Story Me the Stars

{A Reflection on Genesis 15}

 

Adonai brought me outside,

opened a window in time 

and said:

"Story me the stars—

tell me their days,

their sacred season dance."

We walked, robed in silence

and He probed:

"Story me your children

yet to come,

the ones you think

I haven't given,

who will stand here

in a sacred season—

I will hear their cry

under these heavens,

like I hear you now."

"Amen, LORD," I whispered—

my eyes opened to see grace

as my dwelling place,

dwelling deep in His eyes.

I believed...

though no baby of mine

yet cried under the tent

of the starry sky.

*Photo from the Negev, Israel

Where is Time?

Where is time?
Does it live on the bottom of a well,

the bristly back of an elephant,

or under furry-soft moss along a fallen tree?

Does it crouch in the crevices of caves,

under the eaves of fairy cottages,

or over the smile of the man-in-the-moon?

Where is time?

Is it tucked deep in the heart,

with old memories of lost love,

and ambitions that have crumbled?

Is it hidden in the mind,

trapped in formulae and fancies,

buried under long-unused ideas?

Where is time?

Does it flit, forever beyond our fingers

outstretched, fleet as the wings 

of an owl or the feet of a fawn?

Is it running like swift spring streams,

chortling at us from just over the next rise,

or peering down from the treetops?

Where is time?

Does it hide in an hourglass 

or stuck between calendar pages,

awaiting freedom by the flick of a hand?

Is it waiting to pounce upon us,

springing on our vulnerable souls

to carry us away at the end of days?

Where is time?

Living in the hollows of longing 

and in the halls and homes of dear friends—

in children's laughter and delighted hearts.

It hangs on the tip of the crescent moon,

dripping over us in flickering shade

and sweet scents of summer hay fields.

Where is time?

Deep in the wells of our belovéd's eyes,

blue, yet flecked with one rusty speck

and over-full of sorrow and kindness.

It dwells in worlds pressed between 

the pages of books, and in the notes

of a bird's song, evensong, all song.

Where is time?

In the pockets of jackets worn on 

autumn hikes, full of leaves and pine cones—

and in brimming cups of fragrant tea.

It crowds in cookie crumbs shared

with family and friends, and spills

over our tongue, savouring memories.

Where is time?

Settled in the silence of a misty forest or

with a comfortable friend, and in the cries

of gulls and the sweep of crow's wings.

Under every dew-encrusted blade of grass,

crowning headstones, rippling in sandstone

and in the shore's ever-lapping waves. . .

Where, oh where, is time?

Juxtaposed

Starry stubs of light
pool time in waxen white
flowing from this shadowed season
when sadness should be bright

In darkness tinged with light
we wait the coming time
when God sneaks in like treason
and all will be made right

But this time it's different
The subtle shades of Lent
look more like darkened joy,
like the negative of a print

Everything is going in reverse
all the bright is coming first,
and then darkness rushes in
swallowing the light of the universe

Is there Easter at the end,
or a deeper darkness to wend
through before day rises,
edged in shade as I am unmade?

I miss him in the weeping of the rain

Dear Aaron,

It rained today. Spicy pine-scent lingers about my porch. . .can you smell pines in the Kingdom? A few days ago (and for the first time in weeks) I went hiking away from my little valley. I saw wildflowers, dark clouds, and green, green fens. I breathed deep, sniffed in the sweet scent of the douglas pine. I heard the breeze fluttering through the aspen trees—could you hear it too? Today I saw, really saw for what felt like the first time in weeks. The lowering sky, dark, with one hill all crested, crusted with tawny light spilling over it. Everything else was in shadow but that one, golden place. What are sunsets and summer storms like in the Kingdom? The Big Dipper is hanging close enough to touch, just off my porch; each star bright, crisp, and close. What are the constellations like in the Kingdom?

It's coming up on a year. Sometimes I can talk about you without crying. Sometimes I'm a little too far removed, too numb. And sometimes the tears well up in my eyes when I hear a song, or when I realise how long and fast this year has been. Today it was kindness that caught me off guard. Just a kind word of thanks and encouragement from a stranger. . .and it made me think of your memorial, where people I didn't know came up to me and comforted me like I was family. The kindness is unbearable, because in that place I can't be numb—the feelings come, and in them there is sorrow, there is pain.

A whole year. . . Grief swells and ebbs, it doesn't go away. It is etched on the inside of who I am—even when others forget, I remember. I remember your smile and your voice. I remember that I forgot to tell you how thankful I was for your friendship when I had it. I remember that miserable day in the airport in Anchorage, feeling like the person I knew had died—like our friendship had died. And I ached, feeling abandoned, feeling unwanted. These last eleven-ish months have dug up those buried feelings, only to wound me afresh. To kill the tiny, internal flame that still burned—the hope that one day, somehow, we would be friends again. That somehow the medicine would help you become you again, and you would remember that I was your friend. But that day didn't come. A different day came instead. A day that I didn't expect to wound me so deeply. A day that cut my heart open in a way that nothing else has in all my life.

Sometimes I think of life being divided before and after 9/11 (nearly half my life ago this year). And sometimes I think of my life as pre and post Summit, or Semester, or Oxford. There are several lines of demarcation in my brief existence. But now there is life before and after 9/3. Few others will recognise that date as a timeline. As an arrow lodged in my heart, and in the hearts of your parents and your sister, and the few others who were part of your tribe.

Did you know that I almost called you? Either last summer or the one before. I found out something. . . Something kind and generous about you. And even though I had no reason to believe you would speak to me, I almost called. I still wish I had. Even if you wouldn't talk to me. I wish I had said thank you when I could. I wish I could have talked with you one last time. But then 3 September came and there is no two-way phone line to the Kingdom. Not for non-Incarnate mortals to one another. And that's good. . .I suppose. I know I can talk any time to the Incarnate Mortal who lived and died and stood death on its head. I know He speaks to me.

Maybe I've been too busy, too pulled in every direction to really feel much this summer. But the wind whispers your music in between the aspen leaves. The stars in the sky reflect the laughter and fun in your eyes. The warm sunlight takes me back to a hayride on a different Monday that was also the third of September. I have wondered what it will be like to go back to Pagosa after 9/3... I haven't been there since... For a while I couldn't sing the Doxology at church without ending up in tears. It made me think of meals at the lodge. But now it feels like a friend taking my hand and walking me through the pain. Will going to the lodge again be like that? But more than the going back to a place where I remember you is the going to a place where you should be and aren't. Briarwood Ave. The woods at Fort Barton. Sunset hill. Your room. . .your roof. Your memory (in some way) is there—even though I never saw you in those places, you wrote or talked about some of them. But you aren't there. Now comes a different hard. What about your sister's home? What about when your parents move? What about all of those places where you never will be? What about my own home and town, where I hoped to show you my bookshelves and my friendly walking paths and all my favourite things? You should have been in those places, too, but you never came. . .


Time does not bring relief, you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year's bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear To go—so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, remembering him!

—Edna St Vincent Millay

There Must be More. . .

PC: Brian Masbaugh (slacklinemedia.com)

I want the world to be different. . .

I want to respond in kindness every time. To have enough of God's love in me to always be ready to give to others. I want fear to evaporate. For old-fashioned values to be held by everyone. And I want to not get hung on one side of a dichotomy or the other. I want to see this life and this world bigger. To see possibilities. To know how to walk the balance of hope in the face of despair, or that of love in the proper tension of the truth.

My sister told me recently that I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too—like keeping a beautifully arranged dinner and yet cleaning the plate in enjoying all of its flavours. I do. I want it to be true that Good wins in my lifetime. I want the shadow to be small and passing, and for it to pass away right now. For the high Beauty to swoop in and save the day—and the nighttime, too. I long to live in the not yet, because the now is so broken. I long for perfect relationships without underlying currents of tension, annoyance, hurt, or frustration. I long for the fully redeemed Heaven and Earth, and confess that I kick against the breakage in which we still live.

I have been given hope and permission to dream more richly, to see God as bigger than the false dichotomies we are so often handed. . . And then comes the thud—the fact that not everyone else has been handed that gift, or that they have not received it yet, anyway. When I ask for answers and have the problem reiterated, it doesn't help. When I say, "There has to be more than just this—God is bigger than these two bad choices," I get blank silence.

When I've been told that God is bigger than my small vision, but I'm not expected—or even allowed—to see more, I get frustrated. I feel like I'm constantly on the outside and the majority is convinced that there is only one key to get in. But I am not convinced. I don't believe that my life is on hold until I get married or move or have a different job. Yet so many others believe those very things that I begin to live like I believe it, too. But I don't. I don't believe that a circumstance change is what will let me in. 

When it comes to relationships with fellow humans, surely I don't have to be relegated to being friends with only women—and mainly single ones at that. God made us whole humans. He made us to need others—male and female, single and married—in whatever state we are. What I don't know is how to practise the truth that God's vision, His world, His Kingdom is here and now. 

How do I maintain healthy relationships with my long-distance married friends? How do I have rich and healthy friendships with the men in my life? How do I love my single friends well? What is the best way to connect with my local married friends? Confessedly, I'm tired of getting shut out of various friendships because I'm not married. What changed with that ring? Don't we still have some of the same loves in common? Can't we still encourage one another in our most holy faith? Does my friend having a husband suddenly make all of that disappear? If so, it's no wonder that I've looked on marriage with a dubious eye in years past.

If what I've been told is true—that I belong to the Body of Christ, throughout time and space—then why don't I feel like I belong once my friends get married? Why do I feel like I'm a second class human as a single person? My admission ticket to the Body of Christ is not a gold band. It is being sacramentally connected to Jesus, the Head. It is receiving the very same Body and Blood that every other Christ-follower receives. 

I don't have to only have friends like me—that would keep my vision and theirs too narrow. I need people of various ages in different stages of life: single, married, with children, with grandchildren, in various vocations and with a variety of interests and talents. I need people who have different perspectives to help me enlarge my view of God and His world—of His universe. And I need to help enlarge the vision of others. . . Like those who see that there is a problem and think there are only two ways to deal with it. But God doesn't call us to impale ourselves on one stake or the other of these dichotomies. He calls us to the much harder task of another way, of balance and counterbalance—of a slackline walk. And that over a canyon. The stakes are high if we fall, but the stakes are sharp and deathly wounding if we jump to one side or the other, too. We must constantly keep our eyes fixed on Jesus to keep our balance on the slackline. To look to the right or to the left is to lose the view of our Anchoring Point—the Fixed Point in a world of turning. To look to one side or the other is to fall.

I don't want to pendulum swing, I want to walk the straight and narrow. I don't need people to paint the problem, I need help to find the answers. I don't want to see the world as small—it is not. I want eyes, heart, and mind to see how long and how wide and how high is the love and the glory of God. I want the now to step into the not yet. For time and eternity to meet. For chronos to cross into kairos. For all manner of things to be made well. For the shadow to pass and for the stars to shine through to us, to draw us near to them and yet to leave us alive. . . so much more alive than we've ever been before. The glory of God is writ large, but we need His perspective to be able to see it whole, not in pieces. We need to set our eyes on Jesus—the Author and Finisher of our faith—to keep us balanced on the slackline, rather than teetering over the brink, swaying left or right. 

The world is bigger than we've been led to believe. There are more than two options for how life can work. We know about what is past. We live in the now. . . and we long for the not yet to arrive and make all things new. We long for redemption to be fulfilled. We've been told the world is different than we've believed for so long. . . Now we get to learn to live that difference, to dream bigger, to see more than we could before—to not get stuck on the outside, but to finally get in.

Yesterday was Summer's Sister

Yesterday was Summer's sister,

today the leaves come floating down;

Autumn haunts the gilded air,

while Orion trails the Summer Crown.

Today is golden in its passing glow,

Yesterday's shadow soon to be;

the stars dance on and on, while

our lives by the moments flee.

Yesterdays race by more swiftly

than Today knows how to catch,

the months and years, they disappear, 

like flame upon a match.

Today is the joy, the gift, the song

that Yesterday poured her music into;

it is the symphony in which we play,

which tunes our lives anew.

The Blur in the Brushstrokes

Particulars matter. Of course, so do Universals and Forms. I hold to a healthy mix of Aristotle and Plato, tempered by Jesus and His word. I find it interesting that the particulars make up the whole, even if the universal was set into place first. For example, God said, Let there be light, and there was; then He went on to make the sun, moon, and stars. The universal preceded the particulars.

However, we live inside the universe—that is, within the universals. We live inside one planet in our solar system, which is in our galaxy, inside the whole universe.  We live within time—second by second, the future becoming now, becoming the past—in such a rapid succession that it is a good thing we don't constantly focus on how fleeting the present is as it arrives. We would miss it if we did. We live inside the seconds, minutes, and hours that make up our days. We live inside the days and months that form the years. We live inside this framework of time, within our rolling universe.

All this I realised in a few moments when writing the date on the upper right corner of my journal, the place and time of day in the upper left. Upon studying abroad, I learned that most of the world writes the date in ascending order: day, month, year. This seemed logical and more practical to my understanding, and I quickly adopted the practise. In fact, North America (and parts of Canada) seems to be the only place(s) where dates are written in a mid-form of month, day, year.

When did this odd practise begin? Though I gave this question a bit more than a cursory search, I could not find a definitive answer. However, I was stunned as I realised that writing the date month-first deconstructs our very selves, as well as the universal framework in which we live. You see, if we begin, not with the overarching framework of the year of our Lord, nor the particular minutes or days that make up our part in that story, what do we have left? An arbitrary median that shows us neither the details nor the whole picture. It is like looking at an impressionist painting at a middling distance—it is merely blurry, causing one to miss the intricate strokes and colours of the up-close detail, as well as the clearer picture from a farther vantage point.

Our minutes and hours are how we spend our days, and as Annie Dillard says: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing."1 If we live only in the minutes, in the what we are doing, without the framework of the universal 'year of our Lord' or the metanarrative of all of history, then what we are doing becomes those unintelligible brushstrokes of a Monet, seen an inch from the canvas. Our moments in the story are unintelligible without a larger framework.

However, there is a big picture laid out from the beginning of time, from the conception of the universe. When we find ourselves placed inside of that framework, then our moments and days—how we spend our lives—flow in the picture. Our days are the light and shadow of a section of the painting. The stroke of our lives may seem incredibly small compared to the giant canvas, but our placement matters in the whole.

Is there room for something between the particulars and the universal? Like months slipped between days and years? Yes, of course. There is something between individual atoms and the galaxy: planets and stars; water and plants; animals, man, and more. So, too, there are individual humans as particulars, society as a whole. What comes between? I posit two middle-forms: the family and the Church.

Families are made up of individuals, helping one another both to survive and to thrive; society is made up of families composed of individuals. The Church (throughout time and space) is made up of individuals and families being knit together into the Body of Christ Jesus. It is these blurry middle-forms where we sometimes have a hard time seeing either the whole story or the individual words.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

      full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.2

You know the individual words, you begin to see the whole story by the stringing and weaving of those words together into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The middle-form of a story is a chapter—often the length of the story that we read in one sitting—if we are savouring the book. A chapter is a good length of the story to read, to mull over, to build upon. But a chapter alone does a poor job of conveying the story as a whole with its plot and chronology; nor does a chapter catch the depth of the characters, their memories, histories, or significance to the whole. A chapter is a necessary middle-form or larger building block—much like a month—obviously somewhere between the details and the whole.

So, we return to families, the building blocks of society. There is really no such thing as an individual family—there are always extended relatives, family members marrying and branching out again and again. It is easy to see why we use the image of a tree to explain families, because there is that continual growth and branching, like a tree, that make up a whole. A family is a bit elastic, expanding in marriages and births, constricting in deaths. It is fluid, and thus a bit blurry; like a swift stream, like the Monet seen somewhere between brushstrokes and long-distance clarity. The present is the same, the blur between the future and history. The middle-form is always the blur, the brushstroke, the action point, the beam swinging from the crane in the building process. It is like present circumstances, rather hard to understand as you are going through them, but easier to see the edges, the whys and wherefores, after you have made it beyond, gaining perspective from the passage of time.

We live in the moments and the days—the particulars. Particulars build those middle-forms of family and Church, of months and years, of planets and stars; all within the frame of the whole picture, God’s universal story. The moments matter—become material—like paint on the canvas or inky words on a page. The middle-forms matter, too—setting lonely people into their right place; ordering words and paragraphs; building brick upon brick—so that we can see the family, or story, or home. We see the whole by the blurs in concert, the fragmented pieces coming together.

Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

So the little moments,

Humble though they be,

Make the mighty ages

Of Eternity.3

_________

1. Dillard, Annie The Writing Life (New York, New York, Harper Collins, 2009), emphasis mine

2. Oliver, Mary, "Breakage" in Why I Wake Early (Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2004), 32
3. Carney, Julia Abigail Fletcher, "Little Things" Public Domain

Planned Obsolescence and a Culture of Death

"Oh, I know how to use that mixer, my grandma's is just like it!" I said to my hostess as she pulled out her mother's mixer. She looked pleased and then sighed, "Yes, this one is still plugging away, unlike the things they make now. Planned obsolescence they call it. So your products have a life-span of only a few years." The term was not new to me, nor the concept—but that didn't stop the conversation from bothering me. Manufacturers don't want to make a sturdy product, they want to make a cheap product that has you coming back to them every few years. They mismanage our resources—plastic, metal, glass, labour—in order to make a profit.

Far from being a mere economic tactic, planned obsolescence makes its way into other areas as well. The trend of building ugly-but-functional buildings has been the rage for quite a while, with the added 'luxury' of being able to demolish the building at will if it gets outmoded, overcrowded, underused, or any number of other reasons. When I lived in Oxford for a term, I felt at peace even on the fast-paced sidewalks, because I could always duck into an ancient alleyway, or take the next block up. Even if I stayed on George Street, the buildings were far older than anything Colorado can boast, the churches beautiful and unambiguously churches, and one could hear bells chime the quarter hours from anywhere in the city.

Oxford was not built to be replaced one building at a time—as evidenced by a building from the 1500s on a main thoroughfare. Granted, that house was being used as a mobile phone store, but they hadn't torn it down to build a disposable storefront. The English built things to last far into time. Architects like Christopher Wren built beautiful libraries, chapels, cathedrals, and colleges to last—sometimes dying before the work was finished because of the precision and enormity of the building process. It was no light matter to build a cathedral or a school. They would be a place of teaching and refuge for generations to come, they must be built well, they must be beautiful and inspiring in their construction.

This same mindset of building things to last was brought by the English who settled the American Colonies. The earliest cities in America have some lovely architecture, buildings that have withstood the elements and fads. However, in the early 1900s came this ploy of obsolescence. From buildings and cars to mixers and light bulbs, manufacturers began the process of making things disposable. Now we are deluged with plastic containers, glass bottles, and ubiquitous grocery bags made merely to be thrown away. I am two generations down from the 'Greatest Generation' who lived through the Great Depression and the recycling drives of World War II. In two short generations, we have gone from conserving to consuming-with-abandon. The shift began with things like planned obsolescence and it has grown into a killing field.

The industrial revolution turned the whole of humanity into two groups: consumers and producers. Distinctions made by man to obfuscate our calling as human beings, imaging God. Human beings began to be redefined under man's terms, a slippery position for anyone. When persons are defined as either consumers or producers, immediately they are given different values. Rather than the intrinsic worth of being human—made in God's image—humans are given arbitrary values based on their production or use in society. People become what they do, rather than who they are.

When a person too weak and small to fight for themselves is considered a hindrance, it's okay, they are disposable. A quick 'procedure' and presto! the unwanted 'problem' is gone. Snuffed out by 'progress' and a woman's 'right' to kill another person. But if you call a person a 'problem' and say 'remove tissue' rather than 'kill' it sounds less like murder—it's much more sanitary that way. What happens when a person is old and unable to contribute to society? They are shuffled off into homes; separated from families who need to be reminded that everyone deserves compassion, that they themselves are not immortal, that death comes for us all. But we shove aside death and thoughts of our mortality, rushing on in the consumer-producer wheel. Worse still, many elderly are shuffled off this mortal coil by doctors, nursing home workers, or other 'aides' when there isn't enough money or room to pour into a 'useless' person. But human beings are not machines, they are not their ability to produce. They are not animals. They are image bearers, beings—full of worth because they are made in the likeness of God, unlike any other creature.

Manufacturers are not really to blame for abortion and euthanasia—their planned obsolescence is only a symptom of a shift in thinking and beliefs. The philosophies of eighteenth, nineteenth, and following centuries have come to fruition in this culture of disposable stuff and disposable humans. If it breaks, buy a new one. If it's old, throw it away. The jump from stuff to humans isn't far when you base human value on what one does, rather than upon who one is. No wonder God calls us to be stewards, caretakers of resources (oil, plastic, glass, plants, time, money), as well as one another. We are to steward—guard and care for—human beings even more than we are to till the ground or cultivate our imaginations or repair our cars and mixers. We are to cultivate our hearts and minds and culture into thriving grounds for life.

Time and Eternity Have Kissed

Christmas is not an event within history, but is rather the invasion of time by eternity.

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar (Light of the World)

There are things in the scientific and supernatural realm that overlap—or perhaps dove-tail—and pique my interest immensely. Two in particular are light and time. We are told that both move at a constant rate in the same direction—I have my doubts about this, however. Perhaps this is because I am seeing light and time from the other side, the ontological side. 

Scientists see time as Chronos—constant, linear, measurable; unable to grasp Kairos time—the time that stands still or races by without being noticed, the time of being, the time of eternity—immeasurable. I have noticed that my friends in the hard sciences like to measure things, to have precise definitions or parameters, to place things and persons into neat boxes. From kingdoms and classes, to preferences and personality types. Yet persons are dynamic, able to deviate from a habit or routine, to say or do the unexpected. 

When it comes to Kairos—and maybe even Chronos—I think time is dynamic rather than constant. I cannot break it down further, perhaps because I would be trying to dissect a mystery, to grapple with the immaterial. In the midst of our chaos, the mystery of Kairos steps quietly at first, then loudly announced, into Chronos. The Eternal God Himself entered time. No, as von Balthasar says, "invades" Chronos. He invades more personally still, letting us know that He has "put Eternity in" our very hearts, and it searches out Eternity Himself.

The very first Christmas was the collision of Chronos and Kairos—the invasion of time by Eternity. It is both a reality and a mystery, a sacred moment changing all of history. Let us be still, in awe of God Himself becoming man, of time being entered by Eternity.

The Word Made Flesh...

"Nails, spear shall pierce Him through
The Cross be borne for me, for you
Hail, hail the Word made flesh
The Babe the Son of Mary"

—What Child is This?

"The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory..." So says Saint John's opening chapter. The Word was made flesh...The Eternal Word was spoken into time, was made into finite man, frail flesh. What did the Son of God gain by this? Insults, rejection, and threats of stoning. Nails, thorns, and a spear thrust into His side. He who was Light and Life was dealt a death-blow. Yet the darkness cannot overcome the light. Death is swallowed up in life. The Word sounding and resounding in time and space does not come back void. That Word is robust, full of Truth and grace.

Many times it seems that "hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth goodwill to men." That God's promises and gifts are puny next to the prince of the power of the air. However, when Paul says that death is swallowed up in life—and John truthfully proclaims that the darkness is expelled by the Light, unable to overcome it—we see that God's gifts are rich and vibrant next to shadowy, gnarled phantoms. We still live like a people sitting in darkness, trapped into thinking there is a monster in the shade...But the Light is dawning—more full of life, rich hues, and Truth than the paltry darkness that seeks to blind our seeing eyes. The Light is real. The promises are solid. The Hope of our souls was made flesh and He tabernacles among us. Now—and forevermore.

Hail, hail the Word made flesh!

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

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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)