Knowing Home Now. . .and for the First Time

"What do you want to do with your life?" someone asked me recently. Without hesitation I replied that I wanted to do what I am doing. Living life, loving God and people, liking my job, writing, and hiking. Perhaps I should have said more accurately—and succinctly—that I wanted to do with my life whatever God calls me to each day. That doesn't mean I'll stay in this house or this job forever and always. It doesn't mean that I will get to have the same friends all of my life. It means that I will seek to live each day to the full, to "suck the marrow out of life"¹ as Thoreau says.

My answer may sound transitory, thoughtless, or hopelessly mangled—wanting the now without thought for the future. But I have a few things in place for the future, and I see no reason to worry about something I don't have when I could enjoy what I do have. We aren't called to always quest after what may or may not be on the horizon. We are called to live where we are—and who we are—now.

I was once told that I have the pioneer spirit of a first-born—which is rather interesting, considering I'm a youngest. However, the comment was, in part, true. I want more out of life than the homeland of my youth could offer. I longed to go West and live amongst mountains. I had not yet figured out what it meant to live fully wherever I was. I still haven't. Wanderlust plagues my blood sometimes and I must fly down the two-lane highway to chase the wild geese, to breathe in mountain air, to get away from my little cabin, so that I can experience the joy of coming home again.

Chesterton talks about sailing away from Christianity to figure out what he believed, only to find that his beliefs lined up with orthodoxy. In The Everlasting Man he explains it as leaving one's homeland to fight giants and seek adventure, only to realise one's home rested atop a slumbering giant the whole time. He says, "There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.  The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place. . .”² Much like Lewis's, John, in Pilgrim's Regress, learned. He left his home at the foot of the mountains to seek the pull of Joy (an elusive island in that book) and found that he had circumnavigated the world and returned to his mountain home, where the island/Joy had been all along. Or as Eliot so adeptly explains it,

"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."³

These men all knew and wrote about the experience of leaving home to find it. It was not easy, the road was long, but in the end, they arrived home—knowing its value for the first time. The hearts of men long for our true home—the New Heavens and the New Earth, yes—but more specifically, we long for God. Augustine was right to confess that, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him." 

So, how do we live where we are now, while our hearts long for completion in God? How do we live in the present? How do we walk the balance of wanting to be complete now, but living in the not yet? Part of the answer—because I certainly do not have the full answer—is simply to be present. For me, this means I need to not plan one event after the other. I want to be present where I am with the people there, not be thinking about the next event in the back of my mind, hurrying myself along. Part of being present—counter-intuitive to this being written and viewed on a screen—means being face-to-face with people or the world around us, not being at the beck and call of technology. 

Perhaps the biggest part of being present, living in the now but not for the now, is savouring things. Swallow slowly—both food and the world. I love cooking. I enjoy chopping all of the ingredients, serving things as fresh as possible. It takes time and effort to make a meal. I want to savour what took me thirty minutes or more to make. But I want to savour the time it took to make the meal, too. I don't want a dozen labour-saving devices. One or two are sufficient (mostly, a garlic press is sufficient, so my fingers don't reek of garlic for days on end). I want to spend the time chopping, arranging, mixing, letting every flavour meld within my cast-iron skillet. There is deep satisfaction in the process of making a meal from scratch, and at my own pace. Confessedly, I do love my slow cooker for winter evenings of stew or tenderised meat—but I still put all the ingredients in as slowly and deliberately as ever (most of the time).

With the changes made to things like cooking or farming or travel, I wonder what we modern folks do with all of our saved time. Do we dance more and read more? Do we spend more time in conversation or in contemplation? Though e-mails save time and cutting and pasting is helpful, there is nothing like the joy of a real letter—handwritten, not typed—in our mailbox, and the feel of it in our hands and under our eyes. 

What do we do with all of that time we have saved?

"Good morning," said the little prince."

Good morning," said the merchant. This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink.

"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

"Anything you like . . ."

"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."⁴

What do you want to do with your life? The question hangs in the air. I want to use my time saved to cook slowly, to hike long, to be with friends and family, to sit on my porch and watch the twilight fall, to smell the seasons' scents, to dance in the snow. . .In these things, I am learning to love God and enjoy Him forever—because He is Home.

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1. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (New York: Penguin Group), 72

2. Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man (Garden City: New York, Doubleday and Company 1955) 11
3. Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems (New York: New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. 1971) 208

4. de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, The Little Prince, translated by Katherine Woods (New York: New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. 1971) 73-74

Nurturing the Tree of Friendship (n.)

"Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more."  

—The Fox in The Little Prince1

Think for a moment of the most famous friendships in history and literature. What names come to mind? For me it is always King David and Jonathan; Frodo and Samwise; and Anne and Diana. In my own life there are nearly a dozen soul-knit friends, kindred spirits, whom God has seen fit to bring into the dark places when all other lights go out. Usually they come singly, but sometimes in pairs. Always they bring friendship in their hand like a gift

In Western culture we use the word "friend" to mean a number of relationships, from an acquaintance to a friend so close that our souls really do seem knit together, as the Scriptures say of David and Jonathan. My Kasey-friend is vastly more dear to me than my friend John, who happens to be our mailman at work. In a way, I am friends with both, and I am friendly towards both, but one can read my soul, be part of my soul, the other has no idea what the shape of my soul is. Beyond a sliding scale of what friendship means, we have social media influencing our understanding of "friends"—making a noun into a verb, and making you feel like you know a person because they update their status bar every day or every ten minutes. If I know what someone made for breakfast, the song they are listening to, and the quotation they re-posted, I still do not know their essence, their ousia, via their social media site. I know their being by living with them, working with them, arguing with them, getting sick of them, and still wanting to be around that person the very next hour or day. We learn someone's quirks, endearing habits, turns of phrase, and morals by living with them in the daily—at school, work, or home. I cannot "unfriend" my neighbour, I live with her. I cannot decide I only want to be friends when it is convenient, nor would I want my friends to treat me that way. Friendship is time-consuming and takes hard work. It is also gloriously fun, deeply personal, and enriching to one’s soul. Thus, I rebel at the co-opting of the word "friend" in social media, when its etymology is much richer: dear, beloved, to love, to woo.2 A friend is one who walks with us to Mordor, in spite of the deadly peril, believing always that we will return home together...Yet even if they lose hope that we will live beyond Mount Doom, they would never dream of leaving our side, choosing rather to carry us—and die with us if need be. A friend helps us to dream again when all our hopes have crashed to the ground. A real friend speaks truth to us when we are being snippy, selfish, or unrealistic—even at the cost of our annoyance or anger toward them at hearing that truth. We return friendship when we receive rebuke, shine the spotlight on our friend’s accomplishments—rather than seeking our own glory or downplaying theirs—and walk through the valley of the shadow in silence, hope, and companionship with them.

Said more succinctly and wisely, “Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.”3

Friendship indeed does all these things and more. Surely only a handful of these infinitely valuable and intimate are ever granted in one whole lifetime. In ninety-nine out of one hundred cases I would say that is true; but sometimes that one hundredth person is given extra gifts. I am one who has been given an abundance of these gift-friendships. I could never earn them—and I certainly do not deserve them—but I do cherish them. It is sometimes difficult for me to make enough time to maintain all of these friendships, but none of us seem to mind when there is a gap of time between calls, walks, or letters. We pick up where we left off and begin to share our hearts at some point. This does not leave much room in my life for casual “friends”—whom I would call acquaintances. Yet every now and again, I have dinner or coffee with an acquaintance because they are still a valuable person, even if I cannot invest more time with them.

What I have discerned in our culture is that many persons seem to devote much of their time to their acquaintances, leaving themselves little or no time to invest in one of those Samwise and Frodo friendships. No wonder the most common answer I receive to “How are you?” anymore is not “fine” but “busy.” Work, meetings, coffee dates, and various events—along with films, television, and internet browsing—fill up all of our waking moments until we hide beneath the covers at night.

I purposely have to pick one to two evenings a week where I have no plans, where I am not scheduled to make dinner for anyone besides myself, drive somewhere, or run errands. Mostly I end up washing dishes, writing, reading, or going for walks on these evenings. If I am free, I am able to attend to my neighbour when she has had a bad day; or call one of my friends around the country to hear about their souls. To foster intertwining, deep friendships, we must be available. We will have to attend. We must learn to see beyond the surface, seeking to know not simply “How was your day?” but “What made it good or hard?” and “How are you?” as well. We have to listen to the answer, not merely hear it.

To cultivate rich friendship, like husbanding a vineyard, there are times when we have to cut off sucker shoots. Activities, the number of acquaintances we spend time with weekly or monthly, and having our computer or phone on can be sucker shoots. It is hard work to figure out which friendships one ought to pour into. Goodness knows I have invested heavily in some unwise acquaintanceships and too long ignored some close friends. My real friends have been gracious to receive me back again, even as my heart recovers from overextending myself in short-lived comradeship.

That said, it is worth taking the risk of being friends, being vulnerable, being loyal to someone. You should be able to tell a person’s character fairly early on if you spend much time around them. Likewise, they should be able to tell if you are trustworthy and faithful. Will you keep their secrets, or will you gossip? Will you hold them when they cry? Will you share your hard moments with them? Will you drop by unexpectedly and not care if their hair is a mess and they are in their comfy clothes with holes in them? Will you let them do the same with you? Do they bring strength and beauty into your life? Do you build them up behind their backs, before their peers, and in a whisper for their ear alone? Do they make you live in reality, yet encourage you to dream? Does your soul thrill at their hopes?

Friendship is a give and take, not using someone or smothering them with affection. Friendship is made of mundane things like grocery shopping and folding laundry. It is made of looking at sunsets and stars and sharing hopes and fears. There is camaraderie in drinking tea—or coffee, if you must—and just looking at the world together, not saying much. Friendship is indeed an art, a way of life, a choice, a gift. Like all gardens and fruit trees, some friendships have their seasons and then comes the Autumn. Let them go. Cherish the friendships that are like apple trees, blossoming in Spring, green in Summer, bearing fruit in Autumn, and bare in Winter … Yet blossoming in Spring again. Cultivate those, for friendship is the tree itself. 

~ Johanna

* I am writing above about same gender friendships. Male/female friendships do not work quite the same, unless it is within the bounds or marriage. Then it is even closer and richer than anything I have known or described. It is important to have friends of both sexes, but male/female friendships outside of marriage cannot share in the same depth as male/male or female/female friendships.

** Cross-posted at Conciliar Post

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1. de Saint-Exupery, Antoine The Little Prince (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971) 67
2. Friend (n.) Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001-2014 Douglas Harper
3. Sertillanges, A. G. The Intellectual Life (Washington D. C., Catholic University of America Press, 1998) 56