My new lovely, big window was recently installed.
And the Plum tree outside is in full bloom. Bliss.

We are not only conscious of it, but every one of our senses are aware of it. Of a pervasive unlit-ness; of this present and infiltrating Cimmerian darkness. It is recognized even as we look out our window: at the ugly rotting leaves or the tilting dying Oak, or the graffiti which mars the wall. We hear it on the streets: crude language, horrible patois, the distortion of canon, the misuse of beautiful words-- the misuse of beautiful meaning. It is shockingly visible everywhere, especially promulgated through media: slandering, the absence of Truth, the lack of peace, abortion, death, the abuse of sex and sexuality, war, nihilism, murder, thievery, greed and the obsession of self. This darkness is everything that beauty and light isn't. It is everything that goodness and purity is not. It is an epidemic; a raging flood. It's something we don't like to acknowledge very often. Because it terrifies.

[We are] afraid of the dark-- not afraid to go up the stairs in the physical darkness of night, but afraid of the shadows of another kind of dark, the darkness of nothingness, of hate, of evil.

So we rush around trying to light candles. Some are real: books are candles for me; so is music; so is friendship. Others blow up in our faces, like too much alcohol and too many sleeping pills or pep pills. Or hard drugs. Or sex where there isn't any love.

I think it was Toynbee who said that we are a sick society because we have refused to accept death and infinity. Our funeral practices open themselves up to satire, but they are only symptom. There's an insurance commercial on the radio which says, "if something should happen to you," with the implication that without some unforeseen accident of course you'll never die. (L'Engle)

For me, my candles are books and music as well. But a greater light illuminates this great darkness for me, and my shuddering is less for my security is strong:

"Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." (Hebrews 2:14-15)

Sometimes I still find it desperately, nearly impossible to live with such havoc and distortion of peace and love and ravaging the world. But I know that this darkness creates in us a search for purpose and meaning in the midst of it. I think it was Carl Jung who said, "Death is psychologically as important as birth. Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose." Death and dying and darkness and fear-- these shadows prove to us that there really is light.

"The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." (Matthew 4:16)

. . .

On the absurdity of feminist
language:


Her unisex temper would worsen
If as chairman she wasn't 'chairperson':
She required that we ban
Those damned suffixes, 'man'--
So now she's become a woperson.

-S. Vanauken

One spring one of my students showed me her notebook,
in which she had written, "The only good artist is a dead one.
All artists should be shot after they have finished producing.
If they are allowed to live, they will start commenting on their works,
and I have never heard and artist say anything intelligent
about what he has done...

Beethoven had the right idea: he played one of his sonatas
for someone, and when he had finished, the person said,
'That's very nice, but what does it mean?'
And Beethoven sat down and played the whole thing over."

(A Circle of Quiet)

Rebirth? It must be a process of growth occurring after a death? Or, at least, a near death. I was thinking of that late last night; the revival of one's soul and health after being stagnant, moribund. My little ceramic pot sitting on my window sill holds a flowery plant. I am a horrible botanist- I have no idea what it is. But its blooms are a lovely shade of pink and it's very pretty. I am also a horrible gardener, but have tried to take care of it properly: I've watered it and talked to it. (The ferns and other things I have growing in various pots next to it are doing fairly well also. Except for the Mint, who is thoroughly dead, which is sad since it smelled delicious. It was supposed to be planted outdoors I was told, but I didn't think it mattered that much.) Because of my poor plant tending skills my little pink plant has had a pretty rough life. And the other day, it looked dreadful; definitely worse than usual. It's smooth stems were painfully drooping over and most of the petals had fallen off or had turned a ghastly ashen color. It looked as if it was gasping for breath-- its last dying breaths. I watered it again; which is my instinctive cure-all for every plant-ish kind of growing thing. But now it looked even worse, it was gasping for breath while melting in a puddle of water. A couple of mornings later I was very surprised to see it was alive. And- not only was it alive- but its stems were gracefully standing upright, with the delicate pink returned to its petals, as it gently bent towards the sun shining through the window. It looked marvelous. Strong. And so, that's what has drawn my mind down the path of contemplating birth, rebirth and regeneration. I wonder if it is true in every case-- if the life one lives after regeneration, is more beautiful than the life one had before?

"The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wainropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: 'Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!'"

-Treasure Island

. . .

I am fond of encircling myself with the young: infants, children, bright faces- mostly ignorant of their existence- aware only of beauty, color, of laughter, of eating candy, of love. Perhaps one reason I do this, is my unconscious attempt to disguise my own terror of death and dying and of coping with it. I don't know. All I know is that- as a childhood quote comes echoing back to me, from the movie Pollyanna- "Death comes unexpectedly." The death of someone I know was felt last week. That reality was ushered in by the words of a friend who informed me, "___ died today." How can a whole life be extinguished in that one sentence- in that one single word- "died"? People pass away often. Yet when that death lands lands nearer home than the others that's when it is felt. And it hurts. "There is always the memento mori, the realization that death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived." (L'engle) This week, this Easter week, I am more conscious than ever that "all flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flowers of the field," that "man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow," but that "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? ... But thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

. . .