You Have Come to Journey's End

 Dear Aaron,

I didn't know how this day would go; but I've known it was coming. . . I've known it for nearly a year now. Today is September 3rd, you see. A year ago today you thought your final mortal thought. Breathed your last breath. Faced your final fear. Was your parting thought a Switchfoot line? Was it a prayer? Were you afraid? Determined? Relieved? I don't know—and on this side of the Kingdom coming, I can't know. 

What I do know, is that for the last twelve years, I have thought of you as my elf-friend. How could you be anything but kin of Legolas, with your tousled blond hair and impish grin? With your skill in music and lyric-verse? With your love for the stars and the sea? You, a tree-lover and earth-wanderer, you must be of elven blood. So what song is more fitting in memory of three hundred and sixty-five days ago than this one?


INTO THE WEST

Lay down

Your sweet and weary head

The night is falling

You have come to journey's end

Sleep now

And dream of the ones who came before

They are calling

From across the distant shore

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see
All of your fears will pass away
Safe in my arms
You're only sleeping

How desperately I wish you were only sleeping. Sleeping—to awake at any minute and laugh with mirth over simple joys. . . Sunsets, snowflakes, songs strummed on the roof. I want you to be safe in my arms, no more clamouring fears, no longer weeping over your lost Love. But, oh! You sleep a different sleep. The unwaking-on-this-side sort of sleep, where you no longer dream of those who came before—you have crossed to the distant shore.

What can you see
On the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home

And all will turn
To silver glass
A light on the water
All Souls pass


You, who spent so many years along the edges of the water, you know the mournful, lilting—haunting—cry of the gulls. Their voices break my heart and comfort me, all at once. Can you hear their calls? Perhaps for the rest of my life, whenever their voices reach my ears, I will think of you. You, battling the noise and wheeling confusion in your own mind. You, with a whoop of delight, rushing to ring a solitary church bell. You, taking a wounded gull to the bird lady, even though it cost you your job. You, your soul home at last.

Hope fades
Into the world of night
Through shadows falling
Out of memory and time
Don't say
We have come now to the end
White shores are calling
You and I will meet again

And you'll be here in my arms
Just sleeping
And all will turn
To silver glass
A light on the water
Grey ships pass
Into the West

The last year has felt like one hell of a dark night. Like hope fading and shadows falling. So many memories have crowded in on me—or eluded me. For months (and even still), I wanted someone who knew you to talk with me about you. I just wanted to hear a new story, an old memory—something tangible to remind me of you. My grief is different than the ragged storm it was in those first weeks and months. But different doesn't mean absent. Sometimes the storm redoubles and leaves me gasping for breath. Sometimes, just beneath the calm surface, grief runs hard like a riptide. 

Don't tell me we have come now to the end. It can't be the end already. It's too soon. Too soon, can't you see? I don't want you to be across the waters, I don't want you to have answered the call of those gleaming, distant shores. I don't want you to be there without me. So many years ago you set sail, away from me and from unmoving earth. You sailed out into the pitching waves. Did you ever look back? Or did you set your face, unyielding, toward the sunset? 

A lithe grey ship has passed into the West. Yet you and I will meet again. You better be ready for a bear hug, O Westward One. Do you remember quoting Wordsworth to me, years ago? Let me return the gift, as tears of rain pour blessed relief upon this night. . .

‘What, you are stepping westward?'—'Yea.’

—'Twould be a wildish destiny. . .

The dewy ground was dark and cold;

Behind, all gloomy to behold;

And stepping westward seemed to be

A kind of heavenly destiny. . .

— William Wordsworth, Stepping Westward

       

  

"Into the West" Songwriters: Howard Shore / Philippa Boyens / Annie Lennox

This you taught me beyond the grave...

Dear Aaron,

The wind is sweeping through the pines tonight,
rattling my windows, whispering 'round the trees
The sky is weeping rain tonight,
Pouring out its pain upon the needles and the leaves

Always, always these are the nights I want to write
a letter to you, but where would I send it to?
Instead, I find your old letters,
weeping o'er their leaves, seeing your words anew

Tonight you reminded me that Despair makes a
show of his strength—or of our flaws—
Yet all the while he's trembling,
Fearing his bluff is up, but if we pause

And listen to his terms, with bowed heads
and hopeless hearts, saying
"These we will take!"
He confidently assumes we are paying

Paying the price of defeat, when really
we are rallying to fight his prideful will
to the bitter end,
Making the end less bitter on that battle hill

The Dark Lord wages war, precarious,
He doesn't have the upper hand,
But he uses our doubt
against us; yet wavering, we stand

Willing to sacrifice ourselves;
Even when hope has died in our hearts,
We will go down
Fighting against Despair and his darts

And unbelievably the eagles come,
Hope beyond hope—unlooked for—
Holds out a wing
To cover and to carry us once more

But when everything sad doesn't come untrue
under the sunless sky and the lidless eye,
Still we press on
Toward journey's end, by our living Despair dies

This you taught me beyond the grave,
Across the years you reached out to me
In red ink written
Ages ago, when we were younger and free

Free in ways we didn't know and often shunned,
You were wise, I was naive as could be—
Behold, time reveals truth
If only we have the eyes to look and to see

A Shadow of Beauty

I woke in darkness to the jingle of my alarm and the chatter of birds. Perhaps the birds knew it was the first day of Spring and were thus employed with extra jubilation, but my suspicion is that they greet every morning with such exuberance. I listened to their Lauds—their morning prayer-chant—with a slow smile on my sleepy face. Finally pulling myself out of bed as the sky became a deep rose-gold. I never can decide if I like sunrise or sunset better, I'm glad I don't have to—I can simply like them both for their own sakes. 

Being the first day of Spring meant it was my friend-and-co-worker's birthday, and I had offered to make breakfast for the office. As I toasted English muffins and poached eggs in my cast iron skillet, I turned around to rinse my hands and saw a lovely moment: a reflected shadow. The sun coming through my antique windowpanes lit up the tawny dried grasses in the bottle on the sill, but the shadow it cast made them look like fresh wildflowers. I paused my poaching liturgy to snap a photo of the spiritual reality bowing before my eyes. 

There are times in life when all we can see are the dried grasses of our dreams or best laid plans. No matter which way we look at them, they are brittle, dried up, monotone kindling tucked in the corner of the sill. But maybe the problem is that we keep looking at the broken dream or the mislaid plan, whilst God is nudging us to turn around and look at the reflected shadow. When we turn, we see flowers outlined on the wall. We see the contour of each stem and leaf; each pod becomes a glory of its own. The dried grass looks different from this perspective, looks fresh and lovely and renewed. 

Sometimes the shadow is full of beauty, not mere darkness. Sometimes the shadows that fall on our lives are not snuffing out the sun, they are the evidence that there is sunlight. Without light there couldn't be shadows cast, after all. All would be utter darkness, impenetrable, blinding. For darkness, as well as overpowering light, blinds the eyes after time. But shadows are a mix of light and solid things; they are the delicate darkness dappling the wall.

One of the darkest things I have witnessed is my faithful sister being turned out of her home and her marriage. We could only stare at the pieces all around, the shattered lives of those affected, with shock and disbelief and horror. How did this happen? Those pieces looked sharp and irreparable and bleak. In many ways, they are. But when we stop looking at the shards and begin to see the light shine on them, through them, around them, we see the shadow reflected on the wall. We see Beauty and hope springing out of dead things. It isn't the restoration or reconciliation we hoped for, but other good things are germinating. There is Beauty in the shadow, as well as beyond it. There is light high beyond the reach of darkness, as Samwise discovered in Return of the King:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

The Fall and all its evil is but a small and passing thing from God's perspective. There is Light and there is Beauty that evil cannot touch. There is unseen Reality that cannot be destroyed, even when all the seen is turned into so much ash and concrete dust. The truth is that God is Real—He is high and beyond the reach of evil. God is the Light of the world, and it is His light spilling on and through and around us that casts a shadow of Beauty on the wall of life. Many times we get too busy looking at ourselves to see the whole Beauty-filled outline; to see the Light by which we see—but He is there, prodding us to turn around and see what the Light has made new.

Life is Deeper than Fiction

What shapes our ideals about what life ought to be like? Frighteningly, I think many persons are shaped by various forms of banal media more than by their families and mentors, or by historical figures and enriching arts. One's ideas of high school and college are formed by teen fiction a la Twilight and a host of other semi-pornographic novels marketed towards pre-teens and high schoolers.

One's ideas of dating and marriage are formed even earlier, through Disney films or grown ups asking toddlers if so-and-so is their girlfriend or boyfriend. A steady diet of 'young adult' fiction, films, and various genres of music are shaping the minds of children and teens, perhaps more than any other influence. No wonder girls struggle with self-image—not being willowy and graceful, or worse, sassy and sexy—like the ‘heroines’ they admire. No wonder boys and young men are apathetic or aggressive—they have no one in the public square to set an example of good character and hard work for them. They think they have to prove themselves by their wit, sarcasm, or skills. For many, it is much easier not to try and not to care.

Thankfully, for me, my parents made sure we had access to good books, along with other forms of media and art. They were generous during my youth, not policing my library stacks or telling me I could only read things by Christian authors. I read as many horse-centric books as I could find, hoping to avoid 'stupid romance novels.' Yet even horse stories had their share of 'boy drama' and vocabulary I knew wasn't acceptable in our family. Enter the availability of good books on the shelves at home. 

My mom would often get us new books when she attended conventions or workshops. Many of those books were missionary biographies that I read for pleasure or for school. My dad read books out loud to the family on an almost nightly basis; from To Kill a Mockingbird and The Prince and the Pauper, to The Chronicles of Narnia, Carry On Mr Bowditch, Hinds' Feet on High Places, and a failed attempt at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. We also read our share of Tom Swift and Trixie Beldon books, as well as some Louis L'Amor westerns. So it wasn't all classic, well-written literature, but it wasn't anything we couldn't all read together. (Even though Dad read To Kill a Mockingbird to us before I was eight or nine, I think he edited a bit, and many of the words and references went over my head.)

Mysteriously, my family were unaware of Lord of the Rings and its precursor, The Hobbit, but I discovered them my senior year of high school and remedied the deficit. Some of the most influential books in my life I discovered well out of high school: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Giver, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, and others. I found depth in these  so-called 'children's books'—depth I never would have discovered had I read the books as a child. My brain was set in motion by these books to engage life on historical, ethical, microscopic, and macrocosmic levels. I was challenged to ask myself what I believed about time and words or family and love—thus expanding my perception of God and man.

Children's books, I have discovered, deal with weighty philosophical questions in ways that help the reader wrap their mind and life around both the questions and the answers. Who am I? Who is God? What is a good death? How do we process loss? Why do we crave life? What is love? These books also show what perseverance, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and love look like in action.

Confessedly, I had a moderately skewed idea of high school and college life, of romance and marriage, and what it meant to be an adult—most of which stemmed from the small amount of television and films (and sadly, from many so-called 'Christian' fiction books) consumed in our household. The elusive 'grown up' world was one that was both scary and intriguing from these portrayals. I was afraid of various things before I attempted them—physics, college classes and papers, driving on the interstate, etc.—thinking that one had to feel grown up in order to accomplish those things.

Feeling grown up and being grown up are two different things. I still don't feel like a grown up, but I am somehow comforted by the fact that many adults share that feeling. I didn't procure a traditional education, get married in my early twenties, have children, or own a house before I turned thirty. In short, I have not lived the American Dream. For many—who think persons are entitled to romance, intelligence, and affluence—my life's path might appear bitterly disappointing. Yet I am not disappointed nor bitter. I have learned that I am not entitled to the American Dream, even if I work hard. I am not entitled to my next breath of oxygen or my next steady heartbeat. Provisions, relationships, and life are all gifts.

Simply living life—for the glory of God, one day at a time, enjoying what I have—is a great gift. I have learned this lesson through various family members, professors, and friends; through opportunities, experiences, and jobs; and, not surprisingly, through art and literature. I have learned that being faithful in the daily matters of life—from rising on time or doing housework, to interacting with people and listening to God—is what prepares one to be entrusted with larger responsibilities and adventures.

I have been given some unbelievable gifts and experiences that I have striven to use well, both to challenge myself and to encourage others. These experiences have been well beyond my ability to earn, leading me to humbly give thanks to God. They have shaped my character and mind—my very living and being.

Let us come back to the question I asked earlier, what shapes our ideals about what life ought to be like? For me, it has been a mixture of the solid truth and the chintzy glamour of the world’s lies. The more truth I learn to live, the more hollow and false the world’s story rings. Living well takes hard work, faithfulness in the mundane, integrity, and the maturity to know when to play and when to be serious. It takes being teachable, learning to forgive and be forgiven, to give love and to receive love, and to be thankful in all things—even when life does not go as planned or as shown in the movies.

Real life might be stranger than fiction—even though it is full of daily responsibilities—but it is also more wonder-filled and satisfying. Real life, the good life, is deeper and richer than fiction. It is ours to pursue—and ours to receive with humility and thanksgiving.