Loss

This summer I read a book by Gene Edward Veith titled God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life. It was immensely helpful as I thought about career questions and hunted for a job, and I commend it to anyone who’s thinking about what to do for a living, or how to do it.

Veith uses the words vocation and calling interchangeably (for reasons Latin students may recognize), both to refer to whatever it is God gave you to do as a worker, a student, a daughter, a son, a citizen, and so forth. In each of these roles you have a calling.

But recently I’ve been thinking about something Veith points out in his final chapter: vocations—callings—change. John Piper says the same thing in one of his books:

Step back and…plan the various forms of your life’s ministry in chapters. Chapters are divided by various things—age, strength, singleness, marriage, employment, children at home, children in college, grandchildren, retirement, etc. No chapter has all the joys. Finite life is a series of tradeoffs. Finding God’s will, and living for the glory of Christ to the full in every chapter is what makes it a success, not whether it reads like somebody else’s chapter or whether it has in it what only another chapter will bring. (from Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, edited by John Piper & Wayne Grudem [Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1991], pp. 56-57)

Callings change. I am no longer called to several activities that until recently I threw my whole self into: study full time, work for a college, be a member of Grace Community Church. Some aspects of that life I miss; some I am glad to leave behind. In a few respects, I find the loss very difficult.

So I’ve been pondering this passage Veith quotes from the Puritan John Cotton:

The last work which faith puts forth about a man’s calling is this: faith with boldness resigns up his calling into the hands of God or man; whenever God calls a man to lay down his calling when his work is finished, herein the sons of God far exceed the sons of men. Another man when his calling comes to be removed from him, he is much ashamed and much afraid; but if a Christian man is to forego his calling, he lays it down with comfort and boldness in the sight of God. (p. 163)

In this new chapter I am called—summoned—to lay down some things and take up others. “With comfort and boldness in the sight of God.”

A loss may be temporary and nonetheless painful, I am rediscovering. So I was comforted this Sunday when my pastor read 1 Corinthians 7:24: “So, brothers, in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.”

It is God who does the calling. And after all, to answer a call is to come closer.

Poem of the week

Enough of serious poetry for now. This one is just fun, even if it is about lost love and desperate valor. (The hero is grasshopper-sized, after all.) Tolkien introduces it better than I can: it is a kind of poetry "which seems to have amused Hobbits: a rhyme or story which returns to its own beginning, and so may be recited until the hearers revolt." Be careful; it'll get stuck in your head.

(A note to those who enjoy the technical aspects of poetry: whatever faults Bilbo may have had, he seems to have been pretty good at rhythm and internal rhyme. See for yourself. Better yet, read it aloud.)


Errantry
by Bilbo Baggins, apparently

There was a merry passenger,
a messenger, a mariner:
he built a guilded gondola
to wander in, and had in her
a load of yellow oranges
and porridge for his provender;
he perfumed her with marjoram
and cardamom and lavender.

He called the winds of argosies
with cargoes in to carry him
across the rivers seventeen
that lay between to tarry him.
He landed all in loneliness
where stonily the pebbles on
the running river Derrilyn
goes merrily forever on.
He journeyed then through meadow-lands
to Shadow-land that dreary lay,
and under hill and over hill
went roving still a weary way.

He sat and sang a melody,
his errantry a-tarrying;
he begged a pretty butterfly
that fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him,
she laughed at him unpitying;
so long he studied wizardry
and sigaldry and smithying.

He wove a tissue airy-thin
to snare her in; to follow her
he made him beetle-leather wing
and feather wing of swallow-hair.
He caught her in bewilderment
with filament of spider-thread;
he made her soft pavilions
of lilies, and a bridal bed
of flowers and of thistle-down
to nestle down and rest her in;
and silken webs of filmy white
and silver light he dressed her in.

He threaded gems in necklaces,
but recklessly she squandered them
and fell to bitter quarrelling;
then sorrowing he wandered on,
and there he left her withering,
as shivering he fled away;
with windy weather following
on swallow-wing he sped away.

He passed the archipelagoes
where yellow grows the marigold,
where countless silver fountains are,
and mountains are of fairy-gold.
He took to war and foraying,
a-harrying beyond the sea,
and roaming over Belmarie
and Thellamie and Fantasie.

He made a shield and morion
of coral and of ivory,
a sword he made of emerald,
and terrible his rivalry
with elven-knights of Aerie
and Faerie, with paladins
that golden-haired and shining-eyed
came riding by and challenged him.

Of crystal was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony;
with silver tipped at plenilune
his spear was hewn of ebony.
His javelins were malachite
and stalactite—he brandished them,
and went and fought the dragon-flies
of Paradise, and vanquished them.

He battled with the Dumbledors,
the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees,
and won the Golden Honeycomb;
and running home on sunny seas
in ship of leaves and gossamer
with blossom for a canopy,
he sat and sang, and furbished up
and burnished up his panoply.

He tarried for a little while
in little isles that lonely lay,
and found there naught but blowing grass;
and so at last the only way
he took, and turned, and coming home
with honeycomb, to memory
his message came, and errand too!
In derring-do and glamoury
he had forgot them, journeying
and tourneying, a wanderer.
So now he must depart again
and start again his gondola,
for ever still a messenger,
a passenger, a tarrier,
a-roving as a feather does,
a weather-driven mariner.


From J.R.R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 192, 211-214.

Postscript

Ha ha, this weekend my car's tape player broke, so I can play neither tapes nor CDs. So now you can picture me driving up the Beltway in silence, or with occasional classical music from the radio. So much the better for prayer, I'm learning.

Too much to say

When I tried to blog about the England trip in October, there was too much to say, so I resorted to posting verbal snapshots. Now I'm home, and sometimes there's still too much to say. What is life like eight months after college, three months into my first real job, settling into home life and church life after being away? Here's my attempt to paint the picture....


8:45 a.m. Sip coffee, check e-mail. A column of boldface subject lines. Routine updates to the website. Steve fixed a typo. Good. The church plant down south begins public meetings next month. Cool. File that one; I’ll need it later. Photos from Ethiopia. This faraway church...riots in their city, but so much joy in their eyes, and their caregroup looks like mine. List of topics for the next newsletter. Mental note: need to find out who writes what. A list of colleges near our churches...no, we don’t have one yet. Website meeting on Wednesday. Calendar...ah yes. Wait—all day? Yes, an all-day meeting. Take a big notepad. Update from the pastor in New Orleans. God’s grace is amazing. Photos of members’ homes, wet insulation hanging from the ceiling, water-soaked furniture piled by the roadside, mold covering the walls. Some of these houses may never be rebuilt, but these people are talking about how good God is to them. I hope I can meet them someday.

* * *

The classical radio station is playing the King’s College Choir. It’s only 6:30 p.m., but it’s dark. A thousand headlights gleam in my rear-view mirror as we, the commuters, cross the bridge into Virginia. We reach the inevitable slowdown at Tysons and inch forward, four lanes across. Finally I reach my exit. There’s an art to crossing four lanes of traffic in a quarter mile. I’m slowly mastering it. The fewer eighteen-wheelers, the better. Now for home.

* * *

I am curled up in the chair that now lives in my room, wrapped in a crocheted blanket, my feet resting on a cardboard box for a footstool. A candle burns contentedly on the low bookshelf nearby. It is 11, and 6 a.m. will come too soon, but I miss poetry. There’s the good old English Anthology, and Yeats, and that fierce woman who fascinated him.... What could have made her peaceful with a mind / That nobleness made simple as a fire, / With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural in an age like this, / Being high and solitary and most stern? ...And I am thinking of a certain sunlit classroom, rustling pages, probing questions, and a well-loved professor sitting at the front, his chin resting in his hands.

* * *

The empty document stares blankly, cursor blinking. Lean back, run hands through hair. Organize your points, in your head at least. Go get a drink of water. Stare at the screen again. Why can I not think? Begin—no, backspace. Bad beginning. Try again. Pretend no one will ever read this. Name the file “For my eyes only.” Ah, that works. A news story grows slowly, paragraphs inching their way down the page. I can rename the file later.

* * *

We sisters are huddled on my bed because I’m the one with my own room, and we can put the laptop on top of a stack of cardboard boxes. They’ve been telling me about this chick flick for months. The volume is low so we don’t wake up little kids sleeping down the hall. We keep up a running commentary in low voices. “She’s kinda cute.” “Oh, he is such a dork.” “OK, that was a pretty good line.” “Lemme guess—here comes the kiss—what did I tell you.” “Aaww, that’s sweet!” “I would so not be falling for that.” “Oh wait—this is the funny part—why did you tell me?” “I’m thinking he’s kind of cute.”

* * *

My portable CD player is grumpy because of the cold, and maybe because it’s early morning. It has some time to warm up while I listen to the traffic report. Eventually, as I wind around the Beltway approaching the Potomac, it stutters to life and I can listen to the Psalms on CD. How quickly I forget—God is faithful, and I need him desperately. After five or ten psalms there’s a worship CD. Your mercy reigns... It rises with the sun.

Poem of the week

The final stanzas of this poem remind me of my parents, who will celebrate their 33rd anniversary this year. Their marriage is a "wild sostenuto of the heart," as this poet says, and the music of it is an inspiration to me and to everyone who knows them.


For C.
Richard Wilbur

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning's crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the endurance of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.

From Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004 (New York: Harcourt, 2004), p. 30.

Poem of the week

The good friends who helped me with my job hunt this summer--and who have helped me with so much more for many years, including my poetry project at PHC--came over the other night to have dinner and "do Christmas." Kind friends that they are, they gave me a little collection of sonnets that I look forward to reading (and, somewhat rudely, started paging through over dessert. I couldn't resist).


Winter Walk
John Clare

The holly bush, a sober lump of green,
Shines through the leafless shrubs all brown and grey,
And smiles at winter, be it e'er so keen,
With all the leafy luxury of May.
And oh, it is delicious, when the day
In winter's loaded garment keenly blows
And turns her back on sudden falling snows,
To go where gravel pathways creep between
Arches of evergreen that scarce let through
A single feather of the driving storm;
And in the bitterest day that ever blew
The walk will find some places still and warm
Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm
To little birds that flirt and start away.

From Sonnets From Dante to the Present, ed. John Hollander (New York: Everyman Publishers, 2001), 139.

Writing for a living

can sometimes have funny results. I just pulled up a rough draft I wrote—and saved—a couple of weeks ago. Complete with brackets, it read like this:

In October, [[a bunch of people]] went to Uganda to [[do medical stuff]]...

If you've been to Raven's rock

Read Sarah's poem. Wow.

Prayer of the week

This week's poem is a little late. My humble apologies. Also, it's not a poem at all; it's a prayer. I don't apologize for that; this prayer is too timely to pass up.


Year's End

O Love beyond compare,
Thou art good when thou givest,
      when thou takest away,
      when the sun shines upon me,
      when night gathers over me.
Thou hast loved me before the foundation of the world,
   and in love didst redeem my soul;
Thou dost love me still,
   in spite of my hard heart, ingratitude, distrust.
Thy goodness has been with me during another year,
   leading me through a twisting wilderness,
   in retreat helping me to advance,
   when beaten back making sure headway.
Thy goodness will be with me in the year ahead;
I hoist sail and draw up anchor,
With thee as the blessed pilot of my future as of my past.
I bless thee that thou has veiled my eyes to the waters ahead.
If thou hast appointed storms of tribulation,
   thou wilt be with me in them;
If I have to pass through tempests of persecution and temptation,
   I shall not drown;
If I am to die,
   I shall see thy face the sooner;
If a painful end is to be my lot,
   grant me grace that my face fail not;
If I am to be cast aside from the service I love,
   I can make no stipulation;
Only glorify thyself in me whether in comfort or trial,
   as a chosen vessel meet always for thy use.

from The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust), 111.