"How we spend our days is how we spend our lives." -Annie Dillard
At the end of December, I pulled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek off of our bookshelf again, and read it for the second time. I believe that books sort of crop up at times when we are supposed to read (or re-read) them, sort of like how some rocks resurface when you're tilling the ground. And every once in a while, you find a gem in the dirt. This book is one of those gems. I'm so grateful to have randomly pulled it off the shelf, not realizing at the time how desperately I needed it. Something had happened toward the new year that had made me feel somewhat invaded, as if my privacy (which I've never really prioritized - I've always liked living as an open book in a way) was not my own. It made me want to disappear and wrap myself in some kind of cocoon.
And I'm seeing some changes around me that don't particularly feel warm and fuzzy. From the new signs all over our road that we all feel are comical in their overkill in how many there are now (this is a back country road and no vehicular accidents have happened around here, so why do we need numerous signs about curves and upcoming stop signs?) to the growing storm cloud of Artificial Intelligence on the world's future horizon, all of it makes me want to stay close to home and keep the beloved simplicity of country life tucked under my wings like a hen with her chicks.
Along with reading Annie Dillard, I've kept company with Wendell Berry poems by night before bed. In my cravings for preserving simple country life, I read and whisper "amen" to his love of simple life and also his sentiments of grief over how forests are thoughtlessly logged and not made to be functional as any sort of landscape afterwards, like an abused child left on a random doorstep for someone else, or time, to try and heal. How many small towns try to reinvent themselves to stay "relevant" only to lose their identity that made them beautiful and unique in the first place? It takes a long time to build, and a very short time to tear something down. And some changes are irrevocable once torn.
So in all this, I am trying to figure out how to best climb the sycamore tree to get a better view of what life truly is meant to be, instead of trying to see above the shoulders of the crowd around me. Maybe Christ followers are meant to be short in spiritual stature (like a child) so that we seek to climb sycamores to see things differently, instead of being tall enough to see exactly what the crowd is seeing. Maybe chasing after our own innocence is a gift - a perfume to the world that we can pour over its feet and wash with our tears.
I find myself not being afraid to "waste" time by sitting somewhere for a long time to see if a deer or a coyote passes by, or maybe a fox if I'm truly and utterly blessed. The things worth seeing in this world usually only last a split second to be seen before they're gone anyway. It's not a waste of time to sit on the top step of the front porch listening to the eastern meadowlarks, admiring the way the setting sun behind you turns the bare trees on the top of the ridge ahead of you orange just for a moment. And you wonder if the clouds above them are reflecting the glow of light from the trees and not the direct sun, and then it's over before you realize it, and the trees are gray again.
"Just a glimpse, Moses: a cliff in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing. You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like water under the bridge. You have to stalk the Spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of His fleet passage, and hope to catch Him by the tail and shout something in His ear before He wrests away. Or you can pursue Him wherever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh; you can bang on His door all night until the inkeeper relents, if He ever relents; and you can wail till you're hoarse or worse..." (Annie Dillard)
It's the holy things that you don't get to look at directly, or you only get a tiny glimpse of. If you do get a full interaction in, it's most likely that you'll walk away limping for the rest of your life with a messed up hamstring, or the sinew of your pride cut in some way that leaves you changed.
God let Moses get a glimpse of Him from behind, and He placed Moses in the cleft of the rock. His heart bled with the desire to truly touch and know God, but he could not - only a glimpse was granted. Afterward, Moses' face shone like lightning, just from catching a glimpse of God's backside. Annie Dillard wrote, "Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who had 'not gone up into the gaps.' The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps... this is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."
One person who figuratively went up to the gaps pushed her way through a crowd, was perhaps pushed down, and in a split second she reached up to grab the hem of Jesus' prayer shawl, and the knots slipped through her fingers. She was in the cleft of the numerous people clamoring to see Jesus, but in that moment she saw the same thing that Moses saw: the back parts of God, walking away. Except she got to touch it, if only for a second. I firmly believe that Moses would have been almost envious of this sick woman. Although his face shone after his encounter, her body stopped the bleeding and entered into its Promised Land. Moses' heart had continued to bleed, and did until he looked over the ridge into the Promised Land that he would never enter. And God tucked him under His wing and brought him home. Although he didn't get to enter the Promised Land, his body didn't have to decay in the clefts of those rocks.
I want to learn to place myself in the clefts of the rock where I can see God walking away if only for a moment. And I believe in some ways, I have been there, and have seen it. There are Promised Lands that I now dwell in, blessed with milk and honey. Promised Lands where I never thought I would enter. And here I can rest after a long and arduous journey in the desert.
There are Promised Lands that I won't enter, and sometimes I want to close my eyes and not see anymore. But that is to choose to not live in gratitude for the abundant fruit, albeit sometimes glaringly unusual, that grows in my Promised Land as opposed to others'. I have only to be reminded of Beethoven, (who related his friendship with God as two bears in a cave whose backs lean against each other and growl and snarl at each other). As the unbeknownst lead poisoning took his hearing, he mourned the loss of not entering the Promised Land of hearing the magnificent works he composed. His crowning glory, his 9th Symphony, he never heard during his lifetime, and conducted deaf. And when the last note echoed in the hall, he had to be turned around to see, not hear, the thunderous applause that was happening behind him. In the years to come, he continued to climb to the clefts of the rock, and he did not give up composing masterpiece after masterpiece of the most gut-honest music ever composed, although he never got to hear it. One could say he, like Moses, sat on the ridge above the Promised Land, looked down into it, and threw the scribbles of ink-blotted sheet music into the wind to be carried down into the Promised Land for others below. He teaches me that just because we cannot enter the Promised Land and drink of its milk and eat of its honey, that does not mean that we cannot create blessings for those who dwell there.
Jesus said, "Not as the world gives do I give." What does this mean? I guess it means that we enter some Promised Lands and not others. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that He said that "for those that have, more will be given, and for those who do not have, even what they have will be taken away." Does that echo back to Ezekiel, and call us up to the clefts of the rock to stalk Him and maybe try to catch a glimpse of Him? Those that have the desire to try and see will be much more prone to seeing than those who don't really care to climb, look, hunt, notice, or see. Maybe He means that the less we chase wonder, the less we'll experience it. You don't just happen upon a beautiful sunrise with a chorus of celebratory birds if you sleep in.
Annie Dillard:
"Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds." Something I find is that if you pray and ask for wonder, and you chase after it, God delights in giving it. But it does take time to learn to see, and the merits of the priceless gift grow with our desire, our practice, and our learning to see. Placing ourselves outside instead of our bed for a spring sunrise, for instance. We have to place ourselves in the hands of wonder. Pant for the living water as the deer does. Climb up to that mountain waterfall to get a drink. Stephen Graham wrote in The Gentle Art of Tramping: "And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens."
In the play Our Town, Thornton Wilder described those who truly see life for all its wonders and beauties and truths nonchalantly: "The saints and poets, maybe. They do some."
Where do you live? And I don't ask this question in a geographical sense. Do you place yourself, your mind, your spirit, where you can empty yourself of all the self-consciousness of busy adulthood, and pray for the gift of humble and poetic sainthood? Sainthood cannot be attained, it can only be given. And it cannot be given to me when I am too distracted by my own striving for it, admirable as that may seem on the surface. Striving for sainthood is like mimicking the experience of standing under a mountain waterfall by pouring little cups of water over our head. The desire to be washed in grace must be asked for, not pitifully parodied by our own efforts.
And as for living in such a way as opening your spirit toward becoming a poet, where do you live? I have to ask myself: Do I allow for the quietude of open spaces to envelop me until the silence teaches me to notice things? Am I constantly on the go and live in a fast pace? Do I live in a constant onslaught of stimuli and entertainment? Can I learn to give a narrative to what I see after I have seen and experienced it? There is so much beauty around us created by the Creator who will stop at nothing to create more and more and more life.
I loved what Annie Dillard writes about location (physical, mental, or spiritual) being a part of making the way for the poetry of our lives. "Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies... the novelist's world, not the poet's.
"I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship... and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, 'next year, I'll start living. Next year, I'll start my life.' Innocence is a better world."
Innocence is the perfume that washes the stench of the world away. It is the salt of the earth that brings out worth, flavor, and preserves the world.
I want to stalk the Holy Spirit. I want to learn to see the intricacies of creation more and more deeply. I want to bring that perfume, that salt, as footprints where I have walked. I want to build up, not tear down. I want to live in such a way as I can receive the gift of God's waterfalls of grace. I want to be small enough to climb the sycamore to see above what the large people see. I want to live simply, climbing into and through the clefts that bring us to Promised Lands where we may or may not be able to enter, or maybe only throw sheet music into it on the wind.
P.S. Beethoven's 9th Symphony was premiered on May 7th, Thornton Wilder's play Our Town begins with the date of May 7th, and May 7th is also the day of my birth.