Living-Deliberately.com

The French Cassoulet in Nourishing Tradition is one hearty, rich, delish dish that cries and begs for a crisp white wine to go with it.

I made it today planning chicken instead of duck, and beef instead of lamb, and it has sausage besides. It’s chock full of white beans and makes an out-of-this-world savory gravy with a flavor few other recipes I make even slightly resemble.

Worth a try, especially on a cold, cozy day. Have some pears and walnuts around for a spinach salad, and the aforementioned wine, and maybe some crusty bread as well and you have an absolute feast.

This is mostly a shout-out to my Gigi, my grandma and my kids’ (G)reat (G)grandma, who loves the fall as much as I do.

This is our front yard, with my corn stalk decorations and falling maple leaves. The kids will be getting their pumpkins this week to add.

This is the Plateau Home School, across the street from my porch.

This the view up on the road that goes up behind our house.

The end of my driveway.

You know who

The view of the old Presby church on my side yard.

Sorry Gigi that they aren’t better quality; my little camera doesn’t do distance well but I wanted to give you an idea of all the colors I see these days!

Like I’ve said before, this week dh and I are reading “Facing East” by Frederica Matthewes-Green, not to be confused with last week’s read, “At the Corner of East and Now”.

Last night’s chapter delved a bit into the use of icons, which I found helpful because it is THE biggest difference I’m grappling with. It occurred to me that I may not be the only one fairly clueless about the role icons play in Orthodox worship and why, and maybe a few excerpts from the book would be helpful.

The author tells a story about a book she read her children when they were small called “The Little Lost Lamb” that had pictures of Jesus with children in it. Her children spontaneously kissed the picture each night (they were Episcopalian at the time). She says,

“My problem, then, was not with using images of Jesus or depictions of Bible stories or heroes of the faith. I knew our love wasn’t being lavished on a laminated plaque but was being offered through the picture to the Lord himself. The image was like a window, a seen object opening us to things unseen.”

The idea of icons being windows (which is why they are always flat and not 3-D) is much of the Orthodox position. A quote from St. Basil the Great is, “Honor shown to the icon passes to the prototype it represents.”

It was upon reading this that I had two memories strike me that caused this to resonate with me: one, was that as a pre-teen girl I’d hide pictures of the boy I liked at the moment and sometimes kiss them; the other was the memory, fairly recent, of how I’d kiss our daughter Clara’s pictures. I knew I wasn’t kissing her (to my great pain); but that some secret hope within me existed that my kiss would somehow pass onto her where she was, and that somehow, she’d “feel” my kiss. Like a window to my baby.

In the eighth and ninth century there was a great debate over the use of icons and a group called the iconoclasts (icon smashers) destroyed icons believing them to be idols. On pro-icon argument reminded me of my little protest over R. C Sproul’s comparison of them to the golden calf.

“How can they be idols? They’re pictures of Jesus. If it was a picture of Baal, that would be an idol. But Jesus is God!”

She says, “But the Orthodox have no illusion that an icon is itself a god. They distinguish between worship, given only to God, and veneration, the honor that may be accorded an icon, a saint, or the Theotokos (Mary, God-bearer).”

And of course, what is often pointed to is the incarnation itself. Where God in the OT wanted no visible image, he then “took flesh and became a baby. He became visible, concrete, with shocking specificity: a man of certain height, build, and eye color, eating a roast fish on a Sunday afternoon. Because God chose to become visible, we can represent him; we can represent any person or event in his story because these are manifestations of God’s will to invade earthly life, to make himself concrete and visible.”

Which brings out the point that icons must be images of actual happenings and people; not conjectures and ideas of what we want to portray. For instance, an icon can show Jesus and the Holy Spirit as a Dove, but not the God the Father.

David fell asleep at that point and so we only got halfway through the chapter. This week Netflix is sending me the series by Sister Wendy and I’m hoping at least one of the discs delves into religious art and icons, both eastern and western. I’m still uncertain what to think; only that they’ve done it this way for a long, long, long time, while an image-less worship is much more fairly recent and I think, for that reason, some suspicion of that would be appropriate.

Roadkill count on the way to town:

• 2 possums, 1 deer, 1 skunk, and I personally ran over and squashed one small squirrel

Weather:

• slow, drizzling rain, warm temps; fog and smoky mountain mists rising between the hills

On the list:

• two weeks of groceries, with the exception of next week’s produce and milk; screws, paint, masking tape, and lightbubls (CFBs) from the hardware store; honey, Rapadura, a variety of beans and grains from the health food store

In the car:

• one child with a toxic reaction that manifests in behavior issues from 3 hotdogs, 2 smores, and 3 koolaid drinks at a bonfire last night
• one child with extreme reflux due to above intoxication
• one child with a flair for drama, feeling “tormented” to have to go grocery shopping
• one child with a penchant for sudden, ear piercing screams
• the cooler for cold stuff
• 3 bags of trash to take to the dump
• Hank The Cowdog tapes

On the way:

• discovered we forgot the checkbook and after getting on the other side of town, turned around to retrieve it
• discovered David had the debit card and had to meet him at work to retrieve it (seeing a pattern yet?)
• donated used magazines to Senior’s Center
• noticed gas prices were down to 2.03 a gallon
• found ourselves enveloped in the most breathtaking autumn color of my life; absolute blankets of garnet, auburn, gold, and umber.
• cut all the errands and crammed them into one monster Walmart trip; bribed the kids with lunch buffet in exchange for good behavior.

In the store:

• got a dumb look from an employee when I asked where the hot water bottles were; she sent me to the thermos section
• had Andrew push a second cart to put the items in that the baby likes to chew open
• heard an older lady point and say, “Look at them!!!” and stand nearly in awe of our red hair
• nearly cried trying to find Lemon juice in a bottle….not with canned fruit, not with juices, only small containers in produce
• caught “Donkey” when baby threw him about 500 times into the aisles, the meat case, the potato bins…

On the way home:

• tried to ignore an extremely full bladder while it consistantly rained
• listened while Dave Ramsey went over the baby steps again
• rejoiced as the baby fell asleep

After getting home:

• spoke on the phone with mom and then friend Anna while putting away loot
• fed the dog, cleaned the fridge, and consequently fed the chickens
• breathed deep yoga breaths and tried to let hurts roll off
• put veggies onto boil for a light soup

Tonight:

• we’ll have soup, bathe babies, and tuck them in
• watch Survivor with a bowl of pocorn and some Dove dark chocolate
• read a chapter from “Facing East” by Frederica Matthewes-Green
• pray for a night of sleep sans insomnia

I suppose it’s normal along the way through life to find voices that resonate with us and to trust in those voices at some point. We allow their efforts to filter information, helps us sift through ideologies and worldviews that we don’t always have the time for ourselves. We align with them, knowing their imperfections, but being busy people, relying on “trust and go” anyway.

And then some day, sometimes, something happens that causes us to question that voice. Children do it as they mature and realize the humanity of their parents. Patients do it as they differ from their doctors. Students do it as they pass their teachers at times in knowledge and insight.

Being “over” someone is quite the powerful position. Knowing one’s own influence over another may cause corruption or deep respect. When the underlings start to wander, the one in power may resort to “less than” tactics to corrale them back into the fold. It’s an old story.

The thinking person comes to a crossroads though. Who to beleive? Which path to take? At what point does loyalty factor in over pursuing truth?

I’ve lately been wrestling with God. At points over the past few months I dalied very close to intentional agnosticism, a sigh of surrender that “we can’t know”. I’m hungry, nay starving, for a real pursuit of holiness, for genuineness on the part of God-followers. I want to see human examples of those who’ve gone before who really achieved what we talk about: becoming more like Christ. I want to see a respect paid to worship, a recognition of the sacred, and what surrounds in our modern culture pales in near-disgusting comparison to any description of worship found in the bible. As denominations split and micro-split and divide evermore over who’s got “the truth”, I detect an odor that no one does. I’m weary of divisive arugments and feeling like we are very, VERY far from “the church” that Christ is going to have as bride. From the status of things now, in my opinion, she’s quite a schizophrenic, multiple-personality bride.

And onto the scene burst Orthodoxy. Something I knew nothing, nothing, nothing about. A faith, a church with 6 million American members, and yet seemingly invisible to the average citizen in any circle I’ve traveled. A faith I once heard only represented in baptist churches sending missionaries to formerly communist countries, describing “dead” churches.

But this week I learned a few things:

• There is no American Orthodox Church yet; all the churches here come from “mother churches”, they are mission plants, from ethnic countries (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, etc). Over the past century, which short sighted Americans will think is a lifetime but to other cultures is a drop in the pan, over 2 million Russian Orthodox were killed or imprisoned. They couldn’t develop their mission churches in this “new” country because they were fighting for mere survival, and all the while a large part of the west turned a blind eye on their persecution. Now, when they are more free, instead of helping them restore and heal, we call them “dead” and seek to inject our own fragmented denominations.
• The Orthodox church pre-dates denominations. It is what the church would look like if Rome had not decided the Pope was infallible (how it went down from the O point of view) and the Protestant reformation (against the Roman Catholics) had never happened. It is a historic church, the historic church.
• All the ethnic division (Greek, Russian, and others; there are six jurisdictions) is by country but the church itself is the same.
• Orthodox, like Catholocism, has saints. Saints are those “who’ve gone before”. Examples of other HUMANS who have attained, as closely as we can find, the mark we all strive for. They don’t “worship” saints in that they think they are deity.

I find my background has left me wholly unprepared to understand much of what I’m learning about. It almost hurts my brain to think about some of this stuff, so foreign in concept is most of it. I dance close to what point they are making and then just as quickly dance away as I ask questions about dogma or get hung up on icons.

And icons. What a hang up. Perhaps the biggest difference between my protestant traditions and either view of the historic church, beit Orthodoxy or Catholcism, is the use of images. I don’t particularly feel that I’ve missed this aspect of worship and I’ve actually wrestled quite hard with my own particpation in it as I’ve painted the representation of Christ for over 10 years for worship banners, something that meshes poorly with the Westminster Confession’s interpretation of the commandment against graven images.

I’m no where near “landed” on an understanding of icons. But I’m struggling with a contrast: who to believe?

On one hand, I have books by a member of the Orthodox church, a “mother” (pastor’s wife) and her first hand representation of what role icons and images play in their worship and church.

On the other hand I have the words of someone I once highly trusted, a “filter” for ideologies and worldviews: R. C Sproul. In his issue of Tabletalk, years ago, that dealt with the rise of the Orthodox church in America, he addressed the issue of icons:

He compares them first with the golden calf erected in the wilderness. He brings up Calvin’s argument against them: “He argued, for example, against the use of icons because seeking to make visible the invisible God did violence to the divine majesty.”

I knew I was in “trouble” of doubting my old trusted source when in my mind, I retorted with:

but what does a cow have to do with the divine image of God? Icons aren’t images of bovine.

and…

God himself went from invisible to visible with the incarnation….

He goes on to say:

“the cheif abuses of icons are the veneration of them, praying before them and offering sacrifices to them. Again, it was Augustine who argued that people who pray or worship while looking at an image are inclined to think or hope that they are being heard by the image.”

is this kind of like yelling at the television? Seems the kind of argument intended to make others “scoff” at the ridiculousness of others. Reeked of misrepresentation to me.

Intellectual arugments aside, I was left with an uneasy feeling, realizing that something didn’t match up. What the orthodox say they do with icons isn’t what this reformed, protestant, prebeyterian intellectual says they do.

A similar thing is happening over Calvanism with an old pastor of mine. I haven’t followed it that closely, only bits and pieces and a few blog links from Yarbucks, an old friend’s site.

And basically, the same thing is happening as through a series of sermons Dr. Vines is finally, loudly, articulating his thoughts on Calvanism and other denominational higher-ups join into the conversation:

What calvanists say they do and beleive doesn’t match up with what these baptist, non-calvanist, convention and seminary leaders say they do.

At some point the air between conversants gets a distortion, a cloudiness. The sentiments and beliefs in question have to stand for themselves, sans slanted representation. It’s a difficult teasing of it apart, a weariness with divisive humanity, and I suppose necessary. The fight for power over another mucks up the process, the desire to have the strongest “side” seeping in.

I find there is very little trust on both sides because of it. I wonder if anyone believes so strongly in the rightness of their beliefs to allow the Holy Spirit to do the defending and guiding. To trust in the sacred rather than the interpreter of the day.

The wrestling continues.

Not me. My sister and BIL, Joel. I’m linking to their blog this morning because his post hit a soft spot…

“We’ve moved into another house for a while. It’s layed out the same, has most of our furniture but there’s this odd little yellow room. We used to go into the one in our old house all the time but this new room seems foreign. As if someone has grafted it onto our old house.”

I remember each nursery, each room prepared for the little one that was soon to come. The smell of paint, the clean crib, each week getting a new stuffed toy, sheet, outfit. Walking in and breathing deeply, trying to imagine how that sweet little head was going to smell, what their eyes would look like, how much hair they’d have. Wanting it all to be perfect and then, while going through a typical day of home keeping, walking past the door and smiling every time at the secret expectations it cradled within.

Distorted Beauty.

be sure to check out my side bar; my very wonderful BIL is updating and perfecting it quite often per my annoying requests in his inbox, and he’s been very patient as I need the same things repeated over and over and over……

anyway, the result is a sidebar that I”m proud of: not gunked up with random ads or fading ideologies, but stuff I really care enough about to spread.

THANKS Joel (who provides web hosting if anyone is looking for it)

Why won’t spell check recognize “blog” as a real word? What century IS THIS?!

I’m doin’ it this year! Try to write 50k words in a month, going for “getting it all out” rather than fine tune quality. Just my kind of purging ;-).  Here’s the website if any of my wordy friends are interested….

NaNoWriMo

You know what that means? What that looks like?

Today it looks like a grandfatherly country man named Mushy, driving up to my house in the rain with a pick up truck loaded heavily with wood, chopped and ready to stack. Said he knew we were too new to know where to get good wood, said he didn’t want our children to be cold, said he already had the wood sitting there and wouldn’t we like it.

I almost started crying right there in the driveway. He wouldn’t take a cup of coffee or tea; I didn’t have cash to slip into his cab. We just had a nice conversation and our boys enjoyed talking and unloading it with him, despite the cold rain soaking all of them.

Mushy works at the same company as David does, driving the truck. He just heard David talking about wood, followed the poisony-ivy saga, and knew he had a way to bless others.

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Yesterday we had friends over for dinner and one of the kids (theirs? ours? we aren’t sure) found this flashcard of the word “this” and placed it on their plate.

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Up the road is a little dog, some kind of terrier/beagle mix. He was dumped there about two weeks ago wearing an orange bandana for a collar. He sits and forlornly watches the traffic, sometimes pacing along the side of the road, sometimes sitting and waiting. Today Andrew went over and tried to coax him away from the road to eat and he wouldn’t come. Despite sitting in the open rain all day, being cold and hungry, he mournfully waits for his  owners to return for him.  He’ll probably die of a broken heart if he doesn’t get hit first. Later we saw someone else try to encourage him to jump into their truck. He just sat there and watched, unable to fathom an end to the life he once knew.

• Celia said to me last night, as I was trying to get a fire going, “Yeah Momma…keep those home fires going’ “
• as David and I sat down to read last night, with cups of tea and a fire nearby,  we heard singing coming from upstairs. Andrew and Celia had an old book of christmas carols that I had when I was kid (still has the Shopko sticker on it) and were singing, seriously  and beautifully, all three verses of Silent Night.
• Wheaton came to snuggle me this morning under the covers and said, “I love it when you rub my back. You scratch all my itches.”
• Rowan, who has learned to say, “yes”, says it like “yesssshhhhh”. For instance: “Rowan? Are you poopey in your diaper?” and he says, “Yessssshhhhh”.
• Wheaton said over pancakes this morning, “You know? When I was a little baby I didn’t know about God but I heard you talking about Him while I grew up and I knew He was real.”
• Andrew wants the full lyrics to “Sleigh Ride”. I could easily find these online for him but he came up with a plan to ask the librarian this afternoon when we go to Oak Ridge. I like his plan better.
• relatives wondering about gift ideas for the family…think blankets of the electric variety. It’s COLD in the mountains!

When you drive around the bend from town, approaching my street, this is what you see…

The back of the Plateau Home School is in the foreground and the old Presby church is peeking through the trees, which now are tones of red and yellow. These pics were taken on Labor Day weekend.

This is a closer view of the church across the street. It’s over 100 years old with all the origional wood work inside.

This is our house! The front door is now a dark blue-grey, the tree out front is red.

Here are my “city” chickens, in Das Chicken Haus.

The boys (here with their grandparents) frequently walk down the street to watch the trains.

and down the road from the train crossing is our little post office, the last “business” left in the “town” of Lancing.

This, is Red Fox.

Here’s our oldest, the first “apprentice” with his Papa.

We read this book in the evenings, curled up on the futon under blankets with mugs of hot tea. Frederica’s movie reviews have been something I’ve read for a few years now and David wonders why I’ve never passed them on, like I was holding out on a great secret. She also is a writer for NPR’s All Things Considered and her writing is both excellent and humerous. This book is giving us a peek into an aspect of christianity we’ve never before seen or been around, it’s history, it’s practices, it’s hunger for the “why” in worship. Orthodox liturgy isn’t satified with just talking about wanting to worship….they emphasize what about God we DO worship.

Here are a few excerpts from last night’s chapters:

“People newly coming to church should have an unfamiliar experience. It should be apparent to them that they are encountering something very different from the mundane. It should be discontinuous with their everyday experience, because God is discontinuous. God is holy, other, incomprehensible, strange, and if we go expecting an affable market-tested nice guy, we won’t be getting the whole picture. We’ll be getting the short God in a straw hat, not the big one beyond all thought.”

“A liturgical church has an advantage over one where worship is relatively spontaneous, in that people powered by religious emotion simply do run out of steam. Where there is a Liturgy, you show up each week and merge into that stream, and allow the prayers to shape you. But where the test of successful worship is how much you feel moved, there’s always performance anxiety; even the audience has to perform.

I’d been a chrisitan about ten years when I noticed to my dismay that my spiritual feelings were changing; the experience was growing quieter, less exciting. I feared that I was losing my faith, or that I might hear the Lord’s words to the church as Ephesus, ‘I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first’ (Rev. 2:4). Then I came to sense that my faith had undergone a shift of location. It had moved deep inside and was glowing there like a little oil lamp; if I was swept away with emotionally noisy worship, it might tip and sputter. Silence and attentiveness were now key.

I think this happens naturally in a believer’s relationship with God, just as it does between two people who are in love. At first, being in love is so strange, and the beloved is so other and exciting, that every moment is a thrill. But gradually over long years the couple grows together and grows alike. They no longer find each other a thrilling unknown but drink deeply of a treasured known that will always extend to mystery. At the beginning, the heart pounds just to see the beloved’s handwriting on an envelope; at the end, two sit side by side before a fire and don’t need to speak at all. When these rock bands [spoken of in the chapter] urge their audience not to let the joy fade, they may be calling them to fight a fruitless battle against moving to the next stage of spiritual communion, the one where God moves deep inside. When years shape us to be like him, his presense is less electric and strange; yet as we draw nearer, deeper faith yeilds deeper awe.”

Time….it’s been on my mind today.

My friend Julie posted this, about what her daughter brought home from school:

“J, 17 year old daughter, is currently studying psychology in high school and daily regales us with useful information about relationships and brain chemistry. So the other day, she bounds into the kitchen and demands: “What do you think the three things are that kids need from parents?”

Love?

Food?

A really cute fall wardrobe?

Here are the big three:

1. Time (as in time spent with the child)
2. Consistency (as in providing a base that child can count on)
3. Enthusiasm (as in “Woo-hoo - great idea, do that! I’m your fan.”)”

And “time” sat at the front of my brain all day.

Parenting requires time. That’s kind of a “no brainer” kind of statement and yet our culture has about as many intrepretations of what that should look like as we do bad hair days, which back in Florida looked like a dye job forming “roots” but around here could be that lingering 80’s mullet….on a woman.

Awhile back I read a book that dealt with the time we spend with/around/doing stuff for our children. Woman First, Family Always by Kathryn Sansone kinda pushed my buttons. There, all laid out in a shiny happy imagery (with an immaculate dye job and manicure), is an example of the “it’s all about quality” time kind of parenting. This pov seems to postulate that if you get a few choice moments with each child before the day is done, you’re doing a great job. They can have schedules so crammed a five year needs a palm pilot, they can spend the majority of their days having their needs met by everyone but their parent, but when the long day is over, if you get to sit for a few mintues or tuck them in or text message them how their day went, you’re doing okay.

A year later that still kind of splats on my windshield like a fat, black cicada. Hear that?

I want more. I birthed these kids, dreamed of them for years and years before they ever got here, and I get one shot to spend their childhoods with them. I want more than a few moments before bed, when we’re all tired and ready to sleep. A few mintues isn’t good enough, it doesn’t give enough space to really get to know the neat person inside. It doesn’t allow for happenstance miracles that one only gets to experience when they’re there. So much of “parenting” occurs between the sidewalk cracks, the unpredictable moments that fit inbetween the bigger things of the day.

And yet….I find myself experiencing the same panicked wonderment of, “am I spending enough time with my kids?” Do all parents wonder that? Even when it doesn’t make sense?
I”m physically present for my kids most hours of the day. Anytime they need me, I’m only a few feet, at most a room or two, away. We sit together as a family for three meals a day, seven days a week. Our van isn’t equipped with a DVD player so our long car trips are usually spent talking to one another. Our yard work is done by us, our shopping is done together, we’re together for worship, our education is for the most part together. When we go to activities, it’s, you guessed it….together. My kids aren’t yet old enough for me to leave them at home alone so when I run to the store for milk, it’s with everyone loaded. I manage a hair appointment now and then, a little scrapbooking, or time out by myself, but I don’t get a paycheck, don’t have a working wardrobe, get very little feedback from the kind of job I’m doing, won’t be playing on any sports teams, and consider a date night with my husband a beautiful luxury…because it is one.

I could be the poster child for “quantity”. Even when my mind is elsewhere, when I’m busy with the house or another sibling, or a phone call…I’m here.
Why do I do that? Well here it is folks:

Their childhood isn’t about ME. This isn’t about what I want. There isn’t enough TIME in the world to make up for a lost childhood where growing up had to happen too fast, where hurts took place and were never kissed and made better, where ideas have to be squelched because they didn’t fit into the schedule.

I don’t think one can choose quantity over quality or vise versa. Kids need parents who are engaged, who are interested, who are enthusiastic and eager. Sometimes a few minutes is all you get and they have to fortified and concentrated minutes! But Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that isn’t how you make a garden grow. It might take sacrifice to make it happen. It might end up being “what my life is all about”. These are not the days for pursuing my own dreams and goals while giving my kids the dredgy little leftovers I have at the end of the day.

“You can have it all” isn’t a lie. “You can have it all at the same time” is though. To every thing there is a season and a purpose under heaven.