The Invitation
My wife and I took a vacation to England and Ireland this past week, starting with London. I had only the fuzziest of mental pictures from my last trip to London almost two decades ago, but I was freshly charmed by the cobblestone streets, old pubs, red double-decker busses, pleasant green parks, and all the rest. But that was just a warm-up for our next destination, Oxford. Oh the spires, the shady cloisters, the green lawns peeking out through gothic arches!
If you grow up in a certain cultural milieu, Oxford feels deeply...right. I came with a thousand fragments of experience and memory: the old stone church we attended in my childhood, the quaint British movies and BBC shows I was brought up on, the architecture of my Victorian neighborhood in Philadelphia. Being in Oxford was like like seeing all the fragments come together as a single, stain-glassed window. In the words of the poet Sheldon Vanauken who studied at Oxford in the 1950s, it was like "coming to a home half-remembered."
It's easy to romanticize these kinds of places of course, to attempt to live inside the beauty and possess it. Vanauken's mentor C.S. Lewis warned against this in his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory: "These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
Lewis' point is if you get stuck in the longing for beauty you'll miss what it’s pointing to, which is the Kingdom of Heaven. As I've written about before, I think truly good art doesn't try to freeze beauty like a flower under glass, it points you to the garden. With that in mind, I wrote this little sketch of an evening walk from Oxford down to a country pub, not to relive a past experience over and over, but to point toward a future one that the present beauties hint at.
We walked down a narrow street leading away from the ancient university towards a thick row of trees, over a railroad track, and into a broad field under a mottled sky. The very flat, very long field rolled away to the north like a scroll issuing a royal invitation.
It said: come, enter in, partake, abide.
I marveled at the very green grass and the very blue sky, the way the geese and cattle in the distance looked like little blobs of paint on an artist's canvas. Behind them was a dark green slash of woods and river that ran away toward the horizon. What a little rise over a field can do to open the imagination.
We went into the painting, not with the sudden leap of the Banks childen and Bert and Mary Poppins, but with a gradual immersion that made the rough brush strokes steadily sharpen and gain definition. The pale green splash of a field became hummocks and tussocks of rough meadow grass. The dark green slash of woods became a spacious cathedral of towering trunks and spreading branches. The ribbon of a river deepened into a dark pool where water grasses rippled upward toward the light.
We crossed an arched bridge over the river and stepped onto a dirt path that ambled along the riverbank; up and down little hillocks, around large spreading trees, through gates, over crossroads, past stony ruins with unknown origins. This path was made by a thousand years of feet finding their way north along a river whose amber-green water has never stopped moving the other way. Two travelers passing by.
This landscape, so beautiful in its simplicity and content in itself, doesn't ask anything of the visitor except to participate, to give up the wearison toiling after treasures that do not last, to partake in riches given without cost.
At the end of our walk, a pub with low ceilings and a thatched roof waited for us. We sat on the terrace and drank beer next to the lock where the amber green water turned white as it ran down the sluice. A stone lion stood guard on the other side. A wooden footbridge soared gracefully over the river. It didn't seem to lead anywhere, but it didn't need to.
Missing were the drovers herding their cattle, the fishermen punting their catch to market, the farmers carrying baskets of vegetables in from the fields, the soliders riding to distant battles, the monks walking to nearby sick houses, the whole retinue of ages past who made these roads and waters a highway. The countryside would have lived and breathed with activity. Now, rutted fields and overgrowth thickets and crumbling walls are all that's left. But it hasn't stopped talking.
It says: stop, wait, watch. My story is not over.