January 3rd – the ninth day of Christmas

Sweet, quiet January stretches out kindly and demurely ahead of me now.  The wild flurry and strain of the year behind me is lost in the disorder and happy hearted abandon of December.

The most surprising gift of Christmas is what comes “after” it.  The gift of a new beginning.  Clean, unbroken, unstained by failure and baggage, limitations and doubt. That tiny baby boy gives me more than I can ever give myself with all the best of my efforts.  Without judgment or condemnation He gives me a new start.  New.  What breath taking beauty lays in that word.  New.  He gives me a new day.

This  baby that entered my world through a woman in a stable contained in His tiny body the power of the universe and laid down glory to become like me.  Human. The ancient, oft told tale of the immortal taking on mortality for love of a mortal, in this case all mortals, lays firmly centered in the core of all human history, not just our fables. All the world spins on a different axis because He entered as one of us and stayed. This baby that was so newly born and clothed in our same flesh was the Word Himself Who existed before Time and created all that is.   Creator, Servant-King, Holy Son of God become man, conqueror of death– by the power of His Love, He makes all things new!

I don’t take this seriously enough, this reality of new beginnings.  If I did I would carry so much less baggage from one day to the next, from one meeting to the next.  But I have the choice today, this moment to take Him hard at His word and receive His gift of a new beginning draped in grace. And in receiving it I can live well each day, love well at each meeting, dress in the Joy of each moment, confess my sin and hurts by the hour, close each day in peace with a clean conscience, sleep in the peace of His love, and wake to a new beginning unencumbered with yesterday’s grief, regrets, mistakes. That is my new year’s resolution. To listen to Him more completely, be more of a child, be happier in each moment, worry less, love with more courage and heart, cry quicker and pretend less to be strong, give freely, laugh more, and to look for beauty, goodness and truth wherever I am. Because He is there.

Ah, to be new!  Happy new beginnings to you, friend! May you find the well of blessing today.

“The bone and marrow of an artist’s life is lines. Words, notes, brushstrokes.

One after another. Every single day.”  — Artists Life, July 2008

What have been the costs for cultivating beauty? What do you see as the costs ahead as you continue to cultivate the life you are creating?

“Counting the cost is not something I’m very good at. I can be pretty unrealistic about how long things take and how much they will require of me, and I have learned that I have got to be very intentional about my daily commitments. Sometimes it has meant forgoing a lovely gathering of friends to make a writing deadline. Other times it means closing the computer and talking on the phone for an hour. I wish there was a simple formula for simplicity, but the fact is, we have to just keep yielding and feeling our way by faith. But there is always a cost. Yes to one thing means no to something else. I can’t do everything that comes into my rather overstuffed head—I have to choose.”

“Needless to say, living within my means in the artistic sense is a challenge for me, but it’s a healthy discipline. I have learned to turn down opportunities that might seem more ‘spiritual’ for the sake of what I believe to be my own ‘spiritual acts of worship’. The word ‘no’ has become one of my best friends! And the ‘yeses’ to the things my heart is inclined to are like deep, fresh draughts of heavenly air. It was difficult for me to reach that place—I had to fend off a legion of guilt, and one of the main casualties was the opinion of other people. But it was so worth the fight.

Ahead, I guess I see more of the same. Many skirmishes in the same war.”   

What would you say is your deepest hope for your website (and writing) to accomplish? Has that changed since you started the website?

“I would say that it is to kindle hope in other people.  To avow, in the clearest way I can, that God is good and that He loves us. That beauty needs no validation and that goodness and truth have not fled from this hurting old world of ours. All ridiculously beyond me, of course, but I’d love it if God used my words to touch a spring upon peoples’ hearts by which He may rush in and speak what they most need to hear.”

“I don’t know that my hopes have changed so much as developed. It has been overwhelming to connect with so many truly lovely people, and they have given so much in the way of kindness and grace, that it motivates my visions afresh.”

What advice or words of guidance would you give to fellow believing writers and those artists cultivating beauty in life?

 ”Simply this: do no give up. Your words, your gifts, your talents and desires are valuable and valid. You are created in the image of a Creator and your joy in your art is no slight thing to Him. Art is a ‘spiritual act of worship’ for the believer, a giving of oneself in obedience, and in your obedience is your joy.”

“Your obedience may also be the venue for someone else to encounter God. Frederick Buechner said it perfectly:

“The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done….The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” ‘

“A lot of my heroes are writers, of course. I cherish the way that they help me to see life and God and myself, and the value they place on things I’d otherwise think I was alone in noticing or hoping for. L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott were among the first to speak to me on such a deep level, and their influence remains steady and unflagging to this day. The fact that they both created against such desperate odds, and in the face of unique personal challenges, only makes their example more revered to me. Montgomery, in particular, gave voice to that beautiful ache which is the fleeting deposit of joy, and the sheer glory of the commonplace. When I learned that she had written under increasing shadows of clinical depression, my esteem for her was magnified tenfold. What a brave woman, to keep tenaciously putting down words to the good of more souls than she could ever imagine, in the very face of such darkness! It takes a whole lot more courage to write of beauty in this world, than to concede her cause with the masses (and the publishers!) and throw in the towel to cynicism and despair—that’s something the Lord impressed on me several years ago, when I stood quaking on the brink of my own calling. But Lucy Maud made me brave. Her example, and the imprint of her words and stories, inspire me on a daily basis.”   

“Singer/ songwriter Karen Peris of the Innocence Mission is another heroine. She puts things into words and music that literally tear my soul open. It is a curiously beautiful and healing thing, and I love her for it. Sheldon Vanauken and his wife, Davy, of A Severe Mercy, are other friends Philip and I look forward to meeting in heaven (I keep a picture of Davy on my desk to remind me of the high adventure of the life in Christ and of the beauty of the ‘low door’ of service.) Lewis and Tolkien go without saying, I imagine. And Tasha Tudor sparked a vision in me long ago for the kind of life I wanted to live. I owe her so much.”

“I would have to honestly say, though, that my biggest hero is my husband. I admire his practical faith, his calm, quiet grasp on the character of God, his perspective on eternal realities. Life with him is an adventure and a joy. Ironically, it was Katherine Downs would told me—so emphatically—never to marry a man I didn’t look up to above all others. By the unbelievable grace of God, I was able to do just that. Karen Peris said it for me when she wrote, “Seeing you, I know what is right and what is true/and I see the way I want to be, oh I see the way I want to be.”   

You make many references to your husband Philip in your writing and blog posts.  How has Philip’s presence in your life influenced you as a creative being?

“Good heavens, his influence is immeasurable! He encourages me, he keeps track of my commitments and he alternately cheers me on or tells me to take a break, depending on the situation. He’ll wash the dishes or pick up takeout so that I can pound out of few more words. He listens with infinite patience to multiple revisions of the same chapter and he even ventures suggestions, which I am hopefully humble enough to receive.”

“But beyond all that, he just gets excited about everything that I love and enters into my enjoyment. He validates my creative longings and he has helped me validate them myself, at times. And he always seems to know when I’m taking myself far too seriously. There is nothing like laughing in the face of something that was smothering you only a moment before.”

Part 5 will follow tomorrow!

 How have the deep losses of life shaped how you create and what you cultivate?

“I hope I can say that they have helped me to create more honestly. I really think that the losses I’ve experienced have stung my soul awake to the preciousness of life and the brooding tenderness of God in all things. We all have dark places to walk through, nights of the soul in which we can’t see our hand in front of our face. But there is one thing I can say with all certainty—God is there. There is not a valley I’ve walked through that has not been made precious to me by His presence. It’s not something I could ever really describe to another person, but I’d stake my life on its verity. The older I get, the less answers I have—but the more confidence I’ve got in the redemptive love of God. This confidence carries me along in an almost irresistible tide—and in the face of all appearances to the contrary at times. It’s in the light of that love that won’t let me go that I try to look at life and celebrate all the ways in which I see His grace breaking through.”

“When you are hurting, the last things you want are platitudes and pat answers. I know from personal experience that God has used unlikely sources to comfort me when well-meaning others have literally seared me with their ‘good advice’. Beauty touches a place where advice can never reach; a story can articulate a hurt and heal it in the same stroke; music stirs an answering chord when words have utterly failed. The power and the love of God can be in all of these things, and He can meet us in them in ways we can’t even explain.”

“I used to think I needed an agenda for my art: a good, godly set-up and delivery. I don’t have an agenda anymore—I just want to be honest about how good God is, and how lovely His love for us.”

You wrote in one of your blog posts that  “Believing that God is Himself the author of beauty, and that our own individual means of creating it is both a gift from Him and a glory to Him, I cannot think that devoting a whole day to preparing and serving a meal is a waste of time.”  How has your faith influenced your pursuit of what is good, true and beautiful and your motivation for creating Beauty?

 ”Oh, it’s completely validated it. I remember that I went through a period in my early twenties in which I seriously despaired of the world and the life I longed to live in it. It just seemed like it was no use; the dreariness and ugliness of sin’s ravages were too much for the beauty I dreamed of creating. God in His mercy didn’t let me stay there—through the events of my life and my own particular journey with Him, He has underscored again and again the very essence of His character in those three transcendentals, Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and has literally proven that they are alive and well, not only in eternity, but in the endearingly imperfect world around me.”

All artists have demons they fight and usually alone. What are some of the difficulties and obstacles that you confront as an artist and how do you overcome the darkness that threatens you?

“Fear.  First and foremost.  I stumble over that one all the time. I agonize over my words and tremble at the thought of them being misunderstood or misrepresented. It really seems unbearable at times to push that ‘publish’ button, silly as that sounds. One thing that helped me in that area was actually being misunderstood and misrepresented—the very thing I feared. “The reproaches of those that reproached You have fallen on me”—I felt that in my own small, scarcely-to-be-compared way. Just as if the Lord were grinning down on me: “So what? They made fun of you; they hated me.” Also, it’s made me examine my words so carefully, to be sure that they are saying what I want them to say. I hope it’s made me a better writer.”

“Another help is the enlistment of trusted friends. We all need people to whom we can confess our fears. Sometimes hearing the very words in my own mouth has made me laugh that demon in the face. And other times it’s been the Truth spoken out by one of my friends or the ‘effectual, fervent prayers’ they have said on my behalf that have driven out fear. Regardless, we need each other. Desperately. “

Part 4 will follow tomorrow!

What draws you to make life a palette of cultivated beauty? What motivates you to create beauty across so many canvases? And in so many forms? Writing, Music, Decorating, Images, Gardens. Relationships? Many artists focus expressly on one or two genres – like painting and sculpting – but while you have the heart and drive of a writer, you are cultivating beauty in other disciplines and weaving them all together into a broader canvas of art – multi-dimensional that people can actually live in for stretches of time. Has that multiplicity aided or hindered your primary work as a writer and human being?

“I would definitely say that the one and only true draw in the pursuit of beauty is God Himself, whether we realize it at the time or not. Beauty, along with Truth and Goodness, make up His very nature, and I think it is natural for us to long for it in this life as when we do, we’re really longing for Him. To cultivate it is to take things a step further, and I believe with all my heart is an opportunity for which we’ve all been created in the image of a Creator. It will look different in every life, as God’s resources for beauty are endless and immeasurable, but the deep-seated motivation is the same: the desire to contribute to the great canvas of beauty that overspreads the world, in spite of all the ravages of evil and ugliness and sin. In the very face of them, really. Beauty is the standard flapping over this war-torn world of ours that says “All Shall be Well”. I think it gives us the hope to believe that, and the faith to image it in our lives. “

“I would have to say that I keep on striving after the cultivation of beauty because I simply cannot help myself. When my soul, stamped with God’s image, catches its own small vision of how things can be—whether it is a room or a flower bed or a table setting—it is really almost impossible for me to be satisfied without making the attempt to create it.”

“Multiplicity is something that I honestly have to keep in check in my life. I do struggle with it; I want to do everything that comes into my head and I am constantly faced with my own limitations. But the good thing about limitations, as I am slowly coming to realize, is that by their own necessity they force us to be constantly re-evaluating our priorities and motivations. When I feel the ‘panting feverishness’ creeping in, that false urgency that says I have to do it all right-this-very-minute, that is (or should be!) a red flag to step back and tell myself again why I’m doing it. A very wise older friend once told me that I needed to go with the flow of God’s seasons in my life, and it’s some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. I think about that all the time, and try to seek His heart in terms of what I should be giving myself to at a certain time. There are some seasons that I dabble joyously on many canvases, and there is grace for that. But there are other times, equally valid, that I need to center down and focus on the discipline of a writing goal or some other bounded project. I really do feel that all my ‘loves’ are symbiotic and that one creative pursuit can definitely inspire another. Just knowing what to do when—that can be the tricky part, and requires a lot of prayer and not a little laughing at my own often ridiculous expectations for a given day. “

One of the reoccurring themes that really strikes me as I explore your website is the continual reference to friendship. You make references to it in your blog posts, you post links to other friends’ websites and lavish joyful praise on their gifts and contributions, even the book you recommend are references to friendship. This strand of friendship really reminds of me of Diana Pavlac Glyer’s amazing book The Company They Keep – C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. There is such a strong reflection of how friendship has intertwined in your writing and creating.  What role do relationships, for better or worse, have on how you cultivate beauty? And how much would you say you are impacted by community in the processes of creating beauty, seeking truth, and cultivating goodness?

“I honestly do not know what I would do without my friends. The Lord has filled my life with the most amazing people, and Philip and I place a very high priority on these relationships. Every one of them inspires me in their own way, and every one of them has literally poured God’s beauty into my world. I look at them, quietly blooming for Him in their own places, and I see a garden of His diversity and callings. My sister’s reckless determination as a painter and the realities she represents motivate me to sit down at my desk and plod my ‘two typing fingers’ through whole pages of clumsy words till I strike upon a line that hints at what I’m longing to say. One friend’s indefatigable passion for madrigal singing has filled my life with music and my parlor with sweet harmonies. Another’s old-world style parties have sparked ideas for my fiction, while yet another makes me brave by her artistic and intentional domesticity.”

“And then, of course, there is my writing partner. When I think of how hard it was for me initially to open up and ‘confess’ to her that I was writing a novel, I have to laugh. I really can be ridiculously private at times, but the Lord has blessed me to the dazzling point with the insight and advice of my closest friends, and this dear lady is one of those bright stars by which He has loved me so well. We like to joke that the desperate emails that fly back and forth between us when we’re enmeshed in a writing challenge could be made into a book someday to help other flailing artists—or at least to show them they’re not alone. And that’s just the thing—knowing that there’s another kindred soul out there staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page is a loving goad to keep at it when it seems like the stupidest thing in the world. And no one else can quite identify with that mad and exhilarating rush of words and flying fingers that leaves me breathless and a little dizzy, all the more beautiful but no less real for its rarity.”

 Part 3 will follow tomorrow!

It is fitting that the very first person to be interviewed in what I hope to be a rich, long running series is Lanier Ivester. Name sake the most beautiful website I know, Lanier’s Books, Lanier has influenced me over the years in a way no one else has. She inspires me to be shameless and intentional about loving what I love and bringing beauty into every thing I do. I have heard a number of others say this, and it is true for me as well. Lanier Ivester is one of my living heros.

Her website was the one website that I took direct inspiration from when designing and launching this one. You could say that I held her site as the standard to which I measured mine, not only aesthetically but in purpose also. Lanier taught me by her own example about websites as part of linked communities that have real connections of relationship and influence. By recommendation of a friend I looked at Lanier’s site and was instantly drawn in by her sumptuous use of quotes and gorgeous images. Charmed by the images of a farm life populated with endearingly named creatures, beautiful rooms, details of gatherings and escapades, sprinklings of loving tributes, I was irresistibly beckoned in by the Beauty she portrays and the life I have always wanted to live myself. Something about Lanier bid me welcome.

I became permanently spellbound, however, with her essays.  Her essays on life, books, beauty, her husband, her friends, and family, all drew me irresistibly to her site again and again, in turn leading me to The Rabbit Room, and to Ann Voskamp’s  A Holy Experience. I love the rhythm and unashamed elegance of Lanier’s words. I love the exquisite word-smithing she uses so deftly in her writing. I love her commitment to craftsmanship in creating beauty in every form, perfectly demonstrated in her new enterprise of handcrafted books. I rejoice in her shameless faith shimmering through everything she creates and communicates.

What draws me most powerfully and repeatedly to Lanier isn’t simply that she makes her life look beautiful and lets me look in the window at it. What captivates  me about her is twofold.  One, she truly lives out her faith integrating truth, beauty, and goodness into whole landscape of her life, which is something I deeply want to do myself, and two, Lanier makes Life itself look good. She sings to me like fairies through the forest at night and angels through high bedroom windows bringing back memory I have long lost; memory that my own life is good, lovely, dappled and drenched in beauty. She makes me remember the goodness of the kingdom ofHeaven coming to earth and the reason we are to pray and to work for it.

May she do the same for you.

Interview with Lanier Ivester ~ Part 1 of 5

How do you pronounce your name and what does it mean? Is there a particular history behind why you were named Lanier?

It’s a family name, pronounced “La-NEER”—some of my ancestors were French Huguenots and my great-great-great grandmother was a Lanier. It’s still very much a Southern custom to preserve family surnames in girls’ given names, and though I rarely come across another Lanier, I know when I do that we’re probably related somewhere along the line. We’ve never been able to discover a precise meaning in the name, but we do know that the Laniers were 15^th musicians in Italy and later inFrance, so I’ve always liked to think it has something to do with music. 

~ Much of what you portray in your life is bringing a living beauty to things from another time. Your interest in Tasha Tudor, old music and old books, a simpler kind of life style all speak to grace that seems to have belonged to by-gone eras.  Were you drawn to old things – old books, music, customs as a child? Where did that affinity come from?

Oh, absolutely. I honestly cannot remember a time that I was not captivated by everything old. There was a fineness and worth there that I recognized almost without realizing it. Every make-believe game my sister and I devised had a carefully-plotted backstory and was always set in the past. I remember the enchantment of my mother’s antique sideboard, and how I would open the lower cupboards just to catch a whiff of old wood and felt-wrapped silver. And going to my grandmother’s house, a veritable family museum of lovely old furniture and artifacts, was heaven. I would sit with her by the hour, listening to family stories I already knew by heart or flipping through photograph albums of faces made dear and alive by her tales. We would wander over the house together and she would tell me the history of this table or that bit of china; she would show me the dainty bowl in which her own bedridden grandmother had taken her porridge every morning, and the specially fashioned knife and fork duo that had been crafted for my great-great-great grandfather after he lost his hand in the Civil War. It was all so fascinating to me; it fired my imagination and made me see the value in old things simply because they had belonged to someone beloved—someone who had once been as alive as I was. My grandmother made me see and feel that I was part of a long story, sometimes funny and sometimes tragic but always beautiful, and that these bits of the past were precious because they endured and connected me with it.

I don’t think I have ever consciously separated my love of old things from my love of old ways. They are indivisible, really, like a jewel in its setting. The grace of days past certainly has an irresistible charm for my somewhat introverted self. It’s something I really struggle with, actually—feeling the bombardment of the noise and hurry and frenzy of the days in which we live as an actual physical burden. I know that God has placed me in this time period for a reason, though when I was younger I remember going through a distinct period of grieving that I did not live in a ‘gentler era’. I’m okay with the 21^st century now, and actually feel very blessed to have such a long history spread out behind me from which to draw inspiration and the experience of others.

Do you do the photography on your website?

A lot of it. But all the really good shots were taken by my husband, Philip. He’s amazing with a camera. 

What draws you to make life a palette of cultivated beauty? What motivates you to create beauty across so many canvases? And in so many forms? Writing, Music, Decorating, Images, Gardens. Relationships? Many artists focus expressly on one or two genres – like painting and sculpting – but while you have the heart and drive of a writer, you are cultivating beauty in other disciplines and weaving them all together into a broader canvas of art – multi-dimensional that people can actually live in for stretches of time.  Has that multiplicity aided or hindered your primary work as a writer and human being?

I would definitely say that the one and only true draw in the pursuit of beauty is God Himself, whether we realize it at the time or not. Beauty, along with Truth and Goodness, make up His very nature, and I think it is natural for us to long for it in this life as when we do, we’re really longing for Him. To cultivate it is to take things a step further, and I believe with all my heart is an opportunity for which we’ve all been created in the image of a Creator. It will look different in every life, as God’s resources for beauty are endless and immeasurable, but the deep-seated motivation is the same: the desire to contribute to the great canvas of beauty that overspreads the world, in spite of all the ravages of evil and ugliness and sin. In the very face of them, really. Beauty is the standard flapping over this war-torn world of ours that says “All Shall be Well”. I think it gives us the hope to believe that, and the faith to image it in our lives.        

I would have to say that I keep on striving after the cultivation of beauty because I simply cannot help myself. When my soul, stamped with God’s image, catches its own small vision of how things can be—whether it is a room or a flower bed or a table setting—it is really almost impossible for me to be satisfied without making the attempt to create it.

Multiplicity is something that I honestly have to keep in check in my life. I do struggle with it; I want to do everything that comes into my head and I am constantly faced with my own limitations. But the good thing about limitations, as I am slowly coming to realize, is that by their own necessity they force us to be constantly re-evaluating our priorities and motivations. When I feel the ‘panting feverishness’ creeping in, that false urgency that says I have to do it all right-this-very-minute, that is (or should be!) a red flag to step back and tell myself again why I’m doing it. A very wise older friend once told me that I needed to go with the flow of God’s seasons in my life, and it’s some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. I think about that all the time, and try to seek His heart in terms of what I should be giving myself to at a certain time. There are some seasons that I dabble joyously on many canvases, and there is grace for that. But there are other times, equally valid, that I need to center down and focus on the discipline of a writing goal or some other bounded project. I really do feel that all my ‘loves’ are symbiotic and that one creative pursuit can definitely inspire another. Just knowing what to do when—that can be the tricky part, and requires a lot of prayer and not a little laughing at my own often ridiculous expectations for a given day.   

Part 2 will follow tomorrow!

Funny how a single sentence can stop you in your tracks instantly crumbling the edifice of how you define reality. I can still hear her beautiful soft voice on the phone and feel the strain of trying to catch her quiet words:  ”Lancia, the baby doesn’t have a heart beat any more.”

I’ve been here before and I’ve had another phone call like this.  All the things I was doing, all the things of that moment, all the things I thought I had to do tomorrow and the week ahead flatten faster than a deflated balloon.  The baby doesn’t have a heart beat anymore.  She was seven and a half months pregnant.  I’ve loved her like a daughter since the first time I laid eyes on her seven years ago.  I have invested in her with love and friendship, been with her through the last days of being single, then married.  I was there with her through the birth of her first son “ Peter and I are honoured to be his god parents.  A few years later we welcomed his brother into our lives.  We’ve prayed over them all for years, in public and in private. Our lives and our hearts are entwined with them in ways that we can’t even see on a daily basis.  We forfeited the immunity from their pain when we chose to love them.  The bitterness of their pain becomes part of the drink we share along the sweetness of their life’s victories.

When I left the hospital I felt nearly sick.  My head was swimming, my arms were like lead.  I wasn’t sure I could find the keys to my car or find my way home.  Everything flattened out dull and vague. You probably know exactly what I am talking about.  I think I remember green lights all the way back and something about praying for God to be with us and hold us all in His hands.  I pulled up to the house and caught a fleeting glimpse of something on my front steps.  I parked the car and came around and there it was.

Hope on the doorstep

A battered brown box clearly labeled from White Flower Farm. For many years, spring has begun for me  in the fall with brown paper bags holding bulbs from White Flower Farm.  Six weeks earlier this year I had labouriously gone through my annual ritual of picking out tulips and daffodils for the next spring. Almost certainly I had ordered more than I can get in our own beds even though I truly tried to be restrained in the selections. The weeks had passed. Eventually  I had begun to wonder what was taking that box so long to get here. For crying out loud,  I had been thinking when is the ‘right time to plant in your area‘ going to get any more right than early September?  Then it became mid-September.  Then late September and I’m getting tense. I’m waiting every day with a stifled sense of dread for the first frosts and then the quiet anguish I always feel of the ground freezing over.  It’s Colorado after all and I can feel time running out.

Battered but delivered and still full of Hope

A battered box literally sitting on my door step like a solid, tangible, intimately significant message from God to me.  He knows me.  As the gardener that I am at heart, nothing could have spoken His heart to mine more clearly.  Not an hour before I had looked at the tiny body of my darling little god-son, eyes closed now, lying so still and empty.  Already a shadow piercing both heart and memory.  How very like God to know how badly I was going to need that box as a physical symbol to unpack when I got home yesterday. Two days sooner or weeks sooner and the need would not have been met like it would arriving this day. He knew that and took care that it should arrive on time.

A different kind of brown paper packages tied up with strings

I opened the box this morning.  Inside they all wait “ hundreds of homely little papery brown bundles that mysteriously contain something else altogether. They look like nothing of what they will become after a winter’s sleep deep beneath the soil to awaken in Spring.  Small and humble, they are the extraordinary symbol of death and resurrection.  The bulbs don’t look like the beautiful white tulips and fragrant daffodils that I bought them for now but they contain that beauty most certainly.   I can’t just open the box for the flowers I want.  I will have to work for them and to wait. That is so like the real work of grief.  Healing requires work. Rebuilding life requires work. Time does not – by itself – heal all wounds.  Only God does that and we have to work with Him in order to experience it.  I will have to get on my knees, dig holes in the soil and lovingly bury them with hope.  And wait.  Wait through winter.  Wait for Spring.

But months from now they will come back to me. No longer what I put in the ground, they will push their way to the surface called by the warmth of the sun.  They will come up surely and truly just as surely and truly as Spring itself will come back. One by one they will unfold in a new season as Maureen (my favourite of all tulips), Rose of May, White Favourite, Verona, Champagne Diamond, Ivory Perennial, City of Vancouver and Queen of the Night.

Winston Churchill Narcissus in Spring

Not until now have I ever noticed quite so sharply the similarity of an individual’s death to bulb planting or looked at it from the Lord’s point of view. Yes, I’ve seen the symbol of resurrection in bulbs before but never really saw that as each body is laid in the ground, like a bulb being planted, that the Lord is also waiting for a certain Spring when what rises from the ground will be gloriously and utterly different than what it was.  I never thought about the fact that He, too, longs for His beautiful plantings to emerge and like us — with us — waits in Hope.

——-

Blessed be the Lord, Who bears our burdens and carries us day by day,

even the God Who is our salvation! Selah [pause and calmly think of that]!

~ Psalm 68:19

Prayer in Cambridge

Click here to view the embedded video.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation brought us another superlative event this summer which took place in Oxford and Cambridge. Extraordinary speakers from multiple disciplines presented plenary sessions each morning preceded by worship services, then afternoon workshops covering a range of subjects from poetry to creative writing to business management. Evenings led into beautiful meals, world-class music or drama presentations and culminated in happy fellowship at Bag End Cafe. An experience not to be forgotten!

If you would like to view  slide show in full screen HD (best viewing) I suggest that you let turn down the volume and let the entire set load first, then play it as many times as you would like. You’ll bypass the streaming delays that way of the larger files and have a more fluid viewing experience.

This slide show is the product of much labour. It represents something much more important to me than simply a recap of an event I had the privilege to photograph this summer. Much of its significance is based on things that cannot be seen. It is the product of love, commitments and costs, sacrifices made “ mine and many others “ a vision and skill that infinitely exceed my own. It is an offering of worship to my High King of Old, the Ancient of Days and the One Who makes all things new. It is a craftsman’s effort to portray an event, certainly. But deeper still it is my effort to make visible what is often overlooked, or when encountered, not readily grasped: the invisible message being carried by the Spirit of the present and living God.

The underlying message in the midst of ordinary exchanges is something that always draws me. That single thread is what lead me to be a writer and it is why I photograph. Photography, in many respects, is an ephemeral and intangible craft. Pictures can indeed say more than a thousand words, but apart from words, most images in themselves are not fully anchored in meaning. Written words give context, depth, and grounding to what we see in an image. Images give something else, however, something that eludes a multitude of words. I would suggest that images, like poetry, give a visible form to spirit.  They speak to the places in us that apprehend truth, beauty, need, grace, longing, pain, passion, hope and courage ¦ but where we have no mechanism to voice that recognition. Images are a part of the essential vocabulary spoken by God to His creation in the great mystery of communication. Moved by incomprehensible Love, to Love, and to communicate that Love, He creates. We are each products of His vision and that Holy, Mysterious, Immeasurable Love. We are His beloved “ jewels of infinite value to Him, though perhaps we do not know why.

When I photograph I seek with all that I am to portray the invisible undercurrent of meaning in the given moment, to reveal that profound beauty resident in human beings.  In between the lines of physical and observable reality the Spirit is moving always. Much like a movie soundtrack that gives life to an entirely different dimension in a film, the soundless message the Holy Spirit’s presence creates an underscoring soundtrack to each event of our lives as well. It is the message beneath the visible that I want to capture and share.

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A number of people have asked me about the music I used for the background of the slide show. The music is from the album “Immortal Memory” by Lisa Gerrard (of the film Gladiator fame) and Patrick Cassidy. The song is titled Amergin’s Invocation.

The music to a slide show is particularly important because it sets the mood and underlying theme.  This piece came only after I had already made seven or eight attempts to complete slide show and launch it. Every time something went amiss, one technical difficulty after another.  Expressing my exasperation, I was graciously offered the help of the photographer whom I most respect and admire, Regina Mountjoy of Recherche Photography. She has dazzled me for years with her rapturous images and her purely gorgeous slide shows. Her work represents the standard of photography that I aspire to and that is particularly true of her magnificent slide shows. You all will be hearing more about Regina in the near future when I launch my new “In the Spotlight” series of interviews with creative artists who are living out the calling and cost of being light-bearers through creative venues.

After all the stops and starts of putting this together, it was Regina who found the music. She said “It was manna from heaven.”  And the minute I heard it, I knew that was true.  Everything about it fits with what I felt the deep core of Oxbridge to be about. For all its gentleness and refinement, Oxbridge was, and still is, a call to reclaim something that was once ours.  A call to intellectual and spiritual arms, where our weapons are knowledge, truth, keyboards, pens, voices, paintbrushes, musical instruments, vision, conviction, fellowship, goodness,  hope and beauty.  Malcolm Guite said it quite succinctly at Bag End one night “Fifty years ago the devil took our stuff and we’re going to get it back!”   During one of the plenary sessions, Vishal Mangalwadi spoke the two words that explained the calling most clearly to me.  ”Gideon Band.”  We are a small band of people, like Gideon’s band of 300, called to go out into our wide world and reclaim minds and souls for what is Good, True and Beautiful.  For Christ – not in the vein of brutal conquering but in the spirit of releasing and renewing spiritual and cultural liberty.

IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHT OF LANCIA E. SMITH AND THE C.S. LEWIS FOUNDATION.

Daniel laughing at age two

Today is Daniel’s birthday.

My beautiful, prince-like, brown-eyed son.  We named him for the prophet Daniel after these words Youths without blemish, well-favored in appearance and skillful in all wisdom, discernment, and understanding, apt in learning knowledge, competent to stand and serve in the king’s palace¦. (Daniel 1:4)

He would be 35. Today marks another milestone that I will not celebrate with him. Try as I might to focus on life today with all its fullness and blessing, grief resolutely stands at the door of my mind and requires recognition. Despite deadlines and obligations and time-pressures I cannot make my thoughts or hands obey my will or string together another sentence about Shakespeare for school. The truth is liberating and it helps to stop pretending.

Daniel playing serious behind the chair

Every year it seems I unconsciously try to push away the reality of Daniel’s absence with tasks and relationships occupying the space in my life he would have still claimed. Mostly I try to avoid walking too near to such devastating and sacred ground. I fill the hours with present day trivialities to divert my attention to things less knee-bending. And yet every year I am called to kneel in heart and mind before the great I AM and make memorial with Him. Twenty years later I could still cry myself into vomiting if I let myself look at this too long or feel it too openly. And over this chasm of separation and loss  my hope is lain.

Long years now I have spent coming to terms with the Psalmist’s wisdom “ Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in matters too great or in things too wonderful for me. Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me [ceased from fretting]. Oh Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for ever. (Psalm 131, Amplified)  I know better now than to ask the fruitless question “Why?” and to rest quieted in trust of  God’s character.

Both so much younger then and Daniel was eye to eye with me

The day Daniel was born I could not have remotely imagined the impact that he would have on me or how profoundly I would become bound to him, even beyond this world. The day he died I could not have remotely imagined how permanent the alteration would be for me as well as for him. Daniel’s death compelled me to come into the presence of God on a level that had he lived I never could have. Nothing else in this life — other than the death of either of his sisters, had that happened — could have broken me more deeply.  Nothing else would ever have ushered me into that level of acknowledgement of my condition and God’s nature. No where else would I have met so thoroughly the furious, holy, immeasurable love of God Who made us both for Himself. The God Who holds us both in His great hands still and Whose plan for our lives exceeds all my imagination and comprehension.

All these tears have watered ground to bear good fruit.  I have loved other women’s sons with more openheartedness and humility than I would have had Daniel lived.  I have encouraged creativity in every one I’ve found it harbored in to honour all that I loved, and love still, in him. I have come to terms with and confessed on the most elemental level that I can experience, that God is God and I am not. I can say truly with Daniel and Job that the Lord is my High King of old and though He slay me yet will I trust Him.  I hold in fierce, unyielding confidence to the prophet Jeremiah’s recounting of the Lord’s own heart that “ He does not willingly grieve the children of men (Jeremiah 3:33).

Favourite last image of Daniel at 15

With unwavering hope I can still say with the Apostle Paul O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

Today I will water the garden and give my respectful nod to grief.  Tonight I will make a good dinner, enjoy the company of my husband, and go to sleep in trust that Daniel is indeed standing in the Lord’s presence and serving in His palace, just as the scripture we named him for says.

And tomorrow I will write about Shakespeare.

Brooke Fraser is an exceptional song writer and singer whose music has been an inspiration to me for the past several weeks while editing and preparing images from the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s triennial Oxbridge conference. Good friend and Lewis scholar Andrew Lazo introduced this song to me while we were staying at The Kilns this year with other Foundation staff members before Oxbridge began. From the moment I heard it I was enchanted.

The lyrics are superb and are based on C.S Lewis’s famous quote in Mere Christianity which reads in full this way:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and help others do the same.  This is one of my most cherished quotes by Lewis and equally deeply shared beliefs.  I have it framed in my own home as a daily reminder of this truth.

Brooke’s lyrics read as follows and I love every word!

If I find in myself
Desires nothing in this world can satisfy
I can only conclude
That I, I was not made for here

If the flesh that I fight
Is at best only light and momentary
Then of course, I’ll feel nude
When to where I’m destined I’m compared

[Chorus]
Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the mornin’
I will sigh and with all creation groan
As I wait for hope to come for me

Am I lost or just less found
On the straight or on the roundabout of the wrong way
Is this a soul that stirs in me
Is it breaking free, wanting to come alive

‘Cos my comfort would prefer for me to be numb
And avoid the impending birth of who I was born to become

Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the mornin’
I will sigh and with all creation groan
As I wait for hope to come for me

For we
We are not long here
Our time is but a breath
So we better breathe it
And I
I was made to live
I was made to love
I was made to know you

Hope
Is comin’ for me
Hope
Is comin’ for me
Hope
Is comin’ for me
Hope
He’s comin’

Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the mornin’, mornin’
I will sigh and with all creation groan
As I wait for hope to come for me, for me, for me, for me…