Following Austen

23: All things Frederick

I met Frederick during Monday lunch on the Wycliffe lawn.  Actually, I was heading in for seconds, he was heading out with firsts, and I invited him to join our table.

A guy friend told me once that he can tell within thirty seconds if he wants to seriously date a girl.  I was deeply offended.  I mean, is it really all that superficial?  The sound of her voice, he said, and the way she looks—his impression after that thirty seconds is never wrong.  I make those snap judgments myself but admit to often being wrong (i.e., Jack), and actually being pleased to be wrong.  I love the surprise of finding incredible potential where first I could see none. 

But with Frederick our ten or fifteen minutes of conversation (okay, so I did have an inkling of this in the first thirty seconds) showed me that we could never be a match, for all my romantic musings.  I can’t say exactly why, although our theological bents seemed quite different, and the vibe just wasn’t there.  And by this point, to be honest, I was consumed elsewhere, so maybe I wanted Frederick to not really be a match.

Oh, and his name isn’t Frederick, but Jesse.  Frederick may have been in Oxford, but he wasn’t at Wycliffe, and I never actually met him.

22: An hour

My favorite hour of the entire trip was sitting by the River Cherwell with Jack early Monday evening watching punts go by, talking.

That morning, we got seats together by the open doors for lectures (moving air being a premium when air conditioning is non-existent).  David Wenham was talking about the Sermon on the Mount, about its two groups of pronouncements—the first about God’s grace and the second, which can be “profoundly depressing,” about God’s standards, which are so high that no one can live by them. 

I leaned over to tell Jack that I have such a hard time balancing those things, the grace and judgment of God.  He said, “I’ve found in my life, the grace has to come first.”  His answer was significant to me; I sensed that he understood my own struggles accepting God’s grace and was a step ahead of me in figuring them out.

Monday afternoon, the guys went out for a tour, and I stayed behind to take a nap, promising to look up info on Shakespeare in the Park and try to get tickets for that evening.  But the tickets ended up being about $40 apiece, which seemed like too much to pay (especially after having just been to the Shakespeare Free for All in Carter Barron, where Sandy and I sat in damp seats under a spitting sky, praying it wouldn’t pour.  The Shakespeare Theatre’s modern production of Midsummer Night’s Dream had been enthralling, with characters that looked like they were from the 40’s or 50’s and fairies with huge larger-than-life feathered costumes).  Anyway, I didn’t want to spend that much money, especially when it was another production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I left a note under Jack’s door to let him know that I was going to walk through the park, and that I would come back and meet them for dinner at 6:00.

At lunch, Dan had mentioned a grassy spot by the river where the Oxford dons used to lay out naked.  I wandered half a mile or so through University Park (which contains one of every tree that grows in England) the way he said to go, aiming southeast, continuing through a few gates, to the loveliest spot, with the small river on two sides, huge trees, and expanses of sun.  I think what I liked most about it is that it is quiet, not in the middle of a byway.  It seems you have to sort of know that it’s there.  There were groups of people talking and solitary people sleeping.  I found a grassy spot in the sun right by the river and sat reading, watching tourists and students come punting by from time to time, contemplating the lectures and the week ahead.

As I headed back, I was caught off guard by someone too far away for me to recognize, calling my name.  Surely not me, I thought, and ignored him.  But it was Jack (!), and it was me he was after.  He had gotten my note and decided to track me down. 

We purposefully neglected our 6:00 appointment to meet the other guys for dinner, and headed back through the gates and the trees to the grassy spot I just left, and sat for an hour or an hour and a half just talking.  It was quiet, sunny and 75 degrees or so—perfect.  (I didn’t know the actual temperature for most of the trip because I never bothered to figure out the Farenheit-Celsius conversion.)  There was a loud crowd of tourists who managed to get their punt a bit stuck in the grass by the bank, and two ten- or eleven-year-old boys who stripped down to their shorts and eventually worked up the courage to jump in. We sat with our quiet conversation in the midst of the summer commotion.  I’d never felt so comfortable, so at home, just sitting and talking.

21: Falling

I don’t know exactly what it means to fall in love, or what I think about that, so I’m not sure how to talk about what was happening in Oxford between Jack and I.  If the ways of love were a mystery to Solomon, will any of us ever really understand them?  (Thus, the proliferation of books and songs and plays and movies about this one marvelous, mysterious thing.)

Fundamentally I believe that love is a verb, that it is doing things you may not feel like doing and giving and listening and generally putting someone else in front of yourself.  And perhaps it’s not possible to make that kind of commitment for a lifetime without an initial rush of emotion.  I only know that on Sunday night after we met and went to evensong and to the pub and walked home talking about our families and mornings and evenings that I knew this had potential.  And Monday night I thought it could be serious.  And by Tuesday night I knew—well, I’m not sure exactly what—perhaps that he was The Guy I Never Thought I Would Meet.

One thing that surprised me was the way my perception of time changed.  There were so many significant moments, so many in each day that the days felt stretched into weeks, and by the end of the week, I wondered at feeling like we’d known each other for six months.  (The contrast between days in Oxford and days at home—which could pass quickly with a couple loads of laundry, a movie, and a Target run—made me see time’s  malleable subjectivity.)

Unlike other relationships I’ve had, my love for Jack seemed to have depth and stability, to be founded on mutual faith and genuine respect, honest intellectual conversations, strong doses of humor and comfort.  So our attraction had something solid on which to play.

In some ways this Big Thing was a combination of hundreds of tiny, important things.  (I’ll attempt to enumerate some of those in the next few posts without being tedious.)  If alone they were small, together they were undeniable, pointing to something true and sound, of incredible value—pointing to us.

Or at least it seemed that way.

20: Toast

The next morning I came downstairs at 8:00 for breakfast.  I should say, that, as someone who’s far from a morning person, eating breakfast at 8:00 AM in a roomful of strangers is very much my idea of purgatory.  I would not talk to anyone ever before 10:00 AM—best friends included— if I could manage it.  I was wearing my fun pink pleated skirt with the flip-flops that match exactly, but preferred that no one took any notice at all—did not look in my direction, attempt to strike up a conversation, or force me to rouse my still-slumbering social skills.  I would have given anything for an invisibility cloak, actually.  Most especially, I didn’t want to admit the possibility that something romantic could exist here, at least not before I’d had coffee and a decent plate of something substsantial.

When I walked into the room, the fire alarm went off.  The whole room smelled of toasting bread (alas, no bacon or eggs to be had).  Jack was sitting right by the door, looking very good and incredibly awake.  He smiled at me and said, “You walk in the room and bells ring.  You did good getting up early this morning.”  I thought to myself, Crap, he’s still here.  And like a schoolgirl I couldn’t eat my toast.

19: Ah, guys…

Jack and Simon and their friend Paul and I wandered through Oxford looking for a pub that served dinner, and ended up at the Eagle and Child—the Bird and the Baby as the locals call it—the pub where Lewis and Tolkein and the rest of the Inklings group of writers took their famous “long liquid lunches” every Tuesday.  It is small and a bit dark, as any pub should be.  I loved it for Lewis’s sake, and felt compelled to drink half a pint (okay, I’m a wuss) in his honor.

The conversation was rapid-fire.  We managed to cover our religious backgrounds (largely rather conservative, which we have all moved away from to some degree or other); Simon’s work as a journalist covering the world of religion; Christians and politics (Christians in politics—very good; political Christianity—very bad); the shenanigans of various Members of Congress; the importance of ending poverty and various other Christian efforts in social justice; the dangers in the cultural trends of American Christianity (which I frustratingly cannot fully articulate); and my research on Austen and the relative strengths and weaknesses of her various works and the different movie adaptations (Persuasion with Amanda Root and the BBC version of P&P take the lead, at least for me and Simon; Jack admits to having watched some of them with his mother, and I wonder, what does that say about him?).

This is near-supreme goodness, I think, being in Oxford surrounded by single guys, having thoughtful, fun conversation.  It’s their camaraderie I value more than anything else.  Simon is engaged, after all, Paul—the “plumber” from New England (he’s actually a proctologist)—seems a little older and maybe not my type, and I have decided that I can safely rule Jack out because he is Baptist and has a background in politics.  A single woman who wants to be married has, ironically, no sharper skill than that which rules out potential suitors before fully understanding their character.  I have to admit to feeling a certain kinship with Elizabeth Bennet in that regard (although, no doubt, I am more extreme).

And before the evening is over, I wonder if my preference for the dashing stranger has me imitating Marianne’s mistakes in some form.  My determination to rule Jack out doesn’t keep me from throwing him a series of challenges.  I set off on a few of my soap-box pronouncements—like a tongue-in-cheek, eyebrow-raised, condescending, “You really believe there are good people in politics?” and a much more sincere, “On so many political issues, you can find a Christian justification for either position.”—and watched his reactions.  And by the end of the conversation I knew that he wasn’t a typical Christian conservative guy.  He’s politically moderate, supports conservation causes, is deeply concerned for the poor, and believes (wonder of all wonders) that free choice and predestination work together in the salvation process in some way our finite brains cannot understand.

We walked back to Wycliffe ahead of the others, Jack and I, talking about our families and other personal things.  He asked if I was a morning person and I said, “No.  Actually, I can’t imagine the possibility of ever being a morning person under any circumstances whatsoever.”  And I learned that he is an early riser, almost every day.  And this little exchange seems to signify something (because the other skill that single women possess is overanalyzing every turn of phrase), our moving from group discussion to near-intimate details.

18: Spiritual awakenings

Christ Church Cathedral is one of the smallest in England.  As with many of the college chapels in Oxford, when you walk in you are met by rows of seats—wooden pews (which in many of the chapels can be small, harsh, and uncomfortable)—lining the sides, facing inward.   I have attended evensong at the National Cathedral in D.C. from time to time, and sit in the choir when I go, because there’s room there for the small group of people that come; when you sit up there you feel like you’re part of what’s going on, closer somehow to the Psalms and prayers.  But in the National Cathedral and most others, the choir is a quiet, secluded place up at the front, set apart from the masses in rows of pews that fill the depth of the structure.  Here, at Christ Church, it is as though everyone is in the choir, because there are no masses of pews. We are all intimate and participatory.  My group sat in a row of folding chairs in what seemed to be the north transept, although the cathedral isn’t exactly cruciform.  The service was crowded that night, but even tucked back on the side, I could feel the beauty of the building.

If I had a bit of bravura and somewhat disguised perhaps-I’ll-deign-to-talk-to-you air on the outside, inside I was still more than slightly panicked, still struggling with the unexpressed and perhaps irrational fear that I had misstepped somehow, that all of this was too big for me.  The service washed over me with a continual sense of the grace and goodness of God. 

Being regularly exhausted submits me not only to mood swings but also to dramatic spiritual experiences.  I don’t know how to explain them, except that in some ways you know things more fully and more clearly when you are physically quite at the end of yourself than when you are able to carry out your daily tasks without ever thinking your psyche might slip through a fissure in the fabric of the universe and you might never recover.

One day, after I left my job, I sat in the tiny sunroom of my townhouse at the café table that’s squinched into the corner by the french door, reading psalms and thinking about the utter truth of Jesus.  In my exhaustion His character—His complete truth, the kind I have never experienced here—was clearer and more important and more true to me than it had ever been.  I sat daydreaming in the sun and lost myself in it. 

I was weary of the problems I’d had at work, of not being able to get people to listen to the complete story, always having to summarize and synthesize, and give them conclusions for which they didn’t understand all the background, and having them build on this scant foundation a thought system of their own about my work or the problems we were addressing that was not entirely true.  Every experience, it seemed, was more complex than anyone else truly wanted to know, and thus they always had slight half-truths, and I felt scandalized, and misrepresented, and lost.  And I began to sense that it is nearly impossible for any of us to be completely true, when the mass of raw material we are working with—the heart and soul and mind that form our thoughts and desires and words—is so completely faulty to begin with.

I realized then that Jesus knew all the exacts, everything the way it exactly happened, all the intricacies and dependencies and turns of phrase.  And also that He was true in a way no one else ever would be—completely and thoroughly, with no shades of doubt, nothing motivated by pride, nothing muddy, everything clear and true and sound and trustworthy.

And this was so important to me as I sat in the sun that I thought about being in the presence of this complete truth and imagined declaring its goodness—His goodness—the way the angels do, maybe, proclaiming and honoring Him for who He is.  So I pictured myself going around in front of Jesus everywhere He went in Heaven, preceeding Him, declaring Him to be faithful and true and calling the rest of Heaven to attention.  And I quickly determined that that would get insanely annoying for all of eternity.

But in this case, in the folding chairs in the transept of Christ Church Cathedral, what hit me with full spiritual force in my exhaustion was the grace and goodness of God—that which I had begun to hope for in the everyday circumstances of my life, but not entirely expect. I kept hearing those words in my head, and as I looked up at the gorgeous ceiling I imagined this grace and goodness coming down to me—to me.  I do not know what the readings were, but we sang a song about Jesus giving us strength for our daily tasks, and the prayers and the song and the readings and the sung psalms—all of them added up to the message that I wasn’t beyond grace, and that perhaps I could hope even now, on this trip, for God’s abundant blessings, whatever form those might take.

17: Evensong

I didn’t expect a life-changing moment when I followed Dan’s group out the back of the Wycliffe property to evensong at Christ Church Cathedral Sunday night after our initial group meeting.  (The meeting proved to be good in spite of having to sustain some painful small talk, and I distinctly perceived a certain someone casting a glance or two in my direction.)  There were three or four other church groups that night—some conservative churches, some more charismatic.  All it took was the words ‘cathedral’ and ‘evensong’ and I knew where I was going.

Someone said there were a couple guys from D.C. in the group, and I thought they would be good to talk to, acquaintances maybe, at least until I had a chance to meet the dashing guy with the big suitcase I’d bumped into on the stairs.

I found out that Simon is a writer, and that Jack is in a masters program in D.C. that I’ve looked at several times—a masters in the classics, the program my friend Lilian did years ago.  And looking back it seems that we were instant friends, Jack and I, although I didn’t realize it on that walk to Christchurch Cathedral Sunday evening, didn’t give it two thoughts.

It seems that love is often like this.  We are occupied elsewhere, we evaluate the situation and think that Love will not make an entrance here, so we move on.  And the next time we turn around, we are surprised to find her well established, warming herself by the fire.  (Yet, even in the midst of our surprise, it seems that we knew all along that this is how it would be.) 

I think Eleanor genuinely expected nothing of Fanny’s brother Edward, and could only admit that she liked him, when really her heart was engaged.  She didn’t understand fully until she knew the situation to be impossible.  And then there’s Marianne, insisting on flashy Willoughby, only to be surprised later at her serious and steadfast returning of Colonel Brandon’s love.  And, of course, Elizabeth and Darcy, who fell in love in spite of themselves and their very bad First Impressions (which was Jane’s original title for Pride and Prejudice).

And such was my experience in Oxford.  I was busy elsewhere, unaware that Love was doing some deft matchmaking behind my back.

16: Walking

It was sunny and seventy-something in Oxford—perfect—and my backpack quickly began to stick to my t-shirt with sweat as I headed south down Banbury Road into the city center.  They say it’s a fifteen-minute walk from Wycliffe, but I managed to do it in ten, turning left on Parks Road and passing the University Parks on the left—large green expanses surrounded by trees and flowers and flowering bushes, college students sprawled in the shade with a book or a companion, or both.

I passed the science buildings and Kebel College, walked by Wadham College and crossed Broad Street onto Catte, in the heart of the city center.  There are thirty-six colleges in Oxford, and college buildings, chapels, and quads are spread throughout the city, a jumble of imposing buildings, interspersed with more commerce than I imagined.  Broad Street and High Street and Cornmarket are lined with shops—sandwich places, mobile phone stores, American fast food places (argh… must Oxford have a Burger King and Pizza Hut?), bookstores, tourist shops.

In college I visited Cambridge once with my parents.  I had been studying in a little beach town on Spain’s Atlantic coast—a difficult trip where eight of us stayed with an American family whose marriage seemed to be breaking (or already broken) and whose house was torn apart, mid-remodeling.  I remember a half-finished stairway to the second floor, sheetrock and nails and plaster and an open roof, the husband sleeping on a mattress in the mess, our teacher slouching along with his Mexican accent and getting angry with me for drinking tinto de verano.  (Our Baptist credo precluded any kind of alcohol.)

I had yet to master the art of bathing suits that looked good on me, or style in general, and spent four weeks with the awkwardness of trying to not be awkward in a foreign country, compounding my sweet-smart, somewhat-unsophisticated-and-insecure persona.  I was cowed at the prospect of not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.  So when my parents met me in Madrid for a short European tour, I was thrilled to see them and alternately moody and mean.

I hold a little-visited string of wonderful memories and embarrassing moments from that trip in my mind.  We rode a gondola over gorgeous Barcelona’s evening lights, sat in a street café drinking red wine in pain after walking around literally all of Paris (my mother was most in awe at the self-cleaning bathrooms at Arc de Triomphe), struggled to find a tiny fishing village in Scotland someone on the plane had recommended to me, only to find it, well, tiny.  I was embarrassed at the time because of my parents’ solid American tourist mentality.  They did not even attempt to be good Europeans, I thought.  They wanted fat-free creamer for their coffee and real American ham instead of jamon serrano and generally talked loudly and shared food in restaurants in distinctly American ways.  But looking back I am embarrassed for myself, my little aggressions, my lack of grace.

In the middle of that trip we visited Cambridge.  It was cool and quiet, and somehow comforting.  Gorgeous college buildings and chapels were softened with mist.  We watched punters on the River Cam and had tea in a cozy shop—small tables, ham and cheese sandwiches with butter and grated cheese (or was that in Edinburgh…?).  My parents waited what must have been an incredibly long time for me to pick out perfect matching Cambridge sweatshirts for me and my friend Shelley back home.  All in all, it was lovely.  I was charmed.  And I expected Oxford to be the same.

If possible, I was disappointed with Oxford’s contrasting noise, dirt, and general commotion. 

At the center of Oxford I passed the Bridge of Sighs, the copy of a Venetian bridge which looks incredibly romantic in pictures but really just connects one college building to another.  The Bodleian Library, founded in the 1300’s—one of the world’s largest—was next, although I didn’t investigate beyond walking by the tower entrance.  After that the round Radcliffe Camera with its domed top, which I found charming but couldn’t help wondering what inspired them to make it round.  I eyed the café behind the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, one of the prettiest spots in town, and then made my way down to get a look at the Thames.

On my way down St. Aldates, I wandered through a bit of meadow by Christ Church Cathedral and began to be enthralled.  Christ Church College is the largest in Oxford, founded by Wolsey in 1525 as an ecclisiastical college.  The main quad is more than twice the size of most, with (of course) carefully manicured lawns with paths leading to a central fountain.  The small cathedral sits opposite the quad entrance toward the right, and when you view the cathedral from the meadow to the south, where it’s surrounded by open space, it feels both quaint and significant.  There’s a perfect spot for pictures by the meadow gate, where you can get flowers and college and cathedral in one shot.

I found the punts on the Thames, by a great little pub called Head of the River, with picnic tables right down to the water, and wandered back through town north on Aldates and Cornmarket and Giles.  I passed the martyr’s memorial to Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer, an ornate tower in the middle of Magdalen Street—sort of a steeple without a church.  I stuck my head in The Eagle and Child pub where Lewis and Tolkein and their Inklings met, passed St. John’s College where the Austens studied and walked back to Banbury Road.

15: Waking

On Sunday morning, I slept in and cautiously navigated the toilet-in-the-hallway situation in my pajamas.  This required several things not part of my regular habits:  decent pajamas as opposed to just a ratty old t-shirt, for one thing—mine were cropped pants in a thin white jersey, with green and pink stripes, and a pink t-shirt—love them!; a sports bra (perhaps the British can manage going braless in pajamas around complete strangers, but I find that prospect horrifying); and the ability to smile and offer some type of appropriate communication when bumping into a middle-aged man in a suit as one is running to the loo first thing in the morning.  My strategy was a bit of a lurk-and-dash–check to see that the coast was clear, make a run for it, and pray that the one closest to my side of the hall would not be occupied, which would necessitate going around a little corner, exposing me to further interactions with people in real clothes.

I took a shower and ate a cereal bar,  and got ready to take in Oxford before our afternoon kick-off meeting, which I still didn’t want to attend, as it would involve meeting people I didn’t already know—which, I suppose, is assumed in the definition of “meeting.”

So I timidly set off down the stairs, in my green t-shirt and matching cool-ish sort of walking shoes and almost-knee-length jean skirt with the ruffle which is ever-so-slightly trailer trash but darn cute.  And on the stairs I bumped into a terribly good-looking stranger.  Actually, he was carrying up a huge suitcase.  I was in his way.  I could have easily gotten out of his way if I hadn’t been a bit dumfounded—I generally lose the ability to think and act with good sense around guys I could be interested in (like any good chick lit heroine, but not promising for one who aspires after Austen), and then there was the jet lag—I wasn’t thinking entirely correctly.  I took him in immediately—dark, wavy hair, green eyes (or were they blue?), great smile, bit of a tan—and went on my way with a much lighter heart, not devoting much mental energy to it, but knowing somehow that he would be Frederick.

14: Grace

There was more to my panic, really, than my fears about the trip.  I think whenever I step out to do something big, I wonder if I will have stepped beyond the reaches of God’s grace.  And perhaps that fear formed the heart of my anxiety.

I have not always believed in the grace of God.  Actually, since I was roughly three, I’ve believed in the big, eternity-changing, salvation sort of grace.  I prayed a prayer to ask Jesus in my heart—childlike and beautiful, I imagine—when I was three and we were all saying our evening prayers in my brother’s room.  I remember kneeling on the shag carpet with our hands folded on his seventies comforter.  I remember that he laughed.  Actually, I don’t remember that anymore but I used to remember that and told myself that version of the story for so many years that now it’s fact, even if it didn’t actually happen.  As a child in Baptist schools I prayed that prayer over and over, in chapel, at Vacation Bible School during the summer; everyone wanted to know in those days the date and time I prayed the “sinner’s prayer.”  I was never entirely sure which one stuck. 

Then in college I wondered if I really believed any of it—God, Jesus, the Bible, the need for salvation.  I took two years to feel my way through doubt.  I still knew, in some way that I’m not sure I can explain, that God was with me, that he was guiding me even as I asked questions and investigated what the rest of the world believed.  I studied C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy, and eventually determined that Christianity was true according to my experience, which was all I could use to judge it.  I felt like it would take me a lifetime to evaluate all the logical, rational arguments and I didn’t have the brain power for that or the time and as much as I could evaluate them they felt true to me, so I came back.  But I came back to a different faith.  It was shaky and easily faltered and could be toppled over into a whirlwind of doubt by the little breath of a series of questions from my brother or a scientific article questioning the existence of Jesus or the occasional realization of the hugeness of the world that did not believe as I did.

But that is not the point here.  I firmly believed in the love and grace of God.  I knew that was one of Christianity’s distinctives.  I could tell you how to confess your sins and be forgiven “of all unrighteousness”—even the things you didn’t know you did.  But I didn’t actually believe in grace for myself, on a daily basis.

I’ve often felt like it’s impossible to keep up with my confession.  I am simply too wrong, in my core.  As soon as I confess and receive forgiveness and occasionally feel the depth of that, the cleanness of being right with God, I set off on another pattern of wrong thinking, where I am the center of my universe, where even when I try to put other people first and love God (and don’t always put that much energy into that), I fail miserably, and am aware of the fact that seemingly two seconds after I have been irrevocably washed clean I am dirty again, like filthy rags.

And years of church and faith – being instructed over and over to read my Bible every single day to please God, being taught implicitly that my spirituality was directly related to the number of services I attended, or the number of people I witnessed to, and being part of a family that doesn’t enjoy or maybe believe in laying about, in taking three hours by the pool with only a drink and a magazine (we are the industrious, entrepreneurial type)—I believed, I suppose, in the necessity of earning the pleasure of God.

I thrived on doing and forgot how to be.  When I finally went to counseling to work through my depression, I was in a state in life where I couldn’t even make myself a cup of tea.  I would watch my roommate make tea and wonder how she could take the time to do such a thing, to let the water boil, let the leaves sit, to actually slow down enough to drink it.  Everything in my life was about doing.  Every minute was scheduled to take advantage of my limited energy.  So I worked until I crashed and couldn’t work any longer.  And when I crashed, on my lost days, I could barely make or eat anything.  I couldn’t even enjoy watching TV.  The days would rush by as I laid on my couch with pictures going by on the screen in front of me, too numb and dissociated to be involved in the stories.

Everything was work.  Work was my salvation.  And not being able to work made me distraught.

It bothered me that I had forgotten how to relax.  I wasn’t enjoying life.  And perhaps part of me knew that I couldn’t save myself.