I think now to the velvet coat, the mug, to the snowflake-small diamond stud in my ear, to the prized Michael Khors dress that somehow magically fit me that you never got to wear, though we oo-ed over it when Lisa dropped it by. I think to the tiny paper and tin music box I bought you as a gift in Austria that plays, “The Sound of Music,” to the worn VHS of that film, which we watched every Saturday, a ritual we held even unto the two days before you passed.

These things, they mean nothing and everything to me at the same time.

Penumbra
By Amy Lowell

As I sit here in the quiet Summer night,
Suddenly, from the distant road, there comes
The grind and rush of an electric car.
And, from still farther off,
An engine puffs sharply,
Followed by the drawn-out shunting scrape of a freight train.
These are the sounds that men make
In the long business of living.
They will always make such sounds,
Years after I am dead and cannot hear them.

Sitting here in the Summer night,
I think of my death.
What will it be like for you then?
You will see my chair
With its bright chintz covering
Standing in the afternoon sunshine,
As now.
You will see my narrow table
At which I have written so many hours.
My dogs will push their noses into your hand,
And ask—ask—
Clinging to you with puzzled eyes.

The old house will still be here,
The old house which has known me since the beginning.
The walls which have watched me while I played:
Soldiers, marbles, paper-dolls,
Which have protected me and my books.
The front-door will gaze down among the old trees
Where, as a child, I hunted ghosts and Indians;
It will look out on the wide gravel sweep
Where I rolled my hoop,
And at the rhododendron bushes
Where I caught black-spotted butterflies.

The old house will guard you,
As I have done.
Its walls and rooms will hold you,
And I shall whisper my thoughts and fancies
As always,
From the pages of my books.

You will sit here, some quiet Summer night,
Listening to the puffing trains,
But you will not be lonely,
For these things are a part of me.
And my love will go on speaking to you
Through the chairs, and the tables, and the pictures,
As it does now through my voice,
And the quick, necessary touch of my hand.

I decided to tackle my overflowing library, starting with Woodlief’s Somewhere More Holy. I found Penumbra in its opening pages. I have a feeling it’s what I need most to read right now.

Have you read any good poems lately? 

My library is bursting at the seams with new reads. It started with Story Conference. They gave us one free book after another from all the presenters who have been published recently – Makoto Fujimura’s refractions, Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Inciting Incidents, curated by Sarah Cunningham. I’ve been reading chapters of each of those here and there. Then Lore decided to send me two of her favorites – Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath and Tony Woodlief’s Somewhere More Holy. And then, when I was supposed to be picking up mushrooms and wine for risotto the other night and I wandered into another part of the store, thinking about how to spend my birthday money, J.K. Rowling’s new book, The Casual Vacancy, leapt out at me, and I knew I had to take it home. So now I have nearly a dozen new books to read. My only problem is that I want to read them all at once, and don’t know where to start. It’s a good problem to have, I think.

What’s on your shelf right now? Have you read any of these yet?

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Today’s post is by Preston Yancey, and it is truly a privilege to host his words here in my space. I hope it fills you as deeply as it has for me. 

~

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

Rilke, in one of his vagabond turns of verse in the collection of prosody he commended as prayer to God.

It is a line of good faith for me, one I read and know immediately I consider believed, but to tell you the reason behind the trust of the rhyme would be to violate the belief itself. I read it, pray it, and it seems the most true of things I could say. Perhaps this is danger; perhaps this is faith. I think the line hard to discern at times.

When I signed the contract for my first book, a lay-friendly exploration of the Scripture as the foundation for our theological imagination, I did not sign with a degree of presumption. I was aware, to the point of petrification, that at twenty-two it was highly likely that no one much cared what I had to say about God and, moreover, at twenty-two I didn’t have very much worth saying. But I signed the contract as an act of faith in the yet to be spoken while two of my best friends watched and whispered promises that this was meet and right and even bounded duty.

But the contract I signed came with a generous portion of time affixed to it. The book was yet to be written and I had signed for the promise of words before there were words to offer. Again, belief in those things yet to be spoken. The yet was the turning word, the tuning word, the word that was vouchsafe and promise, perhaps even covenant, which I wound like rosary up to the vaulted heavens, up unto the throne of God.

There is a misconception, I have found, by some who stand on the other side of the text. Readers as exclusive beings, taking in for leisure and not for generative work tend to think that the theleological triumph is vested in the book contract itself. The signing. The obligation to be published. This is touted as the great victory. And I concede that it is, to a point. I ordered champagne and bought an icon, updated my blog page and admitted politely when declining an invitation that I needed to work on a chapter. (At first, I did this to the point of nausea, God and my friends forgive me, but I have since abandoned the practice.)

But you can only drink so much champagne and buy so many icons before you actually have to do something about that contract you signed which obligated them to publish you as much as it obligated you to actually write something. Then comes the panic. Then comes the staying up into the wee hours and the frantic calls to best friends in which you rather frankly and ungraciously complain that everything you write is horseshit and you have no idea why anyone, ever, would have considered you a wise investment.

And you worry about revealing that too openly, because you don’t want that call from your publisher or your agent asking, kindly—too kindly—Are you alright?

I’ve wound my way to this, you see: the question of qualification.

At a certain point, we have to believe that if He has put before us a thing that needs doing, it is He who makes us able to do the thing that needs doing. I could turn and churn the frantic fear of not being able to write well for days and weeks and end up with blank, lifeless pages. And I did, for a time. But there came a moment of quiet epiphany, in the rustle whisper revelation of the Scripture.

In his epistle to the Romans, St. Paul speaks the poetics of our faith: and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.

It turns there, like Rilke’s yet, all on He.

There’s a lot of theological technicality in the wording, of what we call justified and glorified, but if the Scripture can speak to us on the very surface, is it not inviting us to accept this: that He who began a good work—see, we return again to its own words—is in fact seeing it to completion; that He, who called us according to His purpose, is fulfilling the calling in us; that He, not by our works of righteousness but by His sustaining, is bringing about exactly what He would will be done?

So we are left with this, the question of qualification.

It is God who qualifies. It is God who sees through. It is God who can take credit for any good word ever printed on a page. Should I ever say anything of worth about or concerning Him, it is by His scandalous grace. And it is only by that I am able to take up a pen or place fingers to a keyboard.

Such that I believe in all that has never yet been spoken, if I grasp however feebly to trust in Him.

~

Preston Yancey is earning his Master of Letters at the University of St. Andrews in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts from the St. Mary’s School of Divinity. His first book about a reverential approach to Scripture, ‘Tables in the Wilderness,’ is due out with Rhizome in Summer 2013. His second, ‘A Common Faith: A Memoir of God Found, Lost, and Found Again’ is being written now. Follow his writing at SeePrestonBlog.com and on twitter @prestonyancey.

Heaven will smell like hot apples cooking on a fall day. This is the scent of our favorite season, mingled with smells of shepherd’s pie and pumpkin spice anything. Oh, and the creaking sound of the furnace as it remembers how to heat the house again. The light is dim in the house each morning, the sun rising later and later while we wait for Swiss Miss and cereal before school. We stand on the vent in the kitchen, the heat billowing our robes and warming our slippers.

This is my childhood. This is the month of my birth. This is how I remember life at home.

We try to replicate it now, apples in a pot on the stove, their perfume rising to bless our memories.

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The auditorium was silent at the end of Mako’s speech. Ian Cron took the stage to close the session, and instead of ruining the silence with too many words, Ian asked us to put away distractions, close our eyes, let Mako’s words “find purchase” in our hearts. In that silence, it felt like the whole crowd had unanimously noticed the common bush afire, and collectively taken off their shoes. The room felt heavy with holiness.

It’s been a week since that moment, a week of returning to the everyday, to the online-only relationships, to the reluctant routine. Yet even a week later, my heart still feels that holiness and wholeness, that sense of having tread on sacred ground.

The conference was wonderful, yes. But the deeper thing, the thing that I still am speechlessly in awe of, was the community formed. It was already there, in tweets and emails and links and comments, but sitting together at dinner tables, talking late into the night on my couch with Lore, hugging each other tight before we headed home, those are the moments for which my heart still seeks purchase.

In the spirit of that, a few STORY-themed lovelinks that say it better than I ever could:

A bridge across the chasm.

The voices, or finding your people.

1,000 posts.

What I Quit.

It is Good.

“After all, my lawyer told me love does.”

“We’ve made our home 45 minutes from the heart of humanity. And there is something utterly tragic about that.” City, Suburb, and the Myth of Christian Art.

Ultimate e-book recap of Story 2012. (Free for everyone, even if you didn’t attend. There’s some serious genius in it, so get on that download.)

“Take all of the time you look at your blog analytics on your phone, and use that time to develop your skill in storytelling. The world doesn’t need another “top blogger” — it does need your story.” Darrell tells it like it is.

“Because desert shrubs were meant to live in the desert and they have all they need to live on there. Their roots spread out to the stream too, and do not fear when the heat comes. It thrives in a year of drought and what if the only fruit it bears is to bear the weight of thirty blackbirds? Is that not still fruit?”

“Ex Nihilo”  and “Who Broke Africa?”  by Micah Bournes.

Mason Jar Music, featuring Josh Garrels. (I’ve been listening to this on repeat pretty much all week.)

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