New Life

I intend on this week being the beginning of Spring, the renewed labor for new life within to take root.   I will chance getting out, somehow, the abstract notions of a new person emerging within.  We are imbued in the sustenance that we need to nurture that life.  When I walk, youth, barely formed people so young upon the Earth, swirl about.  I am drawn to tall grasses, trees, sun, the breezes, amid new melody.  They are derived from the same life force as each of us, young and old, whose formation was long in coming, who are still changing, imperceptibly.  I long for water-rich tresses not often visited, for wind's subtle presence upon the water, for warm rock apart from the masses.  There I can utter hopeful, encouraging notes for the New Life, castigate vestigial, reproachful longings, and grow increasingly receptive to what is stirring.

Exodus!

     I once learned Exodus! for a piano recital, when I was eleven.  My stepfather had a friend from the military that would visit us for a few days, who always requested that I play the theme song from that movie.  I remember looking over at him once while playing, and his eyes were closed, a slight smile on his large, round face.  It must have taken him back to something pleasant, somewhere fond.
    
     I appear to be stuck in the twighlight zone that is Exodus.  For half a year, once or twice a week, I'd crack open my student bible and read a chapter or two from that narrative, usually forgetting what had transpired.  A recent, rousing game of Trivial Pursuit - the Bible version - has me thinking it might be time to return to this story.  My wife won, as usual, but there was clear resignation on my daughter's face when I failed to answer most of the questions...on Exodus.  Maybe it's because I haven't reached the plague parts.  It happens sometimes that when you pursue something so piecemeal that you scarcely get through the slavery and drudgery, the sheer gravity of the thing, before you begin to abandon hope.  I'm beginning to believe that the difficult passages, as well as wading through the doldrums, resting on belief, will be succeeded by glory and the great ecstasy of achievement.  And then back again.  The difficult measures in this melody, already written but trusted to us to learn, will require perseverance, and perhaps because of this, it needs to be practiced on most days.

     The last thing I remember when I was reading the bible regularly was a leper.  There was also a centurion with incredible faith.  My every-word-of-the-bible track jots back and forth between Old and New Testament, but Exodus is given in one large course, no breaks.  I must become accustomed to the notion of staying there awhile.  Walk slowly and look around, and note those parts of the landscape that otherwise go unnoticed because of some goal of simply getting through it.  I can break up what seems difficult by reading snatches of Kierkegaard, Jacques Ellul, or Vernard Eller, writers whose approach to Christendom seems more holistic, organic.  I might lump C. S. Lewis' apologetics-laden fantasy in there as well.  Rise early and draw from Proverbs.  Live, love, work, and daydream through the day, retire early, Exodus, then perhaps other inspirational literature, then Exodus again. Perhaps it is time also to return to the piano.  Plagues await me.