Tag Archives: Deep Springs
Looking Before and After
If you’re operating a plough, you need to make a straight row. If you’re looking back at your house—there are your friends waiting for you; there’s dinner being cooked; there’s your bed, which you left too early and will get back to late—you’re going to make a crooked row. And each row that follows will be worse. But in the mouth of Jesus, this country wisdom takes on a new meaning: If you put your hand to the plough of discipleship and look back, you’ll never be fit for the kingdom of God.
The Moon is Swimming Naked and the Summer Night is Fragrant
Too bad we had to walk down, I said to one guy. Yeah, it would be better if we could float. The stars and moon and the water and the friends and the chemical enhancement made the proposition sound almost plausible–as if the world would make a special arrangement for us that one time to mark all we had done and been in that place and to acknowledge the love and gratitude we overflowed with so painfully.
Embrace the Stains
These were the clothes in which he had walked the highways and byways of Galilee. These were the clothes he was wearing when people with every disease came to him. They were clothes stained with the wine and oil of meals with tax collectors and sinners. They were clothes stained with spots of his own blood, drawn by the hard roads he walked. They were scuffed and dulled by walking through the grain fields on the sabbath. They had touched the widow’s son as Jesus raised him from the dead. They had been stained by the tears of the woman who washed his feet.
Suburban Diarist: Valley of the Shadow
And yet now, having known the consolations of a loving marriage, pursued the full course of my formal education, tasted the vocations that define my life, and treasured the unspeakable joy of fathering a child, the prospect of a parting sometimes fills me with far greater bitterness than it did back when my life was still a blank canvass. I’ve had to explain to skeptics that when Paul says, rhetorically, “where grave is thy victory; where O death is thy sting?” he is referring to the final resurrection, not to our own mind here and now. Here and now the grave wins its victory and death inflicts a palpable sting, to those who leave too soon and to those who are left. Yet youth is perhaps innocent even of this.
Risen
At Deep Springs and, I imagine, many other small, isolated communities, a certain convergence of personal styles takes place. We arrived distinct from each other but grew, externally at least, more and more alike: Long hair or a buzz with the #3 razor; generations of farm-suitable clothes intermingling and being exchanged; an inevitable preference for glasses over contacts. The passage of time only compounds the effect. People we knew by smell (not that difficult in that place) or by footfall at the time become blurrier, singly or together. Looking at this picture I at first mistook another guy for me. My mother mistook a different guy for me.
California Diarist: Fruit of the Earth and Work of Human Hands
(I wrote this in September, 2010) It had been eleven years since I’d last seen Tom. At the end of a premature and ill-advised visit to Deep Springs not three months after I had graduated, I sat out where the college’s access road meets the state highway that splits the valley. It was early, perhaps […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 