Category: The Pillar

Dear Piggy

One of the more pleasant accounts I follow on social media is by a “mudlark” — someone who scavenges for lost and discarded items in a riverbank, especially on the river Thames.

I enjoy the tidbits of information about history, culture, industry and fashion she shares along with photos of her finds; but even more, I enjoy her delight in finding things. She seems just as enchanted with the 967th boot nail or marble or pipe stem as she was with the first. She understands deeply these aren’t just prizes or accomplishments to tick off a mudlark list. They’re belongings, things once owned and used and maybe cherished by specific people; and she honors their lives by finding their lost things, cleaning them, naming them, learning about them. Recalling that someone real and important once lived here.

I do a bit of mudlarking myself, albeit in a body of water without any historical pedigree. It’s the little brook that runs through our backyard, and when the water is low, I sometimes clamber around and see what the current turned up.

I’ve found a toy Roy Rogers gun, a miraculously intact vintage lightbulb, and one time, a key from a berth on a boat that sailed out of Boston many decades ago. We find a lot of bottles, some still labeled as lineaments or tonics, and lots of bits of pottery still printed with hints of roses and suggestions of filigree. We find so many forks and spoons and knives, and chains, hooks, latches, bolts, and peculiar wrenches. And we find toys of past generations: a plastic mummy leg from a defunct cartoon; a dinosaur with washed-out eyes; and endless wheels and chassis from toy trucks. Boys’ toys are most common, I suppose because they’re built sturdier and last longer, even if only in pieces, smothered in mud.

One year I was digging up the yard for a patio, and I found a rare delicate toy: A little ceramic pig, bleached featureless, but intact. I was happy to take a break from work with bricks, so I cleaned piggy off, polished it up, and looked for a safe spot so I wouldn’t lose it. I was so pleased when an idea popped into my head: I’ll give it to the baby. The patio I was building features a little statue of St. Joseph, and he’s holding a toddler Jesus. I tucked the pig into Jesus’ outstretched hand and mumbled a quick, sheepish prayer for him to take care of it.

Take care of me.

Why is it so thrilling and moving to find these little bits from the past? It’s not as if we thought we were the first humans ever to live here, and are amazed to discover that this is not so. Goodness knows the evidence of previous families is everywhere, from the old-fashioned, elderly rose bush in front, to the bewildering layers of linoleum I had to chip my way through like an archeologist when I was renovating the kitchen. So yes, of course, we knew there were people here before us.

But somehow, finding their stuff feels like a tiny victory. It feels, sometimes, like it’s something I myself have lost, and am finding again. Even when it’s something unfamiliar, or something I can’t identify, there’s often a sense of relief: Ah, HERE it is. As if I’d been searching everywhere for my inscrutable rusty wrench, or my plastic mummy leg. (I have not).

It’s a displaced emotion, like a false memory you have in a dream. If I were superstitious, I would say it’s a sign of the spirit realm trying to make contact, or a lingering memory from a past life. But I’m not superstitious; I’m a Christian. So here is what I think it is.

I think it’s a sign that we know we’re immortal, and suffer a constant, outraged grief that our bodies are not. We know that we are destined for eternal life, and also that we are always in danger of falling to pieces, floating apart, drifting away, being buried in the mud. Not being found. Being forgotten.

Read the rest of my latest column for The Pillar (paid subscriber content)

 

Body weight

Remember the Shake Weight? Remember the Abdominizer? Remember the Ab Roller, ThighMaster, Bowflex Xtreme?

Once we believed all we had to do was buy this stuff, set it up, and inevitably proceed to become ripped, buff, jacked, swole, or achieve buns of steel, possibly for only five easy payments of $19.99.

Maybe we tried these gimmicks for a while, and they were good for a while. Then they got boring, then they got wretched, then they went under the bed to gather dust. Sic transit gloria ThighMaster.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying equipment to help you get more fit. Some of it is actually really effective. But as someone who recently bought, failed to use, and then threw away a knock-off version of that ridiculous weighted hula hoop, I will tell you what I already knew in my heart: It’s not the equipment. It’s me.

External stuff I can buy and use is not what is going to change my life. What will change my life is (a) doing the thing and (b) continuing to do it. That’s one of the reasons why I return, again and again, to the simplest exercises: The ones that take advantage of my own body weight.

Broadly, this category of exercise is called “calisthenics,” and it just means you’re working against your own self, and gravity. It’s very easy to adjust the difficulty of the resistance you’re using, because it’s just . . . you. You vs. you; and you, as equipment, are automatically tailored to you, for better or for worse. No app or monitor or sensor could possibly do a better job of calibrating a suitable volume for you to work against, than you just being who you are, and deciding to go from there, and keep going.

Well, as you may have guessed, I’m talking about physical fitness, but I’m really talking about spiritual fitness, and there are a NUMBER of directions you could take this idea in.

You could think about how grace builds on nature, and the Holy Spirit prompts you to develop the gifts you already innately have, to become who you’re supposed to be. Or you could think about how, at the end of the protracted workout routine called human life, all extraneous gimmickry will be stripped away, and you will stand alone before God who will judge your fitness only and solely as you qua you.

Let’s instead take a gentler road. … Read the rest of my latest column for The Pillar (paid content). 

Image from DoD (public domain) via Picryl

Find your Bach

If you know me, you know I don’t exactly have a sunny, optimistic outlook on life. I’m a “glass half empty, and UGH, I suppose I’m going to have to wash it, so what else is new” kind of person. That’s just who I am.

But it doesn’t go all the way down. Way down at the bottom of my heart, underneath many, many layers of grousing and complaining, there is an unshakeable, bedrock belief that everything is going to turn out okay.

Everything!

EVERYTHING.

Maybe not right now, maybe not even during my lifetime, maybe not until the whole world had burned, perished, and wafted away, but eventually. It will work out.

I attribute this belief to Bach.

Maybe not right now, maybe not even during my lifetime, maybe not until the whole world has burned, perished, and wafted away, but eventually. It will work out.I attribute this belief to Bach.

When I was little, my father used to play the piano in the alcove underneath my bedroom. He wasn’t a great pianist, but he was persistent, and the music itself spoke for itself. I could hear the faltering notes and chords filtering up through the floorboards, sometimes with certainty, sometimes with longing. Many nights, that is how I fell asleep.

The thing about Bach is that everything does come out all right in the end, but he goes to some wild places before he gets there. I’m not musically educated enough to identify the technical maneuvers and intrigues that go on in his many different kinds of music, but if you listen attentively, you will hear weird, unsettling shifts in harmony, unexpected turns, strange
juxtapositions, incredibly fraught escalations of tension, and even passages verge on cacophony.

AND THEN IT ALL WORKS OUT. More than that: It works out in a way that shows you how everything all fit together all along, from the very first note, even though it seemed random or chaotic when it was passing by. It all works out in the end, and it always produces (and always was, even in the production of it) something so beautiful, so cheering, so full of love and passion and intelligence in its resolution, that when I hear it, it changes me. Bach’s music does what chiropractors or chakra adjusters claim to do: It realigns something deep inside me, and sets it right again. Sometimes it only lasts for a few minutes, but it always happens. God bless Bach.

Not everybody feels this way about Bach. I believe (though I don’t really understand) that some people find him too mathematical or mechanical or even stuffy, and he just doesn’t do much for them. Or some people don’t even care deeply about any kind of music, classical or otherwise. That’s (I say with great effort and self-control) okay. The thing to do …  Read the rest of my latest for The Pillar. (This is subscriber content.)

Jesus doesn’t recycle

Usually my husband takes the family trash to the dump, but he was sick, so I made the drive. I actually kind of enjoy this chore. Trash gets hurled into one dark hole of a bin, but there are several others waiting to receive plastic, glass, metal, and paper. What happens next, I don’t really know; but they say it all gets recycled somehow. I don’t think too hard; I just throw stuff into the right hole and trust the process.

Like so many Gen Xers, I have a complicated emotional relationship with recycling. We grew up absolutely flooded with exhortations to recycle, and saw many, many illustrations of the process: A smiling child tosses a juice bottle into a green bin, and it smoothly emerges seconds later as two elegant wine glasses. Or sometimes the global nature of the system was emphasized: A rising tide of grimy, tattered, worthless trash threatens to swallow the earth, until it’s collected and crushed into formless potentiality. Then a cloud hides it from our sight, and it is all reborn as tidy stacks of sparkling, desirable consumer goods. Recycling will save the world.

I still recycle, and I definitely still think it’s worthwhile to reduce and reuse as much as possible; but I’m way more cynical about what actually happens when we toss something into a recycling bin. Some of that transformative magic does happen, especially with metal and glass. But a lot of it is more complicated. There’s a lot of waste, a lot of fraud, and a lot of inefficiency, and I don’t blame people for wondering if it’s not all just a giant scam, especially with plastics. Much of the push to recycle, it turns out, was really a push to use plastic.

But wow, the imagery in all those optimistic PSAs was compelling. Sometimes the recycled trash would straight up transmogrify into a flower — usually some kind of daisy, a clean, white blossom adorably stretching its leaves like a child waking up from a dream. A yawn, a stretch, and a pop! Beauty, fresh and new, sprung forth from a heap of what was once refuse.

That image is so nice. Isn’t it nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if things really worked that way?

Oh friends, have I got good news for you.

Every time we take a sin and give it to God, he makes it into something good. Every time we take our suffering and pain and sorrow and offer it up, he makes it into something beautiful. This is a foundational truth of our faith, of human life: Nothing needs to be wasted. Everything can be transformed. All you have to do is give it to Jesus.

Thus endeth the part of this essay that can easily be read in a youth minister voice.

What Jesus does is not recycling. … Read the rest of my latest column (and recipe) for The Pillar. (Note: The full column is for paid Pillar subscribers!) 

Image by Jan van der Wolf via Pexels (creative commons) 

Cringe for Christ

One of my core memories is sitting in the pew at Mass, shriveling up with secondhand embarrassment. This was in the early 80’s, and the old French Canadian pastor, Fr. M, loved to roam around the apse, emoting.

One of his favorite hymns was “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and when he got to the part that goes, “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble” he would demonstrate by rolling his eyes up to the ceiling and doing a sort of jazz hands motion with each “tremble.” The liturgical dancers swooped around him in their polyester robes, he rolled his eyes, and I shriveled in my pew.

It was terrible. Completely terrible. I was old enough to know it was terrible, but also self-aware enough to feel terrible that I felt that way. Because he was talking about being there when they crucified my Lord! And here I was, wishing the roof would fall in so he would stop. What is a girl to do?

I now have a whole category for this kind of thing. It’s called “Cringe for Christ,” and I think it’s what will save me. It’s the same thing I feel when I want to share something on social media, but I hesitate because, even though it’s indisputably true, it’s from The Wrong Group. It’s what I feel when I have to teach my kids things like, “When that couple in the movie you’re watching starts having sex, you need to turn your face away, like THIS” and show them.

I felt something similar when I saw the videos of the protesting Minnesotans walking slowly through the streets, singing their 21st century protest songs: “Ho-o-o-o-o-ld on, ho-o-o-o-old onnnnn, my dear ones, here comes the dawn,” or gathering outside the hotel windows of ICE agents, crooning, “It’s okay to change your mind.”

I’m well aware many readers here do not think the protestors have a worthy cause. That’s okay! I can live with that. My point still stands.

“Cringe for Christ” is a flexible principle, applicable to many situations and to literally everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are: Sincerity is more important than good taste. It’s great to have both, and often we can; but if we have to choose one or the other, we should choose sincerity every time. Virtue over vibes.

It sounds so obvious, and I doubt you disagree. But I think we are more susceptible than we realize …

Read the rest of my latest for The Pillar. (Note: This is paid content for Pillar members.)

Maria Obscura

Do you know how pinhole cameras work? I don’t, really, although I have seen what they can do. You block out the light in a closed-off area, except for one small hole, and direct light through that hole onto the opposite wall of the box. Then you will see a projected image of what’s outside, on the bright side — except the image will be upside-down.

People build pinhole cameras intentionally, but sometimes they happen spontaneously. I recently saw photos from an Australian man whose whole garage became a camera obscura. The door faced the setting sun, and the insulating material that lines the top edge had a tiny gap; so when the man stepped into the dim interior, he could see clearly his driveway projected on the ceiling. The colored recycling bins, the front of his car, and even the pavement were all clearly there, upside down.

It was such a compelling image: The workaday car bumper and plastic bins projecting themselves up above, turning jewel-toned in the darkness. They had something important to say, and the thing was just: “I exist.”

Worth saying, and weirdly beautiful, and obscurely sad.

That was the work of a camera obscura. But did you know that everything is always projecting an image of itself on everything, all the time? We can’t see these images, because they all mix together and make white light. When a camera obscura gets involved, the pinhole blocks out all the images but one, and that’s why we can see it.

Maybe I’ve garbled the science, it makes sense to me as far as I understand it. Sometimes I become aware of this ceaseless projecting happening around me. I briefly know that every created thing – not only living things but everything that is made – proclaims its presence out of the sheer insistent, witless joy of being here. Everything that exists comes from God, and it can’t help sending something of itself out into the world, just because it is good. It’s a very simple message: “God made me, and now here I am!”

Sometimes I feel it, when I encounter the goodness of creation hidden in the hearts of wet grasses, buried under layers of loam, sparkling remotely in stars we rarely see, or in other dear artifacts of creation: In human love, in innocence, in beauty, in truth. Sometimes I see it, and I know deeply that creation is good. Most of the time, I don’t. It’s just too dark.

As I write, where I write from, we are counting down to the darkest day of the year. The calendar is like a box that gets a little smaller every day, with less and less light, less and less warmth, at a sharper and more narrow angle away from the sun.

That has, in fact, been the history of mankind. When God made the world, he made it so bright, so vital, so very fresh and alive. The water didn’t just sit, it teemed with life. God made it, and it was good; and then he gave it to us, and told us to multiply. The created world was so good that it shouted itself, projecting itself everywhere all the time, out of the simple joy of being something rather than nothing. It was a garden: Something that makes more of itself; and God and man walked together through it, beholding it, enjoying it.

Then came the box. Mankind sinned, and fabricated walls, a boundary between us and the Lord, and in the shadows we strained to see any goodness.

We began to be people living in darkness, and the history of mankind became the story of that box getting smaller and smaller.

But the box was not impermeable. It could be pierced . . . 

Read the rest of my Christmas column for The Pillar, which includes a recipe for stained glass cookies. 

And a blessed Christmas Eve to all of you wonderful readers. I love yez all, but Jesus loves you more. 

Image: The Virgin and Child, Master of the Saints Cosmos and Damian Madonna, Italy, 1265-1285, tempera on panel – Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University 

 

 

In praise of balance (and pie). My debut at The Pillar!

A couple of weeks ago, I broke my toe. Even though it was only just a very little toe — a piggy, if you will — the break is really cramping my style. It’s hard to walk and hard to stand in one place, and it’s really hard to balance. It turns out that’s mostly what my little toe was for: Helping me keep my balance.

Which I knew, in theory. But sometimes you don’t know something deep down until it becomes so personal that you fall on your heinie, which is what happened to me the other day, when I tried to stand on one foot with a broken toe.

I have spent a lot of time in the last several years thinking about balance, and what it means, and what it takes. Not just physical balance, but something even more interior: Balance in how we spend our time, in how we speak and think, in our politics, in our relationships, and yes, in our spiritual lives.

When I was young, I thought poorly of balance, and compromise, and prudence, and that whole class of virtues that require you to stop, consider, and moderate yourself. I could grudgingly acknowledge they were useful for getting along in the world, if you’re into that kind of thing; but it was clear to me that these were the lamest kind of virtues. They’re a consolation prize for people with no passion, no conviction, no courage, and possibly no personality.

Most of the country feels that way now. I have some friends and family who are very far right and some who are very far left, and they all feel with their whole hearts that theirs is clearly the only honorable position. They also feel that the other guys forced them into it, because someone has to counterbalance all that extremism.

Even people who mean well are very much at sea these days. It’s really hard to know when to freak out, and when to chill; when to sound the alarm and when to pace ourselves. We don’t know when to protest, and when to let things ride, or when to reach out and when to denounce. We can’t tell when to draw bright lines and when to look for common ground. We have, in short, no sense of balance. People get yelled at for trying to maintain some balance.

Lately, I’ve been practicing a form of exercise which I shan’t name, because I’m just too tired to have that fight right now. Suffice it to say it sometimes requires me to stand on one foot. It requires balance. And I have learned that balance is not what I thought. … Read the rest of my first monthly column for The Pillar! Each article will be accompanied by a recipe. 

(I did it, guys. I got someone to pay me to write about food!!)