Newsprint and coffee and marble-soft clouds

Happy Thanksgiving, fair blog readers! I've been meaning to post this for a week or so, just haven't had the time/memory... But now, as I wait for the house to wake up and Thanksgiving with the family to commence, here's a bit of free-flow that's come to me in the last couple weeks. Just to prove that when I'm not blogging, it doesn't always mean I'm not writing...

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The marble-soft clouds spread thin and flat like whipped froth on water's surface, and deep below, deep down through miles of clearwater sky, turbulent hills are branded with geometries of highways and farm plots, white-sharp curves of rivers and lonely clusters of small cities. From up here the world is bigger, and smaller--more manageable, less weighty. From this narrow seat, my neck and shoulder at odd angles in order to press forehead to throbbing window, it is imaginable that life could be similarly carved and sectioned into autumnally technicolor forest, mercurial lakes, paint-by-number pastures. In the thrum of jet engines that is its own kind of silence, everything falls into perfect order, nothing is remaindered. 

But a second look, and the froth is all there is to see: squint-requisite whiteness marked occasionally in winter reliefs, and then the hard cut of horizon, even up here: water and air, but more muddled than sea and sky. And this is the life I know: impossible to fathom or arrange, unknowable, a cover for something deeper. I peer harder and harder into the white, longing for the happy geometries of the ocean floor world I know but cannot prove. The white is solid still--still like marble, firm enough to send sun glares back at me. But in minutes, we will fall, we will take a breath and break the little surface tension, feel the weight of water as life surrounds us again in all it's unfathomables and depths, and what were drawings will return to structures, enclosures surrounding and owning us down in the bottom of the sea.

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Listening to a pair of our authors talk about mentor texts--children's book language that plays in deep verbs and hyphenated adjectives--I wonder when it was that I ended the affair.

I remember, still, sitting at the boxy Mac--my mother asleep upstairs, the instant coffee in the tan mug with the apple, the strange silence of midnight burning in my ears. There was work to do--a paper, a report, I don't remember. But I couldn't. A grip to write--not facts and regurgitated opinions but words and sounds that were all mine--had closed over my wrists as sure as rope, and I felt suddenly accompanied by myriad predecessors: mustachioed men and unstylish women who knew what it was to sacrifice small things and big--sleep, jobs, lovers--in the irregular affair we hold with words.

Because that's what it is: a back-and-forth love affair. A hot-and-cold, bruise-your-heart, cry-and-scream-and-go-for-weeks-not-speaking affair with a thesaurus and an empty page. And here I am, years later, the one who got away. The novels I planned to publish remain unfinished, a waiting cursor blinking expectedly, and forgotten. The very definition of my teenage, my college-age self utterly abandoned in the name of those small things and big, and I don't know if the exchange was a worthy one.

Because this old love still so easily circles and swirls into me--I can stand on the bluff, but without trying at all the water can spin around ankles and sink me into sand smiling, grateful, home. I am never, have never been out of love--but like an over-selfish lover, I insist on what my life fails to prove. I assure my old love, my ageless love, not to read into my silence, my too-many-left-blank pages. And like a lover unmatched on earth, she welcomes me back. No where-have-you-been, no if-this-is-going-to-work, no that's-what-you-said-last-time. Just the sound of a page turning, offering the possibility of new. The smell of newsprint and instant coffee. The burning of midnight silence. A waiting cursor.


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Five-Minute Friday: Mercy

Back on the 5MF bandwagon! Spent the evening planning a Day-of-Atonement-themed prayer mini-retreat tomorrow, so the brain is only firing in one direction right now--with the exception of it's now-immediate direction: that of bed!

GO

Sovereignty has no borders, and so it's not even surprising when I remember to look up the word, when I know the Day of At-One-Ment began as the sun slid below the mountains, and the word is "mercy." One of those words too holy to speak, like we should condense it, should throw away the pen. How can we even look for it, when we aren't good enough to give it? When Peter came out of the water, his brothers still hauling in the net, a Lord he'd denied and known to be dead standing before him, I don't think the word was on his lips, though it coursed through his veins. It's perhaps my favorite story--all the more because it isn't told, because it's too personal for even that man, who would bare everything else, to share with all humanity. The moment when a slaughtered lamb, having purified in one final at-one-ment, would take him by the shoulder, would smile, wait for Peter's eyes, and say the word only He has authority to speak.

STOP

Explanatory notes: 
- My nerdy English major self was almost disappointed at the simplicity of the etymology of "atonement." Literally being made "at one," esp. with God. 16th century.

- Peter's conversation with Jesus is, to some degree, assumed. I first heard a reference to it in a Beth Moore study (I forget which), and Beth is very frustrated that we don't get every detail of dialogue and body language. But I'm appreciate of the privacy granted there--as I am appreciate of the privacy He's granted me in times of utter brokenness. Piecing together Luke 24:34 and John 21:1-8, it's a fair guess that Peter had some alone time to talk, cry, repent, be at-oned. Mark Driscoll makes the point that the only difference between Peter and Judas was that Peter took his sin to the Christ and Judas took his to the grave. How fitting then that Peter would exhort the same of others, especially in his early preaching (Acts 2:38-40).

Book Review: Soil and Sacrament

When I requested Fred Bahnson's Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, I had hoped for a nice bookend with Keeping the Feast. One of my greatest passions is cooking for and feeding people, and I was looking forward to another book along those lines. When a shiny new hardcover arrived at my door, my brows crinkled in dread as I began to page through it: Gardening?? No, no, no, no. This would not work at all. Pesky Speakeasy. Pesky responsibility to read books. I picked up a pen, hunkered down, and cracked open the book with the enthusiasm of an undergrad looking for Gen Ed credits in a Shakespeare course.

But despite my lack of enthusiasm for the subject, Behnson completely won me with his journey from his bucolic community farm to other similar outposts around the continent. Overwhelmed with the mundane problems of running Anathoth, his church's upstart serving a food-insecure community, Bahnson takes a leave of absence, traveling "as an immersion journalist, but also as a pilgrim" (11), and I pilgrimaged along with him. No gardener myself (though I did pick up a few tips from the read), I found myself contentedly joining Bahnson in his forays.

It's tempting to summarize Bahnson--to list off places visited and lessons learned: welcoming in the outcasts of drug dealers and parolees at Tierra Nueva, drawing parallels between mushrooms and prayer lives with monks at Mepkin Abbey, bringing Sabbath and Sukkot to life with a Jewish farming community in Connecticut. But the worth of Soil and Sacrament is, as it should be, in the journey. As Bahnson goes from one farm to another, he and the reader both pull bits and pieces along the way, not only the victories but the failures, the messes.

My only minor complaint stems from how the book wraps up--or, rather, doesn't. While I appreciate that Bahnson doesn't distill everything for the reader, I finished the book wondering about how his journey affected his faith. As the Author Notes will tell you, Bahnson no longer works at Anathoth, and there is no indication as to whether that decision was influenced by his trips, or how. Understandably, he seems very drawn to each community while he's there, but I'd be interested to know what's remained, what's dovetailed together for him now that he's back home.

In a final weaving of theory and practice, Bahnson concludes the book with several practical steps as to how to go about setting up your own community gardening venture, whatever that might look like. Inspiring and grounding, this memoir leads you to look around at the fields you've been given, and leave you asking how you can best serve it, and your community through it.


Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.

Hunger

For some reason, I was never hungry for lunch yesterday. (This. Never. Happens.) I went out to Starbucks with a coworker and picked up an iced green tea; I threw back some cinnamon almonds because I figured I should eat something. And, predictably, by the time I got home I was ready to start gnawing on my purse strap. It's not often, I suppose, that I am actively hungry.

But that got me thinking this morning about hunger. Because I don't have much experience with real hunger--participating in a 30 Hour Famine with my teens a few years ago is the closest I've been--I find that I hunger for other things...

I am hungry for knowledge. If it had been financially possible to just stay in college for another 5 or 10 years, I probably would have. I love learning knew things (the things that interest me, anyway) and puzzling them out. I love reading and organizing my notes and formulating thoughts into pages of writing. I love knowing things--my best friend accurately calls me an intellectual snob. I find myself getting a little antsy to soak up new facts, new ideas, new learning.

I am hungry for experience. I'm devouring a book for Speakeasy right now that covers a man's travels around the continent as he works toward and develops a sustenance farm in partnership with his church, discovering permaculture and composting, monastic life and Central American social politics. I open Google Maps to look up something for my real life, but find myself dragging and zooming to corners of the world--Baffin Island, Indonesia, the Azores--that I have no foreseeable plans to get to.

I am hungry for stillness. This seems silly, coming from a woman who lives alone--why is this not everyday?--but I hunger for a different breed of silence: a purposeful, chosen, dedicated stillness. The kind of stillness that finds you as you sit on the porch in the early morning cool with hot coffee resting in hand, the vastness of an unlived day hanging invitingly in front of you like steam from the mug.

I am hungry for community. I spent Sunday morning with some church friends giving out free lunch at Willard Beach, and I found myself amazed at how quickly we fell into community with passersby. Much to my surprise, there was no suspicion, no circumspection. There were single moms and elderly men and teenagers, all of them talking and laughing in the speckled shade of a perfect day, content--eager!--to share time with strangers. I am hungry for this: for family to be found in neighbors and acquaintances, for us to remove ourselves from relational bomb shelters and share life.

And why am I hungry? Because I settle for slacking off. I settle for rewatching and rehashing and keeping to myself. I settle for sleeping in and wasting time on things that do not--cannot--matter. Instead of living with eagerness and energy and expectation, I curl into the corner and hold my breath and wait.

When I think back to the 30 Hour Famine, I don't remember the hunger of those two days, so much; but I remember the meal we shared at the end: a bite of bread and juice for Communion, and then simple beans and grains--food so much of the world would be tearfully grateful for. I remember laughing with my kids as we shamelessly scraped our bowls clean with our fingers.

There will be a day when all of this is memory, and I don't want to remember the hunger.

Five-Minute Friday: Last

Back in the saddle with 5MF = happy Channy. If you like a little writing exercise, you should check it out. The rules are simple, the people are nice, and how much more energy do any of us have by Friday, anyway?


GO


There is so much ELSE, so much OTHER. So many distractions and excess parts that have no place. But in the quiet, when I can bring my brain to a place away from emails and deadlines, this is what I see:

Us. Simply us. Doing simple things: reading a story from one of our childhoods or making dinner. Looking out into the night sky or flying down a highway with the radio on. Passing the phone when a relative calls and debating repainting the kitchen. Romantical ideas, maybe, but no romance is complete without them, and these are the things I bring my brain to when life is mundane or when the waiting gets painful. Because one day, like Adam, you and I will say, "At last--this is the one my soul loves." And isn't that what covenant love is? That at the last--at the last piece of the day, at the last breath of life, there we will be: palm to palm, dust to dust. At last, Ella sings, life is like a song. At last.


STOP

Little Revivals

"Imagine a woman has her money all arranged, and somehow loses some--doesn't she tear through her wallet, her desk, the laundry piled on the floor in search of it? And when she finds it, doesn't she text a friend or post a photo on Facebook: 'Check it out--I really DID find five dollars!' In the same way, a veritable dance party is thrown in heaven for a single broken heart turning back into the path of God."
Luke 15:8-10, Channy Paraphrase


Life has just been a little meh lately. In several instances over the last few months, people have eagerly asked me what's new, and I have replied with brevity, with apathy, with silence. This isn't to say things are bad, just that there is nothing remarkable--literally nothing worth remark--in my life lately. "That's good," replied one friend a couple weeks ago. "It means things are stable. Stability is good." Well, yes. But there's stable, and then there's stagnation.

And that's what I've been feeling lately: stagnant. Things have been fine--got a nice letter from the CEO celebrating my 5-year mark at work, ministry is trucking along like never before, I've had lots of good friend times lately, I've been in the Word every day for [checks helpful app] 43 days. So what's missing?

I puzzled on it for a bit, and frankly, it didn't take long. A few months ago, there was balance in my life--lots of busy-ness and filled work days, lots to do for ministry as idea after idea fizzled, trips out of town and fitting in as much time with friends around that as possible. But over the summer, everything sort of screeches to a halt, and that time that was my needed rest and downtime (Netflix + couch + mildly healthy snack food) became my all-the-time. And it's stunning how habit-forming that it, and how sneaky--I knew that I was wasting hours each day doing nothing but watching TV shows I don't care about... and yet I didn't care.

So today--roll up sleeves--I made myself a little resolution. (Perhaps I've mentioned my general loathing for New Year's resolutions... so hello, August 22!) It began with waking up early--and rather than hitting snooze for a third time, getting up early--grabbing my journal, and starting my day with Jesus, writing out some thoughts and petitions of prayer. And it's continued with working hard--not just getting the minimums done, but getting a jump start on future projects at work, punctuated by a visit to our gym. And it's continued with--drumroll, please--me canceling my Netflix account.

I should give you a minute here.

While I love Netflix, it continues to be too great a temptation to flop, to turn off the brain, to watch things that, at best, are mildly entertaining and shift from that to emotionally/spiritually unhealthy surprisingly quickly. So I'm spending tonight blogging (shock!), reading my book for Speakeasy, and going out with a friend*.

These are all teeny, pretty insignificant things. But as I ate my dinner (and listened to my Hillsong United Pandora station and had myself a little dance party that may or may not result in heartburn soon), I found myself noticing how small shifts bring about a total change. (For more cookie fortunes, turn to Chapter 7.) I've done very little, but I feel very different. And I got to thinking that I wonder if we don't limit the idea of Luke 15 up there by only quoting it in reference to those utterly blind to God who are found. Because my life, while defined by some major repentances, is more commonly shaped by little revivals, bits and pieces that fall back into place after weeks or years of restlessness and disorder.

So I'm simplifying. More books and less screen time. More writing and less Words With Friends. More prayer and less prattle. More relationships and less... all the crap I pretend is relational. Little changes. Simple things. Almost too small to make a difference. Almost.


*Because we aim to bring you the whole truth on this little program, I shall confess: said friend and I went out... to watch a movie. But it was SOCIAL. And we went out--grabbed blankets and pillows and ice cream and pizza and flopped on the grass under the moon by a lighthouse and my beautiful bay and laughed at the movie and the kids quoting the movie around us. This beats Netflix a million to one.

Five-Minute "Friday" : Story

I missed the real Five Minute Friday (I was on vacation! ...Away from my phone... Yes...), but I love the FMF concept in general--and this week's word--too much to skip for the teeny little reason of being three days late to the party...

GO

When I think of "story," she's who I see: a little blondy-ginger two-year-old, gleefully toddling through grass and pavement, mindless of the sidewalks, then slamming on child brakes to hunch down on the bank, so desperate to not only witness but take part and immerse herself in--

--Well, they're just ducks. Any adult can see that. They aren't numerous or particularly pretty. They're sort of milling around in the water, doing their duck thing, but Story is fascinated, caught up, ensorcelled.

She's an actual, real girl, too--this isn't a metaphor. The niece of a friend, and my companion for one afternoon a couple years ago in Centennial Park in Nashville. And my friend's sister named her Story.

I loved this, loved it from the first time Lauren told me--I may have even insisted on meeting this child with The Best Name Ever. I love that this girl will live with this word swept in loopy script over her head every day: You are writing a story, right now, right here, in this. You are your own character, nobody else's. You are making something new, something lasting--but also something fragile and easily remade. There will be clumsy missteps, but they only lead to more interesting paths; there will be crushing mistakes, but redemption is always the better story. 

STOP