Not too long ago — right as I took off for South Africa this year — I received a most surprising request in my email from an artist asking for permission to use some portrait images that I shot last year in Oxford and Cambridge to create paintings from of Malcolm Guite. This was a totally new experience for me and my first response, like most visual artists I know, was to pull back to protect my “own” work. However, I also immediately thought of the culture of creative generosity that I see demonstrated by Malcolm himself and I was thankful for her offer of photo credit with a link back to my website. This request represented an unlooked for opportunity to learn how to behave with trust in context of creative community. I promptly said yes, even though I was nervous about it, and within days the resulting image appeared in my inbox and in Malcolm’s!   Such is God’s grace to us!

In the portrait by gifted painter Faye Hall  I am delighted to see a new interpretation of what I saw in those moments with Malcolm at The Kilns this past summer.  One of the things that so deeply struck me about this is the rare opportunity it gives to see what I see through someone else’s eye and heart and skill – depicted with skill and nuanced observation.  I see the unique qualities that painting can capture and interpret that cannot be done the same way through photography and I can delight in the sweet opportunity to collaborate with a fellow artist in the process of cultivating beauty to share with others. I am so grateful. You can directly link to Faye’s work on this piece here:  http://fayehall.com/2012/05/creativity-begets-creativity/.  And I heartily encourage you to look at the range of her remarkable work here: http://fayehall.com/category/paintings/

Here is the original image.

Faye shared with me a little bit of how she was drawn to create the painting as well as the two that are yet coming. “I work at Signpost Music, the indie record label for Canadian singer/songwriter Steve Bell. When I started to work for Steve in 2007, my desire to start painting again was revived by the inspiring photos Steve took of peoples from his travels to India and Ethiopia.

My hiatus from painting had previously been a result of working in the advertising business and raising my children. Once the inspiration returned, it has since been pouring out like a breach in a dam. I get inspiration from faces of all kinds. Malcolm Guite is a personal friend of Steve’s, and a curiosity to see some more photos of him caused me to “google” him, to see what was available. As soon as I saw some of the photos that Lancia had taken of him, I immediately contacted him to ask permission to paint a portrait. “The Hand” had to paint!

The result will be a set of three paintings – there were just too many great photos to choose from! “The Journey – Malcolm Guite” is the title of the first in the series. The other two will incorporate some personal handwriting by Malcolm, indicating some lines from a couple of Steve Bell’s favourite sonnets penned by Malcolm.”

We are looking forward to seeing more of Faye’s work and I’ll post links to the next two paintings as soon as those are ready for public release.  Blessings!!

Poetry and the role of the poet

In your roles as poet, priest and rock n’ roller – a binding commonality is the word: the Word of God, the Word made flesh, and the word that weaves language and spirit together to make beauty and truth a part of our everyday life. You use words with extraordinary mastery not only express yourself but to heal and to redeem, very much in the fashion that the Lord does Himself.

Why have you pursued poetry as your venue? Why poetry instead of great fiction like LOTR or The Chronicles of Narnia? Those genres draw on ancient theme, myths, metaphor and work to heal and to illuminate. What is the compelling call of poetry and song-lyrics for you?

Well your phrase ‘compelling call’ is just the right one. There is something in poetry itself, in the magic of rhythm and rhyme, which woke me up, and called me. Reading certain poems I would feel something quickening in me, ‘my heart in hiding stirred’ to borrow a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poetry, for me, always carries a sense of chant, and it is from chant that we get both, enchantment and chanson, both magic and song.

Of course there are other kinds of enchantment and other ways in which we can stir the imagination and produce an enhanced or transfigured vision of the world, and both LoTR and the Chronicles of Narnia are capable of that. But to write a great novel or a sustained work of mytho-poeic fantasy requires an architectonic vision and a sense of sweep and period which I don’t think I have. These are distinct from the gifts needed to be a lyric poet, which is my calling, though of course there are many things in common, and there is something magical and transformative about all imaginative writing whether in poetry or prose. Tolkien writes very well about this in his seminal essay On Fairy Stories. I was drawing on some of his phrasing and imagery in that essay when I wrote my sonnet Spell, as a sort of invocation of the magic potential of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet for all creative writers, but especially for the poet:

Spell
Summon the summoners, the twenty-six
enchanters. Spelling silence into sound,
they bind and loose, they find and are not found.
Re-call the river-tongues from Alph to Styx,
summon the summoners, the shaping shapes
the grounds of sound, the generative gramma
signs of the Mystery, inscribed arcana
runes from the root-tree written in the deeps,
leaves from the tale-tree lifted, swift and free,
shining, re-combining in their dance
the genesis of every utterance,
pattering the pattern of the Tree.
Summon the summoners, and let them sing.
The summoners will summon Everything.

What is significant to you about the publication of Faith, Hope and Poetry? What does it represent in your life?

It was a long time in the making, but completing and publishing Faith, Hope and Poetry has proved something of a turning point in my life.  As I mentioned earlier I had a few month’s sabbatical after seven years work as a parish priest and I found that what I most wanted to do was to re-immerse myself in poetry. In that intense few months, and the year that followed, I re-read the great treasury of English poetry from the Dream of the Rood in Anglo-Saxon through to the work of contemporaries like Seamus Heaney. It was immensely restorative and I found that it had renewed my vision and rekindled my faith. I began to share the experience through a series of lectures entitled Faith Hope and Poetry, which eventually grew into the book. But as the book grew I realized it was going to be more than just a collection of essays on favourite poems. I began to see that poetry was meeting a deep need in me and in others because there was a fundamental imbalance in our culture, an imbalance between reason and imagination, and that my book needed to be a defense of imagination and a plea for restored balance. In particular I saw the need to defend the role of imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, distinct from and yet complementary to reason, not just some private subjective mythmaking, but a real clue about how things actually are. So in the end the book became a bit of a manifesto, a rallying call to resist the bleak reductive materialism of our age, not only for the sake of the gospel as I understand it but for the sake of truth itself.

Would you expand a bit on what Reverend Rowan William refers to as “the theology of imagination”? It sounds like it has a connection to C.S. Lewis’ phrase ‘a baptized imagination’ and yet those two are different things.

Well in some ways the phrase ‘theology of imagination’ goes right to the heart of what I was doing in Faith, Hope and Poetry. If I was to defend Imagination as a truth-bearing faculty I had to answer the questions, “Where does it come from?” “Why, and under what circumstances should it be trusted?” “What kind of truth is it telling us?” And to answer those questions required deep reflection on the doctrine of creation, on God as our maker, on what it means to say that we are made in his image, in the image of a maker, a creative artist. Reflecting on these led me from Creation to Incarnation, to what it means to say ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’. I began to see strong parallels between the urge to make and shape and create which is in our hearts and what the Bible tells us about God as a creator. And when I began to examine the accounts that poet’s give about what is going on in the act of imaginative creation I found that they all used essentially theological language. The key insight came when I realized that Shakespeare’s great description of the poetic imagination at work, (you remember the passage: ‘the poets eye …doth glance from heaven to earth from earth to heaven and as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown the poets pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name’) I realized that this passage is in fact a description of incarnation, of a ‘word’, an ‘apprehension’ being ‘made flesh’ ‘bodied forth’ as Shakespeare says. And so I came to see that the artist’s desire to incarnate a meaning in a particular embodied form is something that comes from God, something that is only possible because God has already done it and has made a universe in which it can be done, and that all successful artistic, imaginative embodiment of ‘the true the good and the beautiful’ involves participation in some degree in this primal act of God. So that is something of what I mean by a theology of Imagination. Now the question of whether or not we have a ‘baptised imagination’, as Lewis used that term, is distinct, but not unrelated. Our imagination is, I believe, part of the ‘imago dei’, the image of God in us. But like every other part of us it is both God-given and at the same time shadowed and fallen. We can and do have what the Bible calls ‘vain imaginations’; false or empty shapings of the fantasy which merely serve the fallen isolated ego and do not participate, as imagination should, in the deep well springs that make and shape God’s good creation. So imagination needs to be cleansed and redeemed.  And it seems to be that our own individual imagination is at least partly cleansed and redeemed when we enter into and enjoy the works of someone else’s redeemed imagination. That’s part of the good that good reading does for us and in us. So Lewis says that reading the great imaginative works of George Macdonald, and reading Milton and Spenser, had the effect of cleansing or ‘baptising’ his imagination! Even before the rest of his conscious and rational self was ready to acknowledge the truths of the gospel his imagination already apprehended in advance. In fact I came to realize that Lewis’s personal experience and the eventual healing and integration of the split between imagination and reason in his life was a symptom of the same split in the wider society of the modern age and therefore his healing and integration was also a tremendous and prophetic sign of hope that this deep split could also be healed in the wider society, that the baptized imagination could in the end bring the whole person, in all their faculties to baptism and renewal in Christ. In that sense just as the imagination is sometimes the forerunner of reason in our journey to faith, so I think Lewis, and the Inklings more generally are forerunners, showing in their lives and work how our wider culture can be healed and return to faith.

What about your chapter in the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis in which you wrote the chapter on Lewis as poet?

Well that was written after I had finished Faith, Hope and Poetry and in many ways it felt like a continuation of things I had discovered there, almost as if writing it had given me insights which allowed me to read Lewis’s poetry with new eyes and see how significant it really is. Lewis under-rated himself as a poet and he has been under-rated or ignored by the literary establishment. So my task in that chapter was to re-assess him, read him afresh in light of all that has happened in the worlds of poetry and wider society since he was writing and make the case for his relevance and importance now. If I have succeeded it was partly by re-assessing his poetry alongside that of TS Eliot and showing how much more they had in common than either was sometimes willing to admit, and also by showing that at the core of Lewis’s poetic vision was a project to re-integrate reason and imagination, both arising in us from the Logos, both necessary if we are to live fully freely.  And that project of reintegration is even more necessary now than it was then. This is what I said near the end of that chapter:

“Lewis has sometimes been dismissed as archaic and out of touch but in retrospect his efforts in poetry, as in other fields, are much more contemporary and much more keenly directed to the crises of modernity that he has been given credit for. There are many complex links between his work and that of his two great contemporaries Yeats and Eliot. He is not perhaps a great poet in the same sense that they were, but he is a great deal better than the long neglect of his verse would imply. There is a clear internal coherence between all his efforts in every field. Taken together these efforts constitute an attempt at the redemptive re-integration of Reason and Imagination, the broken modes of our being and knowing.”

In fact the work on Lewis as a poet sent me back to all the Inklings with a new eye, and I began to see how much more radical and prophetic they are than is usually supposed, and my next book “The Inklings; fantasists or prophets?” is going to develop those ideas further.

One of my favourite quotes is by Leonard Cohen. He said “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”  

Would you discuss the influence of “secular” poets (Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac) and how their work has acted as a bridge for you to see mystery, particularly in areas of life often considered “profane” and non-sacred?

I love Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, and they have been very important to me throughout my adult life and indeed since my early teens. I’m glad you put the word “secular” in inverted commas. We need to think carefully about what we mean by that word. Clearly they are ‘secular’ in the sense that their work is not part of any sacred scripture, and they are not (usually) writing overtly religious tracts or ‘propagandising for any religious movement or church. Further, they are widely listened to and followed by people from any and every faith and none, all of whom find meaning and truth in their work. In that sense you can call them secular, but in another sense they are not secular at all. First because, like the rest of us they are made in God’s image and cannot help reflecting something of his truth and light, further they are, as poets, deep truth-tellers and truth belongs to Christ wherever it is found because He is Truth. Also since God became fully human in Christ, and took our humanity with him, wounds and all, into the heart of Heaven, then anyone who tells us honestly what it is like to be a wounded human being is telling us something about the experience of Christ and so of God. So even the most ‘secular’ writer may end up giving us insights into the sacred. There is something further of course about Dylan and Cohen, which is that they both have a deeply embedded Jewish heritage which has soaked right into their poetic imagination, deeply informed by the psalms, the prophets and wisdom literature, and then they have both, in their different ways, also absorbed the imagery and resonances of a Christian culture.

Certainly there are songs by both of them that feel like sacred music to me and are totally consonant with my understanding of life as a Christian. Cohen’s ‘That don’t make it junk’ for example, and Dylan’s Every Grain of Sand. The text of my paper on the religious roots of Dylan’s work is here: http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/new-writings/

Kerouac is another writer whom most might think of as ‘secular’ or even profane but whose writing is paradoxically rich in spiritual insight. My appreciation and understanding of Kerouac has been taken to a new level through my friendship with Gerry Nicosia, the author of the brilliant Kerouac biography Memory Babe and now a new book about on the road. When I was in San Francisco to do some poetry readings with him he took me on a Kerouac pilgrimage and we talked together about how deeply embedded Christian catholic imagery was in Kerouac’s imagination, especially images of angels and Our Lady. He took me to the church where Jack and Neal Cassady were suddenly moved to pray together and we thought about how Saint Francis was in some ways a proto beat! I gathered some of these memories into my poem ‘cloud-hidden‘.

In the interview with The Journal of the Duke Divinity School, July 21, 2009 you made a comment – “The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that ‘a poet is a person who takes the vision of the child into the powers of the adult.’ It’s the expression of a childlike vision through adult powers” reminds me of a comment made by Michael Ward in a recent podcast the original meaning of “poet” is maker. Is there some further light you could shed for us on that concept of Poet as Maker and Creator?

What would you say the role of the poet is in contemporary culture? Is it different now, in your opinion than it was, say two or three hundred years ago?

The Greek verb poiein means ‘to make’ and so poets are indeed Makers, and shapers. In earlier cultures that role and its wider benefit to the whole community was much clearer. Poets kept and shaped the great stories, the mythoi that bound people to life , that reconnected them both with the sacred and with their own inner being. And that, in my view continues to be the role of true poetry, in its widest sense today. And in the wider sense of poetry I would include the great story telling in novel and film and the other making and shaping arts. But the specific role of a poet, as a maker and shaper in words, a chanter and enchanter of language, has become more problematic. That is partly because many (though not all!) modern poets have ceased either to chant or to enchant. Like other modern artists, they have been so impressed and distressed by the fragmentation of our culture, the prevailing mood of alienation, absurdity, and crisis of meaning, that they have, in some sense capitulated to it and made poetry which is itself so broken, alienated and sometimes deliberately ‘unmeaning’ and obscure that many people have simply ceased to read it! I think this is bad, both for those individual poets and for poetry itself. In previous ages poets were central to life and culture and were looked to as a source of Wisdom and these poets always acknowledged that the wisdom in their poetry was mediated through them, that it did not entirely originate in them as persons. The last great poet in England who could truly have been considered a national poet, someone who was central to the whole life and culture of the nation who ‘purified the dialect of the tribe’ who articulated our deepest longings, but also brought us warning and prophecy, and was widely read and popular, was Alfred Lord Tennyson. I admire Tennyson because although his poetry was popular and widely accessible, it was also beautifully wrought, full of great latent meaning that would only emerge after many readings, and capable of dealing with the darkest of human experiences as well as the most joyful, as in In Memoriam for example. Tennyson shows that you don’t have to be obscure to be profound and that being lucid is not the same thing a being trite.

I hope that in the end modern poetry will re-emerge from a period of willful obscurity, ugliness and ‘difficulty’ and dare again to sing clearly, to chant and enchant, and there are of course some really great poets in our own age who already do that; Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Ceslaw Milscz , Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver among them. In fact I think there are more signs of hope in the North American poetic scene, with the consistently lucid and beautiful poetry of writers like Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle and Dana Gioia than on this side of the pond where many poets seem still to be trapped in the cage of tricksy, self-referential post-modernism.
I think a change is coming, and poetry will have the confidence again to write clearly on the open page of life and when that happens people will return to the poets, seeking and finding what Heaney has beautifully called: a draught of the clear water of transformed understanding and fills the reader with a momentary sense of freedom and wholeness.” (The Redress of Poetry page XV)

——-

It is my great honour to have been able to present this interview series with Dr. Guite,

and my fervent hope that we will be able to collaborate again in the near future on other projects as there are many more questions to explore.

For your continued reading related to Faith, Hope and Poetry –

An excellent review of Faith, Hope and Poetry can be found on Dr. Holly Ordway’s website Hieropraxis here:

http://www.hieropraxis.com/2011/10/literary-apologetics-faith-hope-and-poetry-by-malcolm-guite-an-extended-review/

Many thanks and blessings to each of you! 

 How do you manage to be a poet, a priest, a song writer and musician, a scholar, a husband and father, a friend to many and still keep a sense of what is core and central to who you are personally? 

At best, all these different roles are complementary, and mutually supportive, and often they are; the call to be a poet supports the songwriting on the one hand, and the priestly call on the other, especially in preaching and liturgy, the scholarship feeds the poetry and poetry, I hope, gives the kiss of life to scholarship, and all the personal roles as husband father and friend, the stuff of ordinary and extraordinary life, are themselves both the subjects of poetry and song and also of course the very medium in and through which priesthood is exercised. That’s ‘at best’, and of course it’s not always ‘at best’. At worst these roles tangle and confuse and pull one another apart, engaging in one feels like stealing time from the other in a welter of competing claims as to what is ‘core’ and what is ‘distraction’. So, as your question rightly suggests I have to stay in touch with who I am personally, with being one and the same person in all these different roles, with staying true to my core vocation. Learning to do that is a matter of balance and discernment, and balance and discernment are two things we keep losing and having to find again.

Why not be content with being a professor or a priest?

When I was first ordained I did in fact lay aside both Academia and writing poetry for about seven years in order to concentrate on and learn deeply my priestly vocation, and life in my parishes was totally absorbing and demanding so it felt right to let the other fields lie fallow. But after seven years I was given a mini ‘sabbatical’ for three months, and in that time the desire, indeed the deep need, to re-engage with poetry, both reading and writing became over whelming, and out of my intense reading in that period arose the whole vision for what became Faith Hope and Poetry, so in that sense academia also re-emerged. But poetry and intellectual life were given back to me transformed, as an unexpected gift from God, and no longer in competition with the priestly vocation. I think there is a principle of letting go to receive, of death and resurrection, at work here. If I hadn’t given them up they might have become idols but now I receive them not as in competition with my Christian and priestly vocation, but as part of it.

How do you balance poetry, rock and roll, and being priest – three seemingly completely different areas of creative life?  And then how do you balance the walk of creativity and the reality of daily life – the interweaving of the mundane, the wearying, even the dark parts of life with the creative call and promise?

Well, of course I don’t always succeed in balancing it! Sometimes one or other of the spinning plates crashes to the ground and there is a bit of a mess. Most of the time though I’d say its all made possible by the fact that all those three things; Poetry. Rock and roll, and being a Priest, necessarily involve receiving as well as giving. They are all about something that comes through you, rather than something that comes from you. You can’t write poetry without reading it and to be a poet is to belong to a community of writers over time, a tradition. It involves drawing from very deep wells before you can have anything to pour out yourself and those deep wells, in the poetic tradition are profoundly refreshing to both soul and body. Likewise Rock’n’roll begins with listening, with being uplifted, enchanted and energized by a certain kind of music, so much so that your feet can’t keep still and you want to jump up and make that kind of music yourself. So again, you may expend energy and be drained playing the music but you are also re-charged at the same time. And I must say there have been times when I have been fed up with the narrowness, the stuffiness and false respectability of some ‘church culture’ and getting out with Mystery Train to tear the house down on a Saturday night with the amps turned up to ‘11’ has been exactly what I needed. And finally of those three, ‘being a priest’ is the one that is most completely about receiving, about things coming through you, not originating in you. Two bits of poetry come to mind if I try to describe what that’s like. One is from a George Herbert poem called The Windows:

LORD, how can man preach thy eternall word ?
He is a brittle crazie glasse :
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.

Even when we are at our most brittle and ‘crazed’ something can come through and we ourselves are warmed and illuminated by the passage of that light. The other passage is really a phrase from a Seamus Heaney poem, the Harvest Bow. In this poem he describes a harvest bow, plaited slowly by his father, which he still keeps on the dresser after his Father’s death, and at the end of the poem he says:

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

There’s something about that final image of the dry plaited bow left burnished and warm by the passage of the Divine that resonates with me.

In every life shadows fall. None of us escape the effects of living in a fallen world or carrying out our lives in gradually decaying bodies. None one lives in a world that is sunlit and happy all the time. However, it is a long observed pattern that creative people seem to wrestle more with those shadows than others. I don’t know if that is always true but I do know that I have never met anyone given to being a creative person that did not have lifelong burdens and shadows to overcome, often in the very process of creating.

How do you overcome the difficulties you encounter in your own life and reconcile their reality with the beauty that you also must bear witness to? How is it that you are able to see what is bitter and not what it ought to be and yet be able to also witness the Beauty that is beyond it?

You are certainly right about the burdens and shadows, and right to say that a creative vocation seems to involve a particular kind of exposure and vulnerability to periods of darkness and depression. I think there are several important truths to notice here. The first is that sometimes tears and grief are the right, and indeed, only possible response to things. The Bible is full of tears and outpourings of grief, and there is no promise that we will not shed them, only that one day God himself will wipe the tears from our eyes. And He can only do that because as a human being He has shed them himself, and knows from the inside what the depth of our agony can be. So there is a proper place for the depiction of suffering and the expression of bitterness in Art as in life. We don’t need some anodyne sugary literature saying peace, peace, when there is none. But it is also true that the agony in the Garden and Good Friday are not the end of the story. ‘Love is come again like wheat that springeth green’, and Love has the last word. If a poem is to be true it must somehow be adequate to both these dimensions, and it maybe necessary therefore for the poet to experience both extremes, both the highs and the lows unalloyed. However, it sometimes happens that we go beyond an imaginative empathetic experience of the darkness and difficulty of life, and instead we get trapped in it. We fall into a pit and cannot rise out of it by our own strength. Then we must not be afraid to call for and receive help, both human and divine.

How do you wage war against the darkness and the visits from the ‘black dog’?

Yes, It was Samuel Johnson, who called it that, and Churchill, amongst others, followed suit. In my experience it’s sometimes best to let the black dog lie out there on the edge of the fire-lit circle, and maybe even sometimes take him for a walk, rather than wage all out war, which may just strengthen him. The main thing is not to feed him. He likes to be fed with guilt and anxiety, any number of impossible or self-contradictory tasks and goals, that sort of thing. Time off, a good balance between structured and unstructured time, social time and solitude, these all help to keep him at bay. Contact with the earth, with all things green and growing, with flowing water, being afloat, these things all help me. In the end though it’s sometimes just a question of gritted teeth and the courage to endure. That’s when having a companion who understands, and knows there’s no easy fix really helps. The best picture of that for me is the moving scene in the Lord of the Rings when Sam realizes that, however much he wants to, he cannot actually carry Frodo’s burden for him, or relieve him of it, but then he suddenly sees what he can do and says ‘If I can’t carry the burden, at least I can carry you’ and when Frodo can no longer even crawl he lifts him on his shoulder and carries him. So even though Frodo is still weighed by his burden, his sight, darkening, he knows there is someone there with him, someone taking practical care, helping him to inch forward on the journey.

A perennial theme in your work is your welcome nod of acknowledgment to old things pagan that are steeped in a foretelling kind of beauty, something you share in kind with both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. You allude to this in your wonderful piece In Drear-nighted December, begin to explore it in your comments in your Chaplain’s letter with remarks on “The Old Names” and openly explore it in your song The Green Man.

How do you see pagan language and literature working as a foreshadowing of the Good, the True and the Beautiful that is realized and revealed in Christ?  What is it about the old things, the ancient stories and words that draws you? 

Well of course the word pagan originally derives from the Latin word ‘pagus’ meaning a field, the pagans were the country people, living in the fields (Just as heathen in English originally means, from the heath, a heath dweller) and so there is that link with the earth and the countryside, with rootedness in the soil, something of the good earth, a link and connection we all need, and never more so than in the present age. But the good earth doesn’t stay good, it doesn’t blossom and become fruitful, until it receives the light of the sun and ‘the gentle rain of heaven’. I think, as you yourself have suggested, that the pagan traditions were a kind of beautiful but incomplete preparation for and forshadowing of the fulfillment that was to come, in the fullness of time, with Christ, who comes down to us like dew upon the field and rises like the sun. Christ is more than Apollo but he is not less than Apollo, He is more than Pan, but he is not less than Pan. And every good thing that was forshadowed in Pan must be fulfilled in Christ, which is why even the old stories of Pan himself can still kindle our hearts for Christ. This seems to have been St. Paul’s understanding when he went to the Areopagus (Areo-Mars, Pagus- Field!) in Athens and saw the statue of the unknown God and said, ‘He whom you worship without knowing, him I preach.’ Now of course, as Paul rightly goes on to say, now we have Christ we can read and see the old stories in a new light, and that new light will fulfill some things which were always of God in the old Way, but it will also expose, judge and, if we let it, heal, what was dark and unhelpful. CS Lewis expresses all this very beautifully in Prince Caspian where the river god asks Aslan to free him from his chains and Aslan summons Bachus whose vines break the bridge, and then, if you remember the girls have a glorious romp with Bachus and the maenads but at the end, when they are collapsed in a happy heap Lucy says that was fun but I shouldn’t have felt quite safe with Bachus and his fierce maenads if Aslan hadn’t been there ‘ and Susan says ‘I should think not!’ (I am quoting from memory. I notice that this was strong meat- teaching for adults –Walden Media couldn’t cope and omitted it from the film!)

There is also a particular reason why a poet needs to have an inclusive and redemptive account of the pagan past, and that is simply because so much of the great poetry on which we draw and which forms our mind and culture was written by Pagans! There is a long tradition of reading Virgil in particular, in the Light of Christ. His fourth eclogue, in particular seems almost a prophecy f the coming of Christ, and Dante, who always honours Virgil, makes him a companion and guide to Christian souls on their journey, though he also makes it clear that because Virgil is a pagan he can only take us so far, but not ultimately to the end of our journey, that needs Christian faith and grace, and that of course is where Beatrice comes in.

Part 3 to follow – stay tuned!!

If you wish to use the images please contact me directly regarding their acquisition and usage.

Thank you so much for your courtesy!

Revd. Dr. A.M. Guite, (rhymes with quite) lives out many roles – poet, priest, rock n’ roller, scholar. He is also husband, father, friend to many, and follower of Christ.  He is the Chaplain of Girton College  in Cambridge. Prolific writer and author of several books including the superlative Faith, Hope and Poetry, the chapter on Lewis as Poet in the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, numerous articles, countless poems and sonnets, he is also a generous blogger and podcaster.  Malcolm plays in the Cambridge rock band Mystery Train and has two CDs out – The Green Man and Dancing through the Fire.   Had he lived as a contemporary of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I am quite certain he would have been a member of the Inklings. Indeed, in many ways Malcolm represents a living example of what members of the Inklings were during their time, but I personally fancy that he perhaps kinder and more accessible to the everyday man and woman.

I am humbled by Malcolm’s intellectual capacity but more humbled by the way he makes little of it with others, treating all people with remarkable dignity.  He uses his gifts and his skills truly to cultivate what is Good, True and Beautiful, every day without fanfare or self focus. His poetry expresses in every way what I so often apprehend but am unable to articulate. Yet he is the first to be happy settling in with a pipe and a good ale. He reminds me not only of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in that regard, but he also reminds me that life is good and meant to be enjoyed in all its simple, real pleasures.

——— 

I read in an interview by Karen Wells that you lived part of your early childhood years in Nigeria and believe that your parents were missionaries. Is that correct?

Yes, I was born in Ibadan in Nigeria in 1957 and indeed, my first name is Ayodeji, a traditional Yoruba name which means ‘the second joy’, a name suggested by the Yoruba nurse who helped me and my mother through a difficult birth and probably saved both of our lives. My parents weren’t actually missionaries, though my father was deeply engaged with the Methodist church in Nigeria and, in his role as a Methodist lay preacher,  used to take us with him on journeys into remote rural areas to preach and speak at local churches. He was in fact a lecturer in Classics at the University of Ibadan and fully involved in the life and worship of the ecumenical chapel there.

What influence would you say that living in Nigeria as a child had on your perception of the world and first encounters with mystery?

That’s a very good question! I think the influence was profound, perhaps more than I can know, since not all the memories are at the surface of my mind. But some things I can remember vividly; delighting (and indeed dancing!) in the huge rainstorms and tropical downpours, gathering fruit from the garden for breakfast, being taken by my Yoruba Nanny to market stalls and local feasts where I heard Yoruba spoken and sung with drumming and dancing, but also coming home to very ‘English’ ex-pat pleasures; my father playing English hymns and songs on the piano and my mother telling me the stories of King Arthur and reciting English and Scots poetry, being taught, on the one hand by our Nigerian gardener to climb trees and use a little bow and arrow, and on the other by my father to play cricket and soccer! I think I learned something from that about delighting in variety, about translations and connections, about being ‘at home’, and the same person, in more than one culture.  Like all children I had a strong sense of awe and wonder but I was fortunate to grow up amongst people, both African and European, for whom a response of worship and celebration was a natural and central part of life.  I think a lot of what adults think of as ‘maturing’, ‘coming to faith’, ‘spiritual growth’, is really about recovering what once came naturally in childhood.

I have never heard how you first came to Christ for yourself. What was your journey to faith? Did you always have a sense of God’s presence with you or is that something that perhaps you had to fight for?

Ah, that’s a long story, but here’s a glimpse. As I’ve said I was fortunate to grow up in a Christian household and as a child I had a very strong sense of the presence of God everywhere. Just that sense that Wordsworth writes about in his ‘Intimations of immortality from recollections in early childhood’ I also had, from an early age, some strong awareness and presentiments of darkness, and at one point I suffered very badly from nightmares. The first specifically ‘religious’ or visionary experience I can remember arose from that. I woke up terrified once and afraid to go back to sleep, I must have been about 6, and I prayed for protection, with my eyes closed, and when I opened them again a saw what seemed to be a tall column of white light, like a fluted pillar, by my bed, standing between me and the dark door of which I was afraid. I felt completely at peace and secure and went back to sleep. I didn’t tell anyone, and might have forgotten or misremembered this, were it not for the fact that, years later, in my mid-teens, when I was trying to be an atheist, I happened to glimpse a broken marble column lit by a shaft of sunlight in the ruins of the forum in Rome, and it suddenly brought back the memory of my childhood ‘angel’ because it felt and looked the same; shining, ancient, and indubitably there.

Unfortunately those childhood awarenesses didn’t last, or were buried under other experiences, and I had a very difficult passage through my teens. I had been sent to a boarding school in England which was a terrible place (readers of CS Lewis’s Surprised by Joy will understand what I mean.) In an atmosphere of guilt, oppression and general alienation, I deliberately repudiated my childhood faith and tried for some years to maintain a totally ‘rational’ ‘scientific materialist’ account of life, with a reductive material take on everything, strongly influenced by the behaviourism of BF Skinner, and a kind of bitter existentialist bravado in the face of the absurd. (I was unfortunately a bit precocious and you have to imagine an angst-ridden fifteen year old in a cold school dormitory reading Becket and Jean-Paul Sartre with a flashlight under the bedclothes!)

However the first tiny crack in what I thought of as my ‘total atheism’ appeared a couple of years later, in that same summer in Rome to which I have already alluded. My father had a sabbatical year in Rome and I spent all my school holidays with my family there, and as well as the strange epiphany, or memory of an epiphany, in the Forum, I had another absolutely formative experience there, which was the ‘discovery’ of Keats and through Keats of the whole realm of poetry. I was taken to the house where he died on the Spanish steps and read ‘Bright Star’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ there with an experience of mysterious joy and longing. After that I read everything by Keats and Shelley over and over again and began to try and write poetry myself. I soon realized that poetry itself, this potent and mysterious source, this mystery in which the music of words transforms vision and gives glimpses of something both in and beyond our experience of the world, was not going to be accounted for by the blind interaction of molecules and the unwinding of enzymes! I was by no means a believer and certainly not a Christian but equally I was no longer an arrogant atheist. I was an agnostic explorer open to anything and everything that might touch upon the mystery of our being here but always and especially to poetry.

These glimpses in Rome were followed by others, this time deeply connected with particular places whose history and holiness I didn’t understand at the time, particularly at Glen Colmcille in Ireland and Iona in Scotland, places that it turned out had deep connections with my family history and even my name. But the real turning point came in my final year as an undergraduate in Cambridge. My imagination had already been baptized (to borrow Lewis’s phrase) by all the poetry I was reading but I still didn’t actually believe, and then one day in the summer of 1979 when I was on my own in a house in London reading the Psalms as ‘research’ for a literary paper I had a sudden and overwhelming awareness of the presence of God. One moment I was alone in the room, myself the centre of my own little self-constructed world, the next it was as though I had been flung an infinite distance to some edge or margin, to make room for the enormous  presence and pressure of sheer Being and Holiness that filled the room. I felt the ground go from beneath my feet and suddenly realized that I was utterly dependant, that I was hanging by a thread. But I was content to hang by a thread if only to know that there was, at the heart of things, and radiating everywhere, this Holy Presence. That sense of His Presence of His Being at the centre remained and has, in one sense, never gone away, though coming to Christ, which is what happened next, has changed the way I understand it.  My experience at first was like that described in Isaiah where he sees the Lord, lifted up, and says ‘woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips and I have seen the Lord.’ He knows that God is present in His Holiness and Glory, and yet he feels personally that he doesn’t belong there, in that Holy Presence.

About five or six months later I went with a friend to hear a Franciscan friar speaking in Cambridge and it was while he was speaking that I became a Christian. He was talking about childbirth, about how the babe is utterly vulnerable, utterly dependant on the parent, at first literally dependant on the umbilical cord for everything that gives it life and then, even after birth, dependant and waiting on the love of its parents at every turn. Now while he was speaking I was thinking ‘yes, this is just how I feel towards God, who is always here, I depend on Him for everything, I hang from a thread, he has everything, I have nothing.’ And I thought that was what the Franciscan was going to say, but he didn’t. What he said was. ‘Even though we all depend on God, the Almighty Creator, who gives us at every moment our existence, that is not how God chooses to come to us! No he comes to us as the tiny vulnerable child, He comes to love and to be loved on our terms not his. The baby Jesus was utterly dependent on his mother, he came humbly and vulnerably to her to give and love and affection just as he comes to us…’ and somehow as he was speaking, a complete transformation happened. It’s not that I ceased to be aware of God in transcendent glory, it’s just that I suddenly also felt and knew Him as human and personal too, and suddenly that made me feel, for the first time, that it was ok to be vulnerable and human and personal myself, that I was no longer weighed in the balance and found wanting, it was ok to be human, ok to be me. So after that I went and made confession to a priest and was confirmed and received into the church.

Would you give us a glimpse of the process in your life that led you to become a priest and to serve Christ’s Body in the Anglican Church? 

The call to priesthood was a much more gradual process then that intense conversion experience. After my conversion I was confirmed in the Anglican church, largely because I was so inspired by the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and TS Eliot, all Anglicans, and because the sacramental life of the church, especially Holy Communion are central to my life as they are in Anglicanism, though I don’t think the human divisions we make between churches and denominations are real, ultimately there is only one body. After a period of teaching in high school I began work on a PhD about John Donne and the combination of immersing myself in the work of a great priest-poet and of seeing the deep need for mission and spiritual nurture in the high school where I taught led me to wonder if God might be calling me to serve him as a priest, and particularly as a priest in the world of secular education, so I began to test and confirm that vocation. As part of that process I went on a retreat in which I was asked to discern the heart of my vocation, as a person, not just a priest, and to write down in one sentence, the answer to the question ‘why are you here?’ I wrote ‘I am here to use my love of language and my gifts with it, to kindle my own and other people’s imagination for Christ.’ That’s still my mission and still the criterion whereby I make choices about what to do and what not to do.

Malcolm on the porch of The Temple of Peace, August 2011

What role does inspiration play in your work?  Where does inspiration come from for you? What are sources of Joy?

Now there’s a question! At one level, everything is gift; to live, to breathe, to comprehend, to write, to create. Even when we are ‘working’ at these things with all our might, it is still a gift, still a grace to be alive at all and able to work at anything. So I don’t think of the creative process as a certain amount of hard work topped up by inspiration, I see the work itself as the inspiration. Having said that there are of course times when one is more or less aware of the nudge, the proffer, the gift of words and lines and images, arising as given things from an unguessed at depth and one receives them gladly. I find inspiration throughout nature but especially in images of light and water, light reflecting on water. The lines in my sonnet ‘O Oriens’: “ So every trace of light begins a grace/ In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam/ Is somehow a beginning and a calling;” are literally true.

I think the poetic language about waiting on a muse is something to take very seriously and I think the reality behind every Muse is the Holy Spirit. But if you are going to wait on the muse, you need a trysting place to meet her in and my trysting place is the hut at the bottom of my garden, which you have visited and photographed and which I call The Temple of Peace.

Maggie and Malcolm at their vicarage in Cambridge

What role does your wife Maggie play in being a source of grounding for you? Does a close circle of old relationships support creative growth for you?

Maggie is absolutely essential and without her I probably wouldn’t be writing, or possibly even living. ‘Grounding’ is absolutely the right word. There is a fly-away, slightly chaotic element in my nature which is good for poetry but not very good for living. I oscillate between heights and depths and the depths can be dark and debilitating, Maggie brings balance, order, security and love exactly where they’re needed. I do also have a good circle of close friends who have known me of old and with whom I can be completely ‘unbuttoned’ and relaxed. We don’t necessarily talk about ‘creativity’ or anything like that but they are aware of my writing and support it. There are some living writers whom I am lucky to know personally and who do support and inspire me, but I also take constant inspiration from, and feel in close communion with certain poets ‘in the pantheon’ whom I feel as companions. I have already mentioned Keats, but I should also say that in their different ways Coleridge and Tennyson have each become a huge example and inspiration to me, I read their letters and notebooks frequently and feel in close touch.

 Part 2 and Part 3 to follow!

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!