A Letter From Home

Camp Lone Star in LaGrange, Texas, was like a second home to me growing up, and I worked as a counselor, a lifeguard, and a medic there during two of my four college summers.

In our staff hut one summer, someone put a board up on the wall where we could record the things we saw God doing in our campers on a day-to-day basis.  At the top of the board, in a beautiful hand-written font, was the title, "...but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty."

There are those things that seem to speak directly to your soul, as if they are divine messages specifically directed at you.  There are times when you know that you have been an eyewitness of God's majesty.

I spend most of my time these days in the theatre building on the University of Alabama's campus.  The story goes that our building was originally built to be able to act as a bomb shelter when needed.  If all the girls just put on poodle skirts and the guys slicked their hair back, it would truly feel like you'd gotten in your time machine and emerged into the hallways of some 1950s university.

And this being the theatre building, it wouldn't be all too surprising to me if everyone did decide to dress up 50s style one day.  It's like another world in our building.  You can tell by the looks on the faces of the students who are, say, engineering majors, but have to enter our world for an English class.  But more on that in some future post.

If you were to walk into my office right now and get a closer peak at my desk, right next to the happy little green fern-like plant I have there to liven things up, you'd find a teal piece of scrap-booking paper on which I've carefully hand-written an English Renaissance poem.  Have you heard this one before?  I am wondering how I just discovered it.

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

-John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

If I had an "eyewitnesses of his majesty" board, I would scrawl this poem on it right now.  But then, I guess that's what this blog is for.

This 17th century poem from a brother in the faith has been speaking to me for several weeks now, tapping into my sehnsucht.  To borrow C.S. Lewis's words, at the moment, this poem is to me like "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited".

A letter from home.