Sunshines Up and Down

It’s a quiet afternoon where I sit, curled comfortably between the warmth of the sun and the warmth of something else, something as important. Both gifts from the Father, gifts that wander down from the Father of Lights to find me warm, safe where I had only just moments ago been cold, cold. Activity out the window and activity on this screen capture attention and distract it around the people who move to and from the booth where I fled to find inspiration in the middle of this morning, but my sunshine walls stay and their brightness holds me up.

I’m writing lots and lots today, finally catching up on all of those words that fell through the cracks. I ought to be in Texas listening to my brother give his voice recital, but I couldn’t get a flight … so today has to be enough to make up for what I’m missing, and it absolutely is. God knows how to bless me. The problem is, though, that I don’t always know how to have the blessings.

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Surprise

The iced air shimmers in the dark, heavily laden with a flood of frozen glitter. It powders the stained-glass night with excitement and brilliant ideas, flashing hard in clean flurries under street lamps. The moment feels like the first breath after a happy surprise, when the air that finds your lungs leaves its promises behind to warm your heart. Your eyes were made for sights like these, and you revel in it even though you hear the rustling reminder that it’s only paper. The shining world that unrolls beneath your feet is only a fragile layer of distraction, and your rigid, pointing fingers put holes in it. But – careful! You’ve heard the paper tear before, been the only one for him to clap his eyes on in the single terrified glance left to him before he’s gone and the wind rattles the edges left ragged by his drop out of the wrapping-paper world. You lost him, but gained a precious glimpse of eternity in his passing. So you keep your balance, or are given it, and with two big pieces of spiritual scotch tape make an x-marks-the-spot. The work is hard, because your fingers are nearly frozen, but, finished, satisfied feet carry you safely home.

Things around here are finding their ends, which mostly means that we’re all starting over. It’s a lot of back-tracking to find and conclude the ideas and relationships that were important to us when we got here, in some cases dusting them off or being surprised by what they’ve morphed into. A lot gets dropped during this process, which is okay, too, I guess. That’s how you figure out what’s really important to you – also a surprise, sometimes.

It’s unfamiliar spiritual geography. I’m nostalgic and restless, anxious and unconcerned, frantically busy and utterly unoccupied. The season is changing, and it caught me unprepared – or in denial, during the moments when I’m honest with myself. I had determined at the beginning of all of this to love it and live in it for as long as I could, and ignore the pain of leaving until after I left. But the leaving will be the hardest. I have found that God has left me remarkably well-equipped to make good out of any situation: it’s the space between situations that leaves me scattered and scared.

But tonight I heard the paper rustle, and I remembered. The world is so perfectly wrapped that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt who prepared it so carefully for you, but the gift is that God decides when to rip the paper away and expose you to your eternity. If I give in to fear at any point, and in so doing deny the promise of God’s protection, where then may I finally draw the line? Our choice on this paper planet is, finally, between fear and faith.

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Around A Square

What started as a contest has suddenly morphed into a rich moment of affection and edification, and my eyes close as my heart opens. Something unfolds from the inside and blossoms under my skin, soaking up the sweetness of careful affirmation, all the more welcome because it had gone un-missed for so long. The tight lines that locked our eyes and edged our interaction are knocked aside by the thoughtful kindesses that bubble out of us, brimming. It’s sharing and confessing and rebelling and embracing and laughing at once, and the echoes leave pretty prints on the insides of my eyes.

I was eating dinner the other night with a few awesome people, when something happened that bugged me. Somebody sassed somebody else, then followed it up with a quick, apologetic “but I love ya.” The sentiment was sincere, but was not properly communicated by the words he used to convey it. He did not mean Love.

A language major really helps me understand the different ways that people tie concepts to sounds. The problem with these ties, though, is that they require that everyone agree on exactly what concept is bound to which word. And humans, as we all know, are contrary creatures that have a history of simply flouting the agreements that hinder them. Love, in the case of contemporary American English, verbalized way too often. That is, spoken to too many people in too many different situations, and thus weakened, and is also too often used in its verb form. Rather than to tell someone that we have Love for them, we toss around “love” to talk about objects we want and trends we like. Something is only merely mediocre when we “don’t love it.”

[Tangent: This, econ friends, is part of the reason why I just can’t get down with that whole anarchy thing. We can’t even reach “willing solidarity” in the matter of grammar – in fact, I’m firmly of the mind that it is precisely the “free, voluntary, direct” use of the English language that has been at the root of today’s moral and ethical train wreck. So I’m skeptical about the propensity of 300 million rational, self-interested agents to achieve anything resembling a society, let alone a harmonious one. (I’m open to discussion on this one … I need more opportunities to thrash out my ideas.]

This concept got driven home again at Unite last night.  I don’t often feel the impulse to attend, being Catholic, but I went along with a friend and had a great time – especially because the speaker talked about Love and Justice … and emphasized Love. God is Love, he told us, and everything else is an attribute. Love defines God, and just describes Him. And Christianity is the only religion in the world that centers on Love; remove Love, he told us, and you’ve done away with Christianity.What a way to redefine a word. I want to challenge you the same way I plan to challenge myself: next time you say the word “love,” think of God. Think of True Love, of its source and its definition. Mean it.

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Can we just appreciate you for a second?

You are one of the most beautiful people I have ever looked at. It surprises me every single time you’re around, how gorgeous you are – even though that’s pretty often. You look like something out of that copy of Vogue magazine that Dr. VonSydow assigned as our Politics of Fashion textbook, except  that there is something hard and cold and clean about you, and it sets you a world away from the people luxuriating on those slick and silty pages. I think I might be able to capture it if I tried, but then the idea of freezing you into a photo seems impossible and even a little irreverent. God made you for motion.

And here I’d like to qualify, to tell you that by these things I mean nothing at all beyond what I say. I do not mean that I love you. Some artists know how to appreciate the human form without adoring the soul that animates it … and I am not talking about your soul. I ought rather have directed this entire monologue to God, because I mean only to praise the good work He did in crafting your features.

I simply mean that you are handsome, that God has blessed you with a strong face that speak of permanence, with a big smile that reminds me of Lake Superior winds, that your eyes are thoughtful and that your expressions are striking. In describing you, I do not claim to know you. In looking at you, I do not pretend to understand you.

This is different, dear readers, than loving someone. Let me show you, let me name a few of the people that I love with a fierce devotion. There’s a girl with silky black hair whose mind matches my own, a bright-blue-eyed beauty with words like comfort, the  two treasures with whom I live, my blood sister, my sassy law school buddy, my philosopher brother, my “twin” brother, a world traveler who loves me back, a brazen musician who doesn’t. The subject of my first-ever photo shoot, a few new ones who sing me country songs, a brilliant poet, the girl who hears me, and a guy who listened twice. The gift-giver, a singer, the little sister, and the Thinker. There’s a kind one and his sarcastic friend, a generous cynic and that person from that thing I did that one time. (And I haven’t even gotten started on my family yet.)

I don’t often pause to look at these people, because I spend so much time seeing them. And they, they are those with whom I am enamored.

It’s an interesting exercise, to compare looking with seeing.

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Is this real life?

I took the LSAT this morning. Then, I got home and crashed into bed like I’d been hit by a tractor trailer, determined to sleep as though I’d just been through some terrible and trying ordeal. And then I couldn’t sleep. I hurt. I felt sad. I’m attributing it to my dad leaving (who’d come down to take me to the test and back and whom I hadn’t seen in far too long and lost far to soon), and perhaps also to the temporary loss of my cell phone, which he accidentally took with him. Four hours away. On a Saturday night. No good.

But that didn’t even really matter after about 6:30pm because – and here’s where I get back to the point – I miss the LSAT. Okay, you’re right … that’s ridiculous. But I miss the way I felt before I took this monumental and unnecessarily traumatizing exam. Because before I took it, it hadn’t happened yet. Circular, I know. Point being, now I seriously am on my way to the next and yet-to-be determined chapter of my life. I’ve taken this exam and the score will be my ticket into law school.

So (follow my twisted logic if you can) I’ve taken the exam and I’m now eligible to apply. And because I can means I really should, in order to better my odds of acceptance. And why would I want to better my odds? Because I want to go to law school, of course. Because I want to graduate, leave my darling, gorgeous friends with their great, big hearts and hearty, humble souls and  their kind, thoughtful minds, strike out by myself, far from home and this place which has built me, on a three-year course of arduous intellectual labor surrounded by raving liberals. Yes.

Lord in Heaven, I’m simply grateful that, today, You’re not issuing a dramatic call to action, or presenting me with to an immense glamorous task. Today, You just need me to follow You. During these strange little hours, You just want me to sit and wait on You.  Help me remember that.

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Houses, Not Homes

Amy’s car hums cheerfully along the expressway, matching the curves of the surrounding traffic until we’re one of a whole, hot, mechanical flock that spools along under the six-thirty sun. Her steady gaze finds my face in the rear-view mirror for an instant before Sam swivels in her seat to capture my attention, her great liquid eyes turned sparkly and snapping from the smile that her mouth just can’t manage by itself. Scott’s vision is keen, and it brushes up against my face every now and again when he turns his head to split a joke with me. The smallness of the speeding space into which we’re all folded is made large and laughing and beautiful around our wonder, branching out of hearts full of blue skies and the things of the Lord.

My bedroom is in better shape than the inside of my head, though only somewhat; in both cases, the order I’d created and left in neat stacks has been severely compromised, though not completely ruined. Two suitcases and the desk chair contain much of the physical clutter, but the book, notebook and laptop left open on the bed remind me of how much mental clean-up remains. I’m pointedly ignoring the box on my cell phone that reminds me that I have new voicemails and text messages to address, but this little light’s battery-powered persistence will burn this resolve away in a matter of hours. My heart, at least, is full and focused, so I dismiss the stress in favor of fresh vegetables and a familiar book. With five days left in the city, these are almost certainly my last precious hours of silence and stillness.

It occurs to me that I’ve never blogged from anywhere outside DC before. I wonder what will change.

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Squeaky Green

My daydreams swirl gently between the dust motes hovering in the bright heat that spills through the skylight. I lay still, barely conscious, and wish for two or three more blankets – not for their warmth but for their weight. As it is, I’m not sure gravity will be able to secure me. Even now, I seem to levitate against the comforter’s gentle anchor. Each heartbeat brings with it the legitimate possibility that I might suddenly slip free the planet’s grasp and float off into a corner of the room. The mere fact that this didn’t happen during the last instant has no bearing whatever on the potential for such an occurrence during the next. A moment and an hour later, the alarm shrieks, and the hand that reaches for it feels heavy.

When I was a little girl – a toddler – I was afraid of grass. It was such that my parents used to be able to spread a blanket on the lawn and maroon me there to play while they worked in the yard, confident that my fear would restrict me to the confines of my cotton island. Now, don’t get me wrong: this practice didn’t scar me or anything – I actually find it pretty funny and love to listen to my parents laugh as they recall the memory.

Needless to say, I’m not afraid of grass anymore (rather, the sterile stretch of stiff fuzz on the floor of my cubicle and the fluorescent  glare which serves to render it visible have me craving the sensation of those silky blades between my skinny toes like never before). But the root of the fear hasn’t gone away. I’m still afraid of getting dirty. I fear the discomfort, the unclean sensation that comes with the awareness of having done something wrong, of having neglected the health of my soul. The word used in the Catechism to describe this state is “disordered.” And I can’t shake the association. Messes make me twitch. Dust, clutter, waste, germs, stains – wrong. I am not obsessive compulsive. But I do make my bed every morning, carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer, and derive a real sense of accomplishment from washing dishes. I have always taken pleasure in creating order. Only today do I recognize this behavior as prayer, as an attempt to reflect or approximate the tender care with which God arranges the myriad details of our daily lives.

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Be Not Afraid

This is what grief looks like. It’s in the curve of his back as he folds in on himself, a mug of forgotten coffee growing cold and dry between his still hands. It lines her eyes with absent, clicks under her nervous fingernails and sucks the empty breath from her laugh. It quivers just beneath her mother’s paper flesh, making her heavy, making her fragile. It runs its hands through his hair and colors his jawline until he looks like he’s grown up too soon. He has. It’s there when someone sobs in the kitchen and no one turns to look. His sister’s mother tries to sweep it away, mop it up, stack it somewhere and make it manageable. No one else tries. It tumbles out with the funeral food, left out too long. It colors like panic when the passwords can’t be found, the rosary lies broken, the insurance company calls, the family begins to leave. It crackles with misunderstanding and dead cell phone batteries. This is what grief looks like.

A sudden brush and the hand of God remind me again that the motions of my hands across a physical world aren’t final. An eternity spent with beautiful souls in the presence of God awaits me, made possible by the sacrifice of a man and a Savior that my selfish heart barely knows. I pray today for the grace of conversion and again a new conversion, to be called over and over to the Father of Lights, the Alpha and Omega, my Creator God.

Who can say how many lives have been changed by this death? I can begin to count them, along with the dozens of tiny miracles that link one to another and evidence a plan, until I quickly lose track. I’m exhausted by what I’ve seen. My mother was called to the hospital along with the priest. She brought only a rosary. I go over every day and stay late or through the night, passing hours in prayer and sleepless conversation. Still, we’re finding pale wisps of optimism. A gap has been wrenched into what was once stable, and yet grace flows and hearts hang in prayer. Peace is a possibility.

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In Medias Res

There’s little point in attempting to post about my first post. I have no idea how to start a beginning like that. Simpler to “take a plunge into the deep end of my head”, to borrow a phrase from a favorite singer.

Job inspires an image of God treading thoughtfully above the quiet curve of Heaven, where I imagine He has a favorite path, traced out among starry pebbles by timeless meditative pacing over the sky. Somewhere below, He can see the top of my head and through into my mind where pale wisps of simple, simple thought color curious vision.

Meanwhile, I struggle with the complexities of reality as I experience it. I’m blessed with the problem of having to choose between many good things, but these, paradoxically, always seem to pose such a distraction from my walk. Today I find myself praying again for the grace to discern His will and the strength to carry it out, for conversion and yet a new conversion – to turn and return to my Source, over and over.

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