Medievalish 5.1
A Pep Talk (Mostly For Myself)
Dear friend,
Happy New Year, happy fresh stack of new books (hopefully), happy college-try to new habits to you all.
I watched my eight-year-old play in his first real basketball game last night. There was something beautiful and edifying about watching him miss a shot, droop for a moment, square his shoulders again, find the other little guy he was supposed to be defending, and run down the court. Obviously I love it when he makes shots, steals, blocks, rebounds, too. But the pith of it all was in the missing and then choosing to keep going and trying.
There is nothing profound about that observation; it’s been made a million times. Yet I—and I think it is fair to say we, in the sense of my American and Christian cultures—forget it constantly. We think the heart comes in victory, success, ease. We cut corners because the extra work and failures feel like distractions from the accomplishments.
But the only way to acquire a language is to sound like an idiot for a long time. The only way to read hard books is to read things you partially don’t understand for a long time. The only way for toddlers to walk is to fall down on their cushy diaper bottoms constantly.1 The only way to maintain a relationship is to learn how to love the other person well, and apologize for the countless times you fail to do so, and talk about it well when they fail to love you well too. The apologies and difficult conversations matter just as much—sometimes more—than the good times.
These are not aberrations from the way of things; these are the way of things. I love how this portrait of Marie de France (fl. 1160-1215), poet extraordinaire, depicts her with her pen in one hand and her scraper in the other. The pen scratches the ideas into the flesh of the parchment; the scraper, a knife-like tool, scrapes the errors out. You need them together for a good, properly copied manuscript.
This is all basically a pep talk to myself, which was the only way that this newsletter could emerge this month. The only way to write a book is to read a thousand pages no one will know you’ve read except yourself and maybe the dedicated readers who look at footnotes, on the ones you’re lucky enough to cite directly, and the way it came out in maybe one or two particular sentences, and then to write and change a thousand more sentences. So I repeat to myself, over and over. I am in the middle of trying something new with my writing, and it is very hard, and I have taken about a year writing something that is about forty pages so far. It may never see the light of day. Or it may be born eventually. Who knows? This is not tangential, nor a footnote to this work, nor a retrospective haha it was so hard for a little while but then I got going! It is the work. Pen in one hand, scraper in the other.
There’s not much medieval here for a Medievalish, outside of the attitude (thoroughly medieval) and images of Marie and Christine. But we can baptize it with a quick sprinkle of medieval spirit by including the medieval and modern quotes from the masters that I have had posted around my desk for years, from house to house, exactly for times like these:
“Let us not believe that it is enough to read without unction, to speculate without devotion, to observe without joy, to investigate without wonder, to act without godly zeal, to know without love, to understand without humility, to strive without grace, or to reflect as a mirror without divinely inspired wisdom.”
-St. Bonaventure (d. 1274)
“To be sanctified is to have our character be determined by our basic commitments and beliefs about God. It is a willingness to see and understand ourselves as having significance only as our agency is qualified under the form of Christ and the task he entrusts to us.”
-Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life
“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”-T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets
“On humility’s solid foot we ought to move ahead with seriousness and constancy, because in this life the more we realize that our teaching is not available to us from our own resources, the more truly learned we are.”
-Gregory the Great
“He suffereth [allows] us never to lose time.”
-Julian of Norwich (d. after 1416)
“This booke is begunne be Gods gift and his grace, but it is not yet performid, as to my syte. For charite pray we all to God, with Godds werking, thankand, trostand, enjoyand; for thus will our good Lord be prayd, as be the understonding that I tooke in al his owne mening, and in the sweet words where he seith full merrily, ‘I am the ground of thi beseking.”
-Julian of Norwich
“What am I afraid of? How am I holding back?” -my reorienting questions to myself2
Bless you in all your new or old, hard or easy endeavors.
What I’ve been up to this month:
Literally nothing. The whole family got type A influenza over Christmas and then promptly acquired a head cold and various sinus and ear infections at New Year.
Old Books with Grace is on hiatus until some time this spring! I am recovering from a bout of podcast burn out.
What’s next:
People of Western Michigan, namely Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids: I have two speaking things coming up in your neck of the woods on February 22nd & 23rd. Stay tuned.
What I’ve been reading this month:
Nonfiction: Medieval Norwich, eds. Carol Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson.
Fiction: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. Fun! But also, reading Oxbridge stories always makes me a little jealous that instead my undergraduate experience was spent at the University of Arizona in the mean streets of Tucson, which, obviously BEAR DOWN and all, I am a desert rat forever, but my heart can yearn.
Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: The Orcherd of Syon, the Middle English version of St. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue.
Article: Options today! First, author Brandon Taylor’s Substack piece on getting good at tennis. Very different, a Christian understanding of medicine from Dr. Kristin Collier at The Lamp, brought to my attention by Medievalish reader Fr. Robert Imbelli.
A Prayer from the Past
St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Prayer Before Study” is also excerpted up on my wall. So even though I’ve included it before, here is a piece of it again. Sophia Institute Press has a beautiful Latin-English edition of Aquinas’s prayers that I can’t recommend highly enough. I pray this one all the time.
You make eloquent the tongues of infants Refine my speech and pour forth upon my lips the goodness of Your blessing. Grant to me keenness of mind, capacity to remember, skill in learning, subtlety to interpret, and eloquence in speech. May You guide the beginning of my work, direct its progress, and bring it to completion. You Who are true God and true Man, Who live and reign, world without end. Amen.
Peace for your January,
Grace
P.S. Medievalish is free, and I’d be delighted if you shared it with a friend!
I always laughed at the wonderful pad of fat that my babies all had on their foreheads. What a great protective mechanism for learning.
Fear can occasionally be a guide, but this one reorients me because much of the time I am only afraid of failure, which is not really a good reason to not do something (most of the time). My son in basketball is a good role model. Miss the basket, square the shoulders, run down the court again.
Thank you Grace for this wonderful pep-talk, and all the best for your work/family/life journey, in 2026! ❤️
I LOVE that bit from the Four Quartets, and after reading Piers Plowman during December, I feel like all of Eliot's writing make so much more sense to me. That dream-vision non-linear-ness that has its own kind of logic and sense...
I love this so much and feel very much the same! The Aquinas prayer is one we pray at a study/fellowship/prayer group here. I have grown to yearn for praying those words together.