A Wet Morning in the City

I went to the city today...

just for a few quick hours while the girls were at school.

I took the train.

I had a book, a camera,  and some change for coffee.

It was a happy morning...

until that nice light mist in the air...

 turned to a sideways blowing downpour.

The ticket agent at the train station looked me up and down and said,

"Honey, maybe you should carry an umbrella around next time. You can't listen to them weather men in Chicago.  They say it ain't going to rain.  But, in April, it's going to RAIN."

The Stone is Rolled Back

Happy Easter!

        

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-John Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter" 1964

Braces! (and Easter bunnies too)

the imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Tom Rachman's novel came out last April (2010) and was greeted by rave reviews (Read the NY Times Review).  I come across the book while skimming through the staff picks at Powells Books (where it also gets a great  review).  Written like a book of short stories, this book manages to weave itself together into a novel.  The story revolves around an aging international newspaper and the quirky characters that staff its Rome office.  Rachman's insight into human motivation, ambition, despair, and hunger for relationship is poignant.  With several chapters I stop, close the book, and just sit thinking about the powerful image with which I am left (like a good short story can do).  Consider one character's musings on ambition..

"I say ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall...Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition.  Whatever its ills, nothing has created more.  Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshipped by man."


Agree?  At the end of the day is this what motivates us?  Is it our own deep needs to be worshiped and adored by those around us?


The character goes on, "What I really fear is time.  That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales.  It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving.  There's that line of Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.'  That's right.  We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory.  Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories" (37).


Through Rachman's characters the author himself grieves the dying art of newsprint and mourns for the struggling journalist, but he does this through sometimes funny and quirky characters that will make you laugh or make you squirm with discomfort.  Like other great achievements of man the newspaper yields to the Internet Age reminding me of the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes,

I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after the wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14).

In the end Rachman's characters leave a piercing picture of the folly of human ambition at the expense of relationship.  All kingdoms men build to their own glory will come to an end.  What is our true desire?  To love and be loved, to know and be known.  Yet how many of us sacrifice relationship to the altars of ambition? Each character in the imperfectionists is crying out for human connection and relationship, and yet they struggle in the work that those relationships take.  The book leaves you wondering, "What am I pursuing in life?  Is it the things that matter?  Or things that are merely passing away...?."

All Glory, Laud, and Honor

...to Thee Redeemer King, to whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring! 

Happy Palm Sunday.

 Who's that hiding behind that palm?

Why it is none other than Helen Holbrook- 

our old friend and now new Children's Director at Grace Presbyterian Church!

We are SO EXCITED she is here!

Pea Shoots

Pea Shoots arrive on our front porch today from Fresh Picks, our weekly supplier of organic produce.  I guess spring is finally coming to the Midwest.  My weekly goodie bags are no longer coming from California but are traveling shorter distances from places like Illinois and Wisconsin.

What to do with this beautiful vegetable?  Living Water Farms recommends adding it to a stir fry or tossing it with chopped spinach and chard.

Almost looks too pretty to eat.

Wolterstorff on Justice

All men are created equal.  They are endowed with certain inalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But are they?  Are they equal?  What rights belong to each person of humankind just because they belong to the race of humanity?  And on what basis do we humans deserve such rights?  Because we are rational beings?  Because we belong to a species capable of rational agency?  But what about those among us who are less than so?  Where do their rights fit into the picture?

A few days ago I wrote a short paragraph about a very thoughtful book on grief written by Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff.  Last night I saw him in person and heard him speak at Northwestern University as part of the Veritas Forum.   This was fun on a lot of levels.  The last time I attended a Veritas Forum was in Cambridge, MA in 1998 when I was living in Boston for the year.  The Veritas Forums are "university events that engage students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life."  What does this look like?  Last night it looked like a PhD Candidate in Theater moderating a discussion between Wolterstorff and other Northwestern professors from disciplines such as  Ethics and Literature to an auditorium packed with hundreds of students.

And here was the interesting part.  Wolterstorff, Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale, argues that at the end of the day our rights are ours because they have been bestowed upon us.  We are in a 'worth bestowing relationship.' God has bestowed honor upon us because of Him and not because of our innate capacity.  He has given us a nature with potential for friendship with God.  Want to read more?  Check out his book Justice and upcoming book Justice in Love.

And don't tell anyone if you see me dressing up in college sweatshirts and sneaking into classes next fall.   Wonder if my minivan will give me away...

A Spring Tease

Today was a spring tease- an 80 degree day sandwiched in a week of highs grasping for the 50 degree mark.  A strange oceanside humidity and warmth knocked on our door this morning.  I sit on my front porch tonight,  waiting for the violent storm that will sweep away this moist warm air with lightning and hail.  This is what spring does, right?  She flaunts her beauty tauntingly and then steals away leaving us with a hunger for more.  We enjoy her while she lasts with...

a bike ride to the lake

and a walk down the block to the Northwestern/Penn State baseball game.

It feels so good to be WARM!

Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff

I shall look at the world through tears.  Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see. - Wolterstorff


In 1983 Nicholas Wolterstorff's son Eric died in a mountaineering accident at the age of twenty- five.  This intensely personal meditation on grief, loss, and suffering is a beautiful book for anyone who has cried their own tears of grief or walked beside another in their grief.  It is a mere 100 pages, a book that can be finished in one sitting but will linger in your mind and heart.  This is a book to be read, passed on to others, and shared as a community that we, as families and friends, might better understand our own grief and loss while comforting those who are in the midst of the 'valley of tears' (Psalm 84).

The pictures, letters, and books of the past reveal life to us as a constant saying of farewell to beautiful places, good people, and wonderful experience...in every arrival there is a leavetaking; in each one's growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss.
 - Henri Nouwen, "A Letter of Consolation"  


This week I sat beside someone who grieves.  I felt so helpless to know what to say, to know how to comfort, to know how to be present with her.  Jason passed this book along to me as something which encouraged him.  Wolterstorff doesn't offer any simple formulas or answers to the pain of death.  What he does is remind us that death should hurt, that it is not the way things are supposed to be. What we can do  is "be open to the wounds of the world."  Woleterstorff writes, "The Stoics of antiquity said: Be calm.  Disengage yourself.  Neither laugh nor weep.  But Jesus says: Mourn humanity's mourning, weep over humanity's weeping...but do so in the good cheer that a day of peace is coming."

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Two summers ago I took my first Biology class since the 9th grade.  I signed up for Cell Biology 101 at Portland Community College with hopes of pursuing nursing school one day.  Little did I know how challenging it would be to wrap my Liberal Arts mind around science.  I survived the class by creating narrative out of nature.  The parts of the cell became a working village with various personalities and stories.  Meiosis and Mitosis became conflicts within my own personal biological novel. Things not only became easier for me to remember but delightfully enjoyable.

Perhaps I'm not a scientist at heart.  I'd much rather read the human interest stories about the people than the science itself.  Sometimes a book reaches a happy medium, a book that captures my insatiable need for story while also challenging me to scientific and ethical inquisitiveness.  Such is the case in Skloot's biography of Henrietta Lacks, a woman made famous by a few cells taken secretly from a cancerous tumor inside of her.  These rapidly multiplying cells became the famous HeLa cells which transformed scientists' understanding of how cells multiply.  Thousands of scientific books and articles have been written about HeLa cells, but very little has been written about the woman from which they came.  Skloot steps in to tell her story.

 The biography is the Number 1 book on Powell's Bestseller List and the Number 2 on the New York Times Bestseller List.  Pick up a copy at the bookstore or library and skim the Afterword (pp. 315-328).  It is a helpful essay addressing the ethical, practical, and moral dilemmas of using human tissue for scientific/medical research (often without the knowledge of the donor!).   If your interest is piqued, go back and read the story of the woman behind these famous cells.    Here is a little teaser,

...the question isn't whether human tissues and tissue research will be commercialized.  They are and will continue to be; without commercialization, companies wouldn't make the drugs and diagnostic tests so many of us depend on.  The question is how to deal with this commercialization- whether scientists should be required to tell people their tissues may be used for profit... (Skloot 322)

Skiing Big Sky!

Last summer, flying from Bozeman, MT to our new home in Illinois, our plane caught on fire (story here).   Almost eight months later my girls and I board a plane back to Bozeman on the very ticket vouchers we received for our traveling trials that long July day.  Sometimes surprise blessings come out of a bad day. 

March was an unbelievable month.  

 I have seen my mom, my dad, and my brother all within the last three weeks.  This is a pretty amazing feat considering the four of us represent FOUR different time zones and two different continents.  In March I've celebrated ten years of marriage on the shores of the Caribbean and watched my children ski at 8,000 ft in Big Sky, MT.  I have much for which to be thankful!

Thank you, Dad, for an amazing time on the mountain. 

We love you and we love Montana!!!

First time on skis!

Both girls spend the morning in ski school learning the basics and riding the "magic carpet."
Rynn ends up getting a private lesson because she is the only beginner in her age group.  Everyone has a blast.  After lunch Rynn is ready to go back for more while Eleanor is more interested in hugging the ski school moose.

Dad and I off to hit the slopes.

Day Two

Kids are tired, Dad is feeling sick, and Ham & Chompoo decide to just chill.

I take Dad's truck up the canyon for a day of solo skiing at Big Sky.

I ski for five hours straight with a smile on my face the entire time.  

There is something so unbelievably calming and relaxing about flying down the side of a snowy mountain with all thoughts gone except for the wind in your face and the skis on the snow.

It is awesome.  

Our flight home today is much less dramatic than the last time we left Bozeman. We arrive home happy to see Jason and ready to return to the mountains as a family!  

See all the pictures of our Montana trip HERE