At work last Tuesday, I found myself in a familiar place: my right side aching, my skin burning, my office walls a blur of florescent white and blue. Every month, I cycle through these symptoms and assume that they are normal. That all women carry this kind of pain. That the migraines and the blood and the surreal tenderness of my flesh are just par for the course, and that I, like any other woman on her period, should just suck it up and deal.

I’m not exactly sure what made me think that, this time, the pain wasn’t normal. Maybe it was the fact that the pain reminded me of the appendicitis I had five years ago. Maybe it was these past months I’ve spent in therapy, renaming the old signs of pain, giving words to the new ones.

Maybe I’m more alert these days to what healing requires: self-examination, honesty, the guts to pick up the phone and ask for help.

So when I called the women’s health clinic and described my symptoms, I didn’t hesitate to follow their advice: call a friend, get in the car, and drive to St. Mary’s emergency room.

I spent the afternoon in a tent of a gown, napping on a bed covered with a paper sheet, Friendsplaying softly on the hospital room television. I felt stupid for being there; my cramps went away as soon as I stepped into the hospital, and when the doctor’s intern pressed her finger to my side and felt nothing, her eyebrows raised.

“If it’s just pain you are concerned with, you might want to see your regular doctor,” she said. “It sounds like you are fine.”

Strength, as I defined it growing up, was about endurance; bearing up under the impossible. We carried our crosses like trophies, turned laments into victory songs. “This is what God has done for me!” I would cry out at youth group, my fist in the air, the crowd of teenagers clapping and waving their hands.

I did not know, then, that I was simply ignoring the wound. I did not know that what I proclaimed was bad news, a gospel built on the power of the self to transcend circumstance. I did not know how wrong I was.

After an ultrasound and another episode of Friends, the doctor brought me other news—the ultrasound showed a picture of a cyst on my right ovary, right where the dull ache has faithfully announced itself, month after month.

“Everything looks good,” he assured me, “but you’ll need to be examined further. Just to rule out endometriosis, which can keep women from having children.”

He gave me a prescription for painkillers and a packet on ovarian cysts, covered with penciled illustrations of the womb, the fallopian tube, the long stretches of scar tissue that could be lining my right ovary. That could be rendering me barren, four months before I wed.

I know that nothing is official. That I have no further diagnosis, no way of proclaiming any kind of news for myself. I have been frantically optimistic—“We can adopt, some day”—and completely fearful, my eyes lingering a bit too long over the children I saw at a park the other day, their red curls, like mine, bouncing in the wind.

In the early days of my faith, we celebrated our wounds because we believed that, by renaming our suffering, we could transform it. If we had the eyes of faith, we would be made well. If we believed, we would be blessed. And in my aching and hoping, I saw a husband and children as the ultimate blessing, the ultimate proof I had arrived: no more setbacks. No more curses. No more of the old life.

My friend Kirsten, who runs the organization “cino”—culture is not optional—wrote an article about blessing that has haunted me for years. She writes: “A blessing is never just a bunch of free stuff God drops down the chimney for eldest sons and chosen people; rather it’s a granting of responsibility and the mysterious overflow that results from the faithful acceptance of that responsibility.”

I used to believe in a gospel of prosperity. A system of rewards. Children as sign and symbol of a blessed life.

And now that I face this, I know that what I believe, what is true, is far scarier than I could have imagined. That I would believe in a God who could withhold babies from me, a God whose love both heals and breaks me, a God who is so different from the god of desire I fashioned in high school, noble as my desires may have been.

I know that it is too early to prescribe an answer to myself. I do not know what will happen. But I cannot help but be fearful; I cannot help but ask for help.

Five years ago, when I had my appendicitis, the doctors worried that the rate of my infection would require removing part of my colon and half my reproductive organs, including this ailing right ovary. The morning after my surgery, one of the doctors, a brightly dressed woman with a Polish accent, smiled at my bedside.

“We did it,” she said, her voice singing above my bed. “We saved your ovary. God bless you.”

I hold tightly to that memory; I pray to accept what I have been given, whatever that may look like. I pray to hope and to believe.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.”
—G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland”

When I moved to Boston, I moved into a house with six musicians and two visual artists. My friend Chad had a lathe in the basement and a small sculptor’s studio. My friend Kate kept the top floor filled with sketches. My boyfriend had a small carpenter’s space in the basement beside Chad’s lathe that was always full of wood shavings.

All over the four-story house were guitars and keyboards and drum kits and sheet music and song-writing notes left lying around and a never-ending supply of cords and amps and unidentifiable (to me) percussion instruments, shakers, and tambourines.

Most of my first year in Boston was spent traveling across New England to see my friends play shows. I learned how to “load in” instruments through the alleys behind venues and learned how to survive on the communal complimentary nachos and bourbon my friends were given between their sets.

All of it, from start to finish, was an experience I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to live on the East Coast. I didn’t expect to spend so much time with musicians. I didn’t expect to fall so much in love with what they were doing that I would become a kind of evangelist for their songs.

Music has always been an enormous part of my life and my identity, but apart from a few random concerts growing up (Amy Grant, Tom Petty, Natalie Merchant) and the occasional and mostly unremarkable standard issue blues or rock bands at bars in Jackson, I’d never really spent a considerable amount of time around live music.

But Boston broke something open in me. Boston made me remember that I had forgotten some primordial joy in myself, and in that strange alchemy of live music so incredibly well done, there were moments when I suddenly felt as if I was both 28 and 16 all at the same time and that the only thing that mattered was the ecstasy and freedom of driving around with my friends, unfettered and wild and alive.

I felt as if I was returning to myself in all the pain of adolescence and in all the pain of all the years that followed and redeeming that pain and being redeemed all at once.

I am grateful for that time, even though it was often very difficult. So now when I am afforded the rare opportunity of getting to see my Boston friends play again, I do whatever it takes to get there.

As luck would have it, my friends Nathan Johnson and Katie Chastain (aka Faux Fix), along with the phenomenal Jonny Rodgers (who was just called “stunning” by the New York Times for his performance at the Ecstatic Music Festival at the Kaufman Center), came to play a show at my boyfriend’s nonprofit in Chicago two weeks ago.

So I bought a plane ticket, took a personal day, and made sure I got there, because when those three people get together to make something, it’s worth missing whatever you have to miss just to place yourself in a position to see and to hear it, not only because it transports you to a beautiful place, but because the beauty lingers and then becomes transformative.

After an hour-long show, I am somehow more fully myself than when the show began. And that kind of transformation doesn’t vanish when the show ends. It continues to bear fruit both in memory and into a future of more hopeful days.

Nathan, Katie, and Johnny have been on a month-long living room tour across the United States to launch Faux Fix’s new album, My Antagonist, which has been on a near-constant state of repeat in my car and at my office and in my home, pretty much anywhere I can listen to it for the last two weeks.

It repays every new listen with some new nuance or some new bit of beauty, and beyond that, it’s just so much fun to listen to. If you could see me right now happily dancing at my chair in my office at school, you would see ample evidence to support this claim. I like the CD so much I can’t decide which song is my favorite. Every next song is my favorite until the song after it begins.

I’ve written about Nathan and Katie in multiple blogs for Good Letters over the years, about how much they have inspired me personally as well as professionally. So that’s not news, and if you want cinematic evidence of their genius, check out Nathan’s scores on the films Brick and The Brothers Bloom, as well as September’s upcoming Looper.

Or check out their work with Son Lux on NPR’s All Songs Considered website. Or listen to Katie’s solo album Firecracker and pay special attention to the moment in the titular song when The Fray’s Isaac Slade begins playing the piano and Zach Johnson’s drums kick in (if you want further evidence of Zach’s genius check out the drums on Faux Fix’s song “Lamplighter”).

I’m neither a music critic nor an art critic, but I can tell you empirically that if you get the chance to see them, even if it’s a few hours away, you should just get in your car and start driving, because for one hour, you will be in a beautiful place and afterwards, you will be better and more alive for having been there.

And if all you need is a reason to dance happily at your desk, then My Antagonist will deliver.

But as Levar Burton once famously said, “No reason to take my word for it.”

Listen for yourself.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

Her memoir narrates the nine-month process of adopting her daughter Angelika from Russia–in the process, coming to understand the country in which her daughter was born. She hopes that the book will provide hope to Russians cynical about American adoption, as well as to American adoptive parents ignorant about the culture from which they adopted their children.

Danielle had this to say about Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program:

“One of the things I enjoyed most about the SPU program was studying with and under like-minded people. The students and faculty at SPU care about struggling with and answering–however provisionally–the big questions. They’re not content to merely publish and build up their own egos or statuses–they want to impact the world around them for the better, for eternity.”

The MFA students and faculty recently met together for their annual winter residency on Whidbey Island in Washington. Here are a few of our favorite moments:

Guest author Ann Hood leads a discussion of fiction writing

Poetry students Sarah & Jo before the Art & Faith literature: so chipper!

Poetry student Trevor dresses up as Greg Wolfe for the annual poetry contest

Suzanne–now an alumna!–gives her craft lecture on point of view

Another spectacular sunset on Whidbey Island

MFA folk (a.k.a. the most amazing group of people you’ll ever meet)

In the February issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Alice Mattison states flatly: “Telling the truth is wrong, if somebody wants to keep it secret.” Not long ago I read a note posted by a friend of mine that made my heart sink. Allison wrote that an excerpt from her memoir, posted here, had infuriated her family.

My first thought: Allison is reaping the bitter and inevitable fruit of memoir writing.

My second thought: that’s why I write fiction.

Angering family and friends, or hurting someone’s feelings, is a perennial fear of most of the writers I know. Another friend of mine recently published a piece of creative non-fiction with all the names changed and a gender-nonspecific author’s pseudonym for herself—or himself, whichever the case may be; I’m not telling.

I grew up in a small West Virginia town—not even a town really, a cluster of houses between a mountainside and a muddy river. My dad was the preacher in a Baptist church beside that river. What I learned from those people was that in your everyday life you practiced stone-jawed stoicism. You did not tell your trouble, you did not air your family’s dirty laundry. There was an unspoken code of silence and it seemed to grow stronger in direct relation to a family’s level of dysfunction.

However, sometimes on a Sunday these very same people would come through the church doors and chuck their code of silence in the can with their umbrellas. They would stand to testify and shamelessly wave their deep personal lives in front of a bunch of watchers. Even though people listened with interest, there was always the awkward sense that the real sin—telling the family secrets—was being committed right there in the sanctuary.

The spectacle made me squirm in the pew, made me want to run for the door. It also made me decide to keep mum about my own business. Even now, trying to write about my personal life gives me the heebie-jeebies.

There’s more at stake than mere discomfort though. Allison’s complaint makes me think of a scene in the movie Henry Fool. A young man named Simon Grimm is inspired to write. He sits down and writes a long poem, and it rockets him to riches and fame. (Suspend your disbelief all you poets, I’m making a different point here.)

You never get a glimpse of what Simon wrote. What you do get to watch is his mom finding a copy of the poem on a shelf, sitting down to read it, and then standing up and going straightaway to commit suicide. As silly as the movie is in other respects, for writers this scene is like something out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Sure, fiction writers run the risk of angering someone. Some say every bit as much as memoirists.

I’m sorry but that isn’t true. I can do anything I want in my fiction. Even when writing in the first person about more or less autobiographical things, I can change anything I want to suit my purposes. If I want, I can take Anne Lamott’s advice and give my character a tiny penis, ensuring my brother will never consider the possibility that the guy is based on him.

When I was doing my MFA at Seattle Pacific, I used to eye the creative non-fiction people and wonder, why do they do this to themselves? Like watching the hapless kid wandering toward the dark barn, I wanted to call out, “Don’t go in there. Just run away.”

I thought there was nothing they could get at through non-fiction that they couldn’t just as easily find from a safer distance in fiction. I lived by Picasso’s dictum: tell the truth by telling a lie. And Frank Lloyd Wright’s: the truth is more important than the facts.

This is simply not always the case. After Mattingly writes that it’s wrong to tell the truth when someone else wants it secret, she continues, “but altering the truth is lying, and we know that’s wrong.”

Would a novel about the Soviet gulags have been the same as the facts—the actual names of real people—Solzhenitsyn smuggled out? Would it have been just as good to say a floating, “Crimes were committed,” or, in Nixon’s famous dodge, “Mistakes were made,” and let it go at that?

Miroslav Volf, in his book Exclusion and Embrace, writes that the only route to true healing is first through exclusion, or calling out the guilty and naming the sin. Only then can you embrace them in total forgiveness and love. I know the implications of what I’m saying. My son has shown an interest in writing, so I’m bracing myself.

Plus, this exclusion is not limited to others. The memoirist singles herself out along with everyone else; this makes her doubly excluded, because for her there is no promise of embrace at the other end.

Why do they put themselves through it?

Because the facts must be told. Not to air dirty laundry. Not to get revenge. The aim is understanding, healing, hope.

It takes monumental courage to write the way Allison does. I know that sometimes, when the angry phone calls come, she has to question the endeavor. I can only encourage her by saying what she already knows.

Sometimes you can tell the truth by telling a lie. Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is by telling the truth.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

—Matthew 12: 43-45

As a Christmas gift, I took Jeremy to an indoor rock climbing facility in Grand Rapids. We rented climbing shoes and chalk bags, slid our legs through the safety belt straps, and listened to our climbing guide, a short, wiry woman in black fleece and glasses.

“This is a sport, and you’ve got to practice it to get good at it,” she said, tightening the lock on a clamp. “Now Allison, I’m going to show you how to belay. You’ll be responsible for helping Jeremy if he falls.”

In a series of swift movements, our instructor tried to show me how to be Jeremy’s anchor as he climbed—keep the rope taut, she said. Don’t let go of the rope. Pull it to the right if he falls; this will hold him in place. Yank the carabiner’s pulley lock back to loosen the slack. Don’t let go of the rope.

I listened diligently, letting the instructor correct my form over and over again. But I could barely control my gasps. The rope burned against my hands. “Don’t let go!” the fleeced woman barked. “Keep it steady!”

Jeremy compensated by pushing himself up the wall, his fingers replacing me as anchor, nimble and assured and strong. But when I tried to climb the wall, I almost blacked out, my body banging against the wall’s neon yellow hand grips, the faux rocks digging into my side.

When I bought the climbing passes, I told myself that rock climbing would be fantastic—I imagined that I would conquer a fear of heights, or at least, laugh at my attempts to do so, learning some new lesson about limits, humility, and grace.

But there was little laughter in this lesson for me. The panicked feeling didn’t leave for the whole three hours, young boys darting around me to hurl themselves against the mats in the bouldering rooms.

What became clear to me, in my utter physical panic, was weakness itself: weakness of my arms, my flesh, weakness born of me alone.

For so long, I’ve seen my weaknesses as products of my childhood—if I am anxious, it is because of how I grew up, what my mother and father did and did not do. If I am angry, it is because I learned poor habits of dealing with anger. If I am selfish, it is because much was demanded of me as a young girl, and I’ve had to learn how to claim any good thing for myself.

And, if all else fails, I can always go back to the source: this is how my mother dealt with her own faults, chalking them up to a family inheritance of guilt and sin. It got her off the hook. Why not me?

I’ve spent my twenties seeing myself as a victim, a nerve rubbed raw by the years of my childhood and adolescence. I had to see myself this way. I was a victim. I had to piece through all that I had seen and known.

But at the beginning of this year, with the season of Epiphany upon us, I cannot help but see myself as I was on the ropes, trembling and petrified, no other source to tie my weakness to but myself. On the rock, the nerve exposed was myself alone.

Not my mother. Not my childhood. Me.

What brings me to this comparison is the fact that, in this year, I’ve seen that nerve of self bring serious hurt on the ones I love. I have paraded behind self-righteousness; I have been fickle to the point of despair. I have seen my apologies become winding pits of vindication. And the old reasons do little but rub the nerve a little more raw.

In these past few years, I’ve been cleaning house, kicking out the old spirits that bound me in such a frenetic inertia of emotion and expectation.

And now that I feel like things are getting set in order, now that I feel ready to lift my head and walk beyond what has marked me, it seems like the old fears have come looking for their old resting place, and that they’ve brought a few friends to join them.

Dangling on the rock, I see my heart exposed, pulsing to a hysterical rhythm, one that oscillates between a nihilistic self-blame and a grudge that seems to point my finger at everyone I love and trust.

I’m not denying that my childhood has long-lasting effects. And I’m not making a martyrdom of my failings. That would be just as simple as the victim mentality, to look at one cause as the ultimate answer.

For I can’t help but think that this is mercy, too, that I’m not being allowed to remain a victim. That both life and heart are being healed, even if that healing is apophatic, demanding an emptying of self that goes right to the bone.

This is part of what Epiphany proclaims, the work of Him who was baptized in the Jordan, flesh and bone brushing water, the kingdom come and still coming.

If climbing is a sport, then so is the walk we take into the life God gives us. The rope burns, and the stones are sharp. It feels too simple a word to say that God anchors us in the struggle, that we are held the whole time.

But maybe that’s what this self-emptying way requires—simplicity, trust, abandonment. No more yanking myself through my heart’s old rhythm.

More silence to help myself hold steady, and to not let go.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

I wouldn’t call myself a pessimist, but I often focus on and assume the worst possible outcomes in life, because I think that keeps me aware and safe.

Of course, it doesn’t keep me either safe or particularly aware, but I do it anyway.

Perhaps that actually makes me a pessimist. I hope not. Who wants to be that guy?

In his 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech “Crediting Poetry,” Seamus Heaney ponders the tension of the artist who finds himself lost in the negotiation between the devastating circumstances and the joyful realities of the world. Oftentimes, we assume the worst of humanity and focus on the worst of humanity in our writing, not only as a form of anxious self-protection, but because the worst often bears with it significance that, in Heaney’s terminology, “confers a worth upon the effort which it calls for to confront it.”

He writes, “It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir…. As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note…. Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for meagre heat…. Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place, but in despite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvelous as well as the murderous.”

Heaney refers to this shift from meditating on the darkness and sadness of the world with little hope for his role in its mending to a desire to represent the hopeful events that are also true as his “changed orientation.” Something akin to a changed orientation has also been happening in me.

I witnessed the fledgling bits of this in me last week.

My boyfriend is the assistant director of a nonprofit agency in Chicago. Simply put, their emphasis is on helping single mothers, often neglected and abandoned, and their children, who have often been equally badly treated, recover not only from the devastating legacy of physical poverty but from the even more devastating legacy of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual poverty. They provide shelter, food, education, and counseling, among many other things.

Volunteering there for extended times over the past few months has sorely tested my natural tendency to believe the worst. Because in spite of the bad things that have happened to the women who live there and in spite of the bad things that continue to happen, really good things, genuinely miraculous things, are also happening there every day.

And it’s hard for that kind of good not to prove infectiously hopeful.

Just last week at his agency, I was fortunate enough to witness the adoption of a beautiful infant girl by parents who have been longing for a child for years. I got to see the powerful love of the birth mother mingle with the powerful love of the adoptive parents and with the love of those who had nurtured this beautiful girl while all the decisions about her fate were being made.

It’s a long story, and it’s not my story to tell, but up until the morning of the official adoption in court, it was all touch and go. And I found myself the night before barely able to sleep with anxiety, imagining all the worst possible outcomes as if premeditation might blunt the sharper edges of disaster.

I told myself to pray, and here’s where the crux of my point comes in. I told myself to pray. And so I did. I prayed that this baby would be adopted by the prospective parents who could love her deeply and tend her well, but even as the words of the prayer escaped me, I was stricken with an urgent reluctance to surrender this to God or to anyone, because history, as Heaney points out, has taught me that the happiest outcomes are not always the ones we get, whether we pray for them or not.

I could even see myself clinging desperately to my own vigilant anxieties as if they could buoy me or conversely, as if remaining anxious and vigilant would somehow communicate to God, as if he was unaware, my utter seriousness and desperation for the need for a happy ending in this case.

I could almost see myself physically holding the tension, grasping after it, squeezing it in my hands, clutching it to my chest. I could almost envisage my anxiety as a pulsating cloud, a more powerful force for good or for a solid outcome than God.

My boyfriend, who is about as gracious and empathetic a human as you will ever meet, made a simple but profound point when I confessed my panicked visions to him.

“Maybe we have to make space in prayer for the belief that good things happen too,” he said, kindly, kissing my forehead and putting his arm around my shoulder.

Maybe we do. Maybe we have to surrender to that which is infinitely higher, better, and wiser than us.

Maybe we will do it kicking and screaming.

But I wonder what it would be like to surrender to love like that, to trust it fully and finally, to find the energy in swimming with that stronger current rather than always against it, to be always looking back, second-guessing, doubtful and unsure—to dive into rivers of mercy confident of being carried, thriving as they split the land ahead, overflowing their banks, making fertile space for all the marvelous yet to be reckoned.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

Ever since Greg Wolfe started a Facebook thread about the movie, I’ve been thinking about Tree of Life—particularly the section depicting the birth of the universe.

At first it appears to be a cinematic non-sequitur, and it seems also never to end.

It does end, after almost twenty minutes away from the narrative. The big bang gets it started, then galaxies form—gaseous explosions of color and light, giving birth to worlds that twirl and twist into endless space—and the universe spreads. Swirling eruptions on earth eventually lead to the formation of life. Organisms spring up, develop, evolve. Eventually creatures appear. Dinosaurs. They struggle. They kill. They eat.

As I watched these scenes the first time, I assumed that this was just Malick’s way of dramatizing God’s answer to the question posited in the film already, the question of Job: why all my suffering?

God’s answer, which begins in chapter thirty eight of the book of Job, starts with God’s challenge, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

How does this relate to the title? What is the tree of life? Is it the evolutionary branching out of life as it finds its various ways, splitting into ever more specialized forms out at the tips of the tiniest branches? And what does that have to do with the problem of Job?

Artur Sebastian Rosman wrote that this long section also had to do with grace, and mentioned the streams that flow through the entire movie, linking the seemingly unrelated parts together. Mr. Rosman and I are just Facebook friends, but from his posts I have come to value his opinions. I knew he was right. But what could this violent and impersonal series of events have to do with grace?

As I watch I am ever more aware of how massive and old the universe is. The piling on of images leaves me stunned, awe-struck. I do not know where God could even be in all of this, and if God is here, what that God is like. I feel a sense of transcendence, but I cannot apprehend it.

I think of a passage from E. L Doctorow’s City of God: The speaker, a famous physicist, stands in his synagogue and says, “It was not a large world, ancient Israel. The Hebrews conceived of a cosmic God, a magnificent single God of the universe, but naturally in terms of their land and its crops…the applicable honorifics being Lord or King. All very understandable.”

He goes on: “But if you take the trouble to think of what we know today about the universe…how it is roughly fifteen billion years old, and how it suddenly inflated and has been expanding since, how space is ineluctably time, and time is ineluctably space, how gravity can bend it, how another force in space countermands gravity so that the universe doesn’t collapse into itself…and how the universe in its perhaps ever increasing rate of expansion accommodates not just galaxies, which contain millions of stars, but multiple clusters of galaxies that are themselves strung out in clusters of clusters…and with all of this dark matter that we are yet to understand…well, it would seem to me that the creator who originated the universe, or what may possibly be a number of universes of which this is the only one we are capable of perceiving…who is by definition vaster and greater than all this…is perhaps insufficiently praised by our usage of the honorifics Lord and King, let alone Father and Shepherd….”

And there’s the rub. You see, a sense of transcendence isn’t the problem. Everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, senses it when contemplating the vastness of the universe.

Immanence isn’t the problem either. Not really. When I feel this wonder, I believe I am getting a glimpse of the eternal, which is always and ever present in the vastness of space as well as the smallness of each instant.

When Malick pulls me from this mind-bending barrage of images and drops me back into the narrative of Tree of Life—one small boy, one small man, struggling to figure out what his existence and its attendant suffering means—everything has changed.

Now I’m watching him still, but I cannot shake the awareness that the whole vast universe is over both of our minuscule shoulders, time and space too vast to know, and it rolls on into infinity not even aware of us, much less concerned about our welfare.

I wonder with Whitman that I am here at all, that life exists, and I have identity. I am inside my body, looking out of my skull at the rest of the world like a deep sea diver through his helmet’s mask. Identity. It is my particular existence, small as it is, that I am concerned with.

So particularity is the real problem—the “scandal of particularity.” Annie Dillard writes that “the ‘scandal of particularity’ is the only world that I in particular know. We’re all up to our necks in this particular scandal.” This is why the term intelligent design is scandalous too. Intelligence means consciousness, thought—some particular being, something like us, not just massive force; the eternal manifest in a particular space and time.

In this vast impersonal universe it is a ridiculous idea.

Ridiculous, and yet there it is.

Dillard writes, “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” She describes her fleeting glimpse of the eternal as she pats a particular dog and watches the evening light burst through a particular tree outside a particular gas station.

She says, “I discover that, although the door to the tree with the lights in it was opened frometernity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless opened on the real and present cedar. It opened on time. Where else?”

Where else indeed. The tree of life and the tree of light are one.

Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.

He had this to say about the program:

“In ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ John Denver describes first seeing the mountains of Colorado as ‘coming home to a place he’d never been before.’ My experience in the SPU MFA program was like that. After meeting Greg Wolfe and some of the students at the program’s reception at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing, I knew that I had found my MFA program. And when I arrived on Whidbey Island for the first time, it was like coming to my true home.

During my two years, I learned more about art, craft, and faith than I thought possible, and made friends with incredible students and faculty. These are people I deeply admire and whose work and friendship remain critical to my life and writing. I always felt guilty when I filled out residency evaluations, because I could never—even after five residencies—see anything I thought was in need of improvement! The program simply worked perfectly for me.”

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol.

I know them. I used one of them as title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep” by the publisher, who thought the former too gloomy.

Which it might indeed be. Rossetti was melancholic, iced-up with unversed emotion; with passions gone gelid which, reticent, gob-stopped, couldn’t quite state their names.

But she was a devout Anglo-Catholic. Her worship at Christ Church in London fumed with incense and candles, ardent for the Eucharist. Ever virgin, dazzled and expectant, she posed for Annunciations by her brother Gabriel and his Pre-Raphaelite cohort.

Critics say her prosody had its roots in nursery rhymes, the tick-tock of fortunes and unravelings, of goblins vanquished, of witches made meek, of children saved and of children saving all—of things coming round upon themselves.

Still, I say it was snow. She might have been cold; and then she must have been misunderstood. Isn’t that what children always and everywhere are—misunderstood?

When I see snow fall I hear a clock ticking; the clock next to the bed upon which your mother holds you, her heart its counterpoint; and the snow unwinds, sheathes and coils like drapery, like the shade that, as she leaves, cascades down the window sash.

The clock gets lost in your own heartbeat and outside—you know this; you hear it ticking, swinging on its pendulum—the snow falls and will fall for ever as long as it takes to cover everything.

A car will drive by, headlights tunneling, the tires a whir and then a rustle compressed to a sigh.

There is a great clock-work above you in heaven, geared and laboring, and it will spin all night until there is nothing but snow. It will do the work. You may rest. Angels will watch over your bed. They descend upon you like snow. Like a bell in the night, it tolls until it’s put the world to sleep, rung it into silence.

I will wake in the morning and it will be like Christmas: I will race to see what great thing has been accomplished, what thing—vouchsafed in the night—I’ve been given.

And what I have is a world erased, whited-out, veiled and muffled; snow on snow and then, for good measure (as Rossetti has it in the poem), snow on snow again.

There’s no time, only space. I am sub specie aeternitatis. There will be no more suffering. It has been laid down and covered over, swaddled in boundless white. Peace: that’s how it is for me, swaddled too. I have the snow to keep me warm.

Rossetti did not see it this way. In another poem she finds a bird dead of cold and says “Dig him a grave where the soft mosses grow / Raise him a tombstone of snow.”

And then, chillingly indeed, she writes in “Wife to Husband”: “Pardon the faults in me, / For the love of years ago: / Good bye. / I must drift across the sea, / I must sink into the snow, / I must die.” She was never a wife: her one intended ran away to become a Catholic and then a priest. So I must imagine who this husband might be.

But perhaps I am misunderstanding her; perhaps you are misunderstanding me. You are thinking, all that snow is another word for obliteration, for the world wished away, for a kind of death.

And perhaps you are right. It is I who misunderstands, and what I misunderstand is me.

But where I grew up, the first snow fell in mid-November and piled up, snow on snow (none of it melting, only clotting, becoming denser, withdrawing deeper to make room for more of itself) until March.

And then the ticking would begin again, in droplets of meltwater, from eaves and tree branches, along gutters and downspouts, from the rust-gutted fenders and rocker panels of cars.

Time tolls again, drip by drip, telling its beads. Hail Mary, Annunciated. Spring.

But her child will be born in the snow. And that, I think, is what I saw from my window: Him everywhere, snow on snow, snow on snow.

I was cold and misunderstood and afraid to suffer, and as often as not that is how I seem to myself every December, sometimes every day.

Yet today is demonstrably cold, and I am somehow—for reasons I must misunderstand; on account of things I do not see—safe and warm. But for all that—just to be sure—I would like a bleak day, something to hope for, a promise to be fulfilled.

I am praying for snow.

Robert Clark teaches in the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. He is the author of nine books, including In the Deep Midwinter, Mr. White’s Confession, My Grandfather’s House, and Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence.