Week in Words: Glory

I’m pausing in my swim through the archives, lifting my head out of old blog posts for a breath of air in the present. And what I’m reading is 1000 Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp.

Her writing reminds me a lot of Annie Dillard, and also of Dillard’s predecessor, Thoreau. Especially this passage I read this morning:

How I want to see the weight of glory break my thick scales, the weight of glory smash the chains of desperate materialism, split the numbing shell of deadening entertainment, bust up the ice of catatonic hearts. I want to see God, who pulls on the coat of my skin and doesn’t leave me alone in this withering body of mortality; I want to see God, who gives gifts in hospitals and gravesides and homeless shelters and refugee camps and in rain falling on sunflowers and stars falling over hayfields and silver scales glinting upriver and sewage floating downriver.

It’s a very similar sentiment to what Thoreau expresses here, in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Both writers feel something so similar when they’re out in nature, yet they come to such different conclusions about God. I also notice the contrast between a feminine perspective that absorbs the wonders of nature, and a masculine one that seeks to dominate (“drive life into a corner”).

Both passages stir me up and encourage me to go into this day alert to the possibilities. As Ann Voskamp goes on to say, “I pay tribute to God by paying attention.” I hope this will be a digging-deep, thick-scale-breaking, skin-coat-tugging kind of day.