I am reading Awaiting the Child by Isabel Anders, a beautiful meditation on waiting, light, pregnancy, darkness, and religion. Thank you, Nicki, for the recommendation! The book is written as a daily journal by a minister’s wife, experiencing Advent as she also awaits the birth of her first child. It’s a lovely and thoughtful book, profound without being off-putting (to me).
Last night one chapter about wintry and summery believers really resonated.
Wintry spirituality is a kind of awareness, an acceptance of paradox – the coexistence of the irreconcilable. For the wintry believer, irony is a motif and a theme in our human story that cannot be ignored. Winter people know that even the most fulfilling presence of another is best mixed with a pinch of absence for contrast. The harder paradox is one of accepting that pain, too, has purpose and can be redemptive in the end…
This reminds me yet again of the same theme of light and darkness, joy and sorrow, the seems to echo through my days (and my writing, apologies for the ad nauseum pounding of the same thematic drum). I wonder again about this dichotomy, this coexistence of the irreconcilable: is it a venn diagram with one contained within the other (if so, which is bigger?), two overlapping circles, or neither? Does it matter? I don’t know. I know my instinct, always, is to categories, understand, bucket, as though by doing that I can control and compartmentalize my emotions. I know much better than that by now, but the instinct remains strong.
It will surprise nobody that I love charts, graphs, and all kinds of graphical displays of information (my love of maps is well documented). I grew up tripping over Tufte and still worship him. Indexed has been a great find for me, speaking to the Tufte-lover in me as well as the admirer of all things droll and cerebral (Jessica Hagy manages to be both simultaneously).
A random post this morning, but one that captures the multitude of weirdly-connected things that swirl in my head any given day. A beautiful book about spirituality and religion, musings about winter and summer, warm and cold, light and dark, and admiration for those who can succinctly and elegantly sum up complex thoughts in simple graphical terms.