Intermission

Let the music stop
The ghastly clamour cease

For one moment.

Put down the bow
Untune the string
Muffle drum and dampen keys.

Let stillness reign.
Let silence hang.

Erase flesh and beating heart
Chill the blood which throbs in vain.

Throw down the baton
And mark today

With a stop.

Put in the rest notes
Count the beats
I am tired, and in want of sleep.

Four beats of stillness
Let my mind be freed

A two-quavered hiatus
Let shattered body heal

A dotted breve
To solidify my soul

And into the mute void
The lion's roar.

A new sound.

Listen.

A Grief Dismissed

I've a less than 48-hour old grief. A fresh wound, but old enough that I can begin to write about it.

I skirt carefully around my grief, poking it a little, making concentric circles, closer and closer in, until I stare at it, peering at its form. But it's only for a few minutes, before I have to withdraw.

The trouble with grief is that of course one can't just look at it. One doesn't walk around it as if at a museum, studying an exhibit encased in a glass box. Grief is a writhing, living, growing thing. One has to handle it, touch it, throw it about.

Only, it's bigger than me, more like a body of water. I have to enter into its silent immensity. I hold myself there, forcing myself to sit still in its centre. I can only manage a few moments. Like holding your breath under water. Grief is that split second just before you have to resurface: your lungs are almost out of air, but still holding out, and there's a panicked moment of paralysis, before your legs wake up, and propels you out of the water.

It's momentary, quick jerks of intense anguish. Impossible to sustain, even if I am willing to sustain them. Very quickly my mind turns to self-mockery, or tries to rationalise the situation. Reason acts as rudder, pushing distance between me and memory. Away from raw pain.

It's all relative, I know. I've just read the blogs of two families who have lost loved ones. A wife and a son, both to cancer. What do I know of such loss? What is my "loss" in comparison? A loss of future hope, a mirage of a dream. Nothing but foolish musings for addled brains.

Footloose

They say we dance through life
A dance macabre with death

You say we dance in Trinity
A dance of eternal love

We dance in bodies
We dance in The Body

Slow Waltz? Quick foxtrot?
Who knows the steps?

Tiptoeing, testing
Afraid of false moves

Enter into Your rhythm
Following Your lead

Slowly, stumblingly
we mirror, we trace

dancers for grace

A Wedding

I have just come back from easily one of the best weddings I have ever had the privilege of attending. Something has shifted within me, and I shall carry this day with me for a long time to come. I am writing, trying to distill it, to memorise it, and to come back to it for renewal when I might need it for the future.

The day slips away though, as I am trying to remember it. It's a bit like an impressionist painting - the overall image, and the sensation, stays. But soon as you try to focus on an individual part, things blur. But let's try anyway.

Some things I loved about this wedding. The surprises:

Matthew and Miranda are some of the most intelligent, witty, character-full and educated people I have ever met, so I was expecting something unique and sophisticated with the service. I think I had in mind something formal: hymns echoing to vaulting ceiling, a long, white lace train, lilies, and words sung in Latin. Instead, it was held at Queens' College chapel; we were crammed in, and the heat was making everyone somewhat sticky.

Yet into that warm, gathered silence, they came. Singing. The opening song was also the processional for the bridal party. The "best men" were women - Emma and Benita, and amongst "bridesmaids" was a man - Matthew's brother Michael. And then Matthew and Miranda walked in. Together. She wasn't on the arm of her father, and he was obviously not waiting at the front of the chapel for her. Matthew had said to one of my friends that he was planning to break tradition, by going back to an older, Mediaeval tradition - that of crossing the threshold together. Entering, the promised land, as it were, side by side.

There were no flowers. Flowers are lovely, but Miranda didn't carry a bouquet. She simply walked in with the bridal party and then promptly sat in one of the pews, as a member of the congregation. The minister had declared, at entrance to the chapel door: "Let us worship God together!", and so it was. Incidentally, that's one of my favourite things about Christian wedding services. It's about the community of saints, gathering together. The bride and groom, beautiful and central as they are, merely pointers, to the greater grace of God with us, God in us, God amongst us.

The girls in the bridal party didn't wear matching dresses. They wore party dresses that they obviously enjoyed and reflected their personalities. Benita is Matthew's little sister and bears the Champion family resemblance: dark-haired, long-legged and lithe like a gazelle. She had on a simple sleeve-less shift in blocks of navy blue and black. Rachel, Miranda's sister, is the funkier, edgier one, and came striding in a back satin dress with black and white Japanese inspired ruching pieces and lots of marvellously complicated tied bits that I find hard to describe.

The music. They had a choir. There was harmony (seriously. You could take alto sheet music from the ushers). And, as one friend commented - robust, proper hymns. Nothing twee or sentimental.

I loved the way the minister conducted the service, he didn't try to bring his personality into it too much, simply announcing when we were to stand and what we were to sing. But he placed his gifts and attention into the prayers and sermon, beginning with a prayer in the tradition of the Jewish "baruch ata adonai elohim" (Blessed are you, Lord God) - or, as he phrased it: we praise you Lord ...

The wedding vows themselves took the shortest time. There were no promptings. They memorised their promises to each other, and spoke, while exchanging rings. The kiss came as a surprise: he simply leant over and embraced her after the vows were done. Without the inevitable and cheesy "and now you may miss the bride" and giggles from the congregation. Natural and understated. No ostentation.

And then the sermon. I don't remember having ever wanted to cry at a wedding; I just am not that sort of girl who gets sentimental at weddings. I rejoice and I laugh a lot, sure, but never cry. Crying, I suspect, I reserved for the sublime: the beauty or humanness that moves me. This sermon made me cry. I don't think I can talk about it properly, even, and I won't be able to capture the entirely of that wonderful piece of truth, beauty and god-ness (for want of a better term).

The passages were difficult, I thought, and certainly not common wedding scripture that I've ever heard. Deuteronomy 26:1-11 marks the entry into the Promised Land by the Israelites. Thus begins the covenant relationship between God and his people, so integral that we can no longer, after this, speak of Deity without speaking of Relationship; of a God that is always with his people. It was a hard passage, and the minister did his best to contextualise. Then a seamless move into the NT passage, II Corinthians 1:16-20. So seamless that I've almost forgotten how he did it!

I liked that the minister related it to current culture, without too much contrivance. He's very much an "ideas" preacher, reading the signs of the times in terms of changes in thinking and assumptions. So he spoke of promises, that our society is fearful of the air-tight certainty of promises. Promises that seem tyrannically, unchanging despite a changing world. Are Christians naive, blindly walking into something so binding? Making vows to another person for a lifetime. A commitment that says, regardless of the future unknown, the uncertainty, the changes and losses that shall come, that I will commit to you. Not a contingency plan, a phrase about how I shall be your wife/husband until I no longer feel love for you, but a life-long commitment, till death do us part. Unambiguous words. An unambiguous yes.

Such a commitment, he went on to say, is not possible, until we have heard and understood the promises of God. If we believe in a history; a past, a future and a present that is not constructed by chance, by happenstance, but shows the hand of a Creator, a relational Father, then, and only then, can it be possible for a man and a woman to make such promises. Oh, but he put it better than that ...

Christians marry in Church in order to be ikons: in the man and woman we see the promise of God. In the Yes that resounds in us, we see our God. Our response, for those of us who have heard the Yes of Christ, must be, is compelled to be, a Yes, and an Amen.

Thus, we enter courageously and confidently, into the Yes of marriage. Into the Yes of a friendship. The Yes of a Conversion too, I suspect.

Amen, amen.

I'm making a little list

I am terrible at making lists of "favourite" things. I've always thought it's because my opinions were not strong enough, or perhaps my personality wasn't defined sufficiently. I still don't have a favourite colour (it's buried somewhere amidst the changing colours of the sky); I'd be hard pressed to list my favourite books (there are so many and for so many different reasons); and I maintain my permeable status as both a chugger of coffee and a sipper of tea.

I once asked a good friend the usual banal barrage of 20 questions - what was his favourite food, his favourite colour, blah blah. His response was strangely affirming. He liked most food, and his favourite colour used to be, in principle, red, but now he finds he gravitates towards blue. I suspect I would have gotten a more spirited reply had I asked - what was his favourite virtue, or his fondest childhood memory, or his favourite piece of music to listen to when he was sad. But really, he wasn't a "favourites" kind of person, nor a type to make lists and commemorate themselves thus.

He had no preconceived notions of hierarchical structure. He wasn't going to allow experiencing the world as it comes be him, sweeping and fragmented, be forced and bent out of shape by too many value judgments. He had strong opinions, but on things that actually mattered. Things that were Right or Wrong. True or False. And it wasn't that he didn't think it important to talk about the respective merits of tim-tam originals and the new flavours, or Bach vs. Beethoven (who will knock each other out in 3 rounds?!), he just didn't hold to those ideas so tightly, and was happy to adapt, or have his opinion swayed. It wasn't symptomatic of a man lacking in passions, or a weak personality.

It reminds me of the confusion of conflated categories that CS Lewis famously described in the Screwtape Letters. On the modernist thinking clouding the mind of Wormwood's patient:

He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

Conversely, we seem to take singular pride in having strong opinions on such trivialities as TV shows, favourite actors, favourite ice-cream flavours, as if our character, our personalities, are defined by merely these tastes. In our topsy-turvy world we place defined ideas where a string of adjectives might better go. We argue naive matters rather than weighty truths of eternal import.

And then we judge each other by these: he's very cool because he's into entry-level Indie music, she's nerdy because she praises the inside of the Bodleian library... and so on.

I like Chesterton on this too:

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place ... A man was meant to be doubtful about himself. but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part of doubts his exactly the part he ought not doubt - the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubt if he can even learn ... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping' not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility mad a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

(Altho' this is moving us into the mountains of epistemology, which wasn't where I was intending!)

I don't mean to say, let's not ever have silly conversations. We need to laugh, to play at argument simply for the joy of flexing intellectual muscle (and helping me exercise off the flab of mine!). But a balance must be struck. And judgment remains with God, not with us.

Next time someone asks me whether, stranded on a deserted island, whether I'd like to have Fuji apples or Granny Smiths with me, I shall smile, and say both. They will frown. They will say: but if you had to choose one. Ah, but I like them both. One is honey sweet, the other tart with skin glossy and gorgeous. I shall reply. I feel no need to have a strong opinion on this. They will judge me bland, and the topic of conversation shall move elsewhere. I shall sling back my wine, thus adding to my beverage options, and move on too.

Hermeneutics

Bring meaning to my text
Oh Word of God

The daily tasks
The minute, hour, day

Page upon page
Life upon life

You were there
In the beginning

You shall be there
At my end

Book of Life
Inscribe your text on me

Poem

Lord, on mornings like this one
It's hard to believe you exist

The birds splutter out joyous song
Light shutters through the window

And my heart crashes
Shipwrecked and ripped at sea

My soul a tea strainer of tiredness
Squeezed out into a chipped cup

Joy does not come in the morning
And I find that dreary night is more preferable

In darkness at least we can hope
Uncertainties leading to leaps of imagination

In blinding sunlight
Our dreams are revealed for mirage

Chiasma which do not hold water
And reality bursts upon the brain

Are you there, Lord?
Are you true, Lord?

It's me.

You are too far for me to reach
My arms go only to trunk of bark

Then you must hold onto me, Master
Breathe fire and life into cold bones

Tree of Life!
Feed me with your healing leaf

Wrap me in splintering shadows
My faith is but gossamer thin

Your love is warp and weft
You mend and make sufficient

Succour me, sustain me, carry me Lord
Into the blithe continuum of joy

Fiction

These days, everyone is writing. Everyone wants to be a writer. Everyone has things to say: advice, profundities, rants, opinions, stories: a personal, individual take on life, the world, the bigness out there. To some extent I shouldn't be complaining - I'm part of this herd. And it's great! What a wonderful gift, being able to see the world through someone else's eyes. But what is a writer anyway? Why are we so precious about it, giving it a title, a role? Defining ourselves by it? It's something that everyone does! Literacy gives everyone a chance, language belongs to the hoi polloi, and the blogosphere makes it all the more easy.

What makes one person a published writer, another an itinerant blogger, a third a sometime letter writer? Does it all matter? I know some writers. Quite a few are self-absorbed. Brilliant, to be sure, but anxious for fame, for self-expression, defining oneself against others. Hoping to be better. Is there merit in this?

Maybe. Sometimes one's vision is such that others might revel in it. Laugh, cry, be shattered, become expansive. See by its beacon something else in the world, and beyond this earth.

And I understand the need for creativity. Or better, for making. In being makers, we reflect God's creativity. The great, only real creator, who made all things from nothing, ex nihilo. While we merely play with the lego blocks that God has already provided.

Writing should be like breathing. Words to sustain one's passage through the world. Walking. Looking. Listening. In, out, along the edges of the world. Moving beneath the superficialities, and grasping the mundanity - seeing it for the beauty and brokenness. Writing should be about other people. Should be about transcendence. Moving beyond the scope of oneself.

Guess I'll never be a writer. Le shrug.

3-D People

I am starting to really appreciate blogs. Not my own, but other people's. I am learning all sorts of things about my friends that I didn't know before, and hearing their writing 'voices' - which is so often different from their normal selves. I am discovering their passions and ambitions, daily reflections, witticisms, aspects of themselves that I guess are often lost in the everyday, or don't necessarily come to the fore.

We are all so multi-faceted. There is so much more under the surface that we'll ever know, even of ourselves.

Oh, to know, and be fully known! Who of us can truly say we know a friend so well? What is true friendship but this? To be like God in this! Glory.

Tonic

Tonight I had the joy of listening to Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Alice Pung read from their work: Chris from his varied books of poetry; Alice from her autobiographical work, Unpolished Gem, and from a short story she'd written about a family holiday.

They didn't have powerpoints. Without the pondering heaviness of academic learning, though ladened with sharp wit and intelligence, the night was for the Spoken Word. Two voices, two vocabularies. The presence of two very different writers, and yet what held them together was a joinery of honesty, of reality, humourous presented. Mundane realities - saucers; white goods; mobile phones; a part-time job at Retra Vision; the daily task of making up a bed.

Neither writers romanticised reality, tho' perhaps by virtue of the act of description, or the lyric of poetry, one elevates the mundane. At any rate I came away with a sense of seeing (rubbing my eyes clear), and a deeper appreciation for truth telling.

The disarming nature of honesty! I had not, until now, seen honesty as an exacting but fair friend, who welcomes you to sit and speak. A friend once told me that she makes a policy of "honouring honesty" in her life, and has found that honesty repays her, and honours her in return.

I have often seen honesty as a cruel taskmaster. One that reveals the horror, the ugliness within. A master who forces me opened upon a surgeon's table, at worst for the gawking masses, to bear witness to the cruelity and sin, at best for the Master Surgeon to work upon me, cutting and tearing what is diseased.

Tonight, through Alice and Chris' words, I understood that honesty could be gracious and affectionate, tender and nuanced, rather than honesty that is always blunt, cruel, blistering. Honesty that is can be more than simply the opposite of niceness or disimmulation. Honesty that could see reality, and yet not break your spirit. Honest that does not judge.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me! (Psalm 139:1)

God sees us honestly. We are transparent as glass before him.

So should it be with ourselves, and with each other. Looking inwards, looking outwards, looking upwards. Sometimes it feels easy. Mostly the looking at others bit. Sometimes it takes effort, and discipline, not to forget to look upwards. Looking at ourselves? That takes courage, that kind of seeing. Constant and conscious acts of everyday bravery.

For who of us can really bear that much honesty? Emily Dickinson once said that "the truth must dazzle gradually, else everyone be blind." One online commentator, obviously American, likened it to "not yanking up the blinds in the morning in a dark room or the outside sun is going to be blinding!"

Emily's advice then? To tell all the truth, but "tell it slant".

I think I can see what she's getting at. Speak honestly, but indirectly, with nuance and subtlety. In the rest of that poem she talks about "success in the circuit" -moving around the truth, spiraling to reveal, rather than blurting it all out. I'm not sure I entirely subscribe to that, being someone who appreciates directness, and finds subtle circumlocution somewhat patronising and occasionally false (I can see what you're doing, y'know, just tell it to me straight!) But I would definitely say: our words should be considered, carefully picked like choice fruit, and lovingly appropriate for the occasion and person.

Further on, Emily uses the illustration of children, who, initially frightened by lightening, become easy by having the phenomenon explained to them. So too us, in our "infirm", must have the splintering brightness of truth "eased", by its being told it kindly. Our tone (for what is content without form?), ought to be sweet. Our intention not to accuse, but to elucidate, letting, in Emily's words again, the truth's "superb surprise", come to us, dropping slow, and lightened by understanding. For there is joy in truth, just as the morning sun is a delight, as long as our eyes can adjust to the sudden light slowly.

And, I think, as imitators of Christ, we can go one better than Emily in why and how we tell the truth. God saw us, and he judged his Son instead. Unexplainable logic! impossible grace! We have freedom, but we live with the responsibility of mercy.

"Tell all the truth, and tell it in all grace." It doesn't scan as well on the page, but I think it'll work OK in life.

Present Tense

I am by nature not a very present-minded person. I'd much prefer to dream about the idealistic future. It goes without saying that dreaming of future hope might often marr our ability to live fully in the present. I keep expecting long stretches of contentment, only to find that happiness comes now, in small moments, sharp and stabbing, or soft and barely registered, momentary breaths of a sleeping babe.

I am in a bookclub, and we recently read the dystopia novel "Brave New World". (By read I mean I skimmed!) But one of the central thesis of the book is that it is better to have continual peace and comfort than any extremes of emotion.

CS Lewis once remarked that it is in these momentary moments of joy, rather than in the settled comfort and heartsease, that the past is transfigured, and shows forth its eternal quality.

So here are my moments of happiness for the last few days:

Sitting on the black snail sculpture at uni, eating cherries with Sandy and engaging in a pip-spitting competition.

A barrage of bad puns in a facebook message with a friend. Plantea (plenty) of Plan and Tea was the worst.

Finding Jalna yoghurt on sale at Coles.

Funny Italian chap at Brunetti's who threw the plastic lids of coffee cups on a pile like a frisbee and then apologised for his agression.

A baby who couldn't stop laughing at me at the stoplights on Lygon Street. I don't know what about me made her laugh, but she didn't stop.

The bane of being busy

Lately I've become increasingly (and painfully) aware of my reputation for busyness. This came to a head yesterday when I offered to catch up with a friend over the weekend, and her response was: "But you're too busy."

My busyness has gotten to such as state that my friends don't even trust my word anymore.

On any given day I find myself beginning conversations with students at breakfast with: "Got a busy day ahead of you?". I always have to "rush off" after scoffing down a hurried lunch, and I have begun a habit of taking early dinner, as I don't have time to attend Formal Hall and coffee in the SCR afterwards. My invariable response to the question of "How are you?" seems to be: "Good, but ... busy!" It's funny tho', I don't think I always mean it when I say it - it just seems to be easiest thing to say. No-one questions you, and most nod their heads respectfully, or click their tongue in sympathy.

Busyness has become a by-word in our society for our self-importance; a badge of a person's success. The more tasks we have to do, the more important/interesting/needed we feel. Our identity is placed in being strong, action-filled people, and we pride ourselves in being able to juggle multiple jobs at the same time. Busyness, I suspect, also means we can hide in our work, and avoid having a real conversation. It's a way of hiding from our fears. By getting caught up in the pressing minutiae, we don't have to lift up our eyes to look at the bigger picture of our lives, and where we're going. But busyness saps our lives of beauty. When was the last time I went for a long walk and looked at a tree? Or spend an afternoon with friends, unfettered by nagging thoughts of unfinished projects, my brain empty of calculations of rescheduling my timetable so that I can squeeze in an extra hour of admin in the evening?

Of course, I'm not decrying work. Work itself isn't bad. In fact, it's very good. There are many valuable things to be done, and idleness is as much a danger as busyness. Sometimes we simply have to work mad hours and numerous jobs - the reality of life is that there are responsibilities, rent that needs to be paid, assignments that need to be turned in, deadlines that need to be met. But work will always want more of us, and when busyness become a habit, and you give the impression of not even having time for friends and family (let alone God!), then you've got to wonder.

Jesus understood this very well. We've been working through the gospel of Mark at Christian Union this semester, and students have picked up on the almost ritualistic regularity of Jesus' departing to a high mountain to pray. There couldn't have been more important or urgent work than the proclaimation that the Kingdom of God had come near, and yet the Son of God took time out to spend with his papa.

So, I'm going to make a conscious effort not to be so busy, and, perhaps more revealingly, not to appear as if I'm too busy.

*****************

The formal rituals of liturgy really help in regulating rest and work. There is the Jewish Sabbath or Shabbat, a day of rest between Sundown Friday and the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night. It's a time of rest, of celebration, of reflection and prayer. (Compline and Evensong, services within the Catholic and Anglican tradition, echo similar concepts in the closing of a day's work with thanksgiving and prayer.)

Shabbat is ushered in with the lighting of candles. Traditionally, the women of the family lead the prayers. Hands are drawn over the twin flames of the candles towards the face, welcoming in the light of the Sabbath day into oneself. (In fact, in one of the songs, Shabbat is conceptualised as a bride or a Queen, to be welcomed into the home). Then the festivities begin, as the family gathers around the table for the evening meal. Prayers and blessings are recited, there is singing, and bread and wine is shared.

Saturday is then spend in enjoyment and play, the contrast being not to engage in activities that are considered to be 'creative', by way of exercising order/control over our environment.

My favourite part of the Shabbat ritual is the Havdalah, the service that marks the end of Sabbath. Again, a braided candle, symbolizing the light of Shabbat, is lit. Wine, as always a symbol of joy, is passed around, so that people can take a final sip of the joy of Shabbat.

As one of the final acts of Shabbat, spices, such as cinnamon and clove, are placed in a box, and passed around, so that everyone might smell the fragrance. The sweet-smelling spices symbolize the sweetness of Shabbat, and the idea is that worshippers breath in sweetness of Shabbat in one last time so that it might sustain them through the week to come until Shabbat can be welcomed once more.

Havdalah is intended to require a person to use all five senses: taste the wine, smell the spices, see the flame of the candle and feel its heat, and hear the blessings. Thus the sounds, tastes and smells of Shabbat brings the holiness (ie., the set-apartness) of Shabbat into the rest of the week.

Whatever you might think about the divide between the sacred and the ordinary, or the role of ritual and liturgy in daily life (and I'm certainly not into forbidding certain tasks and abiding by strict laws on the Sabbath), the sentiment deserves consideration. This is one of the occasions I find myself deeply grateful for our physicality. Time and meaning are marked through our bodily senses. God dignifies and enriches our mundane, transitory doings with glimpses of eternity, as we echo his pattern of work and rest in creation with our own.

Capitulating to the inevitable

Good grief! Not another blog?!

Not another computer screen full of half-baked ideas, maudlin sentiment and introspective drivel? Lashings of well-worn metaphors, multi-clausal sentences? Argh. Run away, run away now! (Also, I must to say, as self-proclaimed Luddite, who advocates the return of fountain pens and parchment, this feels the oddest thing!)

The world doesn't need another blog, so why am I doing this?

The blog is called "Addison's Walk" for a number of reasons, and maybe an explanation of some of the thoughts that went into the name might help.

Firstly, it's homage to CS Lewis. If ever I had a spiritual father in the Christian faith, it would be CSL. On warm summer nights, CSL and his friends would stroll along Addison's Walk, a side path on the grounds of Magdalen College, that runs past the river Cherwell, in Oxford. CSL was converted, in part, due these long walks with his friends. CSL, Tolkien and Dyson got into some heated arguments - hammer and tongs - long into the night; lasting till early hours of morning. (Then, being the freakazoids that they were, instead of going to bed, they wrote poems, summing up their arguments in verse. Tolkien's "Mythopoeia" was the result of one of the most significant of those summer walks.)

And so, in a cheesy turn of metaphor, this blog will like an Addison's walk, in tracing the passage of a life after conversion. I hope, if this blog continues, that it'll help me see God at work in me, and encourage me to take captive every thought, decision and act for Christ.

Another thing about Addison's Walk: I've always enjoyed talking the best, when it's coupled with walking. And I love the image of friends walking and talking together. I think this is largely the reason I've chosen this public platform, for what otherwise would be private musings. By nature unhealthily private and introspective, my thinking needs to be aired - taken into the sunlight, as it were - and then (trans)formed by being challenged by others wiser and clearer-thinking.

I have a memory like a sieve, and am incredibly scatter-brained. So I also write so as not to forget - a rather desperate grabbing before the waters of Lethe drown out all. Perhaps it's my training as a historian, but I find time and memory incredibly sad concepts. The reality is that all things shall pass and be forgotten, and their value lost along with the ones who found them precious. So this blog will try to capture transitory moments in reality, and, to borrow a phrase from Updike, "to give the mundane it's beautiful due." (The assumptions/world view underpinning that phrase are profound - but perhaps more on that in another post!) Of course, it's only God who Remembers, and all this is but my playing 'grown ups' in the dress-up box.

So! Adding to your plethora of on-line reading material, email updates and general grey cell exertion, here is my humble little patch of cyberspace. I pray that sometimes it might be useful for you, and enjoyable, as you stroll along Addison's Walk with me. It's mostly harmless. We'll see how it goes, anyway.

WHAT THE BIRD SAID EARLY IN THE YEAR

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

- CS Lewis.