We homeschool my youngest sister; English is my area. Last night I attempted to teach her to self critique. Since we are studying poetry (reading and writing), I thought now would be the perfect time to teach that particular skill - poetic attempts can always be made better (at least when written by amateurs such as myself or my sister). I expected to spend about half an hour working with it, then I would turn her loose to write a sonnet (her last writing assignment this semester) and have her self-critique it, which would also make it her best writing assignment of the semester.
We spent half an hour on one four-line verse; another half hour on two more lines. I helped with the first; I watched her struggle through the second. Yet the things she critiqued where completely different than what bothered me - she looked for perfect rhymes, things that said exactly what she meant, while I looked for rhythm, flow, and carefully crafted phrases that evoked the author's intent. I have no qualms admitting that both her requirements and mine are necessary to a good poem, at least of the type we were attempting to critique.
But it brought to mind something that I'd read, and incorporated into her lesson when introducing sonnets. In A Wrinkle in Time, one of M. L'Engle's characters compares our lives to a sonnet. A sonnet has a defined length, a particular rhythm, and a set rhyme scheme. If any of those are varied from, the poem is no longer a sonnet. Yet within those confines, the author is free do do anything he chooses. (Wordworths' "Nuns Fret Not" has a similar message). Our lives are the same - they are of limited length, and a set pattern, but within that pattern we are free to create the life.
But editing. The painstaking reworking, the erasing, rewriting, erasing again, marking through, altering, brainstorming, strengthening what is said, building up the beauty, and yet feeling overwhelming frustration by the lack of solution - how does that play into our lives?
We are saved - the ending of the sonnet is set, the last couplet already written in unalterable characters. We are sinners, saved to become saints, the background of the poem beyond our grasp to rework. But within our lives, somewhere where sovereign power and free choices meet, we struggle to edit what our lives are writing. Our apologies try to mark out our mistakes, our clarifications try to strengthen our relationships, our decisions help bend our lives to our will. But I have spent much time remembering, too, what has already been written. I wonder how it will influence the lines to come, and what I should have altered to make the poem read better.
How much freedom do we have, within this pattern, to remake ourselves, to edit what has happened in the past? What's done is done; don't cry over spilled milk. The past is in the past; all we can alter is the future. I've heard those over and over.
But the past has shaped who I am, and I cannot leave it behind. We learn from our mistakes; we carry the baggage; we are even called by Scripture to strengthen our faith by remembering God's faithfulness in the past. The past shapes the future - how much are we allowed to edit the past?
Our actions today can remedy hurts we have left in the past. Our words spoken today can change the impressions we have left with others in the lines already written in our lives. We are dynamic, not static, and the changes God works in us, the edits we strive to bring about according to His commands, interact with the past. The events in the past cannot be changed, but the mark they have left on other people can be, for better or worse. It is an interesting perspective on the way we interact with time - and on the way our actions today edit the poem God is writing.
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