Watching and Waiting: Fog

I wrote words for these photos yesterday and somehow lost them.

I was crestfallen, but then today found more words that fit with what I was thinking,

so perhaps it was best this way.

These images come from my walk in the park yesterday morning. The fog was amazing.

I tend to love fog, so I found it beautiful.

But I was also thinking how it might be for someone not used to fog and not familiar with the place.

It could be disorienting, even frightening.

If you'd never experienced fog before, you might wonder how long it would last,

or even if your whole world had somehow changed.

I thought about people I know, mostly younger than me, going through hard things,

disorienting experiences, confusing transitions, strong emotions,

which tend often to make it very hard, if not impossible, to see clearly.

The fog yesterday was so thick, it condensed on branches like this. Beautiful to me, but not so beautiful if you were wondering whether your feet would ever be on dry ground again! 

In the fog, our eyes can play tricks on us. You have to lean on your knowledge of what you knew was there before, and trust that memory, that knowledge.

This is beautiful as an image of reflections on water, but when life situations feel this unstable and distorted, even the light coming to us can seem painful sometimes.

I found myself yesterday thinking of these people, thinking these things, and wanting to say, "Watch carefully and wait. Don't give up. Refrain from making rash decisions about which path to take."

As a friend once told me in a tough time, "Don't doubt in the dark what you've seen in the light."

Those are good words.

And then today I read these words of John Donne, from the blog of a friend of a friend:

But today if you will hear His voice,

Today He will hear you.

He brought light out of darkness,

Not out of a lesser light;

He can bring thy summer out of winter

Tho' thou have no spring,

Though in the ways of fortune or understanding or conscience

Thou have been benighted til now,

Wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed,

Damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied til now, 

Now God comes to thee,

Not as in the dawning of the day,

Not as in the bud of the spring

But as the sun at noon,

As the sheaves in harvest.

It wasn't quite noon, but this last picture was taken less than an hour after the first one. The sun's rising to a certain point completely cleared away the fog, and it felt like a different world.

This Advent I'm thinking those words of John Donne might make a good Christmas gift to lots of people living in the foggy confusion of our world these days.

"Now God comes to thee." Emmanuel!

Lent, Day Twenty-Seven: Confluence

Over the weekend, while driving here and there running errands in my car, I listened to an interview by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio with Gerald McDermott on a recent book he cowrote on The Theology of Jonathan Edwards.  One theme that McDermott emphasized in Edwards' work is the beauty of God. Because most people's familiarity with Edwards is limited to one less-than-beautiful sermon, Edwards is not generally thought of someone who was deeply in love with God and considered God's beauty to be the primary quality of God that draws people to belief.

At one point, either McDermott or Myers said something like, "So for him, it wasn't about being driven by duty, but drawn by beauty." Which easily sticks in the mind. And it did.

Separately, yesterday at some point the thought came to me, "You can't reason people out of something they weren't reasoned into." (Turns out that comes from Jonathan Swift, but I don't know where I heard it. Probably by way of my high school English teacher, as it seems like the sort of quotation he would have on his chalkboard.)

And I was thinking about how hard it is to reason oneself out of behaviors or even ideas that did not come about primarily through reason but through "the affections," as Jonathan Edwards referred to the deeper part of the human being, what the Hebrew scriptures refer to as "the heart," though it is much more than what Americans usually mean by "heart," which they separate completely from reason. If I understood correctly about Edwards, he wasn't separating feeling and thinking and calling "the affections" the emotional part of a person. Instead, he meant the deep part of a person that influences both their thinking and their feeling. It has to do with the heart's desire for meaning and beauty and love.

And so if the heart's desire for meaning, beauty, and/or love has led someone to a particular belief, or practice, or relationship, or whatever, even if that belief, practice, or relationship turns out not to be a true or sufficient object of desire, purely reasoning about it is not likely to help a person see that or change their ways. We see this all the time with the obvious addictions. People really and truly want and need love, or peace, or happiness, and they find something that temporarily gives some semblance of that in a substance or relationship. But the drug, or drink, or relationship ends up causing more trouble than the seeming good it brings. Simply pointing this out and reasoning doesn't generally help people, even when they want to make changes. They usually have to have something greater to motivate them. Something that offers greater love, peace, or happiness.

And we can all relate to this, I think, when it comes to something as simple as food. We need food to live. It's normal to enjoy good food. Good food is a great blessing. And yet we can overeat and make ourselves unhealthy in all kinds of ways by it. But I don't know many people who succeed in changing their eating habits simply by reasoning themselves away from that luscious piece of chocolate cake on the table before them. We need a better motivation than "that just isn't logical."

So, with these things going on in my mind the past couple of days, I sat down this morning and saw on my "Ordo Kalendar" that today is the day of John Donne. One of my favorites. I decided I should read something by him to honor the day and got out our "Top 500 Poems" anthology. The first poem they had in the 25 pages on Donne was one I remember learning from my high school English teacher, who was a gifted actor and excellent reader-aloud of poetry:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

"Reason . . . proves weak  or untrue." Being driven by duty just isn't enough. But being drawn by beauty/love has great power, even the power to cause Donne to wish to be enthralled (which can mean both to be enchanted or captivated, and also to be enslaved) by God.

This is a rather rambling post, but I was fascinated this morning to find this poem before me and to see how it fit with the things I had been thinking about.

Oh, yes, and also that the psalm for today was Psalm 89, which begins, "I will sing of thy steadfast love, O Lord, for ever," and has several themes that connect with Edwards' themes.

And it all relates to Lent, at least in my mind (which I think can find connections between anything and anything else sometimes), because it has do with fasting and discipline in general, and with the beauty of Easter/resurrection that is the very reason for Lent in the first place.

But more on that later. And perhaps it will be less rambling. But only perhaps.

A few days later, April 8, I just found this article on "John Donne in Lent." I had no idea just how appropriate it was that these thoughts came together when they did. And I don't believe I have ever written such a hyperlinked blog post....