a year of slow learning

Hi everyone,

I hope you’ve been keeping well in this tumultuous year. Amidst the grief, sorrow, and anger that many of us have undoubtedly experienced, it may sometimes feel jarring to also experience moments of joy and hope in this time. My friend Alice Hodgkins captures this delicate tension so well in her words. Whenever I read her blog posts, I come away with a renewed sense of God holding, nurturing, and loving the world and everything in it, and a greater desire to surrender my life and my plans to God’s abundant love and grace.

Alice’s writing is pensive, emotive, and heartfelt, and the best way to read her work is to savour it slowly and allow it to settle gently into your soul. I am honoured to “host” a beautifully reflective piece she has penned here for this blog. May it bless and encourage you!

xx,
iz

Long ago, in what now seems like another life, I used to teach high school. One day in history class, a student somewhat flirtatiously asked what my greatest fear was. I think he expected me to say heights or spiders, but I’m compulsively truthful, so I looked him directly in the eye and said, “Failure.” He was blessedly silent for the rest of the hour. And if I was afraid of failure at the age of twenty-four standing in front of a classroom full of teenagers, it is a fear which has only become more pronounced as I’ve stepped deeper into adulthood.

I am by nature a maker and a planner and a dreamer. These are not bad things to be. They are traits which make it possible for me to write, to take a blank page and put something on it, but when I lean into them too heavily, as I often do, I usually find that I’m angling for creative control not only of whatever task is directly before me, but of my entire life. The ship of my life must be kept afloat by my own ideas: the accomplishments, the employments, the sartorial choices, the relationships, the minute person-to-person interactions. I take control so things can succeed as they ought.

But if, on a global scale, this year has been the story of anything, it has been the story of the dramatic failure of human control. So many best laid plans have not merely gone awry, but have crumbled into dust and blown away with the wind, betraying how flimsy they were all along. We thought the world was firmly in our grasp and then a virus smaller than the eye can see has come along and knocked it all off-kilter, not because we weren’t holding on as tight as we possibly could, but because it was never ours to hold in the first place.

And while I certainly feel the ways this wave has lifted and carried and—to some extent—crushed all of us collectively, I have spent quite a lot of time this year preoccupied by my own personal lack of control. I now cannot make a list or put on a dress or spin a daydream or buy a plane ticket to make it all come right. It occurs to me that the tools I had at my disposal for warding off failure were pretty limited. How could I have thought I could save myself? And so I sink. As the Book of Common Prayer would have it, I must “gat me to my Lord right humbly.”

Yet, despite my absence of power, and though the last few months have been occasionally painful and certainly stark, I am coming to see the ways they have also somehow been lavish with a kind of hardy beauty, like some desert flower which refuses to die because it does not know how. In September I went out to a little cabin on one of the Gulf Islands with a couple friends. As the ocean lapped on the rocks below us, we were content to realize that in the midst of the chaos we had brought too much food. More than that, there were too many books, too many puzzles, too many words to be said, too many silences to be listened to, and too many garden beans to snap. I found myself stepping lightly among the plenty of the days, not in fear or flippancy but in reverence.

In truth, the larger lesson of these last two years in Vancouver which hit me with a bracing jolt in the middle of a lecture on the Psalms and which I am still swallowing with difficulty, is that Jesus loves me. He really loves me. Not because other people say so, but because he does. And that love is out of the reach of my control. I cannot predict it and I cannot understand it and I cannot stop it. That love sees my failure and is not afraid.

I spent two months this summer working part-time at a long-term care facility and I think the experience poured gold into the cracks in my soul. It was a stressful job in certain ways and I was often running from place to place. On one unit, whenever I entered a particular bent old woman would roll along after me in her wheelchair grabbing my hold of my hand and kissing it repeatedly, eager and happy. I always had to disentangle myself because I had somewhere to be, but love followed me down the hall anyway.

I’ve reorganized my bedroom a whole lot this year. It’s apparently a new hobby of mine. My bookcase has been in two places and the desk and chest and mirror have been in three. But no matter how many times I redecorate and rearrange, my view on the outside world remains the same. It is a long shallow window set high in the western wall of my room and through it I see clouds and a tangle of pine branches and sometimes, when I cannot sleep, I see the moon.

But I cannot rearrange the sky, nor will I try. I’m learning.

save for later:

alice+hodgkins.jpg — alice hodgkins

was born and raised in North Carolina, and now writes, studies, and watches people on the bus in Vancouver, BC. She is always hopeful that she will run into a poem where she least expects it. You can read more from her at *alicewithpaper.com*.