There and Back Again

Last week, my brother and I made the long-awaited journey to Oxford. After a year of preparing, reading, planning, hoping, praying – the adventure is finished. We went there, and came back again. This is the tale, as best as I can tell it.

Why Oxford?

{ Grief, Observed }

“There must be hope and joy somewhere – I believe God intends those things for us – but I haven’t quite found them yet. Sometimes I think the world has no right to laugh at anything.

A Great Music

{ Many Hues, Endlessly Combined }

I live with four beautiful Sisters. I have no biological sisters, but these adopted ones have taught me much about the manifold hues of Christian friendship.

Life Between the Gardens

{ Green and Growing Things }

I have, in recent weeks, begun really preparing for Oxford, compiling all the sites and experiences my brother and I want to see and do during our short week abroad. It’s hard to believe our trip is barely over a month away.

Lessons from the Pevensies

{ Yearning for my Youth }

I am starting a new academic semester and therefore another life chapter. As graduation and the “adult world” loom, I daily feel a stronger pang of Lewis’ longing or Joy. 

Advent

This image is a recreation of this postcard from the sisters of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey

 

{ The Hopes and Fears of All the Years }

Winter came right on time this year here in the Hudson Valley. It’s my favorite place to celebrate the Advent season.

Joyful in Hope

{ Fallen into a Tale }

“But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it… Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

-Sam Gamgee, The Two Towers

A Terrible Benevolence

{ Begging for Tenderness }

In 1956, at the age of 58, C.S. Lewis was married for the first time to Mrs. Joy Davidman Gresham. Divorced, ethnically Jewish, a former communist, and a New Yorker to boot – she wasn’t the picture of a traditional English housewife.

Prisms and Paradoxes

{ The Death of a Cynic }

All my life I have had a tumultuous relationship with human beings. When I was four or five, a young Romantic through and through, I told people when I grew up I wanted to be either a doctor or a McDonald’s worker – because “I like people!” I wanted to help them, whether through the miracle of medicine or the gratification of fast food, I guess.