The other day a line from the nineteenth-century poet William Wordsworth popped into my head: “The world is too much with us.” Is it ever, I thought. I need some kind of withdrawal. Wordsworth often laments the rapacious march of the industrial revolution across his country. He is pained by the scars left on his beloved English countryside. There was much to be troubled about. But when we let the world get with us too much, he surmises, we are numbed into a kind of spiritual paralysis: “We lay waste our powers,” we give “our hearts away,” we sing “out of tune.” Could this be where we are too?

I’ve been away from my blog for a couple of weeks. I’ve felt stunned into silence over all that’s unfolding across our land. What could I possibly have to offer? I came to prayer this morning almost without words, surely with scrambled thoughts, fear for my nation, grief for my black brothers and sisters, so many of whom I know and love. I came as well with little trust that our leaders can lead us out of our polarized political and cultural environment into much needed conversation. I came to prayer this morning uneasy.

I’ve been thinking we need a good dose of nostalgia. In fact, I’m hoping for a new age of nostalgia, rising up over the horizon. There were some good things way back when, things worth remembering, reviving. Surely we can’t claim we have it all together in the present. I know I will be told to be careful not to idealize the past, and yet I am discovering that memory can restore a richness we might have lost, a stability perhaps, more continuity, making for a more colorful story. Sometimes it might guide to a better way of living.

There are just a few principles in life that really matter: love, first of all, love in all its forms, love for God, for the one we married, for family, friends, for those who desperately need love, for beauty. Add to love, then, things like loyalty, kindness, forgiveness, humility, patience, reconciliation. Not thinking too highly of ourselves, that should rank way up there as well.

If only we can be released from lockdown, we imagine, there is a normal to which we will return, simply getting out and about, going to dinner with friends, getting a hair cut, for goodness sakes, planning travel for the summer. For others, of course, it’s sending kids back to school, gathering again with colleagues over good work, heading back to college for face-to-face learning. Our times of isolation are not normal, we tell ourselves. Surely we’ll go back to the old ways. Soon. We hope. Surely.

As the lockdown lingers, nerves fraying at the edges a bit, I am trying to imagine just swinging through. Consider Robert Frost’s marvelous poem “Birches”:It's when I'm weary of considerations,And life is too much like a pathless woodWhere your face burns and tickles with the cobwebsBroken across it, and one eye is weepingFrom a twig's having lashed across it open. . . .I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.

I want to propose a special kind of reading for lockdown, perhaps a perfect antidote for the anxieties of sequestration. It’s an ancient practice, much of it sparked by St. Benedict as he opened his great monastery at Monte Cassino in the sixth century. With a collapsing classical culture all around, Benedict believed the Christian life could not flourish without both reading and prayer. Along with work, these were his three pillars. We have much to learn from this enduring practice.

My son Michael had a dream the other night. He was driving his car, at quite a speed, only to discover he was driving backwards, in reverse. After slamming on the breaks a number of times, he realized he couldn’t stop the car. I get the feeling these days, don’t you? We’re driving backwards, out of control. It’s scary.  

I was out on Twitter Easter Sunday afternoon. Sharon and I had participated in the morning in a beautiful, though un-normal, worship service online. Our pastor, the Reverend O’Grady, preached a heart-felt sermon, our choir sang with beauty and power, Lisa Edwards’ organ was magnificent, as always. There was a lot on our hearts as we came to our screens that morning, a lot of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, boredom, loneliness. We came to this unusual altar with a deep yearning. And then, even from our isolation, we shouted out: Christ is risen, he is risen, indeed! And we meant it.

In his Friday column last week, David Brooks points to “an invisible current of dread running through the world. It messes with your attention span.” And then he adds: “I don’t know about you, but I’m mentally exhausted by 5 p.m. every day, and I think part of the cause is the unconscious stress flowing through us.” Yes, this thing is messing with us.

I love this painting, Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1872, quite possibly the painting that launched the whole impressionist movement. It’s marvelous. Sharon and I first hung a print of this painting when we moved to our condo in downtown Seattle. The painting was like looking out those big windows, sometimes into the fog, sometimes out over the blue Sound toward the Olympics, over the city as it would wake up each day. We would watch the ferry from Bainbridge arrive very early in the morning.

I’m finding it hard to write these days. I suspect we are all having a hard time just thinking clearly. We still live, day after day, with sinister danger, a pandemic, a huge cloud spreading gloom on the horizon. Economic damage is not far behind. Do I see any sunshine I can report? Are the clouds beginning to break? What can I say?

It’s been raining in California, seems like for weeks. I know, I know, we need it. Thank God for the rain. But give me some sunshine now. I’m ready. Give me spring blossoms and birds. Let me imagine long summer evenings on the patio. Really what I need right now, what we all need, is some kind of certainty, clarity, assurance. Summer will come again, won’t it?

I woke up this rainy morning under a cloud of fear, not so much for my own safety, though there is certainly that too, but fear for our world, for the thousands who may be struck down with illness, for the millions who may be nailed with crippling financial loss. The world is out of whack. The clouds gather.  

I’ve been thinking about how my practice of reading the Psalms every day can possibly address the urgent questions these days. Name the issue: The looming, ever-dangerous coronavirus; the corrosive polarization of our politics; the hollowed out moral center of our society; threats to our financial well being, and on and on. I am totally alarmed that hatred seems to come from our lips so easily, no matter our position on things. Things are bad.

During my early morning reading the other day, a line leaped off the page from one of R. S. Thomas’s poems: “In an age of science everything is analyzable but a tear.” This is what I’ve been trying to say for years, but here, in one stunning image, this wonderful Welsh poet catches it all. I couldn’t shake this image for days.

I was reading this morning in Abigail Rine Favale’s stunningly beautiful book Into the Deep, the story of her “unlikely” conversion to Christianity, one that ends with a wholehearted plunge into the Catholic Church. This is my second reading, not something I usually do with this kind of book. It’s penetrating, wonderful.

We were with a group of people recently where someone remarked: “I can’t believe how much depression and anxiety and hopelessness seems loose among so many people, many of them our friends.” We are constantly reminded of the statistics, but we feel it close by as well.

I have always been attracted to poets who sense God’s presence in the surrounding beauty, in cool air as it touches our face, in water as it ripples across ageless stones, in a whiff of breeze across a lawn. The scene may bristle with arresting color; it may call out in the soft voice of a dove; it may arrive quietly as the moon rises over a field of wheat.

I’m back. A number of friends have asked me if I would ever return to my blog. There are lots of reasons I stepped back for a while. I’ve been intensely engaged writing my new book, now tentatively called Conversion: Drawing Nearer To The Heart Of God. In addition, Sharon and I had to take an unexpected pause to make our way through a rough patch with health in this past year. We believe we are healed and feeling better than ever, full of energy for what’s out ahead.