Sketchbook

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I 59

---

Dear Friend,

I hope that I mentioned I would be in a quiet place last week, and if I did not, then I am sorry that I may have left you wondering. I hope that you might believe me that I thought of you often, and when I say I thought of you, I mean I love you and that I prayed for you, believing that God knew exactly what you needed at that moment.

I was at a secluded beach on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. And by secluded I mean that each morning I would walk to the ocean from my little tent, before coffee, and walk for miles before I would see another person. I want to say that I spent the week listening. Paying attention, which, Mary Oliver tells us, is the beginning of devotion. Adoration.

I can say for certain that I spent the week falling in love and feeling loved. Which, I think must be the same thing.

You might wonder what that means, and you might wonder what happened. I would wonder these things if the roles were reversed. Yet, It’s hard for me to put it into words. I am thinking that instead of explaining, I might simply share some of the sketches that I drew. Maybe that will give you a hint of what I saw. What I loved: Is that okay with you?

---

3 April

This is what I hear:

This is the song of the universe:

“We are with you.”

Yesterday morning alone on the beach, listening to the surf symphony. It was white noise, but it was also blue noise and pink noise, and the noise of light green moss and every color you have never touched. There was the rumble of thunder, there was a splashing, the high-pitched of sanderlings, the low pitch of geese, there was everything in between. And when I lost the tune to what if? and felt completely alone, there was the call of a hawk or an osprey. 

“Listen!” It said.

“We, too. With you.”

The surf lunged for me. Like Carley bringing me a ball to throw. I tried to jump back, but not with my whole heart. 

---

I am coming to believe the song is playing all the time. In you. In us. Always the same song, but never the same sound. An eternal song, yet never growing old. Not wasted if I cannot hear. Not wasted on the sanderlings, I think. Not ever. Be still.

---

I must be empty to be full. I must be completely alone to be completely with. As long as there is any space, any fold, any crease in which I hide myself, I am incomplete. 

Yet I cannot unfold myself. Only Grace. To try is to hide in the crease. The tryier I get the more of me I grasp. 

---

A Quiet House. 

I imagine being a caretaker of a quiet house. A house where people go to hear the song of the universe. There is no teaching. No program. There are no little pages to fill out or birds to check off someone’s list. No identification guides.

No gold stars. 

Listen. 

I will make coffee and tea each morning and fresh bread. I will slice oranges and lemons and cucumbers when they are given and some days I might lightly boil eggs, or accept apples from the neighbor’s orchard.  Maybe the sisters from the monastery near Crozet will offer cheese. There might be preserves in the pantry. Near the flour and salt and yeast.

Guests might sit together at the table outside under the oak before beginning their listening. The new guests will wonder if they are doing it right and nobody will get in their way.  Not ever.

People might join the fire that I will build and tend in the evening.  And maybe we will be empty together.

Listening to the with song. Humming silently. Together. 

Always with. 

---

The wind blows hard from the west tonight. The sound’s lazy bodies pile onto the jetty. Their hands reach toward me. Longing to touch. Occasionally our fingers brush.  Cold on warm. “We are with you,” they say. 

And they are.

---

4 April

Your name is Life. 
Lazarus. Centurion’s daughter. Jesus. Each emptied. 
You filled them. They lived. 
Empty me so that I may live. 
I long to embody Life. To embody You.
Not beauty. Not joy. Not ecstasy. Not compassion.
Only You. 
Amen.

---

How simply might I live?

How simply ought I to live?

I don’t think them the same question, but my simple living is far from both might and ought. Perhaps it’s time simply to walk toward simpler. 

---

Your name is unspeakable. 
You said: “Tell them, ‘I am sent you.’” and I imagine the fates, knocked dizzy, loading their packs and moving to the mountains.  
Silence my fates. No more ‘what ifs?’ However true they might be. 
Because I am collapsing under what if? but walk lightly with I am. 
Please may it be. 

---

I woke from my nap and my Garmin battery was empty. It was disorienting. Unsettling. No tool to tell me where I am in time and in space. Only the tides. Only the setting sun. Only the diminishing wind and the cooling air. Only the gentle ache in my gut. 

Only brown pelicans. Only sanderlings and the jets from Oceana. Only water moccasins.  Only the sound of the surf. Only live oaks and dunes. Only a tent. 

No watch. No GPS. No thing to orient me.  

When do our tools replace the reality they were meant to manage for us? 

“Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open….we are off ‘one to his farm and another to his merchandise.’ Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking…‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.”

-Thomas Merton

5 April

---

I am afraid to return to the frenzy. 
Afraid of forgetting. 
Afraid of my losing my hearing. 
Afraid the eyes of my heart will go dark. 
It takes almost no time at all. 

Trust, he whispers, and places his hand on my shoulder, gently. 
“Just keep going,” he says. 
“Take my hand,” he says. 

---

They are common loons. You know that now. They line up like surfers in the swell, waiting for a set. The sun barely above the horizon. Their feathers black wetsuits. Forty of them. Maybe fifty. 

Rising. Falling. Waiting. Evaluating. This set or the next? This wave or the next? Deferring to their friends, their fellow surfers. 

Occasionally, between sets, one slips his board, dives down, finds a fish, and returns to the surface.

You have seen this. Remember. 

---

Kathryn asked on Monday, or maybe Sunday. “Do you ever wonder if God allows himself the joy of being surprised?”

I do now. 

I wonder about our insistence that God has a step-by-step plan, a complete foreknowing of what and when and how and where. Why would I am need such a plan? 

I love the idea of a playful God. A God without fear. A good and just God who sometimes splashes oil on a canvas and waits and waits and waits for it to dry. Who lets love happen. Sometimes messy, always beautiful. Not because every variable is accounted for. But because God knows his own name. 

I’m elated by the thought of God’s playfulness. Also, but less so, by his ability to see all the angles. 

Saddened by my fear. Saddened that God’s plan must take some particular form that we, his creatures, have established for Him to be worthy of our trust. 

(This is not to reject what Merton calls, “the dynamic sense of God’s revelation of Himself in history, nor “the sense of the movement of history toward the final, eschatological fulfillment of revelation.”

It is to reject the idea that God is unable to improvise. To play jazz. Jazz is a with sport.)

Thank you, Kat. 

---

I love that you can hear, and often see the edge of a breeze approaching before you can feel it on your skin. And how sometimes it lies down before it finds you. 

---

“Our feeling of helplessness in the presence of injustice and aggression (and suffering, etc.) arises from our ‘deliberate dismissal of God from our common affairs.’” 

Merton and Ghandi

God doesn’t leave us helpless. 

We deliberately dismiss God. Then feel helpless.

---

Here is how you know they were common loons. On the way back up the beach, you find one struggling in the sand. Almost helpless. Her webbed feet so far back on her body that every attempt to get to the surf drives her chest deeper into the wet, sticky sand. 

You walk toward her gently. She sees you. Her voice is too weak to be a warning, and too afraid to be an entreaty. It’s the first time you have heard the mournful cry of a common loon from two feet away. Your heart cracks open. 

Then suddenly, somehow, she throws herself at the surf, barely at all, and a gentle breaker reaches for her and gathers her up. 

Brings her home and she is swimming. 

With you, sweet lady. 

With us. 

---

6 April

You name is With You Always. 
You said so yourself. 
Gently, disassemble the striving walls I built, brick by brick, to keep you outside, and that have long constrained me. 
So that I might be released and  follow you, and finally. 
If it be your desire. 

---

Yes I was falling in love. And yes. I missed you. Every moment.

Oremus,

Chris