We were made to be warmed and fed.

Romanós writes in his blog today about the Holy Trinity and the way the church fathers found instruction about God in the sun. Especially in the last week I appreciate this picture, because we haven't yet shut the windows of our house against the coming winter, and it doesn't warm up in here anymore. Until such time as we start building fires, I find myself going outdoors just to stand in the sunshine. Below are some snatches from the post.

The Orthodox fathers use the sun as an analogy to the Holy and Divine Triad. The sun itself is the Heavenly Father. The light of the sun is the Divine Word and Son of God. The heat of the sun is the Holy Spirit.
No one can see the sun, except by the light, which enters our eyes and shows it to us. We have no other way to be in contact with the sun or even know for sure that it is there, but for the light (and the heat). If you approached the sun to touch it, you would be incinerated long before you reached it. The Father, thus, is ever intangible and unreachable to us, in His essence.

This analogy also teaches about the relationship of the three Persons of the Trinity, which in its order lines up with the original Nicene Creed, not the altered western version. Romanos goes on to dwell on the primary aspect of this God on Whom we depend with our every fiber: Love. There is no coldness in Heaven; when we are truly with Him He is a radiant Fire that fills our entire being, and we sit as at a banquet.

There can be no love except ‘between’ and no pure love, impartial and selfless love, except between ‘three.’ Hence, the Divine Nature says, ‘Let us make man in Our image.’
 
....we take our places at the banquet of the Divine Nature, becoming by genuine adoption what Christ is by nature, sons and daughters of the Most-High.

See the Orthodox ikon of the Holy Trinity, the original written by Andrei Rublev, posted above. There you will see the three ‘angels’ seated around a table, with one place left open for another.

That one is you.

Read the whole post here.

Our mother has fallen asleep.

 Today is the Feast of the Dormition, dormition meaning falling asleep.

It's the day we have a funeral, so to speak, for the Mother of our Lord, 

the Theotokos.

 

Our rector in his homily mentioned a couple of things that made an impression on me. Mary is not "the great exception" as some might teach. But she is our Great Example. She loved God and said "Yes" to Him, she bore Him in her heart and soul as well as in her body, and because of this love she suffered painfully with him as she stood by the cross.


Loving God was everything to her.

This love was expressed at the Incarnation and in its icon where we see her holding Christ in her arms. But in the icon of the Dormition, the detail shows Christ holding her in His arms. And of course that is where we also want to be when we fall asleep, with the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

 A blessed feast to all!

What I love and don't fear - domiciliphilia

Hyssop is blooming in my garden, reminding me of Psalm 51: Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed. Thou shalt wash me, and I shall become whiter than snow. Three years ago seeds must have fallen into the ground from the plant I'd bought; why they waited so long to sprout this spring, I don't know.

The zinnias are going strong, and now the purple coneflowers are coming on. I got distracted and forgot about them when they were dormant and the foxgloves were dominating that space, and by planting the red zinnias I broke my rule about not having red and magenta-colored flowers together. That could have been a disaster!

But they seem to be getting along o.k. Even when the landscape is not living up to my visions, I'm relaxed out in the garden in the midst of my accomplishments. They are really God's accomplishments; the little contributions I made could never on their own have created the splendor that is right here in my back yard.

An orange dragonfly posed for a picture.

I have joked that I approach agoraphobia, but it's not near the truth. I just love being home and working at home. Until I came home to the Orthodox Church, I dragged my feet even about going to church, much as I loved the people there, and God. And though I will gladly drive and fly all over the country and even the world to see and be with those dear to me, it's annoying just having to run errands in my town and break my concentration, my focus on home.

It's not laziness, it's an attentiveness that encompasses many kinds of mental and physical work. You've seen the long lists of things homemakers are called upon to do; well, I have my own intensely personal version of that list, and only God knows all that is on it, what burdens I carry and how light they are here in my realm.

No, I don't fear going out, I don't have a phobia of The Marketplace. But when I do go, it is always with the anticipation of feathering my nest with things I will bring back, or with the confidence that I will soon return to the place where I am most alive and productive...and the hope that having accomplished those outside tasks I will have a longish reprieve from distractions, and be able to get on with my best work.

I'm not agoraphobic, I'm domiciliphilic.

What the World Needs Now

A recent confluence of thoughts began with hate and destruction, in a blog post from Fr. George:

When we dream about changing the world, we are expressing our own dissatisfaction with it, and thus our rejection and disdain for it. Can you really change something you hate? Not really. What you really want to do is kill it. We want to destroy the world to build one of our own liking.

To love is to accept things as they are, calling the good as good and the bad as bad, and not needing to change them in order to accept them. The truth is you can only change yourself, and even there we have limits because we were all made in certain ways and some things were not made to change.

Fr. George's exhortation to love and accept "things as they are" brought to mind this poem by Mary Oliver that I have posted in the past:

MESSENGER

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

When I pay attention, I can hear that a message is always being sent my way, a choice is set before me every day, and on some days it seems to come every few minutes: Will I receive life, and my life, as a gift, or will I fight against what is handed to me, and try to create my own life and self the way I see fit?

I'm familiar with the teaching from wise church fathers that acceptance is a large part of humility. And when I read this passage from Metropolitan Anthony (from "Meditations on a Theme") it seemed to go right along with these other expressions I've gathered here, on what should be my attitude in this life I've been made steward over. Met. Anthony credits St. Theophan as the source of his comments about how the earth can teach us:

Just think about what earth is. It lies there in silence, open, defenseless, vulnerable before the face of the sky. From the sky it receives scorching heat, the sun’s rays, rain, and dew. It also receives what we call fertilizer, that is, manure—everything that we throw into it. And what happens? It brings forth fruit. And the more it bears what we emotionally call humiliation and insult, the more fruit it yields.

Thus, humility means opening up to God perfectly, without any defenses against Him, the action of the Holy Spirit, or the positive image of Christ and His teachings. It means being vulnerable to grace, just as in our sinfulness we are sometimes vulnerable to harm from human hands, from a sharp word, a cruel deed, or mockery. It means giving ourselves over, that it be our own desire that God do with us as He wills. It means accepting everything, opening up; and then giving the Holy Spirit room to win us over.

 This week I'm getting ready for a trip to the mountains, to My Lake (see posts with the label cabin). I'll be getting the garden watered, and in the mountains I'll be seeing lots of earth and its fruiting forests and wildflowers. I will try to take it all as a reminder to open up and give the Holy Spirit room.

The Music of My Life

The third chapter of The Hidden Art of Homemaking is the impetus for this post. It is titled simply "Music," and continues the theme of how Christians might express their creativity in their varied and unique circumstances. I am participating in the discussion of the book on Cindy's blog, Ordo Amoris. This is a long post and I apologize -- you would be smart to skip it and go do something creative!

It might have been 30 years ago that I first read Hidden Art, and I wrote on the day of the author's death how important it was in developing a vision for my life. At the time of its publication in 1971 I don't think there was anything else like it, but feminists were writing plenty about the stifling life of the typical housewife. It was lovely to have laid out before me many concrete examples of interesting people and their home-enriching activities.

Just a couple of years later, Karen Mains wrote Open Heart, Open Home, which also contributed to my Christian vision, on the theme of hospitality. And I was married in the early 70's, and enjoying keeping house and garden even before the children started arriving. When the house started filling with kids, I never lacked for creative projects and plans.

But I hadn't even read Schaeffer's book yet. My young-married-childbearing years were overflowing with culture and creativity, and I could not relate to the reader Edith seemed to be writing for, someone who is frustrated, locked up, or unfulfilled (her words).

Only recently have I been able to look back over my life and see with more understanding (I hope) why the story reads the way it does. I needed time to think, and I needed to see more of the plot toward the end, before I could notice how the first chapters fit with middle parts of my saga.

Part I contained an excess of family drama, as we call it these days, emotional and psychological stress that I didn't get any help dealing with. If you have a splitting headache it is hard to tap into your creativity. It's the same with emotional pain, maybe more so when it isn't diagnosed or even acknowledged, but stays like an always-freshening wound that makes you want to move as little as possible.

Me in Part II

What brought me into Part II was getting married to a good man and empowered to create my own story, free of distracting pain. The setting was calm and clear and full of the hope of the gospel. It was somewhat the opposite of what Schaeffer talks about, because being home was my obvious opportunity to do just about anything. I had had no lack of examples and ideas; actually, the hippie era for me segued into a homesteading spirit a la The Mother Earth News. And there were all the creative people I'd known growing up (just about everyone), while I was storing up tinder for my creative fires.

I see that I have mixed a few metaphors here trying to tell my story -- or am I writing the score for the symphony that has been playing out? Though this chapter is about music, it seems as good a place as any to bring up what seem to me to be realities on which our artistic life is built. They apply to music, too.
 
I received little musical training as a child, and I had no career that I had to put on the back burner. But growing up in church was good ear-training, and even in the Girl Scouts and in public school we sang a lot. I was lucky to marry a musician, and by means of his guitar and my singing we filled the house and our children's ears with music.

We sang in the car, using songbooks I wrote out by hand. We sang around the campfire. We parents sat on the bedroom floor and crooned lullabies to our children every night. And in church I helped the young readers to develop fluency while hymn-singing, running my finger along the page under the words while they looked on. But I don't know how to read music.

At first there wasn't money for music lessons, and I wept over the injustice of a world in which my firstborn had no opportunity for a more structured musical education. Then grandparents and great-grandparents stepped in and God provided a generous piano teacher two blocks from our house. From that time forth the provisions continued in various ways, so that eventually all of our five children learned to play at least one instrument. The photos are of them and a grandson enjoying their music. Two of our daughters became piano teachers in their teens.

But for many families, music is not something they can really accomplish. My parents could not provide it for me, but it all worked out o.k. Some women find that their distracting drama only starts when they marry, or when a child falls ill. There are women for whom getting through the day is like climbing a steep mountain, and while they might be relieved to stop and smell the flowers, it's asking a lot to tell them they ought to get out the seed catalog and develop a plan for further landscaping. But I suppose they aren't the ones reading Hidden Art.

When Schaeffer says things like, "Christian homes should...be places where there is the greatest variety of good music," I balk at the word should. I don't know how she might otherwise have presented a picture of what she considers the ideal home, but every time she says we should do this or that to develop our creative side -- and in the short Chapter 2 she used the word nine times -- I get annoyed that she is telling me what my Christian duty is.

It just seems backward to me, because I can't recall ever doing one creative homemaking thing out of a sense of duty, though I firmly believe we are all obligated to do our duty. To fear God and keep His commandments is the whole duty of man, according to Ecclesiastes (Not that we can even accomplish those basics on our own). It seems to me that the rest, the art and music and beauty, flow naturally from a human soul that is nurtured by God's love -- just as sap running up a tree trunk results in bright leaves and colorful fruit. The main thing is not to tell the tree to make fruit, but to keep the connection to the life-giving Fountain -- Who is also the One who heals all those diseases of the heart that might hinder us.

What do you know -- beauty in our life is one of the healing potions God provides. So if we start with small things that brighten our homes, say, singing a few lines from a hymn over the kitchen sink, or teaching a nursery rhyme to a toddler, just in response to the impulse, we are creating culture and feeding our own souls. It keeps the sap running, and the more the tree grows, the more sap and delicious fruit there will be.

Since Edith Schaeffer wrote this book and What is a Family, the only two of hers that I have read, thousands of families have discovered that homeschooling provides the opportunities to build the kind of family life and culture that the author presents a vision for. Just give us enough time with our children and all these good things are more likely to happen. The vision she sets forth was an ingredient in the soil that nourished my own heart and gave me the courage I needed. All the rest is in Part II, Part III, and still writing... Oh, and still singing new songs!

It's not about feeling balanced.

From another site:

No frail human morality can ever hope to contain the overflowing fullness of life with which Christ desires to rejuvenate the faithful.

...The world will not be saved by optimistic humanism that believes human progress and morality will eventually save the world. For Dostoevsky and the church fathers, man’s deepest problems are not moral, nor even psychological, but ultimately existential and ontological. It’s not about following the rules or feeling balanced. It is a matter of choice and it is a matter of human nature being touched by the hand of God Himself.

Only by daring to leap towards God in spite of the good and evil that exist in the heart can the believer hope to get beyond the contradiction of the human condition. In order to avoid descending into nihilism, Dostoevsky offers his readers another path: the acceptance of suffering and affliction in the context of a relationship with God. It is only in this context that man is able to recognize a path out of his fallen condition. It is only this Love that is able to transform suffering into salvific joy.

Read more here: Ancient Christian Wisdom blog

Snow falls but I am warmed.

On the plane to Philadelphia I got halfway through Metropolitan Anthony Bloom's God and Man. It helped to calm my jitters that had developed since the initial excitement and decision to go to my last remaining aunt's memorial service. I was about to arrive at an event and to enter a house and family where every person was a stranger.

Eeek! What was I getting into? Metropolitan Anthony encouraged me with words about love and life, and before I knew it a first cousin once-removed was hugging me at the airport and driving me to a houseful of other huggers and gracious people. I stayed up with them later and later every night sharing stories of our grandparents and parents, digging up memories and laughing with happiness over all the many connections we have by way of genetics and family traditions.

The realities of The Kingdom I had been reading about are certainly pertinent to the activity in my heart last weekend, but I'm still debriefing myself about what happened. I may never figure it out enough to put it down in words, but it was exciting and glorious.

What I am able to do is share some photographic images of the little bit of Philadelphia I experienced. Cousin #1 put me in The Nursery at her house, which is decorated in the most comforting and cozy way, with pictures of the Teddy Bears having their picnic, and Babar, and more pictures and items that probably helped me feel that I was falling asleep with the Sandman's help as when I was a child. Stuffed animals sat around on the stuffed chair and on the extra bed, and green leaves were painted on the creamy yellow wood floor.



In the kitchen Revere Ware pots had been hung on the wall - hey! just the way Grandfather used to do! - and science "experiments" I won't describe sat on a shelf all ready for the grandchildren, my first cousins twice-removed. Flowers filled the air with sweetness - We would soon load them in the back of the car to drive to the memorial service and reception.

See that orange towel on the kitchen counter above? I brought it with its citrus-y design as a gift to remind my cousin of the boxes of oranges my father sent across the country to their family every Christmas in bygone days.
 


Out back, raised beds were awaiting spring planting, and pussy willows budded right off the kitchen porch. I sat on the steps going down to the garden to talk on the phone to Mr. Glad who was still back in California missing me.










The morning of the memorial service we walked a block to the train station to meet daughter Kate who had come from D.C. to be with me. She had never even met her great-aunt whose life we were honoring that day, but she was happy to get acquainted with the cousins, and she slept in The Nursery in the bed next to me.

One night Cousin #3 cooked dinner for the two of us at her place, a very "vertical" row house in South Philly, narrow and rising five levels. She honored the first owners with a photo on the wall showing a very sober and Italian wedding party featuring the bride-and-groom owners. It's a pretty old house of the sort that has (newly refurbished) rosettes on the ceiling in some rooms.

All the long weekend, all the folk I met were amazed at how much I resemble my late aunt; the cousins in our branch of the family haven't been together in a long time, and for most of their lives they had been daily surrounded by people related to my aunt's former husband. I was happy to provide a facial link to her instead. We pored over all the old photos we had assembled, staring at the faces as though trying to penetrate the souls of our ancestors to understand who we are.

I woke up the morning of my departure to see the ground all white, and snow falling. The birds arrived at the feeders, and I even saw a female Cardinal for the first time. I've never lived where this classic red bird does.

After I was dropped at the airport, I wandered around waiting for a flight that was delayed for weather, and wondered at how fast I had made a fast friend of my cousin. Someone told me before I set off on my adventure that a cousin is sort of like a sister, but better in that you don't have the tension that can happen between siblings.

So it seems at this point, and I'm grateful for the gifts of God. He is everywhere, of course, even in the middle of a bunch of strangers. We don't have any love that doesn't come from Him. But that provides plenty.

The Power of a Great Melancholy

"Automat" is a picture of sadness -- and yet it is not a sad picture. It has the power of a great melancholy piece of music. Despite the starkness of the furnishings, the location itself does not seem wretched. Others in the room may be on their own as well, men and women drinking coffee by themselves, similarly lost in thought, similarly distanced from society: a common isolation with the beneficial effect of lessening the oppressive sense within any one person that they are alone in being alone. In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafés, we may dilute a feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture may come as a relief from what are often the false comforts of home. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a living room with wallpaper and framed photos, the décor of a refuge that has let us down.

In this second chapter of his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton writes about people who travel more from an unhappiness at being home than from a desire for recreation. He includes reproductions and commentary on other paintings by Edward Hopper (whose "Automat" is the painting at the top of the page): "Gas," "Compartment C, Car 293," and "Hotel Room."

The themes in the paintings here seem primarily to be isolation and loneliness, but to expand the scope of the chapter titled "Travel Places," the author also introduces the life and writings of Charles Baudelaire, whose work was a significant influence on Hopper, it turns out.

Baudelaire

Baudelaire, who from an early age wanted nothing more than to flee from home, all his life "felt more at home in the transient places of travel than in his own dwelling." Not that he ever seems to have escaped the restlessness he describes: "Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds. This one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he'd get better if he was by the window."

My own childhood and temperament having made me a perpetual home-lover, I'm unable to fully understand these dissatisfied impulses, but I have done a bit of solitary traveling now and again. I liked it because I like being alone, but I also always had caring people on one or both ends of my journey, and a measure of peace knowing that the One Who loves me most was right with me. 

Otherwise, I might have said with Baudelaire,

Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!
Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!

I've struggled for weeks to write on this part of de Botton's book, knowing that the topic is really too difficult for me, but wanting to tackle it because it's fundamental to our existence. What line divides a peaceful solitude and a painful loneliness? Can any one of us hope to understand another person's experience of isolation? Is loneliness an essential ingredient of human life, at least a step on our way to maturity?

In this book on travel we can't expect to find a deep exploration of these ideas. Or even a nod to the question of whether we in the 21st century experience our loneliness any differently from Hopper's subjects. In the whole book there is not a mention of cell phones or the array of social networking tools that seem to prevent any of us from being part of a scene such as de Botton describes in the paragraph above. Perhaps it's a deliberate omission, and he hopes to gently propel the reader back to a low-tech experience of being alone.

But being with strangers in an airport or service station nowadays likely means being surrounded by people using electronic devices that exclude them from any here-and-now community, lonely or otherwise. We know that many of them/us are doing this in an effort to have friends, to be in community, all the while missing possible opportunities to connect with people present in the same room. How might this development change the dynamics of a place like the automat?

De Botton writes about his own bad feelings being transformed while sitting in similar place, into a "gentle, even pleasant kind of loneliness," and he values Hopper's paintings that "allowed their viewers to witness an echo of their own grief and thereby feel less personally persecuted and beset by it."

Hopper - Night Shadows

As I pondered the meaning of loneliness, I thought for a long time that de Botton is trivializing it. Along the way I read various writers on the subject in hopes of understanding everything better. Of course de Botton writes from his own experience, and it must be that his own feelings are not on the level of acute alienation, nor is he destitute of support, to use some synonyms. If he had known what some people feel as catastrophic and terrifying, what John O'Donohue, in Anam Cara: The Book of Celtic Wisdom, calls "...the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain..." I don't know that he would make these fairly easy remedies, such as looking at paintings and riding on trains, sound plausible.

De Botton is such a pragmatist, as evidenced by his use of religion, that if he had in fact suffered an agony of soul I would expect him to be one of the many people who tell us that loneliness is the human condition. Get over it, make use of it, learn to live with yourself and with the knowledge that you are completely alone and there is no fixing it.

Even Jesus was lonely, after all. In his darkest hour, when he might have taken some comfort from his friends at least standing by, they fell asleep and left him all alone and feeling forsaken. And this shows that he did take on the whole of the plight of being human.

It's an aspect of our lives that we in the modern age are especially prone to and sickened by, but it's not what we were made for. We were made in the image of God, The Holy Trinity, where all Life resides -- God in three persons, a unity of Love, as Bishop Timothy Ware explains in his book The Orthodox Church: 

Our social programme, said the Russian thinker Fedorov, is the dogma of the Trinity. Orthodoxy believes most passionately that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not a piece of ‘high theology’ reserved for the professional scholar, but something that has a living, practical importance for every Christian. Man, so the Bible teaches, is made in the image of God, and to Christians God means the Trinity: thus it is only in the light of the dogma of the Trinity that man can understand who he is and what God intends him to be.

God is personal, that is to say, Trinitarian. This God who acts is not only a God of energies, but a personal God. When man participates in the divine energies, he is not overwhelmed by some vague and nameless power, but he is brought face to face with a person. Nor is this all: God is not simply a single person confined within his own being, but a Trinity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each of whom ‘dwells’ in the other two, by virtue of a perpetual movement of love. God is not only a unity but a union.

If all the humans you know fail in their love toward you -- and they likely will -- and if you feel alienated from society, from God, even from your true self, your salvation does not lie in accepting this situation as All There Is. As St, Augustine said, "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee."

In the Church we can be brought into communion with the Holy Trinity and with other people who are learning to participate in that "perpetual movement of love." This is the opposite of alienation, but we may have to go through the Valley of the Shadow of Death to get there. If that's what it takes for us to realize our need, and to become desperate enough to cry out to the only One who will never disappoint us or hurt us, we might consider it the power of a great melancholy. 

This is the fourth in a series on The Art of Travel. The other posts are
Introduction
Possessing Beauty
What Van Gogh Can Do

Grandma didn't make pesto.

My grandma of renown was no slacker, and she was the person who taught me by example how to prepare for a trip. When my sisters and I stayed with her in summertime, we usually went with Grandma and Grandpa on a week's outing to a cabin or camp in the mountains.

Everything was ship-shape on the home front when we drove off early enough in the morning to have breakfast at the Tracy Inn on the way. There was not a speck of dust on the furniture, and the beds had been made up with fresh sheets as soon as we were out of them. Certainly Grandma would have made sure that Grandpa deadheaded his prizewinning flowers.

Liam, whom I'll see tomorrow!

But Grandma would never have thought to drive down the state to visit one grandchild for a few nights, and then turn around to fly across the country the very next week to sojourn with a passel of other grandchildren for more than two weeks. The way I am doing. I have to keep reminding myself that in a myriad of ways I am not Grandma.

I am blessed to the point of unbelief having so many grandchildren, and Grandma only had a few of us whom she saw twice a year. Grandma didn't do the gardening, and she didn't write any blog posts, though I daresay the wonderful letters she wrote are worth more per hour invested than what I put out.

If there had been basil growing in the back yard, I know she would have arranged things so that the pesto was made at least a couple of days before departure, giving her time to sweep and mop the kitchen and get to bed at a reasonable hour the night before. She wouldn't be complaining, because she liked traveling and had Everything Under Control.

Not me. I have mostly been whining about everything, including the reality of all the work undone and how I hate leaving home. I was standing at the sink this afternoon whimpering as I pulled leaves off stems, when it hit me that making pesto is one of my most favorite things to do. How wonderful is it that I have a garden that grows basil, from which a woman can create one of the wonders of the culinary world?

And the people in my life -- oh, my! Preparing for and going on trips with my grandma was one of the happiest activities of my childhood. She was so good to provide that for us. Hugging and holding my children and grandchildren is necessary food for the maintenance of cup-running-over happiness. Right now I don't really care if the floor is still dirty and the bed unmade (and a hundred other negatives I won't waste time listing even to myself) when I drive off tomorrow morning. What do you know -- I'm not Grandma!

If Grandma had been washing basil and found a Japanese beetle in the sink, she'd have said, "Tch, tch!" with disgust, but I saw it as a photo opportunity. I could feel this way because this summer I'm not growing green beans. Japanese beetles have ravaged many a crop of green beans here, and in the past I developed a quickness in squishing them between my fingers.

Grandma would not have written a letter or recipe or anything the night before a trip. But writing is also one of my favorite things to do. So here I am.

I see that I blogged about pesto three years ago without giving my recipe, so I will put it up this time:

PESTO

3 cups packed basil leaves

2 large cloves garlic

1/3 cup pine nuts or walnuts 

1/3 to 1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

Mix in the food processor, adding the oil and cheese at the last. Add more salt if you like, or more oil if you need it to be runnier. I've had this keep for weeks in the fridge, and years in the freezer, and still be flavorful.
 

It's probably easy to guess what is another favorite activity I will indulge in before the sun goes down: gardening. I need to spread some manure around where I thinned the perennials yesterday. Maybe I will run out of energy to clean up all the basil-tinged oil smeared around the kitchen before I fall into bed, but it's very comforting to have a few little tubs of that tasty stuff in the freezer when we haven't even got to August.

Grandma wouldn't understand my style of housekeeping, but she would love me anyway.

Almost Perfect World

Yesterday I got up on the wrong side of the bed. A cup of tea seemed to be in order, and when I saw the special tea blend from Germany, "Perfect World," it seemed like the right morning to open the package.

There is no ingredients list. I sprinkled some leaves out on a plate to give it a look. There are chamomile flowers there, I can see that much.

steaming & steeping

I poured some boiling water over the herbs in a measuring cup, and brewed it what turned out to be too weakly. After a few minutes I put the pretty liquid in a pretty teacup for beauty's sake. That wasn't enough tea to direct my mood in any way. I'll have to try it another time, stronger and in a big mug.

in my grandma's teacup even

Today I woke up again. Almost before I figured out what side to get out on, my dear, sweet-hearted, only-beloved husband brought me some flowers. It's been a nearly perfect day so far.

Flowers and Love for This Mother

My Favorite Rockrose

I have loving gifts and greetings from my dear children all around me today, though I didn't have any of them present in the flesh. My husband's taking me out to dinner soon to celebrate -- and this morning it was wonderful to be in church, and hear a homily about the Samaritan woman, whose heart was open to Christ and who became a missionary of the gospel.

Cerinthe grows like a weed.

After the Agape Meal that we always have after the service, we heard a guest speaker, a priest who helped translate a recent book about Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos, who reposed in the Lord in the 1990's.

One thing Father Peter said that impressed me was about the different perspective that an Orthodox ethos gives a person. He said that in Greece, for example, where people are raised with this background, even if they are not currently living out a Christian faith, they may unselfconsciously have Christian ideas about some things.

Bearded Iris

Modesty, for example. Here in the United States, the concept of modesty carries for many people connotations of old-fashioned or conservative, but when someone raised in a culture infused by the church thinks of modesty, he thinks immediately of Christ's mother, the Theotokos -- a person, and not a concept. What a blessing God gave me in this word on Mother's Day!

Before church, and afterward, I couldn't help but stop to take pictures of the flowers that I no longer have the job of caring for. Pearl sent me a vase of flowers for Mother's Day, which I have on the table nearby, and God gave me these as well, just a few examples for today of the beautiful gifts he has given me my whole life through, including that of the experience of motherhood, the gifts of five children, and soon-to-be eleven grandchildren. What can I say about this except that it is astounding?

A (probably belated) blessed Mother's Day to all of you!

being, being, being

The poem below, about being in love, is speaking to me and for me, though of course it's imperfect for that use, coming from a unique and distinct soul, with his own lonely knowings and loves.

Imperfect, but skilled and helpful, and conveying so much of the humanity that belongs to all of us. Love. God Is Love, and if we do any of this work that is the verb to love it is by His grace. If we feel anything like love coming to us or flowing from us, it is the Holy Spirit, for He fills all things.

The poem might be primarily about romantic love, which is inconstant -- not that most of us don't fail to be steadfast in all our loves. In the second stanza the lover declares his constancy, and in the last admits that his love is "in a moment gone."

But I can't help feeling the effusion and mystery of divine Love in it, and am reminded of Christ's teaching that we ought to first love our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Isn't all love, whether we are giving or taking, essentially God sharing His Life with us and among us, the Love of the Holy Trinity? He uses people to do it, but after all, we find out that it was The Lord.

IN LOVE FOR LONG

I’ve been in love for long
With what I cannot tell
And will contrive a song
For the intangible
That has no mold or shape,
From which there’s no escape.

It is not even a name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as still
As the established hill.

It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever prove
What it is I love?

This happy happy love
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and above
Between todays and morrows;
A little paradise
Held in the world’s vice.

And there it is content
And careless as a child,
And in imprisonment
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world’s day long.

This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Is like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger’s paws
And vindicates its cause.

~ Edwin Muir

Elder Zosima and his brother

In my reading of The Brothers Karamazov, I came this morning, Monday of Holy Week, to the part "From the Life of the Elder Zosima." The elder first relates about his older brother, who only at the age of seventeen and sick unto death, turned from anger and scoffing toward a path that might lead to repentance, and seemingly only to please his mother. But that is not an entirely bad reason.

...on Tuesday morning my brother started keeping the fast and going to church. "I'm doing it only for your sake, mother, to give you joy and peace," he said to her....But he did not go to church for long, he took to his bed, so that he had to confess and receive communion at home. The days grew bright, clear, fragrant -- Easter was late that year. All night, I remember, he used to cough, slept badly, but in the morning he would always get dressed and try to sit in an armchair. So I remember him: he sits, quiet and meek, he smiles, he is sick but his countenance is glad, joyful. He was utterly changed in spirit -- such a wondrous change had suddenly begun in him!

The young man asked forgiveness of everyone and talked about his great sin, but at the same time was so happy and full of thankfulness and exhortations, that people thought he was going mad.

Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love. The doctor would come -- the old German Eisenschmidt used to come to us: "Well, what do you think, doctor, shall I live one more day in the world?" he would joke with him. "Not just one day, you will live many days," the doctor would answer, "you will live months and years, too." "But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other's offenses? Let us go into the garden, let us walk and play and love and praise and kiss each other, and bless our life."

This older brother died a few weeks after Easter, when the teller of the story, the elder Zosima, was only eight years old. He talks, now near death himself, more about his childhood, and how it was also during Holy Week that he began to see more when he went to church.

But I remember how, even before I learned to read, a certain spiritual perception visited me for the first time, when I was just eight years old. Mother took me to church by myself (I do not remember where my brother was then), during Holy Week, to the Monday liturgy. It was a clear day, and, remembering it now, I seem to see again the incense rising from the censer and quietly ascending upwards, and from above, through a narrow window in the cupola, God's rays pouring down upon us in the church, and the incense rising up to them in waves, as if dissolving into them. I looked with deep tenderness, and for the first time in my life I consciously received the first seed of the word of God in my soul. A young man walked out into the middle of the church with a big book, so big that it seemed to me he even had difficulty in carrying it, and he placed it on the analogion [lectern], opened it, and began to read, and suddenly, then, for the first time I understood something, for the first time in my life I understood what was read in God's church.

The reading was from the book of Job. And tonight I myself plan to attend this liturgy, and though I haven't seen the program for the service, I now have confidence that I will hear this same reading. How many times have I also watched the beams of light shining down when I stood in church, and even felt their heat on my face, like the warmth of God's Holy Spirit?

The Elder Zosima is a fictional character, but he is believed to be based on a real-life monk in old Russia. In the novel, where I am reading, Zosima goes on in his very moving fashion to tell his life's story: "-- and over all is God's truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!"

Isn't it sweet that God should arrange for me to read this passage this morning, to help me in an unusual way to become even more receptive to His being with us tonight by means of hymns such as, "Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense....," and the Psalms of Ascent -- and the Holy Mysteries!

Last week our bishop was present with us, and he gave us a good word about the last days of Lent -- well, technically Lent has come to an end, but we are still in the anticipation and preparation that is Holy Week. He said that Lent is not about finding every bit of dirt in our souls, but about the bridal chamber, about discovering the great love that our Lord Jesus has for us.

Perhaps Zosima's brother went to a Bridegroom Matins service on Tuesday; we have three of them this week, and tomorrow I hope to attend at 6:30 in the morning. The Lord Himself has been filling my lamp with the oil of His Holy Spirit!

On today's theme, about spending time

In honor of the day, a favorite love poem by Richard Wilbur. All our loves flow from the Holy Trinity -- Happy Valentine's Day! 

 

A Late Aubade

You could be sitting now in a carrel

Turning some liver-spotted page,

Or rising in an elevator-cage

Toward Ladies’ Apparel.

You could be planting a raucous bed

Of salvia, in rubber gloves,

Or lunching through a screed of someone’s loves

With pitying head,

Or making some unhappy setter

Heel, or listening to bleak

Lecture on Schoenberg’s serial technique.

Isn’t this better?

Think of all the time you are not

Wasting, and would not care to waste,

Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.

Think what a lot

Of time, by woman’s reckoning,

You’ve saved, and so may spend on this,

You who had rather lie in bed and kiss

Than anything.

It’s almost noon, you say? If so,

Time flies, and I need not rehearse

The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.

If you must go,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.

--Richard Wilbur