Parenting by faith, and not by sight

So I finally (finally!) finished Ann Voskamp's spiritual memoir One Thousand Gifts. This one took me a while; it's one of those books that changes you in the reading of it, and so I couldn't really read it faster than my soul was capable of changing.

Which... is... s.l.o.w.l.y.

But anyway, I finished it, and it's a wonderful celebration of the sovereignty of God; doxological Calvinism, like Piper at his finest. The prose is stunning in some places, tough slogging in others, but the whole book is well worth the effort.

Voskamp burrows deep into the concept of gratitude, finding it to be a way of looking at just about everything about the gospel and the Christian life. Her claims about gratitude seem a little over-the-top, but I keep looking for parts of the Bible that aren't about gratitude in some way or other, and I'm having a surprisingly difficult time of it. She's right; it's everywhere.

Unsurprisingly, I'm most deeply moved and convicted by the parts where she talks about parenting. I keep coming back to the scene where her boys are squabbling and being all-around little sinners to one another, and she chooses to practice the "hard eucharisteo" of giving thanks to God for them, right there in the middle of it. And God transformed the situation into something beautiful.

It's hard to work up the courage to try this at home. Frankly, it's terrifying, and completely unpredictable, because thanking God for my children as they are means loosening my white-knuckled grip on the beautiful little golden image of what they're supposed to be.

Thanking God  for my children means trusting God with them. It also means loving them aright. Augustine tells us to enjoy God alone, merely using everything else as a means through which to enjoy God. I never quite understood what he was getting at until now, but I'm convinced that this is what he meant, and that he's right. It's only when I'm thanking God for my children that I'm truly loving them; the rest of the time I'm only really loving what they can do for me. Perhaps all our loves really boil down into either a love of self or a love of God.

When I thank God for my children, I am loving God through them. And when I love God through them, I am loving them more deeply and truly and fully than I ever can when I think I'm thinking only about them. And Jesus takes this love and breaks it and multiplies it, and this is when the the miracles happen.

It's terrifying, because none of it adds up, none of it's anything I can make happen, and none of it's anything I can take any credit for. This thanksgiving before the miracle is a leap of faith, but beyond the dying of the mustard seed, there is shade for rest, and birds sing overhead. From the golden blossoms there grow new seeds, and I gather them up with the memory of mountains moved. As little as I know about tomorrow, it will certainly require yet more faith.

Negotiation

No poems today, please.
Just the bare, prosaic fact
of a leaking faucet.

Ignore the rhythms if you can.

If you must, commit them to the leaves,
but be sure and bind them up,
to save them for tomorrow.

Crossing the Sea

After the five barley loaves and the two little fish, broken and scattered and gathered like manna from heaven, the crowds wanted to take him and force him and make him be their king.

But Jesus went up on the mountain alone, and while he was still gone, his disciples got into a boat and tried to cross the sea.

Darkness was over the face of the deep, and a great wind rose, stirring the waters. The waters were rough and they were right in the middle of them, three or four miles from either shore, when they saw Jesus walking, nearer and nearer, and they were terrified.

"I'm the one. Don't be afraid."

They wanted to take him into their boat, but already they were at the land they sought.

When the crowds back on the other side woke up, they knew that there had only been one little boat, and Jesus had not gone in with his disciples. But as soon as they figured out that he was really gone, they got into the next boats that came along, to chase him down and try to make him give them more bread. But his body is the true bread from heaven, broken for the life of the world, and he will not get into our boats. These are hard sayings, who can accept them, but there is nowhere else to go. He alone has the words of eternal life, and for all that we try to save him, he saves us instead.

To Odysseus, With Love

I trace your footsteps in my mind
every night you linger
weaving and unweaving improbable tales
picturing always impossible poscards:
the feast flows forever
wish you were here.

Review: Pity the Beautiful

luscious, silky words
glide sweetly over my tongue
leave me poem-tipsy
                         #undertheinfluenceofGioia

For my birthday, my dear friend Sharon gave me two slim volumes containing some of the loveliest poetry recently published; Sounding the Seasons by Malcolm Guite, and Pity the Beautiful by Dana Gioia. I had every intention of savoring them, enjoying them just a few poems at a time, and with Guite's sonnets, that's exactly what I've been doing. His imagery is good, and very wise; worthy of much slow contemplation. But with Gioia... well, I got a little carried away.

I sat down in my rocking chair with baby in one arm, book in the other, intending to read a poem while I nursed. But one poem turned into two, and two poems turned into three, and I ended up sitting in that rocking chair long after the baby had passed out in my arms, long after I ought to have gotten up to fold some laundry. As a matter of fact, I didn't get up until I'd finished the entire book, and I was a little bit dizzy the rest of the afternoon.

These poems are very nearly perfect. Deeply rooted both in tradition and in his own place and time, the formal poems are effortlessly fluid and the free verse is measured and balanced. In poem after poem, the flow of words evokes exactly the right feeling for the subject matter. The verbal craftsmanship alone makes this collection a joy to read.

The content matches the form in loveliness. With a tender immediacy, he explores our shared experience of mortality, and in so doing reveals the sacredness embedded in the mundane rythms of modern experience. Here, too, we are human; this life also is the stuff of myth. It just takes a bard to make us see it.

Like a good friend, these poems offer deep companionship and a fresh perspective. And like a good bottle of champagne, they go down easily, but do be careful. They will probably make your head swim afterward.

In which I mention just a few of the many Ann(e)s who have inspired me

The other day, Isaiah looked over my shoulder at the computer screen, and asked what I was reading. He said it seemed like The Wuggy Chronicles. As a matter of fact, he was right. Those were my words, and I wasn't sure which pleased me more; that my son was able to accurately identify narrative voices, or that I'd finally found mine again.

It's been a while. The prose dried up a few year years ago. I stopped writing very much of it, and when I did write, it would be dry and forced. But thank God, not all words have to be prose, and I wrote a lot of poetry in the mean time. A sonnet doesn't drop down from heaven full-formed after all, but is something that you can sit down and force yourself to do. There's no guarantee that it won't be horrible, but sometimes the very force of your forcing is what gives a poem its life and energy. And then I found that sometimes sonnets really do just show up in your mind full-formed; that if you spend enough time forcing yourself to write poems, sometimes the poems will begin to force themselves upon you. This was exhilarating, and also slightly debilitating. Poems don't wait for convenient times, and I burned a lot of dinners.

But then the poems dried up too. All those time when I thought I was forcing myself to write sonnets, it was really partly an illusion. The choosing was real, and was needful, but it turned out to be only a small part of it. There was something else there, too, and all the choosing in the world couldn't bring it back.

The timing felt just terrible. There were things that I needed to say, had to say, but the words were gone. So I read a lot books on writing, and I tried to learn to write my prose on purpose like a grownup. I crafted meticulous outlines, set myself word count goals, and if this was some sort of school assignment, I'm pretty sure I would have gotten an A. But for all that, the fire never made it out of my bones and onto the page.

I fell in love with Anne Lamott quite on accident, when I got her name mixed up with Annie Dillard and read Traveling Mercies. After that I read Bird by Bird on purpose, and I absolutely adored it. I tried so hard to take her advice and write lousy first drafts, save the editing for later, but it never worked. If I didn't edit myself, word by painstaking absurdly slow word, I wouldn't be able to find any more words to write at all, good or bad. And on those rare occasions when I did manage to get it out on paper, I wouldn't know how to fix it.

Looking back, I guess I learned that always, always, I'm writing blind, and when I pretend to know where the words are supposed to go, it's just not true. There was nothing to do but to simply write what I could, and to wait.

But then a few weeks ago, a perfectly ordinary day was suddenly and decisively a story about everything I've been thinking during those proseless years, and I've been chipping away at it ever since. It's slow slogging, just a few words a day, with much more rearranging and polishing than the story seems to warrant, but I'm starting to be okay with the fact that this isn't up to me. I don't get to choose whether or what to write, and I don't get to choose how fast to write it or how well it will turn out. All I get to choose is how faithful I will be in the living and the telling of my stories, and in the perplexing ever-changing interdependent tension between them. It looks a little different every day, and I can rarely see more than a few words ahead. Faithfulness turns out to be more about faith than I thought.

Last night, Andrew took September to the beach for a little father-daughter camping trip. Whenever he's away, I like to fall asleep listening to a lecture or an audiobook, and this time I found an Ann Voskamp interview on YouTube. And oh! She too writes slow, editing as she goes, and for her as well, the writing comes before the seeing. So apparently this too must be a way of writing, and I am ever so glad, because this is the only way that I can write.

And now that I'm chipping away at the story that I have to write, but don't know if I can, I'm starting to jot down the beginnings of all sorts of other stories too. Perhaps these are stories that I can write at convenient moments, when I'm not in danger of burning anything. We'll see. There are no guarantees, no knowing ahead of time, only the blind faithfulness of showing up and writing anyway. And come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that's what Anne Lamott was getting at all along.

Frustration

He wants me to read him a picture book,
and he wants it to be the one that he took
away from his brother, and he wants to look
at the pictures all by himself and alone,
and he thinks that his brother ought to have known
better than ever to take a look
at the book that he wants to be shown.