LIT moments 2

I don't know what it is with me and buses... In 2007, I blogged about an 'LIT' moment that happened to me. An earlier one occurred in March 1990 - 19 years ago on a Greyhound to Cape Town. I used to keep a diary, which I have to this day and that's how I remember it so clearly. It was a five day Easter study break and my folks had surprised me with a ticket home from Hammanskraal (in the middle of nowhere) where I was studying at the time. After boarding the bus in Johannnesburg, I settled in an upstairs seat, sprawling across two as the one next to mine was empty. Just before we were about to depart, a girl - about my age, 19 at the time - squeezed past and took the seat next to me. She wore glasses and was, I remember thinking, really pretty. We got chatting - her name was Lizette. She was Afrikaans and travelling to visit her boyfriend, Anton, who was in the Airforce at the time and based in Cape Town. We chatted about life and all kinds of stuff for hours. She fell asleep, her head resting on a pillow on my shoulder, her breathing deep and steady. In the wee hours, in the darkness, as we passed through the Karoo, she stared vacantly out of the window. I had been dozing on and off. I looked at her reflection in the tinted glass: 'What are you thinking about?' She turned, and I will never forget the way her wide smile, absolutely lit up the whole of her flawless face. 'I think you know', she replied, shyly. 'I really love him'.
I remember being so grateful for the privilege of witnessing this simple moment of someone in love - uninhibited, wonderfully and recklessly joyfull! In the midst of the darkness of the desolate Karoo. Unexpected. A moment of grace.

Dorothy

Earlier today, I attended the funeral of my wife's aunt, Dorothy, here in Welgemoed, near Cape Town. She was 70 and on Saturday morning lost her battle with cancer. The dominee who preached, related a poem that I need to look up but was similar in vein to that famous 'For whom the bell tolls': he spoke of how when a person dies a whole small world dies with them: the knowledge of the experience of their first crush, their first kiss, even their first fight. I was struck when it occurred to me how often I get impatient with elderly people as they seem to waffle on about past events, to which I cannot relate - often because I didn't know the other people in the story. And yet - it seems that this is precisely why they persist in repeatedly telling the story: looking for somebody to really hear that story with all that it contains -spoken, unspoken and all that cannot be put into words - a meeting of hearts so deeply that it almost becomes a shared memory. It isn't the whole story, I know, but surely human loneliness at one level is the absence of a memory held in common with at least one other human being?

Beauty

Have you ever sometimes idly wondered about whether or not there is such a thing as objective beauty? Thoreaux reckoned that 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.' Maybe there is something in that, in the sense that the perceived beauty of a subject is dependant on the capacity of the 'observee' to appreciate the beauty of a piece of art, music, writing -even another person.
Perhaps it is easier with the arts as 'finished' products that we interact with and I would go with the 9th century philosopher, Abu Sulaiman al-Davani: “Music and singing do not produce in the heart that which is not in it.”
People however are more complicated, I suppose. Perhaps with regards to inter-human perception of beauty, it is even more dependant on the observee than the subject: 'Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.' (Rabbi Julius Gordon)
I'm not sure, now....

Cape Town

I live in an apartment right on the beachfront in Cape Town and have an awesome view of the city at the foot of Table Mountain from across the bay. In the early morning and during the day when the city basks in sunshine, there is a vibrant rowdiness about it within the protective crescent of the mountain range. Table Mountain rests like a contented lioness lazily watching over her cub playing happily at the edge of the sea - quite safe from the rest of wild, mysterious Africa.
At night, the character changes and the city quietens, the black presence of the mountain in the winter months, when it is not floodlit, an ominous presence to any that would threaten her. The sparkling lights across the water like the REM of a city asleep, dreaming of the endless summer days to come.

7 months

The number of months since Kirstin's death almost fade into meaninglessness - merely numerals recording how many sunsets and sunrises we have witnessed that she has not. They cannot convey those moments of the almost unbearable horror when the raw loss hits you afresh in an unguarded instant and threatens to overwhelm your sanity by the sheer finality of its presence. And then ... sitting at my desk tonight writing this, as if reminding me that nothing is ever really final in this world , by His grace I feel her presence. As sure as I feel the presence of my sleeping wife in the next room.
The most I ever did for you was to outlive you. But that is much. (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

A real writer

My admiration for those who are truly proficient in writing is unbounded because every now and then, I glimpse just how far ahead of us wannabes they really are. Linda Nichols is an author with Park Literary Group (a New York agency) and described the role of the creative process in writing: A story usually begins with a seed. Sometimes it's an event. The opening scene from At the Scent of Water was born when I was having dinner with friends and we watched a man at a nearby table wait with champagne, roses, and a very small velvet box for a dinner partner who never came. I never forgot the impact of watching that man wait, and several years later a story was born from this incident.(http://www.parkliterary.com/writingtips.html)
An entire story in barely 5 lines.

Snatches of tranquility

The nature of modern living means that despite our best efforts, with jobs, kids, and the rough and tumble of life, we yearn for a peace that is, more often than not, elusive - except for stolen moments here and there: the quiet house before anybody else is up or awake, the soft morning sun beginning to gently caress the garden awake with its warm beams; the stillness of the Church before others arrive for the service; the unexpected encounter with nature that 'intrudes' a wonderful moment of blessing in an otherwise chaotic day when you see a strikingly beautiful flower growing defiantly out of a grubby, city sidewalk. All we have left are these snatches of tranquility, reminding us that behind it all, Love waits.

Truth and Love

In an earlier post, I distinguished between what I saw as the difference between a happy and a life of meaning. I guess that what I was trying to say is that I feel such a sense of urgency about my life and such responsibility for the gift and privilege that it is that I don't want to waste it. Not because God will call me to account, but because I will be ashamed if I do and have to face Him empty handed. I can be such a contradiction in the sense that I seek truth and seek to communicate it because I am paranoid that if I am to communicate love, it must not be something vacuous, but Love in the fullest, most profound Christian sense. The trouble is that I feel I am approaching an understanding of what it is not and even occassional glimpses of what it is. But it has not made me more loving. And is that not the point?

New Age freedom and the Christian Journey

I am almost obsessed with living a life of meaning - something beyond happiness. Happiness has always seemed to me, to be a frivolous or superficial basis on which to judge the quality of one's life. This was reinforced some years back when I came across the following passage, by the writer, John Powell: Do we get fulfilled by trying to have all the experiences we can? Is it true that the more experiences a person has, the more fulfilled or developed he or she will be as a person? Or Is a person fulfilled by making a commitment and then choosing experiences according to whether they honour, promote and reaffirm the commitment. Trying to choose all available experiences is confusing, fragmenting and disintegrating to the human person. Human nature desires reality as somehow ordered and meaningful. This implies a value structure, priorities. It is in the light of these values and priorities that we must evaluate experiences.

I have read so many beautiful passages and works by New Age musicians and writers, but without a faith context, for me, they merely evaporate into nothingness - much as an icecream, so creamy and sweet to the taste, once consumed, leaves little behind of nutritional or nurture value. I do not agree when people say that the meaning of life is about the journey not the destination, because as a Christian, I look forward to union with God. I must appreciate the journey in itself as it is what leads to and teaches me about Him. The context however, of the journey, is that it is always a journey towards Him. It is not a sightseeing journey of exploration. It is a journey of purpose. And in that, it is different from the journey of the wanderer and the philosopher. It knows it has an ultimate destination - God, who is my home.

6 months on

It is 6 months today since Kirstin died. Somebody posted this somewhere - I am too lazy to look it up, but it communicated what I first heard in the movie, 'Shadowlands': that joy and suffering, love and pain are always, absolutely always, inseperable. I have, in the years subsequent to seeing that film, read and heard that truth expressed similarly in a variety of ways. This was one of the 'tightest' imo:

The sense of loss
must give way
If we are to value
the life that was

Grief is not a sign of weakness
Nor the lack of faith
it is the price of love… (Author unknown)

The marvel in my view, is not that this is true, but that as in another classic, The Thorn Birds, our human need or drive for love gives us the courage to love in spite of what is inevitably, to come.

"There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles. "The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it."(Colleen McCullough)
Rest in peace, Kirst. In Him.