Autumn Storm

Autumn is here, glory be! She came tonight like a thief in the night and we were taken completely by surprise. At five o clock the sun was out and laughing, by seven, the world was covered in clouds and thunder and the mountains were completely invisible under the winter clouds moving in.
Autumn is here; season of firesides, season of color. Strong wind and music and trees that turn otherworldly in their dying glory. Hot chocolate and mysteries, first snowstorms and last sunny days. Dusky afternoons and cloudy days, oh I love it. It is glorious to the soul of this dreamer who loves to take long walks and think and then write it all down. This is the season of good thoughts I think, there is so much to inspire them.
Autumn is here!

Georgetown

I greet you from the cedar laden streets of Georgetown. I know that this is an odd time to begin writing again after a nearly six month hiatus, but, oh well. Life is a strange, many splendored thing and I just sat down today and started writing. Who knows why, but it's nice to have a spot of time. Now, don't expect anything inspired since I can't write in an inspiring way when I'm hot, and Texas is always hot. (Sorry all you Texans out there, this state and I kind of grate on eachother.)

However, I did discover this quote today which is worth a few more people in the world knowing about. So, to begin my blogging existence again, I will open with these words:

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
~Henry David Thoreau

I'm thinking in this sort of way lately; life demands an advance in the direction of dreams and I intend to make it. May you all have a dream advancing day.

Novel Thoughts

Life and art always mingle, so here's a bit of a novel whose idea had its birth in my experience of the Anglican church. This idea actually came to me the first time I ever visited one back in Nashville, and this was a sort of idea scene that just came together. Hopefully all these ideas will resolve themselves into one flowing story eventually.

The priest said the blessing and broke the bread. The ushers came forward, and the people began to file out row by row. Usually there was a soft murmur of conversation while the people waited their turn to kneel, but not today. There was a strange hush surrounding them; few spoke, and the sanctuary seemed filled from red carpet to beamed roof with an almost tangible presence of quiet that bade voices be still, and movements hushed. Even the piano seemed quiet in its gentle song. Only the priest and acolytes spoke, moving from soul to kneeling soul, their hands moving slowly in blessing, their robes swishing lightly against the carpet.

The quiet grew heavy and present, surrounding the people with an invisible force that had the uncomfortable effect of turning their thoughts deeply inward. Some seemed uneasy in its presence. The well-dressed woman rebelled against it, clearing her throat, moving from foot to foot in restlessness. Anna was awed by it, dropping her eyes from the high altar, and holding her hands to her heart as if something was pressing against her. The old man welcomed it as a familiar friend, and closed his watery eyes that it might rest his old soul as it had so often done before.

The line moved slowly, for the people seemed to linger. Prayers were longer with this cloak of silence to still them. Finally the woman reached the altar, just as her stifled impatience burned her cheeks crimson. She knelt hastily and stuck out stiff hands to receive the bread. She ate quickly and again reached impatiently for the chalice. But as it was almost in her fingers, a slight noise made her hesitate before taking it.
Someone had slipped in late; a stream of sunlight burst upon the silence and then slowly faded. The late man walked swiftly forward and joined the line as the hush descended once more.

But the merest breath of wind had crept in around him. It swirled slowly up the aisle, caressing the hot faces of the waiting people. It reached the impatient woman and cooled the fires in her cheeks, breathing kindly round her warm hands as they grasped the sacred cup. She suddenly felt the coolness of the silver on her fingers, and she lifted the cup to her lips more slowly than she had the bread. Something in the lightness of the breeze bade her look upward. Her eyes met the gaze of the crucified Christ in the stained window above the altar, and a trembling woke a fear in her heart that she had not known since childhood.
This is My blood...
The warm wine caressed her throat and glided near her heart.
Shed for you...
For once, her eyes really closed in prayer, and she knelt much longer than was her wont.

Beside her knelt Anna, her gray eyes large. She too felt the gentle touch of the wind. It brought a tingling to her arms and cheeks; it surrounded her with a bracing cool, like that of starlit air. Her hands also trembled as she took the holy bread, but it was because of the tears brimming in her eyes. Holding the piece of bread in her cupped hands, she lifted her eyes to those of Jesus as He suffered on the cross. The nails in His hands made her blanch.
This is My body…
She ate the bread.
Broken for you...

A tingling rush came over her face, and she lifted her hands to cheeks that burned. She found herself trembling, caught between the coolness of the wind and the heat of her heart, and suddenly, she realized that tears were covering her cheeks. She drank of the wine and realized that her heart had just been broken. But the breaking was sweeter than any former wholeness had been, for it had broken in love.

Still the gentle wind moved among the people, touching faces and hands, stimulating hearts, making a trembling in their very souls. A tiny bit of a girl smiled as the cool blew the wisps of hair from her face. A father brought his baby closer to the warmth of his arms as the air glided by. At the altar, the wind blessed the hands of the priest, and his movements became stronger, his voice yet gentler.

No one in all that grand sanctuary was safe from that wildly gentle wind.

Copyright Sarah Clarkson, 2005

Grey

Tonight we are in a towering lodge on a great grey, wintry lake somewhere in the mountains of Maryland. We arrived in late afternoon, to the snow just beginning it’s etching of the air. The chill is bitter, but it has instilled a deep quiet in the earth and the landscape has been painted with a full, subtly tinted palette of greys. The trees are lithely dark and grey, the fields sere and slightly silver, the sky brooding grey, the jutting edges of the rocks a flinty grey. It strikes me that sometimes the wonder of creation is most vividly evident in the vastness to be found within even it's smallest elements. Who could know that you could make the world breathtakingly gorgeous while staying literally within one defined color? It is that “eternity in a hazelnut” as Julian of Norwich said.

Great Music Everyone!

Thanks to all you music lovers out there. What a great list of artists, I've got a lot of listening to do. Someday, I'm going to make a CD of all the very best songs of each particular one. I'm also going to make a compilation CD someday of what I call the "last" songs. It seems to me that on a lot my favorite albums, some of the best songs are the last, "hidden" ones, that never make the radio cut. Examples would be Nicole Nordeman's "Send Some Rain", and Bebo's "All That I Have Sown". Some of the most beautiful songs get put in last, it's like finding a treasure at the end of the album.

Keep on listening and loving that music out there everyone, thanks!

Random Thoughts From the California Desert

Well, we're back from a week in LA, which just confirms the fact that I never actually want to live there, but it's awfully fun to visit. It's just like summer out there, the perfect kind of summer, flowers everywhere, warm days, breezy beeches, oh my!

However, to get out there, one has to drive two full days through an eye-catching array of flatlands, prairies, mountains and high desert, which, though incredibly beautiful by turns, can also get incredibly monotonous by hours. Thus, we had ample time for discussion and music, and as it happened, we merged the two on this trip. Having listened to a really talented lineup of our favorite musicians, we got started on the subject of what truly makes some music "artistic and creative", and why some music seems to lack that extra element of grace.

What sets apart a Rich Mullins, Michael Card, Bob Bennett, Andrew Peterson apart from so much non descript music. My two cents worth of idea was that I think in writing songs, some musicians say what they have heard to be true, i.e., "God is good, God is faithful" (and a thousand variations thereof), and some musicians say what they know to be true from having lived it. And the difference shows in the music thus written, because lyrics that are written from deep understanding and long experience have a depth, a subltely, even a symbolism that lyrics written without a personal understanding will never have.

It's the difference between the "reckless, raging fury that they call the love of God", in the words of Rich Mullins, and the blank statement, which I have heard sung a thousand times in various praise songs, "God's love is amazing". One has experienced the love of God in a way that shapes and drives the words, the other is simply a general statement.

So who are the true artists? I want opinions, artists and songs. Here's a beginning list:

Andrew Peterson
Rich Mullins
Chris Rice
Bob Bennett
Fernando Ortega
Bebo Norman
Michael Card

9.5 Theses

Please, everyone, go read the great article on Christianity Today website titled "9.5 Theses on Worship". We have had many discussions lately on this topic, as we have been visiting numerous churches, and this guy says what I've been wanting to say myself on the subject. Go Mr. whatever your name is!

January and Mysticism

To all the people who actually had the faith to look back at this blog after me ignoring it for a month, thanks, and happy new year! (Four weeks late)
Christmas and the new year have a way of throwing me off my normal rhythms and it takes me a bit to get back into the swing of things. But here I am, and it's good to be thinking through my keyboard again.

Having gotten Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism for Christmas, I've actually had quite a bit to think about. Far from being a book full of misty speculation on the meaning of transcendence, this book is the kind that takes you by the shoulders and makes you sit down and think. Just in the first chapter, my whole understanding of reality was challenged when she pointed out that each person experiences sensory reality in a subjective way. And though I might argue that we can all touch and feel the books sitting round us, or the house in which we live, what are the elements that make up that reality? A bunch of atoms compressed together? (Or, according to the new superstring theory, which I find fascinating, a bunch of dancing strings?)

Not that physical reality isn't incredibly important. But the point of it all was that beyond the daily reality that we know so well but that is, really quite subjective, beyond even our own limited understanding of spirituality, there is living spiritual reality of love and life that we barely even dream of. And it is where the things we most value in life come from; beauty, love and, her term, religion. So I was reading this in Starbucks the other day, (talk about contrasting concrete reality with the spiritual!), and afterwards turned to my Bible for a bit of study, and came upon 1 Corinthians 2, and was amazed indeed:

"but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory..."things which the eye has not seen and ear has not heard and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him..."

The realization that there is a glory out there beyond my wildest imaginations is something that I often lose, but the shock of rediscovering it is always bracing to my soul. And as I sat there in Starbucks, sipping a cappuccino and contemplating the mysteries of God, I felt renewed in my desire to live life with a mind more set on the Eternal.

It's just a beginning, and I will probably have much more mental food to chew on as I read this two-inch thick book. But it is making me think about life in a new way. Anyway, since this is all quite jumbled in my mind, you'll be doing well if you can make sense of it. But it is what I am contemplating lately, which is rather amusing since January always catches me with many very commonplace, unspiritual things I must do. But it's good to remember again the something beyond. And especially to endeavor to live there at least part of the time.

Before long, I may be a mystic myself.