pull up a chair

sometimes when i pull up a chair, and plonk myself down at this table i am really only beginning to trace an idea, almost like beginning a drawing by dragging my finger through a scattering of powdered sugar. (who paints in powdered sugar, i do not know, but then my mind is a mysterious sometimes-tilted place…) 

and so, this morning, with a tidal wave of a week behind me, and a busy day ahead, i am sitting here tracing my finger along the tabletop, thinking aloud about a thought that surfaced and re-surfaced all through the week.

it’s the beauty of small things.

a few nights ago i was sitting below ground in a library where once upon a time i would have been a regular resident. i was back at my college, a college where one of the study carrels on the fourth floor of the old library all but had my name engraved in it; it certainly had my coffee stains seeped into its woodgrain. this night i was in the new iteration of what had once been my temple of memorization and occasional epiphany.

i was talking about my book, and talking about how my holiest posture, the one that stirs me most deeply, is when i feel small against the vastness of the universe. how i break out in goosebumps, the most comforting goosebumps, when i am crouched down low, arms wrapped around shins, an origami of flesh and joints folded, nestled between dune grasses, perhaps, looking up, into the star-salted heavens. 

i consider it a holy thing to know how infinitesimal we are in this vast and intricate cosmos. our modernday world could do with a very strong dose of downsizing our egos. humility is wanting in the 21st century. 

as serendipities so often happen, that one moment was followed by this:

not long after the talk had wrapped up, a jesuit priest i’d met earlier in the day––a brilliant young priest i hope to befriend, for i do believe we both felt something of a lightning bolt strike in our shared fascinations with theology and literature and their divine intertwining––my new friend father joe came bounding up to the armchair where i was still sitting, slipped a piece of paper into my hand, and began speaking in latin. yes, latin. he then told me (in english, thank heaven) that when i was talking about how i love to go small, he just happened to think of the great line from thomas aquinas, a line often quoted by pope francis: 

“not to be confined by the greatest, but able to be contained by the least, is a mark of the divine.” 

i am still marveling that i have a new friend who whips off lines from aquinas, in latin no less. and i admit to being schoolgirl-crush blushed when i learned (from a little morning-after googling around) that he earned his DPhil at oxford, and might be the closest thing to an Inkling (that literary cadre of Tolkein and CS Lewis and Oxfordian friends in the mid-20th century) in my current state of being. 

but back to small things. 

the very morning after being so taken by that line from aquinas, the first thing i happened to read was this paragraph from the japanese writer Miho Nonaka “on the beauty of small things.” 

“I am drawn to small things. I wrote the poem [“The Museum of Small Bones”] after seeing an exhibit of the skeletons of small animals like bats, moles, and baby lizards. …There was a sense of dignity to the architecture of each animal’s bones. When you see something like that, you can’t help but reflect on God’s creativity as an artist. And for me, smallness matters, because it makes God’s intentionality and investment in each creation appear that much more acute.”

the reason i read with pen and sometimes scissors in hand is because other people always say what i’m trying to say, only better than i can. and so it is with Miho: “…smallness matters, because it makes God’s intentionality and investment in each creation appear that much more acute.”

the intersection of thirteenth century aquinas, and 21st-century nonaka, is what stirs me to attention. surely there is wisdom to be plumbed, and contemplation to be unspooled in the hours and days before me, as i deep-dive further into the beauty of small things. we are living in a world of atrocity. we can be broken at any moment by the sheer evil and deceit that comes without pause, it so often seems. but there, on the simple footpath we trod, we stumble on tiny shards of shimmering light. shards that just might save us. 

and this week, the beauty of small things is the shimmering shard of thought that just might brace me against the unending brokenness. 

and on the subject of brokenness, i offer this prayer for the state of israel*…..

Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first manifestation of the approach of our redemption. Shield it with Your lovingkindness, envelop it in Your peace, and bestow Your light and truth upon its leaders, ministers, and advisors, and grace them with Your good counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our holy land, grant them deliverance, and adorn them in a mantle of victory. Ordain peace in the land and grant its inhabitants eternal happiness.

Lead them, swiftly and upright, to Your city Zion and to Jerusalem, the abode of Your Name, as is written in the Torah of Your servant Moses: “Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers.” Draw our hearts together to revere and venerate Your name and to observe all the precepts of Your Torah, and send us quickly the Messiah son of David, agent of Your vindication, to redeem those who await Your deliverance.

Manifest yourself in the splendor of Your boldness before the eyes of all inhabitants of Your world, and may everyone endowed with a soul affirm that the Lord, God of Israel, is king and his dominion is absolute. Amen forevermore.

i pray too for the innocent of gaza, for those without hope, or water, or food, or electricity. i pray and i pray. and i wonder over and over who in hell’s name beheads a child? pray for this desperate world. pray however you do, however you can…..

what saved you from brokenness this week?

*”prayer for the state of israel” from the jewish virtual library

photo above by my favorite law professor, will kamin, back when he was taking AP photography his senior year of high school….