Trying Advent

As a kid I didn’t think much of Advent beyond lighting candles to count down to Christmas. Later, I knew other people who “did” Advent, and I enjoyed reading my favorite bloggers (like Sarah Bessey) writing through their Advent experiences, but I was never able to settle myself down to actually try waiting quietly myself, as much as it appealed to me. Besides not being part of a church tradition that recognized Advent, this quiet waiting time also overlapped substantially with Final Research Paper Cramming Season (when I was still doing coursework) as well as Grading Final Projects Season, and we always traveled a lot during December for family things, and so between this and that it never got going. The month before Christmas was always a time of intense busyness and anxiety for me, and the closest I ever got to stillness was the week after finals, right before Christmas, when I would inevitably get knocked out by some virus that had been lying in wait for me to stop moving so it could catch me.

This year I’m settled. We live far enough away from family that although traveling for Christmas isn’t going to be a huge ordeal, we’re too far to make separate trips to all the other holiday parties at the homes of friends and family in Indianapolis over the next few weeks. We’re responsible for shaping our own traditions this year, and while I’m going to miss the always-competitive White Elephant exchange with my mom’s family, I admit I’m also breathing a sigh of relief at not having to make another weekend trip this month.

I have time, space, and quiet for the first time in years to stop and listen and look. I’m lingering in the darkness instead of rushing out to pregame the holidays. This doesn’t mean I haven’t put up my tree, or that I’m not listening to any Christmas music yet, or anything like that (I admit I’m not that hardcore), but I’m taking it slowly. I’m counting down the days on a homemade calendar, trying to do one thing with the kids every day, slowly, a bit at a time, with an emphasis on making things with our hands and giving things away (also hot chocolate and watching movies, because of course). We’re reading parts of the Bible on some mornings, and other days exploring other wonderful stories and traditions, like putting out shoes for St. Nicholas and baking lussekatter on St. Lucia’s Day (no picture of the lussekatter because I am clearly not a food blogger, but they were pretty good for a first try and a good excuse to finally bite the bullet and buy some saffron). 

I hope my kids are getting a broader sense of the Christian narrative and tradition than just “Nativity scene + Tree piled with gifts = Christmas.” I love both those things, but the narrative is so much richer, and I hope that our family can start to see the rich tapestry of stories, traditions, and beliefs that has been woven around the simple yet radical idea of God With Us.

It’s not the super spiritual and disciplined candlit season that I’ve sometimes fantasized about, but I’m ok with that. I’m walking through this time deliberately, at my own pace, instead of scrambling while it rushes past me, and keeping my eyes open as I do.

Much of what I see in the news is part of the deep darkness of waiting—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, burned mosques, hateful rhetoric coming from people who worship a God who is love. But the words we speak and sing in church, the children’s Christmas pageant, the food pantry down the hall from where I teach 3^rd and 4^th grade Sunday School, pictures from all the church toy drives I’ve seen all over Facebook, the stories I read about the loving welcomes that refugees have been getting in both Canada and the United States (even in spite of the efforts of certain state governors)—these are the promise of coming light. I’ve never been so aware of that tension before, between the now and not-yet. 

On the first day of Advent, after church, Queen Mab and I went to go see the Nutcracker, and on the drive home, as we were talking about the lights and decorations and church, I quizzed her if she knew what season it was (we had talked about it in Sunday School that morning and I was curious about how much she had been listening).

“Winter?”

“Well yes, but also--”

“Advent?”

“Yes! And what’s Advent about?”

“Hope!”

She's listening and watching with me.

Kicking tables, clearing space

I try to maintain a pretty even keel, and sometimes I look pretty successful (at a Parents Association meeting last year when I was trying to listen while B cavorted around the conference room, another mom told me she admired how “zen” I was about it. She should have seen me trying to get Queen Mab out the door that morning). I’m naturally a pretty passionate person, though—I feel things deeply and my instinctive reaction is to yell about it or cry (about both good and bad things). But that’s exhausting, and I have a child whose emotions are just as difficult to regulate as mine. So I’ve put a lot of work into practicing calm and patience and peace, and on the whole, I’ve gotten better about it (hence the zen comment)—feeling my feelings without necessarily splattering them all over the place.[1]

But of course I can’t just will myself into it like “BE CALM, YOU!” (as much as my husband has tried to tell me to “just calm down!” Nice try, honey). I’ve had to be careful about avoiding things that set me off if I’m not mentally prepared to deal with it right at that moment, especially online, where everything in the world could theoretically pop up on the screen in front of me. So for example, I try to limit Facebook to staying in touch with people I care about and following my favorite bloggers. This certainly includes discussion about all kinds of hot topics, but if I find that I’m spending too much time agonizing over whether or not to reply to any particular person or page’s posts that I strongly disagree with, I unfollow them. Because either this is a person whose posts are mostly just going to make me angry and I had better protect any real-life relationship by not letting the things I dislike about them constantly appear on my screen, or because they and I just don’t have the kind of relationship to safely have the intensity of discussion that their posts are calling for. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, or percentages of cute-baby-picture : ill-researched-“satirical”-meme that I follow, just an effort to pay attention to how I feel. Other times, if a friend just tends to share a lot of frustrating posts from one particular page, I just hide the page and continue enjoying their cute babies/funny cats/interesting anecdotes.

Lately this approach has been wildly inadequate, because the questions and fears are too big and the conversations and arguments about national security against terrorism versus protecting the victims of that terrorism have been bleeding all over the place. It’s impossible to open Facebook without stumbling across thousands of comments from people I don’t know, claiming to share my faith while saying things about refugees that chill me to my very soul. My hands start shaking when I see calls for massive acts of violence, for reviving the old Japanese internment camps, callous suggestions that war orphans just go back where they came from.

And there I go into online-social-justice-warrior mode. It starts off feeling awesome and righteous, but I’m sure you can imagine how it ends up.

After someone I trust very much privately pointed out to me that maybe I was getting a little carried away, I took a few deep breaths and tried to figure out what to do with all this energy I have. Because I know that anger, especially against injustice, isn’t a bad thing in itself. I mean, look at the Old Testament prophets! And didn’t Jesus go around overturning tables?! If I didn't figure out something, I was going to end up looking for more tables to kick over.

A few minutes later the same person who had (metaphorically) taken me aside  suggested, “Let your sadness spur you on to good works -- being the hands and feet -- you know? invite the broken to YOUR table as a way of pointing to His.” At the same time Esther Emery shared this good word: “We…do well in the world not by multiplying and extending our outrage, but by multiplying and extending our relationships.” 

I started to wonder about that story of Jesus overturning tables. He was so angry, and then what? What did he do after he starting throwing furniture and kicking people out of the Temple? I realized that while I've heard that story so many times, I hadn't heard much about what comes after. So I checked. According to Matthew,

“Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

My house was designated a house of prayer; 

You have made it a hangout for thieves.”

And the very next verse says, “Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.”

His anger cleared out the clutter that was getting between him and these people who needed him, and then filled that empty space with healing and compassion, "multiplying and extending" relationships with other people. These healings were probably small things to everyone around him, affecting only the poor and marginalized who had little to no influence on society. I bet those loan sharks and merchants set up their tables again as soon as he was gone. The whole thing probably just seemed like an awkward blip in the middle of a long day, but they mattered to the individuals who met him, and he'd made a very clear point about who belongs in that sacred space. It's a story that has resonated for years, even if the immediate effects seemed negligible.

The still, small voice sometimes has to repeat itself a few times to be sure I get the message. I'm very glad, though, that it sometimes speaks to me through the internet, since that's where I usually am when I need to hear it the most.

I don't have the power to solve the world's problems. I can't protect anyone from terrorists and extremists--I can't even make anyone to understand what seems so clear to me! But if my outrage leads me away from mere anger and into relationships and small acts of love, it will be enough.

[1] For example, I try to take a “gentle parenting/attachment parenting” approach (because they have the most useful parenting tools for me for trying to parent my intensely passionate kid without letting my own intensely passionate self become a big jerk about it), but I’ve unfollowed all but a couple parenting Facebook pages because of a few too many comments or shared blog posts that said things like, “My precious angel has never once made me think of laying a hand on him aggressively and anyone who feels differently is a monster,” (to which I respond with all kinds of words I can’t write here in case someone shares this with one of my grandmas).

A letter to my alma mater

It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.(…) For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. -G.K. Chesterton (The Defendant, Chapter 16: “A Defense of Patriotism”)

I first read this passage in my Advanced Christian Thought class in high school, and it comes to mind whenever I encounter some pseudo-patriotic variant on the “love it or leave it” theme protesting any criticism of the United States. While my opinion of Chesterton has shifted over the years (he’s an excellent writer, which cleverly disguises the vapidity of many of his arguments), being introduced to his work was only one of the many gifts I was given at my high school. Covenant is my alma mater in the truest sense—there I was encouraged to grow into the earnest overthinker you all know and love, to paint the walls (literally) with the colorful overflowings of my imagination, to think deeply about art and literature, and to look for the movement of God in even the most mundane circumstances.

I love my high school. And because I love it, Chesterton expects me to be its “most candid counsellor.”

Since I graduated in 2004, I have become increasingly conscious that while I had an amazing experience at my school, many LGBTQ students did not. And furthermore, while we were encouraged to discuss many aspects of Christian faith and practice from multiple angles, questions of sexuality and gender were not among them (heck, even the possibility that women could be pastors or equal partners in their own marriages was never honestly explored, which caused me no end of trouble for the first few years of my marriage). It took me years to discover and then independently fill those massive gaps in my understanding of human experience. There are too many stories that can’t fit neatly into the boxes on a table of “the Christian worldview” (in fact, the suggestion that there’s only one “Christian worldview” is laughable).

A large group of alums sent our high school a detailed letter back in August explaining these concerns and other, related problems. I sent my own letter, signed by my husband and his brother who are also alums, and we waited for a response. When it finally came it was underwhelming. Like Chesterton, it was well-written but with little substance. Disappointing, but not surprising. 

So here’s my letter. If nothing else, maybe it will be helpful for someone else who's come to the same sinking realization I did, that the way I had been trained to read the Bible had somehow put me on the wrong side of Augustine of Hippo's admonition that “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”* 

I truly believe that the people who responded to our letters sincerely think they're showing love to their students, but if your students consistently feel marginalized and dehumanized, I suggest you reconsider your definition of "love"—you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.

August 31, 2015
Covenant Christian High School Administration

7525 W 21st Street

Indianapolis, IN 46214

To the board and administration of Covenant Christian High School,

As Covenant alumni who benefitted greatly from our education there, we are writing in support and affirmation of the August 25^th letter from Marianne Richardson et al. Their requested changes to Covenant school policies are necessary for the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of not only Covenant’s LGBTQ students, but all students of every orientation and identity, by better preparing them to be loving, compassionate members of their communities.

Covenant’s core values as listed on the school’s website include

• Loving Community: a joyful pursuit of Christ in faith, hope, love, freedom, grace, and truth. 

• Human Dignity: all persons are created in the image of God and deserve of love and respect. 

• Academic Integrity: passionate, careful, honest, and charitable engagement with ideas.

• Church Solidarity: dedicated to a thriving local and globally diverse community of God.

A community that casts out its own when they fail to live up to expectations is neither loving nor in pursuit of Christ, especially when those who are being cast out are already marginalized by society and at a dramatically increased risk for suicide, homelessness, and assault. Neither does this treatment of these marginalized individuals respect their human dignity as being created in the image of God.

Furthermore, Covenant’s refusal to acknowledge alternate perspectives on human sexuality as held by many faithful biblical Christians gives the lie to both the claims to academic integrity and church solidarity. Currently Covenant cannot honestly claim to envision the “total preparation of the student” because upon graduation, many of us are totally unprepared for and completely flummoxed by the mere existence of ordinary individuals such as an office mate who is both lesbian and Baptist. This represents a failure of Covenant’s model of Christian education, in that not only are LGBTQ students further marginalized by the very people who should have shown them the most radical love and acceptance, but even straight, cis-gendered students are ignorant of the lived experience of faith and sexuality outside Covenant’s walls.

We challenge Covenant to live up to its values—to lovingly embrace all their students in the community of Christ, to respect them as children created in God’s image still learning what it means to live out God’s will for their lives, to welcome generous and respectful debate, and to embrace the whole church even when those diverse limbs and organs of the body of Christ have similarly diverse beliefs about the Christian life.

Erin (Hall) Kissick (Class of 2004)

David Kissick (Class of 2004)

Scott Kissick (Class of 2006)

*(Since I blame Augustine for Western Christianity's unhealthy fixation on sexual sin, I think it's only fair to enlist his support in trying to alleviate some of the symptoms of this pathology.)

(and here's a link to the Google Doc version) 

Writing goals (and why I'm not writing a novel in November)

I've wanted to do NaNoWriMo for ages, but instead I've always ended up writing things like my dissertation (or, like last year, defending it). And this year---

I'm still not writing a novel.

But I will be working on this book that's been rolling around in my head since May (since the ICMS conference in Kalamazoo, more specifically). I keep poking at it and thinking, "Meh, maybe later. I've got to write Other Little Thing right now and a book seems big and scary." But the things I'm wanting to write about for this book keep popping up in blog posts and poems, and I guess I should actually face this beast.

The advantage of hitching my project to something like NaNoWriMo is that it requires me to actually write every day, even if I don't feel inspired, and it precludes me from spending B's valuable naptime revising instead of generating material. Because I can sit and fiddle with the wording of a single sentence for hours, just to avoid facing a case of writer's block.

For now I'm calling it Kitchen Mystic, because reasons. And having a name for it makes it seem more like a real thing, even though it will almost certainly evolve away from that name as it grows. But I'm letting you all know about it now, because it will make it harder for me to bail on this project in a week if it turns out to be hard ;-)

Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo in some form?

The kingdom of God is like....

On Sunday afternoon, I had the delightful opportunity to have lunch with part of our church’s Confirmation class, along with some other adults (it still surprises me to be on the adult side of these conversations, incidentally). We talked about our faith and told stories about how God had moved in our lives, and there was such a range of stories. I represented the “willing to admit to getting really mad at/about God a lot” contingent, but others had stories of getting distracted from God and being led back, or hearing clear words from God in crisis, or simply feeling God’s presence throughout a long life of quiet, perhaps boring, faithfulness.  

Then Monday, my pastor and I took an adventure to the north side of Chicago to deliver a minivan full of winter coats and other wintery accessories to RefugeeOne, an organization that assists refugees who have been resettled in the Chicago area.

So back in September, shortly after pictures of little Aylan Kurdi started circulating online, I knew I needed to do something. And RefugeeOne came up through a link someone shared on Facebook. They were holding a coat drive for refugees who had been resettled in the Chicago area but had previously come from warm climates and had no winter gear. I figured I had some things I could bring, but their office was about an hour away and I didn’t have enough stuff to make the drive worth my while. So I asked on Facebook if anyone had anything else I could bring, and my pastor suggested I get the church involved.

At that point, basically all I did was say the same thing I did on Facebook—I asked people, “Hey, do you have any coats? Because these people could really use some coats,” and coats poured in for weeks. They filled the Sunday School director’s office and overflowed the big cardboard boxes that the Sunday School students had decorated to collect donations. Sunday morning at the end of Sunday School the kids hauled them down from the office where they were stored and piled them over the altar rail up front, and during the service we blessed them and the people who would be wearing them.

So the next day, it was wonderful to visit RefugeeOne’s offices and hear about the many ways that they work with refugees, from the moment they get off the plane until they become citizens. They find and furnish apartments for them, stock the pantry, then help them get jobs and learn English—for those who have lived in refugee camps for many years, sometimes even showing them how to use the door key for that new apartment! RefugeeOne’s hallways were lined with gorgeous artwork done by refugee artists and photographs of their clients at different stages in their journey here.[1]

My pastor asked the woman who gave us the tour, whose job is to escort their clients through the permanent residency/citizenship paperwork maze, how she felt about her job—was she hopeful? Discouraged?

She responded that she loved it—she was never discouraged. Her work held so much beauty and significance for her, as the child of refugees herself, and she loved helping people come here and thrive.

Afterwards we—my pastor and I—had a long talk over fabulous Ethiopian food about what we had seen and what had inspired us about this visit.

Honestly, I was both inspired and a little jealous of the meaningful work RefugeeOne does, showing God’s love to others and blessing their lives in such concrete, tangible ways! And fearlessly crossing those boundaries of culture, religion, and language that typically segregate us from each other—it was a beautiful image of God’s kingdom.

My place in my church and community are so safe and easy by comparison—I know that God doesn’t call the citizens of the kingdom to stay safe and comfortable. That’s not how the kingdom grows. What if I’m not fulfilling that call because I’m Here where it’s safe and boring and I write long blog posts agonizing over whether my work means anything instead of being There where it’s risky and gorgeous and I could actually help people?

But those coats.

Then he said, “How can I picture God’s kingdom for you? What kind of story can I use? It’s like a pine nut that a man plants in his front yard. It grows into a huge pine tree with thick branches, and eagles build nests in it.”

He tried again. “How can I picture God’s kingdom? It’s like yeast that a woman works into enough dough for three loaves of bread—and waits while the dough rises.”[2]

I only contributed about a pine nut’s worth to that coat drive. And then there were over fifty coats, plus boots and hats and gloves and scarves and snowpants. God’s kingdom was sprouting leaves and tendrils in closets and garages and under-the-bed totes in homes all over Lemont.

And the kingdom of God was there in the holy conversation[3] at lunch on Sunday where people who had walked with God much longer than me reminded me that sometimes a life of faith is slow and quiet, and again at lunch over Ethiopian food on Monday, where we digested the new-to-us work of God we had just seen. It’s like my sourdough starter, which takes way longer than the instant yeast in the jar in my fridge. To make bread I have to dip out some starter, feed it flour and water and let it set overnight until it’s bubbling and oozing and the happy little yeasties and sour lactobacillus have worked their way into the whole mess, and then I knead in even more flour, and salt and sugar, and let it set even longer while it swells again before I can bake it. It’s messy and slow and domestic, but that’s the image Jesus gives for the kingdom.

The starter's name is the Burblicious Burbletron.

This doesn’t change the sense that perhaps things are too safe here, though. Gardening and sourdough may be slow and boring but they’re still messy—you get dirt under your fingernails and dough crusted on the countertops, and sometimes things don’t grow and you have to clean up and start over. If that’s the case, how do I make my work here more dangerous?

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep 

your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

We walked out the door of the church carrying armloads of coats—maybe we’re already on the road to something dangerous and beautiful and holy, if we can let ourselves be swept off.

---

[1] If you’re in the Chicago area, you should really check them out! http://www.refugeeone.org/

[2] Luke 13:18-21 (The Message)

[3] I found the lovely phrase “holy conversation” in The Holy Twins, a beautiful life of Benedict and Scholastica written for children by Kathleen Norris and illustrated by Tomie DePaola. I highly recommend it. Incidentally, it also shows how two siblings can live lives of equal holiness and faithfulness even in very different settings—Scholastica quietly gardening and praying and teaching in her nunnery and Benedict wandering around living in caves and being nearly assassinated all the time because he kept telling people what to do.

Valuing my work

I had a meltdown several weeks ago at my husband, because I felt like I was making time for him to do all kinds of fun things like play his video games on his big new gaming computer or purchase and attempt to restore an old anvil so he can try to make knives on it, but there was no time for me to do those kinds of things. He pointed out that he *does* do work—most of his adventures in his workshop result in things like coffee tables or the very lovely sewing table/desk I’m currently writing this on. I countered that if he quit doing that work, we would still be fine. If *I* quit doing *my* work (which, unlike furniture-building is the sort of goalless repetition that unmakes itself as soon as it’s completed—the laundry is washed, dried, and put away only to be worn again, and the food is prepared only to be eaten and vanish, leaving a huge mess to clear up so that I have space to make a new mess in a few hours making more food), we would starve to death in a filthy house.

I felt had no time to do anything towards a larger goal because I spent all my time doing all these smaller tasks. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy cooking—I have a darling little sourdough starter named the Burblicious Burbletron who lives in a green glass quart jar in my fridge—but I wanted to keep taking steps towards something bigger, something involving writing and research. Not necessarily a full-time job, or even a book, but establishing a voice that people will read because I have something to say, not just because they know me and want to know what I’m up to. It would be great if it involved money.  

But I felt like this wasn’t getting anywhere because I didn’t have the time to focus on it—I was too busy dealing with putting out fires at home because David’s work seemed more valuable than mine and not worth interrupting to deal with all those little piddly things.

I said as much, loudly and furiously and perhaps a bit tearfully.

“Then what do you want me to do?” he demanded.

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again.

Here’s the thing: the problem isn’t that he doesn’t consider his work more important than mine. It’s that I don’t consider my work as important as his. And if *I* don’t ask for what I need because I don’t think I merit it, he can’t give it to me because he doesn’t even know what it is!

About a week later, I opened up my mailbox to discover a check for me, for a little essay I had written for the October issue of Chicago Parent (it’s only in the print version, but it touches indirectly on some other things I’ve been pondering so a different form of the story will probably end up here at some point). It was a very nice little check, and even more so, it reminded me that my words still have value outside my journal and this blog.

Part of why it’s taken me so long to finally put this on the blog, though, is that there are actually two aspects of my devaluing of my own work.

First, I’m assuming that those day-to-day chores are worth less because they are stereotypically feminine. You’ve heard the double-speak, I’m sure, how women are such magnificently self-sacrificial angels for staying home with their kids, but if a man stays home with his children, he’s a loser. Kathleen Norris in The Quotidian Mysteries has pointed out that the word menial

“derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to remain,’ or ‘to dwell in a household.’ It is thus a word about connections, about family and household ties. That it has come to convey something servile, the work of servants, or even slaves, is significant. It may help to explain one of the strangest things about our culture: that in America we willingly pay the garbage collector much more in salary than we pay those who care for our infants in daycare centers. Both might be considered ‘menial’ jobs, but the woman’s work, the care of small children, is that which was once done for free—often by slaves—within the confines of the household. Precisely because it is so important, so close to us, so basic, so bound up with home and nurture, it is considered to be of less importance than that which is done in public, such as garbage collecting.” [emphasis mine]

Basically, I’ve just fallen into our patriarchal culture’s trap, leading me to treat feminine things as less-than masculine things (like how I hated wearing pink until Mab started convincing me to wear it, and I discovered that I actually did like it, or the rest of the whole “ugh, girls” thing I had going on through most of high school and college).

Second, I’m treating my own writing as a hobby and not as work on the same level as the homemaking things. This seems paradoxical—my writing is public (in aspiration, at least) and therefore theoretically of greater importance than the things I do in private! But until I got that check, I was unable to put any kind of dollar sign on my writing. I can do a cost comparison of day care for B versus staying home with him, or the amount of money I save by making dinner every night instead of eating out, or making homemade crackers or granola bars instead of buying an equivalent version at the grocery, but not with writing. In fact, writing takes me away from doing those very things—in some sense, it costs me money to write. It’s hard for me—as someone who has always been notoriously bad at spending money on myself, even back in high school—to justify that cost.

And really, it wasn’t the check itself that did it. It was my friend Heather who found it in the magazine, on her own, and posted it on Facebook with a comment about how much she enjoyed it. I realized that more people have read that little essay than have read anything I published in grad school, and that the editor (someone who doesn’t know me and has never met me) thought it was worth the cost to her publication to have my essay there instead of any number of other wonderful submissions. Something about my words connected with other people in a way that they haven’t in the past.

It seems like I shouldn’t be able to value both of these kinds of work at the same time—one of them is going to have to be sacrificed in favor of the other.

But right before her discussion of the word “menial,” Kathleen Norris also said that

“We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing, and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places—out of Galilee, as it were—and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet (…) Even if we do not make such glorious poems [as the one by Margaret Gibson quoted above] out of our ordinary experiences, arranging Easter lilies or making salad, we are free to contemplate both emptiness and fullness, absence and presence in the everyday circumstances of our lives (…) We can become aware of and limit our participation in activities that do not foster the freedom of thought that poetry and religious devotion require; I cannot watch television, for example, and write a poem. I might be inspired by something I hear or see on television, particularly in news interviews, but this is rare. The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.” [emphasis mine]

I think the baking and the writing and the laundry and the revising can support each other, and the more I value the things I create, whether they are eaten or read or worn, the more they will add value to each other.

Gender, overthinking parenting, and Queen Mab

Between two buildings of Queen Mab’s school is the memorial Zen garden—a brick courtyard surrounded by kindergartener-high black-eyed Susans, with a long L-shaped sand table and an even-longer water feature made of massive rock slabs that looks like it was lifted straight out of Turkey Run State Park, populated by a few stray goldfish. During recess on hot days, the kids take off their shoes and socks and wade in the water, or scoop mountains and rivers into the sand table, which they flood with water carried from the little waterfall in a cracked green watering can.

One particularly blistering week near the beginning of the school year, Mab came home almost every day wearing the extra outfit from her cubby, with the clothes she had worn to school folded damp in a plastic bag. So every day I had to send her to school with new extra clothes.

Friday morning, though, we forgot the bag of clean clothes on the desk in the entryway, and didn’t realize it until I unbuckled her from her car seat at drop off. Mrs. R eyed Mab’s pink shorts and thought they were short enough that she’d probably be fine, if she was careful.

So I kissed her and told her to keep her pants dry, then drove home.

On the way, though, I started to worry that she would fall in the waterfall and get really soaked and then have nothing to change into. I imagined how she would have to play to avoid that. Carefully. Not with the wild freedom that she always moves with, as she absorbs herself into whatever world she’s currently created for herself. In short, she wouldn’t have nearly as much fun at recess if she had to be self-conscious about keeping her clothes dry, and I didn’t know how many waterfall-hot days they had left.

I supposed I could let her deal with it as the consequences for forgetting her stuff, but to be honest I had forgotten it too, and I’m an adult and been forgetting stuff my whole life and I still haven’t learned my lesson (for example, I forgot to bring the printout of her kindergarten dental form to the dentist only a few weeks before. The receptionist graciously didn’t make me suffer the consequences of my mistake and force me to home for it—she printed off a new copy herself).

Mab’s only five—she has her whole life to learn about forgetting stuff, but only a few weeks out of these few years to go outside with her friends and splash in the waterfall during recess. I was just reading yet another online article about kids’ development suffering from not playing outside—climbing on the rocks and sliding into the water would probably do her more long-term good than suffering the consequences of forgetting her stuff, anyway.

It’s only an eight minute drive. So a less-than-20 minute round trip to take her stuff to her. What did I have to do that morning? Not much. Just sit outside with my iced coffee while B eats sidewalk chalk.

I could give up 20 minutes of that for her.

So I did.  

What sorts of lessons did I teach her, by saving her from the consequence of forgetting?

I taught her that I’m here for her as much as I can, as much as is appropriate for her at this age, to help make up for what she lacks. I taught her that her time is valuable to me, too. I taught her that it’s important to me that she have the freedom to get messy, because as Apple Jack said, “Gettin’ messy is often a side effect of hard work,” and fear of getting dirty will paralyze her.

Someday (probably sooner than later) she’ll notice the approving tone when people see her all dolled up in her favorite froufrou outfits and her stealthily-applied eye shadow originally purchased for a dance recital and say she’s “all girl.” And she’ll want more of that approval. I don’t blame her—I like approval, too. And she’ll start to figure out what being “all girl” means.

I hope she knows that I don’t care if she’s “All-girl” or only 73% girl or just 18% girl (that 18% is made almost entirely of tulle, by the way) or always neat and clean and careful about her appearance—that I will go out of my way to make sure she doesn’t have to. If she gets mud on her tights and tutu because she’s chasing bugs or doing somersaults down the front yard, that’s fine with me. In fact, I hope she does.

When I picked her up from school that afternoon, of course, I discovered that the dash for extra clothes had been unnecessary—Mrs. R was right, and her shorts were short enough that she hadn’t gotten her clothes wet playing.

But as she climbed into the car, she gleefully announced, “Mommy! Mommy! Guess what?! I touched a fishy!”

“Ooh! What did it feel like?”

“Cool! It was so soft and smooth!”

Ten years from now when she forgets something my response may be different, but right now this is what I want her to learn. That exploration and adventure are worth the risk, and that fish are soft, not gross. And it only took me 20 minutes to do (and a lot of overthinking)

Parenting, prisms, and Corpus Christi

Last Sunday my family and I visited the church I grew up in. My parents are still there, the sort of people you could call pillars of the congregation, who between the two of them have taught almost every Sunday school class and participated in almost every ministry over the past twenty-some years. Because of that, even though I haven’t been an active member for over ten years, I still have an “in”—I mention my parents’ names and immediately everyone knows where I fit in the picture. People who have never met us know where my sister and I live and who’s had a baby recently.

I like coming back to the place where so many of my ideas about life and God and community were shaped. I have a lot of wonderful memories of love and friendship in those halls, and there are many people there who I look forward to seeing. My parents worship there. There’s hot chocolate mix and hazelnut creamer to put in my coffee during social hour—it’s like caffeinated Nutella. But there’s a reason—a lot of reasons, actually—why I haven’t been an active part of that church since I graduated from high school. Some of them I’ve mentioned in other posts, and some of them align with the theories of handwringing bloggers bemoaning the departure of millennials from the church.

My kids’ initial response to the service (it’s not like they’ve never been to my parents’ church before, but it had been awhile) was how I imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder accidentally stumbling upon a rave. But they caught on pretty fast and Queen Mab told me later that she “liked the music.”

When it was time for communion, I decided to stick with our own family rules and let the kids participate as they do in our home church. If you’ve seen my facebook posts about my kids and communion, you know it’s important to them. Mab wants to be a priest or a pastor when she grows up so she can give communion, and B will randomly point out the window at Church Across the Street to announce “Body’a Ch’ist” and will put tiny invisible pinches of something in my palm while whispering, “Body Ch’ist, daketa you.” So even though it’s not a thing at my parents’ church to give communion to little kids, I figured that since they both had been baptized (as infants, but whatever) and it wasn’t like there was anyone policing the aisles (the plates were being passed by guys from the youth group) I would go with my own best judgment.

Mab passed the plates and got her little cracker and juice cup like a pro, and B saw what we were doing and stuck his little hand in for a cracker as well. But then he did something he’s never done before.

Instead of putting it in his mouth, he tried to feed it to my dad, then to me. We both tried to explain to him that it was the “Body of Christ,” and I even tucked it in his palm with the usual “Body of Christ, broken for you,” to try to make it clear to him. But he just grinned at me and shoved it in my mouth, repeating, “Body’a Ch’ist,” and I realized—

He thinks this is a game. He thinks we’re only playing communion and doesn’t recognize it as the real thing.

I’ve always wondered what B means when he says “Body’a Ch’ist”—how does he define it? I’d been worrying that maybe he just thinks of it as “snack in church,” but apparently his definition is more nuanced. He’s taken it from Episcopal priests and Lutheran pastors, familiar faces and complete strangers, as a thin white cracker or hunk of chewy brown bread, standing in line or at the altar, beside a firepit and in the middle of 6^th Street, but this was the first time he’d refused it (not counting the time he held the bread in his cheek until the end of the service, then when the rector came around to say hi and held out his hand to B, carefully pulled out the soggy wad and laid it in the open hand. Sorry, Father Bradley!).

Apparently the ritual makes the difference.

My feelings on this are mixed. I’m happy that he’s learning to appreciate something that I’ve come to value deeply, and that his understanding is a *smidge* deeper than I’d been afraid. But in Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi, she describes stories propagated to encourage lay piety and adoration of the Host which featured an innocent child refusing to participate in the Eucharist, thereby revealing that the Host had not, in fact, been properly consecrated due to the priest’s impiety. And I don’t particularly want my kids to actually think that this other way of celebrating communion is fake.

Ways of celebrating communion have been on my mind lately, because within our own home church, there are many parents who are making different choices about their children’s participation in communion than we are. It’s been traditional in this congregation to wait until 5^th grade, but participating younger is allowed. Our pastor would give it to every child who reaches for it, but she respects that other parents have their own reasons for letting their children wait. These conversations in our home congregation brought to mind a lesson my dad gave once about communion, years ago, at that very same church where B refused communion, standing right where the praise band was set up on Sunday.

He told us about coming to our denomination (which was then known as the Independent Christian Church) from having grown up Nazarene, and worrying about the new denomination’s practice of weekly communion. In the Nazarene church, communion is monthly, or even quarterly, which made it a special event, outside the everyday, and he was afraid that if he participated every week, it would lose its sacredness.

He discovered that any sense of specialness that was lost by partaking weekly was made up for by the constant reminder of Christ’s love and presence. But then, instead of announcing that our church’s way was the best way and he was glad to have switched over to doing it “right,” he pulled out a prism on a chain and let it hang in the air, catching the spotlights and scattering them like sparks.

Both practices, he explained, brought out different facets of communion and enhanced its beauty.  I’ve never forgotten the image of him in a dark suit, holding out that glittering prism.

It makes it harder to snark about a way of worshiping that I left behind a long time ago when I remember that this particular way of doing church is one of the facets on the prism that helps diffract the light into brilliant rainbows. A flawed facet, sure, just like all of them, and yet still clear enough for me to have met God there, over and over, in the songs and the prayers and the people, until I stumbled my way down the path that led me where I am now.  And it reminds me that the different choices that other parents make for their children often emphasize different truths. While I want my children to value the things that I value, I also want them to learn to respect the perspectives that other people take and to see how those perspectives help transform white light into dazzling colors. It’s not that everything is true or that everyone is right, but I suspect that there may be more ways to be right than to be wrong. 

Perspectives

It occurred to me a couple weeks ago, while reading The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (which is one of the loveliest books I’ve ever read) that the reason I’m a lousy poet and the reason I often have trouble seeing God is probably the same reason—because I’m not in the habit of looking at things sideways, or upside-down.

Of course, sideways and upside-down are relative—as any astronaut will tell you, it all depends on your coordinates! But most of us default to the same set of coordinates, and then wonder why there aren’t any nice God-shaped-data-points on our grid. Because it’s the wrong grid altogether.

I’m pretty good at doing this with literature—otherwise how would I come up with a reading of a text that none one else has considered seriously yet?—but with everyday life, with loads of laundry and the dishwasher and potty-training, I keep too busy to pause and crouch down and look at what I’m doing from underneath. Which is something that Norris is exceptionally good at—her description of laundry as liturgy makes me almost look forward to folding towels.

Anyway, I wasn’t really sure how to proceed with this thought, so I stuck it in the back of my mind, made a note that I should probably try writing poetry again, and kept right on with the dishes and job applications and refereeing sibling melees.

In the middle of all this, though, I looked out the living room window and got a surprise. A yard full of August Surprises, in fact.

I’ll be honest—I’ve never really got August Surprises (or naked ladies/lilies)—they’re kind of weird and stark. I like my flora to be lush and effusive—I love a pergola overflowing with clematis and unpruned Rose of Sharon bushes. The area between the front of our old house in Lafayette and the sidewalk was an overflowing block of columbine and purple coneflowers. August Surprises, by comparison are basically decorative toothpicks.

But I went out to take a look at them, and it occurred to me that their long, narrow shape would make a nice little mural on the edge of a wall in the bathroom. So I took a picture with my phone. Then another picture, just to be sure. I had to take pictures from lots of angles, of course, so that I could compose my own clear image of them with paints later. But the more different ways I looked at these lilies, the more compelling they were.

Finally, I crouched down and took this picture.

While I was down there, suddenly I got it.

From above, at a normal adult height, yeah, they do look a lot like decorative toothpicks on an oversized burger. But from down here, eye-level with the flowers themselves, they suddenly become tree trunks in an ancient grove, or arching pillars in a cathedral.

***

This evening while I was cleaning the kitchen, I felt like sitting down, but I had already folded and hung up the kitchen chairs so I could sweep. So I sat on the floor.

My house looks different at a toddler’s eye level—tall and spacious. The furniture looms, and under the table suddenly becomes a tantalizing place to hang out (well, to a toddler—I was distracted by the pieces of spaghetti I had somehow missed when cleaning up).

Our basset wandered in, and I leaned forward to lower my head down to her level. Then all the way to the floor, and back up. There’s a bunny I know who, whenever he encounters a new space, does a high-middle-low check, stretching his body up as high as he can to smell the air up there, then down to his own level, and finally sniffs at the floor, too. Investigating space in another axis.

I got myself off the kitchen floor before anyone came in to ask what I was doing—last time I was flat in the kitchen it was because I had nearly shattered my tailbone on an unseen puddle of dish soap. 

Beloved

On Saturday, after a successful but exhausting week (which included a last-minute Skype interview and solo-parenting through one church service and three overnights) I was all Giving-Tree-ed out.* So I decided to take the afternoon off. And by afternoon, I mean a just little over two hours, mostly during B’s nap.

I still felt guilty, even while defiantly telling myself I had earned a little break. After all, the last time I was entirely child-free was during the two hours I was presenting at a panel at Kalamazoo, back in May. I spent most of this break shopping for new clothes, which is about the most stressful indulgence I can subject myself to, because while I get to pick out new clothes (yay!), I spend most of the time wandering through racks of trendy clothing in despair, so overwhelmed by choices that I no longer even know what I like and feeling irrationally horrible about spending money on myself, even for clothing that actually fits and isn’t threadbare, especially since the only time people expect me to be in public wearing anything nicer than pajamas is once a week for a couple hours at church. This task, clothes shopping, is difficult by myself, but absolutely impossible with the kids.

However, after finally finding some decent clothing, including a couple of pairs of pants that fit, were comfy, and looked cute (this took over an hour—it would have taken much longer but I had limited myself to the one store that I had a coupon for), I drove to the library.

While it took me almost an hour and a half to find five articles of clothing, it only took me about five minutes to find five books. After I grabbed three in a row, I decided it was time to go home before I cleaned out the religion section.

That evening I started reading the thinnest of my five books—Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, and tripped and fell right into this paragraph:

“[T]hough the experience of being the Beloved has never been completely absent from my life, I never claimed it as my core truth. I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. It was as if I kept refusing to hear the voice that speaks from the very depth of my being and says: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.’ That voice has always been there, but it seems that I was much more eager to listen to other, louder voices saying: ‘Prove that you are worth something; do something relevant, spectacular, or powerful, and then you will earn the love you so desire.’ Meanwhile, the soft, gentle voice that speaks in the silence and solitude of my heart remained unheard or, at least, unconvincing” (33).

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about failure. In the month since I posted that, I’ve had some tiny successes here and there since then (positive but noncommittal responses to a freelance job application and essay submission, and if anything comes of them, I’ll let you know) but overall I still feel like I’m in a holding pattern, waiting for something that will validate all these applications and submissions and make me feel like I have somehow earned the right to go do something fun for an afternoon and to wear new clothes.

I know intellectually that I am valuable no matter what I achieve, or don’t achieve, but the longer I go without achieving any of the accomplishments that I have spent the past eight years using to determine my value** the harder it is for me to believe that.

Last week in the lectionary reading we heard the story of the Israelites’ daily manna, and the guest preacher discussed the necessity of finding manna from God to get us through one day at a time—little things, like paragraphs we stumble across in books, for instance. (There was more to the sermon than that, but as I mentioned above, I was solo-parenting in the pew and missed most of it). I’m holding on to that paragraph today, and to the little book that leaped off the shelf into my hand Saturday afternoon. I don't feel like the Beloved, but I still am anyway.

Dear Reader, we have infinite value, and we are Beloved. Always. 

*I hate The Giving Tree so much. That’s another post, though.

**“Value” in this case narrowly defined as success in my particular program, of course, but you spend that many years defining yourself by a single set of standards and it almost can’t help but bleed over into the rest of your identity, even in spite of my conscious efforts to avoid that very thing.

Failure and I

The other day Queen Mab and I were working companionably in the front office—I was sitting at the desk writing up documents for yet another job application, and she was at her little plastic table behind me making a hand puppet out of a paper bag.* Suddenly she burst into tears and appeared at my elbow, clutching her puppet and demanding that I do part of it for her because it was terrible and ugly and she hated it (more or less). I gave her some suggestions and sent her back to her table.

After several iterations of this, though, I pointed out the easel next to my desk. David made it for me our senior year of high school. It was the first big thing he made out of wood. Even at the time that he made it, he was frustrated by its many flaws, and today he can’t even bring himself to look at it, because with skill and experience he’s come to see even more of them.

With bonus Mr. B

But if he hadn’t made that flawed easel eleven years ago, he wouldn’t have learned how to do better, and he wouldn’t have built me a perfect blue pine bookshelf in an hour the other day when we got tired of storing my books in boxes on the floor. I told her that if she practiced something now, even if she wasn’t good at it, that was the only way to get better.

Also, my bookshelf has a wizard.

She finished the puppet, whose shirt was a little aggressively colored out of frustration, but overall is a perfectly satisfactory creation for someone who hasn’t started kindergarten yet.

A couple days later, I realized the irony and hypocrisy of this conversation. Because I have spent most of the summer wallowing in my failure to get someone to give me a paycheck. This is a new experience for me.

If it hadn’t been for being on the track team in high school, I would have had little-to-no experience failing up to this point—the things that I really cared about I always ended up accomplishing (even if not quite as well as I would have liked). I married the first guy I ever dated, completed all the degrees I set out to complete, conceived, birthed, and nursed two children in *almost* the exact way I had hoped, attended every conference I submitted an abstract to except one (oh, Iceland—someday I will see your volcanoes and glaciers!), and the one article that I submitted for publication was accepted easily (albeit a year later :-P).

Note how many of these things depend on luck or the preferences of other people rather than my own amazingness.

Of course, because I’ve always been so successful at the things that really matter to me (and even a lot of the things that didn’t matter so much), I dread failure.

After countless job applications (literally—I long ago lost count of the applications I’ve submitted), the occasional “what did you do today anyway?” from my husband (not in so many words—he’s generally more tactful than that!) and frequent episodes of losing my temper in an ugly way at my eldest, I feel like the inverse of that “All I Do Is Win” song as lip-synced by Emma Stone on Jimmy Fallon—all I do is fail.

This, of course, is not entirely true. The other day I made two amazing loaves of bread, a quart of fabulous frozen custard with raspberries from the farmers market, and a surprisingly yummy experimental soaked-flour zucchini bread recipe using zucchini from my garden. This afternoon Mab and I had fun practicing fractions on the front porch (pedagogical insight: fractions make a lot more sense if you replace the word “circle” with “pizza.”). 

All of these things are successes. But they are so small. Today I wanted to walk the kids to the library and playground, but for various minor reasons (excuses?) it didn’t happen. At least I renewed the books online.

All my successes are tiny, but my failures come in every size.

This, I think, is the part where I should talk about how I’m going to be ok with these little successes, that failures now are somehow preparing me for something better later like I told Mab, that that’s what life is made of, that little successes are really big successes etc etc. Also, if this was a testimony or something like that, after I come to terms with what I’ll call my “redefinition of success,” something surprisingly wonderful will happen.

These things are probably true (except maybe that last one—I don’t live in an inspirational baseball movie), but I’m just not feeling it today.  

But I'll try again tomorrow.

---

*I wrote this paragraph the night before I started writing the rest of this, just thinking about Mab and that easel, but then I sat back down this afternoon and saw the word “failure” at the top of the page, and suddenly it resonated with me. A lot.