Beginnings
Welcome, if you’re reading this
I’m Amanda. My only intention is to write each email to you with intention. As a person who, like all of us, contains multitudes, I cannot promise to explicitly post on theology or literature, or to leave out baking and my cat. In fact, this newsletter will probably involve all of those things at various points. If you are here and find my wanderings of interest, feel free to subscribe or check back in every so often. This will probably be an offshoot of my already-established sites: my blog Farmgirl Writes and my professional site Amanda Patrice Bourne (as well as, eventually, a baking blog). I’ll drop a link here to new posts on those sites occasionally.
About the name of this newsletter
T.S. Eliot writes in East Coker of Four Quartets that
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated…
a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered…
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion…
In my end is my beginning.
(I have done Eliot a grave injustice by leaving out substantial lines of this stanza for the purpose of brevity, so please do go follow up by going to read East Coker right away.)
“Home is where one starts from” is a sort of matter of fact statement that is often true: for most of us, there has been a people and place at the beginning of our lives that casts long shadows—for good or ill—over the rest of our lifetimes. But Eliot here is also speaking in a deeper sense, saying, I think, that our lives are begun and ended in God—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. At the beginning of Lent 2022, I am adopting this reminder that I (we!) am paradoxically a work-in-progress whose end is in my beginning—in the arms of a loving God. Home is where one starts from.
Even as the world becomes stranger, and fires of Mordor spread so quickly that I can’t keep up with the news anymore, this newsletter is a way to write through it all—still, and still moving. So, I hope you’ll join me on this newest adventure.