Mountainside Shells

Introducing A Lover's Quarrel

I was standing on a hillside in Wyoming, 7,500 feet above sea level, holding the fossil of a sea mollusk. All around me were the sagebrush and gnarled pines that grasped for every stray drop of moisture in the thin dry air, but in my hand was the shell of a creature that lived in a warm salt sea. In moments like those, I fall in love with the world, and the impossible mystery of it all. How can a seashell tumble out of a hillside a thousand miles inland and nearly a mile and a half up in elevation? The answer, of course, is that this world is very old, and it has memories and secrets that we cannot possess. Every hillside, plain, and valley remembers something we can never really know. This Wyoming hillside was once the bottom of a shallow inland sea, and the churning of the world has lifted and folded the earth until the remains of the mollusk sit high in the mountain air, far from any ocean.

I was standing by a Minnesota lake, thinking about water. I’ve become fascinated lately with the idea of “residence time,” which in hydrology is a way of describing how long a typical molecule of water will stay in a given body of water once it has entered it. How long will a molecule of water reside in a lake, or a glacier, or a cloud, or a stream? It turns out that for the deep ocean, the answer is about 4,000 years, and I think that’s just fantastic. A drop of rain that falls onto the surface of the south Pacific and mixes its way to the bottom will stay in there about 4,000 years until it evaporates out again. For a river, the residence time is about two weeks. The water comes through fast; it runs its course and is gone again. For a cloud, it’s about ten days, which is still a long time for a cloud, if you think about it. The water in a glacier will fall as a snowflake and be pressed into ice that will glide along for a thousand years before calving off into the sea; a molecule in an aquifer seeps down and stays for ten thousand years. In the Minnesota lake where I was standing, the average molecule of water had probably been there ten years. The world moves slowly, and all at once, in rhythms we might not live long enough to notice.

I was standing in church, reading a passage from Genesis aloud to the congregation, noticing something I had never noticed before. This happens frustratingly often: it is only when I am moments from preaching a sermon or teaching a class that I see something new about the text that knocks me off the things I had planned to say. This is what I love about the bible and what keeps me coming back to it: the sense that no matter how many times I walk its terrain, it still has ways to surprise me. There are things embedded there like seashells in an arid mountain hillside—things that have been floating around in there for untold thousands of years. It’s beautiful, and frustrating, how inexhaustible text and tradition can be. Bible, too, has secrets and rhythms we cannot quite know.

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” That’s the last line of an otherwise forgettable Robert Frost poem called The Lesson for Today. In the poem, the line is suggested by the narrator as an epitaph for himself; in real life, the line adorns Frost’s own gravestone. It’s a wonderful way to encapsulate a life: “a lover’s quarrel” speaks to the kind of struggle that only comes when you love something dearly. Rarely do we wrestle with something that doesn’t matter; we only really contend with the things that are dear to us. We quarrel because we love, and perhaps we love because we quarrel. “A lover’s quarrel with the world” suggests that the world is worth loving, but that the world also defies and wounds that love.

That’s what I hope this space will be about. I too have a lover’s quarrel with the world, and with the texts and traditions that have borne me and shaped my life. My quarrel is with the bible and all the harm it has done, and all the harm that has been done by the churches and Christendoms and empires that have claimed the same loves I claim. The bible is poison and it is a weapon, and so is the church, and yet there is something life-giving there too, at least for me and for many of the people I know. Sometimes I wish I could give it up and do something else, but I couldn’t do that any more than I could renounce my own bones or learn not to think in my mother tongue. We belong to each other and to our pasts, for better and for worse.

My plan for this space, at least in the beginning, is to do a few things. As an academic, I do a lot of academic writing. That kind of writing tends to be closely bounded in style and limited in audience. Not too many people are clamoring to read heavily-footnoted articles in paywalled journals. So, I plan to use this space to explore other kinds of writing, hopefully more accessible and useful to a larger number of people. I want to do this in a few ways, at least.

First, I want to use this space to reflect on the cycle of texts that in parts of Christianity is called the Revised Common Lectionary. There’s nothing special about the lectionary; it’s just a list of texts that some (but not by any means all) churches use to guide their weekly gatherings and reflections. I’ve blogged the lectionary before, trying to comment on each passage, but here, my plan is to write a short essay reflecting on connections I see emerging out of the texts, and to do it in a way that remains as curious and generous about as I can. My plan is to do this roughly each Monday, for the following Sunday’s texts. For those of you who follow the lectionary in writing or hearing sermons, I hope this space will be a resource for you—a mirror for your own reflections on sacred texts.

Second, I want to use this space to play with some forms of writing that I don’t have an outlet for elsewhere. Lately I have been experimenting with creative nonfiction writing (like this essay that you’re reading); I hope to publish a lot of that here. I might be posting poems, prose poems, short fiction, prayers, or other kinds of writing, hopefully on a semi-regular basis.

Third, I want to use this space to comment on the many expressions of religion, and especially Christianity, in the world at large. Religion is forever popping up in beautiful and destructive ways, woven into our lives, embedded in strange places and floating around in long, almost-imperceptible cycles. Here, I hope to think about some of the entanglements of our world with religion, and especially the forms of Christianity where I have found my life and work.

Finally, I want to cultivate and curate beauty here. Photography, art, literature, music, spoken and written word—all are part of the lover’s quarrels we all carry on with the world. Beauty is at the beginning of the quarrel, because beauty is what draws us in and holds us fast. I am not an artist, but I live in the midst of human creativity in my own home, and in the circles where I travel, and I hope to bring as much of it to this space as I can.

A seashell on a mountainside: that speaks to a world that we can only begin to know. It points to a love that must always be incomplete and tentative, and maybe contentious. It says something about how enfolded we are, how we live and speak in the middle of a longer story, and how the world is always wilder than we know how to name. I have a lover’s quarrel with the world, and perhaps you do too. Perhaps we can quarrel together.