A Home for Words

Intentions are funny things.  Especially considering what often happens to them.

I created this blog in the early days of August last year.  It was one of a number of things I was trying to do in a flurry over the course of a week.  I was a busy guy, simultaneously trying to transfer the bulk of my worldly goods from a small one-bedroom apartment to a storage unit roughly one block away and preparing myself to leave the country for three months.  On the eighth day of that month I would be boarding a plane for a series of flights that would take me to Glasgow, Scotland, on a journey that would ultimately find me arriving on the Isle of Iona, where I would spend eleven weeks working as a volunteer for the Iona Community. 

I was excited about this.  I was also nervous.  There were ways in which I knew what to expect from these eleven weeks, but there were even more ways in which I felt I was stepping into a luminous but obscure mist stretching out over roughly three months of my coming life.  I knew without question, however, that I wanted to pay attention to what unfolded on this pilgrimage.  I wanted to process it, to meditate on it, to be attentive to whatever had been prepared for my eyes and ears, my touch and taste and smell. 

And so I created this blog.

One morning less than a week before my departure I sat down in a comfy chair at my favorite coffee shop and set all of this up.  From my chair I could see out onto the main street of Johnson City, TN and watch as it lived out the early hours of this day.  We were in the middle of an oppressively hot summer, so I was happy to have an indoor task to occupy my attention.  I was pleased with myself.  I now had an outlet ready to share my thoughts, feelings, and impressions from my time on Iona (however that might end up looking) with the audience that I had convinced myself might exist.  I even gave it what I thought was a snappy title derived from one of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino. I chose a background that I thought might possess some approximate resemblance to the Scottish landscape in which I would be living and working.  This was going to be great.  Then, on the tenth day of the month, I arrived on Iona.

And through the eleven weeks that I spent there I never once posted anything here. 

I wrote, to be sure.  A journal full of details and reflections is one of the most valuable physical objects that came back with me to Tennessee.  None of those things, though, ever made it to digital form.

Now I am once again sitting in a comfy chair in my favorite coffee shop, looking out on the main street of Johnson City.  The inviting view of a sunny spring day doesn’t look all that much different from the summer’s day on which I set up this blog almost nine months ago.  I have been home from Scotland for a little over six months, and a lot has happened in that time.  The country, the world, and my own small life are all starkly different than the versions of them that I left last August.  Terrible, wonderful, baffling, laughable, dizzying things are happening.  And I find, in the midst of all of this, that words are rising up from my often-foggy mind, and they want a home.  That is what this space will be.

This will not primarily be a chronicle of my time in Scotland, though I will certainly return to that journey frequently here.  It will not be primarily an outlet for my frustrations, concerns, and hopes with our government, our nation, and our world, though the theme will arise from time to time.  It will not be primarily an outlet for reactions to and reviews of the things that I read, watch, listen to, and participate in, though I am looking forward to offering some of these reflections.  Nor will it be primarily a journal of thoughts and impressions from my experience, though I can’t imagine that there would be much to say without those reflections.  Before anything else, this space will be a home for words.  It will be a home with an open door, and you are invited to visit any time you would like. 

I am writing, to be sure, as a Christian for whom Jesus Christ gives the pattern of thought, of word, and of action.  This does not mean that all (or even most) of the writing offered here will be religious or devotional in nature.  It does mean, however, that the spiritual will be a consistent lens through which these reflections will view the world.  I am more concerned here with honesty than I am with orthodoxy, but in looking to the psalms I see that the latter perhaps speaks best as it grows out of the former.  I hope to grasp the assurance of the psalmist as articulated in the song and prayer of the Taize community:  “I am sure I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Yes, I shall see the goodness of our God—hold firm.  Trust in the Lord.”  I hope, should you decide to make an occasional visit, that you can, too.