Some mornings, when Lorraine and I arrive at the Theology library, the lights are still off in the basement book stacks. Peering through the doors into these catacombs, all you can see is gloom; the library was once a chapel, and the basement is mostly underground. Yellow hallway lights sculpt the silhouettes of shelves, with here and there the glimmer of a gilded binding.

Anything could be in there, I’m thinking.

Advent has me pondering “all things visible and invisible”. I started down this road thinking of “A Christmas Carol”, and specifically the scene after Jacob Marley’s visit to Ebenezer Scrooge. The latter peers from his bedroom window and perceives that the outside air is filled with ghosts clustering around those in need. These departed spirits are in torment, and, as Dickens says, “the misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.”

Most of the time, Ebenezer would not have seen these spirits…they would have remained invisible. How much of reality, then, remains invisible to us?

My sister-in-law has experience casting out demons. At Thanksgiving, she told of things she had seen when praying over those who were bound by evil. And her words mirrored those of Father Amorth, the Vatican exorcist, who has liberated thousands. I’ve never seen folks writhe on the floor to escape being prayed over, nor have I had doors slam as demons left my household; yet these things have happened to people that seem pretty sturdy to me.

I suppose, maybe, folks like me have the equivalent of poor eyesight. Maybe I’m colorblind to the incorporeal. And I wonder if this is a case of not having the faculty for seeing, or whether I’ve just got atrophied? Maybe we all could see spirits, once upon a time….

I enter the gloom of the book stacks, searching for light switches. Each burst of florescence pushes the shadows back, and over and over I have to walk forward to confront new ones. There are dozens of switches in this dungeon.

In “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, C. S. Lewis places his protagonist, Lucy, in a precarious spot. She must go into a wizard’s study, open his spell book, and find a spell that will cause the invisible Dufflepuds to become visible once again.

As she seeks the “visibility spell”, Lucy is sorely tempted to utter an alternative, one that will make her more beautiful than anyone else in the world. This evil beckons, but she does not yield to temptation. And, once she finds and speaks the words of the spell she was seeking, not only do the Dufflepuds appear, but also the wizard, plus Aslan, the Christ figure in Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia”.

Surprise!

I’m wondering if seeing angels and demons is like throwing light switches. With each burst of light, you get to see something that you didn’t know was there. Flick! There are the atlases. Flick! There are the art books. Flick! There’s a copy of “Brideshead Revisited”.

Maybe we only see the things we’re supposed to see.

I’m coming down on the side of atrophy; I expect my “angel vision” needs a heap more training. So, during Advent, I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for Ebenezer’s ghosts. To find them, seems to me all I’ve got to do is flush out folks who are depressed, or ill, or in need of a helping hand, then start scouring the horizon for halos.

And the more I keep gunning for glimmers of the supernatural world…that is, the _real_ world…the more I reckon I’ll be able to see through the gloom.

- Jef Murray

I bought a new rain gauge. Since Atlanta is in the midst of the worst
drought on record, I don’t know if this speaks more to my folly or to
my faith.

But with the coming of autumn and the lack of rainfall, I’ve gotten
antsy. I’m wary. And somehow, measuring the mood of the weather makes me feel more alert. It’s a puny way of recollecting that the oceans of the air are always changing, that our world is vaster, and wilder, than we reckon. Tomorrow, the hurricane _could_ be right outside my door, even if each morning has lately dawned the same…blue, and blank, and bleary.

I know others feel this. In north Georgia, where my mother and sister still dwell, the popcorn pop of gunfire can now be heard most
weekends; hunters track the mule deer that have populated the
Appalachian peaks. And towing home some token of the wild, whether a trophy rack or a locker of venison, helps hunters shake off the drabness of domesticity.

It’s not clear to me whether this is a male thing, or whether we all
experience it…this tug of the wild and the need to drag bits of it
back home to our concrete canyons. It’s the call of Atlantis…we need
more in life than crisp hedges and primped lawns. We’re all, I
suspect, more Ent than Entwife.

I was trying to express a bit of this strange autumn dis-ease of mine
to a group of other artists, but failed miserably. The discussion was
on eastern versus western art, and about iconography in particular.

Icons are not supposed to be a creative effort of the individual…they
are intended as a means of prayerfully reproducing images that were
fixed in time hundreds or thousands of years ago. Their production is
a tame toiling; the unkind might even say icon “writing” requires
technique more than talent. And some professional iconographers
bristle at the thought of altering an icon or creating new ones…of
messing ‘em up and seeing what happens if you don’t follow the rules.
The rules _are_ the icons (!), and to be a good iconographer is, it
seems, to be completely content with respecting the rubrics.

I respect iconography immensely, but I expect I could never be an
iconographer; I always aim to amble past the fence posts. I want the
wildness, and can’t resist seeing whether a blur here or a brushstroke
there might lead to something new. I want the work to come alive and not be struck sapless in the very commotion of its creation.

I know I’m too antsy.

I dug a posthole in our yard so that I could mount my new rain gauge.
While spading up the dust, I found a grub several inches below the
surface, where there was still a trace of moisture to be found. Soft,
and white, and helpless, it curled in on itself, waiting in the deep
earth for wildness to return, for the hurricane to come and plump the
soil.

And I thought that here I was, too, curled up in the static earth,
warm and woozy, but also withering. Without the rains, without that
undeserved bolt of wildness and bluster, I, too, would parch and pale.

I dug a new hole and moved the grub, gently pressing new earth around it so that it could await, in its deep dreaming, the coming of new life.

“God is in the rain” says a line from folklore. And even when there is
none, it don’t mean it won’t come again. The storm will, I know,
someday mount anew the western sky and rumble through our forests and hammer our hills. It’ll douse doorways with flung foam and will rend the heavens.

And when it does, and whilst the deluge gluts my new rain gauge, I’ll
ponder the grub, and hope that it, too, has endured its time of
waiting and watching. I’ll remember that, without wildness, there can
be no witnessing; without grace, there can be no glory.

- Jef Murray

“It sounds kind of sad,” the little girl said.

It was sad. I was in a classroom full of middle schoolers. We had just
learned to sing a very simple Gregorian chant, a setting of the
Sanctus. And despite the fact that this was a Catholic school, neither
the music teacher nor any of her students had ever sung even the most modest chant melody before.

I was reminded of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, and particularly of
the deep and abiding sadness that permeates his tales of Middle-earth. In those tales, ages and ages have come and gone, and the remote histories and legends of the earliest times are largely forgotten. But the Elves were the keepers of the legends. They were the stewards of the ancient wisdom and lore that linked generation to generation back to the very creation of Middle-earth…back to the time when the earliest peoples had spoken and lived with the Valar, those mighty angels and servants of God Himself.

Tolkien’s Elves were immortal, and so they were, as such, natural
guardians of history and wisdom. But Tolkien modeled these mythical
beings after the Benedictine monks of Europe. The western monastic
tradition, which began with the Rule of St. Benedict, spread throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. And in those times, as the
Roman Empire crumbled and western civilization was overrun by waves of conquerors, all ancient lore and wisdom was gathered by the monks and preserved. And the prayerful temple music of the ancient Hebrews was remembered and modified to suit the celebration of the Catholic Mass, becoming what we know today as Gregorian chant.

Music is one of the greatest gifts of God to man. And ancient melodies
that were sung by our forebears have an immense power; they can
connect us palpably with our fathers, and our fathers’ fathers, and on
back through the ages. And when we sing these ancient melodies, we
mystically join our voices with those ancestors, making audible the
very communion of saints…that spiritual and earthly choir that
cherishes what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful.

So why does no one sing Gregorian chant anymore? One could argue that it’s too “old fashioned”, or that a capella singing is too difficult
for average folk, or that no one wants to sing in a foreign language.
But I think chant is scarce for a different reason. I think it’s
because, as the little girl in that classroom said, “it sounds kind of
sad.”

We modern folk want diversion. We want bubbly songs that make us feel good. We want nothing that reminds us of pain, of loss, of suffering. And as a result, worship in many churches these days is little more than (often bad) entertainment.

But, as anyone who has ever truly suffered will tell you, pain,
sacrifice, and loss are often necessary for growth. There are things
in life that are sad: people are hurt; families are destroyed;
neighborhoods and nations are overrun by criminals; we lose those we love.

But by papering over these things, we also paper over the brokenness of our world, and the sin that underlies that brokenness. And when we deny sin, we deny the possibility of redemption, the possibility that the sadness and hurt are just temporary. We deny the possibility that life is too glorious and too important to waste on diversion.

“Yes, it is sad, isn’t it?” I answered the girl in the classroom. “But
isn’t it also beautiful?”

And that, perhaps, is the best description I can ever give, not only
for Gregorian chant, but also for life itself.

- Jef Murray

The phone rang. Thinking it was a friend returning my call, I picked
up rather than letting the answering machine take a message. The voice on the other end explained that I didn’t know him, but that he and his wife were the owners of a house Lorraine and I had built in the 1990s. He wanted to know more about the house, and about the folks who had designed it.

Lorraine and I built the MarshNest in 1990, planning to someday live
in this cottage overlooking the salt marshes of the Gulf coast of
Florida. Because of hurricanes, the place was perched 17 feet above
ground level, and the view was at or above the tops of the surrounding trees.

Lorraine and I had been miserable at the time. We were in high stress jobs that gave neither fulfillment nor a real sense of financial
security. We were not church-goers, and had no community or friends other than the people we knew at work. The money was good, but that was all. And, in order to compensate for our suffering, we had decided to create a small paradise for ourselves away from the big city.

We were in love with the marshes, the tides, and the wildlife. We
escaped to the MarshNest as often as we could…frequently once a month or more. Our encounters with wildlife instilled in us a deep sense of home, of love, of wonder. We felt God so clearly in the marshes that we slowly began to seek Him out closer to home.

Over the ensuing years, I became more and more interested in the
Catholic faith. Its mysticism coupled with its grounding in reason was
a paradoxical package I could not resist exploring. And Lorraine,
likewise, was awakened to the possibility of returning to her
childhood faith. We began attending Mass, and in 1994 I was received
into the Church.

The subsequent years changed almost everything about us. I began
helping others explore ways out of dead-end wage slavery at the same time I plotted a way for us to leave our own high stress jobs. The MarshNest was still a solace, but as we found ourselves more and more engaged with our community at home, we no longer felt that the marshes were the only places where we could experience God’s love. We experienced Him in our church choir, in talks I gave to others on getting out of debt and exploring their dreams, in work we did with the Missionary Sisters of Charity (Mother Teresa’s order).

In 1997, we sold the cottage, freeing ourselves up, simultaneously, to
explore the possibility of leaving our careers and pursuing goals that
we’d not had since childhood: goals of contributing something of
beauty back to the world, of bolstering others’ faith and hope, of
sharing some of our own sense of wonder not just at creation, but also
at the care with which God will lead you if you’ll let Him.

“We just love the place,” said the voice at the other end of the line.
“We feel God so strongly here that we thought we’d like to know
something about the folks who built it.”

I couldn’t explain to the caller the whole of our journey, but it
struck me suddenly that, perhaps, this was the beginning of his. Our
giving up of something that we had loved so much so many years ago was allowing someone else to take a few teetering steps down his own
spiritual path. And with this thought, I was overcome once again with
awe and wonder at the mystery, the mercy, and the magic of God’s
world.

Nai Eru laitalyë (may God bless you),

Jef Murray