just sayin'
Monday, September 23, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
First poem I memorized
Love, We Must Part Now – Philip Larkin
Calamitious and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity.
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly placed the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests: you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks that see
The grain going forward to a different use.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Wise and foolish men
-- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
What seems like cruel, ceaseless punishment is the torture that makes me grasp the infancy of my faith and the flimsy foundation it rests on -- not of rock but quickly erodible sand. When I'm broken and weak, desperate for any sort of sign You haven't completely abandoned me, may my thirst not be subdued by self-pity but relieved by and made more desirous of Your incomprehensible grace.
In other words, it's time to grow up. Time to move on to the solid food of the Gospel and discard that Gerber Baby tasteless mush I've heretofore been subsisting on.
Bold. Bold. Bold. I must be bold. Trying to legitimize my weakness by dismissing it as reasonable is even worse than disobedience. It's willful denial. Please use me not just despite my inadequacies, but precisely because of them -- so glory will be returned only to Your name.
"This people honors me with their lips
But their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men." Matthew 15:8-9
Friday, February 3, 2012
Frightening, foolish... and fantastic
Once, someone asked me what single quality I most wanted to pass on to my children. Without hesitation I replied, "Joie de vivre." Love of life. That sense of waking up in the morning and thinking that there may be good things ready to happen.
That fantastic feeling is easily lost in a frightening tide of bad tidings. Once, people drifted into unexamined marriages with illusions about a lifetime of romance, or torrid sex, or two hearts that beat as one. Today people plan weddings dogged by divorce and adultery statistics, hearing ubiquitous warnings that marriage is hard work and they might want to try couples counseling even before the ceremony. While once everything was unspoken, now it seems that everything is out there.
Or everything but this: that lots of marriages are happy or at least contented, and pulling in harness can be more satisfying than going it alone. That amid the guys who try to pin you down at a party, it is not so unusual to find one who lights you up and makes you laugh. That sometimes people do stupid things and take stupid chances and get away with it without ruining their lives. A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree--or even, occasionally, the careless--may turn out to be half a life, like the Bible with the Ten Commandments but no Song of Solomon or Sermon on the Mount.
So this is a plea for parents to remember to have That Talk with their kids. No, not the one about smoking cigarettes or driving under the influence. That's the one they will certainly get. What they need to hear occasionally is about the pleasures, not just the perils. Even when we talk about September 11, we can tell a tale of human goodness as well as evil, a tale of those who saved strangers as well as those who murdered them. For all the sleazebags who will try to lure a kid into a car, there are many Good Samaritans who are just concerned when they see a 12-year-old trudging along the road in the rain. I suppose we live at a time when we can't afford to let them accept the Samaritan's ride. But we also can't afford to have them think that Samaritans no longer exist. All these lectures, lessons and cautionary tales can't be to preserve a lifetime of looking over one shoulder. As Oscar Wilde wrote, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
-From the brilliant Anna Quindlen (full post here). I miss her writing.
This is what I still (perhaps naively) live by -- I'd say it's been worth it.