A Wheatfield With Cypresses

While in London, in the National Gallery, I had something I can only describe as a spiritual experience. As usual, I headed to the gallery that I knew would have Van Gogh's works in it, intending to soak in one of the four 'Sunflowers' he painted in 1888.

But although the painting was there, with various tourists taking pictures with it, I found myself drawn instead to the painting beside it - Van Gogh's 'A Wheatfield With Cypresses'. He painted it in 1889 while still a patient in the mental asylum in Saint-Remy near Arles, and the Wheatfields were what he saw from his window, as he looked out towards the Alpilles Mountains.

The picture I took of it gives it no justice at all, because in person (in painting?) it conveys such a force of the will to live. It is the sort of scene you come across that just strikes you at the heart and reminds you that even if everything is going to pieces, the wind in the wheatfields and the japanese cloud sky is enough to live for.

 'I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when you know that what I'm at is the painting of some sunflowers. If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so quickly. I am now on the fourth picture of sunflowers. This fourth one is a bunch of 14 flowers ... it gives a singular effect.'

I watched that painting for a good 20 minutes, just standing in front of it, soaking it in while I listened to 'The Mighty Rio Grande' (I think Van Gogh would have liked post-rock music) and noticed how every aspect of it, from the clouds to the mountains to the various trees and bushes, all had flecks of yellow in them. A unity of colour, I suppose, but also just a love of yellow that seeps out of Van Gogh and makes its presence felt. A love of yellow is something I would be the very last person to fault.

I wonder why he didn't sign it.

06/06/2016

Ola Gjeilo's Northern Lights


And the single sentence:


'It seemed to her that she had come from a world of shadows and had arrived in a place where finally life was real.'

— Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

are enough to make my heart heat up with a half-crying, half-10 km run feeling.

O Helicanus, strike me, honour'd sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.

Today's sunset was a blue cloud pockmarked with bright flashes of pink.

There is so much magic in the world.

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

Thoughts on going home

In a conversation with Lizzy as we walked back from Pembroke to Medwards, we both thought about how strange it will feel like to go home.

Whenever I properly visualise the moment when I see my family again at the airport, I always cry. They are largely happy tears, but at the same time they are also tears of anxiousness over my fear that things have changed, and lots of other mixed in emotions that the english language cannot adequately express. And after my conversation with Lizzy I have begun wondering if they will be tears of another kind of homesickness, because of missing Cambridge.

How easily our hearts grow roots in places where we plant memories, and how hard to uproot them. And I think my heart has roots in so many places, that I constanly have a tugging to a bit of me somewhere else. Cambridge really has become beautifully familiar.

At the same time I wonder if my first week back will just be a succession of continuous lump-in-throat moments because everything will be so familiar but so new. The humidity and heat, the run along the green corridor, the way the bathroom curtain sticks to the wall, the gentle innocence of Tim's sleeping face, the smell of Emily's house and the familiar indents and curves of all the people I will hug again. I wonder if my head will still fit into its place on my Mum's shoulder.

Confession

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. - Great Expectations, Charles Dickens


I have been finding it incredibly comforting recently to confess. To tell God about all the times I fail, the times where I am bitter and mean-spirited about my body, or the times where I fill my days with meaningless things, or the fears I have that I am selfish with my time, or the times when I just feel so much doubt about His goodness.


It feels slightly odd to confess to a God who knows everything, even the bits I try to hide away and squash into some non-descript and secret part of myself, like my appendix or something. But then I realise how amazing it is that God asks us to confess, to tell Him about our struggles. Because it does not benefit Him - He knows it already. He asks for confession because it is good for us. My heart feels lighter, I realise I know my sin and want to change and though I lack the strength God is there with His hand outsretched saying 'Reach over here, Miriam. Fall in, breathe out. I will carry you.' and He forgives and helps me.

When loving is not easy

Romans 12:9 ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good’


Love and Hate seem antithetical, and reading them in the same sentence in Romans made me feel strange. But I've come to realise:


Genuine Love cannot exist in a sinful world without Hate.


Righteous, radical love is not always smooth, gentle, positive, placatory, soft and warm. Since evil hurts people and dishonours God, we are called to abhor it just as God abhors its presence in us.


The thing is, this 'hate' is not how we'd normally define hate. This 'hate' is not the evil, malicious sort that hurts others and is violent and destructive. In fact, we are called to hate sin because it hurts others and is violent and destructive. To answer sin with sin would be counter-intuitive.
John Piper defines two sorts of hate and two sorts of love:


The first kind of hate - Hate which rejects and is far removed from something in its entirety, which resists and repudiates the values and qualities of something. This is the kind of hate I hold towardanimal abuse or human trafficking and exploitation for example. I consciously reject and refuse to support these systems.


The second kind of hate - Hate which is the intense intentionality to curse something. This is the kind of hatred which leads to more hurt and violence, the kind of hatred that sees people slander another group of people, or build walls between them.


And


The first kind of love- Love which embraces and is intimate with something in its entirety, which rejoices and affirms the values and qualities of something.


The second kind of love- Love which is the intense intentionality to bless something.


God both hates the sin that lives in us (‘You are not a God who delights in wickedness ... You hate all evil doers’ Psalm 5:4) and loves us ('For God so loved the world') at the same time. He can simultaneously hate and love us because of the different sorts of 'hate' and 'love'.


When He first created us, perfect and sinless, He loved us with the first kind of love. The all-encompassing, total love of our entirety. Then, when sin entered the world, that love was no longer possible. God is so perfect and just that He cannot accept and affirm sin. Instead, with sin infecting us, He hated us with the first kind of hate, the rejection of our new sinful selves and the sin within us that not only dishonoured Him but was soul-destroying in us.


The amazing thing, however, that He still loved us with the second kind of love, the love that intends to bless us. And He did.


He sent the biggest blessing of all - His only son Jesus Christ. God’s love moves him to save people who in and of themselves in their sin are loathsome and hateful to him. Jesus' death on the cross paid for our sins, since the payment for sin is death. Without sin, we could be loved again by the first kind of love, which draws us into an everlasting and intimate relationship with God.


So when I say I love you, it is not easy. I do not love all of you, in fact, because I love you I hate parts of you which I see destroying you or tearing you away from God. And I hate parts of myself that destroy me or tear me away from God. To truly love myself I despair at my hated sin, and ask God for help.


And I truly love you, dear friend, and pray that God's transformative love will always surround you, and change the parts of you that you despair at.


'Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.'

It's someone else's childhood now

On the Saturday, we drove by Silver Birches, because Auntie Sarah likes circuitous routes. It's a lot smaller and less beautiful than I remember it, but I could still see the path on the left hand side of the house that I would run through, and fling myself on the grass, and say 'I'm here at last!' and behind that the pear tree with the swing, and Grandad's shed, and the big field for flying kites.

The next day we drove past again, not stopping this time, although we did slow down. 'There's someone visiting,' Grandma remarked, and I turned my head and saw a grey car parked outside, and a woman lifting her son out and setting him down. I could almost hear the crunch of that gravel that used to be one of the 'England sounds' I would conjure in my head when Singapore was getting too stifling. My throat felt tight, and I realized the time of pink roses and Dee Dee's wheelbarrow rides and bumping down the stairs was over. A new child will be bumping down those stairs and flying kites in that field now.