Mrs. B's Centennial

A couple of weeks ago, on the 12th of October, it was the 100th birthday of dear Mrs. Brooks, the neighbor and lifelong family friend who shared Jesus with me when I was a little girl.

Mrs. B, as I grew up thinking of her, is a precious saint. She was not only instrumental in leading me to faith, but in influencing and loving most of my family in Jesus' direction. When my mother, spiritually hungry and looking for help in understanding God, went to her door years ago to find out about the Bible clubs Mrs. B had for neighborhood kids, Mrs. B invited her to come see for herself what it was all about. That invitation, and her gentle teaching and loving presence, made all the difference in the life of our family. I will be forever grateful that she was the one who scattered gospel seeds and helped to water them for so many years.

I have no idea how many other lives and families Mrs. B touched over the years, but I would guess it is beyond counting. She taught Bible clubs for decades. She and her kind husband, Clifton (who always reminded me a gentler real-life version of Fred Flintstone) were known for their loving and generous friendship to many. Just as one example, when I was a pre-schooler, they once took care of me for a whole week during the day-time when my mother was in the hospital and then recovering from surgery. For a child who had not grown up located near grandparents, this was heady stuff. I still remember Mrs B scrambling eggs for my breakfast and adding bacon bits to them, Mr B pushing me in the cart at the grocery store, and Mrs. B laughing as she made me peanut butter sandwiches (hers were the best, I apparently proclaimed, because she spread the peanut butter right to the edges).

Both of my sisters eventually taught during the summers with CEF, the organization Mrs B was a part of. Although I never did their summer program, I did end up working with Mrs B in a Bible club when I was a teenager. She had decided to teach some refugee children from Cambodia who had moved into the neighborhood and she asked me to help. We couldn't speak their language and they could speak only a little of ours, but she loved on those kids with Jesus love and I followed along in her wake, happy to watch and learn.

Loving others in her gentle way has always been what Mrs B does best, and it's why her quiet voice, speaking the truth of the gospel, has always carried such weight. During my first couple of college vacations, I went with my mom and Mrs B to a program that Mrs. B regularly taught in. It was a detention center for juvenile girls who had gotten in trouble with the law, and Mrs B thought it would be good if someone closer to the girls' age could share a testimony with them. Introvert that I am (never a public speaker), I went because she asked, and I did my best to share as honestly and lovingly as she had shared with me. And I watched as those teen girls, hip and cool and insecure and in pain, swarmed around her after the Bible lesson she taught, just wanting to be with her. Some of them called her Grandma.

Mrs. B has outlived her dear Clifton (though he lived to be near 90, I think) and has even outlived one of her children, her pastor son who sadly died unexpectedly of a heart attack several years ago. She now lives in a nursing home where she can get the daily care she needs. It's not hard for me to imagine her bathing everyone there in the same gentle love she's always shone on everyone she's come into contact with.

I didn't know what image to put on the card I made for her birthday. I finally chose this:

I had seen this painting no long ago on the "I Require Art" blog. It's a painting called "Yellow Sycamore in Autumn," painted by Edgar Payne. I thought the wonderful spreading shelter of the tree, and its bright color and stage of life, seemed to capture so much of what I felt when I thought of Mrs B and all the beauty she's shared in her hundred years. Right down to that blue patch of sky...like a window where you can glimpse heaven.

When I went to write down the specifics of the painting so I could put them on the back of the card (something I always try to do when using an artistic image) I almost laughed aloud. Payne painted this in 1916. It's 99 years old...painted when Mrs B was just a tiny girl of 1.

"A stately squadron of snowy geese..." (Reading Washington Irving)

Jedi Teen and I have been reading Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," first published in 1820. This is one of those stories that I could have sworn I must have read somewhere along the line in my literature studies, but apparently I missed it.

The headless horseman is such a deep part of our American literary landscape that the story and its characters feel very familiar. I think I must have seen the Disney version (their Ichabod Crane is the visual that kept playing in my brain as I read) and I am guessing I read some sort of abridged version in grade school or middle school. I also came across inferences to the story in my beloved Trixie Belden mysteries that I read over and over as a child, stories that happened to be set in the Hudson River valley.

I don't know why I never read much Irving, given that his collected works was one the books that my grandmother, an inveterate re-reader, read regularly. It was one of the beloved books she brought with her from her home in North Carolina when she moved into our home in Virginia when I was nine. I caught onto some of her other reading loves, but somehow I mostly missed Irving.

I'm glad I found him now. I had a delightful time wending my way aloud through his dense prose, deliciously thick with description. There's something substantial about biting down on 19th century literature: when you finish a novel or a story (or sometimes even a page, paragraph, or sentence!) you feel you've eaten something hearty and filling, like a good creamy potato soup with a dark grain bread.

It's not surprising I mention food here. Irving delights in showing us how much Ichabod Crane, skinny as a scarecrow, loves to eat. One of the funniest scenes in the story, and there are many, is when he goes to the Van Tassel home to woo his sweetheart. He's enamored of her family's wealth as much as he's enamored of her, and the way he notes that wealth is to note how much there is to eat. Every animal he sees in the barnyard, alive and kicking, he envisions on a platter:

"The pedagogue's mouth watered as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind's eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy..."

We were both impressed with so many turns of phrases. The sweet girl couldn't help chuckling over some of them, like the phrase "sleek unwieldy porkers" to describe a group of pigs. In that same scene, I appreciated the alliterative joys of a "a stately squadron of snowy geese..." I know that more than one of my English teachers would have likely slashed at some of those adjectives with a red pen, or at least warned me against their overuse, but there is something about the sheer layers of words that really works to create this story's atmosphere and tone.
 

The Pevensies at Hogwarts

I feel nigh unto certain that someone has written about this already, but have you ever noticed how neatly you could divvy up the Pevensie children in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe into houses at Hogwarts?

I was not feeling terribly well last night and picked up my well-worn copy of LWW just to let myself dip into a few of its friendly and familiar pages. And right there, on page three, we have this exchange among the four children who have just landed at the Professors' house:

"It's an owl," said Peter. "This is going to be a wonderful place for birds. I shall go to bed now. I say, let's go and explore to-morrow. You might find anything in a place like this. Did you see those mountains as we came along? And the woods? There might be eagles. There might be stags. There'll be hawks."

"Badgers!" said Lucy.

"Snakes!" said Edmund.

"Foxes!" said Susan.

Laying aside the fun possibility that the owl they hear hooting outside is delivering mail, don't you find their animal choices somewhat fascinating? In the world of Harry Potter, the animals associated with people are always "telling" about someone's character -- whether they are the animals associated with their Hogwarts house, or with their patronuses or an animagus form.

Peter's enthusiasm gives us a lot of animals to choose from, but I find it interesting that he ends with stags and hawks. The reference to stags here at the beginning of the story could be a pre-echo of the end of the tale, but as I think of it in connection to Harry Potter, I think of course of Prongs. Hawks are birds associated with heraldry -- not to mention hawks rhymes with Fawkes. Put that all together with Peter's kingly courage and the gift of the sword from Father Christmas, and I'm going to say the Sorting Hat would put him in Gryffindor.

Lucy's badger puts her firmly in Hufflepuff, which I find delightful and just right. Her loyalty to the truth, her faithfulness to Aslan, and her perseverance in the face of trials all seem to make this Hogwarts house just the right place for her.

"Snakes!" said Edmund...which is where I almost started laughing. Slytherin, anyone? Edmund, pre-Narnia and especially pre-encounter-with-Aslan, seems to fit the scheming, ambitious, smart-yet-insecure portrait of many a Slytherin. Post-Aslan, of course, he's a different sort of boy, and one can imagine him having more trouble fitting into Slytherin after that (one thinks of Jill Pole noting how much Eustace has changed when he goes back to school after his adventures in Narnia) but perhaps he could bring qualities that house sorely needs.

Susan's mention of foxes is a little more ambiguous, though I do think that foxes, as very smart animals, make her a potentially good fit for Ravenclaw. It's too bad that she didn't say eagle instead of Peter, or this whole scheme would feel almost tailor-made for the four houses.

It would be interesting to see a whole family sorted into different houses, unlike the Weasleys who are just Gryffindors through and through.

I feel half-way certain that I must've read something about this somewhere at some point, or it wouldn't have jumped off the page and bitten me like it did last night. So forgive me if the thoughts aren't entirely original. I just found it fun to contemplate story worlds colliding. I've written about that in other ways before, both here (where I find preludes to Rowling in E.M. Forster) and here (where I find them in Elizabeth Goudge). Hmm. And I've found bits of Tolkien in Rowling too. Once again, we realize just what a wonderful story soup Rowling has stirred up in Harry Potter.

John Couch Adams and the Search for the Planet Neptune

Not long ago, I was helping my daughter brainstorm for an independent writing project. This is a project from her writing curriculum, so certain assignment parameters were set, but the topic was open (partly to encourage brainstorming from inspiration to final paper).

Her dad and I decided to ask her to confine her topic choices to something in the 19th century, chiefly around the middle of the century, since that's the period she's currently studying in history. Beyond the era, we gave her carte blanche on topic choice. As usual, she gravitated (pun intended) to science first, though she ended up swerving direction in the end and is currently at work on a paper about the impressionist artist Edgar Degas.

Before she got there, we were doing some online research into scientific events in the mid-19th century and came upon the discovery of Neptune. In the wonderful way of learning trails, this led us to the book The Neptune File by Tom Standage, which our library quickly moved to the hold shelf for us.

As I said in my very brief review on Goodreads:

This is a highly readable account of the 19th century search for Neptune, the first planet ever discovered not by observation but by mathematical deduction. Standage's writing style is engaging. He makes the science, and even the math, not only interesting but understandable.

His fascination with the history is evident on every page too. I enjoyed his profiles of some of the major players involved in the discovery and the controversy that surrounded it, especially John Couch Adams, Airy, and Le Verrier. Adams emerged as one of my new 19th century heroes: his humility is just as impressive as his intellect.

The story of John Couch Adams (pronounced "Cooch"; he was from Cornwall) really did intrigue me for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that he was a poor and relatively unknown graduate student who "got there" faster than anyone else (meaning he got to the relative position of the unknown planet based on his elegant and complex mathematics) and yet due to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings and downright blunders, almost never was credited for that amazing work. Someone else "got there" not far behind him. Le Verrier's math may not have been as elegant, but he got there all the same, and he had the good fortune to be in a position to get people with powerful telescopes to listen to him and take him seriously, so they could point those instruments to the sky and confirm his prediction. Which they did, prompting the world to credit Le Verrier with a discovery that Couch Adams had actually made first.

This controversy from 1846 was the whole reason I found this fascinating book in the first place. When the sweet girl and I were looking up the discovery of Neptune, the first thing she asked was: "Who DID discover it?" I went to a trusty online search and came up with...Le Verrier. And then read and googled a bit more and came up with...Couch Adams. Which one was it? she wanted to know. And based on a hasty skim read of online sources, I couldn't tell her, which surprised me. It would seem that something as momentous as the first finding of a planet via mathematical deduction would be a pretty certain fact. It was clear that Le Verrier and Couch Adams hadn't been collaborators, that there was some confusion about who got the credit.

In the end, as I learned from Standage, they shared the credit pretty peaceably, though there were people who shouted at each other across the English Channel about this for a long time. A lot of people in England, responsible for the errors and mistakes that caused Couch Adams' work to be ignored rather than explored at the proper time, tried to justify themselves and pass the buck. To Couch Adams' credit, he never laid into anyone publicly, blaming them for this or anything else. Genuinely excited about the discovery and genuinely humble, he praised Le Verrier's work, seemed gratified that they'd reached the same conclusion, and went on about the business of working. He even turned down an eventual knighthood.

As I concluded in my review:

It's also fascinating to reflect on how a story like this played out in 1846 -- so very different from how it would play out in our age of social media.

The last two chapters would benefit from a revision just because so much has happened regarding both Pluto (the recent fly-by) and the search for extrasolar planets since he wrote the book. (To date, NASA has confirmed over 1,800 exosolar planets!) Still, this is a very readable and enjoyable scientific narrative, one I would recommend to youth as well as adults. I plan to read this one with my eighth grader, as it ties in beautifully with both her physics and modern history studies in homeschool this year.

Can you imagine what the shouting would have been like if they'd had Facebook when this controversy occurred?! Kind of makes you wistful for a time of slightly more civil conversations.

The Middle Years

Lately I've been realizing that some of the challenges (joys, tensions, giggles) at our house consist in the fact that we're all in our "middle years."

The sweet girl (aka Jedi Teen) is in the "middle years" between childhood and adulthood -- never an easy road to travel.

Her dad and I are in our middle years, period. Which turns out aren't the easiest road to travel either, bringing with them new aches and pains, different kinds of questions about our lives and what we've done/still want to do with them, and other issues we hadn't thought about very much before they got here, like the challenges of watching and accompanying our parents as they age.

Now don't get me wrong: both sets of middle years have their blessings and compensations. The sweet girl would likely tell you she enjoys newfound freedoms and enthusiasms, and in some ways, that's true for us in our middle years too.

But sometimes the different kinds of middle years collide head on, and then the fireworks can fly! Sometimes it makes me laugh.

I know that part of the challenge for me is that I am slow to keep up with changes of any sort these days, and my daughter is just full of them -- she is a walking, talking, laughing, long-legged dancing, eye-rolling, hollering, crying, giggling ball of change most days. This slow middle-years mama (who feels like it was just yesterday she was teaching this adolescent dynamo-who-is-taller-than-she-is how to tie her shoes) sometimes just stands there in awe while she watches that dynamo practice her slip jig for Irish dance class.

I suspect, though I don't know, that parents of more than one child get to ease into all this change a little more gradually. Because there is some space between children, they get to keep experiencing one stage of life with one child while another leaps ahead into the next. I've seen this with friends who have kids at multi-ages and stages, and sometimes I am a little wistful about it. Maybe I would deal better with the swift progressions of adolescence if I was still cutting crusts off sandwiches and reading Eric Carle to an up-and-coming sibling. But that's not our experience nor our particular blessing (though I am grateful I still get the chance to spend time and work with younger kids in other venues, even if not here at home).

Still, I think I need to remind myself from time to time to relax and laugh a little more about the middle years. These too shall pass. And probably far too swiftly.

September (A Poem by John Updike)

Not long ago, I came across this poem in my files. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to post in these waning days of September.

September
~by John Updike

The breezes taste
Of apple peel.
The air is full
Of smells to feel-
Ripe fruit, old footballs,
Burning brush,
New books, erasers,
Chalk, and such.
The bee, his hive,
Well-honeyed hum,
And Mother cuts
Chrysanthemums.
Like plates washed clean
With suds, the days
Are polished with
A morning haze.

Isn't that a wonderful poem? It has many elements of a list poem; its simplicity and concreteness could also make this a great poem for children to model.


In fact, it was written for children, a fact that surprised me a little given Updike as the author. I actually went hunting online to discover if the poet was truly the John Updike, because I never knew he wrote anything specifically for children. It turns out that he actually wrote an entire collection of poems about the months of the year. It's called A Child's Calendar and the "new edition" published in 1999 has illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman, whose picture book St. George and the Dragon I love. 

Although I love the list-iness of this poem, I'm especially fond of the first lines:
The breezes taste
Of apple peel.
The air is full
Of smells to feel-

Breezes we can taste and smells we can feel in the air. Might be a cool way to introduce the concept of synesthesia to children.

Complete Joy (Meditative Reading and Thinking With Henri Nouwen)

We've just turned the corner on fall, and I am at last reaching the end of a book I began re-reading in mid-summer: Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son.

I first read this book many years ago in seminary. My seminary years are now so long ago that they're beginning to feel like a distant memory. Trying to remember specifics of what I learned gets harder, but the general contours are still with me. And the thing seminary taught me most was to be a better reader.

I learned that lesson in two ways: first, I was taught (by two professors in particular) how to read theology and history in ways that helped me mine, respect, and otherwise engage what was being said. I call this informational reading. Secondly, I was taught the importance of reading that is formational rather than informational. Some call it lectio divina (divine reading). It's the art of sitting with -- meditating on, ruminating, praying through -- what you read. Both kinds of reading are important in different places and seasons, and both are things I knew how to do in some measure before I went to seminary, but it was there that I learned to think about how I approached a text and what I was trying to get out of it (or receive from it, or let it do with me).

I liken meditative reading to sipping rather than gulping. It's a metaphor that works for me, and makes me smile, because I am the "sipper" in my family -- the one who can take a glass of iced tea and make it last for a couple of hours, while my husband, for instance, tends to gulp down one glass and order another. While I am a sipper of tea, I have always tended, by temperament and inclination, to be a gulper of words. That may be a by-product of how early in life I read and how much of my life I've spent doing it, but I do have the tendency to read fast and furiously. It's not always a bad way to read, especially when falling into a story you love (and know you can go back to read more slowly later) but it's not the kind of reading that tends to serve me best when I am approaching spiritual reading.

With the Scriptures and with other spiritual books, I have tried to consciously slow down my reading. I tell myself that learning to sit with a small portion of text is more important than racing through. I have learned to be a sipper of words when it comes to books that feed my spiritual thirst.

I mention all this because I have spent a lot of months reading Nouwen's relatively small book, and it has blown me away on this second reading. I remember enjoying it and getting a lot from it when I read it in seminary, but I am sure I tended to gulp it then because I was in the midst of two-years of fire-hose kinds of reading (ironically the sheer weight of academic reading in seminary almost assured that, despite learning a lot about reading formationally, I spent most of my time reading informationally). I don't think the book was assigned. I think I chose to read it as part of a project I did for a course on Christianity and the Arts, in which I surveyed different ways artists had engaged the story of the prodigal son.

This time through, I've been able to linger in passages, go back and revisit lines, paragraphs, and pages that spoke to me the first time through, and sometimes journal my engagement with the words. The Return of the Prodigal is, essentially, a book about reading: Nouwen spends its roughly 150 pages "reading" Rembrandt's famous painting of the same name, reflecting on what he has learned as he contemplated it, and reflecting on how the painting has helped him to read himself (and find himself in the painting and in the story from the gospels that it depicts). That's a lot of reading layers, and it's just a joy to add to the layers when you come to the book and add your own layers of engagement -- with Nouwen's words, with the painting, and with the gospel story.

Since my memory of the first time I read this book is rather dim, I found myself smiling at how many times, as I sipped at the book this summer, I would think to myself "whoa, that was powerful," or "oh, that's truly a beautiful insight I needed to hear," thoughts that would be quickly chased by the thought "that's probably why I loved this book so much the first time." After awhile, I started to chuckle whenever I had the thought. It's a book full of rich places to linger, and I can't honestly pinpoint which part is the part that might have spoken the most to my 30 year old self. But I can engage how it speaks to me at 47 -- and of course, part of the wonder of reading is that the book itself, sitting all these years with no changes to it text, becomes a different book because I am a different person than I was when last I read it. It has floated into a different place in the river of my life, and oh, I'm thankful it has.

Just one tiny, tiny example of how I find myself sipping at its riches came in a passage I read a few days ago. In the book's penultimate chapter: "The Father Calls for a Celebration," Nouwen reflects on how God invites us into joy. He writes:

"The father of the prodigal son gives himself totally to the joy that his returning son brings him. I have to learn from that. I have to learn to 'steal' all the real joy there is to steal and lift it up for others to see. Yes, I know that not everybody has been converted yet, that there is not yet peace everywhere, that all pain has not yet been taken away, but still, I see people turning and returning home; I hear voices that pray; I notice moments of forgiveness, and I witness many signs of hope. I don't have to wait until all is well, but I can celebrate every little hint of the Kingdom that is at hand.

This is a real discipline.  It requires choosing for the light even when there is much darkness to frighten me, choosing for life even when the forces of death are so visible, and choosing the truth even when I am surrounded by lies. I am tempted to be so impressed by the obvious sadness of the human condition that I no longer claim the joy manifesting itself in many small but very real ways. The reward of choosing joy is joy itself."

He goes on later to say:

"People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness...Jesus lived this joy of the Father's house to the full. In him we can see his Father's joy. 'Everything the Father has is mine,' he says, including God's boundless joy. That divine joy does not obliterate the divine sorrow. In our world, joy and sorrow exclude each other. Here below, joy means the absence of sorrow and sorrow the absence of joy. But such distinctions do not exist in God. Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy...Jesus wants me to have the same joy he enjoys: 'I have loved you, just as my Father has loved me. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love just as I have kept my Father's  commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this, so that my own joy may be in you and your joy be complete.'"

Let those last words of Jesus sink down deep into your heart. "I have loved you, just as my Father has loved me. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this, so that my own joy may be in you and your joy be complete."

Is it not astonishing to realize, really and truly realize, that we are so loved? That Jesus himself wants our joy to be complete? Those were the astonishing words I found myself penning in my journal as I reflected on this passage the other day: "Jesus wants my joy to be complete." I wrote them down large. I underlined them. They were my takeaway, my ribbon to carry with me from this passage, and I am walking with them still. Jesus desires our joy. He is longing for our joy. He is working for our joy. He invites us into the joy he has known with his Father from before the time the world began. He offers us the pathway into joy: abiding in his love, obeying his commandments. In another place, he tells us that his commandment is that we love one another so that our joy may be full. He shows us that true joy lies in our loving as the Father has loved. Our love for others then isn't something we do just because it's our duty or even because we are grateful that we are so loved (though those are all bound up in why we love). Our love for others, through the power of the Holy Spirit, becomes the way we are caught up in the divine life of Jesus and the Father and invited to inhabit their joy which is deep and wide and real and which encompasses everything we know and experience, including real sorrow.

Wow. Just wow. (No doubt, this was the passage that made me love this book so many years ago!) Yes, I'm chuckling again.  And I'm so glad I've had a chance to sip at Nouwen's beautiful book once more.

Harper Lee Biographies and Memoirs

So I've begun reading The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills (2014). This may seem a little like overkill, since it's my second biography of Harper Lee this month. A week or so ago I finished Charles Shields' The Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (2006). But my library had both, and I'm on something of a roll. Added to which, they seem to be the only major biographies of Lee that really seem to count.

Although actually, not to split hairs, The Mockingbird Next Door is classified as a memoir. It's an important distinction in this case, because in some ways it's as much about the unexpected friendship between Mills and the Lee sisters (Harper and Alice) as it is about Harper Lee. In fact, I honestly think it might have been better all the way around if Mills had shaped it into even more a memoir (I'm only about half-way through) sharing more of how this unexpected friendship shaped and changed her as a writer, a human being, a storyteller, a person struggling with illness. Even better, I find myself wishing she'd just decided to write a straightforward biography of Alice Lee, Harper's older sister, because it seemed like Alice was the one who really wanted to share stories with her. And her story -- as a woman lawyer in Alabama who practiced law until she was 100 -- is worth telling in its own right.

But Alice and Nelle (that is Nelle Harper....one thing both Shields' and Mills' books have done is to put me on a first name basis with Harper Lee, who is generally called either Nelle or Nelle Harper by friends and family) are really a pair, and it would be hard to tell one story without telling the other. Especially since so much of Nelle's life was spent with Alice, and Alice was so protective of her sister and her sister's legacy.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding Mills' book -- I'm starting to wonder if there is ever NOT controversy when it comes to anything written about or published by or about Lee -- because apparently Nelle Harper went on record to say she didn't authorize it or endorse it in any way. Alice then went on record to say she didn't think her sister was really responsible for saying that (they were both in late years by that point, and Nelle was in assisted living) but then Nelle apparently countered later to say that you couldn't credit Alice's assent because she was, after all, 100 when she gave it. All of which just feels wearying, and to be honest, a bit sad.

What comes through in the book itself is how much both of these elderly women seemed to enjoy Mills' presence and the chance to talk with her, and how they encouraged her to get things straight about their lives. They certainly encouraged her journalistic activity (she wrote newspaper articles about them long before  she came out with this book) so it seems strange that Nelle at least would feel so adamantly against the book. But Nelle Harper Lee is a complex woman, and she has certainly guarded her privacy fiercely for many years, so perhaps it isn't so strange.

What I mostly come away with is the sense that I wish someone could just tell the story of her life without needing to worry so much about what she's going to think or say about it.

Which is essentially what Shields did in 2006 with his biography. He didn't bother with authorization -- probably because he knew that "hell, no" would always be Lee's response to any such request. What he set out to do was to write the best, most respectful biography he could, given the limitations of not being able to speak to his living subject. He talked to many people who knew her at different periods of her life, and he did copious amounts of research. It's a respectful and very well-written book, one that feels very rich on Lee's life up through the mid 1960s when she stopped giving interviews, but is necessarily a bit thin after that.

In many ways, I think I will ultimately feel that I got to know Lee best through the biography, despite the fact that Mills spent fourteen months living next door to the Lees and actually spending time with them doing ordinary things (fishing, drinking coffee, watching football). Perhaps because there continues to be a sense in Mills' book that she's always hedging her words, always just a little uneasy about the fact that she's sharing in ways that Lee, with her deep sense of privacy and her rather volatile temperament, might not approve. You can't help but get the sense that, for all the times she enjoyed with the Lee sisters, she never got fully comfortable in Nelle's presence, waiting for the unexpected invitation she'd been issued to get to know her to be revoked.

Shields, by contrast, just confidently presents his story. He doesn't gloss over the mysteries surrounding Lee and her reclusivity after Mockingbird, and he asks the tantalizing question that everyone asks "why was there no second novel?" but he doesn't indulge in ungrounded speculation and he doesn't invest too much in one answer, preferring to let us see how Nelle Harper more or less seemed to drift into her later years without, perhaps, making a big decision regarding all that. Mills speaks to that too, but I'm just having a harder time sticking with her more tentative, less cohesive book.

One more note: if you're especially interested in Lee's longtime friendship and working partnership with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood, Shields' book is a goldmine. He provides such a long chapter on that partnership that he almost seemed to be gearing up for a whole book on the subject. Clearly at least one thing he wanted to do was to set the record straight regarding how much Lee contributed to that whole creative process, even though Capote never fully acknowledged her role.

Go Set a Watchman: Harper Lee's Search for the Story She Wanted to Tell

This weekend I finished Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. Originally written in 1957, three years before she published her iconic and beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird, this was an early draft of that classic story, though so different it stands on its own as a novel, albeit an uneven one.

I debated inwardly about whether or not I wanted to (or should) read this book, given all the controversy that has swirled around it. I won't revisit that here in detail, except to say that I feel deeply sad if Harper Lee was manipulated to give her consent to the publication of the book. I'm afraid that's likely the case, given the timing of its release (it was announced just a few months after her sister's death, and Alice had been highly protective of Harper and her work) and her previous statements regarding not wanting to publish anything else. I also find it frustrating to realize just how misleading the copy on the flap, and other advertising, no doubt, reads: as though this was a "new novel" intended as a sequel to Mockingbird. Which it very much wasn't and isn't.

I do think that it's likely that such a manuscript would have one day ended up in someone's archives, so that scholars would have access to it. Much of my own interest in reading it -- and I put it on hold at the library rather than buy it and further benefit Harper Collins -- stemmed from curiosity over how it would read as a draft. I expected there to be a lot more overlap than there was. Instead, what you find are the seeds of the greater novel to come: the characters and setting still in development, the germ of certain ideas humming in the background. This is very much the novel of an excellent writer still learning how to shape a novel...and still trying to figure out precisely what story she wants to tell.

The story in Watchman, in fact, is a completely different story than Mockingbird. Without providing too many spoilers, it focuses on 26 year old Jean Louise (Scout), lifelong resident of Macomb, Alabama. Jean Louise has been living, since her college years, in New York, but she still comes home to visit her family a few times a year. On this particular visit, she realizes that she no longer knows where she fits -- she no longer feels like she belongs to (or in) Macomb, but on the other hand, she is realizing, to a staggering degree, how much this tiny southern town has shaped her. She is also recognizing how much other things have shaped her: especially her upbringing by her rock-steady, older father Atticus; and the fact that she was raised, just as much, by a black woman as a white man, since their housekeeper Calpurnia took her in hand after her mother's death when she was only two.

Watchman is a coming of age tale: it's about Scout's (sorry, Jean Louise's -- she is called that much more often here than she ever is in Mockingbird) coming to grips with growing up. She's trying to find her place in the world; she's trying to understand that she is her own person apart from the people and places that she loves so much and that have influenced her so deeply. She's also trying to realize that she can part ways with some of their ideas and mistakes because she's got to learn to have and make her own.

So much of what makes this story different from the one Lee eventually decided she wanted and needed to tell is that it has a different heart altogether. It is a story of a young adult dealing with growing up and a crisis that precipitates her awareness of who she is and is becoming. In actuality, I think there are a couple of crisis moments, one involving Calpurnia and one involving Atticus, that are almost equally emotionally powerful, though the moment with Calpurnia isn't given enough development or weight, in my humble opinion.

Because Jean Louise is thinking through her own identity, and how her upbringing shaped that identity, she occasionally flashes back to her childhood and youth. It's those flashback moments that will feel most familiar to Mockingbird readers, but also frustrating. If you love Mockingbird, then coming upon these moments gives you the exciting thrill of a familiar train rushing down the tracks, bearing someone you know and love -- but then the train rushes by in clacking roar, not stopping at your station. Or if it does stop, the person who gets off is not who you expect. Most of the anecdotes related from Scout's past in Watchman are different from the ones she tells us in Mockingbird, and while it's interesting to get different glimpses (including moments of Lee's unique brand of humour-wrapped-in-poignancy) they feel tantalizingly brief or somehow unconnected to the narrative with the same depth we're accustomed to. I think this rings true to this story that Lee set out to tell, about a confused young woman who discovers some painful and joyful truths about herself as she tries to sort out a rush and tumble waterfall of memories, but it means that memory plays second fiddle to the more important melody line of young-woman-finding-herself.

Memory has a far different role in Mockingbird, where the heart of the story is Scout's childhood, roughly her early elementary school years. We dive deep into it from the first page and never really come up from the dive.  The narrative is still told in flashback, but we're never entirely sure just how old the adult Scout is now, and how far back she's looking. We've still got a sense of unfolding awareness, but this time it's the awareness of a child coming to understand some of the suffering of the world, and how our choices can matter a great deal in how we respond to it. The intense focus of the second half of Mockingbird's narrative on one particular year provides a backdrop for exploring that growing awareness and also some deeply rich character study. But you get a definite sense that the adult voice looking back is the voice of a woman who has not only come to terms with the memories she's relating, but has lovingly shaped them and is telling them on purpose because she already understands their power.

The raw emotion of emotional exploration in Watchman, where Jean Louise sometimes sees memory as the only place where she can safely live and love (while feeling afraid to come outside of those memories back into the land of the living, where relationships are ragged, loss is real, and choices are hard) gives way in Mockingbird to the voice of someone who has come to terms with the hardness of life, looked it square in the face, and understood how even the hard moments shaped her for good. We know that many of the things Scout goes through as a child are not things she could have fully understood then, so the telling of the story and the way it's told subtly points to that kind of deep reflection.

One reason I can't ever read the end of Mockingbird without a flood of tears is because the narrative voice is permeated with such peace and such a deep awareness of the love that held her, formed her, and shaped her in her childhood. Whatever may or may not have happened in the intervening years -- and Watchman, since it's not a sequel, does not really provide us with knowledge of that -- the Jean Louise/Scout who looks back in Mockingbird tells her story with a depth and serenity that speaks of real maturity and love. In Watchman, she is still unraveling bits and pieces as she attempts to fit those stories together into something that makes sense. And might this not reflect, in some real sense, the actual creative process that Lee herself was going through as she wrote a first draft? In Mockingbird, the narrator seems like someone who has gone through that process off-scene and now sketches the picture she's put together from the past in powerful strokes so we can envision it too.

What amazes me is how a woman as young as Lee (31 when she wrote Watchman, 34 by the time she published Mockingbird) became such an artist in just three short years. It makes me wonder what all the in-between drafts must have looked like, as she honed in on Scout's voice and the particular story that called out to her and asked to be told. The pivotal situation that drives that second half of the narrative in Mockingbird is barely glanced at in a paragraph or two in Watchman, a memory that Scout herself acknowledges but barely explores. The page feels practically lit with neon when you read it post-Mockingbird, but you wonder when Lee herself realized that the seed of the story she needed and wanted to tell lay right there, like a small stone you pick up on the beach and rub between your fingers to get a sense of how it feels.

How many times did she take up pen and paper to explore that story, to write it and re-write it, to feel the heft of it again, to drop it into the water to see what it reflected, and then pocket it for later, only to take it back out and begin to once again explore its contours and colors?

Letting the Holy Spirit Preach to Our Hearts (& Giving Into Joy)

It's been a good but difficult and tiring first week of school. I knew back when I set out my schedule for the end of August/beginning of September that the first week of our homeschool year, I was likely to feel a bit crunched. The beginning of our fall schedule overlapped with the end of my summer work ~ right as it was time to dive into fall work (and preparation for more work and ministry), I got flooded with final projects from all my summer seminary and diaconate students. 

Add to this some continued physical challenges (for me) and emotional challenges (Jedi Teen) and here on the eve of Labor Day, I am feeling a little weary.

So I thought I would come here and reflect on joy. 

I've been reading Timothy Keller's book Prayer. In Chapter Six, he highlights the prayer practices of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. In the section on Luther, he quotes the reformer regarding something to keep in mind while practicing prayer and meditation on the Scriptures. Keller calls it keeping  "a lookout for the Holy Spirit." He quotes Luther as saying that if (during the course of our regular and planned prayer and meditation):

"an abundance of good thoughts comes to us, we ought to disregard the other petitions, make room for such thoughts, listen in silence, and under no circumstances obstruct them. The Holy Spirit himself preaches here, and one word of his sermon is better than a thousand of our prayers. Many times I have learned more from one prayer than I might have learned from much reading and speculation...If in the midst of such thoughts the Holy Spirit begins to preach to your heart with rich, enlightening thoughts, honor him by letting go of this written scheme...Remember what he says and note it well and you will behold wondrous things in the law of God." 

I suddenly recalled this teaching today when I came across this line from contemporary poet Mary Oliver:

"If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it."

To which I can only say, to both the old and the new, yes and yes. May it be so, Lord.

Eve of Eighth Grade

I've had at least three potential posts percolating in my mind this week, but I can't ever seem to let a new school year start without marking it in some way on the blog. It's funny to realize that I have actually been posting on this blog for so many years that our homeschooling journey hadn't even started when I began!

And yet, here we are on the eve of our ninth year of the learning journey together: 8th grade. Ready or not, here we come!

I think I (mostly) feel ready, though I'm not sure how ready the sweet girl feels. She's had a very good summer in many ways and is reluctant to let go of it. I am hoping that some of our new learning ventures will spark her curiosity and her love of learning -- still there, I know -- and that will help to propel us forward.

Here are a few of the things we're using in the journey this year...for fun, I am mixing up the tangibles and intangibles. (And yes, this is just a small taste of our resources.)

• Lots of love and prayer!
• Patience and gentleness!
• Seeds Family Worship Scripture CDs
• Dad taking the lead in history! (Mom doing overviews, literature and church history tie-ins)
• Horizons Algebra 1
• A new location for the sweet girl's desk (in our living room, in what she calls "the thinker's corner")
• High speed internet (coming soon! The installation got delayed a week)
• Forgiveness
• Laughter
• Middle School Physics (and a whole bunch of other great physics resources)
• Word Up! Latin and Greek root words on DVD
• Chocolate 
• More drawing and poetry time (I hope)
• Second year Spanish
• Some international cooking
• Philosophy for Kids 
• Seventh and final year of Writing With Ease/Writing With Skill Program
• Hugs
• Youth group 
• Family read-alouds
• Ticonderoga pencils
• Irish Dance class (out of the beginners! Onto to Group A!)
• New whiteboard markers and new whiteboard
• Old whiteboard turned into place for verses and encouraging/inspirational quotes
• Loving help and support from so many friends and family members
• First day of school muffins (could we start the year without them?) 
• Perspectacles (eyes fixed on Jesus!)
• Lots of love and prayer! (just to bring it full circle) 

A Truly Beautiful Sunset

Truly one of the most beautiful sunsets ever! I took this at Presque Isle last week.

Almost September....How? A Gratitude Post

It's so hard for me to believe that it's almost September, though the weather -- and the fact that we're home from our annual mini-vacation -- reminds me that it's true.

It's also hard to believe that I've posted so little on the blog this month. It feels surprising because I've actually had a rich writing month -- it's just all been off-blog. The summer turned out to be a good one for reading, pondering, thinking, and poeming; I also managed the rough draft of an essay I didn't plan to write but like a lot (and am pondering what the heck to do with once I revise it). I didn't get much time to work on the novel, alas, though I managed some good reflection times on the back story with my dear husband/creative consultant. I have a sense of where I need to go -- I just need to find the time to do it.

And I'm hopeful I can. The autumn is gearing up to be a highly busy one. Sweet girl/Jedi Teen will be in 8th grade (we start Monday). I'll be working as a teaching assistant and doing a good bit of curriculum writing again as well as staying involved in ministry (church school, missions, afterschool arts). It's a full plate, but I am raring to keep writing and determined to try to keep my morning writing rhythm going even once we move into the busier fall schedule. It's frankly feeling more important than extra sleep right now.

Two other blessings I should mention: our long, long overdue technology upgrade is in the works at home at last. Once we're through the transition, I'm hopeful that will free up much more time for writing, both here and elsewhere. And on a final but profoundly grateful note: my medical tests came back with good news last week. I'm still extra tired physically, but knowing that what I'm dealing with is in the "normal" range of things makes me feel incredibly grateful.

Tired and busy I may be, but I feel read to make these next few months count in terms of creativity and faithfulness. May it be so, Lord! May it be so!

Wordplay! A Creative Exercise for Priming the Poetry Pump

It’s been a delightful poeming month, an unexpected gift to this summer. I’ve been both reading and writing poetry again and loving it.

Part of this is due to my reading “at” a couple of great poetry resources, one old and one new-to-me (more on these in another post). But part of it has just been a wonderful rekindling of a perennial love of words. I find myself wanting to pick them up and marvel over them like gemstones, wherever I happen to encounter them – in good prose or in poetry.

One way I can tell I’m in good poeming season (besides the bouquet of poems blooming in my journal) is because I’m relaxing with some wordplay exercises. While word play can refer to any sort of playing with words, I tend to use it as a heading in my notebook for a particular kind of writing exercise I started doing many years ago and return to whenever I’m feeling particularly playful with language.

I don’t think this is an exercise I picked up anywhere in particular, although I may have patched it together from dribs and drabs of other writing exercises and prompts. Still I’ve honed it over the years, finding new ways to relax into it each time I do it. It doesn’t have an exact set of rules. I basically know what to expect when I go into the exercise, but one of the fun parts is that I never really know what to expect, because it always leads to such creative and varied results. 

Here are some of the parameters for the wordplay exercise as I’ve developed it.

1. Start with culling a list of words from a book or any other bit of writing. This will be your resource list. Your list can come from almost any type of book or article – in fact, it can be fun to experiment with different kinds of resources. I’ve pulled my list from magazines, history books, poetry anthologies, and nature field guides. You could try it with a favorite novel or a science text book. Sticking with one book is usually my favorite way to do the exercise, both because it limits my choices and because it delights me to see what a vast array of words you can find in almost any resource. Poetry anthologies or collections are, of course, some of the best for dipping into, since poets tend to use such concrete and evocative language.

2. Set a limit for how many words you list. This can be any kind of limit – a “page’s worth” (however you decide to write them on the page), a certain number of words, a number of words within a given time frame, or a number of columns of words. I like to write my lists in long columns down the page.

3. Try not to be too conscious of which words you’re choosing. This sounds harder than it is, because once you’re in the groove of choosing words, you’ll see how easy the choices are – it’s like picking fruit from branches. When I say “try not to be too conscious,” I mean don’t go looking for words with common sounds, or a set number of verbs or nouns or adjectives. But don’t worry or be surprised if you find yourself clustering around certain types of sounds or words. Let your pen write down whatever words your eye falls on most naturally. Pick the word up mentally and let it roll around your brain. If it feels good, jot it down; if it doesn’t resonate with you in that moment, skip it and move on. If you find a word that you really like but find yourself wanting to jot it in a different form, that’s OK too. Recently I came upon the word “boisterously” but decided to drop the “ly” and tuck away “boisterous” as an adjective. You can always go back and ad the “ly” later when you’re using it, or change it in some other way.

4. If it helps to prime your creativity, capture your words in colorful felt tip markers or crayons, or alternate different colored ballpoints – one word in blue, another in red, black, or green.

5. Occasionally, a poem may begin to form (chomping at the bit!) as you’re making your list. If that happens, go ahead and run with it first thing.

6. More than likely, however, you will find yourself pausing for breath once you’ve compiled the list, pleased just to sit there and look at it for a minute. Like other things you collect, words can be beautiful in and of themselves, each one as different and unique as shells or wildflowers. Let yourself enjoy the collection.

7. Get ready to play! This is where I have to confess the guidelines break down a bit. I don’t have a single approach to how I play with the list beyond this: I begin to put words in groups (clusters, bevies, strings) on the page. Sometimes I do this on the actual page where I wrote the list, letting the words dance in the margins. Sometimes I do it on a facing page. Sometimes I go for groupings via sight features and sometimes by sound. Although there isn’t any set way to do this, here are a few possibilities you might try to get started:

(a)    Read through the entire list, either silently or out loud, and let yourself notice repeating sounds. Did you gravitate toward a lot of words that all started with the same letter? Put them together. Did you happen to collect a lot of words that major in long “i”s or short “a”s or long “o”s? Let them gather together and see what happens.

(b)   Group words by form. Let your nouns huddle in one place, or divide them into concrete nouns and more abstract ones. Encourage your adjectives to hang out together and marshal your verbs into one force. Notice if you had a tendency to go for certain forms like “ing” endings or plurals. Anything that makes these words kin is game for a grouping strategy.

(c)    Begin to put together adjectives with nouns, even if they don’t seem to make logical sense. Turn adjectives into nouns and vice versa. Silent can become silence and kindness can morph into kind. Yes, you could end up with some trite expressions – in my wordplay session earlier today, I did this and stumbled upon both golden silence and natural kinship (I think our brains are sometimes wired to make the obvious connections) but push yourself and put words together willy-nilly, whether they look like they belong together or not. You will end up with some combinations you would never have come up with except in playful mode: relentless world, secret father, obstinate rain.

(d)   Look for rhymes. Sometimes you won’t actually find any that occur naturally in your list, but you’ll find words that want you to find rhymes for them. My collection of “ing” words netted me the following: living, bleeding, glowing, meeting, which felt like they were begging for a quatrain.

Once you’ve spent a while playing with the words of your list, grouping them and re-grouping them, you will probably find poems or poem lines start to come. The end goal of the exercise, for me at any rate, is not usually a whole poem draft – though sometimes I end up with one. More often than not, I come up with what I call “snippets” – potential lines of poems, stanzas that might be built into something interesting later, or even just a series of images that I can come back to.

Here’s example of a snippet I wrote in today’s wordplay exercise:

the broken wing of

the boisterous bird

left him earthbound

but his music

was heard

in an echoing chant

that spilled

through the bones

and waltzed

through the woods

and scattered

the stones

One of the best parts of this exercise is that it helps me to approach poetry from a different place: not just a playful place, but one in which form takes precedence. Actually it’s not even form taking precedence, but the words themselves. The words lead me into the poem, rather than an idea I want to convey or even an image I feel compelled to describe. Those are fine places to begin with in poetry, but sometimes I need to get back to words themselves. The wordplay exercise shakes me loose from the typical ways I approach the writing of a poem and pulls me into the music of language.

Why All the Best Ideas Come in the Shower (An Original Poem)

Why All the Best Ideas Come in the Shower

Because you can't hear the phone ring,
and if you can,
you still can't answer it.
Because no one can expect you
to solve a problem
or take care of an immediate crisis,
real or imagined.

Because the warm rainfall
descending on your head
mimics the flow of inspiration,
pouring downward
in an abundance
that catches you by surprise.

Because water is a gift
so precious
that on good days
when you remember to stand
in gratitude
you're more receptive
to other gifts too.

Because you can relax
taut muscles
and breathe deep in ways
that you don't think to do
if others might see,
and if tears need to flow --
who will know?

Because the sound of the water
doesn't just soothe,
it quickens
and helps your mind
make liquid connections
that suddenly!
create so much beauty,
so much sense.

Because unclothed
feels vulnerable but also free,
the same way you feel
on the best creative days
even you're bundled
into protective layers.

Because --
(oh, wait, there were more reasons,
I know, but they have
gurgled softly
down
the
drain -- )

oh yes
Because being cleansed
makes you feel alive
and whole
and covered by
refreshing waves of grace.

(~EMP, 7/31/15) 

Two Men at Breakfast: A Trimeric Poem

My friend Sandy recently posted a picture of her husband and grandfather breakfasting together while they read from their Bibles. The beautiful photo got me thinking about the ways generations share love and faith. It also got me playing with a poem in trimeric form.

This is a relatively new poem form which I first heard about on a blog last year (I think it was a Monday Poetry stretch at Miss Rumphius Effect). It was invented by Dr. Charles Stone, who defines it as:

 "Trimeric \tri-(meh)-rik\ n: a four stanza poem in which the first stanza has four lines and the last three stanzas have three lines each, with the first line of each repeating the respective line of the first stanza.  The sequence of lines, then, is abcd, b – -, c – -, d – -." 

Dr. Stone has written a lot of trimerics. He tends to write very spare lines, which I appreciate (and he is, after all, the inventor of the form!) but one reason I enjoy playing with the form is that it seems to lend itself so well to tiny narratives. This is only the second one I've written, but I hope it won't be the last.

Two Men at Breakfast

They keep the Bible near to hand --
the old man and the younger one.
At the table, they enjoy coffee
and sweet fellowship in prayer.

The old man and the younger one
have long shared a love of mornings
and the God who made them.

At the table they enjoy coffee,
sip the bitter and the sweet,
share their worries and their cares

and sweet fellowship in prayer.
These are the moments that bind
generations together in love.

~EMP 7/28/15

One Child at a Time: Reflections After VBS

We had a tiring but terrific VBS week. This was the fourth year we invited in a local CEF team, recognizing that we don’t have the people power to design, implement, and carry out an original program right now. I also like that it connects us to other churches and a wider community of faith. Yes, there are differences in presentation and emphasis within different Christian communities, but sometimes I think we gain more by working together, even in the tensions, than we would working separately. At least that’s one of the gleanings I took away from this week, in which I sensed the Lord was working in me as much as he was in the kids.

The kids had a great time. With the exception of the first night, when we only had 8 children, we had about 18 coming every night, with a good core coming back multiple times and being there the whole week or at least 4 out of 5 nights. A number of these kids came last year as well. It was a good reminder that, as my dear husband says, when we open the doors, the children come!

There are years (and this was definitely one of them) when I wasn’t sure we were prepared to open our doors; we hadn’t had the energy to do much preparation ourselves and our pool of volunteers to draw on seems to get smaller every summer. Our little family has been feeling a bit burned out lately, and D. and I have been asking ourselves some questions about our ministry call and the best way to carry it out in this season. I have also been struggling a good deal with some physical issues and extra tiredness on account of them.

And yet a marvelous thing happened when we did open our doors and step out in faith. The children came, and God was there to meet them, exactly where they were. God was also there to meet us. He gave us energy, enthusiasm, a renewed sense of realization about how deeply these children need an encounter with his love and a chance to hear and see the gospel.

Since we weren’t doing the heavy lifting as teachers, he also gave us time to just sit and be with the kids during meals (at least some nights; S. and I ended up handling the kitchen for the last three nights) and during the lesson time. That meant time to listen to them and laugh with them and ask them questions (in addition to directing and guiding them…and keeping them out of the bathroom when they shouldn’t be in there…and keeping them from clunking each other on the head or shoving each other around too much when they got frustrated or mad at each other). It meant time to do the goofy hand motions to the songs and to encourage them to repeat the Scripture verses. It meant time to observe and interact with and pray for some of the kids who came with extra special needs: we had a deaf boy as well as two boys who were autistic.

Wednesday night, midweek, felt a little overwhelming. We had a large attendance with no one to sit and be with the kids except us and the CEF team, two of whom were very young this year. Some of the kids got loud, rowdy, and rambunctious and just keeping order became the main task of the evening. In the midst of it all, you could tell there were kids who were doing their best to listen, drinking in what they were given. We quickly recognized that many of them had little to no familiarity with the evening’s Bible story, which happened to be Noah. 

At the end of the evening, I was grateful when two lovely ladies in our church who do outreach to the deaf community came downstairs from the Bible Study they’d been holding. I had contacted them to let them know about the little boy who was attending who is deaf, and they were able to have a conversation with him. One of the ladies was able to come back the next two evenings and really forge a connection with this little boy; she signed the lessons to him and also just spent a good deal of time with him in signed conversation. She also made some beginning connections with his family, who is in need of the some of the resources and personal help she can provide. That turned out to be one of the huge blessings of the week.

Still, by the end of the evening, I felt discouraged. I kept thinking “there is so much hunger here, and we have no real way to meet it. There is so much need for attention and presence, and we have so few people to provide it. Even just attempting to reach the children within a few block radius of our church feels overwhelming.” That feeling persisted for me until the following morning, when I opened the daily intercessory email I get from an amazing mission organization working in India. Guess what the first line read? “How do you transform a nation of a billion+ people? You start with one child.”

Suddenly, our task didn’t seem quite as daunting. Or if it did still seem daunting, God had at least given me the “perspectacles” I needed. Our task is truly not as overwhelming as the task of church planters and Bible teachers in India, but with them we share a common task and calling, a common gospel. And even, in one sense, a common strategy. “You start with one child.”

That phrase changed the whole way I looked at the next two nights, even when they seemed to feel overwhelming. One hungry little boy prayed to accept and trust Jesus the next night. And that night, and the next, there were other opportunities, some of them small, to tell and show individual kids how much God cared for them.

In the midst of all of that, God directed my attention some other words I needed to hear. One was in the book Discipleship in the Present Tense (by James K.A. Smith) which I’ve been wending my way through this month, and the other was in an old seminary magazine.

Let me mention the words from the article first. I’ve been going through old magazines, some of them years old, pulling articles or photos I want to keep and recycling the rest of the pages. I was skimming through a nearly ten year old interview with an alum from my seminary who was talking about his own then-daunting task of a particular ministry, in which he had humbly realized he lacked “tools, talents…and finances.” (Sounds familiar!) But he went on to say that because of that, they had constantly relied on “seeking God’s provision and direction” (also sounds familiar!). He finished with the words “This is a ministry bathed in intercessory prayer.”

The other light bulb that went off for me was in Smith’s book, which is really a collection of essays and interviews. I was reading an interview in which he recapped much of the terrific content from his book Desiring the Kingdom, which I read last summer. Toward the end, he commented that that no matter how small you or your community might feel, it’s important to remember that “you’re in a story of immense cosmic significance.”

Yes.

• Remember you are in a story of great cosmic significance
• Bathe the ministry in intercessory prayer
• Focus on one child at a time

I don’t know entirely what the future of our church’s or even our family’s ministry and calling may look like, but it seems to me that these are wise and important reminders that I know I needed to hear this week.

Limitations and Confidence

I had one of those conversations today that got me thinking about limitations and confidence. As I contemplate my ongoing work as a teacher (in the midst of parenting, ministry, and writing) I often struggle to find the distinctions between knowing and acknowledging my real limitations and simply lacking confidence.

Does anyone else have anything in their life that they feel this way about?

I got into teaching very much through the back door. I’ve never been trained as a teacher; everything I’ve learned as a teacher I’ve learned from experience. I rarely get opportunities for ongoing conversations or professional development that help me grow as a teacher, except in the cracks and crevices of an ongoing learning life of my own.

And these days, I seem to be teaching everywhere: as a homeschooling parent, as a children’s ministry worker, as a graduate school adjunct, as a teacher for an online diocesan lay institute, as a curriculum developer and writer. There’s almost no part of my life that isn’t suffused with teaching of one sort or another, and this past year I literally worked with students as young as three on up through retirement age. The fact that the door keeps opening for me to teach leads me to believe…I hope, I pray….that it’s a calling I’m supposed to be embracing.

I love teaching. There are parts of it I know I do well. There are other parts I know I don’t do so well, sometimes due to lack of time – time to read, think, process, discuss, experiment, grow, pay attention, check out new scholarship. Other lacks that frustrate me at times are lacks in financial resources and decent technology. There are other parts I know I don’t do so well because I just don’t do them well. I don’t know if I could ever develop certain skills as a teacher because I’m not sure I am gifted in certain areas. Like most teachers (I guess?) I try to build on my strengths.

But there are times when I am called upon for a teaching project when I find myself standing in front of it, feeling so unsure if I am adequate to the task, and not always knowing if it’s just me being tired and overwhelmed and lacking confidence, or me coming up against a real wall because I just don’t have the brain and the gifts needed to go any further. This is not intended to be some sort of false humility, by the way. I’m serious about the fact that I sometimes feel very limited as a scholar and teacher, especially when it comes to my work in formal academia.

I don’t mean to be navel gazing. It might sound like that’s what I’m doing, but I honestly wrestle with this question, which becomes a question of practical import when I’m trying to decide which projects to take on and how to approach them. It may not be popular to talk about limitations, but I sometimes need to face the fact that I have them – both tangible and intangible ones. I don’t like the fact that lack of confidence is sometimes part and parcel of the limitations I face, but I suspect it often is. Trying to detangle all that is difficult. Sometimes I retreat and sometimes I take the plunge; sometimes I serve my students better than others. 

Grateful for opportunities, but I do confess sometimes I wish I could put my energies into one or two places, at most, and really dig in wholeheartedly and deepen in those places. Given the current season of our lives and our family's needs, I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, which means I need to keep on learning to do as well as I can putting together the myriad small pieces that make up the mosaic of my working and creative life.  And being as faithful as I can to do them well, even when I can't give some of them the attention they deserve.

Reading Round-Up: Early Summer Edition

Summertime! Our recent trip to Virginia to see family, coupled with the fact that school is out, means I am getting some long overdue reading time. Even though I have a heavier teaching load this summer than usual (at the seminary) I am still enjoying some good reading time.

Here's a peek at some of what I've been reading lately.

Young Fiction

The sweet girl (aka Jedi Teen...who by the way truly has officially reached her teen years now!) has been busy recommending books to me, deep into her own summer reading. Some of these she's found on her own and some we've ferreted out together via book lists. So far I have really enjoyed Savvy by Ingrid Law and One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, two mid-grade books I might not have read but for the sweet girl's encouragement. I enjoyed Savvy, an interesting mix of fantasy and realism, for its creative story-line and highly creative use of language. One for the Murphys, the debut novel of author Hunt (whose second book Fish in a Tree the sweet girl and I both enjoyed earlier this year) is the story of a young girl in foster care. It reminded me a little bit of Katherine Paterson's The Great Gilly Hopkins, though Gilly had less overt sentiment.

Jedi Teen and I reviewed the graphic novel Smile together, and she's gone on to read two other graphic novels by Raina Telegemeier (I've started Sisters, but haven't had a chance to finish it). We both also read the seventh (and perhaps last, though we're not sure) Clementine book by Sara Pennypacker, Completely Clementine. It's so funny to realize that the sweet girl started reading these when she was about Clementine's age. Clementine has only made it through her third grade year in these seven terrific books, while my daughter has shot past her by years. But we both still love them, almost the way you love to and return to a good Ramona book. And that's saying something.

Mysteries

I've needed a lighthearted return to mystery reading this summer, and decided to dive back into my exploration of the books of Patricia Wentworth.  I'm not sure quite how many of the Miss Silver mysteries I've read now, but I know I've done three since late spring: She Came Back, The Gazebo, and Out of the Past. All of these were written in the 1950s, I think, and she definitely had her formula down by then. I'm cottoning on to what makes a Wentworth a Wentworth -- I actually managed to guess the murderer in the last one -- and I'm very much enjoying the camaraderie between Miss Silver and Inspector Abbot, who looks upon this school-teacher-ish maiden-aunt woman with both amusement and awe. I love that he trusts her detecting instincts so completely that he'd pretty much follow her blindfolded in a snowstorm. It's a great early example of an amateur and professional partnership.

Non-Fiction

So much really good non-fiction on my plate right now...it's sort of an embarrassment of riches. I'm inwardly singing with joy over the beautiful essays in James K.A. Smith's Discipleship in the Present Tense, which seem to be "speaking my theology" in ways I've only felt with a few authors in the past. I'm revisiting a gem of a book I loved years ago and recently rediscovered in a library book sale: Henri Nouwen's Return of the Prodigal -- and I need to hear what he has to say just as much as I did then. It's one of those beautiful gospel-centered books that we all need to revisit from time to time for the good of our hearts. And it's reminding me how much I love the artistry of Rembrandt and his Prodigal painting in particular.

I'm learning a ton of history I never knew from David Garrison's A Wind in the House of Islam, a book that is both challenging and encouraging. It's a carefully researched and well-written account of some of the many amazing things that God had done among Muslim communities in centuries past and is currently doing among Muslims in this century. I was going to call it a book of mission history (which it is) but I'd rather give it the bigger parameter of Christian history or just history (thinking about Justo Gonzalez' reminder that we too often separate the study of missions from the rest of church and world history).

I'm still working my way through N.T. Wright's Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians, which is taking me longer than I expected, mostly because I find myself wanting to chew thoughtfully on his insights. I keep meaning to jot some of the things that are particularly speaking to me -- from Wright, Nouwen, Smith, and Garrison especially -- here on the blog. Maybe I will have a chance to do that soon.

Seeing Stars

I keep meaning to mention that the sweet girl and I have started a mother-daughter review blog. We're talking books and movies together over at Seeing Stars, where we're known as Obi Mom and Jedi Teen. Come on over and visit if you're so inclined!

End of Another Year

Well, we've done it! Today was homeschool evaluation day, which for me always feels like the official end of our school-year, even if we finish actual schooling earlier. This year the sweet girl has had dribs and drabs of things to finish, mostly in math, so she's actually been doing a bit of "summer school" (about an hour a day) but even that is almost over now. With the official sign-off from our terrific evaluator, who loved seeing how much S. has "grown and matured," 7th grade is DONE! Thanks be to God!

Typing, Naming, and Praying

Once a month I type up revisions to my parish's prayer sheet. This is a sheet that gets distributed to the congregation each month with updated lists of people to pray for: people in need of healing, people we work with in church outreaches, local and national community leaders, missionaries and ministry workers connected to our church in some way, people being persecuted for their faith. It's a long list. Included in it are also diocesan and international prayer cycles: we pray for various bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people at work in our diocese, in our national church body, and in the wider Anglican communion.

I long ago discovered that it's easier for me to type in the rotating lists of names than to try to lift them from online sources and paste them in. That's particularly true for the communion-wide list, which is printed online in such a way that moving names via copy/paste would wreak formatting havoc with my document, leaving me with lots to clean up and reformat. Despite the fact that it may seem a little tedious to have to type all names in one at a time, especially when some of the names are unusual to this English speaker and not easy to spell, it's still faster and tidier than doing it any other way, in my humble opinion. But more than that, it gives me time to think, ponder, and pray my way through the list as I type.

There's something wonderfully grounding and connecting about typing in a person's name (and making sure you've spelled it accurately). Even though you may never have seen or even heard of this person, typing their name somehow gives you a tangible link with who they are. Since all of the names I'm working with are names of leaders, mostly bishops and archbishops, I know that each one of them has a challenging role and a lot on their hearts, no matter where they serve. Some of the names I type in with ease, and some I stumble over, breaking them into unusual syllables and then putting them back together, wondering if my mental pronunciation is anywhere close to how you actually say the name. Some of the bishops are in countries torn by war or where Christians face daily persecution. As I type their names, I find myself lifting each of them to God and praying that the Lord will watch over his servant.

And I love the names. Some of them have three or four names, many of them biblical. Then there are names (first, middle, or last) that evoke a picture: names like Godson, Maker, and Coffin (all fascinating names for bishops, I think). There are African names like Aladekugbe and Asian names like Iso. There are names that bring to mind Irish, Scots, or Welsh saints.

Sometimes  I confess I am tired when prayer-sheet revision time rolls around, and part of me doesn't feel like taking the time to scroll through the lists and type in the letters. But most of me realizes that by the time I'm done, I will feel more in tune and more connected with people of God all around the world, and more gratefully aware of the myriad of stories that are all connected just in this one slim chapter of the story of the communion of the saints. I know my typing in these lists is just a tiny service but it's one that refuels me every month to remember what a privilege is it to be part of the worldwide body of Christ and to pray for my family.

It Must Be June

We turned the calendar to a new month today. To all intents and purposes, our school year is "done" -- at least officially. I've tallied up attendance records and we've hit our requisite number of days. All that should be left is portfolio and evaluation.

But S. still has some things to wrap up: she's still writing her final research paper for her writing course, she's got a review unit still to do in math, a few stray grammar lessons to finish up to complete the workbook, and some ongoing work in Spanish (ditto). What makes me happy is to see her willingness to keep going with all of this, in a good, disciplined way, even though it's June and we're both oh so ready for a break. The nice thing, of course, is that she can tackle these things pretty systematically on her own and still have plenty of time leftover to begin some relaxation.

The other nice thing is that we're not feeling rushed in the mornings. Which, wonderfully, means more chances to explore learning trails. This morning we lingered at the breakfast table and had an awesome conversation about missions history and the shifting of the Christian world from global north to global south, which got her so excited she actually did a little cheer for our "missionary God!" (which made my heart want to sing, naturally). At lunch, we tackled the Smithsonian magazine that arrived on Saturday and I read her the Pluto article while she ate. She did a big paper on Pluto last year, so I knew she'd find it fascinating, and she did. We're excitedly looking forward to July 14, the big NASA encounter with the dwarf planet.

So yes...it must be June. Learning continues, but it does so in a more relaxed, chasing-your-passions-down-learning-trails way. That's good for us both.

June also marks the beginning of the summer diaconate course I'm teaching, along with four independent studies. Considering I'm still grading for spring, I'm feeling like I'm not getting much of a breath, but grateful for the work. I've got final edits on some S&T work too, and a doctor's appointment this week. Never a dull moment!

Just as Geeky as my Grandmother

One of things I sometimes miss is being able to afford magazines. While I know there are many cool things that can be seen and read about online, I still love the feel and look of a magazine, especially one with good writing and gorgeous photographs.

When we recently got an offer to subscribe to Smithsonian magazine for less than a dollar an issue for a year, I confess I leaped at the chance. Our first issue came yesterday, and I gave myself some late Saturday evening/Sunday afternoon time to enjoy a few of the articles, including a great cover story about lions and a fascinating look at the current NASA mission due to fly-by Pluto next month.

It dawned on me somewhere along the way that I had a very clear picture in my mind of someone else devouring articles with a Smithsonian magazine in her hands: my grandmother, in the years she lived with us when I was growing up.

Apparently I am just as geeky as my grandmother. Which makes me absurdly happy.

Sorting Papers: Quotes and Poem Scraps from the Daybook

I'm spending part of today sorting through a mountain of papers (a long overdue chore). Most of these have been stuffed into boxes over the past few years, but some of the papers go back much longer. In and among the boxes, I'm finding old student papers, scraps of poems I've written, love notes and drawings from the sweet girl from when she was little, photocopies of articles I saved for teaching or writing purposes, mission newsletters, old sermon notes, and collections of quotes and images. It's a plethora of stuff that looks like spillover from my overactive and far too busy writer-teacher brain.

Every once in a while, when I'm going through mountains like this, I pause to jot down a few of the things I'm finding. I thought I'd share a few quotes from what would be a daybook if I ever had time to make one!

"Don't feel like a failure if you're finding it difficult to pursue God's call or can't discern fruit." (~That's from some very scattered sermon notes from 2004! Eleven years ago...and I still need to hear it. Maybe more now than then.)

"Use what talent you possess. The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best." (~Henry Van Dyke, not sure what source)

"The little purple house
with a roof like a cap
perched on the hill
and took a little nap

It shuttered its eyes
and dozed in the sun
and when it woke up
it was almost one

It yawned a big yawn
and its door opened wide.
It invited some friends
to come inside

And into the house
with a roof like a cap
we went right inside
and we too took a nap"

(~EMP, original/undated poem scrap, next to a doodle of a little purple house with a roof like a cap)