Currently returning with the cleft surgery team from Juba, after previously spending a few weeks in Lviv. As the French say, I am le tired.

Because I’m looking for a good word on restoration, as well as for the dirty, overlooked things around the world that strain and somehow work every day; and because last week I reread Alan Jacob’s piece in Comment Magazine on “filth therapy” and “the recognition of what is of worth in that which is scorned by the unseeing”; and because now I know (unsurprisingly) how central that piece is to his thought and writing — I put up an album of photos from the cleft surgery trip with this quote in mind:

“But then what praise is appropriate for those who have taken the filth of the world and given it souls…?”

I tried to think of a good paraphrase that was more fitting to an old, rundown hospital in South Sudan, but I think the idea is fitting enough just the way it is. I will only add a line from a previous year’s journal: Sometimes our work is to make more clear and explicit what is already there, if you have eyes to see.

I’m often torn between the idea of restoring as a means of making visible what is hidden, and restoring as a means of enabling a thing to be what it was not. I’m also happy to leave this unresolved.

What goes on across the globe in hospitals like this one is not as eloquent as, say, the image and feeling of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station,” but it can be every bit as grimy and every bit as redemption-bearing. And it is capable, therefore, as Christian Wiman said of the last line in Bishop’s poem, of an immense theological statement.

Almost everything in these pictures has contributed in some way to the work that produces — or reveals — smiles and faces like these:

Currently Reading: Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context by Peter Hooton 📚

I am beyond excited for this. As I wrote here, Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity”—though mostly undefined and unfortunately titled—is pretty much where I’m at, but few seem to write faithfully about it. I have a good feeling about this one.

Rynek Główny (09March22)

Dubai

It may sound dumb, but after living mostly underground for the last few weeks, I think Dove might be on to something here.

All things worth thinking and knowing need to be retold. And I would say that the central point of one of CS Lewis’s most well-known essays, “Learning in War-Time”, is “retold”—even improved upon—with personal depth by Irena Dragaš Jansen here. Please read.

Interview with Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky

Reading a short essay this morning from James Calvin Schaap, I came across something that makes perfect sense of how terrible Levy’s The Will to See is. Schaap mentions that great stories are shaped like C’s in that they don’t complete themselves but make room for the reader. Levy’s book is pure ego firmly encircled in a bold O—there is absolutely nothing in the book for a reader’s imagination or discovery and, therefore, no enlightenment at all.

Feldman’s Deli