In collecting his wife’s diaries for publication, Leonard Woolf wrote, “At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood– irritation or misery, say– and of not writing one’s diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may well become a mere caricature.”
Sometimes I feel I run a similar risk in writing this blog. The extreme limitations in my “free” time allow me only to write when I am, indeed (and rarely), free– or when Certain Moods hit. And so we get (perhaps too frequently?) posts like this one.
I apologize.
Nonetheless.
In the past two months, three of my friends have been diagnosed with and begun undergoing treatment for breast cancer. This would be news enough– and is. Updates from them inspire faith and also wrench tears and a kind of frustration: as much as we are commanded to– and even desire to– bear one another’s burdens, my cognizance of their pain is limited enough by frank inexperience. And this ineffectualness- or perception of it, anyway- is a burden of a much smaller, but genuine, variety of its own.
We’ve graduated another class at Trinity. I taught these students for almost as many hours as last year’s class, and the concomitant grief of their departure is real but also– for now– mostly unrealized. I can’t register yet what it will mean to return to school next year and not enjoy them among us.
Shortly, a family who is among our dearest friends will move Far Away. Enough said.
And there are other things, tired things, things longer lasting but less blog-worthy that continue on. Things that one doesn’t talk about– not in a blog, anyway– but that weigh us down. You probably have those kinds of things, too.
Since I’ve been free from school this past week, I’ve nursed a pretty awful cold that sprang into Something Worse. I’ve cleaned out two closets, rearranged the boys’ bedroom, made several batches of iced tea and a jar of basil mayonnaise. And I’ve read two books, one of which says what I’m saying here but so much better. It’s Annie Dillard. Again. Are we surprised?
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home– dear and familiar stone hearth and garden– and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner” occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: ‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.’
We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures– from whom and with whom we evolved– seems a mockery. Their ways are not our ways. We seem set among them as among lifelike props for a tragedy– or a broad lampoon– on a thrust rock stage.
It doesn’t seem to be here that we belong, here where space is curved, the earth is round, we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge. It is strange here, not quite warm enough, or too warm, too leafy, or inedible, or windy, or dead. It is not, frankly, the sort of home for people one would have thought of– although I lack the fancy to imagine another.
Sojourners, indeed. Working out our salvation with fear and trembling. Coming along nicely until we lose sight of the prize and then spending precious time searching for it through tears. Busy doing until we forget ourselves, then remembering that so much of the doing is accomplished in inactivity: listening, sitting, being found.
Strange, isn’t it?, that all of our natural impulses are the wrong ones. I think we never actually ever completely get it right.
I am so glad that He always does.
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country– a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Hebrews 11: 13-16
Gratitude, again to Annie Dillard, for her marvelous Teaching a Stone to Talk.
