Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

I found myself singing Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence on Wednesday evening (Dec 23^rd). It was printed in the bulletin emailed out in advance of Old Orchard Church’s Christmas Eve service, and when I saw it listed there, it just sort of stuck in my head. It feels particularly fitting—musically as well as thematically—in 2020. There’s a fresh sense of brokenness, of the desperate need for rescue and restoration. The world is a raw nerve. In the midst of the physical and economic and political and emotional carnage, finally—finally—we see a great Light.

It is a marvel, wholly beyond our wildest imaginings, that God Himself would descend into our ruined glory—walking in the dust from which He formed us, bleeding for our healing, dying to give us life—that He might remake us whole and holy, restored into unhindered fellowship with Him. It seems only fitting to respond with awe and praise.

In that vein, here’s a bit of poetry I wrote yesterday (Dec 27^th) in which I attempted to combine that theme with the theme of this blog:

A Stranger Under the Sun 

Oh, I have been lost and, oh, I have been found
I wander from birth 'til I sleep in the ground
Saw mountain-tops shine where He hid not His face
And valleys well-filled with invisible grace
Rough places made plain and great plains made well-rough
And rivers of fear that grace wasn't enough

Oh, I have been lost but, oh, I have been found
by the God who deigned walk in the dust of the ground
My cries reached his ears and He hid not His face
But poured out His blood in a torrent of grace
Wherever I wander, no matter how rough
He walks there beside me; His grace is enough.

I chose the poem title as a reference to a line in G.K. Chesterton's excellent poem, below. I absolutely love how he wove the imagery and structural parallels together to convey the emotional and theological significance of the Incarnation.

The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honor and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam,
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Wanderlust the Blog, Reimagined.

So.

It's been a long time: more than six years.

Six. Years.

A lot can happen—has happened—in six years.

So why now?  Why resurrect a travel-themed blog when I haven't taken an international flight since November 2014 when we moved back to the States from South Korea?  The adventures since then have mainly been metaphorical rather than geographical, with a handful of notable exceptions (like a road trip from STL to Virginia in 2019...but that's a saga best left for another day).

More to the point, why resurrect a travel-themed blog when I've not gone further than ~70 miles from my front door since the COVID-19 pandemic's waves of quarantines first reached St. Louis in mid-March 2020?  These days, in all honesty:

(Yes, Supernatural even has a gif for that, apparently.)

So why dredge up this insignificant corner of the interwebs now?  Maybe it's self-indulgent, but I've realized that I still have things I want to say—things that I think still fit with the overarching theme of this blog.  I've written a great deal in the past few years in the course of processing a number of life events and this seems like a reasonable place to share selections of those thoughts.

So: Wanderlust the Blog, Reimagined.

It's not always a literal wandering.  Sometimes it's a professional wandering through grad school and career changes.  Sometimes it's a physical or emotional wandering through the harsh landscape of chronic illness.  Sometimes it's a spiritual wandering through green pastures, across lonely deserts, beside still waters, or even through the valley of the shadow of death.  I'm a citizen of heaven, a life-long expat wandering here on earth, eagerly awaiting the return of my King.

Speaking of returning kings, it seems fitting to elaborate on the source of the quotation in this blog's header as part of the grounds for this blog-reimagining.  Odds are that most of you reading this blog don't need additional context for that quotation because either because you know me well or we happen to overlap in a Venn diagram of literary tastes, but please bear with me for a minute, okay?

In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, a poem known as the Riddle of Strider appears which prophetically describes Aragorn, the titular king of the third book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

All that is gold does not glitter;
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither;
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

While I'm confident that a great deal has already been written elsewhere about these stanzas by far more learnéd and eloquent individuals than myself, I want to highlight what resonates with me.  There is something unwavering—settled, even—about Aragorn the wanderer as described in the first stanza, something which is not buffeted about by his nomadic circumstances.  Yes, he has fears and doubts which hold him back from claiming his rightful kingship for a significant part of the trilogy.  Yes, he spends many years as a wanderer, but his character is rooted in something deeper, something that eventually drives him to take up the crown and title when Gondor's need is greatest.  It is this inner character—his courage, his compassion, his commitment to justice and to peace—which informs his actions as a warrior, healer, lover, and friend throughout the saga.  He doesn't undergo a fundamental transformation when he becomes king.  He continues to be who he already was.  The addition of a crown doesn't make him a good king; his extant moral center does.

So what does that have to do with me and with this blog?  The truth is that my physical and metaphorical wanderings over the years have encompassed both aimless exile and wonder-filled exploration.  I'll skip the specifics for now, but since I started this blog just over a decade ago, I've spent a lot of time asking myself the following questions:

When thing after thing after thing is stripped away, what is left of me?  Who am I, deep down where the frost doesn't reach?

I've written thousands of words in the past decade in the course of verbal-processing some answers to those questions, and doubtless I'll write thousands more before my journey ends.  I've decided some of those words will end up here on this blog, serving as a chronicle of both the literal and metaphorical miles I travel.  And maybe, just maybe, someone will find something edifying—whether hope, or solidarity, or challenge—as they traverse the hills and valleys of my words with me.

When Bilbo sets out for Rivendell in The Fellowship of the Ring, he sings:

The Road goes ever on and on,

Down from the door where it began.

No far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

What I can say is this: I am a blade that has been broken, but God is reforging me, piece by piece.