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in which i unpack the icons, letter thirty-four, preston to hilary [photo heavy]

May 15, 2012 in letters to hilary with 1 Comment

On Tuesday and Thursdays, Hilary Sherratt and I write letters back and for to each other, public letters to one another in which we tease out faith and theory and life and episodes of Gossip Girl, and invite you to join us in the comments. You can read the letter I’m responding to here.

Dear Hilary,

It happened. It happened sooner than I imagined it would, but it did. I packed up my life, loaded it in a trailer, spent a night in a barren room, and then walked across a stage. A life was lived somewhere in those packed boxes. A life was made and received. Now, I am home with my parents for the summer, writing grant proposals for ministries and working on the book. My days are interesting people and clerical gymnastics; coffee cups and WordPress. In that way, it’s the same life. It’s the same me. But the icons, the objects that made this life, recall this life, were packed away for a time. I managed a lot of tears before leaving Baylor, but the real tears came in the unpacking. The unpacking of a life, the raw, laying out, of who I am now without the proximity of those who hold pieces of my soul.

And here, I want to show these things to you. I want to unpack the icons of a life. It’s an exercise in hearing.

 

 

 

A wall sconce, hung high. The shell is an icon of baptism, used in very early Christian art. The hanging ghost from Pacman is from a Sonic Kids Meal, which Antonia gave me one day just to get it out of her car. Her first paper in our Masterworks in Art class was on baptism, so they seem best kept together.

 

 

 

A cork, from the last time Samuel, Grant, and I were together, for now. Franciscan, like one of the first bottles, bought because of St. Francis. A shell Samuel sent me last summer, when I was waiting to hear. A piece of sea glass I carried on the shore from St. Andrews, two summers ago, when I first thought I was supposed to go there.

 

 

A memory full desk, with a water bottle atop it like the kind Jerry has, which reminds me of him most, in a funny kind of way. Tiny porcelain things from church camps, Micron pens and Moleskines, iPods, glass milk jugs in the bottom right from my paternal grandmother’s house. A brick, in the center, from the parking lot of the church I served in my freshman year at Baylor.

 

 

 

Atop the desk, another particular icon. Samuel and Cherié gave me that Scripture, my favorite for writing, for the promise of writing, the night before my thesis defense. On either side, in the back, flowering pots of the ugliest sort of fake flowers. Samuel and I may have slowly stolen those, piece by piece, from the lobby of our residence hall. Then a reminder of London, something from my grandfather, and tiny bookend idols, redeemed, from when my mother lived in Asia.

 

Another painted icon. The one Samuel and Cherié painted for my birthday two years ago. And a spoon, which is an icon too of Samuel, but that has a story all its own. A library of movies to the left and the spill over in the center.

 

This was a surprise guest, a giant bear from my parents when I arrived home the Sunday after graduation. He’s reading that little Latin copy of Cicero, there with the red cover.

 

 

 

C’est une plume. The pen I signed my book contract with. Someday, someday, I’ll do something nice with it. But for now, I rather like the almost vulgar simplicity of it.

 

As for the rest? I shall let them be as they are; speak for themselves. Continue Reading…

comes the thunderclap, letter thirty-two, preston to hilary

May 9, 2012 in letters to hilary with 0 Comments

On Tuesday and Thursdays (with a change today, as I was scrambling to finish a draft book chapter), Hilary Sherratt and I write letters back and for to each other, public letters to one another in which we tease out faith and theory and life and episodes of Gossip Girl, and invite you to join us in the comments. You can read the letter I’m responding to here.

Dear Hilary,

I love the hurricane, too. I love the wild whirl of the everyday busy. I love telling people I need to check my schedule to see what I can do about fitting them in. I always fit them in, but I like the idea of being the sort of person who gets to tell them that I’m fitting them in, a narcissism that haunts me even now when I’m supposed to be, already, an adult.

Last night, I started to pack my room to leave. I put in The Kids are All Right, taped up a box, and dumped in clothes. In one of my closets, on a dilapidated chest of drawers, I have kept a piled stack of beautiful words. These are the letters from best friends, old friends, friends that have placed oceans between us and friends that I will soon place an ocean between. The words stretch back to childhood and promise to stretch into old age. After I had packed the second box, managed to fill, close, and tape, I was left to confront this stack of beauty–and then comes the thunderclap. The sudden, heart-stopping confrontation of what it means to be leaving.

I turned off the movie, packed a bag, and fled to Common Grounds to work on my book.

Everyone talks about how hard it is to leave their friends. I know that we all have those people we’re wounded to lose. I know we all say that our friendships are different, more special, more unique, and that somehow that means we feel it more than anyone else. But can I say that for me, that’s true? Can I tell you of the thunderclap that stopped my heart, the realization that hours spent together marveling about the beauty of God and laughing over the quiet jokes of broken words are suddenly taken. Presence slides between fingers.

And it comes as a thunderclap, holding this icon stack of words, these promises that life and love are to be had. What is it to leave well? What is it to depart? I know that we speak of death as the great, awful thing, but in a sense death is better. In death, we trust that the one we love has passed into the presence of Christ, has been ushered into Beauty. There is grief, there is pain, but what is this pain of the living, separated by space and time? What is this pain of knowing that somewhere in the world exists a fractured piece of your soul that you have handed off, have given over, that is no longer your own and is no longer with you?

I think this, aside from the glory of God, is why I look forward to Heaven.

In Heaven, there is no more leaving. There is no more geography of displacement. In Heaven, we can spend an eternity seeing that moment, that glorious moment, when one you love suddenly discovers something new about God and offers that insight and joy back to you.

I look forward to the end of death; but, I truly look forward to the end of leaving.

But, to think of it, this sweeping in of Glory shall come as a thunderclap too.

Love and every grace,

Preston

all but forgotten, letter thirty, preston to hilary

May 2, 2012 in letters to hilary with 0 Comments

On Tuesday and Thursdays (with a change today, as I was posting at Transpositions yesterday), Hilary Sherratt and I write letters back and for to each other, public letters to one another in which we tease out faith and theory and life and episodes of Gossip Girl, and invite you to join us in the comments. You can read the letter I’m responding to here.

Dear Hilary,

You forged a new path. You cleared branches and stumbled over unseen rocks. You were captured by a vision of something good and beautiful, and you followed it.

I forgot something important, or I nearly did. In all that work devoted to exegeting parables well, I ended up brushing past the peace of heart that would have let me apply the same care to the words before me in the daily readings of the Scriptures.

I shared with you how I felt the Psalm spoken over my heart,

This will be written for the generation to come, that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord.

I thought I had understood this. I thought I had written my thesis with the care that understood the thesis itself, the product itself, was that thing being written so that others might praise the Lord by its writing. Within that was the false leap. I elevated my own writing to a place where it did not belong. The thesis itself, the written thing itself, was what I understood to be the cause for the inspiration of praise.

But what if it wasn’t the writing, the words inked out on all those reams of paper, but the actual process of writing?

What if I was so sold on my own excellence, I missed the point?

It is not the thesis as such that was what brought the praise, but the words you spoke, that it was something that made a path, that opened a possibility, that meant that those who are coming behind and who would desire to write something similar now have the vindication to do so, that their own writings would be those things which praise the Lord.

Sometimes, these obvious truths seem all but forgotten.

I stagger around through this life thinking I’m walking smoothly, when all the while I have forgotten the most essential things. Like how it’s not about me. Like how my problems do not cause the world to stand still. Like how there is always hunger but I keep forgetting to bring bread with me into the marketplace to feed the needy. It catches you, suddenly, when you’re about to order your coffee and you realize you haven’t read the Scripture in twenty hours, haven’t much prayed in twenty days.

It’s all but forgotten, the simple ways we’re supposed to survive this journey. Not by bread alone, but the Word of God.

And it’s a fight, the all but forgotten, to bring them back into the forefront of view and the eye of reflection. It takes force; setting aside; the command that in a space and time, things shall be done, because the things need doing.

This afternoon, I pulled out the Book of Common Prayer and opened it to the evening office. I took a red notebook, opened that too, and tried to list out all the things, all the people, all the forgotten tidbits, that needed praying. I worked through the service, I read the readings, and I took each one of those listed items and did my best to pray. I’m not sure if the prayers stuck, if they were those prayers of the righteous that availeth much, but I do know that when I closed the book, the notebook, and sat back down to write to you, though I had no epiphany or great moment of revelation, I had the quietest sense that the forgotten things were becoming remembered, and that this was a happiness, enough for today.

Love,

Preston

for a generation to come, letter twenty-eight, preston to hilary

April 25, 2012 in letters to hilary with 2 Comments

On Tuesday and Thursdays (with a change today, as I was posting at Deeper Story yesterday), Hilary Sherratt and I write letters back and for to each other, public letters to one another in which we tease out faith and theory and life and episodes of Gossip Girl, and invite you to join us in the comments. You can read the letter I’m responding to here.

Dear Hilary,

I am indebted to the way you pray. The presentation went wonderfully. I was given just the words that needed saying, just the way they needed saying. I got to speak of Scripture as a beautiful thing, as a whole we must find ourselves within. It was joy in motion and I was privileged to do it.

Oh my heart, reading about that little girl. Is there much better in this tilted world than for a child to know the name of their Christ? Is there anything more essentially beautiful than that?

And it has me thinking. It had me thinking, after thesis defense and formatting revisions, after the project is put away and thoughts are free to wonder to the other things occupying the end of the semester, why it is we do all of this. We run, sometimes without much thought, hurtling toward this goal of academia that stands in its pleasant ivory tower and waits for our claim to it. We run, we sprint forward just to grasp at it, and the whole enterprise is a kind of exercise in our own vanity, reaching out hoping to seize hold of something for the sake of having known it.

I’m no anti-intellectual, as you know, and I have no qualms supporting higher education. But the past few days have given me pause enough to return to why it is I do all of this. Why is it that I work so hard to choose the right word? Why do I spend so much time thinking through the metaphor or wrestle for days with the smallest of questions that seem absurd to ponder?

Not for that ivory tower.

This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.

My ridiculous, wonderful best friend and his ridiculous, wonderful girlfriend gave those words of the psalm to me on a wooden icon the night before my thesis defense. In the days since, I have returned to it often. I did not write a thesis or pursue a degree because it ultimately fulfills some desire of knowledge within me or because I want to be an academic. I did it because I want to write things that make little girls say that the Good Shepherd is Jesus. If I have done that, then what I have done has been of worth.

It took me a long time to be in this space, to not fret over being misunderstood for it or somehow putting forth words that weren’t quite correct. All I have, ultimately, is the gift given. And so it is put to its use, the words are given back, and the prayer goes forth. Not for myself, but those to be created. Whatever happens, comes, or is made known, may it be that I was faithful and good unto them.

Love,

Preston

burn a little prayer for me, letter twenty-six, preston to hilary

April 17, 2012 in letters to hilary with 4 Comments

On Tuesday and Thursdays, Hilary Sherratt and I write letters back and for to each other, public letters to one another in which we tease out faith and theory and life and episodes of Gossip Girl, and invite you to join us in the comments. You can read the letter I’m responding to here.

Dear Hilary,

Tomorrow, I give my thesis presentation. Unlike the nebulous and anxiety-laden two hour defense next Monday afternoon, this is only a ten minute précis delivered to underclassmen and other professors interested in what I explored as my topic. We assemble in a small lecture hall, poor quality pizza served in the back, and ramble through five presentations and try to convince people that what we’ve done is interesting. (As it turns out, I’m privileged in this regard. I’m presenting alongside Samuel and Grant, as well as Caroline, whom you remember, and someone else, a filmmaker with a striking, unique eye to detail.)

For the past week, I’ve been scrambling trying to figure out what I’ll speak on. My thesis, as you know, is at times painfully unique. Since my first chapter is a mini-manuscript on patristic and medieval exegesis and the remaining three chapters my own exercise in commenting on Scripture in the manner of those gone before, I haven’t really proved anything. I haven’t explored a particular idea or a particular person, I have advocated a method of approaching Scripture and have produced a work that reflects the perspective. But how exactly do you talk about that in ten minutes?

I’ve settled on painting. I’m nearly done producing a 48″ x 36″ canvas that reflects, I think, the complex manner by which we are to approach the Word. And in the process of this I have been working through our wonderings about peace, about being seen by God, about being madly, wildly in love with Him. I am realizing that the thing I am trying to explain, in ten minutes, through a canvas, through a strange, ridiculous thesis, is that the whole of
Christ must be the principle by which we exegete. That the Word, in His incarnation, His life, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, His coming again, is the means by which we must read the whole of creation, to understand the whole of the cosmos.

And I have ten minutes. I want so desperately to know exactly what to say, and how, so that this gigantic perspective I have can be imparted by single word as gift. But it’s too much and the task is too impossible. I have known that this task is my life, so how to condense into such a short time? And I hear the clang of presumption in the words; for, the answer, like much of what we have come to speak of, is rooted in trust.

What does He say?

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

So burn a little prayer for me. Light a candle that my words shall slow into those melodies of Him, that I shall trust in the Artist and let the art be enough. Burn a little prayer for me in the Lady Chapel, in the space of, “Be it unto me according to Thy word,” that, by His mercy, I can speak no more than these things:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being,

And he is before all things, and by him all things consist,

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

He has made every thing beautiful in its time: also he has put eternity in men’s hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end.

Alleluia, alleluia, world without end. Amen.

Love,

Preston

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