Prayers of Kierkegaard, III

Father in Heaven,
Well we know that it is Thou
That giveth both to will and to do,
That also longing,
When it leads us to renew
The fellowship with our Savior and Redeemer,
Is from Thee.
Father in Heaven, longing is Thy gift.
But when longing lays hold of us,
Oh, that we might lay hold of the longing!
When it would carry us away,
That we also might give ourselves up!
When Thou art near to summon us,
That we also in prayer might stay near Thee!
When Thou in the longing dost offer us
the highest good,
oh, that we might hold it fast!

Prayers of Kierkegaard, II

Lord Jesus Christ
Who suffered all life long
that I, too, might be saved,
and Whose suffering still knows no end,
This, too, wilt Thou endure:
saving and redeeming me,
this patient suffering of me
with whom Thou hast to do—
I, who so often go astray.

Prayers of Kierkegaard, I

O Thou Who art unchangeable,
Whom nothing changes,
May we find our rest and remain at rest
in Thee unchanging.
Thou art moved
and moved in infinite love by all things:
the need of a sparrow, even this moves Thee;
and what we scarcely see,
a human sigh,
this moves Thee, O infinite Love!
But nothing changes Thee, O Thou unchanging!

Amelia

Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?

Everyone has oceans to fly, as long as you have the heart to fly them.

Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?

The world has changed me.

Lines from the movie Amelia, which I just saw for the third time. Most years I make only three or four visits to the theater at all.

Here's to flying oceans...and to courage, to having the heart to fly.

The Deal with My Blog

Here's the deal.

When I started this blog, things were not as advanced in the technology as they are now. You wrote your stuff, and it got archived by the month.

Then things started changing. There was a period of time when Blogger was testing some new program (or something; I'm not sure what the right word it), and it made everything more complicated for a while, though they said it was going to make things easier.

Then at some point you had to choose whether to change over to the new way or keep the old way. I chose to keep the old way at the time, thinking I could change later if I wanted to.

Then I noticed that John Michael Talbot's blog had the same basic look as mine, but that it was in a different format from mine, more techno-looking and not as classic and pretty.

Then I tried to put a counter on my blog, because a friend said she was able to see from what countries people were reading her blog, and I thought that would be fun. But to install (if that's the right verb) the counter, it said I would have to switch my blog over to whatever it was that makes it more complicated. And it said that making the switch might cause me to lose some things.

I decided it wasn't worth it.

But in the meantime, everybody's blogs have this ability to tag things and archive them by subject matter and titles, rather than just seeing a month and year--and now I've written so much that there's no way to find old things, unless I happen to remember the time of year I wrote it. And I doubt anyone else cares, but I would kind of like to be able to find my old posts more easily, and to group them by themes.

And I'm wondering, if I did switch over, what exactly would I lose? And how long would it take me to go back and "tag" everything? And in the long run, would it really even matter?

I think I would have to switch the whole look, because if doing that meant that my blog would end up looking like JMT's, I just wouldn't want to look at it. Not that it's terrible; it's just not so pretty. Well, I just went to look at his and learned that it has been removed; I guess he's just relying on Facebook for communicating these days.

Oh, oh! And update: I just happened to find the blog of a distant friend while ago via Facebook, and he uses the same template with the new look. Somehow, looking at his, it doesn't seem quite as techno-uglified as the other way I had seen it....but it does lose a certain simplicity. (I had no idea this friend was a pen-lover. I would be too, if I could ever make enough money to indulge the habit.) Anyway, here it is, for comparison's sake:

http://austinspub.blogspot.com/

Well, I'm not about to make any major changes right now. Too many other things up in the air to add one more.

But for the future, I wonder if any of you can tell me how much trouble it is to switch over a blog from the old-fashioned way to the new way, or what I'm in danger of losing....

Anyone?

Happy Birthday!

I came across an article by a dad suggesting that the best two gifts you could give to your dad were 1) to live your own life well, and 2) to assemble a collage of pictures of the two of you together over the years.

Well, I'm doing the best I can with number one. And the truth is, I don't have that many pictures of my dad and myself together, so number two would be kind of hard to do.

Actually, I don't have many photographs of us together. But I do have pictures, lots of them. They're just in my mind, not on paper.

So here's a collage to celebrate Daddy's birthday today.

I remember Daddy climbing up the big sweetgum tree to help me down, the one time I climbed too high and couldn't figure it out on my own. He couldn't actually get me down because I was up where the branches weren't as strong. He talked me down. "Put your left foot on that branch over there....Now hold on to the branch on the right side, and let your right foot come down to that branch on the other side...." until soon I was safe again.

I remember him meeting me at the bottom of the stairs after Bible class at church, by the water fountain. And with both a smile and a little regret, I remember the time I asked him to stop calling me "Sheil-o-bean" there in front of my friends! I was five then, and that just didn't seem dignified enough to me.

I remember going to work with him, sitting in a college student desk, amazed at the carvings and drawings I saw on the desk. I doubt I understood a thing he was saying up there at the front of the room, but I thought it was neat that he was the teacher.

I remember him in the garden, often in the garden, telling me what he had planted where, and I amazed that he could remember, because they all looked so much alike when they were just little green shoots coming up.

I remember him in the front seat of the car, me in the back behind him, everyone else asleep as we drove all the way out to Gallup, New Mexico. I was astounded that he could find his way so far, having never even been there before, and never once getting lost! (I didn't understand then how the Interstate system worked.)

I remember going out with him to the Harding Farm, where he kept his beehives, and how he would get all dressed in the protective clothing and the safari-looking hat with the veil all around, and how we would watch from afar, admiring his courage as he walked right into the midst of a hive of bees, or smoked them out. He taught us to stay calm when bees were around. "If you can stay calm, they will, too, and you won't get stung." It wasn't always easy, but it was a lesson that applies to much more than bees.

I remember too many things, way too many things, to be able to write about it all here. He is one of the most intelligent, humblest, and gentlest people I have ever known. He knows the meaning of love and faithfulness as few people do. He can diagram complex sentences and used to read his Greek New Testament in church--and he can communicate just fine with the countriest people of rural Arkansas, as those of the churches where he used to preach.

He's my daddy. My sister and I asked if we would need to call him Pa when we moved from town out into the country. And when he got his doctorate, we sometimes called him Dr. Daddy. And it was strange in college to hear all my friends call him Dr. Underwood. But even when I was in his advanced grammar class, he was still Daddy to me. And always will be.

Happy Birthday, Daddy.

Mr. Wright

It's a photo of a photo I took when I was sixteen, I think. Maybe seventeen. I keep in on my prayer desk, in a frame that lines the photo with a quote from Thoreau, "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."

His name was Ray Wright, and she is Ann, his wife. We were standing around the campfire, and I was so glad she showed up in the photo with him, given how dark it was. She meant the world to him, and I knew that simply by being in his English class. I wonder if any man ever loved his wife as deeply as he loved her.

And I wonder if any student ever loved her English teacher as deeply as I loved him. I met him when I was not yet his student. For some reason, I went to him after school and asked for his feedback on something I had written. (Now I can hardly believe I had the courage to do that, I was so shy back then. Must have been an unusual day.) He looked over whatever it was and said he looked forward to having me in his class the next year.

He taught me literature and grammar and vocabulary and writing skills, for which I will always be grateful. But more than that, he became my friend and taught me how to live. He was a very wise man, with a mind and heart that to me seemed bottomless. I could talk to him about anything, and did whenever I got the chance.

When I left for college, and he left for his PhD, we exchanged letters. The excerpt from one below gives you some idea of his wisdom. I realize now, though I did not then, that probably not many PhD students would take the time he did to respond to my letters with letters of two and three handwritten, single-spaced pages. This one was written in response to my struggling with the expectations I had absorbed from being a scholarship-financed student with multiple areas of ability, not knowing how to say "no" to anyone or anything, and consequently almost literally falling apart my freshman year:

Potential is such a deceptive term. There is always a degree of theoretical excellence that a person could achieve, but the product, potential, is the result of many factors which must include weariness, pleasure-seeking, lack of interest, and such things, all of which are a part of being human. When we say, "If I weren't so lazy, I could...," we aren't talking about potential; we are talking about utopian daydreams. What I ought to be must include consideration of my tendencies to be less...Get your rest. Decide what you can do without in your life, and simplify. Pray for wisdom. Look for everlastingness and cling to it. Be thankful for simple pleasures.

In another letter, he wrote about singing in the Ole Miss chorus at the Kennedy Center, the thrill of being in the place, and the beauty of Samuel Barber's setting of the Prayers of Kierkegaard.

He wrote about how he detested some of his classes and professors and the pomp and pride he witnessed in the world of academia, the lack of love for the literature and the lack of love among faculty, the competition and disregard for students. He didn't exactly discourage my ideas about heading for the Ivy League for graduate work, but he certainly opened my eyes to what it might actually look like.

He wrote about how much he missed his wife while away at school, and about marriage. He wrote about faith, and God, and how to have hope in this world by treasuring the small things, the simple things.

He could, I am certain, have gone to the Ivy League, if he'd wanted to. Or he could have sung or acted often in Kennedy Center or similar places, if he'd wanted to. He was very gifted as a writer, a teacher, a singer, and an actor.

But he wanted more than anything to be with his family and to make a difference in ways that actually mattered to people's lives. So he stayed in a small town at a small school that shared his values. He lived a quiet, simple life. In his later years, he took up golf and from what I heard surpassed people who had been playing for decades.

Then he got cancer, endured its horrific pain and the treatments for a few years, and then he died. On November 14, 2002. Seven years ago today. He had gone into a coma a few days earlier, and I actually drove to Searcy on the 14th in hopes of seeing him, but it turned out that I was driving to attend his memorial service.

The last time I saw him was at church in Searcy, in the hallway. We talked as we walked, he limping from pain, as the cancer had moved into his bones. He had been working on a sonnet, his last, and he stopped to recite it to me:

[Sonnet: Meditations on Dying]

It’s such an inconvenient thing to die,
To sink away from all we’ve known of love.
It feels so final when we say goodbye,
For only faith has seen those realms above.
The fading soul cries out for light, for breath,
More days to laugh, to love, to think, to be,
While pain-wracked nerve-ends plead for numbing death
And quiet rest for all eternity.
How shall we know, then, which of these to choose?
We hardly know what is, what merely seems.
Then give us, Lord, what we can never lose
When what we’ve known as life has turned to dreams.
Thus, self, and thought, and love will never die,
And we, in Him, shall never say good bye.

That memory is a precious gift.

I always felt that I was given another kind of gift, in that less than two weeks before that, while singing Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna with our chorus, he came into my mind. He was ill then, but I had no idea he was so close to a coma or to death. We were just singing that gorgeous music, and I thought, "Mr. Wright would have loved this," and for most of the piece I just had him there in my heart, imagining him enjoying the music.

It was my last time to "be" with him during his life. And, coincidentally, our singing that night with Mr. Lauridsen himself present, led to our singing his music not in the Kennedy Center, but in Carnegie Hall, which then again became a connecting place with memories of Mr. Wright. A couple of years later we also sang Barber's Prayers of Kierkegaard, which was another gift.

He was himself such a gift, and he left a wonderful gift behind, a poem that he wrote back when I was his young English student. I remember him talking way back then about the trip to the Grand Canyon that inspired the poem. And I will never forget hearing Dennis Organ, one of my college English professors, reading the poem at the memorial service, at the request of Mr. Wright's beloved wife. Here it is:

Perspective (Posthumous)

Once in Arizona, dearest love, looking down,
We stood hand in hand
And watched mules, tourists, guides,
And even airplanes (looking down!)
Diminish beyond our sight
Into the vastness of a canyon bright
We called—truly called, for such it was—
Grand.
How many selves the size of us,
We guessed,
Would needs be multiplied
(Our life space being, more or less,
Infinitesimal—
Though to us, all)
To fill such emptiness?

Set down in such a splendid place,
We seemed of such a puny race.
Yet would we not, in God’s good time,
We guessed,
When we were one with Him
Who fills all space
Think back (looking down)
Upon such “grandness”
And smile at our presumption?

And now, my dearest love,
You stand (looking down)
Before the canyon of your grief,
Vast beyond belief,
For I, who filled the splendor of your life,
Am gone.
I know, for you to me were all.

And I, my puny self at last set free
To fill, with God, His infinite space,
Can say to you that we,
You and I—and He
(Looking down) will one day stand
And smile
To see that this chasm which you call
(Truly call, for such it seems)
Grand
Is really, when we escape our finite dreams,
An almost invisible scratch
On an infinitesimal table top
On an insignificant patch
Of an earth diminishing,
Diminishing,
To a stop.

--Ray A. Wright

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.