Category Archives: Faith

About 2020

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This year, on Christmas Eve, instead of tuning in our television screen to the standard fireplace channel to set the mood for a magical evening, we opted for a dumpster fire that we queued up on YouTube which had been produced by an Edmonton graphic design firm.

And so we come to the end of The Year That Nobody Expected, Not In A Million Years. Let’s see: there was a world-wide pandemic, premature death, economic chaos and, ugh, social distancing. You mean to say that throughout this sh*tstorm, we don’t even get to cry on other people’s shoulders, pull them in close for a hug or sit side-by-side just to have the feeling that someone else is with you? Isn’t that what shoulders are for? So, yes, the appropriate response might be to throw it all into the dumpster and, for good measure, douse it in gasoline and light it up.

Is it possible that there’s another response?

Easy for me to say. Yes, there have been difficult moments for me this year. There was uncertainty, there was frustration, there was fatigue with the whole dang situation – and that all continues as we move into a new year. But I/we have been “lucky”: our business has survived and none of my immediate family got “The Vid”. (Although Simon claims he can still feel the swab they stuck up his nose to test him back in May.)

The last few months of 2020 I’ve been reading through Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World about different ways to practice faith…well, practically. The last chapter is about pronouncing blessings, which is something that anyone can do. BBT says she’s not even sure you have to believe in God to pronounce something blessed, that “it may be enough to see the thing for what it is and pronounce it good.”

AND THEN she goes on to say that you blessing something doesn’t confer the holiness – it already is just there – that maybe we have no business deciding if something is a blessing or not. One can say a blessing “when you break a bone the same as you do when you win the lottery. The two events may be more alike than you know.“

Hmm.

I remember the first time I was challenged with this concept. It was while I was attending university and had stopped in to visit my spiritual mentor at the time. I overstayed my parking welcome and when I found a (not-a-lottery) ticket on my windshield, he called out from the front door where he and his wife were waving goodbye to me: “Call it a blessing!”

Okaaaaay…how could I do that? Well, first of all, it wasn’t enough to erase the happy feeling I had of the good, long visit we had just enjoyed. I got a ticket, but I was also lucky enough to own my own car. I got a ticket but I probably didn’t starve to pay it. I got a ticket and it taught me to be more careful next time. Apparently, there were myriad blessings in the thing.

The dumpster fire can consume a lot of crap. But it can give off a lot of warmth and light, too, which is Not All Bad. Wishing you a Happy New Year and pronouncing it Already Blessed, No Matter What.

About The Big Wave

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Before I ever understood anything about Pulitzers or Nobel Prizes, I read the slim book The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck, who incidentally clocked in with both of those honors. So, it is no small thing when a writer of such caliber chooses to write for children, which, despite the heavy content, this book is written for. That being said, I think adults can always benefit from reading good children’s stories.

Kino, the son of a farmer, lives near a Japanese fishing village where his best friend Jiya works with his fisherman father. Tragedy visits when a tsunami wipes out the village even though The Old Gentleman who lives in a castle up the mountain offers refuge at the first signs of danger. Jiya alone, sent by his father, manages to get up the mountain in time and then watches with Kino as the terrible ocean wipes the beach clean.

Years later, Jiya decides to return to the beach, to help rebuild the village and to become a fisherman like his father. Kino is baffled with Jiya’s decision and The Old Gentleman derides those who have started the rebuilding. He warns them that he will never again offer refuge in his castle, what he claims is the only safe place.

Jiya answers him:

“Your castle is not safe either…If the earth shakes hard enough, your castle will crumble, too. There is no refuge for us who live on these islands. We are brave because we must be.”

In some ways, this pandemic has felt like The Big Wave – sweeping, arbitrary and devastating. Many people have died and our way of life has changed in somewhat drastic ways. It’s easy to feel like it will never be the same again. It’s easy to be afraid of The Big Wave, of The Next Wave.

In a podcast I recently listened to, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talks with Jen Hatmaker about this feeling of shock that people have – like they’re suddenly out of control, when in fact they were never in control. As Liz puts it, “The world is doing what our world does. The world is just being itself…and it’s doing it perfectly. Because what the world does is change every second…And that’s what it’s always done.”

I take great comfort in those words, which to me paradoxically echo those in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The world does what the world does – as it always has. We were never in control. But we can be brave because we must be.

And though it feels like things may never be the same, we won’t go backward. We aren’t meant for that. We are meant to go back to the beach and build again. And to treasure what we have, if only for this day.

About the Austins

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And now back to our regular un-Pandemic programming. Sort of.

I’m reading a lot lately. I mean, I always have one or two or three books on the go but Pandemic reading has taken on a new slant: my library and favorite thrift shop are closed, I hate e-Readers and I can’t spend all our money on Amazon orders. Because: Pandemic snacks are more important.

So I’ve been re-reading, shopping my own shelves. Actually, pre-COVID-19, I had a plan for My Reading Year (yes, I’m one of those people) that I would do a great deal of re-reading. It all comes from the moving thing: packing up all my books, shedding the ones that are no longer anything more than dead weight (that I didn’t want to move to a new house) and musing over the favorites that I really should re-visit. And this year I wanted to focus on writers I love that write/wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

Madeleine L’Engle falls into that category. Most everyone who recognizes her name would associate it with her Newbery Medal book A Wrinkle in Time – or the recent Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon/Mindy Kaling movie offering of the same name. A Wrinkle in Time is a seminal book that is often lauded by writers of children’s books. Or sometimes, as in another Newbery Medal book, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, it is the backdrop of another story. (A very good story.)

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties before I even heard of Madeleine L’Engle. (I know, right?) A teacher friend lent A Wrinkle in Time to me, plus all the ensuing Murray family books, aghast that I had never read them. And so a L’Engle groupie I became.

Whatever story L’Engle told, her framework was always a moderately conventional family and I think that was a big part of her appeal. The families were like none I knew – ones that discussed physics and tesseracts while their mother cooked stew for supper over a Bunsen burner in their attached-barn-converted-into-a-laboratory. Or where another mother – an ex-opera singer – played classical music records while she cooked supper. Or where the family sat around and discussed theology with everyone from the 5-year old to Grandfather contributing to the conversation. Really, Madeleine?

I haven’t got to a lot of her published journals or non-fiction offerings yet, but any biographical information I’ve read about her suggests that it was exactly the kind of family she was in herself. Minus maybe the space travel and alien abductions. I assume. And Ms. L’Engle always asserted the importance of every person in her fictional families, no matter what their age or how much they misbehaved.

Grandfather, is in fact, one of my favorite characters in Meet the Austins. A retired minister who exudes wisdom, he lives by the ocean in a converted horse stable: the individual stalls are especially conducive to bookshelves that hold Grandfather’s copious book collection. His granddaughter Vicky describes him as a bibliomaniac. (And then parenthetically, tells the reader to ‘Look it up!’ Such cheek!)

Grandfather doesn’t just keep his favorite words in his books or in his head: the most meaningful to him he has transcribed onto the very walls around him. In his bedroom, a quote from Hildevert of Lavardin circa 1125, reads:

“God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”

This quote is so obscure that I couldn’t even Google it. But L’Engle brings attention to a medieval mystic’s words as effortlessly as Hermione Granger waves her wand and pronounces ‘Alohomora!’ to a locked door. (Look it up!)

In the loft, where the children sleep, a poem by Thomas Browne is painted:

If thou could’st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, ‘This is not dead’,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, ‘This is enow
Unto itself – ’twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.’

Have I – pre-slow-and-crawling-days-of-Pandemic – been too full of ‘shrewd activity’? Or even now, with my books and my phone and my TV am I ‘replete with very thou’?

There’s something about the writing on the walls that strikes me, the constant reminders of things that Grandfather believed and wanted to remember. In the bedroom, where the first quote is, he has no other pictures except the picture window, because no picture could complete with the ocean view. But the simple juxtaposition of words reminded him of Whose view it was and Who made it.

What do I write on my walls? What do I want to be reminded of?

Besides hanging pictures or words on my walls, I have a way of remembering some of the lovely things I find in books: I put them into another book. My siblings can attest to how I used to cut and paste and make scrapbooks when I was young, sometimes much to their chagrin as ‘the making of many books’ consumed me – and all the homemade flour paste that Mom could make.

I still cut and paste and draw:

It helps me to remember the things that are important:

And not to mistake the wonderful things:

Good writing and good writers can teach us so much, remind us of what’s important and show us what is possible before it happens. The wonderful things can’t last forever but we can remember them and look forward to different, wonderful things.

About Right Now

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Sometimes I like to take a page or two in my journal and use the phrase “right now” as a prompt to note everything that is happening in my life…right now. Real, ordinary life passes us by so quickly and we rarely take note of it. I have found it so interesting when I look back on these entries that document what was going on at a specific time in my life – for me, for Rick, for my kids, in our town, in our country, in our world. Because we often don’t remember how things were unless we wrote them down, took pictures or posted it on social media.

Throwback 2020 is gonna be interesting in a year or twenty from now.

Besides the oft-told stories of people hoarding toilet paper and antiseptic-wipe scalpers making a killing, we are seeing unprecedented full-stops to travel, to working, to shopping, even going to church, to funerals or weddings. As each day we watch the news and hear the latest stats and mandated shutdowns, it all feels like everything is sloooowly coming to a halt.

I was rifling through my mind to identify what this whole experience reminded me of and I landed on a scene from the movie Apollo 13. In order to save power, the astronauts had to shut everything down. The lights went low, the heat went off, the constant whirring of machines quit, not unlike the eeriness of a power outage when you realize all the regular noise is absent.

In some ways, we are heading into the dark side of the moon. We don’t know exactly when we are going emerge from pandemic status, but the optimistic view is: we will. Yes, Houston, we have a problem but there are amazing people everywhere doing everything they can to land this spaceship called COVID-19.

For some of us, it may feel like we’ve lost the moon, as Jim Lovell stated as soon as he realized they had malfunctioned. Epic trips have been cancelled, stocks have plummeted, savings are being depleted. But it might be too soon to tell. Ken Mattingly, the astronaut who was banned from Apollo 13, lost the moon first, but was instrumental in getting that ship back to earth. And later, on Apollo 16, he did get to walk on the moon.

I don’t want to come off glib or cheezy. I don’t want to make light of this global event that is life- threatening (for some), stress-inducing, schedule-challenging and even, boring for those who are finding social-distancing and just staying at home difficult. Plus, no sports, no graduations, no festivals, no parties, not even any green beer in the pub.

As we emerge in a month or two from the shadow, remember to look for the bright side. I have faith that it’s there. It will always be there.

About Christmas Eve and Perogies

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It’s Christmas Eve and that means…perogies.

Well, yes, I know that’s not all it means. But in my family, it’s certainly one of the “non-negotiables” of Christmas Eve. Rick and the kids and I have our traditions that we dip in and out of depending on the year: a candlelight Christmas Eve service at church, driving around town looking for Santa, Tim-Tams and hot chocolate or playing Gift Trap – one of those strange games no one else has ever heard of that we don’t even remember where it came from. But, perogies – as Severus Snape would say – Always.

Or pyrohy, as my Ukrainian side would assert. Being both Ukrainian and Polish, I can claim ownership of either way to name the potato-and-cheese-filled dumplings that we make and eat every Christmas Eve. There are other variations, of course, filled with sauerkraut, or even blueberries, as my niece is making this year, trying for a more vegan – and sweeter than sauerkraut – version. But potato-and-cheese is my favorite so in my house, since I make ’em, I get to decide what kind we have.

Perogies are part of our pared-down version of the twelve dishes of Christmas Eve that Ukrainians would traditionally eat. My mom had already moved past the original idea of the meal being traditionally dairy-free – hence, the cheese in the perogies – but her Christmas Eve table was filled with many of the usual Ukrainian suspects: kutia – or wheat pudding to start the meal – then fried fish, mashed beans with garlic and pickled herring, to name a few. But there were the not-so-traditional dishes, like steamed broccoli with lemon – a family favorite – and Jell-O for dessert. But always – always – perogies.

Maybe the reason the perogies figure so largely in my Christmas Eve psyche is because when I was growing up, making them was a big part of Christmas Eve. It was sort of a holy endeavor, all of “the girls” preparing and consecrating this bread-like thing for the meal we were going to share together. Making it all the more mouth-watering as we rolled and stuffed and pinched was our family’s observance of Christmas Eve as a fasting day (well, at least we ate a lot less than usual) in anticipation of that evening meal.

When I no longer spent Christmas Eve with my mom, I would make a date with her sometime before Christmas to have a perogy-making day. I would go to her house and she would have the filling and possibly the dough already made – she was terrible at procrastination – and we would spend the subsequent hours visiting and, factory-like, cranking out hundreds of perogies for her freezer and mine.

It’s been five years this Christmas that Mom has been gone. She passed away on December 15, 2014. Most of us had squirreled away some of Mom’s perogies that we had made with her at some other time during the year prior to her getting too sick to make them anymore. It was a bittersweet communion on Christmas Eve, eating some of the last of her perogies that year.

And so, it surprised me the next year when Christmas Eve was almost upon me and…I had no perogies in the freezer. Luckily, I had taken good enough notes and had badgered Mom for specific amounts for her dough recipe and her fillings – because she didn’t have it written down. It always just came out of her head and her heart and her hands. Which was probably why her food tasted so good.

But it’s really not about the food. Yes, the idea of Christmas evokes visions of “sugar-plums” – turkey and trimmings, shortbread, gingerbread, eggnog, even Christmas oranges – things that we may not only have once a year anymore, but at least have a strong association with Christmas and, I hope, with happy memories. Like in Dr. Seuss story of the Grinch, Christmas would still come, and has come, without perogies or turkey or Tim-Tams.

Perogies taste good. But the things I savor even more are in the making – of the perogies with mom, of the memories of Christmas Eves past and of the meal I will share with my husband and kids tonight. In the making of something concrete, we can create something ethereal and even – dare I say? – heavenly. That is what Christmas Eve is all about (Charlie Brown). Not to say that the baby Jesus is like a perogy, but a flimsy analogy can be made of the reverse process: Christmas is when the heavenly was made concrete.

And maybe, just maybe, the humble perogy can help us remember that.

About God and Christmas

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Circa December 2004: Every Sunday School play needs a wise man (Simon), Joseph (Tim) and, of course, a Russian named Boris (Gil)

[Because I love this story from 2002, it’s another Throwback Thursday. Enjoy.]

Some of the most interesting discussions can be overhead from the backseat of a minivan. Sometimes parents are even invited to contribute. The other day as we were on our way to our Sunday School Christmas concert dress rehearsal, my ears perked up at the conversation that was going on behind me. Gil had taken that moment to educate his brothers about what mammals were.

“We’re mammals, aren’t we, Mom?” Gil called for confirmation. Tim, who was in Christmas concert mode and not quite following the conversation, gave the two of us a confused look when I confirmed Gil’s statement. The confusion became obvious to us when he protested, “But I thought we were shepherds!”

Gil responded by telling Tim that people were mammals. But Tim wasn’t leaving Christmas concert mode that easy. “So are shepherds mammals?” he queried. In the qualitative style of a scientist, he then proceeded through the entire cast of nativity characters, asking if each one in turn were also a mammal. Yes, sheep were mammals. Camels, too. No, not angels. And then came the inevitable question.

“So is Jesus a mammal?” By this time Tim was enjoying his goofy repartee immensely. But when Gil answered Tim by saying, “No, Jesus wasn’t a mammal. He’s God,” I had to gently correct our little theologian. Yes, Jesus is God, but when he was a man on earth, he was a mammal, too. 

What parent on their way to a Sunday School Christmas concert could pass up a teaching moment like that one? I explained to the boys that the whole reason we celebrate Christmas is because Jesus came down from heaven and became a mammal just like one of us and that even though he is God, he knows what’s it’s like to be a human being, too.

The boys gave me their token attention, and then digressed into what the difference was between mammals and birds. Gil’s qualification, which for some unknown reason involved the number of times a day a bird goes “poop”, had me making a mental note to spend more time on Science after Christmas.

As Gil continued to “educate” his younger brothers, I marveled at how easy it is for the little ones to believe. In their childlike way, they have the faith to accept that Jesus, who is God, was also once a man. By that same token, it is sometimes impossible for adults to acknowledge the same fact.

Whether it’s Jesus or Santa Claus, Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, everyone wants to believe in something. And when you think about it, maybe the whole idea of Jesus being born a child of poverty in a stable, the humblest of births, is not such a far-fetched idea after all. God made his Son accessible to everyone by making him a mammal, in his own way like both a lamb and a shepherd. During this season of wonder, it’s time to enter into the amazing reason we celebrate Christmas in the first place.

About Church and Christmas

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In the very small town where I grew up there were two churches, one little and one big. My family went to the little church.

And when I say family, I mean it. Not just my immediate family but aunts, uncles, cousins. And neighbors that were like family from our very small town. And when I say little church, I mean that, too. We filled up that very small church every Sunday.

On Sundays, we entered quietly, reverently, craning our necks to look back to see who was whispering so loud before the service started, or worse, laughing. Not that laughing was bad, it just wasn’t part of the proper preparation in waiting for the priest to parade from the back of the little church. But talking, visiting and yes, laughing, were definitely heard after we had paid God his attention, after the climax of the Sunday story – holy communion – had taken place. First communion with God, then with our family and friends.

Going to church was a part of the fabric of our lives, but living in a very small town, the church building itself belonged to us in special way. It was very normal to enter the church on a Sunday, but if we were to go in on another day of the week, it felt different to me, like I wasn’t sure where to stand or what volume of voice to use. But I welcomed it, those odd times of meeting there and the feelings it created in me.

Every year before Christmas, my mother and aunties and almost-aunties would get together to clean the church, enlisting any of their children who were around to help wash the windows and polish the pews. I’m sure it was done more often, but perhaps I remember this best because it preceded decorating the church for Christmas. It was exciting to change the landscape where we worshipped, to anticipate the birthday of the Christ child once more.

I loved being in that church on not-Sundays – the weightlessness of standing around the altar where usually only the priest and altar servers walked and the giddiness of being somewhere sacred and secret. And at Christmas, we would descend into the old basement to retrieve the annual decorations, the most fascinating being the small nativity scene that would be set up on the communion table, the small figures watching as parishioners came in and placed their host in the cup, like the taking of attendance.

It was my first nativity set that I remember. Long before Christmas decorations started multiplying in stores like Helga Hufflepuff’s cup in a vault in Gringotts, the same precious decorations were brought out year after year, with no thought of replacing them. Because they were part of the tradition itself, not just decorating, but remembering, cherishing. Maybe it wasn’t my first nativity set that I saw, but it was the first one I was allowed to touch, as we set it up on the table.

One of the wise men had lost his head. (Well, wouldn’t you if you met God in a manger? Though it seems rather funny – a wise man without a head.) No matter, he still counted – his body was there. It was small, but the whole set was small. Not much shuffling on the table was necessary to include this stable scene that reminded us all of Jesus’ humble beginnings as a man-baby.

The placement of the figures was important, it was part of the alchemy of Advent: the wise men three at one side, shepherds and sheep to the other. The angel with a tiny hook on a tiny nail at the apex of the stable roof. Mary and Joseph flanking the tiny little babe, center stage, like God is supposed to be. I was very young, but I always remembered how it was supposed to go.

I have two nativity sets now and I use the same guiding principles when I set them up. I take attendance as I pull them out of the boxes where they live hidden but waiting. I love how they represent everyone – families, blue collar workers, professionals, animals – and God. Everyone may not be related, but they come together in small spaces and represent the same thing every time: a family.

God’s family. Everyone is included. Even if you lost your head – you are welcome, you are part of the family. Even if you are dressed kind of odd or shabby and you stink like sheep poop – you are welcome, you are part of the family. Even if your beginnings aren’t perfect – that’s not his real dad, you know – you are welcome, you are part of the family. And yes, sheep and camels and all manner of animal friends are part of the family, too.

Angels above us. God with us. In a very small stable in a very small church in a very small town, but representing Everywhere.