Reflections Upon Earth

Yesterday I ran outside to check the mail in my bare feet. Hadn’t done that in a while, and I had forgotten how amazing it feels.

Most of the time, I love school and I love thinking about deep questions. But academic life behind a computer can feel so abstract sometimes. Especially in distance learning, it’s a life disconnected from real voices, real faces—in fact, from real people. It lacks a kind of experiential concreteness, which is essential to our natures.

 So when my feet touched the ground outside, I was sharply aware of a contrast. Suddenly I felt that I had come out of a Laputian, abstract head-in-the-clouds world to taste visceral reality in a way that I had been missing. (Catch the Gulliver’s Travels reference there?)  It didn’t seem to matter much whether it was the rough, untamed grass of nature or the smooth, solid asphalt of civilization. They were both of a piece in a world of real things and I loved them for it. All at once I wanted to drop to the ground and kiss it.

But I was in a neighborhood. And those dread creatures known as The Neighbors would see. So of course I didn’t do it. Such is the power of social pressure.

Really, why should we often feel ashamed of such an action as kissing the earth? We only grudgingly approve it in extreme cases, as of a soldier returning to his native land. Otherwise, it’s just…weird…and greenie…or something like that. Worshipping the earth, maybe. 

I’m glad we don’t think the same way about kissing each other. I couldn’t bear to forbid my littlest sister’s slobbery bedtime kisses to me, on the charge that she was worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.  Why can’t we love the earth likewise, without sacrilege? As the crown of God’s material creation, are we so proud as to have forgotten our roots in the dust under our feet? To avoid calling the earth our mother, I think many of us have begun to consider the earth our servant—and you don’t kiss servants much. But Chesterton once said, “The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister,” and as he adds later, “a little sister.” Quite right, for as he says, we have a common Father—a Father who made us both, giving us something more of Himself, but calling all good. We are both a part of nature and something a little more. Same and other. There is no room here for nature worship, but neither is there room for gnostic pride in our “otherness.” The incarnate God has come out in favor of both the groaning creation and the man who causes it to groan—and redeems both.

Guess what? I’ve been inspired. If I kiss the earth behind the garage, nobody will be able to see… :-)

My Confessions

Funny how a bad week or two can make a faithless blogger feel like blogging...maybe it's a stress reliever.

To make a long, harrowing story of embarrassment and sobbing on my bedroom floor short, I've been late with three papers and two Latin assignments in the past few weeks, besides having made a few posts in western lit discussion forums that I wish I could retract.

One of those papers was really late. I mean reaaaally late. I'm always a procrastinator, but I usually manage to stop procrastinating at just the right moment. Not lately, though. I'm also a perfectionist, and I just couldn't get past writers' block; plus, I was struggling with how to deal with the assignment. Every day as it got later, I began an email to my professor asking him for help, but I could never quite follow through with sending them. So I struggled on alone. One night, after I was going on five days late, I grew so desperate to get the paper done that I wrote a final pleading email in the best Anne of Green Gables apology style, eating huge doses of humble pie and BEGGING for help in the lowest possible style. (I cringe at the memory.) And I swore that if I didn't finish the paper by 8:30 the next morning, I would send the email. Well I finished the paper. (One of the worst papers I ever wrote, but though it was terribly late, it was done anyway.)

For an unrelated purpose, I had to talk to that professor on the phone the same day and disgraced myself all over again by sounding absolutely terrified. Yeah, I'm blushing even as I write that. I'll always wonder whether it was actually noticeable, or whether I'm just acutely self-conscious.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, I positively bit two of my sisters' heads off when they tried to ask me simple questions. "How d'ya spell 'Happy Birthday'?" "I DON'T KNOW; LEAVE ME ALONE!!" "Unbutton my dress for me, please?" "GROW UP AND DO IT YOURSELF." One of them went and cried, and I felt terrible but didn't pull myself away from my computer long enough to go apologize. (Incidentally, I also bit off my fingernails, and I used to have very nice fingernails.)

God is gracious and forgiving. I'm thankful that the work of His Son does for me what I fail to do, and that when I fall short, He giveth more grace.

Still, I'm full of enough pride to wish He didn't need to give me quite so much.