Book List 2013

The tally:

5 fiction
1 biography
3 theology/Christian life
6 nonfiction (mostly education/parenting related)
15 total

This year I also did a lot of reference reading in garden books and commentaries on Luke and Acts (part of a Bible study).

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Phantastes (George MacDonald)

The Hurried Child (David Elkind)

Desperate (Sarah Mae & Sally Clarkson)

Lillian’s Story (Lillian Kristensen & Jessie Chapin)

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (Anthony Esolen)

Casti Connubii: Encyclical on Christian Marriage (Pope Pius XI)

Boys  Adrift (Leonard Sax)

The Well-Trained Mind (Susan Wise-Bauer & Jessie Wise)

The Kalahari Typewriter School for Men (Alexander McCall Smith)

The Wanderings of Odysseus (Rosemary Sutcliff)

Why Gender Matters (Leonard Sax)

The Well-Educated Mind (Susan Wise Bauer)

The Ministry of Motherhood (Sally Clarkson)

A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)

In progress: Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)

Most influential: Les Miserables, though I haven't finished it yet! (Around 700 pages in.) This for a combination of style, story and substance - it's a classic for a reason. It's fiction, it's history, but also theology. The life of the Bishop of Digne alone is a weighty challenge to embody Christ's love in the world. 

On the wish list for this year...

Jane Austen - either Emma or Northanger Abbey

More fiction! Any suggestions?

~lg

Contemplation

"Contemplation is nothing else than a secret, peaceful, and loving infusion of God, which if admitted, will set the soul on fire with the Spirit of love."

~ St. John of the Cross

In defense of feasting

O holy, riotous joy that wakes with Christmas morn, the blazing sun of a world made new, the Word made flesh! All of this waiting rewarded with the cry of a babe, the shout of the heavenly armies, the farmers turned heralds and drudges turned dancers! 

Strike up the band, strike the matches and light up the world with leagues of torches, and bring one yourself, come quickly and run! Christ is born - tell the folk of the village! The Light of the World has come!

O for a thousand tongues to sing this joy, a thousand bells to ring this birth announcement, a thousand jigs and reels to play our winged feet to the manger! 

Prepare the feast and break the fast! Empty the pantry and fill up the tables! The hunger is over, the famine banished, and now to revel in the lavish spread prepared! 

Let heaven and nature sing, all creatures great and small, let everything with breath bring praise,  and crown Him Lord of all! 

~lg

Wilderness walker

In the wilderness, the pillar, the cloud.

In the wilderness, the mount of revelation.

In the wilderness, the daily bread.

In the wilderness, the covenant.

Not by chance, not even our choice, but His choosing.

The only path to glory that we know is through the nail holes. The only way to life through the birth canal.  

The road from Jericho to Jerusalem is filled with bandits and thieves, but we may yet meet our Saviour, not in the holy robes but in the outcast’s embrace, or perhaps even in the bloodied man himself.

Our God, He is a wilderness walker, a burning bush talker. He draws a crossroads in the sand, and we can choose –

Do we walk with Him?

~lg

These Advent days

We live between His comings, lighting our candles, thankful for the fire given, longing for a day when darkness is dispelled finally.

Day and night repeat their arms-length dance, and we try to keep in step, keep in rhythm with the moments given, the tasks at hand, the rising and setting of heavenly lights.

We look for flickers of peace, flashes of joy, smiling across the table in the hopeful glow, knowing that love is a strike anywhere match, and we must keep igniting in the dark or else perish.

We look and long and live and love, and this is the light of these Advent days.


~lg

Remembrance Day 2013

Today, the prayers are punctured with cannon shot.

Today, the river runs red with mud, swollen with the memories of lives swept away.

Today, children stand in the rain and ask what all the pretty poppies are for.

And I pause and look at the guns and wonder how to explain all this to the innocent.

I pull back the curtain on human hurt, just a bit, just enough, I hope, to reveal something of sadness and thankfulness. What it all comes down to – not enough love in our hearts. We humans, we can die for lack of love.

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee.

This is the only way to peace. This is the only thing stronger than death. This is the only thing that can overcome “all this.”

Today, let every heart bloom red with love, lest all these pretty poppies be in vain.

~lg

Intercessions - November 6, 2013

God of the sleepless nights,

Of the weary restless, the heavy-lidded, heavy-laden ones. Give your beloved rest. You who neither sleep nor slumber, soothe insomniac hearts with the steady beating of your own. Sing over the tousled beds, the troubled heads, till all the tangled soul wanderings run smooth and still. Rock away the little fears, the hidden tears, till every child can sleep in heavenly peace. Keep our nights in the hollow of your hand, that when we awake we will be satisfied, still with you.

Amen.

little boy beauty

Beauty is a brown-eyed babe,

Flannel soft and smiling.

Beauty is the steady gaze,

Tender and beguiling.

Beauty is a dimpled cheek,

Smooth and round and warm.

Beauty is the hushing body,

Tucked into my arm.

Beauty is a holding hand,

Whispers of the skin.

Beauty is beholder’s eye,

Wide to take it in.

~lg

descent

How does one embrace the descent? Imitate the weightless beauty of the falling leaf, the leaping stream?

How does one dive wholeheartedly, headfirst into the baptismal font every single day? To abandon all hope of living for self, to drown this choking rebellion till at last lungs are filled in the depths of death’s cold spring?

And where is my end, if all I have I throw into the cracks of the earth, into these rivulets of sacrifice,
          down, down, down,
                              to what end?

My only prayer - 

Swallow me up and spit me out clean.

~lg

Clothed

Do you remember it? The first outfit you chose for your baby girl? Perhaps a decidedly pink sleeper and matching hat. Or an impossibly tiny and frilly dress. Do you remember it? The care, the delight, the amazement of choosing those darling clothes? Do you remember dressing your daughter for the first time, how those little limbs would not stay put, just how she wiggled and made that face and wondered what was going on?

Today, friends of ours will be choosing their daughter’s last outfit. I cannot imagine how they will choose. What love will finger those threads, will tremble in carrying such grown up clothes to the counter. What grief to lay them out and know the stillness with which they will finally rest.

At the beginning and the end, we are all helpless to dress ourselves.

And sometimes in the middle of it all, we can be left feeling stripped, naked, wondering what is going on.

But there is One who comes when everything is inside out and wraps His cloak around us. He wraps His arms around us, and we can crawl into our Father’s lap and into His comfort. 

And somewhere in the middle of it all, this living, heaving, laugh and cry world, we remember the joy. We remember we are all His children.

~lg

A little prayer for the unraveled life

Today – when life pokes holes in my perfect plans, I will reach through the wounds and to the side of the saviour.

Today – when the threads of my sanity unravel, I will let down my hair and kiss his feet.

Today – when all I have seems to wear threadbare, I will stretch out and touch the hem of his garment.

Today – I will shed my patchwork sufficiency and weave all my loose ends into the seamless robe of Christ. 

~lg

Dear Abraham

Dear Abraham,

It’s been awhile, and hard to know how to measure the time, but I think I've found a footing in the promised land. And I think I get what you were trying to tell me about the sacrifice. The willing knife let me see the ram. In my own stubbornness, I didn't want to accept the provision. But by grace I got caught in the thicket, where struggle subsided into submission and I was ready for the altar. I cut the cords and found I didn't need them. My heart and all my blood stood still, and I knew He was God. 

He and not I, and everything else faded and there was the freedom I had been running so hard to find.

A new longing rises from the stillness, desire refined by the fire and all the brighter for it. It surrounds me like the pillars of old, now blazing, now blanketing, and when I step out of the tent at night I see a million promises beckoning. I think of you and smile. It may be a thousand years or it may be tomorrow, but I know we’ll stargaze together again. 

~lg

morning play

Cats and kids run together across daybreak's dewy grass, a lively, giggling, pouncing riot of energy. We tumble out of the house, upturned by the urge to stretch and squeal and see just what this day is made of.

The world is here and waiting, fresh for us after a night of puckish plotting, inviting us to a game of hide and seek. "Count to ten, then catch me if you can," it shouts. We close our eyes and play along, breathe deep, then burst out after the trail of wonder.

Oh, there is a sweetness, a rightness, to begin the day this way.

This is the play that leads to prayer,
wide-eyed,
arms wide open prayer,
childlike,
cartwheels of prayer.

~lg

For All the Good Christian Girls Gone Wrong

We good Christian girls are doomed to live in the messes of our own making, because we know better. Deserving of our doom – yes, this is our self-judgment. And so there is no choice but to buckle down and bear it, to accept our lot, all the while denying our deep suffering for fear the truth will bring us shame.

Better to soldier on than face the shame.

Choices have consequences, and we have no one to blame but ourselves for our imperfect choices. Thus, we bear the responsibility of the imperfect consequences.

We adjust. Expectations, the deep desires of our hearts – all adjusted to fit our present circumstances so we don’t feel the discrepancy. We cannot feel the discrepancy, for then we would feel our failure, and our Father’s disappointment, and there is nothing worse.

If we let ourselves feel the pain, we make sure the pronouncement of our deserving it is quick to follow.

And this, this we turn into our twisted sacrifice, our cross to bear. We have failed – failed ourselves, our family, our God, and the sense of it smolders. It smolders and smothers and we think we are dying to self.

We could not be more wrong.

Self could not be more alive.

We have failed, but not in the way we first thought. We have failed to grasp grace.

This sense that we deserve it? Deserve to lie crippled in these beds we have made because these are the rules? One. big. lie.

Oh, if we are talking about the way the world works, the way human nature works, the way the Law works, we are correct.

Correct, but not right.

For the right way has been shown by God, and it is not our way.

God is most correct to condemn us. But we good Christian girls get stuck here. And what’s worse, we stay and build our lives here.

God’s rightness was shown in Jesus on the cross, taking full responsibility for every imperfect choice and the consequences thereof, even those made by good Christian girls who tell themselves they should have known better.

And our smoldering heaps of disappointed martyrdom? Just another disguise for self-righteousness. Just another way we try to prove ourselves to God.

So afraid of shame, we forfeit our freedom.

So afraid to hope, we dare not pray.

Our sacrifices are not enough, and never will be. Our silent suffering will never atone for our shortcomings.

Oh, come to the cross and bury your damnation in His death! Throw your failures onto His finished work and be free! Receive freely what you’ve been trying to deserve all along – grace.

There is grace for the good girls who do not feel good enough. We don’t need to feel good enough, but we can be made right. Right here, right now.

All our disappointments, self-doubt, and despair – finished. All our suffocating striving and self-made shackles – finished. All our fear of failure and faithlessness – finished.

Let go and live.

Live out of His love and let fear be cast out.

Live out of His delight and let the desires of your heart come to life again.

Live out of His faithfulness and let faith arise.

Let go of the mess and see yet what God may make of it. Rise out of that bed and walk. Restoration . . . healing . . . hope – no, not what you deserve, but what God desires. This is the gospel, and it is for good Christian girls, too. 

life

Last night I held a baby chick in my hand, one that hatched here in Wheatley River, part silkie. So soft, so fragile, clinging to life by a dropper of sugar water and a heating lamp. It had been too cold yesterday afternoon. The day before was sweltering near 30. But then a shift, a sudden drop, and this little one was overtaken by shivers. I marveled at the delicate intricacy of its emerging feathers, of the warmth of its faltering heart – one of God’s creatures. It died before morning, and our eyes leaked salty water.  

This morning we found the first strawberries down by the chicken coop. We had unearthed the patch quite by surprise, clearing out brush early this spring. Arden brought one in to me, perfectly red, perfectly ripe, as if timed to my breakfast. Fruit in season – what could be sweeter? You can’t buy that life on a shelf.

Today I thinned the carrots and turnips. Too many, too close, and the harvest will be thin and twisted. So I pulled up the tiny roots, already veggies in miniature. I marveled at the faint purple of the turnip roots, the hearty green of suncatcher leaves, the very life of these seed babies. I tossed them in the compost pile. Maybe I’ll eat them next year.

This afternoon I found a chipmunk, dead, in the grass by the old tractor. One of the cats must have got it. I swelled at my cat’s hunting skills while mourning the chipper motion that was halted forever, here on the lawn. I lifted it with the spade and laid its life to gentle rest beneath one of the hedgerow’s rotting logs.

Life – size does not determine its significance. Creation whispers as powerfully as it roars, and I am caught up in its Gloria.

Life – it comes and goes between my fingers, and all I can do is try to catch the joy and cradle the sorrow . . . keep my hands cupped open. 

~lg