Telos Fall 2010 Issue

TELOS

04

A WILLIAMs Journal of Christian Discourse

Surprised On the Sixth Day A Draft of Glory

joy fALL 2010

TELOS {Contributors}

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

SENIOR EDITOR

Yue-Yi Hwa ’11

Inez Tan ’12

Andrew Chen ’11

Courtney Atkinson Bianca Brown Fr. Gary Caster Andrew Chen Tasha Chu Meghan Rose Donnelly Kelsey Ham Yue-Yi Hwa Caleb Kim Stephanie Kim

Pinsi Lei Shirley Li Jacquelin Magby Andy Morgosh Michael Nelson Francis Pagliaro Adam Stoner Inez Tan Shirl Yang Emily Yu

{Thanks}

We are indebted to the Cecil B. Day Foundation, the Chaplain’s Office, and College Council.

{Definition}

JUNIOR EDITOR

JUNIOR EDITOR

JUNIOR EDITOR

Rachel Durrant ’13 David Nolan ’13

Effua Sosoo ’13

Telos is the Greek word for “purpose,” “goal,” or “fulfillment.” For us, telos represents a direction that can only be found through God.

{Purpose}

The Williams Telos is a journal dedicated to the expression of opinions and perspectives informed by the Christian faith.

{Contact}

Email williamstelos@gmail.com with comments, questions, donations, or submissions.

LAYOUT EDITOR

LAYOUT EDITOR

BUSINESS MANAGER

Tasha Chu ’11

Emily Yu ’11

Michelle Almeida ’13 Cover photos by Emily Yu. All pieces in The Williams Telos are reflections of personal opinion, interpretation, and understanding of the Christian faith, but do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Telos board or the publication as a whole.

t h e WIL L IA MS

LAYOUT STAFF

LAYOUT STAFF

Esther Cho ’13

Samira Martinhago ’13

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TELOS Fall 2010

t he WI L L I A M S

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inside

TELOS

Fall ’10

INEZ TAN

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Letter from the Editor

REFLECTIONS 04

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How to enjoy your lunch Bianca Brown pushes back against routine.

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In loving memory

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a draft of glory

Jacquelin Magby recounts stories of her grandmother.

Shirley Li takes a deep breath on Mountain Day.

On the sixth day

ESSAYS

Emily Yu reflects on body image and God’s design.

Simply being here

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Surprised Inez Tan probes the other side of sorrow.

Caleb Kim spends a summer in Uganda.

Fall 2010

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ART

Lewis’ notion of joy and the unity 13 of the Christian life

Freedom

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Untitled

The myth of home and the novels of Madeleine L’Engle 33 Stephanie Kim discusses how perfection

falls short of the ideal.

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TELOS

Francis Pagliaro shifts the focus from sin to celebration.

Courtney Atkinson challenges the

dichotomy between aesthetics and morality.

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t h e W I L L IA MS

Joy, not guilt

By Pinsi Lei.

By Kelsey Ham.

Matthew 13:44

By Shirl Yang.

POETRY 12

Fri.

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Hymn of praise

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Windowpanes and winding paths

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Speak

By Meghan Rose Donnelly.

By Fr. Gary Caster.

By Andy Morgosh.

By Mike Nelson.

FICTION 29

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That impossible hypotenuse

By Andrew Chen.

ADAM STONER

The Williams Telos

Letter from the editor “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Him who gives me strength.” {Philippians 4:12b-13} I’m a slow learner. Three years at this school and I still haven’t figured out how to time my smile-grimaces to meet the eyes of the person walking the other way on the path to Paresky. More often than not I either give or receive a scary tunnel vision face.

The fact that I try to time my smiles at all betrays another learning lag: it’s been more than a decade since I first grappled with the bizarre, intangible reality that God-given joy is a foolproof source of motivation and energy (Nehemiah 8:10), but every now and then I still dissolve into a mess of nerves and anti-homework advocacy.

And I still time my smiles. I lack the recklessness that is central to this joy that should be sustaining me, the same joy that is the theme of this fourth issue of the Telos. One clear motif in Old Testament poetry is the act of shouting for joy (e.g. Ezra 3:1213; Psalm 33:3) – yet another divine instruction that I just don’t follow. My self-consciousness ties me down, as in the numerous instances when I open my mouth to crack up at a professor’s joke then stop short. Umm. Sometimes it isn’t self-consciousness that holds me back from joy. And no, it isn’t a dearth of good food (as Nehemiah 8:10 implies) or wine (Psalm 104:15 – really!) either. Right before Jesus was arrested and executed, He told His disciples about the “complete” joy that they will experience under three different conditions: when they love each other as He tells them to (John 15:10-13); when He gives them what they ask Him for (John 16:24); and when they listen to His affirmation of their identity (John 17:13). My recurring failure to inhabit these conditions frequently reduces to inadequate trust: I don’t trust the people around me, I don’t trust God’s generosity, I don’t trust that His crazy sovereignty is the only framework in which I can be free. It’s precisely this freedom that will liberate me to grin like the silly person that I am and to shout with unchecked joy.

To explore this vast and abstract concept, this issue of the Telos presents our most literary selection of pieces so far. Meghan Rose Donnelly finds joy in a new birth (“Fri.”); Jacquelin Magby finds it amid grief (“In loving memory”). Inez Tan examines Wordsworth’s sonnet “Surprised by Joy,” in which he negotiates between overwhelming despair at his daughter’s death and an equally inexorable joy (“Surprised”). Courtney Atkinson reflects on the supposed divide between aesthetic ecstasy and materialistic rationalism, as discussed by C.S. Lewis in the autobiography that he named after Wordsworth’s sonnet (“Joy and the unity of the Christian life”).

The word “joy” shares roots with the word for “jewel” in many Indo-European languages. Permit me a moment of cheesiness while I draw a comparison between the jewels that I’d never wear and the joy that often eludes me: both are exquisite, imperishable, and dear. Here’s to bling. love, Yue-Yi Fall 2010

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How to enjoy your lunch (even if it’s not free)

By Bianca Brown

EMILY YU

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The Williams Telos

We have forgotten how to sing.

We’ve sunk deep into a life of mindless routine, where we’ve trained our eyes to be fascinated with ... the ground in front of us. Our brains, trapped in textbooks, have somehow managed to drag our souls to suffocate there too.

When will we look up and break the cage of self-inflicted monotony?

God’s love is vibrant, dynamic, and it comes with no expiration date. Dare we choose to be awed by His undying mercies?

Look for them, not once in a while, but every single morning (Lamentations 3:22-23).

Joy is the ‘x’ factor for me. It’s it. Happiness is only temporary, dependent on happenings, but joy – joy is independent and victorious over any and all circumstances. We who are more than conquerors in Christ, why do we not live each day in crazy joyful expression over all that He is and over everything that He has given us?

Mindless routine? The sun: does it not rise every morning?

The flowers: do they not bloom every spring? The rains: do they not nurture the soil? The winds: do they not sing of the goodness of God?

You’ve got to get it – you’ve got to understand. Your life depends upon it. Not life after death, but this life, this life that’s promised to be abundant and beyond what you could ever imagine, this life that you’re living right now, this life that has a quality of immortality. Do you believe it? For those who are believers of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are completely untouchable, able, so able, to be joymakers unendingly. God has given you everything, everything for life and godliness. You were meant to live for so much more.

God. He’s Real. He’s not removed from us at all. Your best friend, your mother, your biology professor – we are all made in His image, and God delights in me being different than you.

God delights in beauty. God delights in variation. God delights in telling the stars to shine every night, again, and again, and again, and again. He delights in saying, “Do it again,” to the moon, to the waves, to the trees as they stretch forth their branches and shake off their leaves. I’m made in His image, and I’d venture to say God is the most joyful being in the entire universe. Start celebrating.

This world is not it. The life you live ought not to revolve around the daily schedule you make. How long will it be until you come to the end of yourself, and see past the zone of comfort you so timidly cling to? Shake self, shake self with such a fervor that the shell tumbles away, enabling you to stretch your arms and reach out. Reach out to anyone – knock on your neighbor’s door and show them a verse you’ve thought about today. Stop mid-step and pray for your grandparents. Pick up trash as you walk back to your dorm. And you know that girl you see every day? Please, please tell her that God loves her.

Holding a perfectly formed red apple in my hand, why would I vainly idealize that one could be golden? When did we cease to marvel that apples are red? God has given us every opportunity to come face-to-face with the reality of joy.

There is no conceivable excuse to forsake joy in favor of discontentment in any situation, yet that’s precisely what we do, day after day. Discontentment sneaks up on us, wearing many hats. Complaining about God-ordained-weather, complaining about God-provided-food, frustration over a self-imposedoverbooked agenda, nurturing selfish ambition from a selfobsessed heart.

If God didn’t do a single thing more in your life from this moment onward, you would still be called to be joyful. He died for you, and He rose again, so that you might have everlasting life. Does unquenchable joy require more than this? The apostle Peter told us, “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8).

Bianca Brown ’14 is from Long Island, N.Y.

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Surprised Wordsworth on the coexistence of joy and sorrow Surprised by joy impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport Oh with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind But how could I forget thee Through what power Even for the least division of an hour Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore Save one one only when I stood forlorn Knowing my heart’s best treausure was no more That neither present time nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore Surprised by joy impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport Oh with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb That spot which no vicissitude can find Love faithful love recalled thee to my mind But how could I forget thee Through what power Even for the least division of an hour Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore Save one one only when I stood forlorn Knowing my heart’s best treausure was no more That neither present time nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore Surprised by joy impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport Oh with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb That spot which no vicissitude can find Love faithful love recalled thee to my mind But how could I forget thee Surprised by Joy

by William Wordsworth Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport – Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind – But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss? – That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

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William Wordsworth wrote this sonnet two years after the sudden death of his four-year-old daughter, Catherine, but in it he grieves as though not a day has gone by. When he cries out in misery, “How could I forget thee?” it is both rhetorical – indicative of how deeply he loved her – and guilt-stricken, having in fact let her slip from his mind. Wordsworth specialized in writing poetry of recollection, but even he finds himself running against the human limitations of memory. As much as he wills himself to, he cannot stay purely mentally or emotionally focused on his “most grievous loss.” Amidst such sorrow, how could Wordsworth have begun with the phrase “Surprised by joy” were it not true to his experience? As he “[turns] to share the transport,” even with the reader through the words of the sonnet, we must draw the surprising conclusion that joy and sorrow can be, and indeed often are, found together.

At first glance, the sonnet appears to be a portrait of spiritual barrenness. Though Wordsworth was an Anglican, in this

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nancymarie/3364421453/

By Inez Tan

poem there is no stock Christian imagery – neither angels nor earthly relationships with our parents are meant to give us a any mention of God. What Wordsworth does give us are joy picture of our relationship with God, our heavenly Father. We and sorrow, stripped painfully bare. Joy, the power that “be- can detect faint echoes of a promise from God, the perfect reguiled” him into forgetting about his daughter, consumes him lational being: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and entirely. He describes himself as “impatient as the wind” – un- have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she stoppable. However, he becomes overtaken by sorrow before may forget, I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15) long. We can picture him standing forlorn over “the silent However, we ourselves are only human. No one is able to be tomb,” a stark picture of despair. Nonetheless, in the moment perfectly joyful or hopeful all the time, except perhaps the man that he remembers Catherine’s death – “Oh!” – joy and sorrow whom David Roberts calls a ‘Cheerful Cherub’: “The world coexist. And this is exactly what we find in the Christian life. can be going to pot around his ears, but he remains happy – or The apostle Paul expressed that very intermingling of opposites perhaps I should say ‘slap-happy’ – because his pious cheeriness when describing himself as “sorrowful, but always rejoicing” has apparently robbed him of the ordinary human equipment (2 Corinthians 6:10). Hence, we must recognize that Word- for comprehending the facts of life.” Christians are sometimes sworth’s condition in “Surprised by Joy” is not spiritual impov- guilty of throwing around phrases such as “Be joyful always!” erishment. Far from it (1 Thessalonians 5:17) – it is what one scholar when what they really “The Bible is not full of calls Wordsworthian mean is “Stop being beaming saints, only ordinary poetry of “religious sad already.” While experience – visionary they may even have people who struggled intimations offered as had good intentions, constantly with sin and one man’s heartfelt testhey insensitively overtimony” (Ulmer 30). look or deny the setheir own emotions.”

How can someone verity of depression. experience joy and sorrow at the same time? To make sense of Trying to ignore sorrow in others is at best irritating, at worst the apparent contradiction, we need to look more closely at hurtful. Trying to ignore your own sorrow amounts to smiling what joy is. The very coexistence of joy and sorrow indicates and pretending to be happy when you know you are not. Part that there is more to joy than happiness. It is true that in the of why “Surprised by Joy” is so compelling is because WordBible, joy often appears alongside gladness, and the two are sworth deceives neither himself nor his audience. He humbly closely related. However, Christians believe that joy does not confesses to having forgotten his daughter – “even for the least depend on circumstances the way happiness does. We see this division of an hour.” He admits that he had been “surprised in the book of Galatians, where Paul lists joy with love, peace, by joy,” but also that he still felt “the worst pang that sorrow patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self- ever bore.” His heartfelt outpourings echo the language of the control as “the fruit of the Spirit [of God]” (Galatians 5:22- psalmists, who cried out to God exactly how they were feeling.

23). These are not moods, but attitudes – habits of character God cannot fill us with His love and joy until we allow ourdeveloped by walking in obedience with the Father. That is selves to be vulnerable before Him. how one can cling to joy even in the midst of suffering and sorThe Bible is not full of beaming saints, only ordinary people row. Through faith in God, Paul writes, “We rejoice in our suf- who struggled constantly with sin and their own emotions. ferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; Elijah, one of the greatest Hebrew prophets, was for a time perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3-4). suicidal. Soon after performing a miracle and witnessing all the Joy and hope have much in common. Christian hope is glory of God, he became disheartened by opposition. “Elijah not blind optimism, but faith in a loving God. Wordsworth, was afraid and ran for his life ... He came to a broom tree, as a father calling to his daughter, captured a sense of it with sat down under it and prayed that he might die. ‘I have had the line, “Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind.” Our enough, Lord,’ he said. ‘Take my life; I am no better than my

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Fall 2010

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“The very coexistence of that there is more to

ancestors’” (1 Kings 19:3). All Christians must go through periods of doubt, because faith that has not been tested cannot be claimed. However, reading on to how God spoke personally to Elijah to encourage him, we see the wonderful truth: that God does not reject or give up on the depressed. In fact, he specifically provides for them – many verses in the Bible are specifically for the sorrowful. Jesus included in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” And Isaiah writes, “For the Lord comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones” (Isaiah 49:13).

God’s compassion makes sense because He created us for joy, not sorrow. He made us for gladness, as well as hope. As Christians, the source of our hope is God. When man sinned against God, pain and suffering entered the world, and mankind faced death. Because He loves us, God paid the price of sin by sending Jesus to die in our place so that we could be for-

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The Williams Telos

given. When Jesus rose again, He conquered death. When we choose to believe in Jesus, we have the hope of eternal life with God. We look forward to the promise in Isaiah 25:8 – “God will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces …”

Until then, Christians are no less susceptible to pain and sorrow, consequences of our fallen, hurting world. Returning to the sonnet, Wordsworth’s helplessness comes through in the final two lines, “Neither present time, nor years unborn/Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.” His despair reflects how we still find ourselves enslaved by our human brokenness: the tendency to stay in discouraged and depressed. At times, even as there is something in us that desperately needs to hold on to hope, another part of our nature acknowledges our unworthiness. We deny ourselves happiness and hope, saying that we don’t deserve it. In fact, it is in the nature of happiness and hope is that we cannot work to earn them – they can only

joy and sorrow indicates joy than happiness.”

be freely given. As Wordsworth takes us through the struggle many of us face in accepting joy, the poem becomes all the richer for his conflict and turmoil over finding joy in the midst of grief.

Wordsworth does not indicate what joy surprised him, but his question, “Through what power?” acknowledges that the joy did not come from himself. For Christians, the source of all joy is God. His presence shows us that hope can be found in the midst of hopelessness; His love lifts us out of despair. It is not in unfounded optimism, but rather hope in God that we can claim the Biblical promise for all circumstances: “Though the sorrow may last for the night, joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5b).

Bibliography Julian, Roy. “Joy.” Google. Ed. McKenzie Study Center. 19 Oct. 2010. 19 Nov. 2010 <http://www.mckenziestudycenter. org/theology/articles/joy.html>.

Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography; The Later Years 1803-1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Roberts, David E. The Grandeur and Misery of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Ulmer, William A. The Christian Wordsworth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Ward, Alan B. “Sorrow and Love Flow Mingled Down.”

Google. Ed. Precipice Magazine. 19 Oct. 2010. 19 Nov. 2010 <http://www.precipicemagazine.com/sorrow-and-love.html>.

Inez Tan ’12 is an English and Economics major from New York City, N.Y. She would like to thank Professor Peter Murphy and Courtney Atkinson for their invaluable guidance.

Fall 2010

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Joy, not guilt

Learning to celebrate God’s good world

by Francis Pagliaro

ADAM STONER

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“Anyone who talks about ‘Catholic guilt’ doesn’t know what it means to be Catholic … that’s not what Christianity is about.” Father Gary Caster forcefully asserted this point at a 4:30 pm Mass in late September. He had real conviction in his voice. The Gospel reading that Sunday, Luke 16:19-31, had recounted Jesus’ parable about the spiritual fates of the rich man (who ended up tormented by fire in Hell) and the poor man (named Lazarus, who enjoyed Heaven by Abraham’s side). Many use Luke 16:19-31 to misinterpret Jesus’ message, ultimately failing to understand its truth. They accuse the Church of condemning her members: “If you enjoy life, you are going to Hell! Be afraid! Be guilty! Despair!” However, we know that a look at true Christianity proves that this could not be more wrong.

As Christians, we face a startling and intimidating challenge: The Williams Telos

God commands us to be in this world, but not of it. Indeed, the Father created us all for a supernatural end. Christians live as “resident aliens” in this world. God made us so that He could call us back to Himself. He wants us to go home, to a world without sin. It almost goes without saying that we must reject many parts of human society in order to be in communion with God. Even though Christ has freed us from the powers of sin and death through His crucifixion and resurrection, we still have the freedom to do wrong against Him. We must take the “Thou shalt nots” very seriously. Absolute objective moral truth exists. Some things God cannot accept, and we know these things by natural law, the law that God has written on our hearts. Yet Jesus didn’t found Christianity as an institution of condemnation. Christ made Christianity for redemption.

The need to be in this world carries great importance to Christians. We’ll never find some secret passageway out. Jesus never set up a magical portal or wardrobe to step from this world to the next (not until death, anyway). We are here. We have human bodies, which we see as immeasurable, sacred goods. As Father Caster reminded us in his homily, “God didn’t see the world and say ‘It is bad!’ He said ‘It is good!’” He filled the created order with good things to eat, see, and hear. We are meant to see Christ in the faces of all our fellow humans, and His Father in all the beauty that He created at time’s beginning.

In our journey towards Him, God never encourages us to wallow in guilty angst or to deprive ourselves of joy for its own sake. Rather, He calls us to repent when we sin – to get up when we fall and try again, being joyful all the while. After all, even in the face of His death, Christ took time with the Apostles – His friends – to sit and feast at the Last Supper. The Mass itself is a feast, and God wants us to take part joyfully.

In the early days of Christianity, the followers of Jesus commemorated His resurrection with eight days of celebration.

Eight days of eating, drinking, dancing, playing music, telling stories, playing games and praying out loud. God has saved us!

Is there anything that deserves a greater celebration?

Now comes my point. To really be in this world, we must embrace all that it has to offer. God didn’t set up the earth as some sort of test for us. He didn’t will it all forth ex nihilo just for the sake of putting us through Hell before we can taste Heaven. He made it so that we might care for it, that we might “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). We only need to look out upon the Purple Valley and see that it really does turn a gorgeous purple during an autumn sunset.

In doing so, we must surely realize that God has created it, and created it good. He made the world for us to see and to rejoice in. He wants us to paint it. He wants us to write songs about it. He wants us to live in it and learn about ourselves and our fellow man.

We characterize love as a joyful act. And, as Pope Benedict XVI has pointed out, “Deus caritas est” – God is love. He is also the Logos, the Word, the Classical ordering principle of the entire cosmos. It then follows that love orders everything.

To love someone does not require us to take complete joy in his company, because we can’t like everyone. However, love does require us to rejoice in the fact that the Lord has created us in His own image and that we live each day in the glory of

“To really be in this world, we must embrace all that it has to offer.

God didn’t set up the earth as some sort of test for us.”

God, whether we know it or not. The Father commands us to love one another and implores us to love Him. And love begets joy.

In Matthew 11:30, Christ says, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” Though Christ may have been a tad facetious in characterizing his preaching (I like to think that Jesus had a good sense of humor), He of course speaks the truth. While the pursuit of a Christ-like lifestyle may be long and arduous, it offers unmatched rewards (the most desirable of all being eternal life and the beatific vision). These rewards could only give human beings the utmost joy. The good things of this world – food, drink, music, friends – serve as small tastes, blurry shadows, of what Heaven ultimately will accord.

Christianity began in joy – the birth of a child. It matured in joy – parents seeing their twelve-year-old son show his wisdom and knowledge of God in the Temple. It culminated in joy, as the Son of Man redeemed the world by offering Himself as a sacrifice for our sins. Christianity, then and now, from the alpha to the omega, calls us to be joyful. After all, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).

Frank Pagliaro ’14 is from Harwich, Mass. He enjoys watching the New York Yankees, the Sopranos, and the various antics of his entry, Dennett 2.

Adam Stoner ’11 is a Theater and Art major from Mooresville, N.C. His sketches in this issue are from his recent study in Rome and the Vatican – the one place he has always wanted to see – under a Wilmers Fellowship.

Fall 2010

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Fri.

by Meghan Rose Donnelly Let me situate myself: 7:30 in the morning May 12th 2000 (Y2K) Sunlight and barefeet and waking up to a parentless house “Good morning” she probably said catching the excitement in our throats and filling it with frozen waffles and Aunt Jemima syrup and definitely told us, “6:12 in the morning” before turning back to put the plates away wrong We sat there the 5 of us kidnapped by the morning light and the sweetness on our tongues reducing mystery to the simplest addition Child-eyed, we stared at each other knowing that for the past hour and a quarter we, the 5 of us, had been 6 without knowing it not 5.

6.

Meghan Rose Donnelly ‘11 is an Anthropology and Theatre major from South Kingstown, R.I. She was born on a Thursday in March.

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The Williams Telos

Freedom

by Pinsi Lei

Pinsi Lei â&#x20AC;&#x2122;12 is an Art History and Psychology major from Guam.

Fall 2010

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On the sixth Reclaiming the beauty For those who don’t know me, I’m a tall, skinny Chinese American girl who is currently in her senior year here at Williams. Even if you do know me, you probably don’t know (a) that I wasn’t always skinny, and (b) what my life was like before coming to college.

At the end of middle school, before my growth spurt, I was overweight – not to the point of obesity, but enough to make a fourteen-yearold girl horribly self-conscious.

To this day I hate shopping for clothes because of my memories of trying on clothes and shamefully having to tell my mom that I needed a bigger size.

When I started high school, I decided it was time to take control. I stopped eating breakfast, spent my lunch hour in the library (where no food was allowed), and ate just enough at

“...all I could think to do was to cry out to God” 14

The Williams Telos

home to avoid getting questions from my parents. Sometimes, if I had extra-curricular activities, I would even lie and tell my parents I had eaten at school so I could skip dinner. I avoided social contact and successfully lost weight without anyone noticing my change in lifestyle.

But despite losing the extra weight, I was still dissatisfied.

No matter how much less I ate or how many pounds I lost, it was never enough. I would look in a mirror and just see fat.

Over the course of time, my anorexia wreaked havoc on my body and soul and I spiraled into a deep depression.

One night as I lay in bed, I felt EMILY YU utterly alone and all I could think to do was to cry out to God. Though I had grown up in a Christian household, church and youth group were just things I attended because the rest of my family did.

Having been raised as a good Sunday school kid, I knew what you were supposed to do when you were going through hard times: pray. Until that night, God had never seemed real. But

day with which we were made

by Emily Yu as I lay there in the dark, asking God to help me, I felt warmth inside and out – as if someone were holding me tightly. It was the first time I can honestly say I felt God’s tangible presence, and the first time I truly acknowledged that Jesus Christ was my Lord and Savior.

I can’t say that allowing Jesus into my life automatically fixed everything, but I began to recover slowly. I started to make closer friends, both at school and at church, which helped me force myself to eat regularly at least twice a day.

This gradually restored my body to a low but normal weight.

Even though I was physically recovering from anorexia, I still had not overcome the emotional and mental battle. For the past few years I have been slowly progressing, but it has been a long road filled with struggles and relapses. Every so often I still go through periods of time when I freak out about my weight and stop eating again.

It wasn’t until this year when we began a sermon series on Genesis at First Baptist Church that I began to fully realize the message of Genesis 1 and how it applied to my life. Genesis 1 tells the basic story of creation. I had known it as long as I can remember, but never really looked at it very closely before.

When we began the sermon series, two passages blew me away.

The first was Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” The second was Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the sixth day.” It boggles my mind that I am made in God’s image and that He thinks that I am very good. Who am I to be dissatisfied with myself when my God and my Creator thinks that I am awesome?

Like every other person on this Earth, I am fearfully and wonderfully made by God (Psalm 139:14). Every part of who I am was designed purposefully by Him – He knows how many strands of hair I have on my head, He knows about my weird

“Who am I to be dissatified with myself when my God and my Creator thinks that I am awesome?” jaw that dislocates when I yawn, He knows about my small “Asian eyes.” And regardless of what other physical “flaws” I might have by external standards, He loves me.

Through His love, I’m learning to love myself and to love others, as we are all God’s creations. But this doesn’t come easily. Sin, pain, and sorrow entered the world when Satan convinced Eve to doubt God and disobey Him by eating the fruit (Genesis 3). Like Eve, I believe the lies that Satan tells me in my very own voice and doubt the goodness of God’s creation. I continually fall back into my struggle with anorexia.

Despite my best efforts, I am an imperfect being marred by sin and only by God’s grace can I ever hope to fully recover.

Emily Yu ’11 is a Computer Science and Chinese major from Carlisle, Mass. She has not stepped on a scale in months.

Fall 2010

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Hymn of prai Day unto day the story’s told in wordless ways, the message known by those for whom the universe is hallowed

The earth, the sky, the sun and moon, His fold, moving in splendid rhythms that are sown day unto day. The story’s told

all livings things are holy, signs of God so old they’re found in fields and forest homes and grown day unto day. The story’s told

Kelsey Ham ’12 is a Biology and Religion double major from Bozeman, Mont.

She enjoys spending time with Jesus, eating peanut butter, playing basketball, and going on mountainous adventures.

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ise (Psalm 19)

by Father Caster by cerulean skies, by sunsets orange and gold, through centuries arrayed, and sung in sacred tone.

By those for whom the universe is hallowed

KELSEY HAM

by curving brooks, by waves that crash and foam, that mold the patient sands whose time is measured in soft moans by those for whom the universe is hallowed.

Oh, hear the cosmos singing, her imagery bold, her ancient melody well-honed day unto day. The storyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s told by those for whom the universe is hallowed.

Father Gary Caster has been the Roman Catholic Chaplain at Williams College since 2007.

Fall 2010

17

Simply being here Six weeks of patience and love in Uganda

by Caleb Kim One might expect that going to Africa for a month-long “global internship” would guarantee the discovery of mind-blowing truths, revelations, and lessons about the Christian faith. While that may be true for certain people, I want to tell you that what I’ve learned in Uganda is nothing more special than the familiar message of weekly Sunday worship services – that the powerful love of Jesus saves and heals us.

Through my work with two organizations, the New Start Center and ChildVoice International, one thing was very clear: both the Christian faith and love radically transform lives. The New Start Center is a permanent home for ten boys who were street children in Kampala. These boys were rejected or neglected by their families (if they have any), and the public despised them as well. Their lives were all about finding any food or money that would help them survive the day. When our New Start team went out to the streets of Kampala to see the places where the boys had come from, we saw several street children who were begging, their empty hands stretched out towards passing people and cars. When I saw the kind of life the boys at New Start Center probably led before, I could not help but see how remarkably they had been transformed. The way the boys joked with each other and laughed, the way that their once-empty hands held Bibles during Bible Study, the way they openly expressed so much gratitude for the love and grace God showed them – all of these things helped me see that God is truly working in these boys’ lives. I saw for myself the Biblical truth that God is the father to the fatherless. Each smile and laugh from the boys at New Start was a powerful testimony to the healing love that Jesus brings to all of us.

The strength of Jesus’ love was also hard to miss at ChildVoice International. We spent our days in the Lukodi Community Center with former child soldiers who are also mothers. These girls had to go through painful experiences that no one should ever have to experience. Many of these girls lost their families and saw people get killed during the war. Many of them maimed and killed innocent people in order to survive. However, what is even more shocking and surprising than what these girls have endured is the healing that Christ brings them. The girls’ genuine joy at having us as their visitors, taking care of and loving their children (who were fathered by the commanders for whom they were forced to become sex slaves), and for desiring to serve us as much as we wanted to serve them were all signs of an unbelievable process of healing that only Jesus’ love can bring. Guilty of countless wrongdoings but also deeply wronged and abused, these girls would be rejected by many, but God forgave through

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His Son and demonstrated just how powerful His love really is. People cannot help but ask themselves how in the world these girls came to where they stand now after what they have gone through. I believe that in this earthly world alone, they probably could not. But in God’s realm where forgiveness, love, and redemption reign, such radical transformations are entirely possible.

Furthermore, that same God and that same love is working everywhere because our God is a global God. The God that we often mistake for the God of only our own church, our own campus, or our own community is actually the God of the world, capable of more than we could ever imagine.

Not only did I realize in Uganda that Jesus’ love is what we need to desperately seek (and practice!), but He specifically taught me more about the character of Jesus’ love. Many of us, myself included, are task-oriented people. Therefore, love often becomes another task for us. To show love, we want to do measurable deeds. To love God, we must serve and carry out the work of furthering His Kingdom. But in 1 Corinthians 13, we read that the first thing the Bible says about love is that love is patient. Patience is not something that is actively done. It is not obvious, and the person with whom you are patient with may not even recognize that you are, in fact, loving them through your patience (let us be careful about this as well: love is patient, but patience alone is not love). Many of us can say that we actively serve in the church through measurable deeds, such as leading praise, making the bulletin, serving as ushers, and so on. But are we really able to say that our love for God and our fellow brothers and sisters is patient? I want to challenge all of us to train our hearts to love not only with our actions but with our attitudes and thoughts towards others as well. For if we appear and act friendly to others but also harbor distrust and condescension within our hearts, we are not truly loving. Jesus rebukes us when He points out in Matthew 5 that even the tax collectors love those that love them.

Should we not follow Jesus’ model and wholeheartedly love those who hate and reject us?

We realize time after time that we continuously turn away from God, but He offers us forgiveness through His Son every time we turn back to Him in repentance. Brothers and sisters, is not our God, above all else, so patient with us that it is beyond our understanding? I challenge all of us to see that God is not simply commanding us to love; He loves us first with patience, so that we are humbled, broken, and led to love others the way that He loved us. Let us not love because “that’s what a churchgoer should do,” but because we fully realize how patient, how merciful, how loving our God is toward us. So let us love, but love with our hearts as well as with our actions. In humility, let us be patient with one another, since Jesus tells us to consider others better than ourselves.

The same challenges can be given to all of us with the rest of the characteristics of love that 1 Corinthians 13 describes. Do we trust God’s plans for our lives or do we become impatient and demand different things from Him? Is our love humble that we don’t keep record of wrongs and are not easily angered? Does our love persevere in times of trouble? Does it hope in God? Does our love for God cause us to rejoice with the truth and despise sin? Brothers and sisters, let us reflect on our love for God and those around us. Perhaps we are simply acting out love that is not whole within. I pray that we will strive to love wholly.

At the New Start Center and ChildVoice International, the bulk of our time was spent simply spending time with those around us. We played soccer with the boys at New Start. We also watched the World Cup, saw Ice Age 3, and ate dinner together.

We sat around the campfire and simply talked and joked around with the girls at ChildVoice International. We learned how to say a few words of Acholi so that we could say simple greetings to the girls in their own language. We played silly relay games and threw rocks at mango trees to try to get the mangoes that hung high up in the branches. We did not dig wells. We did not build churches. We neither donated a huge sum of money nor worked on their farm extensively. But we always heard this from those we worked with: “Your simply being here makes all the difference.” Let us not fall into the trap of thinking that concrete actions automatically indicate love. Let us love from the heart and show patience, trust, hope, and perseverance; when we love from the heart first, the actions will follow. When we love God genuinely, obedience will come. Again, let us strive to love wholly as Jesus did.

Caleb Kim ’13 is from Los Angelos, Calif.

Fall 2010

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Joy and the unity of the Christian life On C.S. Lewis, joy and communion

by Courtney Atkinson

YUE-YI HWA

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Expectedly enough, the central motif punctuating C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, the autobiography which chronicles his conversion to Christianity, is indeed joy. “Secular” experiences of joy are the signposts which direct Lewis toward God and communion with Him. Lewis defines joy as a most peculiar longing. It is what he experiences when he is “lost” in literary works of art or struck dumb by the awesomeness of nature.

Keats called it “negative capability,” Otto an experience of the numinous, and Eliot “that music which is heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” In other words, in enjoying art, God, or some other object of deep attention, one is struck dumb; all attention centers on the object. Such phenomena are writ large across the pages of Western literature.

Lewis’ experiences of joy are one side of the dualism which characterizes his pre-Christian intellectual life. Materialistic rationalism comprises the other half. In Surprised by Joy, he himself often notes this division – the division of the aesthetic and the moral, as it were.1 His experiences of joy, for which materialistic rationalism cannot account, along with the fact that Christian writings seize his imagination much more strongly

than other literature, become the grounds for a re-evaluation of tern for the Christian life, one of wrestling with God, coming his thin rationalism. This is why he speaks of “joy” as a signpost to know Him ever better and being known by Him – loving guiding him to Christianity. Yet, once he becomes a Christian, Him and being loved by Him. Most of the time, though, we must give ourselves to God not through religious ecstasy but the importance of such experiences falls away.

Although the signposts fall out of view once Lewis arrives at through everyday particulars – through the writing of a pahis destination – the Christian life – I shall suggest that they per, through patient listening to someone who frustrates us, can teach us something about the destination itself. They bear through everyday prayer when we feel utterly spent. We must its stamp; the pattern of the destination is implicit in the expe- also be attentive to Him who knocks at the doors of our souls, riences of joy, and this pattern reconciles the aesthetic life and be always open to Christ.

The duality which Lewis the moral life. experienced need not exBefore examining the One does not think ist in the Christian life, pattern, I shall more fully because, in the pattern of establish the character of about how one is communion, the aesthetic this phenomenon called enjoying the music life converges with the joy. As Lewis remarks, it is moral one. We are made for only like unto happiness or the work of art; community and for comand pleasure insofar as one one simply enjoys it. munion with God. We are who has experienced it shall not our own. Sartre was desire it again. When one is struck dumb by something outside oneself, whether it be a wrong; Hell is not other people: it is ourselves. The Christian song, a painting, or another person, one’s attention is necessar- life can completely engage the aesthetic and moral faculties of ily focused completely on its object. One does not think about man because God demands the entire self – heart, soul, mind, how one is “enjoying” the music or the work of art; one simply and body alike. Fully obeying his call requires courage, sentienjoys it in a self-effacing way. The self, forgotten, is completely ment, imagination, reason, perseverance – every ability of man. given over to something other than itself. And so “you are the Not only does He demand everything from us, He also gives us music while the music lasts.” This is ecstasy, a stepping outside everything, for He gives us Himself in the person of Christ – on that rugged cross on Calvary, in the Eucharist, beyond this the self, which is without wine and without sex.

It is this motion outside the self which is the sacramental life. Indeed, the pattern of communion contains not only the aspect of joy, because it does not look unlike agape, the self-giv- imaginative life and the moral life; it supersedes and transcends ing love which Christ bestows on us and to which He calls us. both, for there is no life outside it. It is life itself, and it is to this Joy, in its need for complete and pure attention to that which, life that Christ invites us. Would that we accepted the invitateaches us something about communion. St John, in asserting tion wholeheartedly. that “God is love,” makes no sentimental statement but one ______________________ This is the very same division with which Diderot grapples in Le Neveu of inexhaustible theological and mystical meaning – that God 1. de Rameau and Kierkegaard in Enten-Eller. For them, one either leads a life is the communion of persons. The Father gives himself fully, engaged with works of beauty and imagination, seeking them whithersoever lead, or one lives a life of actions governed by moral laws, a life of purely, and perfectly to the Son, and so the Son to the Father. they commitment. These possibilities are pitted against each other and cannot, Each receives the other perfectly. God is perfect and perfective for them, be reconciled. It has become common to think in terms of this the idea that one can choose the moral life with all its rules or agape, self-gift, self-sacrifice. The crucifix is the greatest symbol dichotomy, one can choose a life colored by beauty, pleasure, and the peculiar suffering of love because it is the image of Christ giving Himself wholly of the artist. to us, pouring out His blood for the world.

This pattern – the communion of the Trinity – is the pat- Courtney Atkinson ’11 is a classics major from Java.

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Fall 2010

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In loving memory

Lessons from my grandmother

by Jacquelin Magby

My grandmother passed away on September 11, 2004. In an effort to keep from forgetting so many of the wonderful times, words, and lessons we shared, I decided to compile my memories of her in a manuscript. Thus, in 2008, I started a journal with the promise to immediately write down any memory of her that came to mind. The following selections are from my manuscript. It is my hope that these memories will comfort and inspire, teach and remind, heal and encourage.

My grandmother taught me many lessons and in various ways:

Oct 13 2008 4:06 pm I remember hearing Grandma sing for the family. She was practicing for the praise team at church. The family marveled at this talent they didn’t know she had. I took silent pride in knowing that I had known of her hidden talent for years. Each time I was sick, I would hear her soft voice. She sang me many songs, but the only one I can remember is also the one she sang on the church praise team later that week. “You can’t beat God’s givin’/ No matter how you try/The more you give/ The more He gives to you/ So, just keep on givin’/Cus its really true/ That you can’t beat God’s givin’/No matter how you try.”

Oct 13 2008 4:17 pm I remember wearing Grandma’s shirts whenever I forgot to bring one while spending the night over at her house. I remember dancing on her toes. I remember her smelling like the cocoa butter lotion she used. I remember her using a curl activator on my hair once and how my hair was soaked all day. I remember getting her water in a clear glass with a green trim on top and a green trim on the bottom. I remember her teaching me how to make pancakes, telling me that the secret was to use eggs even if the box didn’t say so and milk where the box said to use water. I remember sitting on the porch, crying and waiting for Sierra to come home, and seeing her car pull up, and feeling relief, but feeling even sadder as I saw her tears. I remember us reaching out and hugging because we knew that me losing my grandma was like her losing a grandma, too. I remember us sitting there on the porch just like we did the first day I convinced Grandma to buy that house because it was just five houses down from Sierra’s.

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“‘And Joy is independent of your happenings.

So, no matter what happens,’ she told me, ‘you can still have Joy in your heart.’”

Jan 13, 2009 12:31 am Many people confuse the two – Happiness and Joy – and use them interchangeably. But Grandma was much wiser. I remember her teaching me the definition of happiness when I was around age 14. Happiness, she said, derived from the word “happenings,” and, therefore, it was dependent on these happenings. So if your happenings were favorable, you were happy. If they were not, you were unhappy. I told her that I was quite uncomfortable with the instability of this emotion and that I needed something more. “Joy, honey, is what that’s for,” she said. “You see, only the Holy Spirit gives you Joy. It’s a gift. And Joy is independent of your happenings. So, no matter what happens,” she told me, “you can still have Joy in your heart.”

I remembered each of these lessons the day she passed. And despite the immense grief I felt from losing my best friend in the entire world, I remember feeling a strange sense of comfort and Joy that I know only God could have given. I can’t lie and say there was an immediate transformation from sorrow to Joy. But the previous excerpts are about the Joy God gives us by allowing us to experience and appreciate the small (sometimes very small) moments in life. It’s now been six years since my grandmother’s passing, and I can assure you that although I still miss her terribly, the Lord has indeed turned my mourning into dancing. The more I gave both my burdens and myself to Christ, the more room there was left in me for Him to fill. What an invaluable lesson my grandmother gave me. It’s true – you can’t beat God’s giving, as she said. Remembering the love she showed me, I know that I would have never been able to beat hers either.

Jacquelin Magby ’11 is an American Studies major and Africana Studies and Latina/o Studies concentrator from Chicago, Ill. Fall 2010

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Windowpanes and winding paths Windowpanes and winding paths Which pass as silent hours Silent thieves, these passive modes With ardor-snatching powers Those worn boxcars which transport me One encounter to the next But nothing more than breaks in life For melancholy rest Oh! but that passion which comes As sunshine spikes anew Demanding body, mind and heart My soul through and through For which all respite from prior days Serves as needed time Like stagnant water, reflecting pools A mirror for my mind But deviate, I rather would From panes and paths and mirrors Experience, I rather would These joys, and tears, and fears Contemplation has its place A mind’s refining flint But give me life, so sweet and true O’er judgment’s jading tint So choose you must your Northern star Pity or passion’s pain?

But be forewarned, the pity path May whip a life so plain Then up with your cross, make yourself To be deadly crucified Lay me to rest and let life be The reason that I died

by Andy Morgosh

Andy Morgosh ’12 is slowly learning to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

He studies Economics and Religion at Williams and hails from San Diego, Calif.

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The myth of home and the novels

of Madeleine L’Engle YUE-YI HWA

An excerpt from “The song of the universe,” a senior honors thesis in English by Stephanie Kim Domestic fiction, in which the home serves as the central setting and the family as the central cast of characters, “so dominates children’s literature from the eighteenth century onward that it cannot be easily separated from children’s literature generally.”1 The rise of industrialization certainly abetted that domination, and some scholars argue that the “mythology of the perfect sanctuary of the home was developed to new levels in the nineteenth century.”2 Ann Alston points out that in such works “the child reader is instantly immersed in a cul-

tural ideology,”3 one that that promotes a version of home that is “loving, respectful, preferably with two parents, contained in domestic harmony and sharing a wholesome home-cooked family meal.”4 Virginia L. Wolf goes further, claiming that this mythology expresses a desire “rooted in our infantile perception of reality.”5 Thus Alston and Wolf both point to a certain danger in this myth of home, which they perceive as a comforting but ultimately problematic denial of reality.

Yet it also seems likely that domestic settings represent more Fall 2010

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than the ideal of a nuclear family in a post-industrial age, even tion and fantastical stories of the Time Quintet, and the latwhen entangled in the didacticism of children’s literature. Just ter referring to the more realistic, domestically focused stories as in idiomatic English usage the phrase “at home” has come of the Austin Family Chronicles. Yet what the two series hold to signify a state of comfort or belonging, the literary home is most strikingly in common is the prominence of the home and more than myth. It is also metaphor, and a possible locus for family, even in books in which the majority of the action hapexploring the conceptions pens outside the home or of selfhood and commuapart from the family.

Her idealized setup of the nity that it represents.

In these novels, home home bars the possibility of Pauline Dewan observes is an anchor and a haven, that serving “as a meetbut it is also the place a simultaneously developed ing place and mediator where the ideal interacand orphaned individual. between the self and the tions between individuals world” is a “key function” in community are con6 Thus, it is no surprise that of the home in children’s literature. centrated. Thus, L’Engle’s version of “home” reveals her undomestic stories are sometimes referred to as “inside stories,” derstanding of how individuals can and should behave in comfor they not only reflect the interior community found within munity. In her works, the home – expansive and chaotic, at a home, but also raise pressing questions about the interior of times unstable and always warm – may indeed be the vessel of the individual, and the relationship between the two. If child- a certain cultural ideology. But it is also the vehicle for a certain hood is about “the conflicting yet interrelated juvenile rights social philosophy, in which the complex boundaries between to individual agency and communal protection,” perhaps that individuals are negotiated and transgressed in the creation of relationship can be best community. located within the repreThus, the problem with Alston’s characterization of the sentation of home in chil- home in children’s literature does not lie in her wariness of an dren’s literature.7 adult-constructed promotion of a specific ideology. In some Madeleine L’Engle was sense, all children’s literature involves this kind of promotion; highly attuned to such all children’s literature is to some degree – even if that degree questions about the rela- is minimized – didactic, simply by virtue of being a top-down tionship between child- construction in which the writer and the audience are never hood and the home. Be- peers. The problem is her assertion that the home found in tween 1960 and 1994, children’s literature is simply an “unattainable dream,” an ideal L’Engle wrote the ten that we can only ever fail to encounter.8 This argument is anbooks that would eventu- chored in the assumption that in all children’s literature there ally be categorized as her lurks a version of the home that is too perfect to be true. Even if “Time Quintet” and “Aus- the central home in a novel is dysfunctional or imperfect, that tin Family Chronicles.” myth lingers in the negative space around it.

But L’Engle’s portrayal of the home complicates this claim The two series focus on two different families, the by making a distinction between perfect and ideal. Indeed, Murrys and the Austins, her intention seems not to be to present a perfect home, but and are in some ways radi- rather one that achieves the best possible combination of values cally different. They are and relational systems. In other words, she presents an ideally sometimes categorized into functioning version of the home and community, not an ide“Kairos” and “Chronos” ally existing (or perfect) version of one. Wolf describes the myth frameworks, the former of home in children’s literature as being rooted in a “continued referring to the science fic- need for the possibilities of unity, certainty, and perfection.”9 Yet

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in L’Engle’s version of the home, she allows space for discord, uncertainty, and chaos to exist in its inner workings, and in fact argues that what might ordinarily be understood as the utopian home is actually representative of a dystopian one. Unity, certainty, and supposed perfection are more evident in a surface glance of Camazotz – the dystopian world of her Newbery-winning classic, A Wrinkle in Time – than in the wind-battered Murry home or the chaotic Austin home, which are otherwise ideal.

A closer look at Wolf ’s argument reveals a more troubling claim undergirding her analysis of the home in children’s literature. Beyond questioning the literary myth of home, she denies the possibility of home altogether, referring to “our essential homelessness” as human beings.10 She claims that “being at one with the world requires freedom from pain and suffering [and] obviates the desire for change and growth.”11 Yet she conflates the notions of harmony and belonging when she alternately uses both “oneness with the world” and “being at home in the world” to describe the myth of home. Thus she leads us to conclude that belonging and growth are mutually exclusive, as though maintaining a sense of security, particularly through relying on others, precludes maturation somehow.

But L’Engle’s portrayal of adolescence pushes against that notion; for her, maturation itself is contingent on a firm sense of individual identity in relation to a larger community. Fur-

thermore, L’Engle seems in part to be reacting to a cultural veneration of individual autonomy by probing into how such autonomy works, and she comes to the conclusion that autonomy best operates when embedded in the context of community.

For L’Engle, characters never have to choose between authentic self-development and their responsibility to a community.

When such a choice is posed, it is always a false one. Thus her idealized setup of the home bars the possibility of a simultaneously developed and orphaned individual.

In fact, L’Engle would no doubt take issue with the argument that we are all essentially homeless in the world because growth so violently subverts the possibility of harmony and belonging. She never presents the ideal relationship between community and individual as completely secure: adolescence tests it, outside disruptions threaten it, and self-imposed isolationism shakes it. But complete harmony and complete belonging are not necessary for the home to exist as some manifestation of those qualities. As L’Engle imagines it, the ideal home is ultimately an imperfect home by nature. The values she promotes in her version of home – freedom of choice and unity in diversity, the tenuous balance of love and fear – all ride on an assumption of the occasionally dissonant chord. And it is those dissonant chords that ultimately make the overall harmony so remarkable in the first place.

1. “Domestic Fiction,” in The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 2068.

2. Ann Alston, “There’s No Place Like Home: The Ideological and Mythological Construction of House and Home in Children’s Literature,” in New Voices in Children’s Literature Criticism, ed. Sebastien Chapleau (Lichfield: Pied Piper, 2004), 55.

3. Ibid.

4. Ann Alston, The Family in English Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2.

5. Virginia L. Wolf, “From the Myth to the Wake of Home: Literary Houses,” Children’s Literature 18 (1990): 66, http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed April 19, 2010).

6. Pauline Dewan, The House as Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children’s Literature (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 4.

7. Mitzi Myers, “‘Anecdotes from the Nursery’ in Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798): Learning from Children ‘Abroad and At Home’,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 60, no. 2 (1999): 227.

8. Alston, “There’s No Place Like Home,” 60.

9. Ibid., 55.

10. Wolf, 66.

11. Ibid.

Stephanie Kim ’10 majored in English and concentrated in Jewish studies at Williams.

Originally from Rockville, Md., she is currently living in Amman, Jordan.

Fall 2010

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Speak

by Michael Nelson

Who knows the depth of life that is within?

Who measures love in height or width or length?

Can numbers tell me I am not alone?

Or show that being weak can give me strength?

Some days I sit and try to understand Why everything You say is upside down How freedom can be got from a command Or how my unrestrained will had me bound.

There’s something wonderful in how You speak That calms my puzzled state with words so mild So strong and reassuring is Your voice That it feels right to follow like a child And just as soon as I’ve become a man I’m three again: Your son, holding Your hand.

Michael Nelson ’12 is an American Studies major with a concentration in Africana Studies. He is from the Bronx, N.Y. and really loves Jesus.

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That impossible hypotenuse

by Andrew Chen

ANDREW CHEN

Five fingers rapping on a checkered pizza parlor tablecloth, washed once, the nylon weave sounding a smart Classical staccato. One forehead doing calisthenics in preparation: irony, happiness, concern, irony, happiness, concern – one two three, one two three. A boy sitting anxiously in a Scheele’s Green leather booth, carefully arranging his face into a caricature of suppressed eagerness. He had the look of someone who wished to appear as if he had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time – this particular circumstance compelled him to

wish that something was going on, to hope that this time and place were significant for more than their shared convenience and social obligation, that something was actually going on and he wasn’t just wasting time. A small pang of guilt pricked him – he couldn’t – wasn’t supposed to – think that this meal was anything more than a visit from an old friend. A softly whirring fan over his head wobbled slightly on its axis, equivocating. Latent in his anxiety was the sort of soft anger that sweats from the brow and is wiped away dismissively, dispersed but Fall 2010

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“... most powerful of all was the fearful suffocating grasp of the unattainable.”

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not dried from the skin. For the greater part of the last three years his mind had been buzzing with such emotions – real, sky-cursing outrage tempered by hope and memory, a clenched fist knocking on a familiar door. Now as he sat in the old spot, the boy found himself disappointed but not surprised that the parlor’s perpetual five-o’-clock shadow, the drooping man who normally stood behind the counter, was not there. For such was the illusory permanence of the restaurant in the boy’s mind that the man’s absence seemed merely part of the rearrangement of familiar objects; something had been lost in the shuffle. The saltshaker was new, the old conical plastic apparatus replaced by an impressive structure of glass and pewter. To some extent the boy (called a young man sometimes) felt that he too could mime this process, the periodic and gradual replacement of the familiar, a slow pouring of new wine into a still-young skin. Between slow sips from the sweating water glass beside him, he who was waiting took the inexplicable goldfish crackers from the small glass bowl and crushed them against the roof of his mouth with his tongue.

Then had been altogether terrible. Then needed a period of disbelief, that first year, of anxious waiting and hapless, fantastic plots of circumstance designed to help him avoid recognizing the truth of hollowing out.

As the year turned into two, and then three and more, the mind turned on itself – he found the veracity of his thoughts complicated by a natural inclination towards the dramatic. Every statement of what he had in one moment considered true, raw emotion was in the next The Williams Telos

pummeled by doubt and a particular, cruel inquisition. As the past years had soothed the rough grain of his experience, he found himself questioning the substance of what he had formerly considered bliss. In any case, the perceived rupture had since been filled or lost, mummified, soggy peat embalming the empty spaces with a damp darkness. Yet even as the boy brushed those long days into dusty corners, most powerful of all was the fearful suffocating grasp of the unattainable. Even in naive pantomime, the silhouette that had transfixed him so for almost two years seemed just that, a blissful anomaly unique and irrecoverable. With such thoughts the boy traced geometric red and white squares with a fingertip and outlined the grand and impossible hypotenuse of two lives perpendicular.

YUE-YI HWA

At once, a hand on his arm. As the boy turned in the squeaky leather he was aware of the exchange of pleasantries, the quick, embarrassed embrace, the familiar touch of hands that knew from habit the contours of his shoulders. A dozen prepared scenarios flashed in the boy’s mind but none seemed to find their place – in the moment, all he could do was grin, gesture – he felt helpless, struck blind.

“What do you want to eat?” The menu’s laminate pages were blistered and peeling at the edges.

“We can split one if you like.”

“Hawaiian still? I remember.” An expectant pause hovered between them.

“It’s really been a while, hasn’t it?”

“We’ve all been busy.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been back – I’m sorry – school and things –” “And Paul?”

“– And Paul. It’s all been …” she paused, shrugged so that the sleeves of her coat fell past her hands. He peered keenly at her over a soda straw, sipped slowly, leaning on his palm.

“Just crazy, I know. I remember.”

“But it’s good to see you,” she said authoritatively, snapping the clasp on her handbag shut and raising her eyes. “This is good, I think – it’s fun.”

So it was just a visit from an old friend – he had expected a constriction of breath, an involuntary catch in his speech, but found to his surprise his chest light, his throat moist. Where had it gone, that wailing malice? He needed it now to shield him and it was gone, not pushed deeper or hidden away, but

“... he was aware of the exchange of pleasantries, the quick, embarrassed embrace, the familiar touch of hands that knew from habit the contours of his shoulders.”

vanished. When had it fled, after years of captivity behind lock and key, and how? He could not know, but as twelve slices turned into eight and then six (a four/two split of pepperoni/ pineapple-sausage), the boy had forgotten to arrange his face.

His laugh seemed a stranger’s – of all the scenarios he had prepared for, this seemed somehow worse, as if he had learned nothing. Yet it was good to see her, she in her peacoat and boots, he in jeans, an old sweatshirt, sandals with socks, the two of them meeting eyes. It was good to know that he could inhabit this place between – where one could sit down and fall into a friendship. While for this boy, the young woman would yet fill his lungs with that heavier air that passes in the shadow of intimacy, he could see something greater than the sum of his former affections rising over the nostalgic familiar. It was fearful in its new strangeness and yet exuded a cold serenity, in the way that we can touch icicles and know as they chill our flesh that they are real. Perhaps sitting in the green booth, the young man had begun to learn how to love without conditions, to shoulder the weight of memory and yet feel unburdened – with time, those heavy stones would wear gently to dust. Reaching across the checkerboard table, the boy almost felt that he could trace, however faintly, that far-reaching hypotenuse, with a calm that, descending, banks slowly and comes to rest lightly on familiar shoulders.

Andrew Chen ’11 is an English major from Folsom, Calif. When not writing, he can usually be found sleeping, playing soccer, or “stomping nerds” in online video games.

Fall 2010

31

aof draft of glory

by Shirley Li

TASHA CHU

Something – there was something – about those Bronfman lights that pierced me. They did not so much seem to shed light as to leech the joy of life from our souls as we were scribbling, feverishly, slavishly, under their pointed glare. But I thought – perhaps they are part of a utopia of sorts, where cold artificial lights shine mockingly onto a shadow-world reality, where a contrived peoples sublimate to the summit of knowledge, never seeing, never hearing the truth that is of these crimson-stained sunrises and these delicately-tinged breezes all around them; their withered thirsty hearts unconsciously always reaching reaching reaching but never quite touching one another. Can our hearts touch? Is it possible for our eyes to be opened up and filled with the light of grace? These counterfeit lights – humming with infuriating content, they were sinister, their radiance nothing akin to the pure majesty of the sun lifting through peaks, peeking through damask curtain-clouds, or the unadulterated beauty of star-gems in the silence of night.

But how can even this starlight reach the deepest recesses of our souls? Sometimes these wellsprings of life are opened up to a gurgling, rushing flow; at other times they lie raw and stripped and naked and darkness covers our eyes. The wind blows – coolly, evilly, I think to myself – yet only a few moments ago would this whistling wind have seemed to be the lightness of laughter. How is it so that my fickle heart can tell me truth? How can it be that I am subject to whims and fancies not my own, yet, my whole being claims these, claims with all its might the shifting sandcastle of my own heart?

But oh! with the breaking of dawn rises the worn glory of College tradition. The morning air is cold, refreshing, a better substitute for quenching the life-thirst of the soul than even frigid Pepsi-cola, whatever those slick commercials starring chilled-out skateboarder dudes I see on Chinese TV may intimate. The mountains glory in the surpassing splendor of their Creator – a silent, solemn adoration that penetrates hearts. I twirl and twirl and twirl and my reuseable Shirley Li ’13 is from grab-and-go bag dangles dangerously in my arms, threatening to spill out – but not before my Cranbury, N.J. heart does, and this is not even the summit’s peak. How is it that these leaves are speckled and spotted as lambs, splotched with living reds and greens that make my very heart vibrate? How can it be that this world is filled with more beauty than life itself can withstand, that this mist veils our sight from glory that would strike us down, prostrate, dead by the unconscionable sin of beholding such wonder with naked mortal eyes? But that glimpse of a momentary flicker of unearthly light can sustain a lifetime of hunger.

The Williams Telos

“Can our hearts touch?”

32

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. {Matthew 13:44}

Shirl Yang â&#x20AC;&#x2122;13 is from Hsinchu, Taiwan. She is still digging.

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