tuesday, 9 september 2014/ ache;

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Still, Lauren f. Winner

#1: Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in the world; I keep living in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze. 

#2: But there is one desert teaching that always stops me. At the center of this teaching is a young man who has gone into the desert to pursue the holy life. After a year or two of fasting praying, and meditating on the Word, he begins to feel that his rule of life is not rigorous enough, so he goes to his teacher and asks for a more stringent discipline. The teacher replies, "Simply do this: go back to your cave, pray as you usually pray, fast as you usually fast, sleep when you are tired." The student, disappointed by this less than scrupulous response, goes to a second teacher and again asks for a more stringent rule. The second teacher says, "Go back to your cave, pray as you usually pray, eat when you are hungry, drink when you are thirsty, sleep when you are tired." Frustrated, the young man goes to a third teacher, who tells him, "Just go back to your cave." The point, I think, is that you can't simply pursue God in the desert; you must also begin to pursue yourself. You cannot fast if you have not first noticed that you are hungry; your hunger is what the cave can teach. 

#3: I happen to feel differently. I find the loneliness of no one knowing if you plane lands on time, of no one to call if you lock yourself out of your house or your alternator dies--I find that loneliness worse. The loneliness of the everyday, more than the loneliness of estrangement. 

#4: "I thought about sloth, about how slothful I've been.""Ridiculous. You've worked hard. I know you have, Charlie."    "There's no real contradiction. Slothful people work the hardest...Some think that sloth, one of the capital sins, means ordinary laziness..But sloth has to cover a great deal of despair. Sloth is a really busy condition, hyperactive. This activity drives off the wonderful rest or balance without which there can be no poetry or art or thought...These slothful sinners are not able to acquiesce in their own being, as the philosophers say, They labor because rest terrifies them."-Saul Bellow 

#5: Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century Trappist monk, wrote that what we are attempting to escape when we try to flee boredom is only ourselves. Perhaps boredom is not unlike loneliness: the best response may be not to run from it, but to give yourself to it, to see it as an invitation to attend more carefully to the very thing that seems boring. One of Merton's biographers, Monica Furlong, put the matter like this: "Gradually...a sense of order overtakes that wretchedness of boredom, there is a movement towards stillness, and in the stillness we find God, and in God, our true identity."   Boredom is, indeed, a restless state. I am, I hope, inching towards stillness. 

#6: I think of a story my friend Julian told me. She was twelve, and she was preparing to be confirmed. A few days before the confirmation service, she told her father--the pastor of the church--that she wasn't sure she could go through with it. She didn't know that she really believed everything she was supposed to believe, and she didn't know that she should proclaim in front of the church that she was ready to believe it forever. "What you promise when you are confirmed," said Julian's father, "is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever." 

#7: Perhaps middle tint is the palette of faithfulness. Middle tint is going to church each week, opening the prayer book each day. This is rote, unshowy behavior, and you would not notice it if you weren't looking for it, but it is necessary; it is most of the canvas; it is the palette that makes possible the gashes of white, the outlines of black; it is indeed that by which the painting will succeed or fail. "Upon the strength of the middle tint depends, in a great measure, the general look of the picture," says one nineteenth-century handbook for aspiring artists. "The management of light and shade, as relates to a whole, ought to be always present in the student's mind, as it is from inattention to this alone that a work is often destroyed in its progress."   Maybe now in the middle, after the conversion, after ten years, on into twenty years, faithfulness is about recognizing that most of my hours will be devoted to painting the middle tint, the sky, the hillside on which no one will comment, the hillside that no one, really, will see. Maybe this is prayer most of the time, for most of my life; I will barely notice it; you will barely notice it; against this landscape of subtle grays, occasionally I will speak in tongues, occasionally I will hear an annunciation. 

#8: And I have heard that some people eventually leave the middle and arrive at an end. I have heard that this end is a place of wisdom, of beatitude. I have heard it is a place of unself-consciousness. I have heard that there is a lot of give in the fabric there.   There is a woman I know in Arkansas. She is a minister's wife, and a minister in her own right, and she has a yoga studio in her backyard, and a piano decoupaged with old sheet music, and in her house is a door from every house she's ever lived in, and when she prays, I believe her, and she is the kind of Christian I hope one day to become. It is like the gospel and Jesus are so much in her that she doesn't have to worry about being a Christian anymore, she doesn't have to worry about it, she is just in that story and it is in her. At least, that's how it looks to me, from the outside. I'm sure she'd tell it differently, but that is how it looks to me.   I expect it takes a long time to get there. 

#9: The Christian tradition is thick with metaphors for the journey to God. The journey is like walking through a castle. Inside the castle are seven rooms, some rooms simple and spare, others full of alcoves and secret passageways. In the first room, people are making a beginning of humbly devoting themselves to God, but they are still vulnerable, still very much at risk of being pulled away. People in the second room are increasingly able to hear God--through holy conversation and holy reading, through prayer. In the fourth room, you may begin to hear God's voice directly. All the rooms are madeo f crystal, and they become more and more suffused with light as you move closer to the seventh room, which sits at the very centre of the castle. In this seventh room, all is light; in the seventh room is God.   Or the journey is like a two-rung ladder of love. On the first rung the pursuer is sick with love, faint with love for God; on the third step the pursuer engages unfailingly in religious performances, in prayer, in acts of charity; by the seventh step her pursuit is characterized by her ardor, her boldness; on the tenth rung her soul is intertwined perfectly with God.   Or again, there is a mountain, swathed in darkness. The mountain is God, and the mountain is your movement toward God. This is what it is like to ascent to God: you are standing at the edge of an abyss, at the foot of a mountain that seems impassable.   All is soaked in darkness. You are fearful. Yet you want to go on.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakmi

#1: Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of one another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

 #2: The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then, sooner or later, I forget about them.

#3: Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such as utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can cause one to feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly unraveling. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes more and more difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. I wonder if I am making myself clear? The mind expands to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability in the midst of the Mongolian steppe. How vast it was! It felt more like an ocean than a desert landscape. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, cut its way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.  

#4: I wonder if this'll make any sense to you. When we got married, six years ago, the two of us were trying to make a brand-new world-like building a new house on an empty lot. We had this clear image of what we wanted. We didn't need a fancy house or anything, just something to keep the weather out, as long as the two of us could be together. We didn't need any extras. Things would just get in the way. It all seemed so simple to us. have you ever had that feeling, that you'd like to go to a different place and become a whole different self? (...) In that new world of ours, we were trying to get hold of new selves that we're better suited to who we were deep down. We believe we could live in a way that was more perfectly suited to who we were.  

 #5: It was time for me to start getting in touch with the reality of the outside world. Try as you might to avoid it, when it was time, they came for you.