Insanity Comes Naturally: October 2011

Every 20-Years-and-274-Days-Old Woman's Battle (Lesson One)

Not that that title refers to anyone specifically, of course. It’s only that I’ve been thinking (a dangerous business, Frodo!). Ruth turns nineteen in just a few weeks. I meant to write something of this nature for her then, but our conversation this morning before work prompted a stream of thoughts that I feel sure will be lost if they are not captured now.

lesson one: do not hide

Quite simply, I was struck today by how well I remember turning nineteen. I think that’s perhaps the most beautiful thing about being spaced as closely together as I and my siblings are – especially with regard to my sisters. That is not to say that all of our situations are identical, but there is certainly a greater degree of sympathy available because nineteen is not so far from twenty.

lesson two:there are right ways to fight

Yes, I remember turning nineteen. It was almost two years ago – was it two years? – and I was contemplating a good few things, and a few good things. I had already decided that I was taking that spring semester off, but by the time the last week of January and my nineteenth birthday rolled around the thing was settled; enrollment was closed, and there would be no changing my plans. I had also made up my mind to spend the spring away at Grandmutti’s, going jobless and largely internetless into a place foreign in all respects except Mutti’s company. And a few weeks after I turned nineteen, I pierced my ears – something no one in my immediate family had ever done before.

Truly, my nineteenth birthday was marked by great changes, and I can’t say I regret any of them. Wonder where my life would have wandered without them, yes; wish I had done differently, never. My spring with Mutti was a much-needed stretch as well as a great refresher, and I needed to learn to know God as good apart from school. (I think I need not mention that I have never regretted the earrings.)

if you have questions, we can talk through the night

One thing that became most apparent in that nineteenth year – and especially in the first four months of it – was how essential it was (is) to know myself as Christ’s, first and foremost. All the things I had derived security from previously were not torn from me completely, but they were distanced in a way that very often felt like loss. And, as I slowly grew to realize, it would be loss – without Christ. Love is never enough without Christ, whether it is the love of a family living in your own house or three states away. It cannot be enough; it is not properly, completely love. And though the human emotions and mind may linger in a state of self-deception and find a variety of relationships and pursuits ‘enough,’ the soul will always return to hunger for the real deal. The mind will chafe and grow weary; the emotions flap about like a tattered pennant at the whim of an angry wind.

I need love. I need Christ.

I've been where you're going and it's not that far.

But it was not only the distance crossed that taught me; it was the getting there. There is a frustrating sort of beauty to having a secondhand, vaguely unreliable car – and that is, that either a road trip can set your teeth on edge and be a hideous disaster, or you can be thankful for every mile of new and beautiful countryside that is crossed without the car bursting into smoke and flames and flying off the road like the mythical dragons that color my Tolkien-saturated imagination.

it's too far to walk, but you don't have to run;

you'll get there in time.

To put it into another literary context: are you Eustace, or have you read the right sort of books? Are you Eustace? Are you going to be seasick over the potential disasters and all the little things that make you uncomfortable, bewailing the fact that rural Kansas and Illinois are really just boring? Or have you read the right books – do you even know what adventure and beauty look like? Does the apparent tedium of the scenic route simply press you to look even more closely for the glimmers of glory, the backwards forms of beauty, the crumpled creases of grace that spatter every mile of our lives? These are the questions that crossing great distances in doubtful vehicles presses one to answer.

lesson three: you’re not alone

It is much the same now that I am twenty (yeah, that day three-hundred-sixty-five days later doesn’t really alter much in the human soul). There is some distance between the things of my childhood that made me secure, a distance that is intended (I think) to make me look beyond the childhood-things to a source of security and love that outlasts distances of fifty or fifty-thousand miles. There is a Love that makes things of the present lovely just as it has made the things of the past. The tragedy is to love the things in either place better than Love Himself.

not to undermine the consequence, but you are not what you do

There is still, at twenty, the odd press to wonder where this road is going, wonder who and what and where lies at the other end. There still remains the constant temptation to slam my hand on the wheel because the vehicle is slow and unsteady, the constant lure to use the rearview mirror to look back at the Egypts where I have lingered. But this is the road I am on, these are the people I have been called to love, and if the going is slow it merely gives us all the more time to enjoy the here.

when you need it most, I have a hundred reasons

why I love you.

I don’t exactly know what I meant this to be; it threatens to be a lecture or a biography, and I didn’t intend it to be either. Whatever it is, I say it as a sister, joined to you by our parents’ blood. They say that blood is thicker than water, but there is another bond between us stronger than the shared blood of a sister, and it is both blood and water streaming from the side of the God-Man, like mercy falling from heaven itself. I suppose in the end this must become a prayer to the giver of such mercy, to the Life who took on death for us: a prayer that is wholly hope and wholly thanksgiving, that you and I will be kept, never loving the people or the rate or the scenery for themselves but always for the redemption we have known and the love we taste and the beauty that lies before us, because we are known by such a great Saviour.

Thank you, Father, for such a love and such a Saviour.

if you weather love and lose your innocence,

just remember: lesson one.

Jars of Clay, "Boys (Lesson One)"

Read More 3 Missages | scribbled by Unknown

Hospital Flowers (Windows in the World)

I do not remember when I first began searching for the sunset. I was on the road before I realized it had begun. My sister painted it into a picture for me once, and I believe that was when I first began to realize. The painting itself was nothing grand: a simple daub of watercolours depicting the silhouette of a girl on a hill against a flaming sky. It was a spin-off of one of the hills in my parent's neighborhood. I had watched many a sunset just so, many times.

But I stopped to look at the painting on its place by my door one day on my way to work, and that was when I realized how distant the sunset was. Fifty-some miles would take me to that same hill; it would not take me to the sunset. The impression of a day gone by - or a day foretold - in an artist's mind; it was not mine to grab. It was too bold and surreal - or perhaps it was too real, the grass on those shadowed hills surely too sharp for my soft and shadowy feet.

I seemed to shake, for just a moment, with a curious longing to expel myself through the veil of the picture frame and stand beside that girl and stare into the face of glory. The voice of Chesterton seemed to ring in my ears: whether it was hell or the furious love of God, I did not know...! But it was early in the morning, and the dim lamp in my room seemed to turn things black and white by turns. Only the picture burned with a maddening brightness, as far removed from my little room and the day ahead of me as eternity is from finite things.

Twelve and a half hours later, I stepped out of a side-door of the hospital and stopped exultantly to breathe of the autumn air. The gentle briskness of the dusk revived my sagging spirits. There was pine in the air; this particular side-door opened into a garden, which (sorry and shabby as it was) held enough charm for my literary mind to walk my body through as often as I possibly could. Thus it was, the cold air biting gently at my face and arms and the pine trees tugging at my nostrils, that I caught sight of the rosebushes. They were draggled and beaten down by the fires of summertime, but now it was autumn and they lifted their blossoms in sweet defiance. On an impulse, I grabbed one and carried it as booty to my car: a simple tea-rose, more wild than not, red and yellow mixing into coral around its hips. The colors burned in the twilight, like the lingering rays of the sun that had already set.

I sang all the way to my car, but the rose was limp and wearied when I reached home, and still the sunset-image mocked me from my wall. Under the lamp's baleful glare, the rose was a tawdry thing: cheapened, gaudy, the trinket of a silly child. I had given my heartsong for a thing that was now pale and dying. I threw the flower on my dresser and went about the business of sleep, dismayed and restless.

I found the rose as I hunted a rogue hair-pin down the next morning. I did not mean to stop at the door on my way to work, nor look at the painting, nor be bothered with flowers, but I retrieved it with a pang of sentimentality. It was dry and the thorns were still clinging up by the flower amidst the curling leaves. It was not the song of my heart the night before; it was a dead thing, a thing thrown away, with no charm except that of a thing given up for the past. But the scent of a rose is supposed to be sweet even after death, and as I sampled it with half a glimmer of regret, the painting caught my eye again.

Then I looked at the rose again, and I knew. It was as though a piece of the sunset-sky had dropped out of the frame and fallen into my hands. I thought I had found beauty in the rose that I plucked just outside of a door I had been walking through every day. But that rose had only been a shadow, an incompletion. Death had darkened its colours, burning the scarlet and gold of the watercolor-sunset all over its petals. It would never be the sunset, but perhaps there were windows and these things dropped through all the time, and the only way to lay hold of them was to let go.

Perhaps there was happiness in these grave emergencies, and happiness in knowing that the painting could be found by being lost. These colours were not so far off and foreign after all.

all along the way the road is paved

with little moments of truth.

Andrew Peterson

Read More 5 Missages | scribbled by Unknown

"It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key."

I fear I have never taken a quote so far out of context. And to top it all off, I am almost late for this. But, well, you know what they say...

(In case you don't know, by that I mean, Better late than never, and better almost late than late. I can't remember anyone ever saying that, but I'm sure someone said it sometime.)

Well! I have had a pebble of a story rattling around in my brain for quite some time now (or perhaps that rattling sound is 'gainst the hollow'd walls of an empty cranium; who knoweth?)... at any rate, it is sufficiently beyond me to prevent my writing much of anything, much less that story itself. I blame it on Dani. It's been five weeks, I think. Yes. And still it eats up each waking hour... always writing, never written... (addendum: the "pebble of a story" is not this story; 'tis not The Brew. That would be too easy by far...)

And so I fall back on Beautiful People, and the character-based questionnaires in an attempt to distract myself. It has been a while since I said anything about my tea story, which still lives but only as an inert and idle plaything. I blame that on the marked lack of tea in my life the past few weeks.

beautiful people: lady jane grey

Lady Jane belongs to that odd variety of characters upon whose existence a story depends absolutely, a fact which is only apparent because of her marked absence from the plot itself. I have yet to bring her into a single event in the timeline of the story (even in my mind). All she has done is not be there, and still she manages to bleed personality all over the silly thing. I know her better than any of my other characters simply because of that. I have discovered more of her story and ideals through not writing them than those I am actually writing.

do they have any habits, annoying or otherwise?

Lady Jane is in the habit of disagreeing with her brother, which he finds annoying. She is also in the habit of gardening, which the gardener finds annoying because she is better at it than he is, and which Lady Jane finds annoying because she has terrible allergies. And she has a habit of rejecting William Taylor's proposals of marriage, which (no doubt) vexes him terribly. As far as usual habits go, she has a habit of being orderly in that kind of way that most people call disorder, but if this annoys her butler he never mentions it to me.

what is their backstory and how does it affect them now?

Jane grew up with nobody around but a nursemaid, and then later a governess. Her constant company apart from that (before she was old enough to know what was proper) consisted of the Taylor children, the nieces and nephews of her governess. Her general state of isolation did not vex or weary her; she took to it as naturally as a fish to water. I think it could be rightly said that she did not become, but was born something of a hermitess (despite the companionship of the Taylors in her childhood and a fine education at a school full of sweet, friendly peers) and cares very little for the society or companionship of others. And as for the Taylors, she sees little of any of them except for William on occasion, and I'm afraid she despises William for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with their separate classes (most of which he deserves). Prior to her disappearance, she exhibited an independence which some might call heedless and headstrong in anyone of a lesser class.

how do they show love?

Jane, if you'll permit a bit of repetition, is a hermitess. She is not often in the way of showing love - that is, she is not full-out affectionate. She demonstrates her affections for her household staff by allowing them to work for her; she does not need them, and would (by her own nature) rather live completely alone. Apart from that, if you meet her on the streets and she likes you, you probably will not realize it immediately, and may never do so unless she has some opportunity of doing you some good later.

how competitive are they?

While the people of her day certainly do climb ladders in society and play sports and engage in other pursuits that necessitate competitiveness for success, Lady Jane has none of these in her immediate context. She is, quite simply, successful by virtue of her existence and character. She has never vied for the affection of a man or a human being; she has never had to, for it was either owed (and given) or unwanted. She is not into making money; she has enough to live comfortably by. She does not need to exalt her station; she has one of the highest places in the country, and she is not flamboyant enough to render herself insecure. Perhaps one might call her politically competitive... she is thoroughly, and perhaps violently, passionate about the good of her country and its people, but in a way that is so foreign to my own pseudo-democratic state of mind that I still do not quite know what she is about. She does not give herself to a system of government or a political party or a cause; nevertheless, she has put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak, and beyond that it is not for me to say.

what do they think when nothing else is going on?

Lady Jane is one of those proud, odd souls who can look back on the moments of decision in her life and know she did rightly without pang or suspicion of self. Mostly, she likes to look at the edge of the forest just under her bedroom window and wish it were not so far removed. Perhaps that is her only regret.

do they have an accent?

Jane has the moderate, polished tone of a well-bred Englishwoman (I cannot put a regional name to it; I do not know enough). I can best describe it by saying that her voice is neither fussy nor dull, and she speaks with more strength of conviction than outright passion.

what is their station in life?

The title Lady Jane speaks rightly of nobility. She is from a family of a higher station in society, though not older, than the Falcons. The title itself is not worth very much at all; lords and ladies in Chelsea usually fall amidst the rest of the families of property (Darjeeling could probably go about as Lord Falcon, if he cared to), but somehow the Greys managed to attain to greater prestige. Here the details are vague and probably intentionally obscured, but her mother married twice and Jane has a half-brother, and the few people who know that much attribute it to that second marriage.

what do others expect from them?

That depends on whom you ask. The general populace expects a bucketload of enigma, with a lot of scandal underneath to provide fodder for speculation. The butcher and the grocer expect their bills paid on time with no fussing, which they get provided the produce is good. Those with political and economic interests other than the butcher's and the grocer's prefer her to remain in her corner of the world (she would be useful in society, were she not so unhelpful).

where were they born, and when?

Lady Jane was born in Steeple, Chelsea, being the daughter of Lord and Lady Grey, who held (and still hold) a little less than half of the profitable property in the area. This took place thirty-some years before our story begins. The historical timeline of the land of Chelsea is as of yet very vague and unknown, and so a specific date would do you almost as little good as it would me.

how do they feel about people in general?

Lady Jane never knew her parents. She thinks often of them, and finds (contrary to popular occurrence) that their shadowed faces do not convince her of her own anguish or bitterness, but a simple curiosity and satisfaction. She sees enough to know they were people, and she knows enough of her station to realize she might not have known them as such if she had met them. Individually, she does not seem to feel about anyone; that is, she anticipates true and proper sentiment and acts on it without bothering to languish in a state of feeling. As for people in the broadest general, she loves her country, but not with the usual sort of patriotism; she will not stand up and thunder out passionate pleas for the good of the people. She is not interested in causes; she is a strange blend of reserve and hearty disdain for the impersonal. If she has ever loved anyone, it is but one person, and that with a fierceness of will and action that most people mistake for a lack of intention altogether.

suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Read More 4 Missages | scribbled by Unknown

Sailing in the Storm

Hey, you.

I know you're tired. In fact, I know you're exhausted. And I know that life just feels like a battering of assignments and tests and hours put in here for school and hours put in there to pay for the hours you put in for school, and meeting this person and talking to that person and worrying about this other person... yeah, I'd say I know Anna's life pretty well.

And I know that sky looks threatening, and the boat is the last place you want to be. I also know why.

Yes, I know the secrets of the minefield, of the storm, and I know the secret of your heart: you're not terrified of craziness and explosions and being exhausted from an excess of work. The reason the minefields terrify you, the reason you and so many others stay away, is because you're afraid you won't feel anything, and you hate being bored.

Wake up. The peril is not in the obvious hazards, the literal bullets, the schedule that wings by in a blur. The danger is in the landscape that never changes, the ground that never seems to ascend or descend, the monotonous plodding that grows more maddening with every step.

Peril is everywhere, but especially in the mundane. The thing that makes the minefields dangerous isn't the mines; it's the fact that you can walk them and never know the mines are going off all around you. That you would dive headfirst into the teeth of death and experience salvation and still - still! - shut your eyes to the beauty of the reality of what God is doing because it is too small for your backwards, twisted mirror-vision to detect, too boring to tickle those itching ears, too even-keel and ordinary to rock the emotion-springs of your heart.

This generation is obsessed with feeling things, and you are no different. So easily entertained by news stories and television shows and musical numbers by popular bands that bellow angst and candied-happiness and troubledness, the never-ending lie that life is what you feel, and you have to feel something to know your life. Meanwhile, we scorn things like marriage or simply being a full-time daughter or being a blue-collar laborer for the next twenty-plus years because... well, to dress it up and put it in as close-to-the-truth and disgustingly false way as possible, a Christian is all about risk, and I don't feel like I'm risking anything in any of those boring commitments.

That's why you won't get into the boat when the storm looms overhead. It's not because you're afraid of sinking. It's because you don't want to risk finding out that the storm isn't be all that it's cracked up to be - or, rather, that you're not all you've convinced yourself you are. Dan Haseltine hit the nail on the head when he sang: I have no fear of drowning; it's the breathing that's taking all this work. The terror is in not in going down with a blaze of glory; the terror is in finding your first squall to be a few mere ripples, and that even those are enough to keep you hanging over the rail puking your guts out for a lifetime. The terror is in realizing that it doesn't take an epic gale to reduce you to the dust that you are.

Yes, there are minefields, but they aren't guts-and-glory. They're the stupid little things we have to do every day to be the people God has called us to be and love the people he has called us to love. They're the myriad of insignificant little conflicts where our life is on the line, and we have to surrender it. And that's the danger: the searing heat of the blast doesn't get any closer to us than when we are totally unaware of its presence. There is peril in the mundane, and it is that we do not know the fires are singing the hairs on our necks because we cannot feel them. We cannot feel because we are bored; we are bored because we would rather be secure than have our ordinary things threatened. Take my life, Lord; create a World War - just don't take my routine, don't take my schedule, don't take my secure little corner of the world, my idols of the thousands of insignificant places where I can feel self-sufficient... give me something grand to feel, something I don't care about so all these little things can still be mine to me, and never yours, never surrendered...

Are you disgusted enough already? Then forsake this gluttony of experience. Feelings are all very well and good in their place, but it's faith that's meant to be your eyes now. To say that life is boring because you don't feel the battle is to fall asleep in the face of an epic gale, even as we shake in our rubbers at the tiny ripples. Yes, that's you. It's good to feel foolish and know ourselves to be dust. Throw yourself on the grace of God. That grace is the only reason you may have faith to see the goodness in being small, in being foolish, in being secure in the greatness and wisdom of Almighty. Are you going to puff up yourself in the face of such great grace and wisdom and strength, protesting that your eyes can do better without the faith he gives so freely?

Come on, soul; you know you were bought with a price, and there's nowhere for you to go but the path grace forges. Let's clamber aboard this vessel and leave the oars behind. We can weigh the anchors of pride and self-sufficiency and unfurl the sails. Let's leave the wheel unmanned; the rudder's broken anyway, and my compass always forgets which way to point. We don't need to use the stars to divine where sovereignty drives us: you know it means us to go further up and further in, and "sovereignty" isn't just a nice word. It works. No, it doesn't feel like a thundering charge up the waterfall into glory yet - this is a Far Country, and we are still plodding, but the beauty of the mundane is that there are always glimpses, and the tragedy is to miss them.

So come on, you. That sky looks doubtful enough for sailing; what are you waiting for?

That's what the promise is for.

Read More 2 Missages | scribbled by Unknown

Every 20-Years-and-274-Days-Old Woman's Battle (Lesson One)

Hospital Flowers (Windows in the World)

"It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key."

Sailing in the Storm

The Blind Leads:

The Authoress

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