The .Plan

Gerard Manley Hopkins has a poem:

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

I envy the kingfisher. Through her example, Hopkins hints at the fact that we have been created precisely for the Christ to come alive in us. But the kingfisher somehow effortlessly achieves congruence between what it is created for and what it ultimately does.

But that is the sort of congruence that needs to be achieved in me.

Stanley Hauerwas is right. Much of the time, we don’t have a clue what we’re doing. Perhaps someday I can do out of love and intuition what I try to do today out of duty. But until then, on those occasions when having a clue is in short supply, the church — as the embodiment of Christ in this world — will continue to speak truth into my life.

From Psychological Science, on the virtues of quitting:

In a paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia and Carsten Wrosch of Concordia University found that teenage girls who are unable to disengage themselves from trying to attain hard-to-reach goals exhibited increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein (C.R.P.), which in adults is linked with diabetes, heart disease and early aging. “There’s this traditional idea in Western culture and science literature that being persistent is good, that if you work hard, you can achieve anything,” says Miller, who has published several papers with Wrosch on the psychology of quitting. “Our take is that persistence is good, but there are times where the most adaptive thing is to say, ‘This goal is not going to work out.’ ”
–Clay Risen, “Quitting Can Be Good for You”, New York Times, December 9, 2007

She had been crying. Not in the runny mascara and eyeliner kind of way, but in the puffy eyes with dark ringlets kind of way. You could tell by looking at her that she had probably cried herself to sleep that night, burying her face in the pillow to muffle her sobs so that the medicine intern in the call room next door wouldn’t be woken up. Perhaps, unmercifully, her pager had been uncharacteristically quiet for a few hours, giving her no reprieve from the turmoil of her inner life.

This morning, she seemed tenuous. A slight scowl darkened her face, as if she were concentrating as hard as she could to scrounge up the reserve to make it through the morning without unleashing another sobbing, gaspy, mess of snot and tears.

Seeing my hesitance, she said, “I’m okay. Just tired”. The scowl melted, and was replaced briefly with a smile.

The smile vanished as quickly as it had surfaced, dispelled by a deep breath and a furrowed brow of concentration.

“Cross cover is a killer. Your guys didn’t give me any trouble, though. Yesterday afternoon I did get paged by nursing about Mr. Smith…”

I breathed easier, glad for the out.

“Tell me about him.”