Holy Guests

Photos are from last night's Advent candle lighting.

Sometimes my life accidentally takes on a theme. Last week, during one of those "Wow. If I move I will be sick" evenings of nausea, I couldn't even focus on reading. I turned to Netflix, which told me I might like a movie called Ushpizin. Yes, a movie in Hebrew with subtitles. So I sat and watched it, and besides not understanding all the jokes that I'm sure were there, I really liked the film. It was uplifting in a largely foreign way, but I also felt a lot in common with some of the couple's hopes. And I could relate to the conflicted feelings they had while trying to give hospitality to guests with a different set of norms.

Then this weekend rolled around, and I found myself as the guest. We visited our local Orthodox mission church (link is to the church's website). We've never been to an Orthodox service before, but I met the priest when I was in Divinity School. We felt like that little bit of familiarity plus having the liturgy in English would make our first experience easier. The service was familiar, but different. I found it so beautiful and restful that we will probably visit as often as we can, just for worship and rest. More on that later. After the Liturgy, we were invited to stay for coffee hour. I think we talked with at least a third of the congregation -like, really talked. People had accents ranging from Southern hick to I think it was Ukrainian and maybe Czech. It seemed as though most of the folks were converts, none of them because of bitterness with their old traditions, but because they felt called and saw something beautiful, holy, in the Orthodox liturgy. But I told you there was a theme and I'm rambling. From the first, we were treated with such kindness and consideration. At least four separate families and three single people invited us to stay for coffee (really a light lunch). A couple of different folks answered our questions when we were clueless and gave us booklets for following the liturgy. People stand in Orthodox services, but this parish had pews along the walls for those who needed rest. We talked to other parents who needed to walk their kids outside for awhile. At the coffee hour, we found that we were treated with honor, and pretty much everyone had some bit of theological wisdom that just slipped into the conversation. I told Andrew as soon as we got to the car after a mere 3.5 hours, "They treated us like angels. They welcomed us like we were the three angels."

We love our Episcopal church, mind you. But sometimes we are just so worn out from all the stuff we do and all the stuff everyone does there. I had started to feel as though at least 1/4 of my interactions at church were wearying rather than uplifting. Rather than being treated like an angel, I think a lot of times I am treated like an imposter. Like, people question why I am interested in doing volunteer work and so assume I have some sort of codependency I'm sloughing off at church or whatever. Not saying this is true, although I read body language pretty well and also remember conversations pretty well, like the one where someone wondered aloud why/how some people -hint- make so much time for the church. (Which, I know, right? What kind of head case volunteers at churches!?) So, in reality, these little snipes don't add up to much of a percentage of interactions at church, but they have been hitting their mark the past several months, and I needed a break. The problem isn't even whether people were really being hostile, but that I was taking crap personally. Thus the need for a break and some rest so I don't get all bitter and angry. When I was in seminary, there was one solid piece of advice that showed up in all the small groups and talks to those training for ministry: have a place to rest outside of your parish. For now, it seems as though I have found that at the parish we visited on Sunday.

The liturgy had the quality of a dream for me. I have read loads of stuff on the early church, which you might expect from someone with a couple of few degrees heavily loaded toward, oh, early church history. I love reading about theosis, which is the way the early church and the Orthodox churches talk about salvation. The key phrase for understanding theosis is "God became human so that humans might become divine." The belief does not sit comfortably with Calvinists or much with Western Christianity after I guess around the sixth century, which is where I think the divergence is more obvious. It's not very suited to most of what Protestants teach (maybe recovered some by Wesley). But it's what Andrew and I believe. That transformation into divine children of God is what happens in the Christian life. When we were at the Orthodox liturgy, we felt the difference right away. The people there were being transformed. Heaven was on earth. When I say the liturgy was dream-like, I mean it seemed outside of time somehow, like prophetic dreams that have a place and also float outside of time. Even though we were outsiders, just listeners, unable to participate in the communion, I still felt the pull outside myself. To stand outside oneself- ecstasy- and be transformed. The sermon was the only time everyone sat. Again I saw a mark of the Holy Spirit. I heard the priest describe the virtue of humility, and I rejoiced to realize that I am not humble. I was glad to know what I lacked, and the recognition of my lack of humility corresponded with a desire for humility that instantly gave me what I desired. That sort of hallmark of the gospel is rare, but it was there.

How much of the rest that I experienced was due to the hospitality of the parish? They mostly offered us knowledge. Is it that people treated us like angels because they believe heaven comes to earth in the Eucharist? Were we given rest because we walked into heaven yesterday? Everything was very simple. The people were simple. The food afterward was simple, in a simple building. There was no programming. But we were treated as honored guests.

I don't know what to make of it all. But the day puts me in mind of the coming season of Epiphany, when we will take chalk to our doorstep again, to inscribe on January 6, "20 + BCM + 10" as a sign that we welcome guests to our home. What will Advent have to be for us to make us treat others like kings, like angels?

a portrait of family joy

Tonight in the checkout line at Whole Foods, Pip learned how to pick his nose. You know, as one does at Whole Foods. First he rubbed his nose, then came the moment of revelation: the finger fits in the nose slot. A look of jubilation crossed his features. New horizons opened before him. Then it was over, the nostril exploration abandoned for a time, doubtless to be taken up again tomorrow. Or another day. The possibilities, once you make the finger + nose connection, are boundless.

On the way home, we rediscovered one of the sexiest songs ever on an old unmarked mix tape we found in the car after having it cleaned out by the Jiffy Lube guy last week. (See video below). We got almost to the end of the song before our small adventurer began to shout.



Then it was time for a moving rendition of "Little Bunny Fu-Fu." Poppa was riding shotgun, so he did most of the song. I only added in the final moment, when Fu-Fu meets his fate of turning into a loon.

We, and by we, I mostly mean "I," lazed about this morning. Andrew let me sleep till 9:30!!! I have not slept that late since before Pip was born. Then I took a nap with Pip in the late morning. Andrew did responsible things like read and study. I did responsible things like sleep and cuddle the toddler and try not to lose my breakfast. I managed a little online shopping, talked with my lil sis (the college student in theology, not the on-the-lam one who is a good person, too, just less legal right now). Then we ventured forth to the craft store to buy supplies for homemade ornaments and gifts.

I bought felt for making Pip some felt chocolate chip cookies. I am not a seamstress, but I can hand sew enough to put some felt circles together for our boy here. We also scored a mother lode of ribbons in the Michael's Black Friday sale. $2 ribbon spools were only 59¢, which is awesome if you love ribbons (okay, and I have a giant box or two of ribbon spools under my bed, so guess who loves ribbons). We also bought two tins for holding holiday baking. I didn't remember until I saw the tins in the store, but one of my cherished holiday memories is the sound and smell of a tin of homemade cookies and brownies being opened and passed around. We will have to have y'all over to dinner so we can pass the tins around. Or at least tea. At any rate, I decided we should add the cookie tins into our Advent traditions for Pip.

Here are my fellas yesterday playing outside at Sharon's. I will post a couple of more photos from T-giving soon.

Advent prep

In preparation for Advent, we've been pulling all of Pip's Christmas-themed books and setting them aside. It's a little weird to prepare for a season of preparation, but there you go. I also bought a chocolate Advent calendar and picked up some of the icon coloring sheets from our church's Advent workshop. For myself, I am reading about icons as a spiritual discipline. I love reading scripture, but I'm so tired right now it almost seems disrespectful how little attention I have to give it. Short descriptions of icons I can take in.

What I'm really doing is starting to plan for the twelve day Feast of the Nativity. We plan to celebrate the 12 Days of Christmas this year. That's when we'll pull out the Christmas books, including a beautiful pop-up I bought for Pip, which will actually be one of his presents. My plan is to give Pip one gift each day and add to the Little People nativity scene at the appropriate times throughout Advent and Christmas. Andrew worried that giving Pip that many gifts would make him like Dudley Dursley, but I pointed out that Dudders had 39 gifts for one birthday, so it's really not the same. I'm hoping to wrap all the gifts in reusable ways, but honestly, I love paper. Most likely some of the stuff will be in beautiful papers. There are some places where going green is against my aesthetic principles. Like giving up cut flowers. To me, that's not green. It's depressing. and dumb. And giving up pretty wrapping paper. Why?

Anyway, a couple of his gifts are books, so they'll be early in the line-up.

Our only big Advent thing to do is the Advent wreath. We're trying to chill and take it easy.

But my question for you is, do you have any Christmas or Advent children's [picture] book faves? If so, please comment.

a great weekend at last

Above: Pip imitates Poppa by carrying his snack bag like Poppa's laptop case.

As my recent post indicated, we were having a really stressful couple of months. A lot of that was due to being over-busy, but a lot more was that we missed our friends and each other. So we took some time to sort ourselves (an ongoing project) and found ways to get a break. Like this Sunday we're going to visit the church of an Orthodox priest I met in seminary, just to nourish our souls and not have to do anything but pray and rest. Our moods took a turn for the better last weekend after a supper club (but were dampened again by scornful church people the following Sunday), then actually improved dramatically this weekend when I got to visit with some folks I haven't seen in a long time.

On Friday, Pip and I met my Div School friend Michael (or I should say the Rev. Michael __, since he's a priest) for lunch. We wound up getting to spend a few hours with him since he went with us to get our car serviced and we gave him a lift to pick up his rental car. Pip took to Michael right away. He passed him a sippy cup, and Michael thanked him. He passed him his "monk-monk," Monkey, and Michael thanked him. He passed him a chip, and Michael thanked him and ate it. Thus the toddler hospitality ritual was completed, I guess. That, and later on Michael gave Pip some of his cookies. By the time we were waiting around at JiffyLube, Pip raised his arms and requested Michael to pick him up. Then he just cuddled him for about ten minutes. I thought it was cool that Pip saw the same genuine goodness and openness and genuineness of spirit we have always seen in our old friend, even though Andrew and I haven't seen him in five years.

Michael and I had a really great conversation about ways forward and pitfalls in the same-sex marriage/debates. If you read anything on the subject, you know how refreshing and unusual such a conversation was. I was able to run some of my ideas past him, and we talked about some of the boundaries that would help people find a theologically and pastorally responsible way forward. I think I'll save that conversation for a separate blog post, so that I can take time to explain some of my thoughts from it. But it was really well-timed for me, since our parish will likely have to embark on some conversations on the subject in the next couple of years.

Update: Please pray for my friend Michael's father. His family gathered this weekend for Thanksgiving, and his dad fell and broke his larynx, so that the swelling cut off oxygen for a few minutes. The family is gathered in a strange city to most of them.

On Saturday, I finally got to spend time with my best good friend Sharon again. For the first time in 117 days. We took a couple few hours for lunch, then spent another few hours wandering around the mall where we met. To say it was cathartic would be an understatement. We both had been dealing with a lot of mess. Then we were able to encourage each other, and for the first time in over three months, shop for clothes. Because neither of us enjoys shopping at certain stores without backup. And if I'm honest, I still have a little bit too much trailer-park in my fashion sense, and not in the charming way. More like the Nadine, big-haired middle aged woman with fuschia lipstick and wildly unsuitable blinding patterns way. Now you know my kryptonite. Paisley in any form. Sometimes I can get my sister to talk me down, long-distance, but in the autumn I need hands-on redirection. Somewhere inside my inner trailer park queen leaps for joy at the sight of sequins, fake gold, flocking, garish paisleys, and pretty much anything else that will just not look right and make my boobs look like novelty hubcaps.

We're looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with Sharon and her family, which is awesome. We have spent the past three or four T-givings with them. Even two years ago, when our plane arrived from Scotland on Thanksgiving evening, Sharon's family had sent along a take-away Thanksgiving dinner for us to eat when Sharon's husband David picked us up from the airport. We are mostly mooching this year, though I am for sure bringing biscuits and pie.

Speaking of biscuits, I got this pregnancy craving for buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy on Sunday night. I spent several hours yesterday acquiring ingredients, then cooking, then eating a big bowl of biscuits and gravy. After which I was full and happy. And completely surprised by how easy it is to make buttermilk biscuits from scratch. How did Bisquick ever fool anyone into thinking that it's easier? With the exception of the fact that it takes two minutes to cut in the fat, these biscuits take maybe one minute longer than Bisquick ones. So three minutes difference. Crazy. Today I was all, yuck - all food, again. But I managed to eat string cheese and wheat crackers for a snack and for a late lunch made some mac&cheese with some of the chicken I baked yesterday. Anyway, yeah. I can make buttermilk biscuits now.

Here you see the requisite buttermilk. Below, sausage that I admit I only made for the gravy. Which gravy was not as good as my mama's, though I called her for directions. I think I need a fattier sausage next time.
I made drop biscuits, but tried a suggestion in the Joy of Cooking to drop them into muffin tin liners. It worked okay, but I'll probably not do it again unless I am serving a crowd.
Sunday was the picture taking session for the Christmas Eve creche slideshow. Here are a couple of photos of Pip in the piglet costume he wore. I will post others on facebook soon.

I love that Pip is so comfortable at our church. He wandered all around, right through the crowds of older kids dressed as shepherds and angels and other animals. He even kept his hat on for the actual staged photos, but we won't have copies of those for awhile yet.

Pip's PSA

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew took a day off work so we could spend time together after a whirlwind of meetings and late nights. We stopped to smell the roses.

what we've been up to here

Redshift

The nausea is overwhelming me with this pregnancy. Combined with an aversion to most foods and being tuckered out, I just haven't had the energy to write down my thoughts much of late. I do have thoughts. It's just that they seem to flee rapidly before my attempts to follow them. In other words, I have redshift thoughts.

Blueshift

The thoughts that seem to come after me, on the other hand, tend to be so complex that they would take a huge essay to pick apart, or so emotional that they keep me awake. I keep thinking about my sister Kristin, who is on the lam for breaking probation, but who really shouldn't turn herself in because of her situation and the injustice of her case. She had poorly treated depression when she was 17 and wore some of my brother's Adderall patches to school one day to stay awake. Okay, if she was a NYTimes reporter, she would write a pithy article about how all the moms are stealing their kids' ADD meds to overachieve and everyone would talk about it at coffee and forget about it. But she was a poor kid. So she got sentence to 6 months in adult jail in one of the the worst human rights violating jail systems in the country (Harris Co. Jail), wherein she was beaten badly twice and had to have her ear sewn back on. For f-ing Adderall patches. Her lawyer apparently smelled strongly of cats and suggested she be put in jail as an opportunity to go to in-jail rehab. Which she did, but a spot didn't open for two months. While in rehab, my sister was several times forced to remove all of her clothes and stand naked with the other inmates in the unheated gymnasium in winter at 2am because the guards said someone was hiding drugs. None of them had legal recourse because none of them could afford lawyers. Did I mention that a judge thought this was proper punishment for bumming your little brother's Adderall patches in high school? The same judge in whose jurisdiction her probation violation case falls. Apparently, once out, my sister screwed up a little with a lot of help from people who should have protected her. My step-mother apparently bought some marijuana and smoked it in front of my sister, who joined in, then got called in the next day to her probation officer, where she would have failed the drug test. This was likely a set-up by my pretty evil step-mother, but to say so is speculation. So my sister, not wanting to return to jail for who knows how long, skipped her appointment, thus breaking probation. No, she wasn't smart about the situation, but she was 18. Then she got pregnant and was terrified of going back to that horrible jail while pregnant. Now she has a baby whom she adores and does not want to leave to possibly be punished to the full extent possible for skipping a probation appointment. Which probation she had because, again, damn Adderall patches. She can't get her GED or a job, and I don't even know where she lives with her boyfriend. I just know that she should never have been sent to jail in the first place, that she wants to lead a better life, that being away from her wicked stepmother will help her keep clean, and that she absolutely cannot afford a lawyer at all, even of the crappy variety, and she needs a good one. So these thoughts come to me at night. What can I do? I'm thinking of applying for pardons from the State of Texas or something. I don't know any good lawyers in that area, or even if there is legal recourse in my sister's situation. If she were a rich kid, she would have gotten a few hours community service to start with, and maybe a few more for breaking probation, but that's not what happened or what is likely for her if she steps forward now. It will be back to jail for six months to be beaten and abused and not get to see her baby or get a job or training or to touch anyone the entire time. There are no open visiting areas there. You talk through bullet-proof glass through "speakers" that don't work, so you shout while she presses her ear against the other grimy side. Uncool.

Honestly, that is the least complex and involved set of ideas that keep me up at night. I also wonder how I am going to cuddle Pip properly when Pete comes along. And then there are the logic tunnels of theology. I pretty much have to read fluffy fiction to get to sleep these days.

Speaking of which, I updated my reading list on the left. Only I left off the cheesey chic lit I keep breezing through, but thanks, Sharon, for lending me some.

I have been trying to pull together Christmas presents this year, but I don't really have energy to shop. We have the gifts we're giving Andrew's parents, and Pip and I are making something for my mom, but I still have to purchase and/or find and purchase stuff for our other relatives. Some people are easy because we can buy some Heifer chicks and bees. But my baby bro is like 6'4" and thin and needs teeshirts, which are hard to find.

In unrelated news, except that I just remembered, my grandma finally cashed the check I sent her for running into her car with my other grandmother's car back in September, so I guess it covered the damages. Whew.

Okay, I have rambled and vented, and now I will sign off so I can post photos of a wonderful little boy.

brains

I don't know much about child development, so maybe I am unduly impressed here. But Pip just brought me his little Tupperware shape sorter. You know, this thing:

He still has trouble getting the shapes out once they're in. I tumped out the shapes for him and came back to the kitchen to make a bowl of cereal. Right after the cereal was made, he whined. I went to see if he needed help. He had already put the oval, the circle, and the cross shapes in, but the star wasn't cooperating even though he had found the right hole. I sat with him to encourage him and told him the star just had to be aligned just right, and he had found the right spot. He got the star in, and then he sorted the rest of the shapes with me there. He left the trapezoid, square, pentagon and hexagon for last. When I talked with him about the hexagon, I said, "This one has six sides. Let's see if there are similar shapes." He said, "six," and found the right slot and put in the shape. Then he picked up the pentagon, said, "Five," without prompting, and put the shape in the right slot. The trapezoid was the only one he tried on two or three slots before he got it. The points seemed like they would fit somewhere else, I guess.

So here I am, taken aback that Mr. I'm Sixteen Months Old can sort all ten of his shapes, many of them with no coaching whatsoever, and then only so he doesn't get impatient with himself.

Look, I remember jacking with those shape sorters when I was two or three. I think this kid has one up on me. Besides the fact that he names all his colors and has started counting 1-2-3-4-5 and trying to say his ABC's and apparently reading some words. Make that several up on me at his age. It's fun to watch him grow and learn. He's so lovable and sweet, my little brainy fellow.