O My Soul

Why are you downcast, O my soul?  Why so disturbed within me?  Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

~Psalm 43:5 NIV

These days I feel as if am being doggedly pursued by an old acquaintance of mine.  He's not particularly a welcome friend, but somehow I just don't know how to shake him.  He does leave me alone for a few days, and then, when I'm feeling pretty good about myself, he reappears.

Let me start over.  A month or two ago, a person named Jan wrote a comment on this blog to say that she loves my posts and values my blog.  That comment made my day, nay, my month and I stored it up in the treasury of my heart to revisit time and again.  Yesterday, as I walked home in the rain, an old weather-beaten man tinged with a patina made of the smoke and alcohol which had encircled him for years pulled up beside me in his battered car.  With a kind face lined in wrinkles, and an over-round belly protruding from his unbuttoned shirt, he leaned out his window and asked, "Elise, would you like a ride?"  Then, at work today, on the set of QVC, Mary Beth, a host whose face I remember seeing on the tv screen even as child (my grandmother was a QVC devotee), greeted me by name and asked how I was.    It's a strange thing to think that these small kindnesses-- strangers knowing my name, other strangers telling me that I mean something to them-- touch me very deeply.  These days, they mean almost the world to me.

That old acquaintance that I was telling you about?  His name is depression and he haunts me.  I left QVC today feeling utterly exhausted (I was on the air modeling from 10pm-11pm, 4am-6pm, and again from 1pm-3pm), but came home feeling a different sort of lethargy.  My soul felt downtrodden (does anyone else but me think it's fun that the past participle of tread is trodden?  Tread, trod, trodden.  I do love English so.) and I was at a loss for how to pull myself out of that funk.  I changed into my workout gear, and it seems a small miracle that I managed to lace up my shoes and step out the door.  At first I walked slowly, and then, with a miniature pinscher eagerly dragging me along, I began to run.  The steps were small and I limited my effort, but then with the cool rain-laden air fanning my cheek, I ran faster.  By the end of it, I felt wonderfully blessed.

I would that I could hold on to that feeling of well-being, but ah, he, my old acquaintance (for surely he is no friend), will not be deterred.  It is a never-ending battle, and I must take up again my weapons of self-defense.

I am thankful today for the kindness of strangers.  Let my prayer be like that of St. Francis:

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

One of my Favorite Hymns

1. Come Thou Fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
Mount of God's unchanging love.

2. Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I'm come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

3. O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing is one of my favorite hymns and I particularly enjoy this version by singer-songwriter, Sufjan Stevens.  My favorite verse has long been the last one.  The words "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,/ Prone to leave the God I love" have always struck so close to home and my prayer echoes the hymn in desiring for His grace to fetter my wandering heart to Him.

The lyrics, by the way, were written in 1757 by a Baptist pastor at the age of 22.  The tune that we Americans sing an old American folk tune called Nettleton.  The story goes that seventeen-year-old Robert Robinson was told by a an old gypsy woman that he would live to see his children and grandchildren grow up.  At hearing this news, the errant young man thought to himself that if this were true, he must change his ways.  That night he went to see the great preacher, George Whitfield, speak, ostensibly to make fun of him, but Whitfield's words settled into Robinson's heart, and two years later he committed his life to following God's will.

If you were wandering what it means to raise your Ebenezer, it's a reference to the 1 Samuel 7:12 in the Bible.  In that passage, to celebrate a great victory that God had given Israel over their enemies, Samuel takes a large stone and sets it up between two cities.  "...He named it Ebenezer-- "the stone of help"-- for he said, 'Up to this point the Lord has helped us.'"  To raise your own Ebenezer would be, in effect, to do the same thing; that is, to recognize the faithfulness of the Lord and to profess how He has helped you and blessed you.

Man Will Endure

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past."

~Excerpt from William Faulkner's 1950 acceptance speech for the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain-- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right,
I have been one acquainted with the night.

~Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night

Because They're Cute

I've been MIA from my blog and when I finally get around to posting here's what I have for ya:

Why?  Because they're cute and the pictures make me happy.  Here's one last one for you:

As Dreams Are Made On

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

~Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1, William Shakespeare's The Tempest

You Have Never Talked to a Mere Mortal

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."


~C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Wondrous Love

There is a great old American hymn that sounds like astonishment itself, and I mention it... because even its title speaks more powerfully of the meaning of our narrative than whole shelves of books.  It is called "Wondrous Love." "What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss/ to bear the dreadful cross for my soul?"  If we have entertained the questions we moderns must pose to ourselves about the plausibility of incarnation, if we have sometimes paused to consider the other ancient stories of miraculous birth, this is not great matter.  But if we let these things distract us, we have lost the main point of the narrative, which is that God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is a kind to be worth, which is to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love.  This is the essence of the story that forever eludes the telling.  It lives in the world not as myth or history but as a saturating light, a light so brilliant that hides its source, to borrow an image from another good old hymn.

~Wondrous Love, from Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books