Better to Receive

I'm writing from my in-laws' house, in northern New York, the entire region of which is currently in the midst of an ice storm of epic proportions. My husband and his family are all having flashbacks to the TRULY epic ice storm of '98, when they lost power for nine days. 

So this Christmas could be a little different. We'll see what happens.

Whatever the case, we're warm and well-fed, and the lights are (at least for now) twinkling on the tree. In a few days, we'll celebrate Christmas with a big breakfast, a reading from Luke chapter 2, and a whole bunch of gifts. Marc and I celebrated a small family Christmas last weekend, and exchanged our gifts then. This was the first gift-giving occasion in which Greta has understood what was going on, and that made it all the more fun; for Marc and me, the best gift was seeing her guileless, unadulterated joy at opening her presents: a new set of blocks, a few books, and her first board game. Upon opening each gift, she exclaimed with sincere delight ("Look! ANOTHER book!") -- she's too young to fake excitement or gratitude, so it was that much sweeter to see her so happy.

Little children have no sense of giving gifts to other people. They feel no obligation to give anything. They have not thought of "exchanging" gifts; gifts are for them to open and enjoy. For the youngest children, receiving means getting something wonderful, something unexpected, and with no sense of needing to reciprocate.

Of course, one of our parental duties is to teach our daughter that it is better to give than to receive. We don't want her to be greedy or self-centered, and we also want her to grow to love giving, even when it's uncoupled from receiving -- giving, we hope, will become its own reward for Greta, as well as a social obligation and (more importantly) a spiritual discipline. We desire for her to grow up to be generous and creative in her giving, as we strive to be with each other and with friends and family. 

Christmas is, for most of us, the season of giving and receiving. When we ask each other, "Are you ready for Christmas?" we usually mean, "Are you done with your shopping?" (I even caught myself doing this a few times, to my alarm and chagrin.) If advertising on Hulu Plus can be used as a barometer for cultural expectations surrounding Christmas, we are very concerned with giving gifts that make us appear thoughtful, generous, competent, and perhaps also wealthy: a commercial for TJ Maxx assures us that, with their merchandise, we can "out-give" everyone. Another, from Walgreens, comforts us with the thought that we can stock up on their products so as never to be caught in the awkward situation of receiving a gift from someone for whom we hadn't bought anything. Obviously we have some real insecurities around this time of year, and the importance of reciprocity in giving is such that it's better to strike preemptively with purchases of items that are fashionable and expensive (or that look that way), and that are suitable for almost anyone.

Giving is a beautiful act, especially when it's done out of affection for the one receiving the gift. My friend, Connie, introduced me to the idea that giving is a way we bear the image of God, who is called the giver of every good and perfect gift. My husband's gifts to me this Christmas demonstrated this kind of attentive love because his gifts showed how well he understands me. More than just the beauty and utility of the items themselves, the thought and insight behind the gifts are what make them so special to me. But now giving at Christmas has become a stressful, competitive act; we look to use gifts as a way to exercise a kind of social power, by being ever ready with a fabulous gift -- never caught unprepared, never put in the uncomfortable position of being unable to return a gift or giving something of inadequate value.

A few weeks ago, a book club I'm in discussed what it meant to have a childlike faith. I think that it's this: it's to be so needy that it doesn't feel like a liability or a fault to be needy, but simply a fact of your life. It is to be innocent of any thought of reciprocity with one's caregivers. It is to be eager to receive, joyful to receive -- and never panicking that you have nothing to give in return, because that's not what you do. You just open your hands and take what's offered. 

Advent is the needy season: the season of the year when the church celebrates a gift of divine love that can never be returned in equal measure. It is so absolutely beyond our ability to reciprocate that we don't feel guilty about the gift or beholden to the giver to respond in equal measure, but simply in awe of the boundless love that comes to dwell in the midst of our need, and usher in the upside-down kingdom, where the needy inherit and the mourners find comfort and the hungry are filled.

Greta is so helpless and so not in control of her circumstances. She is grateful for whatever good thing is given to her, and doesn't perceive herself as missing out on other good things -- she lives, as all toddlers do, totally in the present. She doesn't grieve over imagined futures not realized, desired gifts not received. She simply accepts, joyfully, that whatever is wrapped up and given to her is hers, and that is enough.

So let it be for me, this Christmas. May I be as blessedly needy, as open to whatever is being given, as a little child. And so may I receive, more fully, the Gift.

To Own a Cow

About once a week I think to myself: I wish we had a cow.

Now, hear me out, because this isn't some random bovine obsession (even if I do think cows have big, pretty eyes – everyone thinks that, right?). I wish we had a cow because (1) cows are the source of nearly all the dairy we eat – which is a lot, since we not only love all things dairy, but also use dairy as a major source of protein in our low-meat diet. So a cow could potentially save us a lot of money. And (2) it's difficult for us to assess whether the cows we are benefiting from are being treated humanely – that is, grazing on pastures, eating hay and root vegetables in the winter, and generally being permitted to express their cow-ness. As Christians, we believe it's part of our responsibility to God and our neighbors to take care of the earth and everything on it, insofar as we're able. We don't do it perfectly, but we try, and we're constantly in conversation with those around us about how to live simply, generously, and carefully.

The third reason I want a cow is because of what that would mean about the rest of my life. And so the third reason is a little more complicated, and also a bit mixed – it's both a reason for a cow, and a reason against a cow. Let me explain.

If we have a cow, that means we have land for the cow to graze. Also a barn. If we've gotten to the point of bovine ownership, we probably already have a flock of chickens, a few pigs, maybe some ducks and turkeys. Plus all the space and shelter that these animals require.

Now we're talking about a small farm. If we have a small farm, we have a house and a big garden – fields and pastures, a pond for the ducks, and if we're in the northeast, a sugar bush, of course.

If we have a small farm, it means we are settled. Land and livestock aren't the kind of things that renters usually acquire, or people who think they might move in six months. A cow means that we have picked a place to put down roots and live for as long as we can imagine.

This is a wild idea. For the past five years, I have rented apartments and now a house with my husband (and half of that time we've shared those spaces with our daughter). We haven't always been sure how long we'd be in whatever jobs we've had, but we've always been sure that they weren't “forever jobs,” or “lifelong careers.” We've lived with some degree of uncertainty about the future – where we'd live, who would pay us to do something – for our entire marriage, and that's normal for the twenty-somethings that we are.

That uncertainty has ebbed and flowed. But I tell you what: when the degree of uncertainty gets beyond a certain point, it starts to wear me out. I start thinking, “Alright. Let's just settle with whatever we have for the sake of getting to unpack the boxes once and for all.” Of course, we've never been in a place where we could realistically do that. Whether because of jobs or money, or because we're just not sure yet what it is we're looking for: we can't settle down yet. We can't put down roots, literally or figuratively – we haven't had a garden for lack of garden-able space, but also because we haven't always been sure that we would be around at harvest time.

The desire to find a spot to call home is powerful, and never more so than when we feel hemmed in by circumstances like employment and money. My husband and I both spent our entire remembered childhoods in the homes that our parents still live in, and we yearn to bless our daughter with that stability. We long for perennial gardens, projects around a house that we know we'll get to appreciate for years to come, and the knowledge that we are taking some little corner of creation and doing something fruitful, beautiful, and beneficial with it.

So that's what a cow means to me: it means rootedness, stability, and homecoming.

But you may recall that I said that this third reason for wanting a cow was also a reason for not wanting a cow. The flipside of the aforementioned rootedness and stability is the feeling of being trapped, stuck, committed to a place whether I like it or not. Livestock don't care for themselves. Farms are not conducive to weekend getaways or spur-of-the-moment trips. They do not allow for sleeping in or lazing around because you don't feel like it, whatever “it” may be. When I heap these reasons against my hypothetical cow (especially when I'm mulling this over while sipping the coffee my husband as brought to me while I'm still in bed), my whole vision of the farm starts to look absurd, unlikely, and undesirable. Who wants to be stuck doing the same job over and over, day in and day out, with zero chance of spontaneity?

Then I hear my daughter wake up. I remember that I've already chosen, to some degree, a life of doing the same job over and over, day in and day out, with little room for spur-of-the-moment trips (or at least not ones that might interfere with nap time). I grumble about it at times, sure, but for the most part I genuinely enjoy being a stay-at-home mom. I think part of this is because I have a pretty easy-going kid, but I also think it's because I like the rhythm of life with a child – eating, playing, resting, repeating. There's structure and purpose in my day, and I need that.

I know I need structure because halfway through our first year of marriage, we moved for my husband's job and I wasn't employed for a while. I did a little work here and there, but I spent a lot of time doing... well, I'm not even sure now. I know I read a lot. I think I went for walks. I baked some loaves of bread. Looking back on that year now, as the parent of a toddler, I feel like I should have become fluent in Mandarin while knitting sweaters for my entire extended family. I had all this time on my hands! What the heck was I doing?

This gets to the heart of it. In a lot of ways, I'm far more productive now as a parent of a young child than I ever was before. This is partly because I have to use time efficiently if I want to get anything done. Case in point: if I want to write something, I have to use Greta's nap time because it's the only time of day when I am both alone and clear-headed. Another part of the productivity, however, is that Greta's routine of breakfast-play-lunch-nap-snack-play-dinner-bed is now my routine, too. We eat, play, and do chores together. (Well, sometimes one of us does chores while the other plays.) I rest when she rests. This outline for each day makes it easier for me to think about when something is going to happen, and much more deliberate about seeing it through than I ever had to be before a child was in the equation. I am far more disciplined and productive as a parent than I was when I just had myself to worry about.

All this to say, I do well with a routine, and I also have a hard time setting up a routine for myself. Becoming a parent imposed a routine on my life, and not necessarily one that I'm a huge fan of all the time. Many, many things about being the parent of a young child make life more complicated and difficult – finding babysitters, for example, can really cramp our style when we want to be spontaneous. But the extra step of planning makes the time away even sweeter, because it gives us time to anticipate the break in routine.

Alright, so what I'm saying here sounds a lot like “having a baby is practice for buying a cow.” I've never owned a cow, so I can't say for sure, but I think there's some truth to it. Having a toddler limits our choices moment-to-moment, and so would a cow. Any living thing that requires your regular attention is going to limit your options. But having fewer choices isn't such a bad thing, and a little less freedom might correspond with a lot more happiness.

I can say this with an expert opinion to back me up, because the other day I came across a story on NPR about this very idea. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore University, explains that, logically, greater choice should mean greater freedom which should in turn mean greater happiness. But psychologically, greater choice means paralysis and anxiety about whether we've made the right choice or missed something better, and that means greater unhappiness. We do well when we have some choices, but at a certain point, the liability of too many choices outweighs the benefit of more “freedom” to choose.

A friend of mine bought an old farmhouse with her husband. They're raising their son on beets from their garden and eggs from their backyard hens. A family in our church has put their yard to good use, or “dug in” as I've heard them put it, by planting nut and fruit trees, installing raised beds, and also rearing a flock of chickens. (Actually, we know at least five families within a 10-minute drive who have chickens in their backyards. And these are families who we would consider to be living “in town.” Hello, rural.)

These friends of ours are perhaps not counting on living out their days in their current homes, but they are doing things that only make sense if you take the long view. I mean, who plants their own filbert trees anymore? Who builds a chicken coop if they might up and move in a few months' time? They have committed themselves to homemaking in the older, agrarian sense. They are putting their property, energy, and minds to the task of bringing forth something worthwhile: food, yes, but also instruction for their children (and friends, like me) about what it means to eat and to work—and also what it means to extend hospitality, cultivate beauty, and care for the land and its inhabitants.

These are also friends who do a good deal of traveling, which suggests that it's pretty easy to babysit chickens, and also that rootedness does not mean you are forever-and-always stuck in one place.

So, to buy a cow, or not to buy a cow? It's a purely symbolic question at the moment, but it's one that's coming to symbolize a goal in my life: I'd like to get to a place, both in terms of geography and career and finances, where we can realistically think about purchasing a cow. This place would require a community of family and friends so close they count as family. It would be a place we enjoy year-round (a serious problem I have with our current location, which is dreadfully bleak in the winter). It would also be an emotional place we've arrived at, by which I mean, we will need to be at a place in our careers and our life as a family where we can think about settling down for the long haul.

In the meantime, I will try to find solace in the routine, rather than resent it. I will choose to see the rhythm of my life not as oppressive and suffocating, but as something that enriches it and fills it with possibility. And we'll keep an eye out for the paths that lead toward a home, maybe even a home with a cow.

Better Late Than Never

So the last time I posted was quite some time ago, wasn't it? I started this blog to serve two purposes: first, as a place to collect and organize my writing from the year; and second, as a way to share what I was writing with others, for the sake of overcoming my perfectionist tendencies (that is, to get a piece to the point of Good Enough and then let anyone read it), and also with the idea that I might get feedback. (Which I have, and for which I am awfully grateful.)

I also thought that if I was blogging, it would prod me to write with more regularity (or rather, any regularity at all). I am occasionally called upon to share a reflection in church or to help plan a service, and I have noticed that the looming threat of public embarrassment really lights a fire under me; I hoped that the blog might have a similar effect. Alas, it did not. Instead, I went for weeks and weeks without posting anything (though, happily, these were not weeks and weeks of no writing whatsoever). At first, I was a little ashamed. Now I was just another one of those bloggers who posted a handful of times and then quit. Then, I felt guilty, because I was being lazy about writing – and writing was one of just a few things I hoped to focus on this year. Shame and guilt are not, as it turns out, conducive to good writing. I wrote a couple of things in an irritated, anxious, self-righteous voice. I knew they weren't great, or even Good Enough, but instead of working on them to get them to Good Enough, I chose to sulk.

Shame and guilt, I should note, are not terribly conducive to parenting or constructive in marriage, but others have written plenty about that, so suffice to say I took things out on my poor family on more than one occasion. They stuck around, so I'll take that to mean they aren't holding it against me.

Well. Today is the sixth day of Advent. This past week, Marc hung the stockings and arranged the Christmas tree candles on the mantle. We got the holiday cookie cutters out of storage. Greta brought home a little angel from craft time at the library, to hang on our tree once we get one. I found, and then almost immediately misplaced, my book of prayers and readings for Advent. We started listening to the Christmas Carol station on Pandora.

This felt like it should be the year to start a family tradition – particularly because this is the first year that Greta has been capable of looking forward to something more distant in the future than, say, thirty seconds. I wanted some way to engage Greta in the special wakefulness, watchfulness of this season. I had not, of course, thought ahead much, so the season was well underway before I remembered that we needed to be starting said tradition. We had talked about getting an Advent calendar this year, but then we forgot, and I wasn't big on the idea of buying another thing during a season characterized by over-consumption.

I remembered a friend counting down the days to her wedding with a paper chain, and that gave me the idea of doing an Advent-to-Epiphany paper chain. I cut strips of paper, Greta decorated, and then I taped the loops together and draped the chain around the dining room chandelier (hoping fervently that little bits of glitter glue would not fall into our food at mealtimes). Sure, we started late, but the point is we're starting. Tonight at dinner, Greta will (with parental assistance) cut the first loop off the chain, and signify that we are one day closer to celebrating the Nativity and Christmastide.

As I hung the paper chain, I reflected on the fact that we would have to take it down and pack it in a couple of weeks, so that we could keep cutting off the loops at my in-laws' and my parents' homes. I thought about the degree to which I would regret packing an easily crushed, glitter-glue encrusted art project. Then I thought about next year, when the paper chain might spark some memories for a three-year-old. Perhaps a few years after that, she'll be a seven-year-old, taping the loops together by herself. Perhaps I'll see her as a ten-year-old, showing a younger sibling how to decorate the strips of paper and count out the days until Christmas. Perhaps a time will come when she'll remind me that it's time to make a paper chain, and then I'll know it's really a tradition.

Anyway, it's a small thing, but an important one nonetheless. Especially for me, coming as I do from a Christian tradition that doesn't do much with the church year. I grew up in a Protestant denomination that, for reasons relating to its theology and history (in opposition to the Catholic church), doesn't celebrate holidays in church. Every Sunday was to be a day for celebrating Christ's birth and resurrection, so we hardly needed to acknowledge Christmas and Easter. Decorating was minimal, special services for Christmas Eve or Good Friday were nonexistent.

Now, I should say that not celebrating national holidays in church is a blessing, in some cases. I appreciated my home church's position when I attended a friend's church (of another denomination) around Memorial Day. I wasn't sure at some points whether we were worshiping the Trinity or the Constitution.

Still, I felt that my denomination-of-origin had thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and that it simply wasn't the same to celebrate the Incarnation every Sunday. The church I worship with now is a kind of best-of-both-worlds for me: Mennonites, as you might imagine, don't make much of a deal out of national holidays that glorify the military or nation-state. The particular Mennonites I currently worship with, however, embrace the liturgical year and take great joy in finding special ways to mark the seasons of Advent and Lent, in particular.

Our years in the Mennonite church have been full of festive feeling in the weeks leading up to Christmas – we bring out the wreath of five candles and the children take turns lighting them, and we sing through the marvelous Advent section in our hymnal. The paper chain is an effort to bring that joyful expectancy into our life at home – even if it is a little late to be starting.

This blog post is, likewise, an effort to get back into a routine of writing and sharing; my aim is to post something for each week of our paper chain, which, as I mentioned, takes us through to Epiphany (January 6). Here's the first; look for another one next week. It's a little late to be starting, but: better late than never.

A slightly belated, but nonetheless sincere – Happy New (Church) Year to you!

Stay At Home Monastic, or, Slow Parenting

"In our culture, time can seem like an enemy: it chews us up and spits us out with appalling ease. But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God, and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it."
                                           --Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." 
                                           --Dallas Willard

I am a slow person. Maybe "slow mover" is a more accurate description, because I'm not (I hope) slow in mental acuity, but in most other things: I'm slow when I cook (tendency to double-check the recipe, even if I've made it a dozen times previously), slow when I get ready to leave the house (tendency to lollygag), slow when I read (tendency to look up words, to let my mind wander), slow when I write (tendency to think that if I can't say it perfectly -- and with an annotated bibliography -- then I shouldn't say anything). Easily distracted and a perfectionist is a disastrous combination if efficiency is the goal. I do not hurry well.

I was happy to hear that I am not alone in being slow. Kathleen Norris owns up to it in her book, The Cloister Walk, which I am reading (slowly) during my daughter's nap times. It's a perfect read for the stillness of the early afternoon, and I so much enjoy the way she writes about spiritual truths in a way that's down-to-earth without being dumbed down.

The book is about two residencies Norris, herself a poet, spent at a Benedictine monastery. She weaves together a personal narrative of her time spent among the monks, and a series of reflections on the liturgies of the church calendar. In the introduction, she talks about the way immersion into the monastic life -- and specifically immersion into the Liturgy of the Hours -- renewed the way she thought about time: "Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to 'get the job done.'" She goes on to say, a bit later in the book, that the Benedictines manage their communities as a family, as opposed to a corporation, and that this "sometimes results in Benedictines raising inefficiency to an art form," but that this is part of their witness to a culture which idolizes getting it done -- and preferably getting it done in a way that positively affects the bottom line.

Life as a stay-at-home mom has an uncertain bottom line, if there is one at all. It's difficult to measure the worth of my days, whether my time is well spent. With a two-year-old to raise and a household to manage and a marriage to inhabit and nurture, if there's any proof in the pudding, the pudding won't be ready for another few decades, at least. And even then, so many variables, so many outside forces exerting influence... this is why my dad is always reminding me that "it's all grace."

Having come to stay at home after working an office job, it's a feat of imagination to get beyond using productivity as a measure of my days. I enjoy keeping to a schedule, and I would be more or less lost without a to do list (and more or less despairing if I didn't consistently cross things off). Still, I keep coming back to this idea that staying at home orients me to something akin to liturgical time, "toward process rather than productivity." It's easy to manufacture a busy life where one needn't exist -- and if I continue to stay at home, I see the pressure to fill my own and my child(ren)'s schedule only worsening with time. It's already easy to compare how much (or how little) I'm involved in fill-in-the-blank, especially with families in which both spouses work full-time and have more kids at home than I do. I've wised up about over-committing, but I'm still vulnerable to feeling less-than because my sanity requires time in my day to simply sit and read a Kathleen Norris book, or generally just be slow. And while I know about what I can handle in an average week, I still occasionally feel twinges of guilt or inferiority over what a comparatively small amount that is.

So Norris's description of the Benedictines' orientation toward process, even -- and maybe especially -- at the expense of efficiency, lets me know that there is a long tradition where I fit in, and that I can look to as a model for how I'd like my home to run. In fact, reading The Cloister Walk, I've been struck a number times at how similar my own circumstances are to the Benedictines. I'm in this household because of vows I made before God; I'm living in community; and I'm finding solace in the words of Norris's Benedictine-educated friend, who says, "You never really finish anything in life, and while that's humbling, and frustrating, it's all right. The Benedictines, more than any other people I know, insist that there is time in each day for prayer, for work, for study, and for play." (I would add: the Benedictines, and also the toddlers.)

I get asked a lot, "What do you do?" And sometimes, "So you're just staying at home this year?" (I'll set aside, for now, my irritation that these are our culturally acceptable ways of "getting to know" another person.) To my relief and chagrin, I've used the doula certification work as an out: it gives me a way to respond honestly, deflect requests to shoulder additional responsibilities in the community, and not sound lazy, all at the same time. But the truth is, what I do is find time in each day to pray, to work, to study, and to play. Also to nap, to read, to cook, and to pause and look in wonderment at the gorgeous little creature who is the unknowing catalyst in my effort to be formed into someone patient and kind, generous and wise. Someone with an easy relationship with time -- receiving it as a gift and redeeming it (albeit slowly) moment to moment, whatever the moment calls for.

Storytelling

This is what I shared in church on May 19 of this year. I'm posting it here in its original form, rather than going through and giving it another edit and polish. Which is why, at the bottom, you'll find a bunch of questions; I wrote this to be a kind of extended lead-in to a group discussion (which turned out to be a productive and thought-provoking one, and that's one reason I love my church). 

My dad is a great story-teller. I grew up around thosestories and didn't realize until adulthood, I think, what a gift it is to be able to tell a story: you have to have just the right amount of detail, you have to have sufficient conviction to sound authoritative to your audience, and you have to have perfect timing with your punchline.

I took for granted that my dad's stories emerged from his mind fully formed and polished, ready for the telling. Then I went on a long backpacking trip with him. When we came home, we had lots and lots of stories. Wherever we went, family friends wanted to hear stories, and I heard my dad tell a handful of the best stories dozens of times. I began to notice that my dad would alter each story, just slightly, the first 4 or 5 times he told it. It was as though the story were going through a series of drafts until it was finally right – eliciting the response he wanted from his audience: laughter, amazement, warmth, awe – he was like a chef creating a meal to have the right balance of salty and sour and sweet and bitter. Finally the story would reach its final draft, and he would tell it almost the exact same way every time after that.

Telling stories is natural, which is not to say simple or easy. My experience listening to my dad's stories, and trying to tell stories myself, underscored this truth for me: I'm not the born story-teller he is, but in another sense, every human being is a born story-teller. Even Greta, now just shy of 2 years old, has a story of her own to tell: she scraped her knee two weeks ago, and multiple times a day, every day since, she's told us about what happened – how she fell down on campus and got a boo-boo on her knee, how Mama put special goopies on it, how it's feeling all better now, and how it's almost all gone. Story-telling is a way we connect with one another, make sense of things, and figure out our identities and our roles.

A few months ago I came across a study done by psychologists at Emory on adolescents and family stories. The researchers were looking at the relationship between adolescents' knowledge about their family history and those adolescents' well-being. They came up with a tool called the “Do You Know” test, which asked yes/no questions about “such things as how their parents met, or where they grew up and went to school.” The researchers also recorded dinnertime conversations in the adolescents' homes, and found that the “children that scored higher on the DYK scale were from families that told more familystories over a typical dinnertime conversation.” The paper, titled “Of Ketchup and Kin,” concludes that, essentially, when families tell stories, it's really good for the kids. Children in story-telling families absorb their family's unique history in bits and pieces, and it all adds up to a sense of belonging and helps in identity formation. Stories tell us where we fit in the grand scheme of things.

We just read from the book of Joshua. Usually the part of this passage that gets quoted is “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” But what I want to focus on is thestory Joshua tells, and the people's response, which echoes that same story. They say, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods” because “it was the Lord who brought us up from Egypt, performed great signs, protected us, gave us the Promised land.” Israel sees where it fits in the grand scheme of things because of thestories of God's faithfulness. The story of the whole family of Israel is integral to their identity, and God is integral to the story. Festivals and ceremonies ritualized the story-telling and eventually the written record set it down in a fixed vocabulary and order of events for future generations to reference and memorize and make meaningful to one another.

Over and over again the word “remember” is used in the Old Testament. God remembers covenants with human beings, remembers Noah and the animals in the ark and preserves them, remembers Rachel and Hannah and blesses them with children, remembers the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Israelites are called upon to likewise remember their deliverance from Egypt and remember the gift of the Promised Land, full of “flourishing cities they did not build, wells they did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves they did not plant.” They are called upon to remember that it was God who delivered and God who provided.

But they don't remember, they don't tell the stories, and that's a large part of what the Old Testament is about: Israel's forgetfulness, waywardness, and the resulting violence, bondage, and desolation.

Yet the story doesn't end there, as we know. In fact, one of our purposes in gathering together each week is to tell the rest of the story, together, and to talk about how our own smaller stories fit into the larger whole.

I want to return to the Emory study for a moment. Because the researchers discovered something particularly interesting: the family stories that benefit adolescents are not just stories about success or happiness. The storiesfamilies tell about failures and disappointments also correlate with positive outcomes in the children, such as resilience and sense of well-being. The researchers speculate that these kinds of stories of hardship help adolescents deal with their own struggles, and provide them with a sense of connectedness because of shared experiences with difficulty.

For those of us on the academic calendar (which is most – all? – of us), I think that late spring is a natural time for reflection. It's a time when Marc and I talk about the past year, which is another way of saying it's a time when we tell stories. In the Hopi language, one is thought to face the past, and walk backwards into the future. It makes sense: what we usually think of as “ahead” of us is the stuff we can't see, and what we think of as being “behind” us is what we can see. I think it's another way of saying, the stories are what we have: to see, to know, to examine, and to help us move into the next season, semester, year, or stage of life.

So I want to gather up these disparate strands: the Emory study, the act of communal remembering in the Old Testament, the way the story of deliverance was revised and recreated in Jesus, and the way we narrate our lives as individuals, households, extended families, a church, a community, and whatever large- or small-scale groups we can name. I want us to hear each other's thoughts about how we can be good story-tellers. Here are some questions I've come up with, but feel free to go in other directions, as well:

How do we tell stories well, not only in the sense of being factually accurate (and we could talk about the role of facts in stories, too) but also in the sense of capturing the truth of God's presence? How we tell stories redemptively? How do we tell stories of difficulty or sorrow without glossing over the hardship or succumbing to despair? How do we fit our stories into God's larger story without using scripture as a cliché or platitude (“everything works together for the good of those that love God”)? How are we Christlike in our story-telling, especially considering that Jesus used stories in so much of his teaching? Again, don't let these questions I've just asked limit you.

The Devil's in the Details

Here are the comments I prepared for a church service on July 20, but I didn't end up speaking due to some unusual circumstances. I considered doing a revision before posting it, but decided against it; I want to post this piece as I would have read it in church. Since this was written for a church service that would have included open discussion after I finished speaking, I especially invite comments. (But, really, I always welcome your responses.)

I was asked, along with a number of other people in our church, to talk about a passage of Scripture that troubled, inspired, or otherwise stirred me in some way. Something especially meaningful. I chose Mark 1:32-39. 

Also, this is the piece of writing I'm talking about in my earlier post, "Plagiarism."

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I've recently been reading through Susan Howatch's Starbridge series. Each novel uses mostly the same cast of characters, but each is narrated by a different one, and it makes for a really interesting story. The whole series deals with individuals whose lives are, in one way or another, deeply involved with the Church of England, starting around 1930 and going through the middle part of the twentieth century. (I can't tell you how far, because I've only read the first three books.)

The first novel in the series is Glittering Images. In it, one of the main characters explains that the word “demon” is “ancient symbolic language [used to] express profound psychological truths.” The character, whose name is Jon Darrow, proceeds to counsel the protagonist with a blend of spiritual direction and sophisticated psychoanalysis. Throughout the counseling, Darrow names as demons such psychological problems as shame, guilt, anger, and fear of inadequacy. These demons attack the characters and are only beaten back by the name of Jesus, and frequently the characters are aided by holding a cross. But at the same time, they also talk through their early family experiences and use their history to make sense of their present, in a way that I think would be very familiar to most “normal” (that is, not pastoral) counselors.

On the one hand, this interpretation of demons being ancient symbolic language is helpful to me. I can be quite comfortable with the idea that terms like epilepsy or schizophrenia were not in the vocabulary of first-century Palestinians, and thus attributed to malevolent spirits who inhabited and took over people's bodies and minds. This helps me deal with the weirdness of the Gospels: I guess being like Jesus doesn't mean sending devils into a herd of pigs, after all! Of course, then there's the whole issue of why the pigs would have run down the hill and drowned themselves, and this when Jesus just a few chapters before had said if your donkey falls into a pit on the Sabbath, to go ahead and haul him out. Doesn't seem like a consistent ethic of creation care.

In addition to questions about pigs, this interpretation becomes really problematic when I think about the friends who have suffered from physical or mental pain or disease and been told by well-meaning Christians, essentially, to pray harder. Or to really believe in God's healing. Or to claim the power of the Holy Spirit.

Certainly, God encourages us to make our requests known, whether for health or anything else that might be on our hearts. And certainly God has the power to answer those prayers, though when and how and why God chooses to answer some as we would like and not others is a subject for another day.

The problem with calling all physical or psychological affliction the work of evil spirits is that it really puts the onus on the patient to recover by virtue of her tremendous faith, with gritted teeth and squinty eyes. It also can, unfortunately, put pressure on the patient to avoid conventional or non-spiritual modes of care, such as doctors, counselors, changes in diet, changes in occupation, or whatever the “secular” world might suggest.

Issues of distressed bodies and minds aside, a further problem we have to contend with is that a bunch of the demons talk back to the one performing the exorcism. The Gospels record Jesus silencing evil spirits who threaten to reveal his identity as the Messiah. And then there's the demon who says to the seven sons of Sceva, “Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you?” So this doesn't jive well with my preferred theory that “demon” means something more like a problem with your temper, or your genetic code. And, of course, there are the pigs.

So I'm at an impasse. If the terms “demon” and “evil spirit” really are ancient symbolic language for profound psychological truths, does that mean we all go off our meds and get exorcised? It also puts an alarming amount of responsibility on the shoulders of church leaders, since they're the ones, I'd guess anyway, who would be doing the exorcising.

And if demons and evil spirits are not symbols at all, but in fact distinct spiritual entities bent (hell bent?) on disrupting our communion with God and our souls' healing and redemption, then that leads me to ask a few more questions.

Like, why do we hear about evil spirits and demon possession so much in the New Testament, and especially in Jesus' ministry, but hardly at all in the Old Testament? All I'm really aware of are the stories of Saul, who was afflicted by an evil spirit said to be from the Lord (and thus not a demon in the New Testament sense – and just another layer of confusion); and of Job, in whose story we encounter Satan (again, not really a demon in the NT sense, and Job is a different kind of text than the OT history books and the NT gospels, and thus requires a different kind of reading).

So the Old Testament doesn't help a whole lot in elucidating the issue.

Another question is, what does the demon possession and demon exorcising of the New Testament mean for us today? We still practice communion as instituted by Jesus and practiced by the disciples and early churches. Ditto for baptism. We pray the Lord's Prayer as Jesus taught it to his disciples. We desire to be simple, truthful, holy people who live peaceful lives, as we see in the life of Jesus.

But then the demons. It's just... bizarre, right?

Then again, maybe my response has more to do with an upbringing that didn't emphasize spiritual warfare or demonic activity. Maybe I just think I'm too educated and too sophisticated to believe in something so primitive.

I don't have good answers. But these stories are part of our holy book, and right now the best I can do is say, “Okay, God, it's in there. There's some truth value here that I don't full grasp, but I'm going to keep reading and grappling with it, however weird or irrelevant or freaky it might be.” The best I can do is to let the Bible just be the big, strange book that it is, and to sit a while with the questions, even if I'm not sure whether the questions will be answered for me, or whether I'll be satisfied with the answers if I get them.

When I chafe against Biblical passages or sigh with exasperation at their inscrutability, I'm reminded that I have much the same relationship with God. It's a good reminder to let God be the big, strange God that God is, however wild or transcendent or mysterious.

In the meantime, I take an odd comfort in the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It's a story of naming and changing, and we're told that that encounter leaves Jacob with a limp for the rest of his life. Sometimes I think, “Poor Jacob, limping around the tents and the camels.” And other times I think, “Lucky Jacob, bearing a sign he could never ignore that he had wrestled with God.”

So I'll keep wrestling, and if I occasionally feel like I'm limping through scripture, it will be the sign I can't ignore that God has thought it worthwhile to wrestle with me.  

Plagiarism

There's an episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine submits a cartoon to the New Yorker. The cartoon shows a pig at a complaint desk, and the caption reads, "I wish I was taller." Elaine takes the cartoon around to friends to gauge their responses, thinking the drawing (and herself) pretty clever. At the end of the episode, her boss, Mr. Peterman, recognizes it as a Ziggy cartoon. Elaine realizes that she must have seen the Ziggy cartoon in the past, and that she mistakenly thought it was an original idea when she thought of it later.

Comedy turns on the silliness or outright idiocy of the characters, especially in a show like Seinfeld. We laugh at Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer because they are vain, self-centered, and deceitful. The accidental plagiarism in "The Cartoon" is about Elaine's misplaced confidence in her own creativity and wit; the audience laughs at her because her ego is cut down to size at the end of the episode when she realizes she copped the idea from another cartoonist.

But when I watch "The Cartoon," I also laugh with Elaine, and at myself, because I've done the same thing. I would never intentionally plagiarize; it's serious stuff. In fact, as I reflected on this, I realized that, at the college that employs my husband, plagiarism is, in some respects, a more serious offense than some other student conduct violations, like drinking on campus. It has a more lasting effect on your transcript, anyway. Plagiarism is more than simple theft; perhaps it's more like what we mean when we say someone's identity has been stolen. Someone's words or thoughts can't be taken from them, but they can be used as someone else's means to an end, and it's hurtful to the reputation of the source.

(Plagiarism is also a matter of getting back to the original time or place that a thought was expressed, which is why we talk about plagiarizing one's own work. That's a little bit different.)

A few years ago, something I wrote for a small newsletter was plagiarized. What happened was that my writing was mistakenly (I believe) attributed to someone else, a person who was then a student at the college. I never sought to set the record straight, because the newsletter was going to have such limited circulation, and the pieces weren't things I was planning to use in the future, or even things I was especially proud of. Perhaps I should have spoken up; perhaps I was being a little too modest. I was sure it was a mistake, anyway, so I didn't want to give anyone the feeling that I was angry with them. I'm not even sure if the student ever noticed that something she had never written was listing her as the author.

More recently, I wrote something for my church. I had been asked to comment on a passage of Scripture during our time of speaking and conversation, but that part of the service was unexpectedly postponed due to some unforeseen coincidences. No problem for me. However, the date for which I was rescheduled was a weekend I was already planning to be away from home, and therefore not in church, and after that week our church schedule shifts to a new topic of discussion. So I won't be sharing these comments in church.

"Perfect," I thought. "I'll just put that piece of writing on the blog." But as I went to post, an unpleasant thought struck me. My heart sank as I realized that I had very probably "borrowed" one of my favorite ideas in the piece from another author -- one who's quite well-known, too. I felt foolish and vain, having imagined that it was my brilliant and creative mind that had produced such an idea, when in reality I had simply read it long enough ago that it had submerged beneath my conscious thought only to resurface later. Just like Elaine with the Ziggy cartoon.

I searched for the other author's essay, and found it. I skimmed it, searching for the part that I had unintentionally stolen. Then I saw that I was using similar raw material, but taking it to a somewhat different place. As I thought about it more, I wondered if both of us had independently arrived at the same thought (as this is one that I've been mulling over for some time). After all, it seems quite likely for two Christian writers to interpret the Bible in a similar way and talk about those interpretations in a similar way.

I'm still not sure what to think. There's no way for me to know exactly where my idea came from, and retracing my mental steps only gets me back a little ways before things get murky.

I talked it over with my husband, who quoted an old Doug episode (another cartoon!) to me. One of the characters says, "If no one ever copied anyone else, we’d all be running around naked, grunting at each other."

So with that thought bolstering my confidence, plus a butterfly sticker on my arm for luck (thanks, Bug), I'll post the church piece in the near future.

Labor Pains

I wrote this Lenten reflection to share with my church on Palm Sunday of this year (March 2013). My thoughts were informed and enriched by Henri Nouwen's book Compassion, and the hymn "Fresh as the Morning [God of the Bible]" by Shirley Erena Murray.

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“You will grieve, but your grief will suddenly turn to wonderful joy – like a woman suffering the pains of labor. When her child is born, her anguish gives way to joy because she has brought a new baby into the world.” John 16:20b-21

The image of childbirth and the laboring woman is used in the Old Testament to evoke a sense of fear in the audience. The prophets use labor as a metaphor for events – terrible, distressing events – that will come upon the Israelite people suddenly, inevitably, and woefully.

In John 16, we have a record of Jesus’ words to his disciples, and he uses the laboring woman metaphor, too, but he tells the rest of the story. In keeping with the prophets, he says that the disciples’ grief over what is going to to happen to him will be like a woman suffering the pains of labor. But Jesus continues on to say that while the grief is real and the pain is intense, the anguish gives way to wonderful joy when the baby is born.

I want us to inhabit this metaphor that Jesus uses, to spend some time this morning dwelling in each of three roles – the laboring woman, the child in the womb, and the midwife helping to deliver the child.

Once upon a time, I was in labor. And it was, indeed, labor: childbirth is hard work. I wrote down Greta’s birth story when she was ten days old, and now when I read over it I cry and I laugh. I cry not because I remember the pain, but because I remember the power and the joy. I laugh because I wrote the words “I pushed,” more than two dozen times. It was the only time during my labor when I wanted to give up. I told everyone in the room – Marc, our doula, our midwife – I told them, “I can’t do this.” They all said, “Yes, you can.” They knew how close that baby was, even when I didn’t. So I believed them. I didn’t give up. “Push!” they said. “Your baby is almost here!” I pushed. And pushed. And pushed. And finally, after what felt like days of pushing but was in fact 45 minutes, I gave one last almighty push and the midwife held up a newborn: a new person had entered the world.

Small wonder that the prophets repeatedly use the laboring woman as an image of distress: the laboring woman is in agony, and I use the word “agony” because it denotes not just physical pain, but physical struggle. This may seem odd to you, but the laboring woman doesn’t always remember that a baby is on its way; she needs to be reminded by her birth-partners that her suffering is purposeful. This is what Jesus is doing for his disciples in John 16: he is reminding them that their labor is going somewhere. Jesus puts the disciples’ suffering in the context of a larger story – one that has a joyous conclusion: their pain and grief are real and fearsome things, but they are not forever and the story does not end in suffering. The story ends in wonderful joy.

Furthermore, Jesus tells his disciples that even when he goes away, the compassion of God persists; Jesus tells them to make their requests to God the Father directly, to ask using Jesus’ own name. God is still suffering with us – that is the root of the word “compassion”: “pati,” to suffer, and “cum,” with: to suffer with. Jesus is Immanuel, God-with-Us, God who sees the suffering of creation and is moved to compassion.

We are the woman in labor. We are suffering, and though it may seem that that is the whole of our story, our suffering is in fact a part of the larger story God is telling: our suffering is the labor pains of birthing a new creation. And though we are suffering, we are not suffering alone because our God is compassionate. God-with-Us suffers with us.

The Hebrew word for “compassion” is “rachamim,” which refers to the Womb of God. God suffers with us in the deepest, most intimate place of God’s being. God’s relationship with us is that of a mother carrying a child in her womb; a relationship of intimate care, and also of intimate mystery. After all, how can two individuals be closer than when one is wholly enveloped by the other? Yet the child in utero cannot perceive the whole of the mother’s being – only the warm darkness of her womb and the pulsing, rushing sound of the blood in her veins. The mother cannot be more present to the child, but the child cannot see her face or hear her voice clearly.

We are the children in the womb, communing with God our Mother by taking our nourishment from Jesus’ own body and blood. And as children in the womb, we feel God’s presence in part even though we cannot comprehend God’s being wholly.

One way we experience God’s presence is in the presence of others who can tell and re-tell the story—the whole story—and stand in solidarity with us while we endure our pain and agony. We gather in church to remind one other of God’s story of redemption and of the peaceable Kingdom we are laboring to bring forth. We show compassion by walking with each other through painful times, times of disappointment and confusion and frustration, sorrow and physical anguish and heartache.

In this way we partner with God and with each other and act as spiritual midwives, aiding the creation suffering from the pains of labor. This is the hope we have to share with the world, the love we compassionately communicate to the broken, exhausted, groaning world—our presence, our entering-in as Christ entered in and became God-with-Us. And because of our hope in the story God is telling, we cry out to the world, “Push! Your baby is almost here!”

Our time together during the Lenten season has been focused around the theme of thankfulness. As the woman in labor, we are thankful for the presence of God who suffers with us and the compassion of God in others who stand with us in our agony so that we do not struggle alone. As the child in the womb, we are thankful for the presence of God our Mother who nourishes, sustains, and grows us. As the midwives, we are thankful for God who assures us that the story is larger than the pain and who invites us to join as partners in bringing forth the Kingdom of God.

This is Palm Sunday, the commencement of Passion Week. This is the week of Christ’s agony, of the disciples’ anguish, of the world’s sorrow that the Messiah who came into the world was rejected utterly. The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem is the water breaking – now the labor begins, no turning back. But Christ has made us midwives, partners in the birth of the New Creation, and we have a glimpse of the end of the story. We know that the suffering is not the whole of the story; we know that Christ is the first of many to be resurrected, and that our present painful, difficult work is the labor of God in the Old Creation giving birth to the New. And we know that when that joy comes to us, we will rejoice indeed, and no one can rob us of that joy.

Off on an adventure.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I moved into the house we’ll be renting through May of next year. He’s working at a small liberal arts college (his office is a mile from our doorstep) and I’m staying at home with our small daughter.

I’ve been a stay-at-home-something for two, non-consecutive years previous to this one: the first time was when my husband and I moved to our little town and I spent a year mostly at home, but also taking care of other people’s children and cleaning other people’s houses. Then I stayed home again when my daughter was born, this time taking care of my own child and (occasionally) cleaning my own house.

I decided to blog as a way to 1) share some of my writing and maybe get some feedback from readers; and 2) to stave off the intellectual and creative loneliness that has been present in my previous years as a stay-at-homer, and which I imagine will be a danger this time, too. Essentially, I’d like to cultivate a habit of creativity and to do that with an audience, or better yet, a community.

One last thing I’ll mention is that my posts won’t be strictly from the writing I’m doing during my present stay-at-home year. I wrote some things in previous years at home, and I’ll post some of that; I wrote some things while I was working, too, and I’ll post that, as well. If I wrote something before July '13, I'll mention it in the head notes.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you visit again!

The Other Thing That Money Can't Buy

Lately I've been growing impatient waiting for sweet corn and cherry tomatoes to appear at my favorite local farm stand. I wrote this piece four years ago, and it reminds me why summer's harvest is worth the wait. 

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On the table before me are the last of this summer’s cherry tomatoes. The end of September is about the latest one can expect to harvest tomatoes in my climate, and there is simply no way to preserve the taste and texture of a sun-ripened cherry tomato: the way the seeds squirt out and the tomato-y goodness bursts on your tongue before you chew it up and pop another one in your mouth – and the fact that cherry tomatoes can be popped in your mouth to begin with.

Certainly I enjoy the aesthetics of the wide variety of regular tomatoes – the deep bloodreds, hearty pinks, pure pale golds and vivid greens that show up at our late-summer farmers’ markets. Though I have been known to eat regular full-size tomatoes like apples, more often then not I prefer large tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with cracked black pepper, or topped with sweet basil just picked from my garden, or perhaps with some strong and salty feta cheese scattered across the slices. I have always loved the taste of really good tomatoes, and when the tomatoes (finally) came into season this year, I could be heard humming Guy Clark’s song: “There’s only two things that money can’t buy, and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.” Raw or cooked, it’s hard to beat the tomato for flavor or versatility.

Tomatoes, too, have taken on a special significance for me since my husband and I began to eat locally (and therefore seasonally). As I mentioned earlier, the tomato enjoys only a brief tenure in my particular climatic zone. We wait patiently for the hot-weather crops—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants—and as soon as they ripen, it seems, the autumn blows in and freezes them green on the vine. Tomatoes signify the zenith of summer, put me in mind that the season will only wane so we must seize the days and dedicate ourselves to eating through as many pounds of tomatoes as humanly possible.

But the cherry tomato in particular lays claim to a special place in my heart. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of picking my neighbors’ cherry tomatoes, eating most on the spot and trotting home with the rest collected in the front of my shirt. What was it about these diminutive tomatoes that appealed to me—that they were child-sized? Or that I could harvest and consume them on the spot? Or that my parents did not limit my portions as with my other favorite food, chocolate? Whatever the reason, I never grew tired of picking and eating the cherry tomatoes, and our neighbors delighted in seeing a little girl enjoy the abundance of their garden.

Perhaps it is that cherry tomatoes grow in such abundance, clustering on their vines in spendthrift decadence. Picking sungolds for the first time this summer threw me into a kind of saintly ecstasy; the tomatoes were thick and ripe, it was clear to me at the time that I was experiencing a foretaste of heaven. Crouching by the staked vines, surveying the hundreds upon hundreds of ripe cherry tomatoes, a pure, childlike joy overtook me and my heart still swells at the memory of so much goodness growing right out of the earth beneath my feet. I’m surprised now that I did not then burst out in singing the doxology, or go dancing through the fields.

On every return trip from farmers’ markets or farm stands, my hand would reach for the pint of sungolds and they would be gone before I arrived at home. No matter: my husband doesn’t care for them. Since I firmly believe that any tomato not thoroughly savored is a tomato wasted, I have done next to nothing to encourage his tastes to change.

My family used to bestow the title “nature’s perfect food” on whatever edible item had taken our fancy at the moment. For me, cherry tomatoes are and ever shall be nature’s perfect food. They are mouthwateringly sweet and endearingly small. They need no preparation nor accompaniment to make them palatable or interesting. They are prefect just the way they are.