Emerson & the LA Arboretum

This week I am preparing to lead a Torrey session on Emerson. We were assigned a few of his essays to read, and I am expected to ask the “opening question,” which our group will discuss for our 3-hour class time.

Sometimes when I am reading the classics,  I think I focus too much on what I want the author to be talking about (as opposed to what they are actually talking about). This week, I have been wanting to agree with Emerson (probably because he is a genius, and an every man’s man, and some of his little snippets about the earth are just so darn beautiful), so I am tempted to simplify what he is really saying (i.e. just labeling him a “nature boy” like I did in high school) into something I can agree with.

I actually do think that the real Emerson has a lot to teach me, but I know I won’t get there by picking and choosing small quotes and taking them out of context (which is a REAL temptation because again, HIS WRITING IS SO LOVELY). I think I will get there by actually working through his worldview–one that, I am learning, starts with very different assumptions than my own–and then going from there? I’ve usually found that route to be a good one, but it does take some amount of faith.

In the meantime, one little quote couldn’t hurt : )

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

Christian & I are convinced that turtle on the far right must be HUGE, but we never saw much more than its head. The water was too murky and it was not at all moved by my pleas for it to come out and play. [Also, I probably would have screamed if it did.]

Still probably my favorite plants in the whole place, found in the parking lot. I know these guys are common, but they never get old to me. The colors are so tacky/so me.

Gilead & Lake Geneva

“In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.” – Gilead

I read Marilynne Robinson’s Home a couple of years ago and loved it…I don’t know why it took me so long to read its prequel, Gilead, but part of me is glad I saved it for now. I was reminded again what writing about God and eternity can be… unapologetic but not defensive, humble but not timid.

Her characters are deeply flawed, but hopeful. Their lives are messy and their faith wavering, but instead of trying to teach us some lesson through their mistakes or doubts, she just lets us watch them, and listen to them, and feel with them. And since to talk about Gilead too much might be to ruin its subtlety, I will just share some of my favorite quotes 🙂

“‘For preservation is a creation, and more, it is a continued creation, and a creation every moment.’ [George Herbert]…Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.

“‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that it is exactly what will be required.”

“This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love–I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence.”

P.S. I guess these pictures are the last of my summer… I moved into my new house in LA on Monday, and tennis class starts in 50 minutes 🙂

The Unfamiliar

“We find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before our eyes.”

– The Screwtape Letters

This week my dad and I have been watching segments of the History Channel series The Universe. The narration is pretty awful (I really wish they had modeled it after BBC’s Planet Earth instead of Bill Nye the Science Guy), but the content is just mind-blowing.

A lot of the visuals have reminded me of the film Tree of Life. One of my favorite aspects of that movie is the juxtaposition of the subliminal scenes of nature and the universe with scenes of one family’s grief. In the movie, both are significant realities, but in life, I usually find it really hard to hold the two in tension.

This balance of two seemingly incongruent things–the value of an individual life vs. the physical reality of humanity’s place within the universe–reminds me of one of my very favorite passages about belief, from the epilogue of C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles. Here, rather than the universe, Lewis is talking about the existence of, you guessed it, miracles:

And yet . . . and yet . . . It is that and yet which I fear more than any positive argument against miracles: that soft, tidal return of your habitual outlook as you close the book and the familiar four walls about you and the familiar noises from the street reassert themselves. Perhaps (if I dare suppose so much) you have been led on at times while you were reading, have felt ancient hopes and fears astir in your heart, have perhaps come almost to the threshold of belief—but now? No. It just won’t do. Here is the ordinary, here is the “real” world, round you again. The dream is ending; as all other similar dreams have always ended. For of course this is not the first time such a thing has happened. More than once in your life before this you have heard a strange story, read some odd book, seen something queer or imagined you have seen it, entertained some wild hope or terror: but always it ended in the same way. And always you wondered how you could, even for a moment, have expected it not to.

Sometimes, the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection seems too far away from my ordinary, every day life to be true. Lewis argues that this feeling, while perfectly human, has little to do with the validity of that miracle, because (as he goes on to say later in the epilogue), reality is not determined by our ability to grasp or believe in it.

The strange thing is, I feel the exact same way about the universe as I sometimes do about the resurrection. Even while we were watching the DVD segments of real photos and hearing real scientists talk about black holes and quasars, I found it nearly impossible to believe that this place outside of Earth actually exists, that there things–massive, violent, beautiful things–happening billions of light-years away. It is even harder to believe that now, after I have, as Lewis puts it, “closed the book.”

And so I have experienced first hand the lesson I learned from reading Lewis years ago. My gut “it just can’t be true; it’s too weird” feelings aren’t always (or maybe, aren’t usually) right… and I’m thankful they aren’t. If my gut could tell me everything, there would be no wonder or awe, maybe even no growth.

As my dad said the other night, studying the universe is less like science and more like writing poetry. Maybe that’s why it’s so powerful to me…it seems like a place where the facts themselves are beautiful. They don’t need a narrative arch to speak, but they still tell a story–a story that, I am learning, is way too big to try and squeeze inside my small brain.

P.S. I think some people feel this way about math? I’ve lost hope of ever reaching that mysterious number nirvana, but I have no doubt it exists.

P.S.S. Also, as this week’s storms have shown, apparently I don’t have to watch DVDs about the universe to be terrified of/awed by nature! (our electricity is still out, but we just got internet back!)

The Clamor of Self-Will

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying some lazy days until work starts up next week. Writing, reading, crafting, cooking, and lots of putzing around…it’s great to be back in the Midwest.

One of my last days in New York I found Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom for a really good price, and I’ve been slowly making my way through it for the past 2 weeks.

The writing alone is enough to make me keep reading, but I am most interested in the deeper, subtler conflicts within Franzen’s characters. I am having a hard time deciphering a lot of it, but that’s usually how it is with the best kinds of books, I think.

One quote from Freedom I have been thinking a lot about lately:

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

Rage, one New York Times reviewer writers, because “we helplessly collide with others in equal pursuit of their sacred freedoms, which, more often than not, seem to threaten our own.”

And that’s one of the reasons Freedom is such a hard, sad book to read. It is a story of a family in which each member is individually chasing after what he or she wants (or at least what they think they want). Repulsively selfish, and yet so human.

I’m balancing the sometimes-dense prose of Freedom with C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which, though much lighter on a sentence-by-sentence level, is still taking me awhile to get through because I am dog-earring and marking and copying down half the book! Every time I read it I re-remember things that I never want to forget, but always manage to. Like this, written from the perspective of one demon to another about God and humanity:

“When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means their abandoning the clamor of self-will…He boasts (I am afraid, sincerely,) that when they are wholly His, they are more themselves than ever.”

And what would you know, Freedom and Screwtape Letters, written decades and oceans (okay, an ocean) apart, are beginning to speak to each other. Each is informing my experience of the other…one of my favorite things about reading.

Those other deaths

“The feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me not happiness, but a kind of slavery… nobody talks about it as such though.” – David Foster Wallace, in a 2003 interview

Lately I’ve gotten to write several reader reports for fiction, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a happy ending.

In a few of the manuscripts (and a few published novels) I’ve read this semester, the author chose to resolve the story by having their protagonist get what they want (and modern “happily ever after”s are often bizarre…they involve things like divorcing boring husbands or dropping lousy friends). There is little sense of sacrifice or humility; it’s all about “finding oneself,” which sometimes is just another way of saying “doing what I want to do.”

As readers, do we admire these characters, or do we just like them because they give us permission to live like they live? (I could ask myself this question about a lot of things…the shows I like, the blogs I read, the music I listen to.)

I wonder if admiration is important in literature anymore. Of course, it’s not like every protagonist should be admirable; often characters teach something true about life or about humanity by being ugly. But it seems like too many novels (and memoirs) today are trying to celebrate ugliness, to call the slavery that Wallace talks about above freedom. (By the way, it’s crazy cool to me that a greatly respected secular novelist like David Foster Wallace so closely reiterates the Apostle Paul’s words from thousands of years ago.)

I don’t know how my own writing project will end, but I don’t want it to be just about my character getting what she wants. I’m not sure how to write an admirable character (that is, at least not cheaply admirable), and I think a big part reason why is that too many of my own days are about getting what I want.

Sometimes I trick myself into thinking that if I were to indulge myself less, I would be missing out…that if my day became less about me, it wouldn’t be as full. But Madeline L’Engle (and Jesus before her) reminds me that it’s just the opposite really.

“I must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final, physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom; the death of self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices which, instead of making us more fully alive, make us less.”

Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

P.S. I also just read that one of DFW’s favorite books was The Screwtape Letters…That is really unexpected and exciting to me. More motivation to re-read it this summer.

A Happy First

The view from my boss's office! I got to work in here one day when there was construction in the intern room.

Today at my internship, I got to recommend my first book!

When I’m not reading queries (aka the letters and samples writers send us in the hopes that our agents will represent their work) from the slush pile (aka unsolicited queries aka letters from strangers…I just love book-world jargon, don’t you?), I get to read entire manuscripts that have made it past the querie level, and then write up a reader’s report explaining why I think our agency should represent the book or pass. Then, an agent reads my report and the original manuscript (unless it’s a clear pass), and decides whether they want to represent the book or not.*

Let’s just say that not a lot of slush-pile queries make it to the manuscript stage, and not a lot of manuscripts get recommended. So, a lot of my day is spent sending rejection e-mails, which can be a downer. It’s really cool (and occasionally disturbing) to see the topics people are willing to spend years of their lives researching and writing about, and really exciting to see that there are still so many genuine and humble people out there who love to write. It’s just not so exciting to be the one who makes their day a little worse with a rejection. (Also, isn’t it crazy that a [never published] 22-year-old intern like myself has the power to reject? Of course, it’s the only way a small agency with dozens of queries a day can stay afloat, but still.)

ANYWAY, today I turned in my first reader’s report recommending our agency represent a manuscript I was in charge of reading! (I have written 7 non-recommendation reports so far). I have been reading this manuscript (a magic-realism novel) for the past few days and was so excited today when I liked the ending just as much as the beginning! Realistically, I would be surprised if the agency ultimately decided to represent this book…not because they won’t take my report into consideration, but because there are so many other factors involved, especially with this particular project. Even so, it feels great to finally do my little part in propelling someone’s dream forward.

*I actually was never clear on the whole how-a-word document-becomes-a-book process until I started applying for internships. Most authors choose to work with agents because agents have much better access to publishers than the average Joe, and will use their connections to find the best fit for a book. Of course, some people just skip finding an agent and send queries straight to a publisher (and then the interns at the publisher’s office sort through their slush pile just like I do).

Priests in Black Gowns

Growing up in an evangelical church, the phrase “Seven Deadly Sins” was more of a cultural catch phrase than anything else. (I vividly remember watching an episode of America’s Next Top Model in which the seven sins were featured as a photo shoot theme…let’s just say gluttony as illustrated by a stick-thin model was a little hard to buy.) So I have to admit, when I saw “The Seven Deadly Sins” as a heading in our reading for Inquirer’s Class* last week, I was taken aback/weirded out/nervous. But I’m glad that didn’t stop me from reading, because I actually learned a lot.

For one, our priest explained that the point of identifying the seven sins is not to invoke guilt, but rather to provide a vocabulary for things that all of us struggle with. And though identification of sin is helpful and necessary, stopping there does little good; learning about the corresponding virtue is even more important. He reminded us of something I always forget: as a Christian (and a human), I will never be able to conquer sin by trying not to sin. Rather, I conquer sin by growing in virtue, which I must ask for and receive from God.

God, by His Spirit, offers me patience when I am angry. He offers me humility when I am proud, kindness when I am jealous, chastity when I am lustful, diligence when I am lazy, temperance when I am gluttonous, generosity when I am greedy.

It is grace in the first place that I might even see my sin, because, as Harriet Beecher Stowe reminds me in her book The Minister’s Wooing, I often see what I want to see:

Evil is never embraced undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight.

And most of my willingness to disguise evil as good probably comes from a misunderstanding of the law. Do I really believe that fighting sin and asking for virtue is what’s best for me? Not just “best” meaning it’s what I should be doing because God tells me to, but “best” meaning it’s what I was created for, and what brings real fulfillment and lasting joy? Not always.

A few weeks ago in Torrey, we read and discussed the poems of William Blake. He’s a tough read, but a brilliant poet. And he was much easier to understand once we identified one of his foundational assumptions: Blake doesn’t believe the law brings about his good. Even though he loved much of the Bible, he found the 10 Commandments and many of Paul’s calls to virtue restrictive and even imprisoning.

Perhaps Blake’s least favorite virtue is chastity, and given his view of what chastity is—basically, the forced repression of natural and good passions—it’s no wonder the man wasn’t enthusiastic about it.

In his poem “The Garden of Love,” Blake writes:

“And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds

And binding with briars, my joys and desires.”

Again, Blake’s dislike of the law makes a lot more sense given that he thinks it’s primary purpose is to stifle, not shape, desire.

For the past few weeks I have been reading bits and pieces of Kathleen Norris’ s The Cloister Walk in my free time, and I think she provides a compelling critique of Blake’s viewpoint (still pretty common in our culture today) in her reflections on celibacy. (Though celibacy isn’t commanded in the Bible and therefore shouldn’t be categorized under the “law” that Blake rails against, it’s obviously an example of religious restraint.)

Norris, a poet for whom “literature had seemed an adequate substitute for religion” most of her life, somehow ended up on two extended residencies among Benedictine monks. The Cloister Walk is a fragmented collection of her reflections on her residencies, tracing how she came to value and even love the Benedictine tradition.

Perhaps one of the most controversial topics Norris discusses is that of celibacy. The fact that she interacted with celibate men and women daily for months at a time, befriending them and asking them difficult questions, gives her more authority than most on the subject. She writes:

“That celibacy constitutes the hatred of sex seems to be a given in the popular mythology of contemporary America, and we need only look at newspaper accounts of sex abuse by priests to see evidence that celibacy isn’t working. One could well assume that this is celibacy, impure and simple. And this is unfortunate, because celibacy practiced rightly is not at all a hatred of sex; in fact it has the potential to address the sexual idolatry of our culture in a most helpful way.”

The end of celibacy, Norris argues, isn’t virginity (after all, these monks believe sex can be good and holy). Abstinence is rather a means to develop a new perspective towards the people you interact with:

“I’ve seen young monks astonish an obese and homely college student by listening to her with as much interest and respect as to her conventionally pretty roommate…They’ve learned how to listen without possessiveness, without imposing themselves… Celibacy, simply put, is a form of ministry—not an achievement one can put on a résumé but a simple form of service to others…In theological terms, it is a concept I find extremely hard to grasp. All I can do it catch a glimpse of people who are doing it, incarnating celibacy in a mysterious and gracious way.”

Like Norris, I think I can learn a lot from these Benedictine monks’ commitment to celibacy. They remind me that sacrifice can bring a hidden sort of freedom—freedom to serve neighbors wholeheartedly, and to love better. It’s not Blake’s freedom (doing what I want when I want to), but, unfortunately, I think I’ve tried that enough to know it’s not as great as it sounds.

 

*my church is offering a 10-week course on the history/practices/beliefs of the Anglican church. As part of a writing project, I am using this space to reflect on each week’s class.

Sticky Floors

 

I’ve only been living in my house (above), fondly dubbed “The Blue Door,” for about six weeks now, but it’s strange how much living off campus has changed my college experience.

A house comes with privacy, decorating decisions to be made, room for slumber parties…and also freezers to be fixed, ovens to be scrubbed, a lawn to water. My housemates and I are learning that when a problem arises, we usually have three clear options: ignore it, band-aid it, or fix it.

For example, we’ve been having a slight ant problem in one of our bathrooms. For the first few days, we just scowled and worked around the ants (paying careful attention not to place our toothbrushes in their path, etc). But one night, I heard shouts coming from the bathroom and went in to find my housemate frantically pointing to our garbage can, which was completed coated in ants (turns out they were after an empty bottle of cough syrup). So instead of letting those little suckers be, we grabbed the $2 trashcan and threw it in a garbage bag, and then spent half an hour spraying down every ant we could find. It was g-ross, and the worst part is, we still couldn’t tell where they were all coming from so the problem still isn’t really fixed.

Spraying ants is, of course, just part of growing up. In the dorms when there was an ant problem, you would call dorm services. Sure, they might not get there for a couple of days, but it’s their responsibility.

In my American Renaissance, we just finished Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables, and it has gotten me thinking about houses and humans—about covering up problems instead of fixing them.

Hawthorne describes the most evil character in his novel, Judge Pyncheon, as a sort of house himself:

“Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors. With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately in his own view, is no other than the man’s character, or the man himself. Behold, therefore, a palace!”

I don’t think “men of strong minds and great force of character” are the only one who build themselves up to look like something there are not. Along with palaces, there are plenty of quaint little bungalows (perhaps built with cute clothes instead of gold, quirky habits instead of public honors…) and sturdy wood cabins out there too. And I am scared of building myself up to be one. Because as Hawthorne* recognizes, there is dirt and decay hidden beneath the floorboards of every house:

“Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,–some narrow closet on the ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,–or beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the richest pattern of mosaic-work above,–may lie a corpse, half decayed, and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long been his daily breath!”

It’s terrifying to think that we can fool even ourselves with all our busy building.

In the past, anger has been my daily breath—something I only was able to recognize after I was free from it. Now, I think if I were to look hard enough, I would find self-centeredness and perfectionism among the death-scents I breath daily.

Our floors at The Blue Door are constantly sticky and crumb-y. So, of course, I bought slippers (cute, $6 ones at that). Why not just clean the floor? Because I know it will be just a matter of hours before it gets dirty again. And isn’t it the same with me? Why bother to confront my selfishness and my perfectionism (which is undoubtedly rooted in pride), if I know I will just fall right back into it? There are easier solutions: I can mask my selfishness in little acts of kindness that cost me nothing, I can call my perfectionism “a good work ethic” and keep my critical thoughts to myself.

My housemates and I are not stuck in this house forever; we will probably leave at the end of May. But those dirty crevices in my own heart aren’t going anywhere—finding my dream job wont clean them, getting married won’t clean them, having kids won’t clean them. Sometimes I convince myself that all my bad habits will just magically disappear as I get older, and that is a dangerous lie.

Maybe cleaning the floor can help teach me something about growing up—It can remind me that having a clean house takes attention and care, discipline and repetition. I’m still trying to figure out how to guard against building myself to be a “palace,” but at least I know that $6 slippers really don’t fix anything.

 

* and, over a century later, Sufjan Stevens (see the closing lines of John Wayne Gacy Jr.)

Bitterness and breathing

“In order to be of service to others we need to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others. To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate.

– Henri Nouwen, The Way of The Heart

I have been thinking a lot about this excerpt lately. I read Nouwen’s book this summer, and I jotted this passage down, knowing sometime soon I would need to be reminded. My principal at Capernwray Hall used to say that you only really see what you’re made of when something or someone pushes up against you, because, as we all know, we’re really good at making ourselves look well kept.

And I have to say, I don’t feel like I’m frequently “pushed up against” in life. Especially in the past few years, I have not had many difficult interactions in my day to day life. And so “what I am really made of” has been made a little bit more visible this week, because I have been working through a few difficult situations—situations in which I feel wronged by another, or I feel like someone has wronged a close friend. I have more than once felt completely consumed with anger/frustration/”this-is-not-okay!!”ness, and it is not very pretty. And so I calm down: I talk to my sweet roommate, I whisper a prayer, I work on homework, I eat a cookie. And then I remember. Something makes me think of the situation, and I start going over in my head every reason why this or that person is wrong and everything I would like to say to them about their being wrong. And if my roommate is already asleep, if, like many nights this week, I am lying in bed with nothing to distract me from brooding, I brood.

How do I stop being bitter? And when my friend comes to me and tells me she can’t stop feeling angry, what do I say to her?

This past Thursday night, I had the pleasure (and terror) of co-leading my first Torrey session. This entire semester we will be student-leading all our sessions, which basically means two of us come up with the opening question and then ask guiding questions throughout the 3-hour-discussion. My partner Stacey and I chose to lead on A Tale of Two Cities, the first novel we have ever read in Torrey (up until now it’s been all philosophy, theology, poetry, epics, history, or political writing). And, as expected, this novel has a lot to teach us.

Dicken’s book centers around Dr. Manette, a man imprisoned 18 years simply because he witnessed the crime of another. When Dr. Manette is freed at the beginning of the novel, he still lives like a man imprisoned. When his long-lost daughter asks why her father likes his chamber door to be locked, Manette’s friend replies,

“Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be frightened—rave—tear himself to pieces—die—come to I know not what harm—if his door was left open.”

I wonder in how many ways I am like Manette, choosing to let myself be imprisoned because it is familiar and safe. But of course, Manette’s actions are justified by the years of suffering he experienced; he can hardly be blamed for the frail condition of his mind.

So I think I might have more in common with Sydney Carton, the lazy low-life who, though desperately wishing to live differently, convinces himself there is no escape from his life of selfishness:

“Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honorable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.”

Carton cries because he is convinced that he will not and cannot ever reach “the fair city of his vision.” So instead, he settles for despair and self-pity, because that’s easier than “dying to one’s neighbor” as Nouwen suggests (although, SPOLIER ALERT: that is exactly what Carton ends up doing in the end, literally).

So how do I die to my neighbor? (I think this is probably the same as the question the one above, How do I stop being bitter?)

Maybe my friend John Wesley can help me with this one (and by “friend,” I mean “extremely intimidating guy who I still don’t quite understand”). The first Torrey text we read this semester was his Standard Sermons, and let me say, it was a bit of an emotional roller coaster (although to be fair, I was on post-wisdom-teeth pain medication for the first dozen or so sermons I read). But I did find Wesley’s description of repentance and faith really helpful:

“Thus it is, that in the children of God, repentance and faith exactly answer each other. By repentance we feel the sin remaining in our hearts, and cleaving to our words and actions: by faith, we receive the power of God in Christ, purifying our hearts, and cleansing our hands…By repentance we have an abiding conviction that there is no help in us: by faith we receive not only mercy, but grace to help in every time of need.”

I think that depending on what sort of mood I am in, I tend to focus on only one of the two (usually repentance). But what good is repentance without faith? Maybe that was Sydney Carton’s problem…he recognized his own inability to change himself, but by not moving past this recognition of helplessness, he stayed stuck. And maybe that’s my problem too…I have been a bad receiver. As Wesley says in another sermon, the act of receiving is essential to relationship with God. He describes the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as

“God’s breathing into the soul, and the soul’s breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, and a re-action of the soul upon God.”

I love that illustration, especially because breathing is something so familiar to us, something we all know how to do. Of course, the sort of breathing Wesley is talking about takes time. It takes quiet, and patience, and discipline. Even though I haven’t quite figured out all it is, I do know that receiving is not wholly passive. The way we take the Eucharist at my church—walking up to the altar, kneeling, and raising our hands—is teaching me something about what it is to truly receive. And I’m almost sure that if I can keep my eyes open long enough, I will find opportunities to receive even in the smallest day-to-day ways.

The persistence of spider webs

Geez louise, everything I’m learning lately seems so connected. I think of this post as a sort of continuation of the last one, though I’m not sure I will be able to express how they are related in my head very clearly.

I just finished One Hundred Years of Solitude (finally), and I am tempted to just go back to page one and read it all over. And then again. It is without a doubt the densest novel I have ever read—so dense, in fact, that I found the experience of reading it a lot more enjoyable than trying to talk about it.  Not because there isn’t anything to talk about, but because there is just too much. I walked away from almost every conversation we had in class feeling like we never got to the root of what Marquez is saying.

One concept we kept coming back to was the idea of cyclical time. By following the same family, the Buendia’s, through six generations, Marquez is able to present a pattern of familial habits impossible to ignore. The family not only recycles names (there are literally five characters named Aureliano, not counting the 17 sons of one Aureliano, all named Aureliano…), they also recycle obsessions and vices.

Ursula, the matriarch of the family, seems to be the only one that recognizes that time is repeating itself, that the same mistakes are being made by each generation. But since she has too vague a grasp on the past to retell it, the most she can give are subtle warnings. She warns her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren against incest, but they refuse to listen—aunts are impregnated by nephews, sisters by brothers. It’s all a physical manifestation of a deeper problem: the family’s inability to break out of itself.

In interviews about his book, Marquez says he is not trying to make general statements about humanity through the Buendia family, but rather illustrate problems brought about by the colonization of Latin America. Still, I think we have something to learn from the Buendias.

In Torrey, we just finished up the semester with the book of Ecclesiastes. This book used to really intimidate me, but the more I learn about it, the more I love it. I’m still pretty confused about a lot of it, but One Hundred Years of Solitude has actually helped me understand bits and pieces.

In Ecclesiastes, Solomon (or the narrator, who most scholars believe to be Solomon) reflects on the vanity of “life under the sun” and the cyclical nature of human actions:

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun…No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11)

I am finally beginning to understand one reason my Torrey mentors think reading primary sources is so important. Instead of reading 21^st century commentaries on Aristotle or Locke, we read Aristotle and Locke, because intellectual history is important. It helps me see what parts of my worldview are just products of the culture I live in, and what parts are essential.

And though I am thankful for my education, there are some days I find myself relating a little too much to Aureliano Buendia. In the last few pages of the book, Aureliano finds himself sitting in a chair that was occupied not only by his recently deceased lover, but also by his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. And, for the first time in his life, “he was unable to bear the crushing weight of so much past.” Just like I felt when I was little and began to learn just how big the world is, there have been many times over the past year or so when I have felt overwhelmed by how big the past is. It sounds silly, but there is even a loneliness that comes with an awareness (however small) of the past, because our world seems so present and future-minded.

But instead of being ignorant of the past or crushed by its weight, Aureliano chooses to look at the present worlds for clues telling him how to keep living: “he admired the persistence of the spider webs on the dead rosebushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn.”