You Are Our World: A Journal
~ I Begin to Lose the Rain When I was a child I longed for the rain. When I became a woman I wished this childish way were not behind me. I wanted to want the rain. We had just three seasons in Northern Benin, “dry season,” or “Harmattan,” named after the scorching Harmattan winds that fled off the Sahara desert, “hot season”—no further explanation needed— and “rainy season.” During the two rainless seasons, I longed. Longed with the brittle yellow grasses that cracked and collapsed in the dryness and heat, longed with the fissured mud, dried to a thick clay cake on the bottom of what had once been a pond or a swamp. Longed with the empty, empty skies that stretched on and on in their mindless, unconscious search for mist and cloud. Longed with the fields that felt drab and constrained without red and green and yellow. All they owned for embellishment were tiny, bright pink flowers that looked like far-off stars and whose pinkness faded with the rise of the seasons of the sun. To pick the last of these dry-season flowers was to remember that fields were made for flowers – for celebration and colour. And these were the only witnesses –puny and watered down. Sometime during high school I began to realise I no longer waited for the first rains as I used to when a child. I still wanted rainy season to come, but not with the same intensity. This alarmed me and I remember writing You about it a few times, over the years. The fear returned every April or so – when the first “mango rain” could be legitimately hoped for. (Why did we call the first, fierce rain a “mango rain”? Not liking mangoes, I never cared.) On one occasion when this was bothering me I realised an obvious fact: the emotional connection I once had as a child with the seasons, the rain, the wind, I now had with You. There was a relationship between my loss and my treasure, for while I struggled to let go of my childhood relationship to the world around me, I could feel Your hands, like a parent’s, gently prying open the fingers of my heart. What I held there, so tightly, was a flower I had picked, and in the sweaty press of my eager fist, it has been crushed. It was as though You said to me, Don’t hold on to the flower, because if you hold on, it will die. Look at the Living Flower; and You led me to Your Garden, where every flower grows. It was as though You said to me, Feel, and so I placed my fingers around the stem of the Flower, and stood there a long time, realising: Perhaps I can live with the pain of losing the flower, losing the rain, because now I am in an Eternal Garden, and here the Rain and the Flowers never pass away. Revelation is often characterised by a sense of unusual clarity and wholeness, of consolation in one’s deepest losses. Standing there in the How I Met the Rain I met an African rainstorm the first night my family stayed in the mission house at the This was Rain. Rain on a tin roof. As soon as I understood what was happening, I gave away my heart. From that night forth, the house became the House of the Rain – the House in which I woke up the next morning to Papa’s wide-eyed telling of the damage our first monster rain had done. Tearing up the translucent plastic panels on our water heater – there is no way to describe this wonderful, unique contraption – the rain-heavy wind had scattered the panels across all the surrounding fields and bush. While I slept, Papa had been out retrieving them from far and wide. To my five-year-old mind, the power this rain-wind possessed was unimaginable – a power I had never met before. As we settled into the house and our new life – the life that became mine and can be claimed by so few white women – the rain seemed to settle into my soul. I was no longer terrified, but I now could experience a lovely, tremulous kind of awe. I could cuddle up with my little sister under blankets as our small, sweaty bodies registered odd, African drops in temperature – I could sing and shiver along with the wind. I could run out into the storm, drowning my bare feet in the cold, cold waters of impromptu rivers spattering through the clearing around the house, and run with them, over tree roots, skirting my Dutch father’s attempts at dirt dikes around the front porch, and dash joyously into pooling puddles. And with a peaked tin roof, the rain came streaming down on two sides of the house, creating hundreds of singular shower spouts. Around and around the house I would run, laughing with happiness, having intense, driven water splash the hair on my head smoother and flatter than smooth and flat. I love You. Why is there a connection between these memories and this love? That is what I want to know. The Rain Here is not the Same It has been raining all day. As evening falls, glistening in the puddles and dripping down through the chilled air, I watch a reflection of myself in my window panes. Whenever I look up from this computer screen, I catch soft happiness in the shining eyes that look back at me. Why should I be so happy and peace-filled? I never know quite what to make of rain here in The following day people were talking about the rainstorm. I was slightly surprised they had felt alarmed – had gotten up out of bed to anxiously watch and consider, shutting windows and wondering nervously at the lightning. I tried to make sympathetic conversation, and pitied them in their loss of sleep. But those moments of awareness, between the sheets of life and dream, had perhaps been the sweetest of my week. The storm had connected to the deep part of my being – to the place that is reserved for only the most intimate, natural things. The Tineke of Rain and of Rain here at Houghton does give me happiness, and when I come in from the wet and warm up in blankets and slippers, I feel much as I have felt in Or Thomas a Kempis. Thomas a Kempis has crept into my soul while I was unawares, I think. One should learn to be careful about meditating on books with difficult counsel. No matter how hopelessly you give yourself up as a lost cause where any particular spiritual life pattern is concerned, afterward you find that you have absorbed and changed more than you would have thought. This is not the first time that I’ve recognised à Kempis quietly praying in the shadows of my thoughts – telling me calmly that if I love the rain it will no longer hurt me. But in the frankness of my unspoken thoughts and in the animation of my hidden facial expressions, I honestly can’t love North American rain the way I love rain at home. Not even when I remember to use an umbrella. A Poem Perhaps it is not fair to put the change in my feelings down to the difference between rain in Africa and rain in I’ve been remembering a poem I read once, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. There is a very real sense in which my grieving for the loss of the rain was a grieving for myself—a recognition that my Enemy, as I fought against the aging of my soul, was Death, and that I shared this Enemy with the flowers, the grasses, the bullfrogs that sang so feelingly, the cicadas that refused to surrender silently to the oppression of heat. It occurred to me the other day when I was looking out of a second storey window on a beautiful view, that there is a sense in which, at this stage of my life, I am content not to feel the beauty of nature as keenly as I might. I have already established to myself, and also to others, that I have a relationship to the world I live in – a relationship that while not always emotional, does involve my emotions, and that while constant and unconscious on a basic level, is yet able to be intentionally and uniquely experienced on another. There was a time in my life when it was incredibly important to identify and experience a relationship with the world. Somehow I knew that this was part of who I was, and there was a strange sense of apprehension – as though if I didn’t claim this part, I would lose something vital. But that day, I felt at rest in the world, with nothing to prove and nothing to fear. I wondered why. Well, maybe, I have the true Rain now. I passed through the rain showers; I wailed with the looking wind; and finally, I came to the end of that country, to find that the new country before me was just the same as that I had passed through before, only transformed by the unimaginable beauty of the One it actually was. And maybe, if I had not claimed the part of me that had a relationship to the wind and to the rain, I would not have found this Country quite as lovely, wild, and eternally good as I have discovered it to be. How I Loved the Wind I remember the way I used to feel about the wind too. In my twenties I am a bit embarrassed of how passionately and unashamedly I used to love the wind. One of the most useless, sentimental poems I ever wrote was dedicated to the wind…I had been reading nothing but Shelley and Keats without having a tenth of their skill and instinct, and the results were terrible. But in my isolation as a thirteen-year-old “bush MK” transplanted into a small, considerably WASP town in Ontario, and in my frequent emotional escapes to the unreal land of L.M. Montgomery, I sometimes thought that only the wind understood how I felt – that only in the blowing wind did my soul have an opportunity to try its bitter, sweet voice. And though there was an element of immaturity, as well as of idolatry in the vehemence of my attachment to wind at that awkward time of my life, I still love the wind now. So I want to remember. I want to remember the slow, wet walks along the African beach with the wind piping strains sandy with rough salt pain, and sitting in the beach cabins, eating French baguette sandwiches with the sticky ocean breeze getting tangled in my hair. I want to remember the sad twilit gusts that blew over the poor, dried-out African brushland, and pressed sweaty palms to my forehead in a ritual gesture of blessing. If they did not leave moist, dirty coins stuck to my skin, they left me with the truer gift of consolation. I want to remember how frightened my sister was that same year we were in I want to remember all of these beginnings of divine intimacy, every moment of my Genesis. I want to remember how brave and creative I suddenly feel when the wind rises – like I really could dance if I were only sure of being entirely alone – as though I really could be a saint, a poet, a beautiful person – like I really could be one with You. Permit Me Some Ecstasy I paged through a book about Jackie Kennedy Onassis while eating lunch today. On the last page was a poem, one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s that I had never read before, called “Memory of Cape Cod” – apparently one of Jackie’s favourite poems. It reminded me of my voice -- my inside voice—when I have stood underneath wind-played firs and thought of the sea: The wind in the ash-tree sounds like surf on the shore at Sacramental Theology Last night at our college worship service we sang the hymn, “This is my Father’s World.” In the rustling grass When I look up “sacrament” in The Oxford English Dictionary, it tells me that “sacrament” is “the common name for certain solemn ceremonies or religious acts belonging to the institutions of the Christian church.” Not all Christians agree on the number and nature of sacraments. Generally, Protestants recognise two: Baptism, and the Eucharist, because these are the only two that they understand to be directly commanded by Jesus. Catholics add Confirmation, Penance, Extreme Unction, taking Holy Orders and Matrimony, to make seven. There is also a wider application of the word, however, as “something likened to the recognized sacraments.” It explains that when the term ‘sacrament’ is used for things other than the seven recognised Christian sacraments it is when they have “a sacred character or function,” and seem to be “a sacred seal set upon some part of a man’s life; the pledge of a covenant between God and man.” The word can also denote a “token, sign, or symbol.” “As late as the 14th century,” the OED explains, “there were still traces in English of the wider application of the word formerly current; while the seven sacraments were viewed as eminently entitled to the name, it could be applied in a more general sense to certain other rites.” of nature as sacramental experiences? They can be means of divine grace – but only in the “widened application.” While You did not explicitly command them, Jesus, they fit into our experience of You. Every time I walk down to the bridge over Houghton Creek, near Lambein Women’s Dorm, and stand there, looking at the water streaming out beneath me, I experience grace. The supernatural is not in the water itself. It is in the words that You, Holy Spirit of God, have placed in the mouth of the creek: words of consolation and courage. I am reminded, whenever I watch a river or a stream, flowing so endlessly, that I am now an eternal being – an immortal. With this perspective, I can stand to watch You, Jesus, bearing my pain. I can almost count your cost worthwhile. Yet I recognize that Houghton Creek does something different for me than taking the Eucharist. There is promise and prophecy involved in the Lord’s Supper that is not involved in standing on a bridge watching water, however beautiful. Even though I don’t feel like I understand sacramental theology as well as I would like to, I believe it. I have only to walk out into the glamourous, coloured quiet of a morning such as we had today, to feel sacrament as true. You shimmer down softly in the sunlight, press Your cool body against me in the wind. You cling to the earth in the determined dew. You take me flying with the You are the God who wanted the earth. You are the Christ who took a corporal Body. Waiting I read from Dag Hammarskjöld’s “Markings” this morning. He wrote of “the sacrament of the arctic summer night,” and that made me happy. And this entry gave me joy too, because I have felt the same: So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested – while waiting. Consolation Right now I am sad. I recognize in my heart a gratitude that Your love and healing are not ‘only’ spiritual - that You are consoling me through the whole world – through the physical of bread and wine, through heat puffing up out of the radiators, through warm lamp light in a friend’s living room, and a heavy blanket on her couch. Sometimes I think that it is when I am weakest and hardest to console that Your physical world means most to me, whether in the warm tightness of an embrace, or the warm tightness of nature. As Aquinas would argue about physical pleasure and the “perfect happiness” of unbroken union with You, if there were no physical dimension to consolation, then consolation would not be as consoling as it could be. In my current state of mind, I think I could find it in me to be grateful for anything. Still, the sacramental nature of Your love is really a greater source of blessing than I ever adequately realise. The Waterfall Then there is water. Just water. If I were forced to choose only one element of Your creation to keep, it would be water – the most marvelous, profound thing. I wonder how You ever conceived of water. It is so full of variation. Its colours, its sounds, its temperature, its movement… Within a single lake, I swim through differences, moving with bewilderment from warm to cold. I don’t understand how water can be one and yet legion—how a lake can have patches, how a river can be made up of billions of individual drops. Sometimes I stop to wonder how each drop of the river rapids would feel if it had a heart, and thank You that it doesn’t. The prospect of caring for every hurtling water drop overwhelms me; yet You are not overwhelmed by the reality of caring for every hurtling human being. I have loved rivers and streams, have loved lakes, and the sea, loved to drink, loved to feel strength streaming along my long hair when I swim under the surface of a swimming pool, loved puddles. Perhaps most of all waters, I have loved waterfalls. There are two places in the But the first waterfall, my favourite, is an enchanted place. It is crowded by great rock boulders with smooth rounded surfaces where we lay out our swim towels and sit in the patches of sun. Overhung by dark cliff and shading trees, somehow the shadows are welcome, and the depths safely unfathomable. You aren’t frightened, swimming there, and you aren’t frightened, jumping, once you’ve done it a few times (well, maybe just a bit!) I don’t know how to describe it, besides that being there has always been a spiritual experience. Standing on a rock shelf under the weight of the water as it comes bolting down, I am washed, washed, washed away, until I sing with all my heart in the water that slips off of my battered body, into the gently quivering pool. I have met You there in a different way than I have met You elsewhere. Sitting on a rock slab with my feet in the water, I have contemplated all of my life and my love, the sacrifice of surrender as I have hurtled over the cliff of everything corrupted by Death, the holiness I have found in the quiet as well as the thunderous roar. I remember the last time I went to the falls. Some of my students from The Psalm is the forty-second: She writes: …in [“An American Childhood”] ...I put in what it was that had me so excited all the time – the sensation of time pelting me as if I were standing under a waterfall. I loved the power of the life in which I found myself. I loved to feel its many things in all their force… In my study on The Vision Last night while I was worshipping, I had a vision. It wasn’t a true vision, in the sense of actually seeing and experiencing things that were not physically real, but it was a vision in the sense of a perfect, waking dream. We were singing “All Who Are Thirsty,” a song inviting both healing for our brothers and sisters, and Your needed return. It is partly Psalm 42 in song, and whenever we sing “As deep cries out to deep,” slowly and with passion, I never fail to lament my inability to express how completely my soul responds. What I remember of this “vision” was that the waterfall at Tanougou – the one I love – was You, in a more vivid way than I ever before knew. You were the water that splashed and danced on the surface of the pool, and You were the unknown depths heaving and swelling below. The eager African children from the village nearby were shinnying up the tree that overhangs the pool and plunging down, shrieking with pleasure, as they like to do, hoping for smiles and coins from the tourists who stand shuddering on the rocks. And I saw that these children were Your children. They were jumping into Your laughter. Into Your safe, undefeatable depth. I saw this with brilliant clarity: that we are your ragged, happy children, letting ourselves dance out existence in empty space, falling into You. That we are all these specific urchins, from a tiny village in the poorest part of Benin, who always irritated me by their intrusive offers of help and entertainment, made the vision all the more wonderful. God, in Your Holy Spirit You are my Rain, my Wind. As a Father You are the pool beneath the waterfall – the voice of my falling is one ‘deep,’ calling, calling, calling to Your receiving depths below. You make springs of Living Water well up in my soul. You are the River whose streams make glad the City of God, You are my God. Earnestly I seek You. My soul thirsts for You, my body longs for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no Water. In a land where we need wind and water, I and my sisters and brothers are Your ragged urchins, and You are our World. |