Merry Christmas

Light returns slowly after the solstice, after the Nativity. I am here in this warm room once again, considering the quiet, the lights on trees and in the creche. Considering the silence as my child sleeps upstairs. Considering the dark candles on the wreath. I should light those candles 

It is the Feast of the Holy Innocents and I am considering birth and death, bound intimately in the great feast of Christmas. Bound intimately always, I suppose.

I am hugely pregnant: the small person in my belly is kicking ribs, arching his spine. I am in awe of his presence, terrified of his coming, numb with my embodiment and his. 

Incarnation: the in-fleshment, becoming human, the meat of being man. Is this what is happening to us? Am I becoming flesh as my child does? as my God does?

It is so difficult to live in this flesh.

Both times I have been pregnant I have found my words slow as my body grew. I haven't written a line of poetry in months, and I find my words come slowly and with difficulty now. A funny time to begin again the blog. But this is my New Year's Resolution: to be accountable  here, to try to write, to watch my children and allow myself to feel awe and pain. To produce, to contribute--rather than merely consume--when I enter the online world. 

I will begin again slowly. Have patience with me as I struggle with the technology, with extreme pregnancy and soon--new motherhood.

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Making Midsummer

Summer has arrived. Many signs point to the fact. Even I have not been able to ignore the heat, the cicadas, the Black-eyed Susans. Or the pie.

In our house most of the cooking is done by Yours Truly. I enjoy the concrete creativity, patience, and ingenuity required to put a delicious, attractive, healthy meal on the table.

But in all the thousand and one days of cooking I have never made a pie. My husband makes pies. It is one of his Vocations: Master of Butter Crust. King of Sour Cherries Picked Fresh and Pitted by Hand. He inherited this talent from his most Honourable Mother, who is a pie-maker of great renown.

So for our house midsummer means making pies, and this year was no different. Except we have a new initiate into the Guild of Crust Rollers:

What did I expect? It's in the family.

Early Magnolia

We returned to Kansas City after dark on Monday. After a brief sojourn to the Florida panhandle I was shocked to discover that spring had arrived. In the dim glow of street lights I discerned--flowers in the trees. The Bradford Pear. And the magnolias.
Magnolias are perhaps my favorite trees. Magnolias of all kinds, though different strains of appeal to different parts of my soul. My summer soul loves the dark, rich rooms of the southern evergreen magnolia, with their heavy atmosphere and the regal stillness of their white petals.
But my spring soul, my joyful-after-midwest-winter soul loves the tulip magnolia.
When I was an undergraduate in Chicago there were two venerable specimens outside of the English department windows. They always seemed to be in full, exuberant bloom during finals week when I was surviving (or not) off ramen noodles and no sleep. As I wandered around campus with my Norton Anthology of Whatnot, mumbling Shakespeare or Spenser or Milton and trying to wrap my dim mind around Courtly Love or Incarnational language--there were the magnolias: quiet, lovely, untroubled by term papers or post-structural theory.
The magnolias--so brief. They hardly last a week in the best years. This year, so hot, was not the best year. The magnolias opened early and are dropping early. I saw them open for the first time in the darkness three days ago, and already the petals pool under the branches, turn brown when crushed.
The magnolias--so brief. I almost didn't want to look at them. Surely it would be easier to ignore their beauty, then I wouldn't suffer the loss of the beauty. I feel this way about so many things: babies, rain storms. Too difficult to stop and watch the beautiful thing. To difficult to see it.
"Humankind cannot bear too much reality," said T.S. Elliot. But what people don't understand, is that he wasn't talking about the suffering of children, natural disasters. He was talking about beauty. We cannot bear it.

Or George Eliot: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." We cannot bear it.
Watching the magnolias this spring reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years ago. It's really about the southern magnolia, but perhaps appropriate here as well.

My Magnolia

White within the shadow tree,

you open whole into a cool room,

your windows widen from the bud.

Magnolia, you never break—

no shards. Your pane will melt

like rain upon the autumn yard.

Magnolia, you never cry, your eyes open dry.

Your mouth is mute without a tongue

while choirs of mockingbirds lament.

Magnolia, you never sing,

your music is the odor,

oil between the branches.

Magnolia, you never stain, your pain

is only shadow turning blue.

Your skin will never tear.

My magnolia, the lips that hold you

only loosen

and let go.

Custom

Yesterday our new sofa was delivered. Our *custom* Lee Industries English Roll Arm sofa has put all our other furniture to shame. So lovely, so well built, so...comfortable.
This is our first "grown-up" purchase to date (excluding, of course, our gorgeous antique (i.e. reeediculously expensive) Chinese buffet which we bought while we were broke in graduate school. And that wasn't what I would define as a "grown-up" decision.

Besides the Chinese buffet most of our furniture has consisted of 1. Ikea things inherited from Devin's dorm room, 2. Decent though dated things inherited from grandmothers and aunts, and 3. free or basically free stuff from roadsides, Craigslist, flea-markets or old chicken-coops (i.e. the coffee table pictured above. It was in some guys barn covered in chicken...youknow. Needless to say, he didn't charge us to haul it away.)

We had the loveseat (another fleamarket find) recovered, and it doesn't look so bad.

The problem with custom is that it is fosters a spirit of discontent. Everything else in the house looks a little bit shabbier next to the new *custom* couch (I mean you cheapo jute rug!! oh--and baby toys, yes.)

The only thing in the room that outshines the sofa is my own little darling piece of Custom Work:

Harriet reeeealy wanted to look at the "babies" on the little screen on the back of the camera. Because, you know, that's what cameras are for (taking pictures of babies. Not sofas. Duh, mom).
"Babies??"
"Bayy bees!! ?"
"Baaaayyyy Beeees!!"
She so doesn't care about custom furniture. Who knew?"

First Friday

First Fridays are important in our family. The first Friday of the month is, as you know, set aside as a day of special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and I have, at some points in history attended First Fridays adoration and Mass. Small children I could name have made this practice a bit more challenging, but this past Friday I was able to attend Mass with Miss Hattie in tow. Hattie amused herself by reorganizing the hymnals and I was able to grab a quiet moment, for which I am so thankful.

But First Fridays are important to Thomas More and Myself for other, secular reasons as well. Namely: Good JuJu and the vintage markets in the West Bottoms, which are only open on the first weekend of every month. I usually go down on Friday morning with my lovely friend Anna, but since she now resides in Our Nation's Capital I have been lacking a shopping buddy.

This month I headed down with some Bible Study friends and my husband, who took some time out of his busy schedule to hang with the ladies.

A view of the warehouse.
Thomas More and Harriet trying out a Bentwood cafe chair.

Chandelier sideways.
Bridge at sunset. After shopping we ate at a delicious vegan restaurant off Summit.

I liked their stripy wall.

And their metalic gold wall. I entertained Hattie by taking pictures of her and showing her the results on the little screen on the back of the camera.

This is probably the least flattering picture I have ever seen of either of us.

Shoots and Starts

Winter Solstice: Half-spent was the Night

"Light! More light!" -Goethe

Christmas falls very close to the winter solstice: the shortest day of the year is the 22nd of December.

I have noticed that many Christians seem uncomfortable with the proximity of one of Christianity's holiest days to the ancient, pagan celebration of solstice. "Pagan" elements in the celebration of the Nativity are regarded with deep distrust. Christmas trees, yule-logs, gift-giving, Father Christmas, even the Christmas ham are identified as "heathen" intrusions in an essentially Christian holiday. And this suspicion is not new: in the 17th century Protestants in Britain and the United States banned the celebration of Christmas for its heathen notes (and its idolotrous "trappings of popery.")

Non-Christians also enjoy pointing out the (supposedly) pre-Christian roots of many Christmas traditions, implying that, after all, the "authentic" holiday was pagan, earth-centered, and has survived *despite* Christianity's appropriation of the solstice symbols.


A person who is a good and true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature, but rejecting superstitious vanities and deploring and avoiding those who 'though they knew God did not glorify him as God...'

I have never understood either of these approaches. What was true and good and beautiful re-Christian pagans is true and good and beautiful always and for all. Or, as Augustine wrote, "truth belongs to the Lord, wherever it is found." The pre-Christian Europeans might have celebrated the return of light in the midst of darkness. But this longing for LIGHT, the joy at light's return--these impulses are fundamentally human and universal. They are the foundation of any religious desire, any quest for truth. They are, in the end, our desire for God. "My soul waits for the Lord," the Psalmist sings, "more than the watchmen wait for the morning. More than the watchmen wait for the morning."

Before the first Christmas both the psalmist and the scop in the dark Germanic woods, both the priest in the Holy of Holies and the ordinary man in the field--all waited with foreboding and longing for the advent of light: literal sunlight in a dark season--but also divine brilliance to pierce the soul's darkness.

In the centuries before Christ the prophets of Israel looked forward to a real incarnation of Light: the "Son" who is dimly suggested by the "sun" in the sky.

The People who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.

Meanwhile, the fertile imagination of the gentiles waited for the solstice and invented myths to illustrate the same hope: tales of gods who died and rose again--Dionysis, Mithras, Osiris. For us--we are gentiles--Christmas was the day of fulfillment, the day that "myth became fact."

Gentile that I am, I balk at the idea of throwing out the "pagan" elements of Christmas celebration. I have no qualms about celebrating the winter solstice. My Christmas tree is full of light. If these things are partial they have been fulfilled in Christ. If they were pagan, they have been baptized.

Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse's lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night