Here are some words that might be familiar to many of you, and they’re more than excellent advice:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4: 8

The Apostle Paul penned these to the church in Philippi, a church he’d founded around ten years before. From prison in Rome, he wrote to thank these friends for a gift they’d sent, and he encourages perseverance in Christ and the deep importance of unity among believers.

His words here are very nearly the end of the letter, following on an admonition to counter anxiety with prayer, thanks, and simply asking God for what you need. It’s straightforward and also— as is true of so much scripture— profoundly personal in its application. I have uncounted nights of anxiety in which I’ve prayed those very words and then directed my thoughts after them.

We all need to follow Paul’s counsel here from time to time.

But the apostle couldn’t possibly have meant that this should control the sum total of our thinking. If that were the case, we’d have to turn blind eyes and deaf ears to the news. We’d have to ignore the needs of those around us— not to mention the weaknesses in ourselves.

Jesus said we’re to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16), but we can’t be wise if we’re ignorant.

Recently I sat down with Paul Marchbanks and, through the lens of Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, we talked about the power and importance of exposure to what we call the grotesque. Marchbanks argues that reflection on the bizarre, ugly, and disturbing in film and literature can reap some deeply important rewards in our faith and in our relationships. I think he’s right, and you’ve got the conversation here in this newsletter to see if you agree.

As I say in the video, Marchbanks teaches literature and film courses at Cal Poly and writes film reviews at Christianity Today. He also has a great YouTube channel where he mines ideas in film and literature (don’t miss the playlist of 13 videos on the redemptively grotesque). Father to two daughters, he made a video specifically about the benefits of guiding young children in watching “hard stories.” You might want to watch that video, too.

I’ll have more to say on the topic of the redemptively grotesque in my next newsletter, but for now, enjoy my conversation with Paul. There’s so much here.

And thank YOU, as ever, for being here, too. Please feel free to leave your comments!

With joy,

Rebecca

The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as materials. Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be; and whatever the size of a family, every member should be employed either in earning or saving money. -from The Frugal American Housewife1

Well, it’s August and here we are: end of summer. But I resist this because it’s not really summer’s end at all. The autumnal equinox is more than a month away.

What we’ve got right now is The Return to School, which should make all of us at least consider bouquets of newly sharpened pencils. Because all of us know the feeling, even if the experience is long in our rear-view: it’s the end of summer as we know it.

The Return to School is a whole thing. Maybe you recall being trooped to the shopping mall for new clothes and shoes. You’ve seen for yourself the back-to-school sales. It’s binders, paper, scissors, and pencils for children and high school students. It’s dorm-room set-up for college. Maybe it was you I passed in the toiletries aisle at Target, your cart jammed with storage bins, a mini fridge, and a roll of plastic-sealed carpet leering ominously as a cannon off your port bow. I remember you.

Yes, it’s that time of year, arriving well before the pumpkins and their spice, before sweater weather, before the leaves turn. Time for those of us in academia to retreat into air-conditioned classrooms, commencing a precise series of weeks known as a semester. Here we go.

My colleagues and I were back at school last week getting ready for the new year. I call it “teacher in-service,” but that’s just a simple way of saying that I was working at school despite the absence of any students.

In retrospect, I think it might better be called housekeeping.

Interesting word, that. “Housekeeping” has nothing to do with paying one’s mortgage or rent. It doesn’t refer at all to maintaining ownership. Rather, it (broadly) means maintenance itself. Think of the untimely knock on your hotel room door and, “Housekeeping!” announced from outside. They’ve come to maintain the room: to clean it, air it out, make the beds.

Housekeeping at a school is different, of course. Last week, we enjoyed happy reunions after summer weeks apart. We spent time in prayer together. We remembered the school’s mission. We had updates and reminders from our HR, counseling, and safety departments. And we were trained again in administering emergency prescribed medicines, just in case.

We also had division and department meetings, lunch, and time to work in our classrooms.

All of this a kind of housekeeping: metaphorical sweeping up, tidying. Reminding ourselves of where and how things go. Getting things in order.

How do you keep house? Do you keep house? In addition to the general cleaning, I have some rules:

1. The top sheet goes on print-side down and is tucked at the bottom with hospital corners.

2. The bathroom always has visible an extra roll of toilet paper and a plunger. The last thing a guest in a pinch wants to do is lean out the door and ask for either of them.

3. Wastebaskets are handy and, as often as possible, emptied. Nobody wants to look at garbage.

4. The kitchen cleaned before bedtime.

5. And finally, home should keep available books, music (and musical instruments), plants, sunlight, a pet or two. And children, if you can get them.

But none of these is necessary, I’m sure you’ll agree. These are housekeeping extras, not fundamental. They are house-graces, if you will.

Housekeeping is profoundly practical. I think it’s about what’s necessary, fundamental as bringing a pencil and notebook to class. The word’s third definition, in fact, is this: “the routine tasks that must be done in order for a system to function or to function efficiently.”

I have some housekeeping yet to do before my students arrive, and thinking of it in these terms makes me ask what my students must know— necessarily, fundamentally— about orthodox Christian theology?

In my classroom, I define theology as the study of God and all things related to God. Here’s what I love about that definition: it encompasses everything, because all things are related to God. As the maker of all, everything— everyone— is his idea. All that breathes, all that is exists because he conceived of it, then brought it into being.

As such— and whether or not we know it, whether or not we even think we want it to be true— all things belong to him. Psalm 100:3 says it this way:

Know that the Lord is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

That’s the beginning of my theological housekeeping. The 9th grade students start with it, and everything in the curriculum grows from there.

I wonder if all academic disciplines could be categorized in this way. When I taught humanities and, before that, English, housekeeping might have been organized around important dates on a timeline or grammar.

But what of the graces in these disciplines? The grammar, the timelines, the other essential details were a kind of scaffold. I wanted the students to learn to think, to process and weigh ideas. I gave them building blocks to form a solid essay, taught them to mount and defeat an opposing argument.

The graces came from the students themselves when, after practice and example, they learned to express their own ideas and to do so cogently, succinctly, even beautifully.

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I am not my own but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood; he has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.2

This is the grace of teaching Theology— never by force or obligation. But that, through weeks and months of considering the all-powerful and loving God, my students would discover what belonging to God can mean. That they are not only contingent and dependent on him for their existence, but that they are known by him and can know him, that they can live for him a life of ever-increasing joy.

And now few housekeeping notes for this newsletter.

1. It’s my aim to write to you weekly, but if I’m going to pull that off, some of these missives will have to be shorter than others. I’m guessing you won’t mind.

2. A new type of post, which I hope to send your way monthly: video! About once a month, I’m hoping to post (sometimes live!) a conversation between me and another thinker-in-Theology. Typically, you can anticipate these conversations coming to you in a post of their own, followed a week later with some writing (by me) that explores an aspect or two of that conversation. Perhaps you’ll remember that I had one such conversation last year. I enjoyed it so much, and I hope you did too. So be on the look-out. First up: a chat with Paul Marchbanks, professor of film and literature and film reviewer about this movie.

3. This one’s tentative, but I’m hopeful: a return to book discussions. I started this (also) last year, but life got away from me. Nonetheless, the reading and conversations were great, so I’d like to give it a go. Stay tuned!

4. And finally, it came to my attention last week that Substack offers an AI reading of this newsletter. Please know that, unless I notify you otherwise, I always record my newsletter for those who prefer to listen, and it’s always available at or near the very top of the newsletter. Where we can, let’s stick to Real People, amiright?

I have no poem for you this week. Instead, enjoy this remarkable paragraph from Marilynne Robinson’s brilliant novel Housekeeping. It’s poetry enough.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

If you or someone you love is returning to school soon, then here’s to you and them! There’s nothing like a fresh beginning, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, many thanks to all of you for being here. I love this little pocket of the interwebs, and I’m so glad you want to join me in it.

With joy,

Rebecca

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I have a new word for you.

Well, it’s a new word for me, anyway, and I’m a little bit thrilled about it because it’s a simple word with a simple meaning, and yet I’ve never heard it before.

What is it? you’re wondering, or I hope you’re wondering. Otherwise, why go on?

Quickly now: the word is ludic.

There, I’ve told you. Now you must answer me in the comments below: Do you already know this word?

You silent reader, you. I know you’re eager (of course you’re eager) to know, but I’m left to wonder which you want to know first: the word’s meaning or where I found it?

I found it here, in a review of the novel Orbital:

Bill Anders’s “Earthrise” picture, taken on the Apollo 8 moon mission, in 1968, presented the Earth, for the first time, as we see the moon: gibbous, squashed, half shrouded in darkness, and almost ponderously ludic, as if playing sluggish peekaboo.

Looking at that photo, reading Wood’s words, can you guess what “ludic” means?

“Peekaboo” is your best hint: ludic means playful.

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The synonyms for ludic are many. Many.

Here are some: comical, hilarious, droll, humorous, jocular. These make sense to me in the context of the word’s primary definition, because playful— to me— is joyous and innocent, constitutionally positive.

But synonyms tell rich stories, providing dimension one might not realize or, indeed, anticipate. Such is the case for me with ludic, which is defined as above but is also synonymous with brainless, daft, puerile, insane, and asinine.

Alas, so pejorative!

And also I get it: the playful can trend this way. I’ve seen it happen. Lots.

But still, my introduction to ludic started so well. When I think of playful, I simply don’t think (at all) of behavior trending toward weak-minded, half-witted, or mad. Do you?

Of course, depending on how you connect words to others in your brain, ludic may immediately bring ludicrous to mind. And ludicrous does indeed mean half-witted.

Interestingly, ludicrous’s first meaning is funny (causing or intending to cause laughter); but in my experience, it’s more commonly used for its second meaning, which is ridiculous:

After Steve’s ludicrous tantrum over the tofu, I hardly wanted to take a risk with him at the Ethiopian restaurant.

We have no problem with the connection between ridiculous and ridicule. These clearly go together: we ridicule that which is ridiculous. But ludic — I mean playful— need not entail the scorn inherent in ludicrous, right?

I find it a little sad. As I said, on meeting ludic I had no idea of its irrevocable tie to farce.

In ninth grade I found myself in honors English, a surprising development as I was innocent of academic ambition at the time. I had no idea what I was in for.

In that academic year, we read and discussed as a class three full Shakespeare plays (this one, this one, and this one), a passel of short stories (including this one), and maybe three to five full novels (unforgettably this one and this one). We also had a nasty little project going known as “supplemental reading,” for which we had to select from a list one novel a month, read it in full, and then— without any notes or discussion— respond to it via a written essay in class. And no, we weren’t given the essay question beforehand.

Never mind what students appear capable of in terms of reading nowadays. The coursework in that 9th grade honors English class was vigorous.

Also, almost without exception, the literature we read was sad.

The only lighthearted text I recall from that year was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And in places, To Kill a Mockingbird made me laugh out loud. Everything else was ponderous and heavy. Tragic.

This got to me.

I continued with honors English throughout my high school career, but I was wary. At the beginning of year two, I pulled my new teacher aside and asked, Why was everything we read last year so sad? And should I be expecting more of the same?

Funny the things I remember. We were standing outside her door just before the start of class. Behind her, morning sunlight filled her classroom through windows that looked into a begardened courtyard. I didn’t yet know it, but over the coming months she was to introduce me to Greek mythology, which I would love. We would read The Iliad, Julius Caesar, and El Cid. I would give a very bad speech. And we would embark on a vocabulary study that would terrify me, prepare me for the SAT, and refine in me a love of words that would shape ways in which I see the world.

She explained: We read tragedies because the tragic takes the human condition seriously, whereas the comic simply doesn’t.

Fair enough.

Who doesn’t love a good comedy though, am I right? In the heaviness of this world we need to laugh. And laughter is good for you: it increases blood-flow, protects your heart, and relaxes your muscles. It also releases things like seratonin, which boosts your mood. And shared laughter connects us to others.

It’s healthy, too, to laugh at ourselves, to confront our shortcomings as humorous so we can rise to overcome them or at least realize they’re not tragic flaws ushering us to an unavoidable doom.

I have a dear friend who with her husband always watches an episode of a sitcom just before going to bed. Bill and I also have a set of favorites we love to turn to (here are some of them). Sometimes we’ll pick one out intentionally after a heavy day or a particularly unhappy documentary as a kind of catharsis.

It works.

But there’s a danger in humor if we find ourselves always and only looking for the comic. It can slide so quickly from ludic to ludicrous, from finding the bright side to seeing everything as a joke.

Years ago I saw a new TV comedy advertised that I knew we’d love. I was kind of proud for having discovered it, as it’s usually my husband or children who introduce new delights from popular culture.

I wasn’t wrong: the sitcom has a strong set of hilarious characters, and the writing develops their various, self-inflicted problems in brilliant ways. But I stopped watching it a long time ago. Why?

To a person, the characters are only comic fools. There’s no goodness among them, no strength, nothing to root for. The plot always and only serves to lampoon their idiocy, which ultimately leaves me feeling a little hopeless. The show is 30 minutes of well-written, amusing contempt— and I can do without contempt, thank you very much.

contempt. 1a: a feeling of intense dislike for someone or something regarded as unworthy of respect or approval : disdain.

---

I’ve wondered from time to time what makes a thing truly funny. Philosophically, I mean. How do we define humor? I’m sure there are studies on this.

In considering it, I’ve actually questioned what God finds funny— for certainly he has a sense of humor. One could (one should) argue, in fact, that he has the very best sense of humor. That he invented humor itself.

I’d like to pursue this curiosity at some point, but let’s make this distinction here: surely humor is more pure when one is laughing with someone rather than laughing at them. Because there’s something about laughing at someone that minimizes their plight— that could, if we’re not careful, belittle them. That finds us— sometimes, anyway— viewing them with contempt.

Of the Greek myths we studied in 10th grade, the story of Apollo and Daphne was my favorite.

It begins with a tease: the god Apollo, archery master that he was, laughed at Eros because of his tiny little bow. But Eros, who happened to be the god of love, doesn’t see the humor. When Apollo is looking the other way, Eros shoots him with one of his arrows, making the god fall in love with a nymph named Daphne.

This is the love god’s M.O., as is revenge, when necessary: he shoots Daphne with an arrow that makes her hate love. By the rules of Greek mythology, the relationship is doomed.

Apollo pursues her and she flees, but a nymph is no match for a god. As he gains on her, Daphne cries out in terror to her father Peneus, god of the river. Just as Apollo reaches her, Peneus transforms his desperate daughter into a laurel tree.

It’s a simple origin story: Apollo can’t be united to his love, but he gestures toward granting her eternal life by transforming the laurel into an evergreen. And in most ancient representations of the god, you’ll see that he wears a crown of laurel leaves.

Famously, the laurel wreath itself went on to symbolize power and achievement (think crowns in the Roman empire), but Apollo famously wore it to honor Daphne. It’s a reminder of his love for her, but it must also remind him that his jest was foolish, as it cost Daphne her life.

I liked that story because of Apollo’s vulnerability, an uncommon trait among on Olympians. Most of the time, the divine wield their power over humans in ruthless self-absorption.

Sure, you can find your exceptions. But even Athena had an ulterior motive in aiding Odysseus. She definitely had an affinity for him, what with all his clever craftiness, so like Athena herself. But don’t forget she had it in for Poseidon at the time. Helping Odysseus was a way for her to exact some punishment on her uncle.

Most of the time, Athena is as selfish and vengeful as the rest of the Olympians. Just ask Arachne.

You can’t argue that this little missive is anti-humor. Remember that I started with a love for ludic’s primary definition. Laughter is one of the best things we’ve got going, I’m convinced of it.

The problem I have is with scorn. Derision. A posture that belittles. These have so much to do with turning a blind eye to the beautiful, to subsisting on half-truths. To holding the world at ironic lengths.

What I mean to say is that there’s danger in it.

Remember the description of the moon I quoted above? It’s part of a review of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. The novel is a fictional account of twenty-four hours aboard the space station, told through the experience of six astronauts. As these scientists go about their daily tasks, they view Earth out the station’s windows: seas and oceans, continents and cloud formations over the course of one day.

Harvey writes that the Earth

harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

This novel sings Earth’s singularity and assents to its insignificance.

And I do think it’s natural, upon seeing something so vast, so apparently limitless as our universe, to feel small. But does knowing that smallness also make us extraneous? That’s a lesson extended from the wrong gods, a heritage of our own mythologies. It’s a tale told by Zeus and Tiamat, by Lamech and Gilgamesh and, more recently, Nietzsche and our interpretations of Darwin. What have we learned?

That next to power, weakness is ludicrous, insignificant. Contemptible.

Harvey is right: the light is coming through. But we need to change our view: let’s let the ever-expanding understanding of our universe not tell us first about ourselves. Rather, let it tell us first about the One who made it: that he must be vastly greater, wiser, more powerful than we have yet conceived.

And then let us consider what he’s done, what he does for us. What if, contrary to all our expectations, this outrageously powerful being doesn’t demean or even ignore us? Recall that in truth he loves us, that he is Love itself. That sidelined though we may be within this “giddy mass of waltzing things,” God nonetheless became one of us, condescended to live here, bled and died for us. Rose from the dead. Prays for us. Knows us. Calls us to himself.

He has an affinity for mortals, not contingent on what we are but very much based in who he is. In which case we’re not so belittled after all. We’re not held in contempt. In fact, our circumstance is very much the opposite.

Psalm 8

Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory
in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.

Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

All right now. Did you know ludic before you read this? Tell me. And have you read Orbital? If not, get to it. You’re in for a treat.

Meanwhile, thanks so much for being here. I continue to be amazed by it. Amazed and grateful.

With joy,

Rebecca

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Remember middle school and that lesson on figurative language?

I’m guessing you know what I mean: figurative language is words that work beyond themselves, that don’t just say a thing in order to tell you something, but that somehow create an experience. They draw a picture in your mind, help you see— or taste, hear, feel— something the writer sees that, on the page in front of you, isn’t actually there.

And you’ll remember the finer distinctions: personification, simile, metaphor. Hyperbole.

Similes made sense to me: “a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’.” For one assignment, we had to write a list of them. One of mine: “The witch’s nose was like a bumpy, green pickle.”

I was proud of myself.

Metaphors were harder. These were comparisons without using “like” or “as,” and this didn’t make sense: how does one make a comparison without actually making a comparison? I remember resorting to removing the “like,” and it worked well enough: “The witch’s nose was a bumpy, green pickle.” But the power of metaphor didn’t gain traction for me for a long time. A college Creative Writing class required a poem employing an extended metaphor, and I wrote a longish series of lines about a true event when I was four years old, flying a kite with my father and older sister on an October day at the beach.

The description was good. My professor said so, and she also pointed out that the poem lacked a metaphor. I’d made a personal experience vivid for my reader, and that was it: a narrative told in truncated lines, attached to nothing.

I’ve practiced since with the power of metaphor, how it can work to underscore an idea or, better yet, replace and thereby enhance it. One of my favorite scenes in my novel is the narrator’s recollection of playing in her driveway as a child. Her father was washing the car, and the rivulets of water that streamed down the macadam became for her an imagined landscape. Water and landscape are important metaphors in that book, and the scene works as a kind of foreshadowing.

Metaphors in literature are wonderful things for many reasons, one of which is their function as invitation. With metaphor, the writer intentionally opens a door for the reader to engage and interpret. Reading in this way isn’t merely a matter of digestion. It’s participation: the writer and her reader working together.

Here’s something about rain that I wrote almost twenty years ago. I’m including it here because it relates to this little discourse on metaphor. See if you can tell what the metaphor means.

Rain, 27 August 2007

Bill and I stepped out of the store and walked toward the car. We’d gone about fifteen paces when I realized I was getting wet; I looked down and saw the smallest drop of water on my forearm. “What’s this on my skin?” I wondered out loud. And then, “Oh, it’s raining.”

“Funny,” Bill said. “I’ve known it was raining since we stepped outside.”

The clouds weren’t dark overhead. At least, they were only dark in places. The sun was shining. What clouds there were didn’t look as though they meant business.

***

We drove over Route 40 and looked down at the traffic.

“Looks like it rained hard there,” Bill said.

And sure enough, the pavement was dark from the water, and the cars’ bumpers and taillights were softened by the fine spray they tossed up in their wake.

***

I don’t know how old I was on that summer day when I stood with Jill and Janet on Oaklawn Dr. in Pittsburgh. I think maybe Laura was there, too, and my sister Emily. We stood at the edge of Jill's driveway and looked down their street. The street rolled somewhat, as all streets do in Pittsburgh.

We looked and we could see– very distinctly– that it was raining at the end of that street. Just a few houses away, in fact, we could see rain was falling there: a sheet of gray, or a deepening of color, and the sound of it: the hiss and splash of individual drops that, gathered together, are like someone asking for peace.

***

We saw this, too, in June on the Masai Mara. Kenya’s share of the Serengeti, here the savannah rolls on and on, interrupted only by the lone acacia or the head and neck of a giraffe. Eventually hills loom and block the view, but these are very far away.

Sometimes as we rode along, we watched a storm spill over a far-off stretch of land. The sky took on shades of dark blue and deep plum there; lightning cut through the blue; a sheet of gray, or a deepening of color, and no sound but the wind in Kenya’s blond grass and the rattle of our matatu’s diesel engine, the wheels feeling their way along the red, rutted road.

***

No matter where it's raining, the rain must also stop, yes? It finds a place it won't fall, a line it won't cross, a patch that must, this time, stay dry.

Sometimes that line is invisible. The rain thunders down on your roof and every roof for miles around, and you can't imagine but that it's been raining for your whole life, that there's nowhere in the world that doesn’t know rain right now. 

And sometimes that line is just there on the Mara, or at the other end of Oaklawn Drive, or it cuts through your own backyard.

Maybe that’s nice if you’re a person who likes rain. But what’s the metaphor?

That’s a trick question. There’s no metaphor here. Like the poem about the kite on the beach, this little series of paragraphs doesn’t contain a metaphor at all because I never made the necessary, implicit connection.

I was writing about a challenged friendship: I think we simply had different perceptions about how to communicate. I felt that we were forever failing to understand each other, and I worried that I was often somehow offensive to her, but it was my guess to figure out when and why.

The rain was meant to represent this difference: that some people like things plain and straightforward, and some don’t.

On Saturday I caught up with a loved one over lunch. Once upon a time she was my student, but now she’s fully grown up, practicing law in far off New England, and we hadn’t talked at length since October.

Suddenly she mentioned that it was raining. Maybe she said it because of the weather reports: we knew storms were pending; or because she knew we’ve been in a serious dry spell. Or maybe she mentioned it because we both love rain. But in any event, she said it was raining and, when I looked out the window closest to me, I saw no rain at all.

From her seat, she could easily see out two windows, but neither of these were an easy view for me. From her perspective, the rain was obvious. From mine, it didn’t seem to exist.

It’s a tendency of human nature, it would seem, to divide people into categories. Have you noticed this? I’ve seen it all my life, and there’s good humor and maybe some wisdom in it. Some people squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube. Some people are risk-takers. Some don’t like chocolate. Some are pessimists.

For every category, an opposite exists by default. City-life or country? Mountains or beach? Introvert or extrovert? These classifications can be insightful. They can help us understand ourselves and each other. And they’re fun.

But a different kind of classification troubles me, and I see it with increasing frequency online. It’s the tendency of a writer or influencer to distinguish people who are happy.

This sounds strange at first blush, but the writers do it intentionally because they’re building online communities based on suffering. In order to build sympathy within that community, they must mark its borders, which is done by identifying people who aren’t like them. In their view, there are two kinds of people: those who have known hardship, and those who haven’t. Those who haven’t are the happy ones, the so-called beautiful ones, the untarnished lovelies who haven’t yet lost their shine.

The sympathetic community is one kind of people, and the shining beauties are the other.

What could be wrong with this? People who suffer need community. They require it. What a relief to find someone— even if that someone is online— who understands and is sympathetic to your pain!

The problem here lies in the notion of exceptionality, which is a lie. There’s no such thing as a charmed life. No one lives their days, sunrise to sunset, without pain, loss, or hurt. Everyone loses their shine.

No, we don’t all suffer bullying, eating disorders, financial ruin, abuse, addiction, miscarriage. But we all suffer from something. It may be that the beautiful only look that way because it’s too painful for them to appear otherwise: the vulnerability and openness that are grace to some might, in fact, be too raw and painful for someone else, so they keep their pain inside. Or maybe they’ve found a way to live in joy in spite of what they’ve suffered.

When going through a particularly difficult and painful time, I would often attempt to dismiss my suffering. Other people have it worse than me, I thought. It didn’t seem right to want relief or to need sympathy when other troubles outweighed mine.

In a way, I was right: other people did have it worse than me. Yes, things were difficult, but I had a happy marriage and healthy children. I lived in the United States, for crying out loud, enjoying a life far easier than most of the millions living in developing nations.

But if receiving compassion is contingent on who needs it most, then there’s lots of work to be done in finding out who deserves it.

I asked myself where God’s compassion begins. Automatically he can rule out pretty much anyone living in the West, what with our running water, paved roads, and local hospitals. He needs to measure suffering by category, degree, and case, comparing this need with that, dismissing the milder ones. By my reasoning, his compassion would come down to the one person suffering the most. I reasoned further: this person would most likely be female and likely a child, one barely subsisting in an impoverished corner of the world.

This is terrible theology.

Christianity is judged for being judgmental, but it doesn’t draw anywhere near the distinctions attributed to it. In fact, I can think of very few, with two important ones coming at the beginning.

The first is between God and his creation: He is the Maker, and everything else is the Made. The second lies between humankind, made in his image, and the rest of the created order, over which we’re to be stewards and caretakers in service to God.

Why caretakers? Because all of it is precious to him: “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.”1 Implicit here: all of his creation is in need of his compassion, and God answers that need.

There’s a thought.

As humans made in his image to care for his creation, we’re to follow suit in terms of that compassion. We’re not to judge people from the outside, (for example) distinguishing the needy from the well-off.

We’re to look on each other with generosity and sympathy. Even people we don’t know personally. Even people who have hurt us.

Here’s another thought: if it’s written in our makeup to look at the world with compassion, if being human entails a spirit of sensitivity to all, then regarding someone— anyone— as undeserving is actually inhumane.

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Why are we like this? Why do we categorize people, disregarding some and elevating others? Or why do we doubt our own need, belittling our circumstances in view of someone else’s?

I wonder if it’s because we don’t really believe in a God who sees and knows us just as we are, who doesn’t actually compare our problems to anyone else’s but simply wants to bring us comfort and meet our needs.

Paul speaks of him this way: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort….”

(That phrase: “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” is enough to ponder for days.)

Continuing “…who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.2

The charge made by distinction in Genesis— that humans are made in God’s image— continues here in the New Testament. And those who have known the comfort and goodness of God are best enabled by him to extend these to anyone— everyone— who has need.

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Sitting at our table between windows, this dear former student and I appeared needy to exactly no one. Neither did anyone else. At the very least, we’d presumably all arrived in our own cars to a nice lunch spot and had our choices from the menu.

Yet my young friend is enduring suffering I’ve never known and probably never will, and I’ve known suffering she’s only imagined. Neither of us has had a charmed life because— remember— there’s no such thing. We’re both simply learning to depend on the grace and goodness of Christ.

Gloriously, these are available to anyone who wants them. There are no excluding categories or conditions for coming to God— except, maybe, the need to acknowledge your need.

In Revelation, the apostle John recorded his vision of the people who will know and worship God at the end of time. He calls them “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language.”3

Literally anyone. That’s not a metaphor.

A dear reader sent me this poem via email a little while ago. I’m delighted to share it with you here.

Rain in Summer

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain! 
How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout! 
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain, the welcome rain! 
The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain. 
From the neighboring school
Come the boys,
With more than their wonted noise
And commotion;
And down the wet streets
Sail their mimic fleets,
Till the treacherous pool
Ingulfs them in its whirling
And turbulent ocean. 
In the country, on every side,
Where far and wide,
Like a leopard's tawny and spotted hide,
Stretches the plain,
To the dry grass and the drier grain
How welcome is the rain! 
In the furrowed land
The toilsome and patient oxen stand;
Lifting the yoke encumbered head,
With their dilated nostrils spread,
They silently inhale
The clover-scented gale,
And the vapors that arise
From the well-watered and smoking soil.
For this rest in the furrow after toil
Their large and lustrous eyes
Seem to thank the Lord,
More than man's spoken word. 
Near at hand,
From under the sheltering trees,
The farmer sees
His pastures, and his fields of grain,
As they bend their tops
To the numberless beating drops
Of the incessant rain.
He counts it as no sin
That he sees therein
Only his own thrift and gain. 
These, and far more than these,
The Poet sees!
He can behold
Aquarius old
Walking the fenceless fields of air;
And from each ample fold
Of the clouds about him rolled
Scattering everywhere
The showery rain,
As the farmer scatters his grain. 
He can behold
Things manifold
That have not yet been wholly told,--
Have not been wholly sung nor said.
For his thought, that never stops,
Follows the water-drops
Down to the graves of the dead,
Down through chasms and gulfs profound,
To the dreary fountain-head
Of lakes and rivers under ground;
And sees them, when the rain is done,
On the bridge of colors seven
Climbing up once more to heaven,
Opposite the setting sun. 
Thus the Seer,
With vision clear,
Sees forms appear and disappear,
In the perpetual round of strange,
Mysterious change
From birth to death, from death to birth,
From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth;
Till glimpses more sublime
Of things, unseen before,
Unto his wondering eyes reveal
The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel
Turning forevermore
In the rapid and rushing river of Time. 

                               --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Once again, I’m happy to extend a warm welcome to new readers! Thank you— new and less so— for being here. Your presence means a great deal to me, truly.

As ever, I welcome your response in the comments. And as usual, a fun language-related prompt because that’s often how we do: send us all a metaphor in the comments! It can be one you love out there in music, literature, whathaveyou. Or it can be one of your own devising.

I love metaphors, truly. Don’t you?

With joy,

Rebecca

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No. That’s misleading: we don’t collect clichés, we collect expressions; and we don’t so much collect them as we spot, discuss, and mentally tuck them away. When inevitably they reappear, we note them to each other with a wink and a nod.

That said, I never realized that this is a thing we do until now, when I thought I’d write to you about this recent conversation:

Bill and I were having an argument discussion, and in making a (good) point I thought I’d already made, I began a comeback rejoinder with the word, “again.” Bill told me he didn’t like this and explained: “Again” at the beginning of a statement carries a tacit accusation that one’s interlocutor hasn’t been listening.

That’s not always true. Beginning with “again” can serve a different purpose. It can simply introduce a new example to further a point. But in the case of our recent contretemps conversation, Bill’s perception was spot-on. “Again” signaled my perceived need to repeat myself because I thought he hadn’t been paying attention.

Then came more conversation, this time considering phrases that denote the obvious, which is that the listener is being spoken to. Phrases like: “I’ll have you know,” “Let me tell you,” and “Just so you know.”

By definition, conversations are an exchange of information between persons. On that definition, the above phrases are redundant: presumably everything a person says to another is something she will “have you know” or is “for your information.”

“(I’ll have you know) I should be home by five.”

“I loved that movie (for your information)!”

But that’s not what we mean when we use those phrases. Here the speaker actually means something else: she’s miffed and feeling justified about it. These phrases (I’m telling you) don’t so much relay facts as attempt to put the listener in his or her place. (For your information) they are efforts at winning. “I’ll have you know” is a try for triumph.

Rhetorically such phrases have their place, but redundancy is a writer’s enemy. What does she want but to keep her readers reading? When things get redundant, the reader smells a rat: Does this writer know where she’s going with this? Does this writer have a plan? Am I wasting my time?

At best, repetition is deployed for emphasis. At worst, it’s a mark of inattention— or of actually having nothing to say. Perhaps for these reasons, it’s also a mark of young writing, of the adolescent essay, if you will. I’ve read too many essays that sound like a drive toward word count. The student says the same thing again and again, barely rephrasing, in a desperate effort to reach what’s shaped like a paragraph but is, in a sense, empty.

My favorite writing professor in college warned us about this. First and foremost, have something to say, he told us. And avoid at all costs what he called, “the Department of Redundancy Department.”

I put that in quotation marks because it’s a direct quote. All those years ago I jotted it down in my notebook’s margin because I couldn’t be sure he’d ever say it again.

Avoiding repetition in writing is paramount, but avoiding it in life is impossible. It’s actually a mark of human existence. Think about it: on the daily one gets up, gets ready for work, goes to work, works. There’s a sameness here that’s comforting, so familiar we don’t notice it.

But it’s also a rogue keenly suspect at this time of year. If you’re on social media or in academia, you know what I mean: photo captions of newly minted graduates and beleaguered teachers are all asking where the time went.

And where did it go? To sameness and redundancy. In March, my freshmen and I were deep in Mark 8, but I had to check my lesson plans before I could tell you that. In March— as in February as in April— I daily pulled into my parking space, put my lunch in the faculty refrigerator, unlocked my classroom door. The trajectory of Mark’s gospel, Peter’s declaration, and the ensuing shift in Jesus’ teaching all made for significant conversation in my classroom, but until I looked it up, the details of March 25, 2026, intermingled in a penumbra of sameness.

That sameness— the monotony, even— is often necessary. I can’t imagine teaching school without it: we thrive on routine. Anxiety is reduced through familiarity, and repetition facilitates assimilation of new knowledge, which can then foster capacity for even more learning.

The early months of this calendar year included a number of snow days for our school, creating a brief haphazardy that challenged that structured learning process. Yet even those interruptions are vague in all the similitude. Looking back at this semester, few events readily rise in my mind: my parents’ visits and one from Emma and Sam; the two-year birthdays of two grandchildren. A spring break getaway with my husband. A still and blissful afternoon listening to Verdi’s Requiem. Otherwise, life was a sameness: a grace, a comfort, and also an oblivion that runs toward forgetting.

Recently I came across a moving essay about monotony, specifically within marriage. The essay is in some ways a lament: after multiple miscarriages, the author and her husband don’t have children and won’t have them. She examines ways in which that absence contributes to a monotony that deeply concerns her. She writes, “Chaos and delight are interruption to monotony in a marriage and children bring both.”

She isn’t wrong. Just last weekend my husband and I hosted two of our grandchildren overnight. Both chaos and delight ensued.

But I don’t know that children prevent monotony. They don’t prevent sameness, anyway. Routine seems embedded in the essential dailiness of our lives, even the unpredictable, milestone-marked lives of children.

For their first five years, I kept calendars of my children’s doings. From landmark events like first steps and lost teeth to quotidian play dates and funny quips, I recorded something of each of them every single day.

Someone close to me remarked at the time that this was foolishness. Herself mother of several grown children, she asked me, “What are you going to do with all that?” The question gave me pause, but only briefly. The calendars were “a net for catching days”1 in my children’s fleeting, inestimably precious childhoods.

Did they solve the problem of sameness? No. I remember many things of those childhoods, and some of these I remember vividly. But rereading those calendars now would nonetheless be full of surprises because the ensuing days— even those days themselves— were also subject to routine.

Where did the time go?

This question belies others, ones more difficult to ask. Some of them are practical: Where did the time go might reflect questions about what we did with that time. Was it meaningful? Was it valuable? What was it? And some are existential: What does it mean to be alive? How one can live day in and out, physically present in the waking and going to bed and everything in between, and yet somehow miss the very thing one is living?

In those reflections, we’re aware of what C.S. Lewis termed time’s tyranny, its “unilinear poverty, ” a hidden power hastening us always forward. Its control over us inflicts an “always aching wound… almost equally when we are happy and when we are unhappy. For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished by it.”2

Astonished, indeed. Where did the time go? Here is presupposition, both for Lewis and the aforementioned essay: life should not be monotonous. It matters; therefore we should notice it.

Further presupposition: we matter. Our lives, our very beingness matters. When asking Where did the time go?, we feel this in our bones.

"Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes."3

"O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!... Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!"4

“As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.”5

The Bible tells it straight: my life is fleeting. A mist. An evaporation. Dust turned to dust, caught up in the next breeze, disappearing on the wind.

The calendar’s grid, the plot of land, the Instagram square won’t safeguard any of it.

Our church services always end the same way. I’d imagine that an outsider would find it strange: on the invitation, the congregation stands row by row and slowly walks in lines to the front of the room. There we take a cube of bread from a basket and a small plastic cup of grape juice from a tray, and we return to our seats.

“The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, shed for you.” And then we eat and drink together.

Every Sunday this repetition. Some might say a monotony. But as I said before, repetition aids the memory. And what is it we need to remember?

That our very lives may be dust, but they nonetheless belong to the One who is eternal. We’re more than a little baffled: time remains a mystery to us even as our lives are immersed in it. But God isn’t baffled: “He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”6

What’s amazing is his love for this dust. Bought by him with his blood, our lives, in his view, are anything but monotony. He counts our hairs7, he holds our tears8, he sees and cares about everything we do.9

I need this repetition, one that pulls my head from the hourglass sand of my everyday and reminds me of the eternal: the God who was and who is and who is to come. The One who is always the same.

My life and yours mean more than we think they do, even more than we understand. This is true despite our oblivion: when we’re idly flossing our teeth, sitting at the traffic light, or grading an empty essay.

Ten Years On,Mary Still Tends the Lilies

At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden and in the garden a new tomb...they laid him there." John 19: 41-42

Her forearms ache inside and out,
sweat baptizes the ever-stony ground
in this remembrance place as, she,
the land's own resurrected daughter,
born anew seven times over,
tends the lilies laid into stubborn earth
amid aftershocks of fear and joy, now
they're vibrant in the gathering dark, a vow
of things yet to come, the air is thick
with memory, heady with her expectancy
she lingers in the cool of every single day.

Charissa Sylvia

Of course I’ve got a game for you, and I wonder if anyone can guess what it is…. Okay, I’ll tell you.

In light of focusing on repetition and the ways in which it can mar writing, I’ve littered this little essay with familiar expressions and idioms (and “littered with” counts, I think). Your response— should you choose to have fun (ahem)— is either (1) to guess (or count) how many of these occur in the essay or (2) name one (or two or three or more) of them in the comments.

See? Fun!

ON THE OTHER HAND, you don’t have to respond that way. You don’t have to respond at all. But you may choose to respond to the ideas of the essay themselves. I’d love that. Or to the poem. I’d love that, too.

It’s up to you.

Thank you for reading (or listening). Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us if you’re new (Welcome!).

With joy,.

Rebecca

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Our youngest turned twenty-five on Monday, so we did what we always do: we watched the video of the moment she arrived.

Well, not exactly. My husband didn’t film her actual birth, but the recording starts moments later with her loud wail and my visible relief.

Twenty-five years on, we watch it amazed: our introduction to Emma Grace. She was a stranger to us. We knew only what’s evident in the video: our daughter, naked, pink, and wailing, with her damp shock of strawberry blond hair.

My parents are here for an extended visit, and I don’t know that they’d seen the video of Emma’s birth before. But that experience led us to watch other videos of our children, taken sporadically, at best, over the years. Here are the boys, Emma’s older brothers, aged four and two, doing a silly dance in the kitchen. Here’s Everett, talking to his baby sister who’s dangling in her bouncy seat in the living room. Here’s William, maybe age seven, roller-blading in our cul-de-sac. Here’s both boys standing over Emma in her cradle, “reading” her a Magic School Bus book.

The videos could hardly be called a chronicle. They pick up and drop the narrative again and again, and, watching, we piece it together: “Oh, this was with the family at Hilton Head!” “Oh, this is at your parents’ house!”

It’s footage we’ve mostly forgotten, busy with the ensuing years. Our children are all married now. Each of our sons has two children of his own, and we’re captivated by these grandchildren: it’s their needs we occasionally have the privilege to meet, their antics or quips we recite to each other. Our own children’s childhoods are firmly in the rearview.

But watching these videos over the past two evenings, my husband and I find that these long-lost years aren’t so lost at all. The immersion in memory is absolute: we remember Everett looking that way, talking like that. William had a lisp. Infant Emma was enthralled with her big brothers. We feel like we’re right there again with them like that.

Maybe I have an overactive imagination, or maybe my memory is just acute: I recall contextual details: the way the air felt that day at Duke Gardens; my fatigue when their silliness approached a threshold. Even their clothing is familiar. Those repeated chores— wash, fold, put away, tug onto and off little bodies— have done their work: watching my children perform for the camera, I remember each onesie, shirt, and dress, the feel of their different fabrics under my fingers.

It’s tricky to write about parenting and motherhood. The risks are great. I’ve long tried to avoid landing in the camp that has it’s place: writing from a remove, hiding affection under witty critique. I’ve never even called my children “kids,” the word sounding oddly demeaning. Our children are uniquely vulnerable to our gaze for many years, and I tried to avoid the pull of even good-humored over-exposure, writing about them in my essays with a circumspect intimacy.

But the other side of the writing task is slippery, too: despite how deeply one feels about her role as mother, writing about it readily slides into mawkishness. How do we invite people— parents and non-parents alike— into the mundane profundity of motherhood?

Invited to attend an early book discussion of my novel, I was struck by the comment that the book lacked detail about Maddie as a mother. Others agreed, all of them mothers themselves. And Maddie is a mother. She has three sons, each of whom plays a part in the book. But the story is really about her marriage, and crafting that aspect was my focus.

My answer to the critique was that motherhood can be too easily manipulated. I wanted my reader to care about Maddie, but how to make that happen? The novel is serious, and tugging maternal heartstrings in that context could demand too much of my reader.

Later it occurred to me that there is a great deal about motherhood in Healing Maddie Brees. I guess I wish I’d had the presence of mind to point it out in the book discussion. At the same time, the fact that these readers hadn’t noticed it felt like a small success.

Bill and I were awake for a long stretch last night. Part of my problem was the cold I’m nursing, but soon I realized he was awake too, both of us mulling over those family videos and their backdrop.

I think we’re supposed to look back on those years with deep nostalgia. Isn’t that what everyone says? “The days are long, but the years are short,” they say. “It goes so fast.” “Sunrise, sunset” is the stirring ballad in Fiddler on the Roof, and the implication is that the your children’s young years are the best. You’ve got to seize them and pay attention and suck out their very marrow.

I’m grateful to say that we did indeed pay attention, that we did seize and enjoy the time as best we could. But that time was also the most difficult of our lives— not because of our children, but because of other things— protracted, challenging things— that were happening to us at the same time. If our children’s childhoods were charmed, it was nonetheless in the context of their parents’ need.

With the gratitude of retrospect, we wouldn’t change this. Financial security might make for some kinds of comfort, but it’s never guaranteed happiness. In some real ways, our children were reared with want, which did the good work of stemming materialistic expectations. And mostly they didn’t know it.

More and more frequently I hear reports about couples deciding against parenthood. This decision is deeply personal and likely arises for multiple, important, and well-considered reasons.

And more and more frequently, my husband and I think about this decision. From the safe perspective of having reared our children and seeing them relatively well established in adulthood, ours might be an easy view. But that view is informed by some new experiences that raise practical questions.

Over the past few years, several of our friends have been widowed. In the context of these shocking, premature losses, their young adult children are of ineffable solace. In other cases, friends face diagnoses that could result in long-term need or disability. Here again, adult children are a buffer against potential neglect and a source of wisdom for spouses overcome with weighty decisions.

Which isn’t to say we have children as insurance policies. They can’t possibly be that. We know of too many people with broken child-parent relationships to be convinced of such assurances.

But do we choose not to have children because the relationship may someday disappoint, even rupture? Do we decide against them because we simply don’t know how things will pan out?

How things will pan out is something we never know. Not in any practical sense, anyway.

I understand that many are opting against children due to fear of the future: climate change, political unrest, even the simple cost of raising a child are deterrents. And then there’s the impact of even one child on the household: life is upended. The expenses are great. Children have very real wants and make very real demands, and by those lights, remaining child-free is infinitely easier.

The plain fact is that rearing children is hard. In my very conscious efforts to enjoy my children, to pay attention, to suck the marrow from this fleeting and precious time of my life, I was sometimes flummoxed by how hard it was. I wrote it out in my prayer journal once, an honest question to God: “If having children is so wonderful and goes so fast, then why do you have to make it so difficult?”

I’m fascinated by the work of philosopher Laurie Paul. Her book Transformative Experience examines ways in which we make decisions, addressing an important question: what if deciding to do something will irrevocably change me and/or my life? Paul presents new ways to consider making such decisions.

Because it’s the “irrevocably” that’s at issue. Not all decisions are equal. Should I have ice cream? Should I go sky-diving? These don’t usually matter in a permanent way.

But other decisions change us forever. Maybe at one end of the spectrum, it’s the question of where to go to college or an option for a career path. But others, such as becoming a parent, mean even more profound, irreversible change.

Childless, you cannot possibly know what it will be like to be a parent. You can observe others, track how they change, note the necessary adjustments to their lifestyles. But the changes involved in becoming a parent aren’t mere issues of schedule or accounting. To become a parent means becoming….

Well. Quite honestly, I lack the words for it.

I think it’s fair to say that the fears run high for Jesus’ disciples in John 14-17. He’s told them that going to Jerusalem will entail his suffering, death, and resurrection; and his disciples are duly warned he’s leaving them.

I’m sure this is confusing. Jesus’ actual entrance into the city is termed “triumphal”: crowds greeted him with praise. But the chief priests are set against him. One of the disciples is going to betray him. The meal they’re sharing is held in secret, and Jesus’ words are full of comfort, because the disciples need it.

Within his long speech, Jesus makes a reference to childbirth. His point is that the grief and trouble the disciples are about to face will be as nothing compared to the pending joy. He says, “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16: 21).

This is no simple analogy: with these words, Jesus tries to open our gaze to a joy far greater: his resurrection and all that comes after— the restoration of his deeply loved world.

He was never married, never a father. But he knew enough of life to see the metamorphosis that is becoming a parent: this was the comparison he chose. He was speaking of transformative experience: consuming pain and trouble remade. A conversion into joy.

There’s nothing like new life, and within that context, there’s nothing like new human life. A brand new person, full of need, a bawling dependence.

The work this entails is profound. It continues for decades. In some ways, it never ends. Being responsible for that, tending to his needs, her insistence on connection, ushering that person into a thriving independence is the greatest work I’ve ever done.

At church the past two Sundays, our four-year-old grandchildren have chosen to sit with Bill and me. Cousins Porter and Scottie are the best of friends, more like siblings, and it takes them a minute to get settled with us. But last Sunday and the week before, Porter has ended up in my arms while we’re singing hymns. Astride my hip, he amuses himself with my earrings, plays with my necklace, tugs my hair over my nose.

There’s no shyness here. Porter treats me as an extension of himself. Once upon a time, his father behaved in precisely this way.

I belong to them, an irrevocable gift.

The Answer

When I go back to earth
And all my joyous body
Puts off the red and white
That once had been so proud,
If men should pass above
With false and feeble pity,
My dust will find a voice
To answer them aloud:

"Be still, I am content,
Take back your poor compassion!--
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy.
Lithe as a bending reed
Loving the storm that sways her--
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy."

-- Sara Teasdale

A little something about words

Last time I asked you to respond with your best guess as to what the prefix “ob” means in words like object, obtrude, obstacle, and obstinate. As ever, I’m delighted by the responses. Thank you.

Here’s the skinny: in those words (and some others), “ob” means “in the way of.” Looking at the word examples, I think you can see how that makes sense.

This time around, let’s talk adverbs. Maybe you already know this, but maybe not: writers are warned off them, the idea being that strong verbs should be used instead of adverbs. Pith is of high value in good writing: say what you mean, and do it with concision.

That said, I try to cull my writing of adverbs. And sometimes I can’t or don’t want to. In this essay, for instance, I very intentionally used the word “irrevocably.”

So here’s how you respond this time around, if you so choose: send me an adverb you enjoy. Or send more than one. Send six. Send a dozen. Let’s litter the comments with adverbs— AND, of course, anything else you’d like to say.

I love hearing from you. Truly. R.S.V.P.

All for now, my friends. Thank you as ever for being here.

With joy,

Rebecca

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Hi Friends.

This newsletter is kind of a follow-up on what I wrote two weeks ago. You don’t need to have read that to make sense of this, but just in case you’re a fan of continuity, or you like that joyful chime of references in things to stuff you’ve read before, or if you’re just looking for something to read, then hustle on over to that link above before continuing here.

Otherwise, we’re off!

One of the first conversations we have in Theology 1 explores the concept that God is outside the created order. To you, this may seem like simple Christian understanding: as Creator of the universe, God is separate from what he’s made. The implications here are many, and many if not all of them may be obvious to you.

But more often than not— prior to our discussion, anyway— those manifold implications persist unexamined by most of my students. Of course most of them are fourteen and fifteen years old, so perhaps none of us should be surprised.

Yet one of these implications, clear as it may be, is a persistent problem for many people, from believer to philosopher to atheist: because he’s not within the created order, God isn’t obvious.

And here is where we break away momentarily from whatever it is I’m going to write and consider that word, obvious. It’s a word that obviously doesn’t get much in the way of consideration (in my experience, anyway), because it’s, well, so obvious a word.

But let’s not leave it there. Why should we? Let’s have a little fun and consider the word’s parts— or its first part, anyway: ob. That tiny prefix is one you’ve met and no doubt deployed to good effect in quite a few words, one of which is obvious (ha! See what I did there?).

My guess is that you’ve also used it in words like these: object (both \’ob ject\ and \ob ‘ject|, obtrude (and adjectival form obtrusive), obstacle, and obstinate. In all of these words, that little prefix means the same thing.

Here’s your good time: guess what the prefix “ob” means in these words (and in “obvious”), then write your guess in the comments below. Of course, because you love words (like all normal people), your guess will be educated by the words in the list— and it should be.

Why? Because ob is a very common prefix, and it doesn’t always mean the same thing. If you choose words other than the ones provided above in informing your guess, you may in fact guess incorrectly. So be careful.

My apologies in advance to any Latinists out there, as the prefix of obvious may in fact be obvious to you, and so maybe our word game isn’t so fun. On the other hand, if you’re a Latinist, then you’re probably having more fun than most of us most of the time, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

But let’s return to Christian theology and consider the problem laid out earlier: God created the universe and therefore by definition is separate from it. He is outside the created order. As such, we don’t see him actually in the universe.

This doesn’t mean he’s not here, as discussed in this newsletter before. The Christian faith teaches that God isn’t at a distance. Neither is he circumscribed like we are, such that he can be only in one place at a time. Rather, his presence is best described as repletive: he is in all places, everywhere, all at once. He fills the world.

The Psalmist describes it like this:

Where shall I go from your Spirit?
    Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.

Psalm 139: 7-10

Replete with God as the universe may be, we still might rather wish he were obvious. Plain. Evident, even. Among the Enlightenment’s many legacies, evidence holds high value in the 21st century West. We have firm attachment to affirmations afforded us by what we deem science. That which we can see, hear, measure, test, observe, weigh, and otherwise materially account for is what we feel certain is real.

And God, as he presents himself to a naturalist view, fails to present himself.

Philosophers and theologians call this concern divine hiddenness. Where is God? Rather than being everywhere always present, God seems marked by absence and silence, hidden where no one can find him. The questions come: Does God exist? Are we to believe in him? And if he does exist, if we are to believe in him; if he is loving; if he desires a relationship with humankind— why doesn’t he make his existence obvious?

I’m deeply sympathetic to these questions.

In my few years teaching Theology, some of my students have asked about divine hiddenness. They haven’t framed the question theologically, but they ask. Why should we believe in God? How do we know he exists? What can we know about God, and how?

I have that sympathy, born of my similar questions, to offer. And I also offer what we know— which, first of all, is that God reveals himself in the natural world. Paul tells us that… “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”1

The Psalmists say this too, again and again in their beautiful ways, as here:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

Psalm 19: 1-4a

And as modern science progresses, as researchers probe increasingly complex systems, arguments for an intelligent agent— a Maker— often make more sense than natural selection.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, and given eyes to see, one might discern the “eternal power and divine nature” that Paul talked about: God’s wisdom in the sunrise or the seasons’ turn; his power in a hurricane’s spin; his tenderness in the finely formed fingers of a newborn baby.

God has also revealed himself in his word, the Bible. In sixty-six books, testaments Old and New, over thousands of years, by the pen of more than forty human authors through the power of the Holy Spirit, we have a stunningly coherent narrative of a God who so loved what he’d made that he insisted— despite our rejecting him— on making himself available to us.

This narrative’s fulcrum is the incarnation: God enfleshed, come to live among and like the rest of us. Jesus didn’t enter the world as did the gods of myth: to mock and manipulate human existence. No, the center of Christianity is the Creator himself become part of creation, a real human person living a real human life, dying a deplorable death, and then defeating death for all time, coming to life again.

As C.S. Lewis famously said, God as author didn’t remain outside his book: he wrote himself into the story.

And he promised he’d return.

When he comes again, there will be no divine hiddenness. He won’t appear merely as a guy from Galilee, a one-time carpenter turned itinerant teacher. When he comes again, his glory will be unmasked, everyone the world over will recognize him at once,2 and “every knee (will) bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”3

When in the incarnation God visibly disclosed himself to the world, he did it with humility and meekness so surprising that many don’t believe Jesus was God.

When he comes again, his God-ness will be undeniable. In which case divine hiddenness is perhaps a kindness: through it, he doesn’t insist on himself, force us to know him, prevail his presence such that we can only admit, like it or not, that he is God.

Hidden as he currently may be, it would appear that the loving, good God is one who invites us: to ask, to look for him, to find him out.

There’s this marvelous little moment in the gospels in which Jesus speaks explicitly about how we should look for God. The conversation begins with his disciples asking him how to pray, and Jesus responds with the famous “Lord’s Prayer.”4 It’s simple and direct, and in it, Jesus says we should ask God for what we need.

And then he goes on to say more about asking things of God, telling a story about a guy who wakes his neighbor in the middle of the night because he needs something. In every way, the guy seems annoying; Jesus even refers to him as impudent. And yet, he says this is how you should ask God for what you need and want: insistently, even obstinately. With impudence. Like a child pleading with his parent.5

It’s an accurate picture: God the Father, creator and master of all; and we his children, powerless by comparison, utterly dependent on him:

“…ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”6

The invitation— the command, really— is that we ask him for anything, everything, insistently and with impudence, all the time. He already knows what we need,7 so this really is nothing other than his shoulder pushing against the door. His palm pressing it open. His standing, knocking, calling through the crack from the other side.

He doesn’t make it obvious, but this invitation to ask him anything is really an invitation to himself. Here I am, is what he’s saying. I know what you need. Please just ask.

The Door

Too little
has been said
of the door, its one
face turned to the night's 
downpour and its other
to the shift and glisten of firelight.

Air, clasped
by this cover
into the room's book
is filled by turning 
pages of dark and fire
as the wind shoulders the panels, or unsteadies that burning.

Not only
the storm's 
breakwater, but the sudden
frontier to our concurrences, appearances,
and as full of the offer of space
as the view through a cromlech is.

For doors
are both frame and monument
to our spent time,
and too little
has been said
of our coming through and leaving by them.

Charles Tomlinson

I hope you’ll spend a little time with that poem. It’s beautiful.

Thank you for spending a little time with this newsletter. Your being here is a gift to me, truly.

Don’t forget to participate in the word game! And no cheating! You can’t go looking up the words and “accidentally” see their etymology, either. You know better.

I hope to be back in two weeks. I hope to hear from you before that. But no pressure.

With joy,

Rebecca

The father was ushering his children toward home. Calling to one while tunneling another’s arms through coat sleeves, answering the persistent question of a third.

We were on our way out of church. He was chatting with me, and I complimented him on his children. “They’re beautiful,” I said.

He responded with a smile, raised eyebrows, and, “For now.”

I thought on that answer during my drive home. Did his “for now” reference his current situation, in which he contends with the caprice of his children’s moods and needs? Or did he mean what I’ve heard so many parents admit: they enjoy their children as children, and they dread the teenage years?

I work with teenagers all day, five days a week. I’ve reared (with my husband) three people through their teens into adulthood. If asked, I have some earned wisdom on offer.

The fear of the those years turns here: the teenagers’ natural shift in focus from their parents to their peers. You know how it goes: suddenly they’re more interested in being with their friends, doing what their friends do. For companionship, influence, even identity, the normal teenager is concerned with what her fellow teenagers are up to.

Their task is to become an adult, and it’s the parent’s task to help them get there. The problem is that, often enough, only one of these parties understands this dynamic: the teenager persists in trying to go it alone. In this way, the intimacy that’s the gift of family life can be lost even while the family is under the same roof.

Here’s my metaphor: the parent is on one side of a wall, the teenager on the other.

Of course as the parent you didn’t want the wall there in the first place, but this is part of the deal. Call it your kid’s independence, his growing sense of identity apart from you. As much as your teenager needs you, becoming an adult means, in part, finding an identity beyond or separate from the adults closest to you. A parent’s insistence that the wall come down could scuttle the entire enterprise.

No, the parent has to leave the wall alone and focus on the door. Did I mention there’s a door? Well, there’s a door in the wall, and it’s a heavy one. It’s been poorly hung. Maybe the house is out of tilt, maybe the door jamb’s out of plumb. Whatever the case, the door is willful, forever swinging shut.

Your job is to keep it open. Every chance you have, you must grab the door by its edge, press it with your palm, or give it a nudge with your shoulder.

There are lots of ways to do this, and folks should do what works for them and their child. But in case it helps, here’s some methods we employed: Driving (or riding along) en route to all sports practices, games, and tournaments; camping out to fold the laundry where he’s playing a video game. Attending the gym’s 6 AM class so you’re back at home when she gets up for school at 7:15. Insisting on a daily hug, even though he doesn’t seem to want one.

All of this is attending to that metaphorical door. Here I am, is all you’re saying. I’m here if you need me.

The job is subtle, quiet, and— most of all— attentive. You pay just as much attention to a teenager, in a way, as you do to a toddler, even though neither of them notices.

But they don’t need to notice. You just do your job: keep the door open.

I’ve actually looked up the word “door” in the dictionary. If you’re new here (and a lot of you are! Welcome!), this may strike you as odd, because who needs to look up the word “door”?

I do. If you’ve been around this newsletter for some time (Thank you!), then you’re not surprised at all.

Or maybe you’re actually still a little surprised, because who needs to look up the word “door”?

It’s me.

Now here’s our word game. How do you define “door”? Don’t look it up. Just be quick: answer now in the comments, because I’m about to go on discussing the word and I don’t want to steal your answer or feed your thinking and thereby rob you of fun.

Ready, set….

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Door is a dull word. The French and Spanish are so much more beautiful: porte, puerta, both deriving from port.

The definition of door is this: “a usually swinging or sliding barrier by which an entry is closed and opened.”

A barrier, my friends. Merriam-Webster’s best synonym for door is barrier.

And here all this time I think of a door as means of access, a way in. Turns out I’m wrong. A door is a deterrent, a hindrance, an obstacle.

The French and Spanish words are better. Don’t you think they’re better? They must be. What are synonyms for port? Anything friendly at all?

Why yes: mooring, cove, inlet, haven.

Turns out a door is just another kind of a wall, but one that moves. Or can move, anyway.

For all my going on about teenagers and doors, the fact is that walls and doors are part of every relationship. Marriages, friendships, the relationship between you and your boss.

Make no mistake. I’m not talking about intimacy here. Or boundaries. And this isn’t Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” That were a topic for another time.

This is just a little something about doors and how we all have the ability to shut them on— or should I say against— one another. In every relationship, the possibility exists that the door can close. For a while. Maybe forever.

Sometimes we’re the one doing the closing. Sometimes this is for good, healthy, even life-sustaining reasons.

And sometimes we’re the ones who stand surprised, even grieved, by the sealed barrier (yes, barrier) where once was a friend.

Maybe you know what I mean.

The temptation now is to focus on the door— but this time, that is absolutely what we must not do.

If you’re the one who closed it, then focusing on the door means rehearsing again and again your reasons for closing it.

And if you’re the one the door was closed against, then focusing on it means rehearsing again and again its injustice.

Either way, what we’ve got is a build-up of bitterness, and there’s no life in that. Bitterness is mere hard ground, malignancy, cold bones. It’s the soul’s ossification.

No, our job is to focus on what builds up behind the door. Forgiveness is good. An effort to see the person on the other side with compassion, even if he or she hurt you. A new narrative, maybe, in which we look for the ways that we were wrong or try to understand that other person’s perspective.

Just a little mercy. A little grace.

Of course, grace is the most unnatural thing in the world, isn’t it?

But the point here is that focusing on what’s behind the door, rather than focusing on the door itself, leaves us open to what might happen when and if the door opens.

If the door opens, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be ready for it? To greet that alienated other with joy?

Practicing forgiveness, in my experience, is a great way to be ready for that.

Jesus called himself the door: “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture” (John 10: 9). Here, he was simply saying that he is the way to God. Acceptance of his mercy, his alien grace, his life as ransom for mine.

And he also acknowledges that there’s a door between us and him: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me” (Revelation 3: 20).

Interesting how he knocks, right? The omnipotent God could force it open, could obliterate the door. Could dissolve it without a word.

Instead we get an invitation. I find this amazing. It’s as if he wanted a real relationship with us. As if mercy is actual. As if grace— foreign as it might be— were genuinely on offer.

“I Stand and Knock”

All night he was wind leaning on a door
you wanted to open. The whole world
spilled through the hole he’d torn
in his side. He had nothing to say

that wasn’t your name. In his teeth
his own blood turned brown. You had to
see him naked, name those animal scars
in their torchlight contortions. Only then.

Someone saw him through the window
slumped on the porch the prints of his hands
all over everything. They said how much
he must care so you rested then

against the other side, pressed your palms
where his might be, swore you heard your name
under that rough wind. Love is open hands
you kept saying. Love is a door.

—Daniel Priest (see here)

Friends, I know. It’s been a while. And by “a while,” I mean a long time. Too many months of not writing here. Why? Teaching last semester just seemed to take all I had to write with. I'm pretty sure this next term won’t be the same.

Thank you, dear subscribers, for waiting it out. And if you’re new to this newsletter, a second, heartfelt welcome!

Thank you (all) for being here. Truly. I’ll be back sooner than later, pinky promise.

With joy,

Rebecca

Three years ago, my husband and I joined a church plant, contextually significant only because here— unlike every church I’ve attended all my life— we receive communion every Sunday at the end of service.

Every Sunday.

We leave our seats in ordered rows and stand in the center aisle. Music plays. We listen and we wait our turn. And when we reach the pastor, he holds out the basket of gluten-free bread that’s been carefully cut into cubes. He says,

“Christ for you.”

Rarely does that moment fail to make me think of Kathy, who has taught Bible studies for decades. I attended one of them for nearly ten years while I homeschooled my young children, and more than once, she talked about taking communion. She told us she always tried to hunt up as quickly as possible the largest piece of bread she could find.

Because if in fact one is being offered Christ in a tangible, take-able form, one wants the largest morsel on offer, right?

I do.

“Christ for you,” Malcolm says, and I usually smile at him because I can’t help myself. What’s the feeling? Relief. Gratitude. Christ for me again this Sunday morning when I’ve slept poorly and therefore had a bad week, been annoyed at my husband, frustrated by all I have to do and haven’t managed to accomplish, harbored— nay, relished— uncharitable thoughts on the drive to church.

Christ for you.

What does it mean, exactly? How many of us standing there waiting our turn are considering atonement theory, the grammar’s simple math? Christ for you is at the very least substitutionary atonement: Christ willingly took on the debt I owe, the punishment I deserve, so that I can live the life I live, for him.

A few weeks ago I was blindsided by hatred. Simply reminded of a person I’d not thought of in a while, a person who has done me and my family wrong— I found myself full of hate.

This shocked me. I don’t hate anyone. And this particular person is one I’ve prayed for consistently— until, I guess, I was distracted enough not to think of her. When she turned up again, hatred came, too: strident and so self-assured.

But Christ for you means Christ for the person I hate, even if she’s wronged me, even if I’m right about how wrong she is. Christ loves the wicked, the infidel, the one deserving my hatred. And he also loves the one incapable of giving that love.

I can renounce the hate but can’t conjure the love— and here again Christ is the willing substitute, accepting my repentance, which is all I can muster. He offers his love in exchange for my hatred. And slowly, surely, his love entirely supplants it.

Christ for you.

We had a routine advisory meeting at school the day after Charlie Kirk was shot. On Thursdays our meeting is quick, a mere twenty minutes. And it seemed like a reasonable thing— these being high school students— to check in on how they were feeling about Kirk’s death.

The conversation was honest, I think. The girls didn’t all agree about everything. But it was good to talk together about it, to look at their young faces in this context and hear what this news might mean to them.

Their lives are so different than mine at their age. I didn’t have vibey videos and TikTok influencers bidding for my attention, telling me what to think, producing the news, distilled and selected, to sway my opinions.

I also didn’t have a twenty-four hour news cycle, the near inescapable flood of information to sift and process.

And I didn’t have the occasional drill— so different from the air-raid drills of my earliest school days. I didn’t have what these girls have: the lockdown routine that prepares us against an armed intruder: lights off, blinds closed, doors locked, and bodies huddled silent in the least visible corner of the room.

In all this context, it seemed best to talk about Jesus.

I reminded them that we don’t have a God who sits idly by, distracted by his many interplanetary obligations, his vast busyness that leaves us sidelined, an afterthought.

No. We have the God who loves. Who conceived of each of the girls in his own magnificent mind, then called her into being. Who doesn’t simply observe the dismay of the world, but joined us here. Lived, died, rose again.

Christ for you.

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe.  Look he said.
The son looked.  Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour.  The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
               On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky.  many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs.  The son watched
Them.  Let me go there, he said.

-R.S. Thomas

For those of you who’ve been waiting to hear from me, thank you for your patience. Maybe things will pick up around here. I sure hope so.

Meanwhile, thank you for joining us (that’s for all the new folks— you know who you are!), and thank you faithful ones who’ve been around for awhile.

I promise a word game next time.

With joy,

Rebecca

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Teaching started in earnest this week, so I’ve only got a little something for you this time. As always, thank you for reading.

The study hall meets in my classroom on Wednesdays. I’m not responsible for it, but there I am, working at my desk, today innocently overhearing a conversation between freshmen I don’t yet know.

They’re three days into their high school career.

The boy with the open laptop is (mysteriously) perusing dictionary.com, and he announces the word of the day to his neighbor.

“‘Stymie!?’” the neighbor responds. His voice is laced with derision. “What kind of a loser uses a word like ‘stymie’?”

True story.

“I do.” I answer him unashamed over the bent heads of the other students, who seem to be trying to make good use of their study hall.

“It’s a great word,” I tell him, and I ask him how it’s spelled: maybe he’ll see (surely he’ll see) the delight. The word is funny looking at best.

He spells it correctly and is unimpressed.

Begin— just begin— to name words that rhyme with it. None of them will be spelled the same way. (Your word game: words that rhyme with “stymie.” Ready, set, go!).

And then there’s what it means: hinder, impede, thwart, block, encumber, bind, curb, shackle, stifle, restrain, hog-tie. Excellent words, all. Surely he could find use for stymie.

Among all those words, only stymie is Scottish, only stymie comes from golf. And of all its synonyms, stymie is the best onomatopoeia: it practically screams vexation.

But I don’t tell him any of this, of course. He doesn't know me yet. He thinks I'm ridiculous. And he has work that’s been assigned to him, maybe even things that are due tomorrow.

He’ll be in my class next semester.

I have a new colleague who’s never taught high school before. She works with her church youth group, and one of the teenage girls there gave her solemn advice for her new job: “Don’t try to be cool,” she said.

My colleague laughed in the retelling, and I laughed too.

“Of course I won’t try to be cool,” she says to me, as if to the student. “I’m becoming a teacher because I nerd out about this stuff.”

Which is what we all do: nerd out. About etymology and semi-colons, the periodic table. About sine, cosine, and tangent, the beauties of the triangle, musical or mathematical. About the Haarlem Renaissance, translating Seneca, the structure of a sonnet, the importance of a counter-argument in your essay. The birth of Christianity in the Roman Empire. How to conjugate the subjunctive in Spanish.

We nerd out all day. It's what we're paid to do.

As teachers, we write, modify, implement, improve curriculum. We design projects, invite narratives, require alternative modes of expression. We assign things and grade them, attend soccer and volleyball games. Praise our students and encourage them to continue to try.

But at bottom, our job is a marriage of loves: love of students and of subject. Plus the earnest faith that we can help them find each other.

On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High

Before I opened my mouth
I noticed them sitting there
as orderly as frozen fish
in a package.
Slowly water began to fill the room
though I did not notice it
till it reached
my ears

and then I heard the sounds
of fish in an aquarium
and I knew that though I had
tried to drown them
with my words
that they had only opened up
like gills for them
and let me in.

Together we swam around the room
like thirty tails whacking words
till the bell rang
puncturing
a hole in the door

where we all leaked out

They went to another class
I suppose and I home

where Queen Elizabeth
my cat met me
and licked my fins
till they were hands again.

-D.C. Berry

I’m loving getting to know my new students and enjoying so much the ones I’m teaching again. The start of a new school year is always a big lift, so I appreciate your appreciation of this short little something. I’ll hope to be back here with more soon enough.

Don’t miss the word game!

With joy,

Rebecca

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Here it is barely mid-August and they’re telling us summer is over. Halloween decor and costumes are on display in the Target, and on my way to this very website I was offered clickbait promising that Jennifer Aniston is going to keep us all in flip flops during the fall of 2025. How can they know that already?

I will and always do resist— not the flip-flops but the premature change of season. I say it isn’t fall until the equinox, which this year hits on September 22, which is still six Mondays away. No matter the weather you’ll see nary a pumpkin on my porch before then.

This resistance has found its way into some of my conversations this week, as I and my colleagues returned to school on Monday for teacher-in-service. In that reunion the question came, inevitable, sincere, and often: “How was your summer?” and I answered, and a time or two I noted that my summer isn’t was but is, ongoing despite the requirement of my presence at school basically every weekday from now until next June.

I guess I’m ornery like that.

How is your summer? I’m asking sincerely, and I’ll be delighted if you choose to answer in the comments below.

Summer is something we ask about. We look at it differently than we do the other seasons, don’t we? Bound or not in some way to school, many people’s lives are still shaped by the academic calendar. Folks tend to have summer plans and expectations. Schedules relax or are abandoned, life switches up for the time. Then fall marks a return of discipline and routine.

For teachers, summer means recuperation, rest, and planning for the upcoming year, and often includes goals having nothing to do with teaching. That was true for me. In addition to working on this coming year’s theology curriculum, I had all kinds of plans, and my greatest hopes were pinned on my writing. That book on Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death? I’d make a big dent in the draft. I had three essays in the works that I’d hoped to put forward for publication. And I wanted to get to know a few more writers here on Substack.

I managed to do almost none of it.

Henry James wrote, “Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me, those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” I don’t disagree.

In truth, I think the word summer is beautiful all by itself. The initial sibilance gives way immediately to the euphony of u and m; the -er, to my ear, speaks of continuance. Taken together, the word evokes the sounds of crickets and cicadas hidden in tall grass, a salty bay of water curling on the sand, light in the sky at 9 PM, and time boundaries pushed so far to the corners that you forget what they’re like.

I know my little analysis of the word’s composition isn’t for everyone, but surely the word “summer” evokes something for you. What is it? I’ll take any answer that’s true— positive or negative. Don’t think about it too hard, because your first thought is probably your truest. Write it in the comments below and then return to enjoy what everyone else has to say.

That’s what I plan on doing.

But I’ve already told you that I don’t always do what I planned. And I had a lot planned this summer. So what have I done instead?

Well, I preached my first sermon (that was in June) on questions that Jesus asks. I taught a Bible study for my church on the attributes of God, drawing all the foundational passages from Exodus.

I worked on curriculum, in part by re-reading this insightful book (highly recommend) and parts of this wise and compelling one (also highly recommend). I chatted with this person about this movie, and I’m looking forward to talking with him here on Substack (coming soon!) about the role of identity in that film (go watch it!). Meanwhile, please check out his YouTube channel.

I also took care of some house projects that simply feel like too much to take on during the school year: rearranged some contents of kitchen cabinets, scrubbed down the pantry, repaired a wallpaper issue, and, with my husband, cleaned out the storage room.

With a dear friend’s help, I planted a perennial garden where I’ve always only had weeds. The garden is doing well as are the weeds. So I’ve spent more time weeding there (why isn’t the word unweeding?), usually listening to this podcast (which I also heartily recommend) to keep me company.

And I’ve been reading. Lots. Not just the nonfiction named above, but also some really splendid fiction: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Crossing to Safety; about half of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (which I had to abandon for several reasons, one of which is that his book reminded me I don’t actually care for Hemingway). And now I’m halfway through Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I’ll be writing about all of them. Eventually.

Well, maybe not the Hemingway.

But I didn’t write. Not really. I added two essay drafts to the 21 here on Substack that were already waiting for my return, but that’s about all.

It’s taken me a minute to figure out why.

I’ll admit that the weather here lately— for the past week, anyway— is certainly enough to make a person think about fall. As I noted earlier, this is August, every bit of high summer, and in North Carolina’s Piedmont that means humidity and heat, air conditioners running so hard that Duke Energy asks us to go easy. Refuge can be found in only two places: indoors and a swimming pool. And by this point in the year, the pool water might actually be too warm to be any relief.

But this past week, every day, the weather has been amazing: low humidity, temperatures in the 70’s. We’ve had the windows open day and night. We’ve enjoyed morning coffee outside on the deck, where I’ve also done some teaching research in the middle of an afternoon. Some days were cool enough that the cicadas were quiet and only the crickets kept me company.

Around here, this is the kind of weather that makes a person think about football season. Thanksgiving, even. It reminds me of our daughter Emma’s wedding day, not yet a year ago. Emma and Sam got married in October, and the days prior to the wedding were full of heat. But on her wedding morning the humidity broke, the air was clear, the sky that rich autumnal blue. Perfect weather, truly. It was the way autumn ought to be.

I confess that this week’s weather had me looking forward to football and a November chill, but then my practiced resistance reared its head: Time goes fast enough; there’s no need to rush through any of this.

I sat on the deck and watched the leaves filter the sunlight. I tried not to think about going back to school because that was still days away: in-service starting the 11th, and students arriving the 19th. And it will still be summer.

Kierkegaard said that human beings are unique in part because they are always becoming. We’ve talked about that here before: while other animals also become, they don’t develop beyond their adult state.

But human persons continue developing and changing, beyond adulthood, all their lives. And in this becoming we have agency: we can and do make choices that impact and shape what we become.

We have an innate sense of this capacity, but it’s bound by specific tensions. Kierkegaard describes them as polarities, and these reside within every person. Part of the task of becoming a fully realized self requires the person finding a kind of harmony between them.

One of these tensions is between necessity and freedom. As human persons, we are free to make choices. We can train or educate ourselves, try new skills, move to new places, reinvent our identities through myriad practices or adjustments.

But at the same time, we’re pinned down by necessity: things true of us that cannot be altered. We were born where and when we were born; our parents are our parents; our history is our history; our talents, faculties, and aptitudes are, quite simply, what they are. These necessities impose immutable limits on our freedom, and we can’t deny their existence. Without them, I suppose we’d be capable of anything, but their erasure would also necessarily erase us.

On Kierkegaard’s view, necessity plays a big part in determining who we are. But I think it works in smaller ways, too. I think it’s been at work in me this summer. Here’s how.

Since 2021, we’ve gained our four grandchildren, I earned a theology degree (living abroad for the better part of a year) and I started a new job for which I’m writing (along with a stellar colleague and friend) the curriculum.

My husband and I also joined a church plant, a very sweet community. But being there has meant leaving a church where we served and which we loved for nearly thirty years. Once in a while I again consider the losses: the people I don’t see, whose paths simply don’t cross with mine anymore. I might try to keep in touch, but the absence of routine interaction within that community makes it all that much more difficult.

And then there’s Emma’s wedding, nearly a year ago. We’ve converted her room to a guest room, but the art and photos on the walls remain the way she left them. Standing in her room, I’m caught by the realization that our nest is finally empty. My children’s childhoods, so dearly anticipated, so deeply loved, often feel like a myth.

In the fullness of our freedom, we can deny necessity for a time. We can plunge headlong into new and challenging work. We can find ways to serve in a new church and find new friends there. We can surround ourselves (true joy) with grandchildren and the utter delight they bring.

But this summer, of necessity, my writing stalled. I think my mental and emotional reservoirs were full of fatigue from so much change. I needed mindless busyness for my hands, others’ conversations about theology and philosophy. The satisfaction of a clean pantry. A perennial garden with weeds.

We’re made of dust after all. All praise to the Maker who is sympathetic to that.

As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
      for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.

Psalm 103: 13-14

After so many weeks of silence, I’m especially grateful to you for being here. And welcome to those of you who are new! Thank you.

Don’t forget this week’s word game. It isn’t a game, really, so there’s no need to be cowed by competition. Just respond because that’s fun of you.

You know it is.

And here’s your poem. It’s not really related at all to the newsletter this time. Or maybe it is. You tell me.

Summer

And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins:

behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs

and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves—
and then is gone,

leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air.

Carlo Betocchi

Thank you for reading, my friends. Enjoy the rest of your summer! There’s lots of it left.

With joy,

Rebecca

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Homecoming is a familiar plot in movies and sit-com episodes. By that I don’t mean the story of a high school homecoming dance, and I don’t mean Odysseus’ embattled nostos. I mean a narrative based on a character returning home after so much time away.

I’m sure you’ve seen this: maybe it’s Thanksgiving, a sibling’s wedding, a family funeral that our main character must attend. The story opens on his departure from an adult life lived at blissful distance from childhood family and friends, and it builds on interactions at home with people he knew and who knew him in his life before.

We have the makings of tragedy and/or comedy here. Sometimes our main guy learns a lesson or two; sometimes he falls in love. Invariably he’s confronted with familiar realities he’d just as soon do without— which is a reason for that aforementioned distance.

No matter how the plot turns, we can all identify. The people who have known us longest don’t always know us best, but they often enough know things about us that we’ve outgrown or would just as soon forget. Sometimes these are the very things that those people remember, like to recall, like to remind us of.

Know what I mean?

I remember when Facebook had been a thing for maybe five years or so, and I saw an essay or an op-ed somewhere about a strange dissonance the platform afforded. Before Facebook, the writer said, folks pretty much lived their lives with the people they were proximal to. You may have stayed in the same town or moved miles away, but your dealings were with the people near you— and those with whom you remained in contact.

This contact required phone calls, visits, email, letters— actual snail mail!— and Christmas correspondence. And in this way, one maintained relationships over time with a certain amount of deliberate attention.

Then Facebook brought them all into one’s living room. Not just those on the Christmas card list, but everyone on Facebook— which quickly amounted to a lot of people. In the frenzy of early adoption, one requested and accepted “friends” willy-nilly: why not reconnect with such-and-so? I think he sat behind me in Algebra I!

The essay asked a simple question: are we meant to stay connected with (what feels like) everyone over all this time? Maybe it’s best if we don’t. Maybe we need a little distance sometimes— not just from the people we once knew oh so long ago, but from the person those people once knew us to be.

Maybe this kind of connection inhibits one, be it ever so subtly, from the very human process of growing up. Of growing away from our younger selves.

Because we’re not— are we?— the same person we were in Algebra I.

John Locke (1632-1704) would say we are— if we remember being in Algebra I. For him, diachronic identity (“dia” meaning across and “chronic” from chronos, meaning time) is situated in episodic memory. I remember these episodes: waiting for fifteen long minutes on a train platform when I was six; sitting three seats back in the far right row in Algebra class when I was thirteen; eating a peach at the kitchen sink ten minutes ago.

According to Locke, that consistent consciousness across these events confirms that I am the same person who did each of these things.

This insight came to us here last week through Melissa Cain Travis, a philosopher who examined some theories of identity in her essay on Severance. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Perhaps you’ll recall that Travis explained how Thomas Reid (1710-1796) found fault with Locke’s theory.

He argued that lost memories do not mean loss of identity. What if I forgot everything about Algebra I? Would I no longer be the same person who sat there? Attendance records, old seating charts, and the confirmation of some former classmates could situate me there no matter what I can’t recall.

We discussed this last week, and Travis points it out in her essay: “lost memories cannot possibly mean that personal identity doesn’t extend back to forgotten life events. To be sure, an advanced dementia patient or someone with severe, permanent amnesia is still the same person even if they’ve lost their episodic memories or even all awareness of their earlier lives.”1

This makes sense to us, right?

The church my husband and I are part of meets here. We use the space on Sundays for our community’s worship, but on weekdays the building is a center for neurodiverse people, folks with neurodegenerative disease, and the people who care for them. The professionals here educate caregivers, train volunteers, and provide people with understanding, friendship, and communal activity.

I’ll admit I know little about the brain and how it changes. What I do know I’ve learned in my role as a teacher, gaining understanding about neuroplasticity and how teaching methods and classroom environment can help students learn. But every week while at church I seem to learn something new about degenerative brain change simply by reading a placard or list of support tips tacked on the wall. And I’ve lingered over a series of photos that hangs at the back of the main hall. Each is a photo of a person or persons, paired with a brief biography. Each was impacted by a neurodegenerative disease, and each of them has now died— some in terribly tragic ways— due to that disease.

The unwritten subtext: that with understanding and some focused care, these lives would have ended differently. Gently. They’re the reason this organization came to be.

I’ll just say now for the record that I do in fact remember my Algebra I class. Our teacher was Mr. Greenway, a tall, large, and very kind man who was a huge Pitt basketball fan. He had a voice like a radio announcer, and with his excellent teaching he quickly dispelled my fears of learning Algebra.

I did indeed sit in the third seat back in the far right row. I’m the same person who sat there, but I’m not at all the same. I’ve been married for 35 years. I’ve birthed and reared three children and launched them into the world. Those facts alone have changed me significantly since my days of solving for x.

No matter how long we live, diachronically we remain the same person. At the same time, as Kierkegaard says, we’re always becoming. We don’t know what changes lie ahead for any of us, of course— which is one reason why we need philosophy and theology: they can affirm that all persons, no matter their changes, remain persons of inestimable worth.

Practice

To weep unbidden, to wake
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward--
 
is this merely practice? 
Some believe in heaven, 
some in rest. We'll float, 
you said. Afterward
we'll float between two worlds--

five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I'd remember that--

until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.

-- Ellen Bryant Voigt

More to come on identity: bodies and souls. And more to come on other things as well, but this is all for now.

Thanks so much for being here.

With joy,

Rebecca

Hi.

I know, I know. It’s been a while. But look what I have for you!! A fascinating conversation with my new friend Melissa Cain Travis. It’s a richly philosophical take on identity and ways in which that subject is explored in the hit TV series Severance.

More on that in a moment, but first: a warm welcome to new subscribers here! I know you received a welcome email from me, but it makes sense now to situate you and longer-time readers in this particular issue of this newsletter, which is one of many on identity.

Saints and Poets isn’t always about identity (what it is; where it comes from; what it means; how we think about it, how we find it), but I often explore the subject here. Identity is a hot topic from a cultural standpoint, but it was also important to Soren Kierkegaard. And long before Kierkegaard, it would seem that identity is important to God— for all the reasons listed parenthetically above and so many more.

I wrote my recent Masters dissertation on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. This work on despair isn’t about identity per se— not in the way we commonly regard it in the 21st century— but it’s most definitely about what it means to be a human being and the many ways in which we as human beings fail to become true persons.

The dissertation focused on joy (which might seem odd, given the description above), and it was adequate in terms of meeting the requirements for my graduation. But as an old colleague once said, there’s “more meat on that bone,” and I’m simply not finished with the project. So I’m turning my dissertation into a book.

Here on Substack, I’m exploring some of the ideas that will eventually find their way into that book. In some recent writing, I’ve talked a little bit about the significance of our having bodies. The show Severance deals with identity and bodies, too, but in a way far different from my exploration so far. It presents us with some fascinating philosophical questions— and this is where Melissa Cain Travis’ expertise is essential.

Please enjoy the video of that conversation (if you haven’t already!). And here’s Travis’ article that let to our conversation.

In other news, my official, professional teaching commitments ended just a little under two weeks ago, and one of my summer goals is do more writing here and better develop my use of Substack. So you can look for more from me soon in an inbox or Substack account near you!

Meanwhile, don’t forget that we’ve got a reading group going on this subject of identity. We’re reading Oscar Wilde’s classic The Picture of Dorian Gray, and we’ll be discussing it online on Thursday, July 24. Go get it and get reading.

Finally (and as you now know *wink*), Melissa defines some important philosophical language in our conversation. To be honest, terminology created a big shift in my understanding during my graduate degree in analytic theology. Words that used to carry specific, pedestrian connotations took on new significance in the world of philosophy. Materialist/materialism are examples of this. From a philosophical standpoint, “materialism” is this (read the first definition there).

What does the word “materialism” mean or conjure to you? How close does your definition come to that of a philosopher? Put your answer in the comments below and we’ll enjoy the conversation.

And your poem. I chose this one because of its rich physicality (while we’re talking about bodies and materialism) and, of course, because of how the poet connects that physicality to the mind. And more.

Enjoy, my friends.

Meditation on a Grapefruit

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
                      To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
                       To tear the husk
like cotton padding                a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
                                  To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully       without breaking
a single pearly cell
                        To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling       until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
                 so sweet
                            a discipline
precisely pointless        a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause         a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

Craig Arnold

More video conversations to come, I hope. I enjoyed this one with Melissa so much, and I hope you did, too.

Thanks for watching it. And as ever, thanks for reading Saints and Poets.

With joy,
Rebecca

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It’s that time of year. Are you familiar? For some it’s unavoidable; for others an abandoned memory. But for those many in its midst, Maycember is a saturation such that, even if you’re not immersed in it yourself, you can watch or read about it online.

Before I write further, our word game. Friends, this is one that (on my end) writes itself. “Maycember” is the coinage of harried parents during May, describing activities and calendar items so constant that they evoke the equally busy month of December. Your job (I know you know already) is to create your own blended month and then, of course, tell us why you call it that.

Of course at work Maycember is unfolding all around me. Its force is somewhat delayed in our upper school, but this month students have been feeling it in the form of final projects and unit tests. For weeks we’ve been enjoying senior capstone presentations; this past week ended in days devoted to final exams. On Monday we enjoyed the Senior Walk followed by a senior awards ceremony, and in the coming week we’ll wrap up exams, celebrate the last day of school, and finally launch our seniors with a small handful of important events. Meanwhile, some of my colleagues have to duck out occasionally to catch their child in a class production of Hansel and Gretel or to give an interpretation of Horus or Bastet for Pharaoh Day.

Each of these is a not-to-be-missed milestone, carefully planned and prepared for. And yes, these and so many other events (field trips, Field Day, end-of-class parties, dance recitals, sports banquets) can make May feel like a whiplash marathon. Every week— even every day— presents with things parents, students, and teachers alike must send, bring or prepare, set up or clean up, or simply be on time for.

To be honest, I don’t remember May like this when I was a child, but maybe that’s because I was a child, one who didn’t keep a calendar but was merely reminded of things and then ferried to and fro. As for end-of-school activities, I only remember Field Day and a vague cognizance that it marked the school year winding down. I know that at some point we began counting. It was the end of fifth grade, I think, that found me standing next to my driveway after the bus had dropped me off, chanting “Six more days!” in its retreating noise. I doubt anyone heard me or even noticed, but the chanting gave me immense satisfaction at the time.

Here and there, some beleaguered mothers have talked with me about Maycember mayhem. Just last week it was the mother of four ages seven and younger, the smallest an infant clutching her mother’s blouse in a tight fist.

“It’s exhausting,” she said to me, and she unreeled the list of the upcoming week’s events. Each would require her presence and attention, and some her preparation in advance.

I understood and of course was sympathetic. It’s exhausting to be a parent of young children even on the best days, so of course the week (and month) ahead loomed formidable. In this context, I think it’s helpful to have videos like the one linked above so that we can remember to laugh at it. This kind of thing, too, seems wise, because there’s no way around it unless you decide to pull everyone out of school— and out of every other activity in life while you’re at it.

I vividly remember the building busyness of our children as they moved beyond grade school. Weekly soccer practice became daily; family dinners were undone by overlapping sports schedules, play practice, instrument recitals. I caught myself one day wanting to cancel it all or at the very least to wish it away. And then the arresting realization: it would all go away eventually, along with the children.

The downside of Maycember isn’t, to my mind, the busyness. It’s what the busyness does or has the potential to do: to obscure or eclipse May’s promise.

Maybe it was more noticeable when I was at grade school in a Pittsburgh suburb. Spring comes later there— later than it does in North Carolina, anyway. The classroom windows likely only stand open in the last few weeks of school, and the smallest breeze can bring it in.

“It” being what every child is— or should be— aware of: a sense of the widening freedom of the coming days, of not having to be somewhere or do anything. Of staying outside after dark playing flashlight tag, or swimming so late at the local pool that you’re there long after the pool lights come on. Days with your head in a book, your toes in the sand. Days (one can only hope) short on screens and long on wonder.

The May air that slipped into my grade school windows intimated as much, although I don’t remember how. But I knew what was coming.

This little edition of my newsletter is a one-off, just something I was thinking about that I wanted to write down. Nonetheless, feel free to respond in the comments below anyway: maybe your own thoughts on Maycember or the heady delight of end-of-school. Or respond to the word game. You know you want to.

In other news, we have a next book for our ongoing book-discussion-conversation on identity and Kierkegaard’s ideas in The Sickness Unto Death (on which, you may recall, I am writing a book)! We’ll be discussing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and you should read it because it’s a great story, well-written, and a classic. Go get the book, and pencil us in for conversation on Thursday, July 24.

Finally, I found a poem, because of course I did.

The High-School Lawn

    Gray prinked with rose,
    White tipped with blue,
    Shoes with gay hose,
    Sleeves of chrome hue;
    Fluffed frills of white,
    Dark bordered light;
    Such shimmerings through
Trees of emerald green are eyed
This afternoon, from the road outside.

    They whirl around:
    Many laughters run
    With a cascade's sound;
    Then a mere one.

    A bell: they flee:
    Silence then:--
    So it will be
    Some day again
    With them, --with me.

-Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928

Like I said, this is a one-off. Maybe I’ll send another newsletter on schedule this coming week, and maybe not, because it’s Maycember, don’t you know.

Thank you for reading!

With joy,

Rebecca

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My husband corrected my grammar the other day.

Appalling.

We were chatting over coffee on Saturday morning. Who knows (now) what we were talking about. And, “It’s six of one, half dozen of the other,” I said.

Bill’s answer was casual, as though I’d immediately own my error. As though I’d meant to say something else. “Six in one, half dozen in the other,” he said.

What?

I was offended. Fascinated (of course). And offended. And I immediately forgot whatever it was we’d been talking about, because I’ve used that phrase, in precisely that way, dozens— no, hundreds— of times. He’s only now correcting me?

But also.

“Wait, what?” I said.

“Six in one, half dozen in the other,” he said again, and then pointed out what I’d been saying all along: an expression that identifies two options for getting the exact same thing.

On the other hand (this realization slowly dawning as he patiently described it), if it’s six of one, half dozen of the other, you’re not talking about same things. You’re necessarily talking about different things, in which case all things almost certainly are not equal. You could be talking about apples and oranges, for instance. Or apples and donuts.

See?

I saw, amazed. I’m pretty sure I’ve been saying “six of one, half a dozen of the other” all my life.

Do you use that phrase? Do you use it correctly?

What’s wonderful about this isn’t merely my husband’s enjoyment with me of allthingsrelatedtolanguage (I know you love it too, you wonderful reader, you). It’s that so much meaning rides on so small a word.

We’re talking about “of” and “in,” for heaven’s sake. Two letters, huge difference, everything hanging on that tiny preposition.

But of course, prepositions are mighty things, and most of them are fairly small— er, short. Here’s a (not exhaustive) list. Note how short many of them are:

Back when I taught middle school grammar, I was told that a good way to teach prepositions was to explain that a preposition is anything a squirrel can do to a tree. This sounds strange, but bear with me. Referencing the list above, we can make some sense: a squirrel might run about a tree or among some, across or along a tree’s branch, hide behind a tree, rest beneath it, dig a hole beside it. And that’s just prepositions from the first column, all describing the squirrel as relating to a tree.

You get the gist.

Prepositions show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and other words in a sentence. They’re important, and they’re a good time— especially when it’s time to diagram sentences. But we’re not going to go there.

Instead, you’re going to respond to this newsletter in the comments below with a sentence that includes a preposition— and then a second sentence identical to the first except that you’re going to change out the preposition. That’s all you have to do. The change in preposition will speak for itself as to how important prepositions are. Also, you’re clever, so the change of preposition is likely to bring us all some amusement.

No need to cast about you for words: see the list posted above! Just enjoy yourself some prepositions, then respond below.

And have fun! You know you will.

This talk about relationship makes me think about what it means to be a human being. In my Theology class, my students and I take some pains to identify what a human being is. The definition’s first part: a human being is body and soul.

We are embodied, something I wrote about a while ago. I noted that theologians such as Thomas Aquinas identified two types of beings: material and immaterial. Human beings are material, bounded by what’s around us (for example, I’m sitting on the sofa in my living room). That we’re limited by our bodies is so obvious as to be (most of the time) seemingly insignificant. But it’s very important.

Somehow along my growing up years, I absorbed and even believed the notion that our bodies aren’t good, that they’re the lesser part of our selves, the greater part being our souls.

I’m not sure where I got that idea. It wasn’t from my parents, and I don’t think anyone at my church taught it, not explicitly, anyway. But one can absorb the idea well enough in a context that speaks of sin as “of the flesh,” or that the most important work is in the pulpit or on the mission field. Language about “denying oneself” or pursuing the spiritual while foregoing the material can have that kind of effect on a person.

Ideas like these provoked important aspects of my novel Healing Maddie Brees, whose titular character believes that God isn’t interested in our bodies. Visiting the medieval Italian town of San Gimignano, Maddie and Frank come upon a statue believed to have healing powers. Maddie is incredulous, and she lets Frank know it:

God didn’t go around doing miraculous healing. He didn’t do miracles these days. God worked through science; he let people figure it out. The problem came, she said, when people expected him to work magic, or when they looked at him as a means to an end, like they could use him to get what they wanted. Meanwhile, the Bible was clear on this: God was concerned with our souls, not our bodies. That was the whole point of the church, wasn’t it? Saving souls?

Of course, Maddie is wrong.

Remember this newsletter of a few weeks ago, a comparison of creative narratives: the ancient Greeks, Mesopotamians, and Hebrews as recorded in Genesis.

The point there was to demonstrate the vastly different conceptions of the gods and God. Whether or not a person takes the Genesis narrative literally, one can hardly miss how the ancient Hebrews perceived God: eternal and all-powerful, summoning earth, sky, and all creation with the power of his word. There’s no violence to be seen, no competition, jealousy, or retributive justice. Just a world being born by the authority of one who willed it and declared it good.

But I left off the part about the creation of humans, and once again we’re helped to note how the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians saw it. For the ancient Greeks, humans were made by Prometheus, who presumably liked them because he went on to give them the gift of fire. This generosity wasn’t appreciated by the gods of Olympus, and Prometheus pays for this in a very particular way for the rest of eternity.

The Mesopotamian’s view has Marduk creating humankind for a singular purpose: as servants and slaves of the gods.

The Hebrew telling is, once again, vastly different. Whereas the rest of creation is spoken into existence, humankind is formed by God’s hand, his body sculpted out of the dust. Then, says Genesis 2: 7, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

The sense of human identity and worth, in this telling, couldn’t be more different from that of the other ancients. We were formed with an undeniable tenderness: deliberately, by hand, breath bringing breath, spirit engendering spirit. And we’re not slaves but are instead, in God’s image, made to rule and subdue, be fruitful and multiply.

On the Hebrew telling, humankind—body and soul— is creation’s crowning touch.

Which brings us to Easter.

It’s still Eastertide, you know: the stretch of days between Resurrection Sunday and Pentecost Sunday, which this year is June 8th. So you won’t mind, will you, if I mention the body of Jesus.

John’s gospel makes much of it. His telling of Christ’s passion includes multiple details of Jesus’ body, from the division of and gambling over his clothes to his thirst, to the spear thrust into his side.

It was a colleague who pointed out to me John’s mention of his body after his death. In 19: 38-42, he writes about it in detail. Joseph of Arimathea asks for it and, given permission, takes his body away. He and Nicodemus then wrap his body in spices and strips of linen and lay him in a tomb.

If you’re looking for it, you can see the tenderness here. My colleague pointed out that, after Jesus’ death, the Father seems to have cared for his Son’s body: it’s only ever handled by friends.

This isn’t the end. The resurrection was Sunday morning. Mary, the first to speak to him, was able to put her arms around him.

“Why did God have to be incarnate?” I ask my students. We’ve talked about this before. It’s the end of the semester, and by now they know.

“So he could die,” they say.

Exactly.

But death wasn’t the final word for Jesus, and it’s not the final word for anyone who chooses to trust in him.

Our bodies matter. Our physical bodies— strong or frail, well or ill— matter. Job understood:

“For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last he will stand upon the earth.

And after my body has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I shall see God.”

Job 19: 25-26

I’ve shared this poem with you before, but I can’t during Eastertide write a newsletter about our material selves and not include this poem. So here you are:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike

Whatever you do, don’t forget to respond with your prepositions. Seriously. Don’t.

And thank you (again and again) for reading.

With joy,

Rebecca

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First of all: welcome to all the new followers and subscribers here! Over the last month, quite a few of you have joined us, and I’m delighted to have you.

Second, our book discussion is slated for tomorrow night. Work continues on my next book, a study on identity and joy in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. As regular readers here will know, this means I’m exploring various ideas around identity in this newsletter. We’re also reading and discussing several books on the topic.

Up for discussion tomorrow: O. Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own. If you’re planning to take part in the conversation, respond in the comments with “I’m in!” and tomorrow I’ll send you a link to join us. We’ll start at 8:00 PM EST and won’t continue more than an hour. I hope you can take part. I’d love to see and hear from you!

Last time around, I invited folks to respond with the name of a precious or semi-precious stone. True confession: I did this (in part) because I was looking forward to the words themselves— to what they look and sound like. The stones you named did not disappoint.

Here’s the list: obsidian, smoky quartz, jacinth, carnelian, tiger eye, and beryl. And my husband, quoting Barbra Streisand in a great moment here,1 listed micas, quartz, feldspar, pyroxenes, magnetites and coarse and granulated plutonics.

That list is worth saying aloud. I highly recommend your reading it aloud now. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

You’re welcome.

Names are important. I think it’s no small thing that, in Genesis 2, God invites Adam to name the animals. Made in God’s image, Adam is to rule over and subdue God’s much loved creation. Naming the creatures is an exercise of that authority.

Think about it: providing something with a name means giving it an identity. This title will be the means by which others distinguish, recognize, call to mind that thing. And so the name is important: it must express something essential about that which it names.

This suggests something else about Adam’s project of naming. In order to do it well, he had to know the creatures he named. He had to observe and think about each one. In other words, this first act of “ruling and subduing” entailed careful attention to and appreciation of God’s creatures. His task wasn’t domination (as humankind has so often misconstrued our calling); rather it was intimate care.

Last week’s poem had an interesting line about naming. Did you see it? There at almost the end? Tomlinson writes, “Whatever cannot be mastered with a name.” Because there is also a kind of mastery in naming. By placing a title on something, you are, in a way, defining what it is.

We know this is true. Do you like your name? Why or why not? Have you ever had a nickname you didn’t like? One pinned on you in order to tease? The reason you don’t like your name or nickname is because of that inherent mastery: the identity it imposes isn’t something you relate to or accept.

But a name is a master even in small, practical ways. What do you do when you hear your name spoken in a crowd? See? And even now, with my children all grown, I’ll still turn my head in the store when I hear a small voice call, “Mom!”

Fascinating, then, that when, in Exodus 3, Moses asks God for his name, God doesn’t give it.

It’s certainly fair of Moses to ask: he doesn’t know God. He’s been raised in Egypt, surrounded by many, many gods. He grew up in Pharaoh’s house. The God of his forefathers— of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob— is remote at best, belonging to another place and a time out of mind.

So when God commissions Moses to be the leader through whom he’ll rescue his enslaved people, Moses asks God, “Whom should I tell them you are?”

And God answers, quite famously, “I am.”2

There’s lots to be construed from this simple sentence. One translation suggests an open-endedness: “I am” means “I will be what I will be.” In other words, God is inviting Moses and all of Israel to find him out, to get to know him. “I will be what I will be” means “I’ll show you who I am by what I do.”

And then God proceeds to introduce himself to all of Israel in the greatest act of salvation prior to the atoning work of Christ. He reveals himself to Israel as faithful, trustworthy, and powerful beyond the imagination. He ushers them from slavery loaded down with clothing and jewelry that the Egyptians voluntarily heap on them. He leads them with pillars of cloud and smoke. He parts the Red Sea and they walk untouched between walls of water.

Only then— rescue accomplished, promises made good— does he invite them to be his people, his “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”3 After they have begun to know him.

Last Sunday was Easter. My favorite story among the many is Mary at the empty tomb, her vision impaired by tears, bereft.

They’d thought he was the Messiah, finally come to deliver them. But he insisted on a message so different from what they’d anticipated: suffering, dying. What in the world?

It was unimaginable that Jesus should die. Only weeks ago, he’d raised Lazarus from the dead. Jesus was no ordinary person: surely, as the Roman soldier in Mark’s gospel tells it, he was the son of God.4

But Mary had seen him lifeless. She’d watched his shrouded form laid away, the stone cover the door.

Now she stands alone in the garden. The other disciples have scattered. Jesus’ tomb is a gaping hole. She’s lost everything, even the body.

And then Jesus says her name.5

What If We Were Alone?

What if there weren't any stars?
What if only the sun and the earth
circled alone in the sky? What if
no one ever found anything outside 
this world right here? --no Galileo
could say, "Look--it is out there,
a hint of whether we are everything."

Look out at the stars. Yes-- cold 
space. Yes, we are so distant that
the mind goes hollow to think it.
But something is out there. Whatever
our limits, we are led outward. We glimpse
company. Each glittering point of light
beckons: "There is something beyond."

The moon rolls through the trees, rises
from them, and waits. In the river all
night a voice floats from rock 
to sandbar, to log. What kind of listening
can follow quietly enough? We bow, and
the voice that falls through the rapids
calls all the rocks by their secret names.

-William Stafford

I do hope you’ll join our book discussion tomorrow night, even if you haven’t read the book! Remember to let me know by saying “I’m in” in the comments.

As for a word game, what’s a name you love? Or, if you could choose a different name for yourself, what would it be?

And finally, thanks so much for being here.

With joy,

Rebecca

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The last time I wrote to you, my subject was the capacity, no, the tendency, no, the proclivity habit aptitude drive (for so it would seem) in humankind to do and to make, to enhance and improve, to order and tend and manage and regulate the world around us.

My subject was not (I hope you noticed) to argue that we do this well. And I won’t argue it here in this edition either (although I think it would be fun: humans have learned to tend the earth in excellent ways). Neither will I argue that we do this poorly: examples of our ruinous domination abound (one can look here for a particular view).

No, my aim was simply to point out that we do, in fact, rule and subdue over God’s much beloved creation, even if we do so unwittingly.

But in truth, I think we know that we rule and subdue, even if we don’t think about it. We know we do because we’re vexed when we can’t. Think on it: when the remote doesn’t work, when the car won’t start, when the guy pulls out in front of us in traffic. All of this is annoying because we’re otherwise accustomed to having things our way: and having our way is a kind of ruling. See?

What we don’t necessarily think about or believe is that we do so because God told us to. He in fact made us to this very end.1 On the Judeo-Christian view, this ruling and subduing is a distinguishing feature of the human identity.

But I’ve made this point already. I’m really wanting to talk about something— er someone— else.

And that something is…. words! Who’s surprised? No one.

Today I’m beginning this conversation with a series of screenshots: a recent dialogue via text message between me and my husband.

Here goes.

Before you ask, I think he entered “quate” in his search engine because (as you can see, if you know the game) Wordle had accepted it as an actual word. Which it isn’t, certainly not via Merriam Webster, which makes me wonder just how trustworthy is the games editor at The New York Times, because (rather famously in these parts) “immanence” wasn’t recognized as a word there only last June.

“Immanence” is one of my favorite words. Seriously. Why doesn’t The Times know it?

My husband knew neither “agate” nor “chalcedony” (he was joking about “variegated”), and I’m not sure why. But anyone who’s stuck to their reading in passages such as Exodus 28 or Revelation 21 would be familiar. Ahem.

Anyway, I know you know what’s coming. You’re about to be invited to some fun! Here goes:

Respond in the comments below with the name of a precious or semi-precious stone. The more obscure the better!

Nope! Stop it. Don’t worry about what your answer may be compare with everyone else’s. Just answer with the first (appropriate) word that comes to mind! Do it.

Remember: this is a good time.

And while we’re off the subject of this newsletter, allow me to remind you of something fast approaching: our book discussion!

On Thursday, April 24 at 8 PM EST, we’ll meet online to discuss O. Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. I’m about halfway through the book and am looking forward to excellent conversation about it with you.

Go get it.

But all this about words and books isn’t the point today. No. Today we’re talking about creation narratives.

If you teach theology (like I do), then you’ve spent considerable time in the first several chapters of Genesis. It’s impossible not to. We learn about people from what they say and do, thus the first words and actions of God in the Genesis account are essential in helping us understand who he is.

And if you’ve taught humanities (like I have) then you may have spent considerable time in other creation narratives of the ancient near east. What’s important is how these tales compare.

Take the Greeks’ story, for instance. Many of us are familiar with the Titans, offspring of Gaia (the earth) and Ouranos (the sky). Perhaps due to a legacy of violence, one of these Titans mutilates his father and then goes on to swallow whole his own children (because— why would he think this?— he fears they’ll be violent with him). One of these children (Zeus) escapes the swallowing and later returns to rescue his siblings and murder his father (worst fears realized). You no doubt recognize Zeus as the king of the gods and ruler of Olympus.

Humans only emerge in the Greek scenario when Prometheus (a Titan) makes them. As in the Genesis narrative, humans are made of dust, and a god(dess— Athena) gives them the breath of life. But when Prometheus gives the gift of fire to humanity, he suffers eternal torment for it. One take-home: “Titans love humans more than Olympians do,”2 apparently.

My students and I used to read the Enuma Elish, a creation narrative from ancient Mesopotamia. Gods abound in this tale, too: Apsu and Tiamat and their many children who manage to annoy their mother and one of whom, eventually, kills his father. Then we have Marduk, who “looked like a god of gods for all time.” After his arrival there come more annoyance, more struggle, and the creation of monster-like creatures who battle the gods for vengeance. Ultimately Marduk kills Tiamat, whose body— split in two— becomes the heavens and the earth.

In the end Marduk surveys what he’s made: “He stood still for an age, having a strange and wondrous thought…. ‘I will have blood all around us. I shall frame it with bone. I shall build a creature.’” That creature is man, made for a specific purpose: “‘You shall serve all of the gods”… and free “the gods from eternal labor.”

The origins of humankind— as per the view of our near-eastern ancients: “chaos, violence, and death.”3 In these narratives, humans are accident or afterthought, their thriving unsought, their purpose enslavement. A dark view.

The Genesis account, by contrast, depicts a triune God bringing order and light out of dark chaos, not through violence but by the power of his Word. Speaking each into existence, he establishes places in which beings can thrive and then sets them there: birds, fish, insects, animals. He calls each of them good.

His pleasure in what he makes seems to be his reason for it, which isn’t hard to imagine. One only need look closely at the crests and turns of a dog’s coat, a replete covering ending only at the nose: the care and wisdom here speak for themselves.

And then when God makes humans, he says we’ll be in “his image,” for the express purpose of “ruling and subduing” the creation. And his creation is in need of subduing: it grows and multiplies with abandon. Witness, for example, the wild chicory on the roadside, pressing up through cracks in the pavement in natural obedience to God’s command: “Live!”

Of the creation on that last day, he says it’s “very good.” Words of deep approval. Contentment, even. The farthest cry from chaos.

It’s fair to say that, among all the gods in these creation narratives, the God of Genesis is the One who loves.

I don’t always find a poem that connects so beautifully with the newsletter it’s attached to, so you can imagine how pleased I was to recall this.4. Enjoy.

Adam

Adam, on such a morning, named the beasts:
     It was before the sin. It is again.
An openwork world of lights and ledges
     Stretches to the eyes' lip its cup:
Flower-maned beasts, beasts of the cloud,
     Beasts of the unseen, green beasts
Crowd forward to be named. Beasts of the qualities
     Claim them: sinuous, pungent, swift:
We tell them over, surround them
      In a world of sounds, and they are heard
Not drowned in them; we lay a hand
     Along a snakeshead, take up
The nameless muzzle, to assign its vocable
     And meaning. Are we the lords or limits 
Of this teeming horde? We bring
     To a kind of birth all we can name
And, named, it echoes in us our being.
     Adam, on such a morning, knew
The perpetuity of Eden, drew from the words
     Of that long naming, his sense of its continuance
And of its source--beyond the curse of the bitten apple--
     Murmuring in wordless words: 'When you deny
The virtue of this place, then you
     Will blame the wind or the wide air,
Whatever cannot be mastered with a name,
     Mouther and unmaker, madman, Adam.'

                              -Charles Tomlinson

Don’t forget the word game. Don’t forget the book discussion. Don’t forget I’m grateful to you for being here.

With joy,

Rebecca

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What’s your favorite store? And no, I don’t mean Target. I mean what’s your favorite kind of store?

For decades I’ve been a fan of hardware stores. Yes, I like Lowes and Home Depot, but really I like the independent kind that have been around for awhile. You know what I mean: typically they’re stashed on the first floor of a two-story, Main Street building, and they have fishing tackle, a tricycle, two sizes of box fans, and a refinished wooden filing cabinet on display in the front window.

Inside, their narrow aisles hold tightly packed offerings, organized or not. Making one’s way down said aisles requires a certain amount of dexterity and a keen eye: broom and mop handles potentially abound, as do wayward hoses, a weed-whacker partly dislodged from its shelf, and that box of balsa wood airplanes that a child pulled down and then abandoned when his father called to him.

Yes, I love hardware stores. I can stare at a panel of paint chips in deep contentment for as yet unmeasured lengths of time. Neither do I mind (terribly) standing in line waiting to pay, because here I’m surrounded by a favorite thing about hardware stores: the people who patronize them.

Why do I love these patrons, you ask? Because people in hardware stores are doing something. They arrive and leave with an eye gleam appertaining to endeavor: building, planting, attaching, expanding, mulching, adjusting, making. Any and all of the above. A person in a hardware store has a task in hand and improvement in mind. She’s there on God’s errand, whether or not she knows it: ruling and subduing1 the Creator’s beloved creation.

These days my students and I are talking about the “ruling and subduing” bit, and also the rest of God’s mandate for humankind: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Quite a list of verbs there: be fruitful, increase, fill and subdue the earth, rule over its living creatures. All because, on the Genesis account, humankind is made in God’s image— the image of the God who rules over all.

My students and I spent time today talking about this “subdue” bit, sometimes translated as having dominion. For many, neither of these words is favorable.

Clearly, to subdue can mean to overcome, defeat, conquer, master— none of which sounds very nice. Taken this way, God’s words become permission to overpower, perhaps also to exploit or abuse.

And so larger context is essential to avoid such misinterpretation. My students and I look again at that Genesis 1 account, of which the verses quoted here are very nearly the tail end.

What we discover is creation wrought where once was only darkness and chaos, order and thriving beauty brought into being by the Word of Beingness Himself. And this Eternal Beingness declares time and again, over every aspect of his creation, that it is good.

In this context, ruling would be about seeing to the ongoing thrivingness of all that God has made. And subduing it would mean bringing continued meaning and order where the mandate “Live!” seems to mean consistent and sometimes explosive growth, spreading, and mad reproduction. Doubt me? Consider the weed flower Lysimachia clethroides, whose tall green presence plumes during the summer in a lovely, tapering wand of small, star-shaped flowers.

If you’ll consider said plant, if you’ll take a moment to look it up, you’ll immediately see words like “invasive” accompanied by tips on the plant’s removal. And you’ll also learn its English name, which is gooseneck loosestrife. “Gooseneck” for the shape of that tapering wand of blossom. And “loosestrife” for what this plant does: spreading with wild and tenacious abandon, it wreaks strife for the gardener, who is at great pains to subdue it.

My students and I consider these: “rule” and “subdue.” So much of our work and living are precisely these actions, borne out in multifarious ways. A potato farmer rules and subdues differently than does a librarian, a math teacher rules and subdues differently than do his students. Laundry also is a kind of ruling and subduing, as is balancing a checkbook. All these tasks are best performed with attention and care for that which we oversee.

What I find fascinating— and something my students and I discuss— is that human beings do indeed obey God’s word in Genesis 1: 28 regardless of whether they know, believe in, or have any regard for the God who spoke it.

This (of course) goes for all of us waiting in line at the hardware store.

Once upon a time, my sister and I spent several hot hours in the summer sun trying to remove gooseneck loosestrife from our (other) sister’s garden. I enjoyed the name of that invasive garden plant more than I did its removal, to be honest. I’m sure you’re not surprised.

My word game invitation to you: create (or identify) two pairs of compound words (in the way of gooseneck loosestrife) that mean one thing. And also, tell us what they mean. Remember, you can come up with something that actually exists or make up your own. Either way, put it in the comments below. And also (always) feel free to comment in any other way you’d like.

Also, don’t forget our upcoming book discussion! O. Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own, a book about identity. We’ll meet online to talk about it on Thursday, April 24. And here’s some good news: the book is newly available in paperback!

Finally, your poem:

Two Sewing

The wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
it stitches into the thin
cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.

Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.

                        -Hazel Hall

That’s all for this time, friends. Thanks so much for reading.

With joy,

Rebecca

In the classic quarrel over what makes for a good story— is it character or plot?— I say character wins.

My husband might disagree with me, as would many others. One can have a novel composed of deep and vibrant characters in which virtually nothing happens. This isn’t to say that my husband can’t or won’t appreciate such books, but at the end of the book he’ll nonetheless comment that “nothing happened.”

Most people, when reading a story, anticipate that something will happen, that there will, in fact, be a story.

But I say that character wins the debate, because it’s characters that make a story happen. Yes, yes. Things happen. Volcanoes erupt, cars crash, disease sets in, milk is spilled. All of these (and then some) might make for a plot.

And in any good, real, believable story, the plot will turn on how characters respond to and live among those events.

Dickens is famous for the uncanny coincidence of his plots. But we can’t dismiss him, in part, because his characters are so rich and compelling. They engage those events inflicted upon them in ways we understand and can imagine ourselves doing— or ways we can imagine the characters themselves doing, because Dickens has made those characters so unmistakably true.

But I digress. The point is to say that, in good stories, characters matter. And this is very much the case in the book we some of us met to discuss last week.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library made for some very good conversation, pretty much all of which turned on character. We discussed them separately: five people on whom were centered the book’s five plots. We liked that these varied in demographic, that they all lived in Tokyo, that they found what they were looking for (you guessed it) in the library (sort of). And we liked, too, the secondary but somehow also central figure in each plot: a detached, mysterious, yet thoroughly conceived librarian who dispensed wisdom in her detached and mysterious way.

The book is very well done, we all agreed. Not showy. Not making too much of itself. Richly satisfying.

How? (Here’s a spoiler but honestly, dear reader, you had your chance). In each plot, the main character undergoes a kind of transformation. We likened this pleasure to that famous shopping scene in this movie, or to those home makeover shows. Who doesn’t like to see something neglected, mistreated, forlorn receive the care and love it deserves? and then— voilá— experience the fruit of that transformation?

This is what author Michiko Aoyama achieves five times over— and she does so with a quietness and delicacy that is—in my opinion— so very Japanese. She’s understated, and I loved it.

One among us gave the plots’ predicaments an apt description: she said that each of the five characters is, in his or her way, stuck. Aoyama and her mysterious librarian somehow enable each of them to find their way out. The plot here is painted with the lightest touch, but the effect is unmistakeable: there’s so much hope.

Of course there came a time in our discussion when I had to reveal why I wanted people to read the book with me. And of course the answer is Kierkegaard.

As I’ve said in these pages before, an underlying premise of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (on which I’m currently writing a book) is that human persons are always in a state of becoming. And as I’ve already described, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a bright illustration of this reality. Our becomingness (not a Kierkegaardian term) is unique to our being human, because (on Kierkegaard’s terms) being human entails that we are spirit.

Like other animals, humans grow into an adult state and there remain. But unlike other animals, we continue to become within and beyond that growth. We become more wise, more gentle, more educated, better at woodworking or writing poetry, in better shape, wealthier, more relaxed. Other things. All of which— or most of which, anyway— would come with some effort or, at the very least, some attention.

Or— perhaps less obviously— we don’t become these things. This, too, is part of Kierkegaard’s premise: we’re becoming whether we’re attending to it or not. As spirit, the human being’s growth and change are ongoing: we’re subject to development (for better or worse) regardless of our thinking about it.

By these lights, a person can, say, become an expert on pruning roses without intending to become such, simply by pruning lots and many kinds of roses. And by these lights, a person can become hardened and bitter, inured to their blindness of others’ worth simply by holding grudges, rehearsing the reasons for them over and over again. In each case, the change is unintentional and very real.

Always becoming.

The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel can be read as a litany of rules. Do this and do it in this way; don’t do this; don’t do things like that. Read in that way, the sermon can come across very heavy-handed, with impingements and restrictions everywhere.

But Jesus is the one speaking here. Christ, the one through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together.1 He understands that we are embodied spirits, made in God’s image and therefore made to be like God. All of which suggests that something else is intended here.

This is, in part, a description of life in his kingdom: the kingdom of heaven. Here, persons rest in God’s perfect provision, trusting implicitly in his goodness and wisdom. They don’t need to worry about what they’ll eat, drink, or wear. And they don’t need to be anxious, because they know that the Father sees, knows, and cares for them.

And in part it’s a description of the life most beneficial to those in that kingdom. Knowing that we are spirit and continue to be shaped by what we think, say, and do, he teaches us the most life-giving way to think, say, do.

He says, “Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you2.”

Why? Because in his kingdom, we don’t have to worry about whether we have enough, and we want to care for the poor because our God cares for the poor, and we’re his instruments in doing so.

We’re also to give to those who ask because this helps our own becoming: when we give, we practice withholding judgment of those who are asking, and we practice not being greedy.

He tells us to practice mercy. As we do, we become more merciful. And this is, in itself, a mercy.

Two notes before I go.

1. Starting now, I’ll be sending new issues of Saints and Poets every other week. This is because the weekly schedule of producing these missives is preventing my writing elsewhere— and I need to be writing elsewhere. More on that soon.

2. Would you like to read another book with me? This go-round it’s non-fiction: O. Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own. Noble is deeply thoughtful and easy to read, and his book searches out some interesting, present-day issues about identity— which, you may recall, is the focus on my book on Kierkegaard. We’ll meet online to discuss it on Thursday, April 24.

I have no word game for you this time around, but any response to what you’ve read here is most welcome. Always.

And here’s your poem.

A Cure of Souls

The pastor
of grief and dreams

guides his flock towards
the next field

with all his care.
He has heard

the bell tolling
but the sheep

are hungry and need
the grass, today and

every day. Beautiful
his patience, his long

shadow, the rippling 
sound of the flocks moving

along the valley.

                  --Denise Levertov

Isn’t that the loveliest poem? I think so. In my mind, the shepherd of the poem connects beautifully with the One who gave the Sermon on the Mount. But maybe that’s saying too much. I usually try not to say too much, especially when it comes to connecting the poem to the text of my newsletter, but here we are: I’ve said too much.

Thank you for being here anyway, and for being.

With joy,

Rebecca

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Eleven. Eleven times. I think that’s a good number of times to use a specific word in a (relatively) short newsletter. By “good,” I mean many. And by “many,” I mean too many.

Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Last week I wrote to you about vulnerability in an effort, at least in part, to correct something I’d said in the newsletter before that. And at the end of last week’s newsletter, I invited readers to guess how many times I’d used the words “vulnerable” or “vulnerability.”

Sarah Davis won! She guessed it on the nose, and her prize is the immense satisfaction I’m certain she’s feeling right now.

Well done, Sarah! Thank you (all of you) for playing.

What’s strange to me is that I never considered looking for a synonym. It’s my habit to be watchful about how many times I use a given word in a single piece of writing. It’s my delight (and distraction) to consult a thesaurus (Merriam-Webster has an outstanding application on their site) in order to say the same thing in different ways.

When I was in high school, the vocabulary building program in my English classes had a section called Shades of Meaning. Here we’d learn a handful of words that were termed synonyms, and we’d have to demonstrate knowledge of how the words differed and the best ways to use them.

I hated it at the time, forever certain of failing the weekly (and very difficult) vocabulary quizzes. But I think I learned a lot. And here’s the thing: shades of meaning among synonyms are an excellent time.

So here’s your word game this time around: offer a synonym (or near-synonym) for vulnerable, and explain the shade of meaning: how is this word expressing something a little different than the word vulnerable itself?

You’re going to love this.

Maybe I’ll wish I’d chosen one, or some, or all of them.

In other news, I had to move last week’s discussion of What You Are Looking for Is in the Library to this week. That’s right! If you were unable to join us last week, never fear! We were all unable to join us last week, so you missed nothing!

Our discussion is re-scheduled for this Thursday, March 6, at 8 PM. Once again, reply “I’m in!” in the comments below, and on Thursday morning I’ll send you an email with the necessary details. I hope that all who wanted to join last week can do so this time around, and maybe we’ll add some more of you to the group. I’d love that!

And in the last bit of news, this week I’m enjoying spring break. I’ll spend most of it at home, tackling some purge/home-improvement projects, some yard work, and some writing (always some writing). But I did want to get out of town for a few days, so I’m writing to you now from Charlottesville, Virginia.

What is it about getting out of town? There’s just something delicious about shaking off the claims of work and household. And I love— as a friend once wrote of her road trip— to feel the road: to know and count the distance between here and there, to watch the change in landscape as you go.

We chose Charlottesville, in part, because it’s not too far from home. It took us a little over three hours to get here, and it was a beautiful drive. I love the sunlight in winter, especially in the afternoon: a light shade of amber, as if fields and trees have been drenched in Chardonnay. We drove through forests straight and still, everything bare except for the furled parchment leaves of the American beech. And then we emerged into this part of Virginia, a place we’ve loved for a long time. Everywhere are hills and the split-rail fences that limn them; open fields bleached pale; gnarled and wind-swept cedars; lone, dun trees in otherwise cleared farmland, holding their empty arms up against the sky.

We visited Charlottesville often in the earliest years of our marriage, making the southbound trek from our college town in western Pennsylvania. We’d leave on a Friday after work and stop en route at The Italian Oven in Somerset, PA, for dinner. That trip was twice as long, and I remember fading in and out of sleep while Bill drove, awakened now and again by wild and haunting songs from this Tears for Fears album.

Funny how we remember things: on this trip Bill and I have been recounting these details to each other. We concur on all of it, and yet we’re sure we haven’t got everything right. We didn’t listen to that album every time we drove to Charlottesville, did we? And how many times did we stop at that Italian place? Certainly it wasn’t always.

But it was always Adam we were going to see, our college friend who’d moved to Virginia to study here. His program was one year, but he stayed on for several years afterwards, living in a little three-room cottage that, once upon a time, was likely a farmhand’s house. The cottage is one of several on a winding road that climbs to what must once have been the farmhouse. The rolling fields all around these are mown, but just beyond Adam’s cottage the forest starts up and climbs more steeply: one pleat among many folds in the Blue Ridge Mountain range.

We visited him often, at all times of the year: in the spring when the forsythia amazed us with February blooms; in winter, when I planted myself in front of the wood stove. In summer, when I remember waking well after noon to birdsong and the leaves of some friendly shrub tapping at the window screen.

Always Bill and Adam were cooking dinner late into the night. We never ate supper until after 10 p.m.; we usually watched movies until the early hours; we always slept until afternoon.

Bill remembers watching a Steelers game here; I remember reading in the main room while it rained. At least once we hiked the mountain behind the cottage. At least twice we went into Charlottesville proper and had a walk around UVA. Several times we were around a fire pit in the front yard. And one time many friends from college descended for a weekend that resembled something out of The Big Chill: we blazed up the mountain in somebody’s jeep to a watchtower that some of us ended up climbing.

A favorite memory: one late night that weekend one of us stumbled outside into the dark, only to call everyone outside: the hillside and the mountain, as far as we could see, was lit up near and far with what were easily thousands of fireflies.

A more favorite memory: the time Adam introduced us to Wendy. It was always Adam-and-Wendy after that.

Over the years, at almost every visit with Adam and Wendy, we’ve talked about those days at the cottage. Since Adam’s death in November of 2022, Bill and I have talked about them some more. And over dinner last night, we talked about them again.

Those early years of our marriage were difficult ones in several ways. We don’t doubt we carried their weight with us to Charlottesville.

What we didn’t know then: the difficult things were going to work out.

What we didn’t imagine then: those cottage days would come to an end.

What we grieve now: the impossibility, in any capacity, of recreating them.

When we arrived yesterday in the late afternoon, Bill and I drove immediately to the cottage. It’s mostly the same: tiny footprint, metal roof. They’ve painted that roof, covered the porch screens in plastic, installed heat. And to my very real annoyance, an SUV was parked out front, blocking a full view of the house.

But imagination serves when we need it. See the four of us coming over the hill after a walk down the mountain. Adam is talking about what to make for dinner, and the whole weekend is still ahead of us.

Serenity

Brook,
Be still,--be still
Midnight's arch is broken
In thy ceaseless ripples.
Dark and cold below them
Runs the troubled water,--
Only on its bosom,
Shimmering and trembling,
Doth the glinted star-shine
                       Sparkle and cease.

Life,
Be still,--be still!
Boundless truth is shattered
On thy hurrying current.
Rest, with face uplifted,
Calm, serenely quiet;
Drink the deathless beauty--
Thrills of love and wonder
Sinking, shining, star-like;
Till the mirrored heaven
Hollow down within thee
Holy deeps unfathomed,
Where far thoughts go floating,
And low voices wander
                     Whispering peace.

                              -Edward Rowland Sill

As ever, you’re welcome to respond here in any way you’d like, but here are two reminders:

1. we’re looking for synonyms for “vulnerable”/”vulnerability,”

2. respond “I’m in!” in the comments if you’re planning to join the book discussion tomorrow.

I’ll end with this reminder, as I need to read it again myself:

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. -I Thessalonians 4: 13-14

Thanks so much for being here.

With joy,

Rebecca