Terrain

I am on book eight of winter break. So far I have read: Walking on Water (L'Engle) -- though that one might not count because I technically finished it during finals, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (Lewis), Thirteenth Tale (Setterfield), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon), A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle), A Wind in the Door (L'Engle), and The Prince of Tides (Conroy). I'm also in the middle of A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Jane Eyre. Lots of L'Engle, because I asked for, and received, the Time quintet box set from Santa Claus. ASTW is the third book out of five. Lots of L'Engle has been good for my soul. This is from Wrinkle:

"Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure." - Madeleine L'Engle, from A Wrinkle in Time

Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace consult the Happy Medium just before they go to Camazotz, a "dark" planet where the Murrys' father is captive. The Medium shows them the struggle between light and dark in the universe: there are planets that have been completely taken over by darkness and evil, and from the Medium's celestial view these planets look closed off, darkened, void of life-giving light. These planets have completely given up. There are also planets that have merely the shadow of darkness, and she reveals that Earth is one of these planets. The assault of evil appears as thin, grimy cloud that threatens to choke the planet if not for the retaliation of the forces of light in the form of Jesus of Nazareth (and others: St. Francis, Aristotle, Gandhi, Euclid, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc etc). In this quotation, they see a small triumph of light in deep space.

I think of the heart in similar terms, and if there's anything L'Engle has taught me in my first rereading of these books since circa fifth grade, it's that size, distance, and magnitude are temporal at best, so the comparison works (in the Time quintet's context at least). I think of my heart as a territory belonging definitively to Jesus, but one that is still not immune to evils: uncharitable quips, almost unnoticeable; small, unforgiven trespasses of others that sit and fester and turn much larger and uglier; impatience; cruelty that stems from feeble cowardice; I could go on and on. If my heart is a territory belonging to Jesus then there are deep rivers, high mountains, and open plains that sing his name and glorify him. But I realize there are selfish pockets of resistance, in the form of the sins I just mentioned (and those are just a few). I imagine that those take the form of scabbed, thirsty desert terrain along the edges, and patches of inland forest where the canopy of the trees is so thick that not a single ray of the sun (son?) can penetrate it and reach the forest floor. It's a compelling thought, to me, at least... what does the terrain of your heart look like? Where are your patches of resistance?

What a day it will be when I can give my heart wholly!