Half Life
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”
Meditating on the poignancy of time passing and lost loves, Edna St. Vincent Millay writes in one of her most devastating sonnets:
“Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, / Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, / Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: / I cannot say what loves have come and gone, / I only know that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more.”
This past holiday season, I have keenly felt the waning of my youth and a corresponding and consuming desire to live more deliberately. I have mournfully wondered where all the birds have gone and felt burdened by all of the excess of my life. I’ve felt a quiet pain over squandered health, freedom, time. I’ve tried to understand the melancholia, to unpack and pray through the emotions. Whoever said that youth is a gift wasted on the young was spot on. As I approach middle age, I cannot help but reflect on the girlishness and idealism that have fallen victim to this life, to the freshness and hope and sparkle that have been rubbed dull with trial, heartbreak, sin, and the more mundane stuff of our average days.
Wordsworth put it this way:
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and / stream, / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore;— / Turn wheresoever I may, / By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no / more” (Ode: Intimations of Immortality).
I have been grieving the close of my youth and the disappointments of this life we all face; I have not been rejoicing in Christ. Perhaps this setting year has also found you grieving the passage of time, and you deeply miss that outlook on life you once had or the enthusiasm you once regularly felt. The New Year has stirred up in me intense discontentment, regret, and a consuming craving for change, to throw off the old and put on the new. I wish I could say that all these feelings had a righteous impetus, but that is not the case. The world and my selfish desires have been tugging at my heart.
The chimes ring on the front porch. The chimes ring, and I want to cry. Surely life was meant to be sweeter than this! Surely there was to be more laughter, more love, less betrayal, less disappointment, less tragedy, more success, more joy. I don’t see the clouds because I am turned with my back to the window, but the brightness between them invades the room in bursts of yellow. The way the sun hides and then shines soothes me. I am sentimental and at times maudlin. I want something other than what I have when I have so much. I want and want and want.
I want a forest. I want a bonfire. I want some loud music and a long train ride. I want some riotous living to cast off all this dead weight—all the accumulated dross—the flotsam of this fallen world that is coating me like oil. I must confess that I still love many things of this earth tremendously. I love the woods. I love kissing. I love a well-crafted novel. I love laughing with friends. I love my husband’s hands on my waist. I love long conversations over dinner and wine. I love music and dancing. I love to travel.
I have tried to take all these thoughts and emotions captive to Christ, to hang them up in his light like a prism in my kitchen window. I watch the varied rainbows they throw off—little beams of pride, fear and self-centeredness everywhere. They are striking and beautiful, even though I know that they should not be. Holding them up to God’s light reveals the imperfections in the crystal. It has been hard spiritual work to give these emotions up once more to Christ, to reject the aspects of my longings that are worn and belong to the woman I used to be before I met Jesus—that stand between me and wholehearted devotion to him—and to discern the difference between the desires that honor God and those that do not. I’m surprised to find that these old patterns of thought and living are still so alluring.
In the years I have walked with Jesus, I have probably given up on dreams that I did not need to give up. I’ve placed things on the altar that were not sinful, that God did not want me to sacrifice. I, like everyone else, have had to learn how to authentically walk with Christ, as myself and not another, as the woman Jesus had created—according to his Word and his Spirit and not according to any misplaced asceticism or somberness that has only the appearance of wisdom (Colossians 2:20-23). I have stumbled in many ways, and all the missteps sadden me.
I have been satisfied with intolerably little, and not in a Pauline “I’ve learned to be content in any and all circumstances” sort of way. In retrospect, it seems as though life has happened to me, as though I have been a passive onlooker devoid of agency. What have I done with all that the Lord have given to me? Have I used my gifts to the hilt, drained them to the last drop, savored the irreplaceable and peerless experiences with which I have been blessed? Whom have I loved supernaturally so that they encountered Christ? I have let my life slip by, lived by another—befuddled, disappointed, sometimes excessively happy, sometimes content, sometimes wretchedly miserable. I think I have used God’s sovereignty as an excuse to not try, plan or act. Somewhere over the past decade, I have stopped living with anticipation and excitement, with enthrallment and appreciation, with focus, intention or exuberance. I’ve turned down my lantern’s light and have stopped living with passion. I called this dimming submission to Christ, but it is not. I have confused laying down my life for not really living, not fully engaging, at all. But the romanticism basic to my personality refuses to die. And praise God that it has not, because there is such good for his kingdom that he can do through it.
The difficulty for me has been that before I was born again, I was a raging sensualist. And so when I began to follow Jesus, I turned from this, sensing that such enjoyment carried a scent of the unholy. As that grain of wheat fell to the earth and necessarily died, parts of myself that did not need burying were caught in the internment. I put to death too much hope and enthusiasm and boldness rather than giving them to Christ so he could prune and nurture them for his purposes. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” as though I need not engage deeply in this world because heaven is so valuable, as though the reverse of this statement is not, in fact, true (Keats, Ode to a Nightingale. Instead of the abundant life Christ came and died to give us, I fear I have been living an attenuated life. I’ve too often hidden away his internal light underneath a basket and not allowed it to illuminate the world around me. Somewhere, there has been an error in the translation, and I have interpreted through my actions and choices that following Christ is a constrained and rigid dance. This is not what I know to be true, but these are the steps I have waltzed—it is how I have lived. It is tragic.
In Psalm 103, David speaks directly to his soul, which—like mine—was apparently in need of encouragement:
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, / and all that is within me, / bless his holy name! / Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, / who forgives all your iniquity, / who heals all your diseases, / who redeems your life from the pit, / who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, / who satisfies you with good / so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use some youth renewal and a reminder to bless the Lord, to not forget all of his benefits, especially these David lists here—that he satisfies me with good and crowns me with love and mercy. The author of Psalm 107 reiterates that God, “satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.” When my soul is longing and hungry, as it has been, these verses help anchor me to the truth and remind me of God’s goodness, sweetness and his care. There is no abundant life apart from Christ, no temporal enjoyment that will satisfy more than him, no way to straddle the fence between self-governance and Christ-dependence.
El Jaleo, John Singer Sargent
But I see now that there is nothing wrong with being in love with the life that Christ has given to me, with the abundant, living water of his Spirit, with all the beauty and good gifts I see everywhere that remind me of my God but also that are simply enjoyable to experience and behold. I am to die to myself, casting off that which stands between me and love for Christ and primary commitment to his gospel. I am to deny myself—not through ascetic practices, obsession with my own sin or disengagement with the world—but through ceasing to put my own interests first and giving myself utterly to his. I am to sacrifice what needs sacrificing and seek his kingdom—set my mind on heavenly things—but this does not mean I am to have no pleasure or enjoyment of all that my Father gives to me. I am to love God with all my heart and mind and soul and strength and others like I love myself. Passion for Jesus and love for other people and for all that God has made is not wrong. Feely deeply is not inherently evil, and neither is pleasure. We turn from sin, but this does not mean saying no to all pleasure. We say no to sinful pleasure, and the difference can sometimes be difficult to grasp. The spirit is not more important than the body, than the physical, as the gnostics believed, and it seems this heresy has somehow worked its way into my practical theology. Lust for life and fleshly living are not necessarily the same thing. Only God and I can know if Christ is truly central to my heart and the cornerstone upon which I am building my life. Only he can help me to regain my balance if my love for his good gifts gains an improper and idolatrous place in my heart.
As the dust has settled and I’ve begun to find my foundation once more, I have been left with one haunting and pressing question in the midst of all the melancholia and grief. How will I spend the remainder of my time? What changes, if any, must be made to live boldly and intentionally for Christ, to live more fully overall? I could dismiss my musings as typical time-passing-induced-panic, but they are more than this. Caught beneath all the fleshly yearning is a pure desire for things that God himself wants us to have—namely, love and significance—and a recognition that I have gotten off course and not lived fearlessly or deliberately for that which matters most.
Perhaps you have felt it, too. That your sails have been left to flap in the wind, your kite string let out too far into the bluebell sky—slack now and useless—so that the life you are living surely does not resemble the life God intends you to live. It has become warped and cluttered with fraudulent meaning—the life that is not life but appears to be. Not because it’s hard, but because it is distracted and filled to the brim with excess and meaningless, because you do not recognize yourself as you go about your day, because you are not risking anything or doing any identifiable good, because you are far from Jesus and do not love him first, if you love him at all. Perhaps the world is pulling at your heartstrings, too.
The New Year can be a natural time for such depressing and ponderous thoughts, and I find when scrolling through the various writers and ministry leaders I follow on social media that there is an overall consensus that a reevaluation of our lives and priorities, an assessment of our spiritual state, is in order. Most everyone seems to be experiencing the need to “declutter their souls” (as Sally Clarkson refers to it), to simplify. I, too, am eager to shed the chaff that has accumulated in my spirit and in our home, in my focus and routines and in my priorities. There are things I value and love that I have ignored, things I would claim to want for myself and my family, but I have been too busy to put them into practice. I am swept up in a powerful current of living a life of necessity—doing only what needs to happen to keep everyone fed, clothed, clean, and ferried to school, sports, programs, church. These most basic things completely fill the days, and they create a rhythm that ruffles my feathers and makes me stressed and miserable. I am perhaps spoiled and soft. It’s very possible. But the young woman in me who has now nearly vanished sighs and wrings her hands, distraught that reality is so far from the stuff of dreams. I have such tenderness for her and want to show her otherwise.
Thoreau believed that “If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations” (Walden).
We want what we do to matter. We are surrounded by so much that does not, so much that—in essence—distracts us from the very things we most desire. Television, movies, video games, the internet and social media are a few of our favorite diversions. What more do we want than to connect with others, to have community, to be loved, to have purpose, to be about our Father’s eternal work? Real connection, real love, and real significance—tangible and fulfilling—will elude us as long as we search for them where they cannot be found.
I need to slow down. I need to savor. I need to cut out. I need to spend more time in the wilderness where “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” (Hopkins, God’s Grandeur). What is this tameness and convenience that has come to permeate modern life? I hate it and yet have tolerated it. Must I?
I want a life close to the bone, days drenched in beauty, significance, and appreciation—the hovering moments that so easily flit by if we do not stop to savor their preciousness. Have I settled, accepting a half-life in the name of surrender to Christ rather than pursuing the abundance and fullness he describes in his word, nourished by the waters and breath of God’s Spirit? Have I given of myself to that which is most important and lived according to my ideals and his? Do I even know what these are? Why does the very daily routine of our family drive me mad? Must I do things the way I do them? Must my life look like it does? Must my days be spent reassuring myself that all of the inconsequential busy work has kingdom value and is therefore worth it? Is there a way to bring more importance to the daily tasks as well? We do all that we do as unto the Lord, but what we actually choose to do matters. Can we change how we spend our time so that it is better, more beautiful, more meaningful? Yes, we can structure our days with a kingdom focus but do work that has both heavenly and earthly importance; the two are not mutually exclusive. The echoes of Eden that resound in our hearts can propel us to number our days and cherish them so that we are better stewards of each passing moment. It will take careful thought and deliberate carving out. We do not accidentally slip into intentionality, but we can craft a beautiful, Christ-centered life that honors God while living boldly, choosing to engage in that which brings us closer to our Lord and closer to his divinely designed purposes for ourselves and our families.
Mary Oliver writes in her poem, When Death Comes —
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. / When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. / I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened / or full of argument. / I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
I, too, want to be a bride married to amazement, a bridegroom taking the world into my arms—the beauty of Jesus, his creation, people, music, kissing, falling in love, serving, comforting, laughing. Worship, prayer, praise. A bride married to the amazement of my Savior and this one life he’s granted me, which is a gift from heaven, as will be eternity and the new heavens and the new earth. It is a fine line between asceticism and fervency for Christ, and an equally bewildering edge between sensualism and appreciation for all that God has given us. Lord, help me to walk the narrow way that leads to eternal and abundant life, savoring your good gifts with a song in my throat and a blinding, contagious light in my soul.
Father, make me the woman you always intended, not the pantomime I’ve been. Bring back summer and the birds that sing to the boughs of my heart. Bring back all the love for you and for living that the numbed years have stolen, the years the locusts have eaten (Joel 2:25). Restore them, Jesus. Restore me.