Rachel Starr Thomson

Ephesians is a companion letter to Colossians, and here we find the bracing instruction, taken perhaps from an early Christian poem or hymn: “Awake, sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Messiah will give you light!” (5:14).

In other words, it’s time to wake up! Living at the level of the nonheavenly world around you is like being asleep; worse, it’s like that for which sleep is a metaphor–being dead. Lying, stealing, sexual immorality, bad temper, and so on (Paul lists them all in a devastating short passage) are forms of death, both for the person who commits them and for all whose lives are touched by their actions. They are ways of sleeping a deadly sleep. It’s time to wake up, he says. Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say inthe creed that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.

What we all need from time to time is for someone (a friend, a spiritual director, a stranger, a sermon, a verse of scripture, or simply the inner prompting of the Spirit) to say, “It’s time to wake up! You’ve been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there’s a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!”

- N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

No one who lives stands still. One begins to ask questions as soon as one can speak. Indeed, my first utterance, if I am to believe Mother, was not a single word but a coherent question: “Where’s Daddy?” I must have wanted to know. The young, at least, always want answers . . .

The only reason for asking is to get an answer. The only reason for seeking is to find (not to maintain one’s ‘Seeker Status’). The only reason for an open mind is to fill it with truth–as open eyes are to see with. Or an open mouth to snap at a bit of steak. Otherwise, a mouth that just hangs open indicates vacuity; and a mind for ever open on all the great questions is no less a mark of vacuity.

But when one finds–finds love or finds truth–it becomes (or ought to become) a constancy in one’s life. Those questions are answered, and one needs no longer be concerned with them, except to help others seeking answers. But new questions pose themselves . . .

- Sheldon Vanauken, Under the Mercy

Amy Carmichael, on a picture of the Alps — a pine-filled slope leading to a misty valley, with mountains beyond and clouds edged with light.

I see in this valley and mountain a general view of our years. We stand, when we are young, on the sunny slope among the pines, and look across an unknown country to the mountains. There are clouds, but they are edged with light. We do not fear as we dip into the valley; we do not fear the clouds. Thank God for the splendid fearlessness of youth. And as for older travelers whom Love has led over hill and dale, they have not been given the spirit of fear. They think of the way they have come since they stood on that bright hillside, and their word is always this: There are reasons and reasons for hope and for happiness, and never one for fear.

The mist and the clouds, and the light in the clouds, work together like separate notes in a tune; even the shadows of the pine trees on the grass have their part to play in making the picture. There is nothing that could be left out without loss. And it is so with the pictures of our lives. We are called to believe this and to act as though we believed. We have the presence and the promises of God. We are meant to march to that great music.

- from Gold by Moonlight

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible — or at least visible, at least discussible — those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts, and of all ideas to forms.

- Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction

Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing was a fantastic shot in the arm years ago when I was playing with the idea of becoming a writer. He understands what it means to be creative and can articulate it like few others. This short passage is from the Preface.

These essays were written at various times over a thirty-year period, to express special discoveries, to serve special needs. But they all echo the same truths of explosive self-revelation and continuous astonishment at what your deep well contains if you just haul off and shout down it . . .

And now:

I have come up with a new simile to describe myself lately. It can be yours.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.

After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Now, it’s your turn. Jump!

The wind had a secret.

All across the Seventh World it blew, whispering, shouting, singing its wild way in the far northern mountains and fjords; it danced the new-growing leaves and flowered boughs in Galce and the vineyards of Italya. It whistled through hollows and secret places in the Eastern Lands and skipped across the tops of white waves to the Isles of Bryllan. There it soared over the craggy Highlands, swirled in the meadows of Midland and the valleys of Cryneth, played with the chimney smoke in old Londren.

The earth listened and rose to meet the wind’s blowing. Every blade of grass, every wildflower, every soaring eagle filled with the secret and trembled with it.

High above the wind’s place of singing, the stars over the Seventh World heard the blowing of a far-off hunting horn and shone the brighter at the sound.

The earth quivered as the wind’s words filled it and begged for release.

They may not yet know . . .

. . . it is a secret still . . .

keep it.

(From Chapter 1 of The Advent, Book 3 of the Seventh World Trilogy, work in progress)

I read Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising Sequence over ten years ago, but long after I had forgotten the details, its mood still lingered in my memory. It’s no wonder, with atmospheric writing like this. In this scene from The Dark Is Rising, eleven-year-old Will wakes up in a time that is not his own.

Will went out onto the landing again and took a long breath, and he shouted with all his might: “Wake up! Wake up, everyone!”

He did not now expect any response, and none came. There was a total silence, as deep and timeless as the blanketing snow; the house and everyone in it lay in a sleep that would not be broken.

Will went downstairs to pull on his boots, and the old sheepskin jacket that had belonged, before him, to two or three of his brothers in turn. Then he went out of the back door, closing it quietly behind him, and stood looking out through the quick white vapour of his breath.

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the outbuildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away. Will set out down the white tunnel of the path, slowly, stepping high to keep the snow out of his boots. As soon as he moved away from the house, he felt very much alone, and he made himself go on without looking back over his shoulder, because he knew that when he looked, he would find that the house was gone.

He accepted everything that came into his mind, without thought or question, as if he were moving through a dream. But a deeper part of him knew that he was not dreaming. He was crystal-clear awake, in a Midwinter Day that had been waiting for him to wake into it since the day he had been born, and, he somehow knew, for centuries before that. Tomorrow will be beyond imagining . . .

from The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

It’s been a while since I posted some of my own work as a passage, so this week I’m featuring an excerpt from Taerith — one of my later books and my contribution to The Romany Epistles. In this scene from Chapter Four, Lilia prepares for her wedding to a king she does not know, her thoughts conflicted and searching for hope.

Beyond the fields around the castle the dark fens lay, blotting out the landscape for miles around, criss-crossed by roads that were torn from the swamps and upheld by hard labour and pain. Farther away, Lilia could see the beginnings of the moors, and there, glinting under the sun’s searching rays, the river. Grey-blue eyes appeared before her face: Taerith’s eyes. She shuddered and turned from the window. There was a bed in the tower room; she made her way to it, and sat with her head bowed so that she need neither look at the world without or her reflection within. She feared herself just now.

A sharp rap at the door put Lilia’s heart in her throat. She rose, smoothing her skirt with trembling hands. A thousand nights at home she had dreamed of a knock at the door and all that it could mean: the mysterious strangers, the legion of adventures that might ever wait on the other side. But the servant who entered, head bowed and voice mumbling and low, carried with her nothing of promise.

“You are wanted below, my lady,” the servant said.

Lilia smiled at the woman, hiding her feelings as best as she could so the servant wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. “Let me follow you,” Lilia said. “If I try to find my way alone I will be lost.”

The woman lifted her eyes to Lilia’s face for a moment, but no emotion in them responded to the plea in the young woman’s tone. She simply nodded and turned to go. Lilia squared her slim shoulders, picked up the hem of her dress, and began her descent from the tower.

Steep stone steps led downward in a sharp spiral, a close, colourless passageway that existed only to transfer travelers from one little world to another. Lilia had often thought of such passages that they did not have any claim themselves to placehood. They led to places full of memories, warmth or cold, horror or happiness, but they were only stretches of grey limbo without sympathy or character. But into what very different worlds they might lead! Her hand trembled as she reached out to steady herself on the stone. The servant woman did not look backward at her. Lilia had hoped that the woman’s presence would make her feel a little less alone, but her hopes were as futile as the spiraling stairs were unflinching.

The descent took them down to the realm of celebration. From somewhere below Lilia heard shouts and cheers. Her cheeks coloured–she heard Annar’s name in the chorus. He had presented himself to his people. She would be next.

The noise grew louder with every downward step. She felt faint, and tried to calm the fluttering in her stomach by smoothing the satin of her gown over it. At last they were plunged into it; they were on a level with the crowd; the new world was just on the other side of a wooden door. Lilia closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and heard the creak of the hinges as the servant woman threw the door open. She stepped out into the open air, under the shadow of an awning.

Immediately the old woman was replaced by new attendants, young and fair, with their arms full of yellow blooms and their cheeks flushed and rosy. In their midst Lilia looked like a pale slender flower grown from the frost. The crowd hushed as she stepped out from the shade of the castle into the cold winter sun. They had formed a close-packed circle around a polished platform, built by the king’s men at the entrance to the small chapel in one corner of the courtyard. The crowd filled the courtyard to its very edges. Young boys perched in the few trees that graced the ground, weighing down the branches like an awkward flock of adolescent cranes. Others had climbed the steps that led up to the castle wall, and used the stairs as precarious seats while guards patrolled the parapet above them. The rich stood nearest the platform, with military men and representatives of Mother Church, while the poorest tried to worm their way closer. Many stood outside of the castle walls altogether, and crowded the road.

You can read all of Taerith online at this link. Enjoy!

Many of my readers may be familiar with the donkey in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, who wears a lion’s skin and is passed off as a god by a scheming ape. But you may not know that the ass in lion’s skin has been around since hundreds of years before Lewis–and he’s eventually always recognized as a fool. In recognition of this April Fool’s Day, enjoy this short story from Aesop’s Fables.

An Ass once found a Lion’s skin which the hunters had left out in the sun to dry. He put it on and went towards his native village. All fled at his approach, both men and animals, and he was a proud Ass that day. In his delight he lifted up his voice and brayed, but then every one knew him, and his owner came up and gave him a sound cudgelling for the fright he had caused. And shortly afterwards a Fox came up to him and said: “Ah, I knew you by your voice.”

Fine clothes may disguise, but
silly words will disclose a fool.

Tradition has it that Aesop was a slave–but many of his fables probably originated with other writers. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop for lots of interesting facts and theories surrounding this ancient author of practical wisdom.

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, but not even a dozen were published in her lifetime. Her distinctive style was unusual, but its music is timeless. The poem beginning “We like March” often taps its rhythm out in my head at this time of year.

We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder’s tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot.
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
On his British sky.