Category Archives: quotes

Middlemarch – Ladislaw’s force of unreason.

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One Saturday evening Will Ladislaw is thinking about the foolishness of his current situation, in which he has taken work in the town near to where our heroine Mrs. Casaubon lives, because of his feelings for that woman “for ever enthroned in his soul.” But he has been forbidden by Dorothea’s jealous husband to visit their home. So, “he could hardly ever see her.”

His thoughts are going irritably round and round on this subject when, “suddenly reflecting that the morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church to see her.” It’s not his parish, and his presence would annoy Casaubon certainly, but he reasons,

“It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see Dorothea? Is he to have everything to himself and be always comfortable? Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to do. I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation; besides, I know the Tuckers. I shall go into their pew.”

Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and skirting the woods, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green growths piercing the brown. Everything seemed to know that it was Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church. Will easily felt happy when nothing crossed his humour, and by this time the thought of vexing Mr. Casaubon had become rather amusing to him, making his face break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine on the water — though the occasion was not exemplary…. Will went along… chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and coming out….The words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday experience….

…. Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air — a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises.

This is one of a thousand passages in Middlemarch that so delightfully convey the personality and the feelings of one of the characters. I wish that I could transcribe a score of them just because I admire so much Eliot’s art. In this case Will is to himself in happy concord with even the weather and the season, and with the landscape that the author paints with a few perfect phrases. I think that Eliot is a little bit in love with Will Ladislaw, for how else could she make me fall in love with him?

The last phrase, though, comparing Will and springtime, is suddenly ominous, because, as we all know, the weather is unpredictable at this time of year. And the spirit of spring — I am as susceptible to its easy promises as anyone.

I did read this novel aloud with my husband 15 years ago, an acquaintance that was too shallow and distant for me to retain more than vague impressions. This time, on my own, I’m more engaged and enraptured, but still, I don’t want to take a year to read as thoroughly and meditatively as this book seems to warrant. So I’m glad Arti proposed two months, and I look forward to the remaining weeks and stories.

photo credit: Pippin

Slipping from the tedious plane.

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I was telling Mr. Greenjeans about how An American Childhood by Annie Dillard encouraged me in my writing. He comes from the author’s hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is the backdrop for her growing-up adventures told from her vividly revealing point of view. I took the book off the shelf to put aside for him, and turned the pages a while, seeing passages I’d marked long ago.

Hers is a unique point of view, of course, as each of us is an unrepeatable individual looking out on our world. Whether it is her perspective that is unusual as well, or only her ability to convey it in words, I don’t know. I do know that few children today have the liberty of youth that Dillard describes as regularly offering periods of time so deep and distraction-free that you can “lose yourself.” In a chapter on her love of books and reading, she tells how she felt:

The actual world is a kind of tedious plane where dwells, and goes to school, the body, the boring body which houses the eyes to read the books and houses the heart the books enflame. The very boring body seems to require an inordinately big, very boring world to keep it up, a world where you have to spend far too much time, have to do time like a prisoner, always looking for a chance to slip away, to escape back home to books, or to escape back home to any concentration–fanciful, mental, or physical–where you can lose your self at last. Although I was hungry all the time, I could not bear to hold still and eat; it was too dull a thing to do, and had no appeal either to courage or to imagination. The blinding sway of their inner lives makes children immoral. They find things good insofar as they are thrilling, insofar as they render them ever more feverish and breathless, ever more limp and senseless on the bed.

-Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood

The most fragrant dispensation.

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Since Pascha I have been reading The Eucharist by Father Alexander Schmemann. It is so much more than I expected; I don’t know what I did expect — maybe with such a simple title I imagined something “dry and scholarly”? We can count on Fr. Alexander to be scholarly, but we can also count on his words to be infused by the Holy Spirit and to convey his own obvious joy in the Holy Spirit.

My priest was graced to hear these words as seminary lectures; the author died before he could finish the English edition of his book, but use was made of the original Russian and the French translation in the publishing of the edition I am reading, in 1987.  It’s another of those many lasting gifts that Fr. Alexander has given us.

Much in the section on “The Sacrament of the Kingdom” is especially fitting for the celebration of Pentecost this week, so I share from the riches I’m receiving:

…Through his coming on the “last and great day of Pentecost” the Holy Spirit transforms this last day into the first day of the new creation and manifests the Church as the gift and presence of this first and “eighth” day.

Thus, everything in the Church is by the Holy Spirit, everything is in the Holy Spirit and everything is partaking of the Holy Spirit. It is by the Holy Spirit because with the descent of the Spirit the Church is revealed as the transformation of the end into the beginning, of the old life into the new. “The Holy Spirit grants all things; he is the source of prophecy, he fulfills the priesthood, he gathers the entire church assembly” (hymn of Pentecost). Everything in the Church is in the Holy Spirit, who raises us up to the heavenly sanctuary, to the throne of God. “We have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly Spirit” (another hymn of Pentecost).

Finally, the Church is entirely oriented toward the Holy Spirit, “the treasury of blessings and giver of life.” The entire life of the Church is a thirst for acquisition of the Holy Spirit and for participation in him, and in him of the fullness of grace. Just as the life and spiritual struggle of each believer consists, in the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov, in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, so also the life of the Church is that same acquisition, that same eternally satisfied but never completely quenched thirst for the Holy Spirit.

I can imagine that there are writings about the Holy Spirit that are “dry,” if the writer is not skilled, or has not experienced life in Christ. But the Holy Spirit himself cannot be dry — he is sent to water our souls with divine life. At the close of this section Father Alexander gives us a prayer from the compline canon of the Feast of the Holy Spirit:

“Come to us, O Holy Spirit, and make us partakers of your holiness,
and of the light that knows no evening, and of the divine life,
and of the most fragrant dispensation….”

On Pentecost, trees clap in church.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the human will to live, and how it is a gift of God, and not a mere “survival instinct,” as scientific materialists might term it. We do not bring ourselves into being, and we can’t keep ourselves alive; and yet, most of the time we try to survive. It’s because God has given us LIFE. I also think about trees most days 🙂 so these words of Fr. Stephen Freeman are a joy to me, as we prepare for the Feast of Pentecost.

I had fun searching for photos of trees in church. The first photo I believe is from the author’s own parish church in Tennessee. The snippets below, which were included in our church bulletin this week, are from his blog post several years ago on Pentecost and Creation.

PENTECOST and CREATION

There is something about life, at least in our earthly experience, that is inexorable. Any individual case of life may be fragile, but life itself endures. In the Genesis account we are told that God blessed this planet and said:

Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:11-12 NKJ)

The Feast of Pentecost…focuses as much on the Holy Spirit’s work in Creation as it does on the Spirit’s work in the Church. The Church is decorated in green. In Russian tradition, branches of birch are brought into the Church; fresh green grass is placed on the floor; flowers are everywhere. In Soviet times a secular version of the festival remained, called the Day of Trees.

The outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Church is not something separate from Creation—nor are the trees a distraction from the Church. They are, together, a proper reminder of the role God’s Spirit plays always, everywhere. He is the “Lord and Giver of Life.” Just as the Spirit moved over the face of the waters in the beginning of creation, so He moves over the face of all things at all times, bringing forth life and all good things.

Though I am frequently assaulted with bouts of pessimism, despairing over various aspects of our distorted civilization, the truth is that like the planet itself, civilization with its drive for beauty and order seem inexorable. The history of humanity is not the story of a fall from a great civilization with increasing instances of barbarism and cave dwelling. Great civilizations have risen and fallen, but civilizations continue to occur. Some may already have begun in the ruins that surround us now. The story told in Scripture is not the story of collapse and decay. There are certainly dire warnings of terrible trials and great catastrophes. But these things do not reveal the mystery of God’s will. These things are cracks in the pavement while life continues to burst forth:

God has made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him (Ephesians 1:9-10).

What appeared as tongues of flame upon the heads of the disciples at Pentecost was a manifestation of this Divine Purpose at work. With the sound of a mighty rushing wind, the Holy Spirit filled the room. The fullness of the Church burst into the streets proclaiming the Gospel in a multitude of languages. Being birthed in Jerusalem was the New Jerusalem, where there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female. Instead there is the fullness that fills all things bringing forth all things in one—in the One Christ Himself. The voice of Pentecost is the voice of creation’s groans being transformed into the “glorious liberty of the children of God.” Stones cry out, trees clap their hands and the song of creation rejoices in the One Christ.

—Fr. Stephen Freeman