Tolstoy on Shame

The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home to Russia cured. She was not so gay and thoughtless as before, but she was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.

Dostoevsky: not known for easy reading

Anna Karenina has been my first Tolstoy book. Tolstoy intimidates me for two reasons. First, because you could bludgeon someone to death with even the paperback version of War and Peace. Second,  because I have only read one other Russian author and that author happened to be Dostoevsky. That man’s prose is so dense that I feel like I am swimming through mud when trying to understand the dialogue between his characters. I understand that this problem lies with me and not him though. Not to mention, I cannot help but respect Dostoevsky because several of my favorite people happen to also be his devoted readers.

However, Dostoevsky aside, now that I am ankle-deep into this somewhat shorter story of Tolstoy’s, I find myself enjoying the experience much more than I expected. This story is akin to a picture album and each chapter a snapshot: compact, tidy, almost self-reliant. They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and this is much rarer of an occurrence than you might think. I just want to put some of these snapshots in frames and hang them around my home.

Our Letters to Younger Selves

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased…

Dear Zoë Catherine,

You are 15, in the middle of a long winter. You are lonely and you feel like a stranger in your changing body.

You go to bed praying that you will wake up with your old body, twelve pounds lighter.

You want to sleep all day and you refuse your breakfast before school.

You don’t know how to live in this new body or this new world where you are a woman, not a girl, where men blow you kisses through the car window, and where airbrushed women with sunken cheeks and vacant eyes stare at you from billboards and magazines.

You are wondering how to be whole and how to be happy and how to hold onto your girl self and let her go at the same time.

Getting Our Eyes Off of the Clock

In a blog post from about a year ago, John Piper discussed Christian unity and truth and how they “are served better not by removing fences, but by loving across them…” Using C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as a jumping-off point, he explains that we are not meant to live in the hall of general Christian beliefs (although we may first enter there) but should seek out the denomination or “room closest to the truth.” I agree, but I would also argue that every denomination understands certain aspects of the Christian faith particularly well and that, while we must land in one room or another, we can go further than simply praying for those on the other side of the hall.

We can learn from them.

The Virtue in Being Dangerous

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth…But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also…A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls…”

Throughout Scripture, it can be difficult not to get the impression that the good man is a mild man, one whom children can feel safe around and enemies may plunder without worry. A lot of bad art featuring angels in Heaven playing harps seems to give the impression that our ultimate goal is to reach a place where saints are subdued, lethargic, and generally sleepy. If one isn’t careful, the idea could creep in that Christianity is full of people both boring and weak-willed.

Unexpected and Undeserved

Since October, I have finished my last classes at Messiah College, moved to England for these next 3 months, and, most recently, decided to postpone attending grad school so that I can gain some experience in the world outside of academia before returning to what has primarily structured the past 17 years of my life. For someone who is barely 22 years old, that is a routine with deep roots. Although the inevitable growing pains are daunting, I am excited to see what God has in store for me.

In the past year there has been a lesson that I have had consistent opportunities to learn: how to respond to grace freely given. It is an odd thing to hurt the people you love most time and time again and yet feel more loved than you ever have before after doing so. If you are anything like me, you make the same mistake over and over. Like St. Paul says in Romans 7, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”