If you bop on over to Forgotten Classics, you’ll find a podcast of P.G. Wodehouse’s short story “Leave it to Jeeves,” read by yours truly.
It seems that Sarah Reinhard liked the readings I did a while back of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and she and Julie ganged up on me at the Catholic New Media Conference. I’d been at a loss for what to read next, and then realized that some of Wodehouse’s earlier books, including My Man Jeeves, are now in the public domain. Woohoo!
It’s Tuesday. It was a Tuesday, eleven years ago, that I came downstairs for breakfast, in a hurry to get to work, and found my wife watching the news on TV. “Will, a plane hit one of the World Trade Center buildings.”
I didn’t get it. I thought it was a small plane, an accident, I wondered how a small plane had gotten into that airspace to begin with. It took a while for Jane to make it clear that the plane was a 747, and it was a while longer before I realized that it wasn’t an accident.
I think that the penny dropped as we watched the second plane hit the second tower. And then, as we watched and listened, the first tower collapsed.
It wasn’t an accident; it was a terrorist act, an attempt to scare us and break our wills, to break our country. It was deeply, deeply wrong.
So the lightning; now for the lightning bug.
In recent weeks (a phrase I could have written with equal justice at any time in the last ten years) I’ve seen scorn, bile, foul language, and vitriol in on-line forums and comment boxes. Much of it is directed at shutting down voices the commenter doesn’t like, not by reasoned argument, but by shouting and fear. It’s an attempt to scare the speaker, to break his will, to take him out of the dialog.
This isn’t the lightning; it’s only the lightning bug. It doesn’t kill people. Purveyors of combox hatred aren’t mass murderers. Still, the lightning bug does resemble the lightning in its own small way. And it, also, is deeply wrong.
Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, is not the book I was looking for.
What it is, pretty clearly, is a reworking of the legends of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin in present day England (remembering always that the book was written in the mid-1980’s; “present day” has changed quite a lot since then). So we’ve got a Faerie Queen, and a man bound by her, and the plucky girl who is going to free him. (This isn’t a spoiler; we know she has to, because of narrative causality.)
In general, I really like Jones’ work. I’ve reviewed many of her books over the last couple of years, and haven’t found any out-and-out clunkers. Nor is Fire and Hemlock and out-and-out clunker. But I confess I found it slow to get started, occasionally tedious, and not particularly satisfying. The ending was particularly opaque to me. Which is to say, I know more or less what happens, but the logic of it eluded me completely.
I might be in a minority. The re-issue I read has an introduction by author Garth Nix, where he goes on and on about how this is his favorite of Jones’ books. He lists others that he likes (all of which I like as well), and he talks about how he re-reads this book every so often and how he always finds new stuff in it. I can well believe this.
I can well believe this, because this re-issue ends with an essay by Jones on just how she constructed the beast. And it turns out that Jones is not one of those authors who just starts with a neat opening scene, and then follows the characters to find out what happens. No, she’s the sort of author who constructs every little bit of the story to a carefully-defined plan. And it turns out that she’s not just building in Thomas and Tam, she’s building in the entire range of European folklore and adding several heaping dollops of T.S. Eliot. (Yes, I know I just mixed a metaphor. I did it on purpose, because turn-about is fair play.)
Now, I’m impressed by authors who can do such layered, detailed, multi-faceted work. But in this case, I think maybe she let love of her subject carry her a little way overboard. Or possibly I’m just a little too straightforward, I dunno.
So you’ve begun to pursue the interior life. You’re learning to respond to the Lord’s nudges. Maybe you’ve even asked Him to help you hunger and thirst for righteousness. So what happens next?
It’s like this. There’s this person you’ve been bumping into. Maybe you meet them at the grocery store, or in the hallway at work, or at the gas station. And you find that when you bump into them, you have one of those neat conversations that just goes on and on, even though you both really need to be going. So what’s the next thing to do?
Well, if you want to be friends with this person you plan to get together with them on purpose instead of accidentally. You have them over for dinner, or you go see a movie, or you watch a football game together. You hang out.
And that’s the next thing to do with Jesus. You need to hang out with Him, spend time with Him, make it a point to spend part of each day with Him. It can be difficult to make the time; but it needs to be done. Here are some ways that I’ve found time for God.
First, I don’t usually turn on the music when I’m in the car by myself. Instead, I try to spend that time with God, sometimes praying a specific prayer, and sometimes just chewing over the day with Him.
Second, I get up a little early. This is hard, because you can’t burn the candle at both ends for long. Once you start getting up early, you’ll probably find that you need to go to bed earlier, too.
Third, there’s a church just around the corner from where I work; and most unusually for our area, it’s actually open during the day. I’ve gotten into the habit of stopping in for five or ten minutes on my way home.
Now, I’m not going to even try to tell you how to prioritize your schedule so as to make time to spend time with Jesus. That’s between you and Him…and by the way, asking Him for help in finding the right time is definitely indicated.
A couple of days ago I compared the interior life to a kitchen remodel. You’ve got a skilled workman doing a complicated job, and while he’s responsible for the work, you still need to cooperate with him or the job won’t get done.
But there’s another way that the interior life is similar to a kitchen remodel: it’s not always obvious what’s going on. In fact, it’s usually not obvious what’s going on. Some weeks it seems like there’s a flurry of activity to no great effect. Other weeks, it seems like nothing is happening at all. Once in a while, you actually see signs of progress. Most of the work goes on while you aren’t looking, and many crucial details are hidden from view.
This is one of the reasons why feelings aren’t a reliable guide to your progress in the interior life: you simply don’t have enough insight into the process for your gut feel to be dependable.
And this is why it is useful to seek out the help of a skilled and knowledgeable spiritual director. (I am not a spiritual director. I’m just this guy with a blog.) He knows what to expect, and how to explain it, and which questions to ask to find out where you’re at, and what to suggest for you to do. Most especially, he can see when you’ve gotten wrapped around your own axle, help you unwrap yourself, and get you moving again.
If you continue to pursue the interior life (and we all should!) you’re going to want to find a director—if only to have someone to talk to, who understands what you’re experiencing and won’t look at you funny. But keep beavering away in the meantime; don’t wait until you find one. You’re learning to love Jesus Christ, who died for you and through whom all things were created. He will see that you get any help you need.
Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone, by Dene Low, is a somewhat funny juvenile that reads like an odd cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Georgette Heyer. Petronella Arbuthnot, a young English lady of substance, is celebrating her sweet sixteenth in the opening years of the 20th century when her guardian, her Uncle Augustus, swallows a beetle from Tou-Eh-Mah-Mah Island and is immediately consumed with the desire to eat insects and other creepy crawlies of all kinds. Horrors are likely to ensue; Petronella is possessed of quite a large fortune that she cannot touch until she comes of age, and her rather Wodehousian aunts, Theophilia and Cordelia, would like nothing better than to take over the guardianship of Petronella and her money. As any reader of Wodehouse knows, being under the care of such aunts is a fate worse than death; but if they learn of Uncle Augustus’ new proclivities, it is a fate only too likely.
And then Dame Carruthers, famous British Actress, and Generalissimo Reyes-Cardoza, ambassador to England from the nascent state of Panama, are abducted right from Petronella’s birthday party, and the marquee tent falls down and nearly smothers everyone, and the game is on.
As I say, Low is clearly channeling Wodehouse and Heyer, a potent combination; but, although the book is entertaining enough (my kids all enjoyed hearing it) it’s rather a pale shadow of the originals. The Aunts are diverting but underused, and though she tries, Low doesn’t have Wodehouse’ hand with language. And then, Petronella is constantly going into raptures over her bosom friend Jane’s brother James’ handsome physique, which gets rather tiresome. By the time we finished the book I began to read these passages in a dreamy voice while the kids all giggled and waved me on.
Still, it’s light, reasonably entertaining, and despite Augustus’ fate not unreasonably disgusting.
The book is subtitled “The Entomological Tales of Augustus T. Percival,” which leads me to believe that sequels were projected; to date, though, there haven’t been any that I can find.
See all posts in this series. When you embark on the interior life, you’ll find that feelings come with it. Sometimes you’ll feel that God is so close you can practically touch him. Sometimes (alas) you’ll feel so bored you’d rather do anything else—almost. Sometimes even more than almost.
The thing is, the interior life isn’t about feelings; it’s about an objective relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s about knowing Christ and loving Christ, which is to say it’s a matter of the intellect and of the will. It’s about choosing to pursue a relationship with Jesus even when you don’t feel like it. It’s about choosing to love Jesus more than the (admittedly delightful) feelings of unity and closeness that He sends us.
And if you want to truly be so close to Jesus that you can touch Him, all you need to do is go to Mass. He’ll be waiting.
As Elizabeth Scalia reminds us today, St. Teresa of Avila said,
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.
So easy to say; so hard to live. True, though.
Looked at one way, the interior life is a long series of repairs. We are broken people in so many ways, we fall so far short of the perfection God has in mind for us; and as we grow in the interior life these things slowly get fixed.
We currently are in the middle of a long kitchen remodel; and perhaps not coincidentally, it occurred to me this week that growing in the interior life is less like being a handyman and playing Mr. Fix-It in your own home, and more like hiring a contractor to remodel your kitchen. There’s so much to do, and so much of it has to be done just right, and anyway I’ve got a full-time job of my own. Better to hire someone who knows what they are doing, and let them get on with it while I go to work.
The contractor, of course, is God. He knows what needs to be done, and he’ll take care of it for you. By His grace, amazing things will happen while you’re not paying attention. The thing is, you need to cooperate with him.
When you’re having your kitchen remodeled, there are many ways in which the contractor needs your help. You have to pick out counter tops. You have to pick out cupboard doors and plumbing fixtures and tile and colors of stain and cabinet hardware and appliances, and on and on and on. If you don’t do these things, work stops. Nothing happens. And, of course, you have to keeping paying him, or he can’t afford to pay his workers or buy the raw materials. If you don’t cooperate, the kitchen doesn’t get done.
Similarly, you have to cooperate with God’s grace, or nothing will happen. And really, that’s what these series of posts is all about: ways to cooperate with God’s grace that have worked for me, and might work for you. Ways to keep construction moving forward.
There is one major difference between remodeling your kitchen and the interior life: the remodel only seems like it’s going to last forever.
For those of you occasionally afflicted with writer’s block, you might be interested in this paper (from the National Institute of Health) on the self-treatment of writer’s block. (Note: it’s a PDF.)
The View from the Foothills 