I made it safely to the snow-covered prairie–a very windy trip, but uneventful. I controlled my 241 horses and raced north, arriving in good time. Praise the Lord.
All is well.
*And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
Well, how was your weekend? I enjoyed some quality time with my therapy dog…
We celebrated daughter #1’s birthday, but it was pretty low-key–burgers ‘n fries at the boy’s house and a French Silk pie…
It was quite hot on Saturday so we bailed on the Greentree Festival in our flyover town. I did, however, go to the bud’s soccer game on Sunday–so hot–96 degrees–but I am a devoted Mamu!
We went after church and Sunday School and a change of clothes at my house. By 1:30 I was wiped out!
Our current sermon series is on Philippians, so Sunday’s verses were very appropriate to what is going on in our country.
I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, 13 so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. 14 And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. (Phil. 1:12-14)
Christ reframes everything, including the way we see our trials. Never forget that God is in control. Our Sunday School class on C.S. Lewis was also excellent and I appreciated that our teacher opened up the last 15 minutes of class to a discussion about Charlie Kirk–something we would never do in church or our sermon.
And this is the transcript of a podcast with Kevin DeYoung which is very helpful about processing violence and grief. “We never want to normalize evil, but we are trying to normalize that God has been with his people and has been with us personally through difficulties, national tragedies, and that same God is going to be with you…They need to know and hear from us a faith that we have, that God has not left the throne, that this did not take him by surprise, and that the end of the story has not yet been written for us, but it has been for God, and it’s ultimately a good story, right?”
Amen.
This is a new Lauren Daigle song (at least to me)–a re-working of the well-known Frances Ridley Havergal (1874) Anglican hymn:
Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee. Take my moments and my days; let them flow in endless praise, let them flow in endless praise.
I was thinking about my grandkids going back to school on Monday and in particular Katie, who started Kindergarten. (I hear that she was a bit disappointed that she did not learn to read on the first day.) Anyway, I looked up my class picture from Kindergarten in 1961–there I am on the right with the bangs. I liked school. I had made it through Junior Kindergarten and learned the ropes. I have no doubt that little Katie will like school too–she has a long road ahead of her!
“I suppose identity depends on memory. And if memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist–I mean if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It is up to God, if any.”
The summer is drawing to a close. The boy and the twins took a last trip to the zoo before school starts and rode the train. I had lunch with my old friend and former administrative assistant and heard all about the goings on at the university. I took the Mini in for an oil change.
Katie starts kindergarten today! She met her teacher yesterday and wore her favorite dress which belonged to her aunt back in the day.
I am looking forward to September and the return (hopefully) to some semblance of my old routine.
Life goes on and I am grateful.
“I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matterwhether over mud or over stones.”
Yesterday we were able to do some driveway sittin’ when the boy came over with the bud while Lottie was in dance class. The bud drove the little Raptor around and we had a gay ol’ time gabbing away. Truly there is nothing better on a lovely spring day than to sit and soak up some vitamin D under the blue, blue sky.
Meanwhile I have been crossing items off my to-do list. The Review is at the printer. I have been to the dentist. And so on. I am reading another Agatha Christie–Ordeal by Innocence, published in 1958. Life goes on at a retirement pace–I have no complaints.
In other news, the pope died. I will let Carl Trueman speak for me. “Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.”
I talked to my 90-year old Catholic friend yesterday about the pope’s passing. She thought he was great–he really cared about the environment. So go figure.
And news alert: there’s going to be a rare ‘smiley face’ celestial alignment in the morning sky this Friday, April 25, so make a note.
My friend Carla gave me Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott for my birthday. I have read it, but I read it again (I do that a lot.)
When all is said and done, spring is the main reason for Wow. Spring is crazy, being all hope and beauty and glory. She is the resurrection. Spring is Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” I read Hopkins for the first time in seventh grade, when I also first read Langston Hughes, and between the two of them, I was never the same.
Poetry is the official palace language of Wow.
Buds opening and releasing, mud and cutting winds, bright green grass and blue skies, nests full of baby birds. All of these are deserving of Wow–even though I have said elsewhere that spring is also about deer ticks–and everywhere you look, couples are falling in love, and the air is saturated with the scent of giddiness and doom. Petals are wafting and falling slowly through the air, and there is something so Ravel, languorous, reminding me to revel in the beauty of the things wafting.
Daughter #2 is back today! I am happy to report that my daily reading habits have persisted, and while there are always misses among the hits, I have several good things to share.
Quick notes: I failed to finish Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) — there is a reason Jane Eyre (1847) is the better known work — but while I trudged through the first half, I also read and thoroughly enjoyed two Fred Vargas mysteries. My mother had mailed them to me, which I appreciated, since I do not think my local prairie library carries French mysteries in translation. My mother has blogged about Vargas many times, but I’ll link to this post, which — bonus — mostly discusses her reading of The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a novel I love dearly and re-read at the beginning of the year.
My local prairie library does carry two shelves of “General Fiction,” which feature a funny mix of contemporary “chick lit” and classic canonical works. Something compelled me to grab John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and I found it surprisingly easy to read. It is one of those epic long novels that, because the chapters are so short, allows you to leisurely chug along with great and frequent reward. Steinbeck alternates between naturalist descriptions of the American landscape, mini treatises on the American economy, and what I found to be the gripping plot of the Joad family’s Dust Bowl journey from Oklahoma to California. I was very happy to read in context the passage quoted in one of my favorite blog posts.
When Katie assembled this Duplo truck with trailer and a multitude of passengers, I couldn’t help but think, “It’s giving me Joad family jalopy vibes.”
Finally, I recently finished Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006). The novel’s dual protagonists are wise in different ways: Paloma beyond her 12 years, and Renée beyond her station (which she believes precludes the intellectual life she keeps a secret). When a Japanese man moves into the apartment building where they both live, the three forge an unlikely friendship. Interestingly, Kakura Ozu is able to intuit the rich inner lives of Paloma and Renée, and draws them out of their shells despite the social structures in which they find themselves stuck. While it was all a little far-fetched, I did appreciate the idea that we can recognize a kindred intellectual spirit when we encounter it, even briefly.
My favorite section of the novel, “On Grammar,” centered on the trio’s shared appreciation of language and disdain for those who misuse it. When Renée and Ozu meet, they both flinch when another — supposedly refined — tenant makes a glaring grammatical error. Their friendship is forged in this moment. And at one point, Paloma snaps when her literature teacher makes an asinine comment about grammar. Later, Paloma reflects in her journal,
“Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. And that’s where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, ‘Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is! How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!’ I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility. I find there is nothing more beautiful, for example, than the very basic components of language, nouns and verbs. When you’ve grasped this, you’ve grasped the core of any statement. It’s magnificent, don’t you think? Nouns, verbs…
“Perhaps, to gain access to all the beauty of the language that grammar unveils, you have to place yourself in a special state of awareness. I have the impression that I do that anyway without any special effort. I think that it was at the age of two, when I first heard grown-ups speak, that I understood once and for all how language is made. Grammar lessons have always seemed to me a sort of synthesis after the fact and, perhaps, a source of supplemental details concerning terminology.”
Paloma is a little overdone as a precocious tween, but I can’t help but relate to much of this. It’s very obvious to me that toddlers intuit grammar from the language around them, and yes, as their mother, I believe that Ida and Katie have an “elegant style” of speech. Ida once looked at the rainy back deck and said, “I wish we could go outside today.” (For reference, at her age, “go outside” would be typical.) Solid and ingenious, rich and subtle indeed!
Up next, I am testing my endurance with Wolf Hall. So far, so good!
I am currently working on an article for the Kirkwood Historical Review about A.G. Edwards, an early “pioneer” of our adopted hometown. They weren’t fighting off Indians or anything, but those mid-19th century guys led very interesting lives nonetheless.
Edwards was a graduate of West Point (class of 1832) and was 45th in a class of 45–the goat. I should note here that the term “Goat” holds a special place in U.S. Army tradition. The term refers to the cadet graduating from West Point with the lowest Grade Point Average (GPA) or “the man who would have stood first if he had boned (i.e. studied)”. Rather than being a badge of shame, it recognizes the tenacity or foolhardiness it takes to be the last graduate of the best of the best. “It is definitely an honor; it is in no way a joke,” according to
James Robbins, author of “Last in their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point.” At West Point, where plenty of cadets “wash out” years before graduation, there’s a genuine respect for the cadet who faltered, but graduated. And, truly, General A.G. Edwards went on to great things.
In other news, this appeared on my Instagram feed on April Fool’s Day:
Well, to infinity and beyond!
Also, I really like John Piper’s answer to Jordan Peterson’s take on happiness–it is wonderful. “Jordan Peterson is negative about happiness as the aim of life because he defines happiness as fleeting, unpredictable, impulsive, and superficial rather than as deep, lasting, soul-satisfying, rooted in God, and expanding in love. He’s probably right that for most people, happiness is experienced as fleeting, superficial, unpredictable, and impulsive rather than as deep and lasting and soul-satisfying and rooted in God.” Read the whole thing.
And here’s a poem: Always Marry an April Girl by Ogden Nash
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.
JESUS IS APT TO COME, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but . . . at supper time, or walking along a road. This is the element that all the stories about Christ’s return to life have in common: Mary waiting at the empty tomb and suddenly turning around to see somebody standing there—someone she thought at first was the gardener; all the disciples except Thomas hiding out in a locked house, and then his coming and standing in the midst; and later, when Thomas was there, his coming again and standing in the midst; Peter taking his boat back after a night at sea, and there on the shore, near a little fire of coals, a familiar figure asking, “Children, have you any fish?”; the two men at Emmaus who knew him in the breaking of the bread. He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.
–Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
This is a thought-provoking article about a group of ‘Jesus Geezers’ and the sad death of Gene Hackman. Everyone needs a church community!
–Evangelist tells Christian and Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress
Don’t forget to look up today! Seek Him through a grateful heart.
At the suggestion of daughter #1 I am re-reading TheDaughter of Timeby Josephine Tey. It is very good and the type of literary mystery written by an intelligent and educated author, which you rarely run across these days.
“Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekly” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.”
The Daughter of Time was chosen by the Crime Writers’ Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time(!). After this, I will try to find some of her other books to read.
I wonder if Hilary Mantel read this book–because Tey brings Sir Thomas More to task for writing the “definitive” history of Richard III based soley on hearsay. He was actually five years old when everything transpired. He was not a witness. Did this book get her thinking about Thomas More? Did she come to the conclusion that Thomas More was a monster and not a saint….Interesting.
Well, the bud and his dad came over yesterday afternoon and we had a gab fest and the bud jumped in with the Beanie Babies for a rollicking good time…
We discussed movies and books and the state of the world.
I liked this one from Tim Challies. “God’s plan all along has been to use ordinary leaders to accomplish extraordinary things.”
dual personalities 