The Friday Clive

"Being fallen creatures we tend to resent offences against our taste, at least as much as, or even more than, offences against our conscience or reason...The tendency is easily observed among children; friendship wavers when you discover that a hitherto trusted playmate actually likes prunes. But even for adults it is "sweet, sweet, sweet poison" to feel able to imply "thus saith the Lord" at the end of every expression of our pet aversions. To avoid this horrible danger we must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined both by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste. This is difficult, because the latter are often much more obvious and provoke such a very violent response."

Twenty

Zack is TWENTY! 

The candles blazed and the family sang off-key, so it is official.

A faithful brother, a hardworking student, a new Verizon employee, a passionate musician, a junior high group leader, a fine man...that is my son.

The cake was delicious (just ask the dog, who ate 3/4 of it!)

We love you, Zack. You are a delight to your family. Blessings to you as you begin this important year of your life.

When joy is almost gone

As I open my emails, answer my phone, read my mail, I am reminded that many of us are in a season of suffering, surrounded by layers of worry and sorrow, and it is collecting deep within us. Worry takes on different faces for different people, and it never is just one thing:  the banal worries of money and terra firma responsibilities, things like lay offs and mortgage troubles and cars breaking and houses aging. Or the love of husband/wife, parent/child, friend to friend, feeling the stretch of years and choices and needing to forgive...again. And even just living with ourselves, seeing our choices and wishing that just this once we could be nice or flexible or ready for the challenge. And then the life and death worries hit us when we are already down; they wash every single other worry away...for a time. The middle of the night phone calls, the hurried travel to be at the bedside of a dying father or cousin or friend, the hope that the surgery of a spouse will bring good news after the terror of waiting, the crash of time and eternity when we wonder why everything else bogs us down so badly. We continue to get up, make ends meet, fix meals, love children, kiss husbands, but eventually we are left wondering where the joy went.

 

One day last week, I reached for whatever perfume was on the bathroom counter. I have three bottles that were my mother's, and I spray a mist of memory out every morning, breathe in Mom's fragrance throughout each day. But the bottle I grabbed was almost empty.  The perfume is called JOY.

 
What do you do when the joy is almost gone?  As someone who believes in God's purposes, who lives for eternity, who knows there is a bigger story being written behind the troubles, I am still human.  And the joy feels depleted right now.

I am curious where YOU go to find joy in troubled times.  What is your wisdom?  Your inspiration?

 

I know that seasons come and go, but joy must transcend the circumstances.  Happiness can be married to the now and its feelings, but joy needs to be bigger and broader and more connected to eternity.

Joy is not gone...just stretched.  I hope you'll chime in.  I would love to hear your thoughts.  

The Way I See It: Autumn

The Way I See It photo prompt comes from Molly at Close to Home.


Where I live we are late bloomers in the autumn category.  We have apple festivals up the hill, and a few more coloring leaves there at the snowline.  But just down the hill at my house it has a decidedly "mild summer" feel to it.  But I searched and found signs of autumn's early rumblings:

I am not sure what possessed me but I bought a pumpkin the size of a small country.  Ginormous is the word that everyone has used.  But you know what?  It makes me laugh.  And it is so beautifully orange.  So even if I have to tighten my core muscles to lift the thing, the pumpkin is here for the duration.

The tree we have the most of is oak, and those leaves turn brown and yellow in the autumn.  It is the reds that I miss.  But yesterday at the library I saw these leaves sparkling in the early morning light and they sang "Autumn!" to me.

And walking across a parking lot, these little "lanterns" were scattered on the edge.  What a strangely beautiful plant!  With the indented lines down their sides, they almost look like fat, shriveling carrots. 

Just outside my kitchen window the light is particularly sparkling in the early morning and the late  afternoon.  The slant of the autumnal sunshine makes it all the more special.  Claire found this patch of weeds all aglow in the late afternoon yesterday.  It is amazing what the right light (and a creative girl) can do to a weed.

The long shadows and the early darkness have arrived, but we wait impatiently for a crisp chill in the air and the first rain of the season.  Autumn's pleasures are my favorites.


You should join the fun! This Friday's prompt is Evening.

The Friday Clive

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.

The Way I See It: Joy

Photo prompt:  Molly at Close to Home

I remember my affliction and my wandering, 

   the bitterness and the gall. 

 I well remember them, 

   and my soul is downcast within me. 

Yet this I call to mind 

   and therefore I have hope:

  Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, 

   for his compassions never fail. 

 They are new every morning; 

   great is your faithfulness. 

 I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; 

   therefore I will wait for him.” 

 An early morning in Morgan Hill, California

When I think of joy I think of morning mercies, new every day, and compassion that never fails.

Therefore I have hope.  AMEN!

Highly recommended

 

"I was not born in Alabama in the 1890s.  You may as well know this now.  I've never eaten grits, cropped a share, or ridden a boxcar.  No gypsy woman attended my birth and there's no hellhound on my  trail, as far as I'm aware  Let this record show that I am a white, middle-class Englishman, openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south.

If that weren't bad enough, I'm also an actor: one of those pampered ninnies who can't find his way through an airport without a babysitter....

Worst of all, I've broken an important rule of art, music and career paths: actors are supposed to act, and musicians are supposed to music.  That's how it works.  You don't buy fish from a dentist, or ask a plumber for financial advice, so why listen to an actor's music?

The answer is - there is no answer.  If you care about pedigree then you should try elsewhere, because I have nothing in your size....

These great and beautiful artists lived it as they played it.  All of them knew the price of a loaf of bread and most had times in their lives when they couldn't scrape it together.  They had credentials, in other words, and I respect those as much as the next man, possibly more.

But at the same time, I could never bear to see this music confined to a glass cabinet, under the heading Culture:  Only To Be Handled By Elderly Black Men.  That way lies the grave, for the blues and just about everything else:  Shakespeare only performed at The Globe, Bach only played by Germans in tights.  It's formaldehyde...

So that's my only credential - my one dog-eared ID card that I hope will get me through the velvet ropes.  I love this music, as authentically as I know how, and I want you to love it, too.  If you get a thousandth of the pleasure from it that I've had, we're ahead of the game."

 

The Friday Clive

Once again, a longer quote. 

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith.  I don't agree at all.  They are afflictions, not sins.  Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ.  For the beginning of the Passion - the first move, so to speak - is in Gethsemane.  In Gethsemane a very strange and significant thing seems to have happened.

It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord had long foreseen His death.  He knew what conduct such as His, in a world such as we have made of this, must inevitably lead to.  But it is clear that this knowledge must somehow have been withdrawn from Him before He prayed in Gethsemane.  He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father's will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not.  That is both a logical and a psychological impossibility.  You see what this involves?  Lest any trail incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope - of suspense, anxiety - were at the last moment loosed upon Him - the supposed possibility that, after all, He might, He just conceivably might, be spared the supreme horror...

But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been very Man.  To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man...

We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they arrive.  But the prayer  in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God's will and equally part of our human destiny.  The perfect Man experienced it.  And the servant is not greater than the Master.  We are Christians, not Stoics."

For the seventeenth time...we begin again

Surrounded by Sonlight binders, listening to piano practice, I take a moment to think of where we have been and where we are going.

Three of my students are done homeschooling.  Two are in college, one is taking a gap year and working full-time.  They are hard working adults now.  When did they become adults?  It seems like we started homeschooling just yesterday, but in fact it was seventeen years ago.  I was thirty-five.  I am now 52.  It was NOT yesterday.

There are three more years of teaching Claire, six more of teaching Brennan.  I must remember:  Finish strong. Each day, each year.  I want to stay inspired, stay energetic (or become energetic again.)  I want to enjoy the hard work ahead. Claire is by far my most creative student, Brennan is the most self-motivated. Creativity can have the time and freedom to blossom here at home; self-motivation gets a whole lot done.  I am really looking forward to this year.

We are using Sonlight Core H and Core 300 this year .  We're tweaking things (I love tweaking) but I am happy to have a lesson plan to start with.  I am excited to learn more about the 20th century, about physical science, about geography and poetry. 

We're back to speech (for Claire and Brennan) and debate (for Brennan.)  Claire is taking ballet for the first time.  For fun Brennan's been learning to juggle, thanks to an Usborne juggling set I found at one of the conferences I worked this summer.  We have plenty of familiar things, a few new ones thrown in, and we are off and running for a new school year.

We have stocked up on our own brand of essentials:  Cocoa...I should probably send Nestle a thank you note when we are done homeschooling.  It is miraculous what solace can be found in a cup of cocoa.  Cool new (to us) maps that we found in Natalie's things.  Brennan and I get lost in maps (in a good way, of course).  And today we head to the library where there is a stack of books on hold for us.  And for the teacher?  Bags of French roast beans ready to grind, and Hugh Laurie playing the blues on the ipod.  

This is going to be a great year.

Dear Natalie

Thursday the 1st was Madelaine's last day here.  We ran some errands, saw The Help (loved it) and then she finished getting ready.  When we finally went to bed, I could not sleep.  There were too many anxious thoughts to unravel, too many rabbit trails racing off in different directions inside my head.  I waited in the dark for sleep to come, but instead the phone rang at midnight.  It was my dear cousin's retirement home calling.  Natalie had been found on the floor of her apartment, she appeared to have had a stroke and they were taking her to Stanford Hospital.  Two hours later the doctor called to report that yes, she had had a stroke, and that it was severe.  I packed a bag and waited for dawn.  I took Madelaine to the bus station and waved her off into the sunrise, and then drove west to Natalie.

 

Stanford Hospital is huge. It took a long time to find which ICU she was in, but eventually I found myself by her bedside.  I was there for two days, holding her hand, wishing that the news was better, wishing that this was all a dream.  Finally, when we stepped out for a few minutes on Saturday evening, she passed from this world to the next.  I will miss her so much.

 

We spent a week with Natalie in Oregon every year for the last thirteen years.  She had never married or had children, so she enjoyed the chance to play grandmother for a week.  She loved seeing the kids splashing in the pool, swinging on the swings, playing shuffleboard.  In the last few years, she and I have made sure we had an afternoon to ourselves, sipping lattes and talking about things.  She was worried about having a stroke, surviving and not being independent anymore.  She was worried about being a burden.  I hope I was able to reassure her that whatever happened, we would be there and it would all be okay.   

 

And all is okay, despite the gaping hole of grief that has been ripped open once again.  We are working to clear out her apartment, and thanks to the loving help of my friend Marcia and my son Zack, we are done going down to Palo Alto.  It is a solemn and yet sacred thing to go through someone's belongings, to determine what needs to happen to all that is left behind.  Natalie had been getting rid of things bit by bit for years, so the job, while big, could have been a lot bigger.  In every corner I find reminders of her love for us:  a birthday card, a note she saved, pictures of our trips to Oregon, to name a few.

Natalie was a kind, generous, brilliant woman, and I am so grateful to have had the gift of her love and friendship for so many years.

Natalie Anne Cobby

3-31-27 to 9-3-11

Eternal rest grant unto Natalie, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.  Amen.

The Way I See It: Work

Photo prompt from Molly at Close to Home : Work.

So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling;  for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

~Philippians 2:1-13~

 

Back to Eugene

My work in this season of life is learning to say goodbye.  Until Christmas, or until eternity.  Letting go while still loving deeply, keeping my hands and my heart open; it is the hardest job I have ever done.

 Sisters, 1985

Layers of loss make it tempting to close up, batten down the hatches, harden my heart.  But I want to keep loving, to look life in the face, all the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to still say yes to what God has for the future.  

 

I want to celebrate while I still have breath.  There is so much Life happening here, and I don't want to miss out because I am too weary to see the party right in front of me.  I know I will regret it if I don't hear the music and start dancing.

The Friday Clive

Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is (more) necessary.

The Way I See It: Home

(A photo prompt from Molly at Close to Home )


When the photo prompt at Molly's was "Home", I was sitting in the Stanford Hospital cafeteria, waiting for the ICU visiting hours to start again.  I was surrounded by medical students whose faces give new meaning to the word tired.  I am sure this cafeteria is their home away from home.  I also saw hospital visitors, many who had children who were patients at Stanford Children's Hospital.  They knew the cashier's names by heart, they knew what soup was served on Fridays, they knew where the forks were hiding and whether or not the entree of the day was worth getting.  This was their home, too.

I had thought I would post pictures of my husband and children, because wherever they are is my home.  But as I sat having my salad, I looked up at the wall art and saw this:

Doctors,  med students, techs, nurses, all trying to help those who are suffering; family and friends looking for hope and healing for their loved ones; me, waiting to hold my dying cousin's hand.  We are all being asked to make a home in this place of suffering, for a short time or a lifetime.  This is a home no one would choose, but many have to live here everyday. 

When I am with these five beautiful faces (and their daddy) I am most at home.  But sometimes we are called away to a time of suffering, and home has to expand to that place, too.

In Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry writes, "Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery."

There is plenty of dark in life; we all need love to carry us.  I am thinking today of those who continue their vigils at Stanford Hospital, continue suffering, continue hoping against hope.  May God bring them love to carry them, like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.  And may our house be a place of light in the darkness for those I call my heart's home.

The Friday Clive

A longer quote than usual:

On Liturgy

Every service is a structure of acts and worship through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore.  And it enables us to do these things best - if you like it, it "works" best - when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it.  As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing, but only learning to dance.  A good shoe is a good shoe you don't notice.  Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.  The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been fixed on God.

But every novelty prevents this.  It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping...

Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity.  I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put.  But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship...

It may well be that some variations which seem to me merely matters of taste really involve grave doctrinal differences.  But surely not all?  For if grave doctrinal differences are really as numerous as variations in practice, then we shall have to conclude that no such thing as the Church of England exists.    And anyway, the Liturgical Fidget is not a purely Anglican phenomenon; I have heard Roman Catholics complain of it, too...

 

One more day

 Summer sunset

 
Last Sunday we had a marvelous dinner, smack dab in the middle of the afternoon, all seven of us around the table.  No one was at work, no one was at camp, no one was at school. We set up a table in the living room, which made it feel all the more like Thanksgiving, and we ate barbeque chicken and potatoes and talked. The talking is the part I will always remember.

And it actually began the night before. A few of us were piled on my bed upstairs and the question was asked, "Can you rate each member of the family on how 'nice' they are?" This strange request reveals a few things about our family: We love personality quizzes (even the Which _________ Character Are You? ones), AND we view life much too competitively. Not only do you need to say if I am kind, but am I kinder than the next guy. That is important. Some of us loved this...those of us who were in the top two or three of everyone's list. Some of us had a different experience, but all of us found it very interesting. One thing we learned is that "nice" is a decidedly subjective word. Opposite of mean? Gentle? Generous? Is it nice to family, nice to outsiders, nice to the masses? And where does blunt speech come in? As a famously blunt person, this was of great interest to me. Another person in the family (who will remain anonymous) was very concerned that skeletons in the closet not be allowed in the consideration of kindness. "Judge me as the (wo)man I am now, not the shoe throwing, angry kid I was before." I am all for judging based on the most recent version of me. Eventually we went to sleep, but my guess is we all thought about kindness as we lay there in the dark.

So on Sunday, as we passed the chicken and potatoes, the kindness scale came back up. It was obviously not a comfortable subject for some, so my peace loving son switched it to the talents of each family member... which then slowly changed to things we simply love about each other. Everyone got their turn.  Details were discussed.  It was an unplanned, encouraging, real and never-to-be-forgotten time. 

We have seen the weak links in our family chain stretch in the last year. We have been hurt, disappointed, scared and worried about each other, sometimes for legitimate reasons but sometimes simply because life is changing and that is intimidating.  As a mother this has been humbling, but I do believe we saw with different eyes on Sunday. And we told each other what we saw. And we could hear it.

Madelaine leaves tomorrow.  We've had a few short weeks of everyone being home.  It is amazing what can happen in a few weeks.  Or in one dinner on a hot Sunday afternoon.