Elsewhere this week: Roads, Dead Ends, and Endings
Reflecting on the eschaton this summer in Maine
Hello and welcome!
If you are new here, I’m an ancient historian and classicist who writes for the church—my next book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic will be out on October 15th! Most of all, I am a homeschooling mom, so I don’t get out much :-) —except a couple of times per semester, and one of those times happened to be this week.
We’ll get back next week to the series on becoming a better writer. Because I was away for half of this week—on an incredibly encouraging speaking trip to Asbury University Honors Program and Lewis House, who are both doing such beautiful things for the evangelical mind right now!—I did not end up having enough time to write the post I had hoped to send today, so you’ll get it next week. Instead, though, I hope you will enjoy this short essay that ran this Wednesday at Current. It is a reflection on love of family, the strange nature of time, and the eschaton, spurred by visiting my husband’s parents in Maine this summer. Here’s a taste:
Canaan Road dead-ends at a cemetery
A statement on the eschaton or just a naming coincidence? I wonder, in the ordinary hush of an August morning in Maine as we drive down Route 1A passing small town after small town, all poised to welcome tourists in these final weeks of summer vacation season.
Quietly watching over us all are the old churches, the focal points of every town’s green. Simple, white, tall, each bearing a weathervane at the top of the spire instead of a cross.
Over a century ago, a native Mainer, Sarah Orne Jewett, wrote The Country of the Pointed Firs, a sort of love letter to her home state. It is a novel built of tales about an unmarried writer. Like so many of Maine’s present-day tourists, she hails from Boston. Seeking to escape the bustle of the big city and to find inspiration to finish writing a novel, she spends her summer on the Maine coast at a town much like any of these…
We come back here because we love. Time seems to stand as still as those white-spired and weathervane-topped churches; only the tiny robot mowing my in-laws’ lawn is a determined reminder that a new age is dawning.
On Sunday morning before we begin our drive homeward, we attend church all together. A small white building filled with beautiful songs of worship, prayers and blessings, and family memories going back decades—like that time my husband’s brother, a mere toddler, nearly drowned when he fell in the baptistery. Such memories insist that the end is ever near and growing nearer; our time on earth is nothing, a drop in eternity’s bucket. For two millennia Christ’s followers have been awaiting that Second Coming, which is living up to its biblically promised elusiveness. After all this waiting, whenever it (or, rather He) arrives, He will indeed come as a thief in the night.
You can read the full essay here.