a sort of obituary

Grandma four months before her death

I dreamed that I was in Grandma’s room, helping sort through her stuff after her death. I was standing next to the sewing machine, and had just given the tray filled with brightly colored spools of thread to my mother.  When mom left the room, Grandma came in.  

“What are you doing here?” I asked in surprise. She murmured something noncommittal and lay down on the bed. “Are you comfortable?” I asked, and she adjusted.  She looked the same, but younger; her body seemed to have a fleshy solidity that it had lacked in her last months, as she became frailer, tiny and brittle-boned. I watched her on the bed. Then I woke up. 

The one thing Grandma always said about her eventual obituary was that she didn’t want anything in there about her sewing.  But there it was, in my dream.  What’s a girl to do?

---

Grandma didn’t talk about God, much. Oh, she would show you the poem about prayer that her oldest daughter, my Aunt Kathy, had written as a teenager, just a few years before she died in a car wreck. But she never showed us the letter Kathy wrote to her unborn daughter a few months before that wreck - the letter explaining that she believed in God because he had been her strength when she was at her weakest. Grandma didn’t talk about God.

Grandma talked about people. As an adult,  I grew to love our gossipy lunch dates, where we talked about people: their pretensions (Dad), mistakes (both my parents, chiefly in regard to homeschooling - her opinion, not mine), charms (my youngest brothers), surprising changes (my middle siblings), and hypocrisy (all Southerners - Grandma was a staunch Yankee).

These conversations used to make me uncomfortable.  Grandma had lived in the same town as my family from the time I was nine years old.  Before that, my memories of her are vague, as dreamy as scenes from a Terrence Malick film: feeding seagulls by the ocean when Grandpa came to Texas for cancer treatments, running in their front yard in Kansas City, filling coloring book pages with Grandpa.  When Grandpa died, Grandma moved to be near us.

I never felt that she was quite the right sort of Grandmother.  I think my imagined ideal Grandmother was something out of a television version of the Victorian age, with white hair piled up in a pompadour, long skirts sweeping the floor, a jar full of freshly baked cookies, and lots of hugs and cuddles and compliments and silly gifts.  Grandma wore sensible shoes and had short, salt and pepper hair. When she made cookies, they had healthy things in them, and she kept them in the freezer, not in a cookie jar. She could be a bit stern, and she didn’t talk about feelings.  

----

When I was in highschool, Grandma helped me sew.  She wasn’t pleased with my methods; I wasn’t meticulous, and I skipped steps.  I didn’t always pin and iron. Grandma laughed at the pajama pants I made without a pattern, but she helped me construct a grey wool skirt that I still wear to this day.

I have a few vivid memories of the trip we took to Scotland when I was a teenager.  I remember being awake in an Edinburgh hotel room at midnight, while Grandma snored loudly.  I looked out the window and wished I could leave and explore the streets on my own.  I remember being annoyed by the fact that every time we passed flowers, Grandma would say, “Do you see those flowers, Amy?  Aren’t they beautiful?” Yes, of course I see them, they’re right in front of me.  I don’t have to comment every time.  I can enjoy them quietly, my angsty little teenage mind would retort. I remember slipping outside when the haggis was served, and napping on the tour bus with all the retired folk from the church (did I mention we were on a tour with older people from her church?). I remember loving the castles, and walking along the rocky beach of Iona by myself in bliss.

I suppose we didn’t connect well. I was too quiet, too bookish and dreamy; Grandma was too practical, too concrete and  -- well, she thought books were a bit of a waste of time. But Grandma kept takingme on trips.  Kept inviting me to lunch. Kept quietly depositing money into my college savings account. Kept supporting me when I made decisions she couldn’t comprehend (like moving to Vietnam). She may not have been the type to say “I love you,” very often, but her love was there, in her actions, steady and reliable, just like she was.

---

I know most people don’t get to have an adult relationship with a grandparent, but it’s one of the greatest things in the world.  As an adult, I decided to reject my anxiety about our gossipy lunches and learned to enjoy them.  Finally I understood her smart, sarcastic humor.  Finally, I allowed myself to be amazed by the heartache she’d experienced in her life, and her resilience, loyalty, and love.

Finally I started asking for the stories -and I could never get enough of them - the stories that gave me insight into who she was, what had formed her, and what part of her was in me. I asked her to write them down, and she wrote by hand, even when her hands were barely working.  This is how it begins, remarkably:

My Great Grandma lived in Missouri and was orphaned during the Civil War.  She was rescued by a soldier from Colorado who took her home with him and raised her.  She married John Paul Jones who had been a settler in this area.  They had 7 children - Dan, a cattle rustler, Ralph and Ray, ranchers, Paul, a sheriff, Alice, Emma, + Etta (my grandmother). Etta had 2 children, Nellie (my mother) + her brother, Bill.  She was married to Carl Stoddard. Carl had a race horse who was the cause of their divorce. (Do you call a horse who?) Anyhow, after the divorce Carl moved to Salt Lake City.  At age 18, my mother went to visit him, and they travelled for a year from Alaska to Glendora, California.

My father, a son of immigrant German parents, grew up in Michigan. He was the youngest of 7 children. Henry, Herman, Bill, Mary, Minnie, Anna, + Albert. Mary took care of him as his mother did not want him. She fed him unpasterized milk from their cow.

Nellie (my great grandmother) met Albert (my great grandfather) when he worked as a ranch hand for her father.  Albert called her on the phone when she had moved to California and proposed marriage.  She didn’t have anything better to do... (which is how Grandma describes both her parent’s decision to get married, and her own). Al’s siblings cheated him out of his share of the inheritance, and he and Nellie were so poor that they lived for a while in a neighbor’s ice house. Then, he worked for 60 years at a Chevrolet factory.

When Grandma was in college, she used to go dancing every weekend.  A different boy every time. A big band would play, and they’d dance till midnight. She married Grandpa in September 1942, and he headed to army training. She and her army wife friends made a cross-country road trip to California to be near their husbands, an epic journey of flat tires and gas rations and desert heat.

-----

Grandma stayed with Grandpa until he died of cancer in 1988.  They stayed together through the war, the post-war prosperity, the free-loving sixties, the loss of their oldest child, Grandpa’s alcoholism and manic depression, and his celebration of five years of sobriety.  She stayed with a bipolar alcoholic, and not because she was a doormat.  

Grandma found a lot of joy in life: in dancing, in flowers, in sewing, in finding a good sale, in traveling and in staying put, in watching her grandchildren sing and dance and grow up. She never talked about the hard parts, and she rarely talked about God.  She didn’t speak much about love.  But I'm starting to think that in her quiet generosity, her steadfast endurance, and her reliable presence, maybe she was actually preaching about God and love all the time.

Eileen S. (Cross) Lepine, October 22, 1920 - March 22, 2013

the active stillness of Advent {guest post}

J.R. Goudeau is a blog-crush turned friend who regularly inspires me with her passion and humor. If this is your first introduction to her, check out Love Is What You Do, where she blogs about literature, motherhood, and her work with Burmese refugees in Austin. I'm grateful for the stories she's sharing here today.


The first time I remember really waiting for something, I found out a few weeks before my best friend that her father was leaving her family. I had to wait for her to find out. It’s a long story and the details are not mine to tell; I was 18. I was devastated. It was the first time I fasted and prayed because I meant it; it was the first time I hiccupped into my pillow late into the night begging God to get up, to move, to do something, dang it.


I went and spent a long day alone in a state park nearby. Armed with my huge study Bible, I sat under a tree and read and prayed all day. I watched an armadillo for more than an hour as it dug in the underbrush a few yards away. I left when it was too dark to see.


Nothing changed. He left their family. She was hysterical. I was bewildered.

***

Jonathan and I waited for four months to get to Brazil. We were 23, just married, armed with our Idealism and our Dreams, ready to change the world. We were supposed to leave on September 20, 2001 to be missionaries. On September 12, 2001, we heard from the Brazilian consulate that someone had stolen our passports.


Because it was the day after September 11, nothing was certain. We had to start over, new passports, new visas, new bureaucracy to hold us up. Every week we called and every week we got the same words: nothing.


For four months, we sat on my parents’ couch watching CNN, reading books, and eating. We had nothing to do. Again, I fasted and prayed. Again, it just took forever.


When we finally, finally, finally got word, got on the plane, got there, I looked around, ready to see the secret reason God had us wait so long.


To this day, there is no coincidental story, no glorious explanation, for the waiting.


The waiting itself was the point; it was not the means to the end in which I got some big surprise with a bow on the top. The discipline of waiting day in and day out was what I needed to learn. The trusting, the holding on, the making just to the end of the day--those habits became familiar, the rudimentary movements I would need to make it through my life.

***

Since then, it seems like every few months we have to wait: to get into graduate schools, to find a job, to get pregnant, to have a baby, to figure out what we are doing with our lives, where we will live, how things will be. In the last couple of years, I’ve waited with a friend to find out whether she had breast cancer. I waited with a dear friend for months as she watched her mother die of cancer. I have waited to hear whether marriages would make it or not. I have waited with friends who desperately wanted a viable pregnancy.


In the last five years, I have waited in the NICU or by my cell phone to hear about 11 different children with severe or extremely rare medical needs.


Some of those babies made it. Some of them did not. In all of those moments, the waiting completely changed me.


It is one thing to wait on something I want, a privilege I would like. It’s another to breathe prayer with every fiber of my being as I beg God for the life of a baby or a marriage or a friend. That is the kind of face-down, in-the-dirt waiting which has left me with scars. My heart has been carved in those periods of not-knowing and desperate hoping.


In my life, that waiting has ceased to be something passive and has become something active I do. It is familiar, even if I don’t always (or ever) like it. Simone Weil talks about the Greek word "hupomene," which she defines as “waiting in eager expectation.”


I hold myself still under the heaviness of the waiting. I try to be patient.


Weil says I should be eager.

***

In March 2009, I sat in front of a computer screen, heavily pregnant with my second baby girl. I had been having contractions every twenty minutes for hours. Past my due date, miserable, blimpish, I drank tea and clicked around the internet. I found a website about China Special Needs adoptions. I read almost all night, blogs and articles and chat rooms and forums.


I waited for a baby who would be born two days later, healthy and purple and squalling with life, but I began to pray again, eagerly, expectantly, for another one.

***

Now we are waiting again, this time for our third daughter who will be coming home from China hopefully sometime next year. The home study was in November. The dossier should be finished and sent off in a month or so.


Our case worker said we could be home with a baby in June at the earliest. And suddenly, six to nine months seems like a lifetime.


We’re researching doctors, preparing for surgeries, thinking through the options for whatever her special need ends up being.


There’s no baby yet—we’ll be matched when our dossier is logged into the system in China—but whoever she is, she already exists. It is likely she has already been born, already abandoned, already placed in the orphanage crib. She is going through a winter somewhere without me and I find myself waking up breathing out to God: please let someone hold her, love her, sing her lullabies, keep her safe, please...just…please.

When we hung up her stocking in our house this year, my little one said, “I sure really miss my new sister.” Our whole family waits and prepares and prays.

And we know, when she gets here, everything will be different and hard and good all at once.


I groan and hold still in the heaviness. With Mary, who waited for a baby and then waited for that baby to die, with the angels who quiver with waiting for the sons of God to be revealed, with all the mothers with empty arms who long with every fiber of their being for babies to come, I wait. I am reminded this week especially that not all waiting is good, that sometimes we wait for a grief that is more horrific than we can prepare for, and I am humbled by the weight of their incomprehensible waiting.


For those who wait in grief and those who wait in hope, I pray this season, as we wait together in all the active stillness of that holy word.

J. R. Goudeau is the Executive Director and co-founder of Hill Country Hill Tribers, as well as a grad student in English literature. When she’s supposed to be working on her dissertation, she can usually be found blogging about books, babies and Burmese refugees at Love Is What You Do.

second languages

Today I have an essay at The Curator about how teaching English as a Second Language changed the way I speak the language of faith.  I hope you'll read it; it means a lot to me.

In the essay, I mostly talk about how my understanding of language and ownership changed while I was overseas.  Living overseas was the catalyst in pushing me toward ecumenicism, the understanding that each expression of faith weaves some unique color, some essential pattern,  in the tapestry of Christianity.  

Because of ecumenicism, I am forced to confess that my faith language is always under construction. I can never assume that I have the final say on what things mean.  

Take the word prayer, for example. Growing up, prayer was ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.  It was individual, personal, disembodied, methodical and conversational.  It was good. 

But I also needed to learn about prayer from the Catholic church, where prayer was something communal and liturgical and sensual.  I needed to learn about prayer from the desert fathers and mothers, where it was constant, a way of life, and bound up with mundane tasks like weaving and gardening.  I needed charismatics to share their new languages with me, to help me become open to emotion and to the power of the Holy Spirit in my life. I needed to learn about meditation from Buddhists, and to learn from Muslims how posture and practice affect prayer.

And so my faith language shrinks and grows, by turns.  But read the essay, and let me know what you think.  

Have a jolly Thanksgiving!

psalms for children and the heavy hearted

I didn’t really have a problem with God until I hit my 20s. Up to then, he had been — like my human father — good, kind, and sometimes inscrutable, but always loving, always approachable, always there.

It wasn’t that I had never questioned him — to be fair, in my teens I had battled doubts about God, but they had been cerebral, intellectual doubts. I read the existentialists, and I studied world religions, and I wondered if all that I understood from the Bible could possibly be true.

But emotional doubts — those I had never encountered. I had never railed against God for his absence and silence; in my sweet, safe, sheltered life I had never had cause to question his goodness. As far as I knew, no one else had either.

So when my world flipped upside down at the age of 23, when God absconded, I lacked the emotional vocabulary I needed to pray through it.

{Read the rest at The Living Church.}

{I promise, I do write things other than book reviews, sometimes.}

Do you trust your feelings?

Do you trust your feelings?

I usually don't. The voice in my head says things like

Feelings change, but the word of God endures and

Guard your heart (which I always took to mean reveal nothing and let no one in) and

How you feel about it doesn't matter, what matters is what's true and even

Girls are emotional, flighty and fickle - don't be a girl.

I first began to wonder if I should trust my feelings more when I was in college. In a unit on feminism, I read about Women's Ways of Knowing.  Could there be legitimate other ways of knowing, I asked myself?  As legitimate as Reason, the way of the Enlightenment?

Lately I've been wondering again about the interplay between reason and emotion and Holy Spirit in decision-making.  I tend to write off my emotions as just hormonal, but Jack never lets me get away with that.   So how do I listen to them?

This week my feeling about one of our big decisions underwent a 180 degree change overnight, for no clear reason, and I'm wondering why.  I'm wondering if I need to trust my feelings, and how to do that.  I'm wondering if I need to talk back to the voice in my head:

Yes, feelings change, but the word of God can speak truth to us in our changing feelings.  You don't need to be afraid of expressing feelings because they might someday change.

Yes, guard your heart, by not embracing filth, by not betraying your own soul, but by embracing all the good people God has put in your life.

Yes, truth matters, but how you feel is a truth, and it matters too.

And who are you to define femininity, and to define it so negatively?

Lately I've been thinking that my refusal to trust my feelings is also a refusal to listen to God.  That maybe God speaks to us through feelings, too, and that maybe there is no such thing as pure reason. That maybe one reason I've been so afraid of feelings is that the churches I've gone to have been so male-dominated.

Do you trust your emotions?  What do you think? (Or maybe I should say how do you feel?)

ten loved memoirs

I'm loving peeking at people's bookshelves across the web this week.  My "to-read" list is getting out of hand, and the local interlibrary loan service is getting a workout.

Memoir is one of my favorite genres, and I have an especial weakness for spiritual memoir and foodie memoirs.  Here are ten memoir-ish books that I've loved.

1. The Crosswicks Journals by Madeleine L'Engle.  These three memoirs about life and writing set by Madeleine L'Engle in her ancient farmhouse are beautiful.  I remember the first, "A Circle of Quiet," inspiring me to learn how to "be" instead of "doing" all the time.

2. The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris.  I've always been fascinated by the monastic lifestyle.  Here Norris uses the structure of the liturgical year to frame her memoir and meditations inspired by three years spent living in a Benedictine monastery as an oblate. The writing is gorgeous.

3. Letters of Vincent Van Gogh  These letters, mostly written to his brother Theo, reveal Van Gogh to be a sensitive, thoughtful man of faith. I started reading this because I wanted to know how Van Gogh had gone from missionary to miners to artist to cutting off his own ear.  I kept reading them because I found a beautiful soul.

4. These Strange Ashes by Elizabeth Elliott is her account of her first year in missionary work (before she was married to Jim). At the end of the year, all of her work was destroyed, and in this book she reckons with that reality.  I read it after going through a similar experience, and it helped me immensely.

5. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken is a memoir of love, conversion, and tragedy.  One of my favorite scenes is when Sheldon and his wife buy their first car.  They take a hammer to the front, denting it as a way to remind themselves that it's just a thing, not a god. The love story here makes for addictive reading, but so does the conversion story, which takes place in England where Vanauken and his wife are friends with C.S. Lewis.

6. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  Kingsolver writes beautifully about a year in which her family vowed to eat only food from their own farm or raised locally.

7. Under the Tuscan Sun by Francis Mayes.  This is kind of a guilty pleasure.  Don't watch the movie, but do read the book.  My girlfriends and I read it as we traveled to Tuscany for a semester ourselves, and we called Frances Mayes our patron saint.  One weekend, in fact, we traveled the 15 km from our little convent-turned-dormitory to Cortona, and searched until we found her house.  We giggled and giggled and knocked on the door, and me her husband.  It was one of my favorite adventures.

8. Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton.  Hamilton, chef at Prune in New York, writes about her unique childhood, the unromantic work of catering, and gorgeously, gorgeously, about food and life.

9. Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott was the first conversion memoir I read that was funny and irreverent and so honest about the difficulty of the life of faith.  I love Blue Like Jazz, too, but I feel like this is the book that made Blue Like Jazz even possible, so I chose it instead.  And while we're on the subject of recent spiritual memoirs that people my age love, let's go ahead and say that I've also loved each of Lauren Winner's books (and have not yet finished her newest).

10. Surprised by Joy & A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. Lewis's conversion memoir, and his account of the grief he experienced at this wife's death, are profoundly moving and, well, perfect.

11. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Since I've already actually listed about 15 books, I'll go ahead and add one more...) A memoir of marriage and loss, the writing is beautiful, and will make you cry.

And there are so many more...what are yours?

a few things in June

Here are some TV shows, albums, books, and blogs I've been enjoying this month.

Borgen.  Look.  There's no Josh Lyman (yeah, I loved Josh - who didn't?), and the dialogue isn't quite as fast and funny as Aaron Sorkin-style writing, but if you liked The West Wing, you will have to like Borgen, a Danish drama about the first female Prime Minister in Denmark - her cabinet, her family, and the government's relationship to the media. I don't want to give anything away, but if you were interested in Anne-Marie Slaughter's article at Atlantic Monthly this week questioning what it means for women to "have it all," you will love watching Borgen's answer as Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg wrestles with her work/family balance.  And, as a student of intercultural studies, I also have to say that it's fascinating to observe this small, wealthy, post-Christian European country through its own eyes.

Rain for Roots. We've been listening to these folk songs for little ones quite a bit over the last month.  With lyrics by Sally Lloyd Jones and music by Sandra McCracken, Ellie Holcomb, Flo Paris, and Katy Bowser, they satisfy me both in terms of musical quality and content -- and Rosie LOVES them.  My favorite thing about them is that each song points to God.  A lot of Christian resources for kids tend to be moralistic, focusing on encouraging good behaviors - be patient, share, don't complain, obey. 

And, sure, kids need to be taught these things.  But in training our children, it's all too easy to subtly teach them to rely on her own ability to be good and acceptable to God, rather than to rely on God himself.

 Sometimes kids just need to be pointed to God. So instead of hearing, "Daniel was brave and obeyed God - you should be brave and obey, too!"  I like that Rosie gets to hear

Who heard Daniel when he prayed?
Who helped him not be afraid?
Who stayed beside him in that den?
Who brought him safely out again?

It’s God who kept him in his care.
He’ll keep you, too--no matter where!

Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices
This latest album from The Welcome Wagon is beautiful.  My sister sent it to me for my birthday, and she reviewed it here.


A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny
Amy Julia Becker, a graduate of Princeton and Princeton Seminary, writes in this book about becoming a mother to her first child, Penny, who has Down Syndrome.  I am almost finished with the book, and I appreciate her candor and care in sharing her story.  (The kindle version of the book is only $2.99 for the month of June!)


Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
I'm about a third of the way through this book, which details the history of the garment-making industry in America and shows how "cheap fashion" has changed the way Americans dress and turned clothing into a disposable good.  So far it's dry at some points and fascinating at others, and I've got a lot of thoughts developing about how to think Christianly - redemptively - about the fashion industry. I'm sure I'll write more about this soon.  (For now, how about this example of redeeming disposable clothing?) (Full disclosure: I received this book free from the publisher.)

On the blog front, this month I've become a huge fan of D.L. Mayfield's writing, and I love the stories Jessica Goudeau shares at Love Is What You Do. Both of these women work with refugees, and some (though not all) of their writing relates to that.  Incidentally, this month I've been volunteer-teaching a group of Burmese refugees at a sewing factory in Gas City.  It's worlds different than what I usually do, teaching wealthy Korean college students, and it's a challenge.  I am stunned by the histories of these Burmese people, and by their resilience and work ethic and hope.

And, frankly, I can't wait to see Brave.

my grandmother

Grandma with Rosie, June 2012.


Today my grandmother, after a bout of pneumonia, had a feeding tube inserted. She will never "eat" another meal again.

I can't stop thinking about that.

About food, and what nourishes us; about breaking bread, and about doing it together; about Eucharist, and how every bite is grace; about life without these rituals of obtaining food, preparing dishes, eating a meal, and washing up.

About the turkey and gravy over biscuits she always made the weekend after Thanksgiving. About the nutty healthy cookies she kept in the freezer in case we came over.

About Last Suppers, and how I hope she had one worth remembering, and how I want her to know that every bite of bread, broken, is forgiveness; that every sip from the shared cup can be hope, sweet on the tongue.

Grandma with her mother and with me, June 1981.

my journey towards mutuality

Today I'm linking up with Rachel Held Evans in her Week of Mutuality, dedicated to discussing an egalitarian view of gender. The goal is to show how scripture, tradition, reason, and experience all support a posture of equality toward women, one that favors mutuality rather than hierarchy, in the home, Church, and society. Rather than digging into debate, I simply want to share the story of my journey towards egalitarianism. Later this week, I hope to post on 1 Corinthians 11 and on how I define feminism.


My parents have a beautiful, loving marriage of thirty-three years. Despite fairly significant differences in the way they approach life (Mom’s a vegetarian, for example, while Dad’s as red-blooded a carnivore as they come), they are loyal to each other in every way. They love and serve God. They make decisions together, and they treat each other with kindness and respect.

They are also pretty fierce complementarians. They believe that God designed different, but equally valuable, roles for men and women in the home and at church, that these roles are hierarchical, and that the truth about God and his church is best displayed in a marriage where the husband is a servant-leader and the wife submits to him as his helpmate. They taught me how to defend this position, and they taught me that it was the only legitimate interpretation of Scripture.

----

Buckled in the eighties minivan, we pass a church marquee. The pastor’s name, printed right there on the sign, in front of God and everybody, is a woman’s name. I mock it, the same way I mock Michael Dukakis with the neighbor kids in the backyard – that is to say, I mock it out of total ignorance. A female pastor?! Well, they clearly don’t believe that Scripture is God-breathed! Hope somebody leads them to Christ!

At Walnut Valley Christian Academy, we have a four-year class called Worldview. Spring semester, freshman year, we read Expository Preaching by Haddon Robinson. For final projects we prepare sermons. I am nervous, and overcome stage fright by imagining myself as Hilary Clinton (true story). I preach, to my co-ed class of ten, on Daniel, and Mrs. Fuqua gives me an A+.

Sophomore year I self-identify as a feminist. We study How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Fee and Stuart, and we write in-depth papers on small portions of Scripture. I don’t want to be bored with the project. So I choose “that passage” from 1 Timothy 2. You know the one. “I do not permit a woman to teach, or to have authority.” I read the commentaries we have at home. I conclude that while some of Paul’s principles did seem to be cultural rather than timeless, the fact that he referred to pre-fall Creation order (“for Adam was formed first, then Eve”) to make his case seemed to indicate that these were in fact guidelines for all time. However, I decide that the way he combined “teaching” and “exercising authority” meant that the only role specifically barred from women was that of head teaching pastor. I feel my conclusion is a little arbitrary.

Meanwhile, I take on about every leadership position open to me in the church. I lead small groups of junior high girls every Tuesday night. I am a counselor on retreats. I exhort the whole youth group, boys and girls, about our besetting sin of materialism. I testify in front of the church (the mega-church) about the value of community. In college I join a similar church, but almost immediately I find the college group oppressive. There is a clear ladder of spiritual superiority, a clear moral mold. I ditch, and help lead the youth group instead. The first time I lead a small group Bible study for girls, my co-teacher looks at me amazed. “I think you have the gift of teaching,” she says.

I go to southeast Asia, and I see God do miraculous things. I begin to wonder if the gift of apostleship (church-planting) is open to women, because a new church is being born around me, in the middle of a spiritual desert.

Then a church from my hometown asks if I’ll send a video message for the Father-Daughter Banquet in February. It’s not my church, and I’m not sure why they’ve asked me, but I agree, and carve out time to record. I speak about the things I appreciate in the way my dad raised me, connecting his parenting to appropriate Scriptures, and encouraging the fathers at the banquet to imitate my dad’s example. I send the video off and forget about it.

Until a few weeks later, when I hear that things didn’t go so well. In fact, some men in the audience, some male leaders in the church, think my video was wrong. Not that what I said was wrong: but that I, as woman, said it to men.

I thought that's what they had asked me to do.

A little bit heartbroken, I kind of go, “to hell with it,” and keep doing the work God has put in front of me.

------

Despite all this, I never really explored egalitarianism until this year. Perhaps I was hesitant to make a fuss. But I’ve grown increasingly ecumenical in my theology, and a solid half of the people who mentored me spiritually in my twenties were egalitarian. We rarely spoke of it, this belief that hierarchy was a result of the fall, and that embracing the kingdom of God included embracing the mutuality of pre-fall creation, but it was clear in the way they lived. When we joined an Episcopal church, I felt I should be conversant with the theological arguments for women in leadership. I read How I Changed My Mind About Women in Leadership, and it was interesting. When I read Finally Feminist, though, my jaw dropped, because this was an honest, compelling way to understand Scripture, and one I had never heard.

Though I’ve always been a feminist, a part of me did not want the egalitarian case to be so convincing. I didn’t want to disagree theologically with my parents, especially on a subject that is pretty foundational for them, and for most of the Christians I grew up with. Beyond that, for me the freedom and fullness and possibility of egalitarianism is scarier, and harder, than the clearly defined roles in complementarianism.

But what interpretation is easiest for me to live with isn’t the best evaluative question. Which one is the truest to Scripture?

This is how I lean, now. I lean towards mutuality. I know, like any good student of expository preaching, that you can’t make a watertight case either way. Intellectually, though, I think Finally Feminist is the best interpretation of these scriptures that I’ve found, and it makes sense in my life experience, too. I’m wondering if it might be time to make a fuss about it.

to be happy

You can't make paella without saffron, and I forgot to buy saffron when I did the grocery shopping on Monday.

The paella is non-negotiable, as it is in honor of our sole Spanish student in the ESL program, and the end-of-semester dinner is nine hours away. So 8:30 AM finds us in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

We shop quickly and successfully, gliding through the aisles. I'm a marvel of a parent. The three year old and the one year old stay in the cart, with only minor whining. We get to the checkout.

And then. Of course. For some reason they won't let me pay with the diaper, the pink Pull-Up, the half-bag of Cadbury eggs left over from Easter, the plastic cell phone, or even my keys. I've exhausted the contents of my green suede purse. My wallet is in my red leather school satchel. At home.

It's not a big deal. It's just that our four square miles of town rests a solid 25 minutes from any grocery store which might carry saffron.

I sigh. We rebuckle carseats and prepare for another hour in the car.

"What's wrong, mommy?" Rosie asks.

"I'm just feeling a little mad at myself for forgetting my purse," I admit. (I euphemize. A little mad: reasonable substitute for pissed off.)

"Don't be mad, mommy. God wants us to be happy."

"Does he?" I ask. I am really asking.

-----

I tell her I will turn on some music to try to cheer myself up. I search for the CD with Adele and Fleet Foxes and Joanna Newsom. I tell her we will stop at the coffeeshop and get ourselves a little cinnamon treat to cheer ourselves up.

God wants us to be happy.

-----

The last thing I want is to teach my daughter to believe in some kind of easy, name-it-claim-it happy faith.

No, the last thing I want is to teach her that she has to deny her emotions -- anger, frustration -- and pretend to be happy, because that's what God wants her to be.

And I don't think I've taught her that. I try to model expressing negative emotions in healthy ways. (Of course, I also seem to model medicating emotions with music and sugar-indulgence. Need to work on that.)

-----

But I'm also not going to argue with her when she says that God wants us to be happy. I'm not going to say, "But what if God is more interested in us being holy than happy?"

She's not old enough to understand the ways in which being holy is the same as being happy. Maybe I'm not old enough to understand that either.

I believe God wants us to be happy. And I know why Rosie believes it. She heard it in the Bible, the one we've already read a half a dozen times.

From the beginning, God's children had been running from him and hiding. God knew his children could never be happy without him. But they couldn't get back to him by themselves -- they were lost, they didn't know the way back...

Jesus knew it was nearly time for him to leave the world and go back to God.
"I won't be with you long," he said. "You are going to be very sad. But God's Helper will come. And then you'll be filled up with a Forever Happiness that won't ever leave.
So don't be afraid.
You are my friends
and I love you.

We have reason to be happy. I just needed to be reminded.

top ten things I adored about the Festival of Faith and Writing

This weekend my sweet husband and friends watched the kiddos while I attended the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Michigan. As a person of faith, a reading fiend, and a sometime writer, this little retreat - with likeminded friends - was probably the most nourishing and restorative personal trip I've taken since Chiangmai, 2005. But enough general blathering. Here they are, the top ten highlights:

10. Learning from the diverse religious and artistic viewpoints of Judith Shulevitz, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Leila Aboulela.

9. Meeting in person - even briefly - some writers and editors I have enjoyed and respected online (like Rachel of Eat With Joy, Katelyn of Christianity Today, and Micha of Mama Monk), and also making new connections (how could Christie and I possibly have so much in common?) Although, I also have to admit that being at a conference with people I "know" from twitter felt kind of like a creepy preview of walking around with google glasses on.

8. Witnessing the graciousness and humility of Ann Voskamp in person.

7. Hearing fascinating stories of God at work around the world from Luis Urrea and Shane Claibourne.

6. Eating at Brewery Vivant and San Chez Tapas Bistro with my dear friends Jenn, Jane, Karen, and Linda (plus new friend Laura). Real! Restaurants! (Yes, our four square miles of cornfields are a bit lacking in this area.)

5. Marilyn McEntyre on caring for words. A seriously inspiring woman, speaker, poet, teacher, academic.

4. The car trips with Jennifer. Two mamas of preschoolers, it turns out, have a lot to say when they actually get a chance to sleep a full night and finish a complete thought. And what a relief to discover that I do still like road trips!

3. And along the same lines, the chance to finish a thought- and even whole conversations! Whole meals! Whole lectures!- without being interrupted by: "You pretend to be a mama wolf, and I'll pretend to be a baby wolf who was shot by gunners..."

2. Hearing Marilynne Robinson speak. Twice. I don't know if there is another living writer for whom I have as much admiration. I'll admit to being a bit starstruck. If you don't know Marilynne Robinson, I recommend to you Gilead.

1. The opening plenary session with Gary Schmidt, whose young adult novels make me cry. I think you should read them, and I'd start with the Newberry award-winningThe Wednesday Wars. I loved what he said about writers as servants, like Namaan's servant girl, suggesting to the pain of the world, "Why don't you try this?"


The audio from the conference should be available online soon. I'll link to it. In the meantime, if you are interested, here is the book list I came away with.

The Princess and the Three Knights: a book review

I promised a full review of Karen Kingsbury's picture books, and (this time, at least), I'm keeping my word.

"I have nothing against princesses, when they are done right. But I do tend to get up in arms when the story told - especially by Christians - to my daughter features a beautiful, silent, passive, nameless teenage princess who needs only a man chosen for her to marry in order to have a happy ending.

Stories matter, and in this formative period in which my daughter can remember the words to a book after hearing it only once or twice, I'm careful about what she hears, especially if she's hearing about God. That's why I find The Princess and the Three Knights (Zonderkids 2009), by Christian romance novelist Karen Kingsbury, so troubling."

Hop over to the Christianity Today Women's Blog, Hermeneutics, to read the whole thing, and chime in with your own experiences or critiques there.

music and liturgy

The first music I loved was on tape. It was Rich Mullins, "Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth," and I was probably about twelve years old. I graduated to CD soon enough, and my little collection consisted mostly of the free discs dad brought home from the radio station - Amy Grant's "Heart in Motion" (and my signed picture), Steven Curtis Chapman's great adventure.

Then in high school I regressed back to tapes, because tapes were what played in my '88 camry. The Hootie and the Blowfish tape I made of the cd I found when I was babysitting at the Whitlock's house. The recordings Caedmon's Call made before they were signed to a label.

Technology changed again. We had napster, and I was sampling new things, mp3 files burned to disc: Rosie Thomas, Dar Williams, Ani Difranco, Toad the Wet Sprocket.

But through all those changes, my listening was always limited to the collection that I owned, and as I result I really treasured albums, and I listened to almost all of them until I knew all the words by heart. The music was important to me.

Then in my twenties there was isohunt, and peer to peer sharing, and then pandora, and then rdio and spotify, and now I can listen to (or even "own") almost anything I want, at any time, and in practically any place.

The abundant availability of music made it harder to value, enjoy, and be moved by. It wasn't worth as much. So it didn't mean as much. It was digital, taking up no space in my life at all. It was overconsumption of something that was as light as air.

This is why, three or four years ago, Jack and I decided to quit peer to peer sharing. We deleted all (ok, not all, but most) of our illegally gained mp3 files. It's also why we bought a record player and started actually purchasing music again, this time on vinyl.

Now, when we get new music, it means something. It's an investment, and it takes up space in our house, so we also invest our time listening to it and letting it grow space in our hearts.

Recently I've felt that listening to music on a record player is something like the liturgy and eucharist at our Episcopal church. Listening to a record is a very physical process. I don't type a name in a search box; I kneel and flip through record sleeves. I stand, and lift the lid, and place the needle just right. The music requires attention, and after a few songs, I move to turn the record over. The records, and the player, take up physical space in my life, a rooted kind of space. They require a physical response. They require attention. They are repeated. Place, roots, physical response, attention, repetition: these not only signal that what I'm doing means something, but they create meaning as well.

a princess problem, part one

This morning I was a scientist studying lions and a magic doctor healing giraffes. I was a three year old girl holding a baby jaguar; I was a "halt-man" (which is exactly what it sounds like); and I was a pony running through a candy forest. I was friends with a lion, a little girl, another pony, and finally, a princess.

She put on an ancient nightgown. "I think this twirls," she said, experimenting. "I must be a princess!"

Time to engage in some research. "What do princesses do?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said. "They organize things."

Then,

"Sometimes," she continued, "people think I'm a princess."

"Why do they think that?" I asked.

"Because they think I'm pretty," she said nonchalantly, and then with passion, "Chase me!" And we're back to tag, running in circles around the house, the all-time favorite activity.

I have nothing against twirly skirts, telling our daughters that they are beautiful, or fairy tales with happy endings. I like love stories, including my own, which, incidentally, began a long time ago in a faraway land and involves a strong man with kind eyes.

I have nothing against princesses, when they are done right. And I think even Disney does them right, sometimes.

But I get all up in arms when the role model suggested - by Christians - for my three year old daughter is a beautiful, silent, passive, nameless, objectified teenage princess who only needs a man chosen for her to marry in order to have a happy ending.

Oh, this book gets my heart rate up. I've tried to ignore it for a year now, but it keeps showing up. And I looked at reviews online and they're all positive! So I am compelled. I'll tell you more about this book (and its counterpoint for boys), and why I - not to mince words - hate it, in a few days, when I calm down. Or even if I don't.

December in Little Rock

With weather into the sixties, we took every chance to enjoy the parks in Little Rock this December, playing at Pinnacle, Alsopp Park, the Rivermarket, & Two Rivers. The natural beauty of the Ozarks had us certainly thinking twice about the place we've chosen to call "home" for now.

We had three things to celebrate this December. First was Jimmy's engagement to EA, whom we all love. With her family we visited the Garvan Gardens Christmas lights.

Second was Jesus' birthday, which we celebrated with songs, fellowship, food &wine, gifts for each other, and gifts for people around the world via Compassion and World Vision. The gift for the whole family that was a hit was the board game Dominion. Rosie's favorites were binoculars and a magnifying glass (she is pictured here wearing every article from her entire dress-up box).

Third, of course, we celebrated Katie's 27th birthday with dinner at home one night and at YaYa's the next night.

It was a lovely trip, and as Rosie says, "I already miss my uncles - Uncle GDaddy, Uncle Mimi, John, David, and...John?" (Sorry, Jim, we're working on it.)

Directions In Which To Lean in 2012

(My blog posting dropped off at the end of 2011 for several reasons - the external hard drive on which I had stored everything, photos included, started malfunctioning; I began teaching again very suddenly and unexpectedly; and I hosted my first family holiday, Thanksgiving. I'm still having trouble with my photos, but am going to blog anyway.)

These are my resolutions, of a sort, though none of them are the kind that require me to do something every day, like read the bible or exercise or drink more water. I always fail at those. These are more like directions I have already started traveling in, and want to continue in for 2012.

1. Eat meatless one day a week, probably two, and when eating meat, try to eat more organically, locally, happily raised animals and animal products.

2. Start composting, and somehow or another, do more vegetable gardening this year.

3. Continue gradually to replace personal health and beauty products, and household cleaning products, with more natural alternatives (eliminate SLS, dyes, fragrances, chemicals, etc). (My pinterest inspiration board is here, and I'm always looking for suggestions!)

4. Use Common Prayer daily & read large portions of the Bible (Message translation for freshness).

5. Help Rosie develop better habits regarding toothbrushing, tv watching, bible reading &memorization. Maybe try a visual schedule with her?

6. Re-work budget and be more organized in spending (in January!).

7. Continue to have 2-3 evenings a week tv-free.

8. Continue to go on a date twice a month.

Would also like to (but don't hold your breath)...
-Revive the practice of morning pages (I haven't done them since 2005!)
-Go for a walk outside every day

PS- With both my laptop and external hard drive on the fritz, I'm blogging through an iPad app which seems to cut off my pictures on some (though not all) browsers. Still working on a fix :-(

baptism

Last year, at one of our very last times of worship with the good folks at Greenlake Presbyterian (hi! we miss you.), Mike Kelly preached about infant baptism. His logical presentation, interpretation of Scripture, and especially his pastoral and fatherly heart in the sermon completely convinced Jack and me that we wanted our babies to be baptized. With only two or three weeks left in Seattle, we weren't able to do it there.

In Indiana, it took us a good six to nine months to settle into a church home. But we did, finally, and this morning at Gethsemane Episcopal Church in Marion, Rosemary and Owen were baptized. We are grateful.

surprised by carrots

This week we picked some carrots in our backyard.


Back in March or April, I planted carrot and pea seeds next to our storage shed. A couple days later, the rabbit family came nosing around, eating flowers off the snapdragon stems in my pots. With a newborn in my arms, I decided to give up the idea of a garden for this summer. I didn't want to fight the rabbits. And I let the weeds grow over my little cleared patch of dirt.




But last week we picked these carrots in my forgotten plot. Their existence reminds me of God's grace, and how he keeps working even when I don't. That he can bless even my short-lived, half-forgotten impulses is a gift. I'm thankful.