Can you remember a time when you were arrested by silence? Where all the frenetic movement of life suddenly paused? Where even the chattering of your busy mind grew utterly quiet, if just for a moment? Perhaps it was a mere sunrise after an unquiet night. Or maybe it was morning light streaming in the window after a long rain. You noticed the flowers from your open window. The birds were up early too. Nothing too spectacular here, I suppose, and yet you are simply swept up in the holy hush all around you.

Just as I was looking for God’s presence this morning, he came and stooped down very close to me. He came, as he often does, through some of the most magnificent words I could imagine. I am feeling these days, as we all are, so much sorrow all around us, sorrow in our weary world, sorrow as we notice how fragile our loved ones have become. Amazingly, I was presented, in my morning reading, with three different poems, each one lifting me out of sorrow and into song. I’ve been told this is how it happens. Somehow joy will blossom out of sorrow.

A blockbuster article appeared last week in The New Yorker with disturbing news about “The End Of The English Major.” I was an English professor. So is my son Mark. This article surprised neither of us. Mark has been giving me fresh reports from the trenches for some years now: “But, Dad, they’re just not reading good books anymore.” The article confirms that a whole generation of students has fundamentally tuned out the value of reading great literature. Universities have failed to make the case. Each one of us must pause to ask if this is a good thing, for students or for our civilization.

In my early morning prayer, meditation, and reading this week, I stumbled into Isaiah 55. I suddenly found myself wide awake. To begin with, I was stunned by the beauty of the writing. In all my literary training, great writing will always be concrete, specific, earthly grounded, no matter where it’s headed toward some profound truth. The rhythmic strategy of Isaiah builds toward dramatic statements about how God utters a word, but not until it is grounded in mundane details of daily life. That’s the way our faith should always be, isn’t it? The Bible teaches this even in the way it is written.

We find in this tender painting a couple coming together in the fields. It’s dusk, presumably after a hard day harvesting potatoes. They are praying. We witness humble reverence here, hands placed together, a sense of silence and stillness, heads bowed. Surely, they are giving thanks for the fruit of their labor, gratitude that they are able to work, thankful that God is present in their little place of life. We can almost hear the bells ringing from the church in the distance. This is a sacred place, where God enters into ordinary lives. This is a place of prayer.

I encountered a story one morning last week that touched me to the core. Jesus and his disciples decide to get into a boat and cross over the Sea of Galilee. And then,

I hope this doesn’t come off as presumptuous. I am sending to my blog readers links to the lectures I have just finished for a four-part series at our church, Valley Presbyterian Church, which I called Finding Joy. I would be mortified if this comes off as self-promoting or appears to call attention to me. It’s just that, after a great deal of preparation, study, reflection, writing, and prayer, I’ve come to feel this class has sharpened my thinking on joy. I hope that has happened to the curious, attentive members of the class. I want to share what I have learned to all of you on my blog.

On Wednesday evening last week I launched a four-week series at our church on what I call Finding Joy. Among other things I had to say that evening, I featured Vincent Van Gogh’s touching painting Old Man In Sorrow, painted in 1890, the year of his tragic death, apparently from self-inflicted wounds. He had sketched this weary old man in his chair a number of years earlier, but somehow, in this year of horrifying confusion and profound sadness, he was compelled to finish the painting. The old man is worn out, exhausted, perhaps close to the end. It was a self-portrait of sorts.  

Well, this morning we wake up to a new year. I’ve always loved this time of year, pulling out last year’s goals and writing new ones. I suspect I may be the optimistic type. Not always, but I try to focus on possibilities rather than the seductions of limitations. I try not to focus on what has been, as if my disappointments lock me into what must always be. We’ve been through a lot over the last year. I sense it’s time to turn the page. That’s where I begin this morning.

During Advent I am attracted to the story of Simeon. Though this story comes slightly later in the sequence of the stories, it fits so beautifully into the unfolding drama. The Simeon story is appealing because he too faces so many challenges, just as we all do, and yet, when Simeon holds the baby Jesus, he is overwhelmed with wonder. Everything now makes sense.

Now that the elections are over, are you breathing more deeply? Has your hyperventilating begun to calm down? Are you stepping back and beginning to get your life in order? I hope so. That’s what I’m trying to do. Perhaps now we can tackle the hysterical notion that nothing matters more than politics. I know I can be somewhat naïve here, but I have said for many years that politics doesn’t matter as much as we have imagined. I suspect there is something hollow in our society that has us frantically trying to fill it with something. Maybe now we can think in fresh ways what deserves our attention so much more than politics.

I am scattered right now. My calendar gets filled with all kinds of things. Worthy though each one may be, when the whole picture is added up, something gets sucked out of my soul. I’ve been thinking anew how God wants to lay claim of my life over how many years left out ahead. This is called discernment. I’ve been there before. I’m sure you have too. If we don’t think through this kind of thing, periodically, we remain forever sputtering about not doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

One of Van Gogh’s gorgeous Sunflowers (there are two series) hangs in the National Gallery in London; Claude Monet’s lovely Grainstacks is displayed in Potsdam, Germany; Johannes Vermeer’s ever-intriguing A Girl with A Pearl Earring finds its home in The Hague. What do these paintings have in common? Well, first of all, they are treasures in the history of great art, to be enjoyed by everyone, to help satisfy our deep longing for beauty. As C. S. Lewis once suggested, we long “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” We find in beauty the “promise of glory.”

I think I want to be a Brit. After all, ancestral English blood flows in my veins. There was a family of Eatons on the Mayflower, who, though leaving England for a new land, were nevertheless pureblood English. You’ll find the Eaton name all over London, including Eaton Square, where former prime ministers, rock stars, and two James Bonds live.   

Things are such a mess these days. Could it be possible to step aside from the whole thing, go somewhere where there is peace and contentment and tranquility? Lately, though, I’ve been worrying about all the guilt we are supposed to carry as we navigate the mess we’re in, as if it’s all our fault, each one of us. Wouldn’t it be great to get away from feeling guilty all the time?

Do you ever think about time passing? We all do, for sure, maybe more as we get older. I remember how I would stand on a certain bridge over that little creek where we spent our summers, thinking how that strikingly beautiful water under my feet would never return to this place and to this moment. Though I couldn’t put anything like this in words, I understood, quite deeply, I could not control time. I could not gather in this beauty, this sparkle, this murmuring, and bring it back again. There it went, gone forever.

Do you know anyone who radiates joy? Could that be you? Could that be me? Oh no, I confess quickly, I might like to be that person, but I’ve got a long way to go. N. T. Wright has said he thinks there is a serious lack of joy in our world today, precisely because we’ve bought into the lie that the modernist dream will make all things perfect. And, of course, as we look around, we are hugely disappointed. This is surely not the dream for which we’ve bargained. Joy seems crushed by so many forces beyond our control. How can we possibly find joy again?  

The great Jeremiah provided my daily reading a few days ago:

THESE are the words which came to Jeremiah from the LORD: Go down now to the potter’s house, and there I shall tell you what I have to say. I went down to the potter’s house, where I found him working at the wheel. Now and then a vessel he was making from the clay would be spoilt in his hands, and he would remould it into another vessel to his liking.

We’ve been hearing so much lately about the end of this or the end of that. We hear often, for example, that this will be the end of democracy, the end of America. We hear all kinds of predictions about the end of the planet. We hear about the end of education, the collapse of our universities, our schools. We hear often about the end of the church, the Christian way of living. We listen to all of this with some measure of fear, perhaps a little skepticism, but something is at work out there to keep us on edge.

In 1986 the great twentieth century American novelist Walker Percy, when asked what worried him most about the condition of the world, answered with this:

Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom. . . gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated . . . from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.

He then adds: “The West [is] losing [its way] by spiritual acedia.”