My first reading occurred during a long day of air travel. This long and uninterrupted time to read was fortuitous. This is a book reading that cannot be digested quickly, needs frequent review and pondering of sentences and paragraphs, and does not tolerate interruption.

The irony of reading a starving young aesthetic’s painful and honest thoughts about wholly loving God while cruising at 30,000 feet was not lost, Weil’s thoughts about beauty seemed prophetic as we flew over the Rockies at sunset. “The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least and inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, . . . Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering. . . . The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation. . . .The Incarnation alone can satisfy it.”

As a teacher, I think the essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” should be required reading for all students and teachers. However, be forewarned. Weil would not be a fan of “No child left behind” or for that matter, much else on our contemporary educational scene. For instance these politically incorrect words, “Quite apart from explicit religious belief, every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.” Weil was no Thomas Dewey-oid utilitarian educator.

Weil is much quoted but I suspect like many thoughtful writers exploring difficult topics is less often read. In addition, to quote her thoughts on education or art without including her clear call for expanded compassion and service and suffering is to misconstrue by omission. Her prose is of an old fashioned and slightly inhospitable academic style, an odd combination of rigorous philosophic rationalism combined with an unapologetic mystical sensibility. Perhaps, some of the lumpy sentences would become more lyrical if read in the original French.

To be clear, I view this review as a first pass on Weil’s thought. I hold my first two readings of “Waiting for God” as insufficient to understand all of what this thin volume holds. Yet, there is a thick and compelling force in Weil’s words, a wisdom beyond what is possible to say and a palpable presence encrusting her printed words. Weil does not treat easy subjects and offers no pat “bullet-point” answers. The faith she describes speaks of suffering more than certainty and acts of contrition rather than acts of assertion. Like Flannery O’Connor, Weil the artist “uses[her] reason to discover an answering reason in everything [she] sees. . . to find [truth] in the object, in the situation, in the sequence.” Weil treats her words as art rather than utility. And as she points out, “Every true artist has had real, direct, and immediate contact with the beauty of the world, contact that is of the nature of a sacrament.”

Sacraments are visible rites that signify and make present the grace of God. How like the God who favored children, the dispossessed, and the lowly to use a young woman’s words in the midst of war as a vehicle for grace. A woman who had virtually no impact while alive and did not feel worthy to partake of God’s sacraments has become the means by which others, and I am in that number, have found a far richer and larger available stock of reality.

April has been a busy month.

For starters, I traveled to San Juan de laguna, Guatemala as a part of a medical team and after a quick turnaround in Durango, my wife Terry and I spent this last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan attending the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing and visiting old medical school friends.

In the space of thirty days I had a remarkable convergence of my medical, writing, and personal life. And while I suspect I will be unpacking this experience for some time, I have made some interesting and disturbing discoveries about myself.

First, and probably not an unusual discovery for any American physician going to the third world, practicing medicine for folks with desperate treatable needs, without governmental paperwork, insurance considerations, or malpractice lawyers reminded me of why it is I love medicine and why I am reluctant to stop. The ability to immediately relieve pain and suffering for fellow human beings is a rare privilege indeed and one I too often forget. While many of my friends good-heartedly offered up accolades for “going abroad” or “giving back” or my “generous spirit,” I must confess that I received far more than I gave.

Second, I am pretty soft and entitled. Beyond my nearly erotic enjoyment of a hot shower after a week with cold or the sensuous luxury provided by good books read and discussed or the blessings of kindred spirits with whom to share or the gift of friendships proven true over forty years or even the precious physical and emotional space necessary to consider the presence enfolding my words, I have much to be thankful for.

Yet, while decelerating this week in Durango, sorting Guatemala slides and reading the many post Festival blog posts and essays (after all, it was a conference of writers) a nagging irritation intruded like frigid air under the door jam. In the midst of warm memories, new friends, and a plethora of ideas I was resentful.

To be clear, this was not the more common resentment genus provoked by “bad ambition,” a fame virus discussed at the conference by poet Luci Shaw. Nor was my pique the result of pernicious vainglory, a validation-need common among writers, performers, and physicians. To be sure, these more common vices are well known to me, companions to the avarice and arrogance that I’m forced to confess far more often than I care to admit. But, not this time. Rather, for the first time, I resented my age.

I would suppose I possess similar trivial disgruntlements as do most folks who pass sixty: I am stunned to see my aged father in the mirror every morning, I no longer trust my achilles to play basketball, and remain surprised just how much slower I am scrambling off the floor than my grandson. But while I dislike and disapprove of the many changes my body has undergone these last years, the resentment I have is less like the loss of something I once possessed and more like an impatience for what is to come—a future I suspect I will not live long enough to share.

Seeing immense but solvable medical challenges, hearing incredibly bright young Christ followers craft insightful words and form new communities, sensing the gathering of a critical artistic mass within the church, discovering a rabbit warren of intellectual and artistic paths I want to explore all make me excited and sad and resentful. I know there is not enough time for it all. I know—well, not exactly—that I have fewer days ahead than behind.

Please, these are not, or I hope they are not, the sentimental musings of an old man. I am one of the luckiest guys I know, accomplished some things, and have relatively few regrets. I am also not naive about the dangers facing this world, the multiple ways we are and can continue to go, “off the rails.”

But these last days have been an eye-opener. Everywhere I look  I see God’s grace budding like a pear tree’s white blossoms. I used to stand in my church and wonder if there were any other Christian artists and now in ways I would have thought impossible five years ago Christians are wondering how the beautiful informs the true. I am disgruntled because I want to see and be in the middle of how all this plays out, how it will be  for my grandchildren and their children, I want to engage in making Guatemala’s water cleaner and their kids healthier, I want to be used by and in these new faith communities I see coming, and I want to craft beautiful words that describe and honor this coming and widening world, this “increasing stock of creation’s reality.”

Perhaps a little resentment isn’t all bad.

Perhaps, because I write in the genre of creative non-fiction I have little patience for most contemporary memoir. However, I have just finished reading Robert Clark’s “Bayham Street” for the second time and recommend his book without reservation. These are essays elegantly crafted, a writing that is deceptively simple in appearance but contain a myriad of quiet layers. Clark’s (he is no relation) stylish and intelligent prose comes as no surprise; he is the author of multiple non-fiction and fiction books. His previous efforts often employ quirky or non-standard paths to tell stories but are always inscribed with a careful and precise language. As I read these essays, often about episodes recounted in previous work (particularly his memoir “My Grandfather’s House”), I sensed I was being taken deeper, past familiar places and into a more confusing yet richer territory, as if I were looking at a Rembrandt painting’s background, brushed expanses whose multiple paint applications allow the patient observer to see a near infinite number of hue differences in what might, at first blush, appear to be a monolithic dark tone.

Clark writes about issues that have engaged his interest for the majority of his adult life. As a member of Clark’s generation, his essays concerning growing up with Dave Garroway, divorce, J. Fred Muggs, “West Side Story,” and coming to adulthood in the Age of Aquarius richly engaged my memories. However, to others this subject matter might superficially suggest yet another baby boomer cultural indulgence, but this would be too thin a reading. Writing lyrically into these well-known cultural markers, Clark explores what he remembers, what he thought, and what he now thinks about photography, religious belief, sentimentality, vocation, F. Scott Fitzgerald, relationships, historical synergy, and the writing enterprise.

As a writer, reading Bayham Street in some places left me with a sense of deja vu, ideas about writing craft and writers that had been dropped into my manuscripts by readers, editors, or teachers as small digestible snippets of wisdom. Of course, from previous reading many of the events that form rallying points for Clark’s explorations were not new but considered as elements in the “Bayham Street essay collage” seem examined with a wide-angle lens or from multiple vantage points. This is the “slanted” or “collaged” or “lyric” approach to essay championed by many contemporary writers including David Shields–Shields is one of three to whom Clark dedicates this volume. This more modern essay approach is far harder to implement but is successfully used here. The author subtly imparts to the reader a far greater “understanding” at the end of the collection than the sum of the parts.

I especially appreciated Clark’s courage to reassess previous judgements. Indeed, I heard a mature voice, a comfortable voice, a voice that was remarkable thoughtful but without cant or agenda. Rather than writing in a binary or changed syllogism style (“I believed this absolutely but because of new data I now think this.”), the prose has the reasoned pliability and paradox of rabbinical Midrash. That is, a writing containing a constant respect for history, an honoring of previous experience and interpretation. Yet, Clark has applied an imaginative lens to the present–what new insights or meanings or understandings can I discover for my current life’s experience in light of my previous interpretation?

Philip Lopate, in describing Bayham Street, had difficulty precisely placing Clark’s “Bayham Street” into a category suggesting it was neither, “. . . a memoir nor a collection of personal essays.” I quite agree and why I consider this collection of essays best as a Midrash Memoir. Like the practice of midrash on sacred texts, understanding Clark’s essays cannot be accomplished by a kind of “drive by reading. His are not essays meant to be the grist for the next HBO special. Rather, these are thoughtful and considered words that once read need to be re-read, mulled, wondered about in light of the past, and only then carefully and provisionally interpreted for the present.