Vacation thoughts...

I'm down in Wilmington, North Carolina for a few days vacation before the autumn schedule starts up. This fall I will be taking classes at a local seminary, and I am quite excited as well as nervous about that. I also need to find a new job, so I anticipate I will be busy. All this to say, I'm enjoying my few days vacation by the beach and Wilmington is an unexpectedly lovely town. It's immensely historic, grand architecture abounds, it's filled with mansions, museums, tree-lined streets laden with fragrant flowers, dockside restaurants and shops. The Cape Fear river flows smoothly by on one side, while on the other the vast and wonderful expanses of the Atlantic ocean pound at the sand day and night.

Getting out of New York always does me more good than I realise. I noticed that down here, everyone (and I mean everyone) who passes you on the street says hello. Men hold doors open for women. People smile at you when you walk in a shop. No one is in a hurry. I don't usually think of myself as a New Yorker, but dressed in black and tapping my foot impatiently when the shop owners direction-giving turns into a half hour musing on the politics of North Carolina, I realise 'if the shoe fits'....

But I don't WANT to be a New Yorker in that sense. There are other things about New York that I love, but I don't love the edgy restlessness that seems to pervade my life and that of so many people I know. I don't love the hardness and entitlement that sometimes characterizes the suburbs. Mostly, what I don't love is a sense of constant fear and stress that shows in the set of the jaw and the way people snap at each other when they are out of sorts (which seems often). New Yorkers often seem to be surviving, which is very different than living.

I know there is no perfect place, but it just does my heart a world of good to be in a place where people seem glad to be where they are, to live where they live. If I had to use one word to describe the somewhat mixed spectrum of people I have conversed with since I got to North Carolina, I might use the word content. They seem to be happy with their lives--not in a fairy tale sort of way, but in a way that leaves room for great amounts of goodness and even pleasure, while also acknowledging the challenges they might face. It's lovely. It takes the wind out of my constantly fighting sails and leave me hanging in a sort of lovely, languid way.

Before I embark on a hectic fall, it is perhaps a gentle reminder (and gift) from God that life (and even theology?) is as much about being as it is about doing. Life isn't always a fight, although I recognize that it is so for far too many people on a daily basis. But healing can seep into the soul even when we are not struggling--perhaps even more when we cease to struggle. All the more reason, perhaps, to stay aware of the impact that rest,nourishment,peace and beauty can have--particularly beauty. The restorative power of beauty is always amazing to me, and I forget it far too often. But beauty often reminds us of God. In the beauty of the created world, we see God's affirmation, His 'yes' to creation, and we can find reconciliation to life in a world that is sometimes so brutal as to cause us to want to split from it altogether. But beauty extends a loving a hand to beckon us back. As a friend has written about in her book Saving Paradise (about which more later), it is a theology of redemptive beauty instead of redemptive suffering. Perhaps God desires to nourish and love us into wholeness and redemption, and the gift of beauty is one of His ways of reaching us with His extravagant love.

A little quote from Augustine comes to mind (taken from that same book):

"I said to all things that throng the gateway of the senses: 'Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.' And they cried out in a great voice: 'He made us.' My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty."