that day. Memories pulled me out of that place and I saw neither the mountains or the trees. Forty or more lines were filled with gratitude. The sun slanted and I knew that kairos and chronos were somehow mixing in a precarious, wild dance. I was both outside and inside time. In that place, yet in my memory. In that moment, but in eternity, too. The giving of thanks for the graces given set me on the edge of time, like a knife blade—not slicing asunder—rather, thin enough to touch. This was where time and eternity met and kissed. As I remembered, as I gave thanks, the Kingdom of God was made a little fuller on earth, as it is in Heaven.** As I received the Beauty of that day, as I prayed often for open eyes and an open heart on that hike, God's Kingdom was enlarged in me—through me.

Nature, as Wordsworth, Thoreau, and others thought, is not an end in itself. It cannot save us from the ills of men, for it too is affected by the Fall. But Beauty—in nature, through art, in words, through music—does something to us. Beauty baptises our imaginations, breathes life into our souls. Thanksgiving joins chronos with kairos, now with eternity. Memory pieces together fragments into mosaics, full pictures of not just our story, but God's Story. Good days, dark nights of the soul, big events, every day graces, tears, laughter, all are fitted together precisely to shade and illuminate the living, shimmering image of God's Story. When we take time to remember, when we let Beauty lead us to worship and give thanks, God's Kingdom is flung abroad more fully on earth, as it is in Heaven. It is where God fills us with His Spirit—where He lives and moves and has His being in us.4 This is the Kingdom arriving. 

*For more on chronos and kairos see Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle
** For more on the Kingdom of Heaven coming to earth, see Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright

__________________________

1. Chesterton, G. K. "A Grace" in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 43
2. Thoreau, Henry David Walden (New York: Signet Classics, 1999), 5

3. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (KJV)
4. Acts 17:28 (KJV)

The Art of Grieving

Drip-drop. Drop-drip. Plink! Glorious Spring rain drips off the gutter-less eaves of my cottage this forenoon; every now and then one drop making a sharp ping off something metal below. Steady, strong notes to set the rhythm for the day, those water-drops. I draw icy water for the kettle, waiting for its warm whistle as a Southwest wind kicks up its heels. The song of the rain slows, softens, becomes silent. Whirling this way and that come the downy flakes of snow. 

Pungent Earl Grey tickles my senses as I gaze long at the steady, slanting white. I am very much alone, but not in the least lonely. Solitude need not make one solitary. Fog, snow, roiling grey skies – they are all friends. The damp, chill, and quiet give one time to pause, to recalibrate the soul toward stillness and Beauty. When we make the time to hush, not writing, nor reading, nor listening to the ever-present music that pervades our senses, we are able to be. We are able to grieve or mourn, to ponder and reflect, to pray and listen, to know and be known.

Stillness and reflection often seem colossal threats to our current 'culture of noise'. Particularly in the process of grieving, perhaps the greatest conundrum in this age. In times-not-long-past, there was a set period for mourning in which the mourner at the least wore a black band on their arm, if not complete outfits of black. Now we hardly even say someone has died, but that they have 'passed away'. We have funerals and weddings in 'Life Centres' at cemeteries. Our culture seeks to sanitise death from all its ugly brokenness. I am very, very pro-life, but even I cannot ignore the effects of the Fall. We cannot pretend that death is routine, neat, and 'part of life'. It is not. It is a violent affront to God the Creator. It is madness and fragmentation at their extreme end.

Grieving is a slow process; whether it is the death of a loved one, the loss of a friendship, or the crumbling of a cherished dream. It takes silence and prayer to walk the road of sorrow. Yet, not even the evangelical church seems to accept this. Half-truths are still lies, yet they ring forth from our Postmodern Evangelical churches and the reams of pages in 'Christian' bookstores: God must always make bad things good. We must always smile and say we are well, that it is good to be alive. Christians are always to be happy, happy, happy - which translates to fake, fake, fake. God will make all things well, but probably not the way we think He should, and often not on this earth. It is good to be alive, because we were made for life - but 'good' does not mean 'easy'. 

The Anglican response to death in the prayer book does not ignore the creeping shadow of death, nor does it wallow in the Fall. It brings one's focus back to God, the Author of life, the Redeemer of death:

Thou only art Immortal, Creator and Maker of mankind;
and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and unto earth shall
we return. 

For so Thou did ordain when Thou created me,
saying, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
All of us go down to the dust... 

Yet even at the grave we make
our song: 

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Even at the grave we sing of the Hope to come. We weep and mourn in Hope. This is not easy. We may sing our alleluias through teeth clenched, through stinging tears. But we have Hope: Jesus Himself, the Resurrection from the dead for all who are 'in Christ'. And when death takes from us one who does not know God, we lament even more. Again, we cannot pretend that death is normal. It is grotesquely abnormal. We still mourn loss. 

Learning to lament takes times of silence, of being. It can take the form of long walks, writing poetry, playing or writing music, cleaning vigorously, cooking and baking (for oneself or others), painting or drawing, gardening, crying, and many other things. Strikingly, lamentation is often pro-creative. By that I mean that we find an outlet for grief, anger, and sorrow in making, in serving. 

Look at the first line of the Memorial Prayer - it calls God three things: Immortal, Creator, and Maker. We tend to think of the last two words as being synonyms, but they are Names and have nuances. A 'creator' begets - the thing begotten is from himself, is part of himself, like a child shares the 'humanness'  and DNA of its parents. A 'maker' is a companion or a spouse, as well as one who designs or constructs. So, the act of creation is intensely personal and part of the creator-begetter. The act of making is taking something already in existence and fitting it together; as one takes flour, water, and yeast to make bread; or wood, nails, and varnish to fit into a wardrobe; or chisels and marble to form a sculpture; or a man and a woman together fashion a marriage. 

In grieving we image God by making. We turn to pro-creation to pro-cess (move forward, continue). We seek solitude and silence in order to better serve, because the act of serving (helping one's neighbour with various tasks, inviting others over for dinner, etc.) brings us outside of ourself so that we do not dead-end in grief.

This brings up the other aspect of lamenting. To lament, I said, one needs times of solitude. But one also needs time with others. God says in the beginning that, "It is not good for the Man to be alone". God was right there with the Man, but still says he is 'alone' or without a match (or mate) of his own. We need other persons. We need friends and family who will be still with us, who will listen to us. We need others to serve with our creative acts. We need those close to us to cry with us, and also to make us laugh. 

The hush of snow is heralding a chance to ponder, time to be. This late Spring snow is a gift before I step into the bustle of Summer. The silence of a full day to process and grieve is worth the thanks-giving. Right here and now I learn to be still and know... and to be known.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

~ Johanna

Loneliness or Solitude?

“Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.”

~ Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

Solitude

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” 

~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Evidenced by the fact that I began to listen to music  directly after typing that quotation. How quickly I forget that Beauty most often finds one in stillness. How readily I push aside God's messages delivered by silence and solitude. 

The whole world clamours and clangs with noise. Even our eyes are assaulted by 'visual noise' - billboards, skyscrapers and 1960s apartment buildings, badly hung Christmas lights, vulgar lawn ornaments, and the like. There is the disarray of 'stuff' all 'round us. Rather than making our lives better, 'stuff' can simply clutter our homes and gardens, as well as our thoughts. Many persons attest to being unable to think or study well in a messy area, myself included. 

Visual chaos and the din of television, films, iPods, et cetera almost constantly fill our minds or blunt our senses. "What of it?" one might ask. Think for a moment of what you do when you go for a walk or run. Do you put in earbuds? Talk on the phone? When you sit down at your desk or kitchen table, do you pull out your smart phone, computer, or a book? Can you fall asleep without music? Do you ever simply look out the window and think in silence?

Outside my window tiny white faeries flutter and float, flurry and fall. Trying to watch individual flakes makes me nearly dizzy, they are coming so quickly. There is something calming about snow, or a blanket of fog. Both give a covering of quiet to ponder, to let the thoughts we push away with noise come forth from their banishment: Do I have what it takes to be a man? Will anyone ever love me for who I am? What am I here for? Do I even make a difference? Is living any better than dying? What if so-and-so dies? How will I support myself when I am older? What will happen if other people find out how little I really know? Am I just faking it through life? Who is God? Is God really real, is He really there? Does God care about me? Why would He? Who am I, behind this skin and those eyes in the mirror - who is this I inside? 

In solitude and stillness I realise I have more questions than answers. Sure, I have a vague idea of how to answer some of the above questions. However, if I spent an hour thinking about Who God is, I might find how little I actually know Him. I know about Him, and in small degrees I know Him, as a person knows another person early on in a friendship. But do I truly know Him? 

When faced with thoughts about family or friends dying, I try to push them aside - usually successfully. It is too hard, too painful to think of them actually being gone from this life. Likewise, I am accomplished at ignoring thoughts about the future state of our government,  how long my bank account will be worth something, or where I will be in ten, twenty, or thirty years. I do not like depressing thoughts, yet sometimes I really do have to face them. Sometimes the pain from 'out there' comes 'in here'. The brokenness of the fall is not just for other people. I, too, experience the fall in my own circle of friends, in my own family, in my own life, in my own body.

Solitude brings these thoughts to the surface, rather rapidly, in fact. No wonder Pascal said that a man is unable to sit in a room quietly and alone. We want to be distracted from the questions  we cannot answer, the thoughts we do not like. We do not want to think about how far we fall short. We hide from rejection and loss. We block it all out with constant music (degrading the worth of music to mere background noise), non-stop communication, and busy-ness.

Have you been running away from your thoughts? Are you ignoring God's arms wide open to you by running the course of the noisy world? When was the last time you sat down to listen to God? Do you often (or ever) turn your phone, music, and computer off completely? Have you taken a walk in silence recently? When was the last time you faced your thoughts rather than fleeing them? How about practising solitude today... Right now.

~ Johanna

Imago Dei

Do you ever wonder what it means that we are created in the image of God (imago Dei)? Do we look like God somehow? Perhaps the things we do image Him. After all, He made us sub-creators in His creation, cultivators in His garden of earth.

Many Christian writers and thinkers of our present time point to being sub-creators as one of the chief ways we reflect God's image. However, there are some puzzling conclusions when drawn out to that end. What about persons who are sleeping, or in a coma, or whose brain function is very low, or the unborn? Does one's lack of 'sub-creating' make them sub-human, or un-human, or less able to 'image' God?

God did not make us human doings, He made us human beings. We are not part of the animal kingdom, we are not under the dominion of anyone but God Himself. He made us intentionally both to be and to do. The King of the universe made us in His image, possessing authority over all of this earth. Whether we are creating business, tools, art, homes, relationships, music, food, et cetera, or whether we are sleeping, in a coma, or are still in the womb, we are human beings, distinct from every other created thing.

Human beings appreciate Beauty, something no other creature has the capacity to grasp. Further, only we experience the pang inside at the Beauty of deep oranges, pinks, and orchids that infuse sunset-spangled clouds. Plants and animals eat to grow and live, but human beings eat a variety of foods for their diverse flavours, even artistically arranging the foodstuff on their plates.

Look at the blue sky, the tufted clouds filtered through shiny green oak leaves. Listen to the birds trill, the crickets chant their clarion call. Listen to the wind crashing through leaf-clad branches, smell the lashing rain on the soil, and see the fierce flashes of heaven-flung fire. Feel the fresh breath of the wind, taste the first flakes of snow, drive with the windows down (and the radio off) just because.

Have you yet learnt to be alone with your thoughts? Can you go a day without background music? Do you know how to sit still without even a book or a pen in hand? Chances are that you have not learnt these things either at all, or as well as you would like. 

Even on those rare occasions when a modern undergraduate is not attending some such society he is seldom engaged in those solitary walks, or walks with a single companion, which built the minds of the previous generations. He lives in a crowd; caucus has replaced friendship.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

~ C. S. Lewis in his essay, Membership  

As a human being, I grow weary of the pull others place upon me. "What are you doing with your life?", "Are you planning to go to college?" (really, I am 27-years-old, can you please stop asking this one?), "What is next for you?", et cetera. Perhaps I ought to reply, "I am being where I am." Part of being involves work, friendships, reading, hiking, cooking, studying, and the like. But it is more, it is deeper, it is knowing that those things don't make me who or what I am. I am imago Dei, not of my own choice, power, or ability, but by His kindness, good will, and authority.

"I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about –born in God's thought– and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking."

~ George MacDonald

 

"Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure."

~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Without the depths of the Valley of Loss, the Heights of Joy are not quite as invigorating as they could be. Without making room for stillness even the sound of a symphony becomes a cacophony blotting out clear thoughts.

Are we willing to walk through the Valley of the Shadow in order to know joy more fully? Do we practise silence by turning off the car stereo, or going for long walks without headphones or a cell phone? Do we thank God for the physical distance between us and our loved ones? Without that space the sweetness and gladness of seeing a long-missed friend or family member is dulled, sometimes into contempt. Do we welcome Sorrow, Suffering, and Grief as tutors to bring us to Joy and Hope and Revival?

Often paradoxes like these arrive in our lives; at first we see only trial, hurt, and brokenness. However, if we allow hard things to be our schoolmasters, we may learn from them and be strengthened by them. This often requires altering the paradigm of our perspective. Sometimes this change can be done manually, but other times it is only by asking God to open our eyes to His perspective that we can see redemption in hurtful and hard things.

"...pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

~ C.S. Lewis

Pain, Sorrow, and Suffering are not God's optimum way of obtaining our attention; yet He uses even these things for our good. He refines us, shapes us through hard things. We find indeed that hardships, distances, silence*, and ugliness help us to appreciate the Good, True, and Beautiful.

~ Johanna

*Silence is not a punishment, or a bad thing. It is actually a spiritual discipline. However, silence is needed to gain perspective on hard things.

Reflections and the Blessing of Solitude

After a whole week of lovely sunshine and zephyrs, I woke to distant fog this morning. Since my final tutorial last week I have been a bit melancholy; today's weather is much more fitting for pondering than the recent glorious Spring days.

End of term at Oxford is filled with a bittersweet feeling of relief from intense days of study, yet missing those very hours upon hours spent expanding my mind and asking questions of the texts. It is as if a continuing conversation has come to a premature end. There is so much more that I want to know about Romantic poetry and its authors. And I have only just begun to understand the philosophical, political, social, educational, and spiritual climate of the American Colonies and France in their respective "revolutions". Eight weeks were not enough to uncover the answers to all of my questions. Nor were they enough to learn the rest of the questions.

Then there is the loss of fellow-minded conversation and lectures at the C. S. Lewis Society each week. Even more acute is the void in the evening from 6.00-7.00, normally filled by evensong at New College (and on occasion at Christ Church Cathedral). That is a blow from which I might never recover.

This week I have spent hours walking around parts of Oxford I had never yet seen, since they were not on the way to the library or chapel. I have visited many magnificent and beautiful colleges. I have meandered down Addison's walk with a select few friends, purchased a first edition Lewis book, scouted out new places to visit, and sought solitude in familiar haunts. It has been a week of much needed stillness and time alone. Reflection on the last eight to ten weeks of work and adventure is vital.

These past few days have afforded me space to pray aloud; to speak of my faults and failures to the One who knows them, yet is big enough to hear them again. Indeed, He is the only One who can take my angry, unfiltered words of frustration and hurt. He is great enough to love me in spite of me. He is merciful to not simply leave me to suffer the consequences of what I have done. He is kind enough to change the desires of my heart. He is Love; and that means He will prune me in order to make me better. He will allow suffering and sorrow to forge me. He will not placate my sin, but excoriate me for it... Or it from me, as it were.

Where, oh where, would I be without stillness and solitude? No phone, no music, no chorus of voices ringing through the flat... Just silence and the steady footfalls of thoughts as they pad toward my pen or lips. If we did not have these times of solitude our souls would be impoverished. We would be but ephemeral bits of persons, not solid humans seeking to be more fully alive.

~ Johanna