grace covered, full of hope.

I recently finished a book called ‘Home is Always: the place you just left…A memoir of restless longing and persistent grace.’ by Betty Smartt Carter.

I want to share some of my favorite pieces from the book, and why:

Yet in the confidence of that freedom, it’s easy to sacrifice a longing to see God at work in the world now-an urge to see his power and beauty impinge upon the material…Our worship services were straightforward affairs.  We sat dutifully, holding Bibles in our laps.  We stared at our bulletings and then at the faces of the people up front who talked a lot because that’s what tradition demanded of them, even on days when they had little to say…All in all, we held to the convictions my friend expressed when she said that faith is a matter of reason- of thinking things out correctly.  While admitting that the Holy Spirit must direct our reason, we’d inherited a conviction that God’s direction will reveal itself in seemliness and orderliness.  But is it possible to worship a Being who is unspeakably beautiful, ineffably strange- the God who appeared to Ezekiel-and never do anything surprising?  Never even be surprised?

I don’t know if it’s just me and Betty, but I long for more of the miraculous and less of the typical in this journey with Christ.  I don’t want to sit in a church that doesn’t hope for the Spirit, doesn’t listen to Him.

I wanted to tell someone how beautiful it was, but you can’t pass an experience of beauty around like a good joke or a box of candy. You can’t force people to adopt a love of yours, any more than you get them to enjoy your vacation pictures. Your only hope is to create a new experience for them from the old-like forms from the imagination of God reproducing themselves in types, which is one purpose of good conversation, and of art.

I find myself all the time wanting to take a moment and stop it- transfer it to a different day and time. One of the most difficult and confusing things about life is that no one understands it quite the way I do, which leaves me alone in the deepest parts of myself.  I guess these are the spots that only Christ can speak to, if I am willing to let him.

One morning a few months later, I sat at home, trying to write but unable to. It was a sunny day in late September. A warm breeze blew in the open window over my desk, stirring in the red petals of a geranium, stirring the leaves of blank yellow paper under my hand. I felt as if I’d been crying for weeks straight, but now more tears came. Why is it that beauty stirs desire? Stirs it, but doesn’t satisfy it. A changing wind, the smell of grass and dry leaves: these are sacraments of memory. They bring the past directly to our sense: we remember similar beauties from long ago, in other summers ending, other autumns beginning. Memory rising in us stirs up desire, not just for glimpses and visions, signs and symbols, but for someone who is no longer there.