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.

_________

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

I Went to the Woods Angry...

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”1

—Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I was angry. Hot tears threatened to spill over long-lashed rims and I did not quite know why. When I began throwing kitchen utensils, however, I knew one thing: it was time to hammer the ground with the soles of my feet in hopes of calming my soul. The two young men I passed in the Summer dusk of late-o’clock did not even attempt saying hello. I’m sure my face was stony, or at least, set like flint toward the direction I was steadily aiming.

My frustrations were many small things from recent days, weeks, and relationships that all came to roost after a particularly trying day at work. I came home looking for a relaxing long shower, only to find that without warning, my shower did not work. I snapped. I told myself that my anger was unwarranted—unreasonable, even. I spent some on-the-edge minutes at home thinking of all the good things about the day and week—and there were many good things. But no, the monster that changed all I could see into wave after wave of red tide swelled in my head, depleting oxygen from my brain and gratitude from my heart. On went my running shoes. Off I stalked in the late twilight.

Rain had beaten the tall, tender grasses into gentled submission, leaving plump droplets lying on those green beds. The rush and roar of the swift-racing stream pounded in my ears, faster than my feet could pound time on the earth. The pulse and throb of the world shifted as I stepped onto the dirt trail, smelling green summery smells, catching glints of fairy flickers along the path. Long I stood by a small stream laughing and chattering in the darkness, running to meet that swollen rush below. Long I listened to a solitary bird, echoing in the night. Ragged breath after breath was filled with the tang of the spicy firs. After some time of pouring out my heart to the Creator, those breaths came more slowly.

My feet found a rhythm in the evening dance. A slower, steadier pace, yet one often stopped. Once, by a host of white fairy-flowers, swaying with a gentle breeze. Again I was arrested by the change of smells as I rounded a bend or rose to a level mountain meadow. Scuffling and crunching on the hillside halted me—I caught three dim shapes, mule deer, putting a safe distance between us. The moon rose above the piney brow of the nearest foothill, shrouded in a veil of lingering clouds from an earlier storm. The diffused light rested on the clinging drops of rain, burnishing them to silver beads on grey-green strands. The Father of lights was arraying the world about me in all her glory and evening splendour.

Dark clouds engulfed the moon, the deer moved into further shade, the smells of the field sweetened and deepened. I turned back along the path, homeward bound, with a stillness inside that blossomed like those delicate, dancing flowerlets. I don’t know where I left my anger, but somewhere in that ramble it rushed away, like the stream after a storm. All that was left was Beauty and stillness, seeping into my senses through every pore. All along the path I was thankful for night flowers, fairy rings, the incense of the woods, and bird’s hymns.

I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life. I thought of that line as I padded home—having long loved the idea. But unlike Thoreau, the woods themselves are not my life-source sort of sustenance. My Light and Life lie in their Maker. He is the One who quiets my soul from things outside, his Spirit from within. He is the One who replaces anger with Shalom—perfect, peaceful well-being. He reminds me how small I am under the dome of stars or the great, dark boughs of the majestic pine. He shows me that just by doing bird things and signing bird-songs, the birds praise him because they are being what he made them. I am still learning to be human—a good and glorious thing—trying to know the uncracked, unfallen Son of Man in all of his glorious humanity.

I want to live deliberately, fully. I want to put away wrath. To do so, sometimes I have to  head for the woods; walking hard, breathing rough, and seeking the One who made both the forest and myself. He is in all places, of course, but I can’t always hear Him—my ears get deaf in the roaring whirlwind of everyday life-cares. I am thankful for the much needed evensong of wilderness and wet—let them live long, as Hopkins once said:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.2

_________________

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

2. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems and Prose "Inversnaid" (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd) 51

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)