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.