Journal Entry, February 18, 2007:  Sabbath in Winter  —  A stream of consciousness trying to thaw.

Glenn says, just share something you’re experiencing about faith and the living of life.  Even a journal sketch is fine.  But nothing I could say is worth hearing now.  My life is a struggle for order and that’s old news to anyone who knows me.  It seems to never end.  These things, “To Do.”

To Do List:  (abridged)
Unpack
Prep to teach Englist Lit
    End Dorian Gray (tragedy); begin Cry, the Beloved Country (redemption)
Visit mom, snowed in.   Visit hospital, Poppi sick.
Wood in / shovel drive / Joshua.
CGO deadline, Sunday. 
Schedule roof replacement (after hail storm) / David
Open mail and email, respond
Finish book proposal
Sledding / skiing with kids?  Square dance.
Voice and piano lesson, Michelle & Joshua.
Prep/pack for Boston / Veritas Forum / research Harvard history

It is Sunday.  Lord, order my life.  First things first.  Can I not stop, for one day in winter, to be re-minded, to become sane, to remember —  to feel held by Truth?  After all, we’re to abide in one another.  I am fighting for order.  I am fighting to abide.   David and the kids are on “pins and needles” around me and my “to do” list.  I’ll disappear for their sakes as well as for mine.

I eek out a private & quiet space in which to write – our bedroom.  The scent of wood-smoke rises upstairs.  I remove the kids’ laundry from a desk, under which I find a well-marked Bible.  My old friend. 

“Guard your heart, it is the wellspring of life.”  Guard my heart.  Guard my heart?  Where is that heart, the seat of my will and affections?  I forget when I last saw it.  Is it buried beneath the snow.  Beneath the busy-ness of family and work and the cares of the world.   

I open the window-blinds by my desk now.  Outside is a world of white.  Snow.  More snow. A week of snow.  Lonely and lovely.  Sometimes blowing but today silent and falling slow.

What is the Loreena McKennitt song about a snowfall?  Search on computer, find: “Snow.”  I listen once but cannot understand her rich brogue, the words intriguingly obscure, not yet within my reach.  My life at the moment is nearly impregnable to beauty.  Do not move onto the next thing.  Wait.  So I listen again, and again.

In her song, a busy and noisy landscape is slowly, silently, covered in snow.  The land is graced by snow.   (Suggestion: that you download and disappear into this world of beauty…)  “Snow,” by Loreena McKennitt:

     "White are the far-off plains,
     And white the fading forests grow;

(The noise rebels:  shoot, can I quote these lyrics on a blog?  But they’re so beautiful I want others to know them. Oh yeah, the lyrics are from the 17th century. Loreena looked beneath the surface of our aesthetic winter – to ancient words and paths – often a “public domain” of buried riches.  I hit “play” to begin again):

     "White are the far-off plains,
     And white the fading forests grow;
     The wind dies out along the height
     And denser still the snow,
     A gathering weight on roof and tree
     Falls down scarce audibly….

(Her voice is so lovely, echoing against cathedral stone.  So calming and quiet a voice.
I unplug the phone.  Disconnect internet.  Lock the door.   Enter God’s real world of beauty through the window.  Depart Matrix.  Enter True Vine).

     "The meadows and far-sheeted streams
     Lie still without a sound;
     Like some soft minister of dreams
     The snowfall hoods me around;
     In wood and water, earth and air,
     A silence is everywhere.

     "Save when at lonely spells
     Some farmer's sleigh is urged on,
     With rustling runners and sharp bells,
     Swings by me and is gone;
     Or from the empty waste I hear
     A sound remote and clear;

(Do I make “empty” space, enough to hear — a sound remote and clear?)

     "The barking of a dog,
     To cattle, is sharply pealed,
     Borne, echoing from some wayside stall
     Or barnyard far afield;
     Then all is silent and the snow
     Falls settling soft and slow

(Lord, please let us live in the country one day, with a barn and a stream... Fair are the meadows, yet You are fairer still.  Musical interlude: the harp, Irish whistle, and crystalline strains of the bowed psaltry.  I recall the Connemara village church of Irish ancestors I visited a decade ago.  Breathe.)

     "The evening deepens and the grey
     Folds closer Earth to sky
     The world seems shrouded, so far away.
     Its noises sleep, and I,
     As secret as yon buried stream
     Plod dumbly on and dream."

     And dream…
     And dream…
     I dream…
     And I dream."

Stillness.  Through the window I see a snowy tree and glimpse a nestle of sparrows. “Dead” branches are merely dormant.  They pulse with future life.   Such is the deeper magic of our budding world.  Such is the hope of our hearts. 

My heart.  I can feel it again.  It beats more slowly, for a change.  Sabbath, the Person and presence of beauty.  The Spirit who is Holy.  In Your peace the cold melts away.  Abiding is beneath the surface, deeper than the snow.  And I am a sinner of presumption when I don’t abide. I am a clanging gong.  A frigid and dying branch.  Not a mother.  Not a nurturer and life-giver.

But when abiding, our home is a giving tree, and the birds of the air nestle in our branches.  I see who is here --  children who are glad to see me glad, again.  Children, friends, spouses and strangers, miracles all. 

Heart of the world beneath the cold of snow, beyond the gleam of night.  We are gathered to You for warmth, and for light.  And to see, again, what is real.

The Father’s heart, the world’s hearth.  Fire of our desiring.