When God Laughs

Posted by Sarah on Apr 21, 2012 in Uncategorized | 9 comments

I wrote the essay below several years ago, but found it recently as I wandered my old files, in search of projects for this year. I found it oddly encouraging – a sort of lesson from an earlier self to the present in the practice of trusting God for many unanswered prayers. With the close of my time at Oxford, I find myself testy as I face an uncertain future. Old prayers, old needs, old questions rear their heads and I find my heart tightening with the strain of trusting God. So these old thoughts on the story of Sarah and Abraham whispered again that I must hope… and trust… and keep on at the both of them every day. May their story bring you a bit of encouragement too.

♦♦♦♦♦

TODAY, I returned to the old, well-walked circles of Genesis in my devotions. I came to the story of the woman whose name I bear: Sarah, princess. This was a woman who knew the pain I carry today, the ache of many unanswered prayers. The story did nothing to reassure me at first. I struggled to suppress a sudden rush of bitter amusement, for the name seemed like a joke to me. What sort of princess is asked to wander the desert for decades, barren not just in heart, but in body, her arms empty of the son God promised her? I nearly stopped. I did not want to be reminded of how long Sarah waited for her prayer to be fulfilled.

But my eyes slipped down the page to the story of Isaac’s long-awaited birth. There, staring up at me, was a single word, laughter. Isaac. The name of the promised child. What a name for such a baby. In the face of my own weariness, God’s little boy of laughter seemed almost cruel, as if a divine joke had been played. For oh, I knew how hard the waiting must have been. Years of wandering, years of hoping, years of disappointment as Abraham and Sarah stumbled through barren lands and dreams and wondered what God was thinking.  After all those silent years without a baby, why would God give their child the name of laughter?

But as I read, I was wooed into the story by that one, ironic word. Laughter. Like a hidden code, a secret message, it caught me unawares and forced me on. I found laughter woven through the Genesis story like a counter melody, a quiet theme in the symphony of the tale. Both Sarah and Abraham laughed at different times with startling results far before their child of laughter arrived and was so named by God. And I began to see that there was an intricate truth, a woven song in the use of this strange, mirthful name to define the identity of the promised child and the tale that Sarah and Abraham both walked to receive him. I read on.

On goes that road…

Posted by Sarah on Apr 18, 2012 in Uncategorized | 12 comments

and I along with it.

I left Oxford in the wee sma’s of a Wednesday morning. But I walked the river path one last time as the sun set, rambled the old streets with friends, had a last high tea, a last cider at the Eagle and Child (and a good talk with it), and had a finger foods fest in the flats with my friends on the last evening. What a gift this time has been.

It’s hard to articulate what four months in England has given me – the study, the friendships, the chance to think deeply all the time. (Mobile discussions are the best; from tea shop, to pub, to long walk, to flats, the talks are endless and I love it.) Countless books crammed, eight good papers written, and a confidence in my own ability to write, think, and express that is a foundation for all I plan to accomplish in the future.

Oddly enough, the independence of the Oxford atmosphere convinced me that I am ready to move full-time into the writing realm. A student I will always be, a hungry reader, a curious heart. But a writer is the form I choose to now live, to give my whole mind and my working hours to the crafting of stories, the telling of ideas, the thinking deeply about all that is true, and beautiful, and good.

I’m heading back to the states with the intent to get a set of children’s books begun this year. Another love though? Sharing literature and stories with other people. I’ll also be teaching classes, mentoring, hoping to do some “Oxford style tutorials” of my own here in town and online. I hoping to find a nice little cottage to rent and set up a library and bring all sorts of students and friends in to tell them about books and do some creative writing classes.

I’m brimful of ideas, at that illumined place where purpose, hope, and the extra push of a great experience is a wind at my back pushing me into the creativity I so desire and the teaching I long to do.

So. Writing will become a much more regular thing for me in the future, to be, of course, reflected here in an ever-increasing regularity of blogging. (Something I’ve been rather bad at in the whirlwind last few years.) I have a new book coming out in two weeks (more on that and a special on that soon), and I have a brain crammed with good things to tell. The summer is looking good.

More soon friends, for now, a last farewell from this side of the pond.

Easter joy to you…

Posted by Sarah on Apr 8, 2012 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Christ is risen!

Happy Easter my friends.

“Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east…”

(Hopkins)

And now for the non-fiction…

Posted by Sarah on Apr 3, 2012 in Uncategorized | 18 comments

What a feast of story I found in your comments on the last post.

I can’t wait to get home and get these books. Summer reading on the porch, here I come. As a follow up, here is the nonfiction section of the list I made for the students at Semester. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, it’s more a list of love, of books that have companioned and cheered me in my learning and journey of soul.

And of course, if you want to, I’d love to know your favorites too.

1. Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle – the best book I have read on what it means to be a Christian and creative. Also by L’Engle, The Genesis Trilogy, a creative, memoir-style exploration of the the characters and themes of Genesis. Her writing came into my life like a hand thrown to a drowning girl when I was doubting God’s love and goodness.
2. The Art of the Commonplace and Life is a Miracle by Wendell Berry – Berry is a KY farmer and his writing demands concentration. He gave up a brilliant literary career in NYC to return to his family’s farm because he decided that culture was falling apart at the seams due to lack of integrity in family, home, land, and community. He decided being a farmer who used land well and invested locally and was faithful to his family was the way to change the world. I find him idealistic, but his evaluation of what is needed, wrong, or necessary to a healthy culture has shaped my thinking on the subject like nothing else. He says things I’ve vaguely thought but never known how to express.
3. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale by Frederick Buechner. Sometimes we need a slim gift of a book to liven us to the joyous, fairy-tale grace that the Gospel actually is. I love this book. Also, his Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought To Say) looks at the greatest works of four authors (Shakespeare, Chesterton, Twain, and Hopkins) and examines how the keenest truths they expressed were discovered in suffering, their deepest beauty created out of pain.
4. Streams of Living Water by Richard Foster – identifies the different “streams” of Christian faith, the way that different churches/denominations focus on and honor different facets of God’s reality. Presents a picture of all the believers in the world, with different gifts and drives, presenting this holistic, beautiful Church to the world. Also by Foster, Simplicity, which is only partly about the discipline of frugality, and is really about the way in which we must learn to trust God to be the source of all good in our lives.
5.  Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places – by Eugene Peterson. This is a book to be a sort of foundation to your spiritual journey; how to look at the Bible, how to view the work of Christ, how to relate every area of life to the kingdom of God as it comes. A long book, traversing many topics, but with the point of showing the believer how Christ does indeed, pay in the ten thousand spheres of our lives and redeems each one.
6. The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis. A bus ride from hell to heaven with people who talk themselves out of grace – not to be missed.
7. Celtic Daily Prayer, by the Northumbria Community. This prayer book, with the Celtic emphasis on beauty, nature, prayer, has formed my devotions daily for the past five years. Morning, noon, evening, and compline prayers, with meditations, devotionals, and special services for high days. I love the rhythm this makes in my life.
8. Culture Making by Andy Crouch – changed my view on what it means to “change the world” – and affirmed the fact that you can fully serve God in every area of life. Culture is simply the choices we make, the food we eat, the things we create on a daily basis.
9.  Tolkien’s essay On Fairytales – a grand defense of why story is so vital to the soul.
10. The Golden Book of Poetry edited by Louis Untermeyer – you need some poetry! This is the children’s version – with a good few classics, whimsy, and great illustration.
11. The Best Poems of the English Language selected and with a commentary by Alan Bloom. – I may not agree with everything Bloom says about these poems, but he’s got an excellent selection and great insight. If you read this, you’ll have a decent taste of English literature too.
12. The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila. Has taught me how to think of prayer.
13. The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence – a humble monk who trained himself to be aware of God in every moment. Beautiful.
14. The Renaissance of Wonder by Marion Lochhead – this is an exploration of children’s fantasy and fairy tale, beginning with George MacDonald. I love the exploration of children’s stories in this genre, but also the author’s insight into the faith that makes many of them come alive.
15. The Evidential Power of Beauty. This is definitely a book for idealists, but I love this because it is a systematic tour of creation, beginning with the smallest elements of reality and working up to the greatest creation of a “heroically virtuous human being,” showing how beauty is an essential part of our knowing and loving God.

There are so many more, but I’ll stop for now. May your reading journey be swift and bright…

A beautiful Sabbath to you.

Posted by Sarah on Mar 25, 2012 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Put fear aside. Now

that He has entered

into death on our behalf,

all who live

no longer die

as men once died.

That ephemeral occasion

has met its utter end,

As seeds cast to the earth, we

will not perish,

but like those seeds

shall rise again – the shroud

of death itself having been

burst to tatters

by love’s immensity.

-St. Athanasios, as adapted by Scott Cairns in his book Love’s Immensity.

Awake my soul

Posted by Sarah on Mar 23, 2012 in Uncategorized | 5 comments

Sometimes you come awake to God as if jolted from a dream. From the hazy, daily, halfway sight of all the things you usually do, the God-obscuring importance of small things, the hubris of accomplishment and knowledge and money-making. Some song, or thought, or hunger strikes you hard and you open your eyes, breathing hard in the night, fully awake and blessed to be so.

I feel that way today. It’s a misty Friday morning in Oxford and I’ve just sat down at my desk for a day of study, but I rode the bus out to class through the fields and had time to gather my thoughts after the wakening I had in the past 24 hours. So many things, small kindlings have come to me in the past hours. Each a line in a poem, whose final verse sums it all in a truth as vital to me as air.

First the study this week of other religions, other faiths, and with it, the study of myself and the way I live what I think is the one, blazing love and truth in this world; Christ. A troubled wondering was mine, for I hunger to know God, to live him fully and it is so easy to be drawn away. When I am with those that do not know him, can they feel him in me, the pulse of his love reaching out through my clean, repented heart?

Luke’s words next, on my post about sentimentality – his point that the ideal we crave is a Person. One Lover who is and causes all beautiful things.

An old sermon, found on my iPod and casually started on last night’s bus ride home, on God as the first love that must be known, his love as the tenderness we crave in every relationship, the love that no other can replace.

A walk at dusk down the Thames tow path, and the realization that I often lose God. That I fall asleep to his presence, even as I scurry about doing things for him and learning things of him. And it’s not that the doing or knowing or even the scurry is bad, but this, this is the sum of it: nothing means a jot if its done apart from the lover God who is the cause and maker and object of it all.

And its simple I know, this waking. And you probably are ten times farther along than me. But this week my heart aches, truly aches, with the knowledge that Jesus is all and I must toss all the rest of my life to the loving of him. He must be first and center. The thought that wakens me to life in the morning, the joy in my bones, the love by which I am settled in myself and able to see into the hearts of others. Day by day, waking by waking, morning by morning, I must reorient my self to him.

I think that God is ever tapping at our hearts, touching our faces, longing for us to come awake. Sometimes I wake more fully and then I long to tell the world. These lyrics I heard on the misty bus ride this morning sum up the wakened cry of my heart:

This road that we travel
May it be the straight and narrow,
God give us strength and grace from You,
All the day through,
Sheltered with fire,
Our voices we raise still higher,
God give us peace and grace from You,
All the day through.

(Jars of Clay, “This Road that We Travel”)

Sentimentality?

Posted by Sarah on Mar 20, 2012 in Uncategorized | 17 comments

I made it onto the last train to the little Welsh village of my friend on Saturday and settled into my seat with a new Elizabeth Goudge. I found a copy of her children’s book, The Little White Horse, in an Oxfam (“charity shop”) here and had been saving it as a treat for end of term. As my connection sped its way along the Welsh coast and a pearled, watery light blossomed in the sea sky out my window, I began. I I found though, that I wasn’t able to submit to the story with a full giving of imagination as quickly as I wanted.

Eight weeks of highly formal study of children’s books with a professor who constantly cautioned me against sentimentality has made me a wary reader. I did not want to be, but I was instantly alert to the fact that the Goudge passage I was reading would be considered altogether sentimental. The scene was certainly that of a fairy tale; an orphaned girl waking in her new home to find it a tower in a castle with fairy touches of flowers, a window looking over far hills, and a dress whose wearing made her feel wrapped again in her mother’s arms. The passage ended with this: “for people are always safe in their mother’s arms.”

I put my book down, glanced out my train window and thought hard. What is sentimentality and why, as a culture, are we against it? While I agree with the avoidance of the sort of sentimentality actually described in the dictionary as “exaggerated, or self-indulgent feelings of tenderness or sadness,” I find it troubling that people increasingly slap this label on that which arouses true sentiment. Love. Motherhood. Sacrifice. Courage. We have begun to see the holding of ideals at all as sentimental. Anything that smacks of the absolutely lovely, the unmarred or untouched, like the unbreachable comfort of a mother’s arms, is viewed with a skeptic’s mockery.

For we act as if these things cannot be true. There is, I admit, truth in this. We live in a world in which we suffer, we watch relationships break and friendships die. We exist with sickness, we endure hard days, hard work, hard choices. Our modern culture is deeply shaped by divorce, disillusionment, longing, displacement. We are hurried and harried with the pace of modern life and haunted by the ghost-like relationships it creates. The habit of electronic entertainment, the ever-increasing rush to acquire money or things, the unbearable emptiness of relationship that comes through families grown distant or broken, neighbors we don’t know, communities we cannot seem to create, empties us of hope. And we come to an awful pragmatism.

We have to deny ideals. If we feel that goodness or beauty cannot be true, then we can no longer desire, or even honor them. The yearning for home, for friendship, a natural life, or even a completely faithful parent is too much to bear when we don’t believe it possible. We have to dismiss ideals as mere sentimentality. With that comes the unavoidable embrace of a cynical point of view. It is the only defense, the only logic we can use to protect ourselves from the pain of shattered hope. But cynicism, once planted, is a rapid and ravenous presence. We cannot limit its reach and it infects every corner of thought, reaching into the way we view ourselves, our morals, and our relationships to others. When I began my course here, the first week of study was on the validity of childhood as a concept at all. What, after all, makes us think we need to protect a child’s innocence? Or our own?

If we will truly face this question, I think we return to a place of conviction. For sentiment is, at base, a viewpoint of chosen innocence. True sentiment, (not the limp, treacly affectation of over-emotion or soppy love stories) is a value for the pure things we believed in as children before sin and failure tried to obscure our belief. Unfailing love for an orphan heart. A true home, a castle of fairy-tale beauty. Mother’s arms that do not fail. Stories that end in grace. These are not self-indulgent fantasies, but rather, ideals; archetypal images of truth, goodness, and beauty that speak to the deepest desires of the human heart.

To love beauty, to yearn for innocence is not to be sentimental, it is to be an idealist, one who holds to the possibility of wholeness even amidst a broken world. Heaven is sentimental. Redemption is the journey of return to an absolute ideal. I read Elizabeth Goudge because her pictures draw me back to the possibility of renewal and teach me to long for a someday perfection. Her stories are not “self-indulgent,” “exaggerated,” they are bold and ringing in their beauty. They present a goodness that may be obscured in our world, but not therefore untrue. I read Goudge to be reminded of what beauty is, to taste the atmosphere of a possible joy that I forget to desire when I see only the failure and fallenness of the world.

So it seems that even after an Oxford term in the in which I was immersed in the savviest of current literary criticism, I am still a believer in sentimental books. If by sentimental you mean a story that presents me with real beauty, with the friendships I desire, with the picture of an unspoilt world, and teaches me to hope for its realization. Like the characters in my story, I believe that “the brave soul and the pure spirit shall with a merry and a loving heart inherit the kingdom together.” That not sentimentality. That’s hope.