Falling Silent

And now comes the best season

   Not yet the brilliant leaves,

      The pumpkin and the cranberries,

         The fragrance and the crackling underfoot.

No. This is the hour of silence.

   The muffled whispers and the white stillness

      The hazy rivers and the haunted shadows

         Now is the season of the mist

Drifting along the surface of the ponds,

   Rising in a curtain across the fields

      Revealing hidden streams

Unfamiliar phantoms fill the farmyards.

   Fog swirls and thickens.

        The traveler, lost a mile from home,

            Finds himself forsaken in an unknown world.

And the swamp, mysterious on the most prosaic days,

   Yields herself to the enchantment,

      Waits as the ghostly wisps weave themselves through her branches,

         Now concealing, now revealing

            Her deepest secrets.

Further along the road, a tree-encircled field

   Becomes a giant bowl that fills with clouds

      that rise

         and build

              and spill

Like smoking incense from a thurible

   Pouring a last cool benediction across the road

      Before the sun’s heat burns the mystery from the day.

AMDG

More Room

As I have told [over the story of our life], the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of mine seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love, where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, . . . , do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

In Wendell Berry's Port William novels and stories, we find a community that is bound together by love and by their common work on the land. It's not a utopia. The work is hard and the people are people, and therefore sinners, but with all the difficulties and sinning, they live a life that is of a piece--they belong to a membership. Membership is the word that Berry uses and it's the common thread that runs through all the stories.

Hannah Coulter is a beautiful book, and is complete in itself, but if I were going to start reading Berry's books, I would not start there. I would start where I did start with a A Place on Earth, which is very good and very sad, and Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, which is filled with humour, some subtle, and some decidedly not. A Place on Earth is Berry's second novel, the first is Nathan Coulter, the story of Hannah's husband in his youth. Written seven years earlier than A Place on Earth, Nathan Coulter is a young man's novel (Berry was 26 when it was published), filled with a young man's angst and anger. It's different in tone from all his other fiction, so even though it's the first, I wouldn't start there.

The only quibble I have with Berry is that one gets the impression that small farming communities such as Port William, are the only place where we kind find a membership--where we can enter that room of love. Perhaps it is the best place for that sort of community to flourish, but we can't all live there. In fact, very few of us can. However, we are, most of us, searching for that membership all the time and we find it in some familiar places and some that are very odd and implausible, like the internet. Grace is everywhere, and it's Grace that holds us together.

The real room of love is here and the membership is everywhere.

AMDG

Silence--Maybe

Once again, I will be away from my own computer for a few days. I may be able to post something, and may not. I might even post the best thing I've ever written, but probably not. If I don't see you, have a nice weekend.

AMDG

The Room of Love

The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day's end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

~ from Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

I have been re-reading Hannah Coulter for a book club, and while I knew that I loved it when I read it for the first time (as I did all of Berry's novels), I did not remember how really beautiful it is. The passage above is one of the loveliest things that I've ever read about sex. I wish that I had read it when I was young. I wish that I had read it to my children when they were teenagers. When I hold this in contrast with the poor, tawdry notion that so many people have of sex today, and, I guess, that many people have always had, it's amazing that one act could be so incongruously construed.

This reminds me of something that Maclin Horton wrote in a post several years ago.

I mean I now see the separation [of sex, love, marriage and procreation] itself, apart from any worldly consequences, as a sort of shocking mutilation, like the severing of a limb from the body. People learn to live with the loss of a limb, of course, and once it’s healed and the person has adjusted as well as possible its absence may be less startling, but the action of severing remains appalling. And I’m now walking around in a world where this action is celebrated.

You can read the rest of the post here. Unfortunately, it has been severed from its comments.

AMDG

Well, obviously blogging and babysitting don't go together. I hope to work on something at lunch, but we'll see.

AMDG

Babysitting

I'm babysitting for my 21 month old granddaughter this weekend, so I don't know how often I'll get to the computer, although I'm going to try and write on paper! and hope to get something posted at least a couple of times, but we will see. I'm at my daughter's house and computer is not particularly comfortable to use. My back is hurting already.

I am realizing anew how a TV can turn a very active child into a zombie. It's pretty scary. I mean, the TV comes on and she ceases to move and speak. She doesn't watch much TV thankfully.

AMDG