Sharon and I have been gone for a couple of weeks, sailing with delight around the magnificent British Isles, witnessing up close some of the deep, enduring roots of our civilization, roots I have studied earnestly over time. I confess, though, I found no time to write while traveling. I’ve missed my connection with you all. I’m eager now to begin again.   

I was remembering this morning, nothing in particular, I suppose, just remembering, but flickering across my mind was one of those bright images out of the past. Wordsworth called them “spots of time,” some event that penetrated deeply. We carry the image with us for the rest of our lives. I’ve been trying lately to pay attention when those images do indeed flicker. I’ve come to believe they might hold some healing power for our anxious lives, a kind of “balm in Gilead / to make the wounded whole.”  

I’m feeling swamped by so many things these days. It may be technology coming apart. It may be the craziness of our political divide. Or perhaps it’s the pain of watching the crumbling of a common culture. I’m exhausted by the endless polarization, the outright hatred loose across the land, the snarky cynicism, our supposed gloomy prospects, the deep loss of common sense.

Good morning, patient readers. I’ve been preoccupied—some wonderful travel to be with our kids and grandkids, some other writing on my long-promised online course, a short, nasty battle with Covid, and oh, well, just dealing with the ever-expanding complexities of life. But here are some new thoughts I want to share that have been rumbling in my head.

Hunched over an emerging sculpture, the great Italian painter, sculptor, architect Michelangelo, towering out over the sixteenth-century Renaissance and beyond, is quoted as saying, “another few days and life will break through.” Every writer or artist, whether great or small, knows what this is like. There is the waiting, when nothing seems to jell, when everything lies flat and lifeless. Some days we might even question whether that new life is just an illusion. Our culture tilts heavily in that direction. Is there really new life out there to be found by my paltry words or halting brush strokes?

Someone encouraged me recently to read a contemporary poet I had not read before. I was intrigued enough to order the latest of his books. About halfway through I found myself searching for reasons why this writing was so unsatisfying. I found the poetry flat and lifeless, no depth, little resonance. Something was missing. There was brilliance of observation, but that skill seemed to draw attention only to itself. This was a closed world.

I was walking behind a young woman in the hallway the other day and was struck how spry and agile she was, just walking, all so natural for her. And I thought, I’ll never walk like that again. When walking becomes a conscious act, you know you are growing older.

In the midst of our ever-frightening world, I am drawn this morning to that marvelous passage from Genesis where God pauses from his work of creation to walk about in the garden. This may be one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture.

Do you ever find yourself grumbling as you roll out of bed? As I splash my face with cold water I’m already complaining why it takes so long to get warm water to this faucet? I start worrying as well why technology shut down our email last evening. Things are just coming apart at the seams, I mumble. I start stressing this early over those two classes I’m teaching—good grief, why can’t I get my act together, like my good friend Tim Smith, who teaches four or five classes at the same time and produces those marvelous podcasts three times a week. What’s wrong with me?

Allow me a little personal note to explain why I am so filled with joy this morning. Wait a minute, filled with joy? Isn’t this the season of Lent, a time to ponder the death of our Lord, a time to recognize sorrow and suffering and sadness that courses through our lives and our world? We’ve got a valley of darkness to wade through before we can once again see sunrise on Easter morning. Resurrection can seem so far away at times.

In recent writing and teaching I’ve been talking about what I think is at least part of the sorry story of our baffling desire to cancel the cultural drivers of the past. We’ve stopped reading those big books or great poems; we’ve stopped viewing magnificent art. Worst of all we’ve stopped reading the Christian Bible as the animating center of what is true and good and beautiful. Those were the sources of deeper thoughtfulness in the past. Are we really ready to discard it all?

Life just seems to bump along most of the time, sort of staying the same a lot. We get up in the morning, maybe too late, maybe too early, splash cold water on our faces, and step into another day. So often we don’t expect much will be new, as we rush forward, checking our to-do lists, checking our calendars. It can get pretty routine.

There is a lot of talk these days, maybe especially among those like me who used to be English professors, about the astonishing decline of interest in the humanities, those subjects we know as literature, history, theology, biblical studies, philosophy, art, music. This decline is going on among all of us, not just students, but most certainly students are drawn to something, they believe, more certainly lucrative.

I have a vague memory of walking alongside my father, stumbling along actually, as we would venture out into one of the fields he was cultivating. Our treks usually took place on a Saturday or Sunday evening, checking on the crops before the week began. I was often invited to join him. I was thrilled. Oh the fragrance of honeydews and cantaloupes and watermelons.

After the First World War, the Great War, where some fourteen million died, bringing enormous disillusionment across the globe, from which perhaps we have never recovered, T. S. Eliot famously described the dry wasteland into which we have wandered.

I’d like to give you a list of ten things I’m following in order to live a better life in the year ahead. But I’ve never been a list-guy. That works for some people, I know, but not for me. I look out ahead and see fog over the landscape, night still hanging over the mountains, but then, sometimes suddenly, I catch a glimpse of the sunrise breaking in the distance. It’s that light, mysterious, yet ever so real, I long for as I step into the new year.

I love this Rembrandt painting depicting mother Mary tenderly tending her baby. She is so young, isn’t she, yet somehow she knows things already. She is holding the holy scriptures, well lined, long read, open I suspect to Isaiah and the other eloquent prophets, passages she has read all of her life over so many dinner tables.

Advent is rooted in a long history of waiting. None of us likes to wait very long, some of us less than others. As God’s people, though, we need to be prepared to wait. Even as we go through difficult personal traumas, or as we witness each day such horrific global eruptions, we must wait. Maybe that’s what Advent is teaching us, once again, as we wait for the baby Jesus to come and make all things right. That’s the Advent way.

I have just finished re-reading Henri Nouwen’s lovely Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living In a Secular World. Nouwen tells the story how a young man named Fred asked him to write something that would speak to him and to his secular friends: “Put it in a language we can understand.” Their friendship began when this Jewish, secular, young writer for The New York Times, came to interview the renowned Christian priest and writer.

This week Sharon and I were making our periodic visit to the psychiatrist who has managed her meds so effectively. Sharon reported to him that she feels this awful bout with anxiety is over. The psychiatrist responded: “Well, it looks like the meds are doing what they should be doing.” And he surely is right.