Making it Home: To Build a Home

March has been a busy month in and around my little Texas home.  I have several new posts in progress, but until I make time to finish and post them, please enjoy another musical meditation on the ideas and complexities of building a home: "To Build a Home," by The Cinematic Orchestra.

Abundant Lives: Come, Thou Fount (Part 1)

Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; 

streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. 

Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. 

Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, mount of thy redeeming love. 

I began singingly almost facetiously, wondering if we were ever going to find the water we had driven so far to see. Technically, it was a mountain spring, not a “fount” that had inspired our trip, but as Rachel, Keith and I wandered through a graveyard in the Tennessee mountains, a hymn seemed the most appropriate mode for deciding which way to go next.  

One week earlier, my friends and I had attended a reading by the poet Jeff Daniel Marion at our college’s Appalachian Center.  First-semester freshmen, we were eager to attend any campus event, and our English Professor, Dr. Ernest Lee, had arranged the reading.   Mr. Marion shared several selections from his most recent book, Ebbing and Flowing Springs, and spoke about the actual Ebbing and Flowing Spring, near Rogersville, Tennessee, which had inspired the title poem.  I had loved poetry since I learned to read, but in all my adolescent sighing over “Tintern Abbey,” it had never occurred to me that poems could be connected to, or rooted in, actual places. I had always valued poems because they took me away from the uninteresting landscape of Terre Haute, Indiana, but here was a poet who drew his words from the land around him.  Rachel and Keith seemed struck by this, as well, and we decided that at our first chance, we would drive to Ebbing and Flowing Spring ourselves. 

We set out on a dark and misty day in late November, headed towards Rogersville, but we soon learned that poets, whatever their other verbal skills, cannot be counted upon for precise driving instructions.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed the drive; I was still very new to Tennessee and was fascinated by the winding roads, the twang of the voices at the gas station, and the way my companions, one from further east in the state, and one from the mountains of North Carolina, responded to the landscape.  As we drove further and further from our college town, whose foothills still seemed Alpine to me, Keith and Rachel would say, “Now we’re coming near the real mountains. Now I feel safe again.” 

  By the time we reached the gravel road and clearing where we were supposed to find the spring, twilight had passed into proper night.  The area was encircled in trees, but in the darkness we could not tell how large the clearing was. We peered through the windows of an old church, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones surrounding it, but we saw no sign of the spring house. For a time we stood apart, silently, each hearing the sound of rushing water, but unsure of its direction or source.  When a light rain began to fall, we linked arms and I began humming “Come Thou Fount.”  To my surprise, voices on either side of me began to sing along, each harmonizing with my melody.  

Aside from a few peers in my tiny home church, I had rarely met people my own age who knew hymns, yet here were two other teenagers who not only joined, but enriched, the songs that were most precious to me. All my ideas about what it meant to know a place or a person shifted: I was standing in the dark, on an unfamiliar mountain, with people I had known hardly three months, and yet I knew I was home. 

That night is my emblem for the home I found in college, a home I treasure not from nostalgia, but for the life it trained me to love, a life that challenges the isolation and petty ambitions of mainstream adulthood. In coming entries, I will write more about how my time at Carson-Newman challenged and deepened my understanding of home, relationships, community, and church. Tonight, however, I am content to dwell in this memory, and to invite you to join me there. 

We never did find the spring that night, but I think we might have stumbled upon the Fount.

Making it Home: To Be Still

I often feel that I'm spending my days building a life, a home, and waiting for others to come join me.  This song, by Alela Diane, is the song I play when I feel this way. I open the window wide, sing along, and hope all the friends and strangers outside can hear.  

Have you been wearing holes in your boots out there?

Have you been kicking bones in the desert sand?

There's a wolf inside the cave and another in the clouds.

I've seen them chewing on, on the shadows in your eyes.

And it's here at home I wait for your wanders to be still.

Oh it's here at home I wait for your wanders to be still.

from "To Be Still" by Alela Diana

Life Undivided: We Are Made for Love

“We are made for love -- and in vain we strive to pour forth the streams of our affection by the narrow channels which the world can give -- and well is it if, stagnated in our hearts, they turn not to bitterness. The religion of Jesus Christ is intended to bring us back to our real natural condition: for all the world is in an unnatural state”

-George MacDonald 

While reading for my dissertation, I found this quote in one of George MacDonald’s letters.  MacDonald’s lines resonated with a difficulty I’ve pondered since leaving college, if not before, and I decided that it would make an excellent--and hopefully provocative--motto for this year’s Valentine’s greetings to friends and family. In one of my first entries, I discussed one of contemporary Christianity’s “failures of the imagination”--the failure to celebrate and bless stages of life that don’t fall into tidy “marriage, missions, or babies” categories. I also gave thanks for all the new relationships and “fridge worthy” moments life in spiritual community has given me.  With this entry, I risk repeating myself because I am convinced that the very idea of the “Church” -- individuals participating as members of Christ’s body--challenges our world’s very narrow ideas of whom and how we should love. 

I once thought that not being loved by someone would be the saddest condition for a human life. As I grow older, I realize that lacking others to love can strike just as deeply at our roots.  Single adults often feel this lack most keenly because the channels the world provides are, as MacDonald realized in 1848, painfully narrow.  Here is an example of what I mean. A few days ago, while browsing through a really cool data visualization site, Information is Beautiful, I found this visual presentation of “The Varieties of Intimate Relationship.” The graphic, with its careful symmetries and graceful lines, is nearly beautiful.  However, the more I studied it, the more I realized that  I was reading a very pretty map of the world’s very narrow channels for our love.  First, while the chart purports to present “The Varieties of Intimate Relationship,” what it actually shows are varieties of sexual behaviors. (Admittedly, most readers would probably guess this before looking at the chart; but I have what my mother calls “the spiritual gift of oblivion,” and I expected a much broader array).  The use of “intimate” as a synonym for “sexual” is in itself enough to annoy me; not only does its function as a euphemism suggest a strange uneasiness in a culture increasingly open to discussions about sex, but the reduction of “intimacy” to a physical action is downright dangerous. 

The content of the chart reinforces how narrow the world’s channels for love are.  No mention of familial relations, though surely the bond between a parent and child, among others is intimate. No mention of relationships that are not, in some way, contingent upon eroticized understandings of self and other. Although “celibacy” is included, comparing its gentle pink orbs to the “monogamy” and “non-monogamy” groups reveals something even more troubling than the intimacy/sexual synonymy of the title: the monogamy and non-monogamy options name (for better or for worse), varieties of relationships (e.g. “marriage,” polyamory,” “co-dependent” and so on).  The celibacy bubbles, however, only name various reasons and modes of celibacy: “ascetic,” “involuntary (for physical and emotional reasons),” “spiritual,” and a few others. Vows “to God” do make the list, but in all other cases, the modes of celibacy have only to do with the celibate person -- not with anyone else. 

Does anyone else see the problem with this? 

Based on “The Varieties of Intimate Relationship” chart, it appears that monogamous and non-monogamous people are involved with other people, however dysfunctionally, while the “intimate relationships” celibate people have are either with God or with themselves, singly. Sexual behavior aside, the potential for emotional and even spiritual self-involvement is very real for many single adults. 

Now, I could rant for a long time about how frustrating I find this chart, but what really breaks my heart is that Christians spend so little time thinking deeply about wider, richer, divine channels for our affections and energy.  These channels do exist--I have seen them, been swept into them--while mopping floors with other summer missionaries, while eating a meal with a church lifegroup, while worshipping with believers whose language I don’t even know, while teaching classes--but I have yet to hear a sermon on friendship, and most “relationships” sessions at Christian conferences are only about dating and marriage.  The world’s chart has names for all kinds of unnecessary romantic configurations--why do we have so few names for the far more important ways in which we love each other?  

 Some people, including many Christians, may have the luxury of considering this question secondary to the love they owe spouses, children, parents, boyfriends or girlfriends.  As an adult who is not married, I no longer have an excuse for claiming such a luxury, though in the past I did. I have always been rather narrow in my love; as a child and college student, I would select a few worthy people (usually my parents plus a few intimate friends) and lavish my time, affection, patience, energy, prayer, money, and skill on them.  Since leaving college, that kind of focus has been impossible. This is not to say I have not made good friends; on the contrary, I have been humbled and loved and given love in a thousand beautiful ways.  But not by one person. Or by two. Or even by a consistent group.  

This state of love-limbo strains me.  I dislike the weekly crisis of deciding where to sit each week in church, even though I know I would be welcome in any pew I chose. I dislike the constant uncertainties about how much attention is too much, too little.  My life would be much easier if I could pour out all my love on one person within some sort of clearly defined relationship.  Narrow channels, you see, are much easier to navigate. 

My weariness of having such a wide web of people to love (rather than a tiny, manageable few) is largely a matter of temperament, and perhaps the more important danger is that if we do not have persons to love (persons, not “causes” or even ideals), it is so easy to spill our affection in less worthy places--not necessarily wicked channels (though that is possible), but things such as pets, hobbies, school or work.  

I’m trying to take courage and to challenge my imagination, but the wide channels of God’s love can be frightening and can, ironically, feel very lonely. If churches want young adults to feel at home within their congregations, we need to talk about how one develops depth, intimacy, accountability, and joy into relationships that are bound by no vows. We need to name, study, excavate, and plunge into deeper and wider channels for our love.  Not work-for-the-abstract-good-of-humanity channels, not tide-you-over-until-you-are-married channels, not anything-goes channels, but varieties of communion and kinship so strange and beautiful that the worldlings join us, abandoning their pitiful polyamory and their empty fidelities. 

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; 

These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. Psalm 107:23-24, KJV

What are some of the ways in which we (as individuals and churches) do, can, or should pour out our love when the world’s channels are too narrow? What names do we have (or should we have) for these wider channels, these un-charted intimacies? 

Life Undivided: Walking Home

What do these things have in common?

• a man sitting in the grass, playing his guitar and singing to a seven or eight children
• a sign reading “Warning: High Drug Trafficking Area. Do Not Loiter”
• fragments of all kinds: pieces of vinyl albums, newspapers, and once, a gun
• a pony
• magnolia, crepe myrtle, live oak, and pecan trees
• men and women gathering pecans into plastic grocery bags
• goats 

Answer: Each item appears on my “Seen While Walking to Church in Waco” list. 

During my first two years in Texas, I lived about a mile and a half from my church, and during those years, I only drove to Sunday worship four or five times. Every other Sunday, I walked.  While this record may seem quirky or counter-cultural, for me it was intuitive.  Growing up, my family lived barely three blocks from our church, and in college, I attended the church that was across the street from my dorm room.  I did not own a car until I moved to Texas for graduate school, and so while I could have driven to any number of churches, I first visited congregations within walking distance (I had several good choices; this is Texas, after all). My trek to Calvary Baptist was longer than either my childhood or college walks, but I came to treasure those Sunday mornings.  Though very thankful for a reliable car, I have never enjoyed driving, and Sunday became a day I could rest from the rush and worry of controlling an automobile (or automobeast, as I used to call them). 

My view of Colcord Avenue on a typical Sunday morning. The blue is the underside of my parasol--a necessity for walking on a summer day in Texas. 

I mention these walks, and the strange list they helped me compile, because as I continue to ruminate on what makes a place home, I have realized that home is a place I walk. For most of my life, it has also been a place from whence I walk to church. When I moved to my current apartment, I was much closer to campus, the river, the city park, and many other good things, but I could no longer continue my Sunday ambles (Rising at five am to walk across town doesn’t make me feel very reverent). Losing those walks, however, made me realize how important they were to making this city home.

The benefits of walking through the this city for so long makes that curious inventory precious to me. Week after week, I walked the same route: from Maple Avenue to Colcord, from Colcord through a little web of back streets that brought me to the church building. From a car, this route is hardly lovely: a few blocks of stately houses soon gives way to shabbier buildings, unkempt yards, overgrown lots, and at least one intersection with a bad reputation. There are few reasons to linger if you are simply passing from one side of town to another. 

By walking, however, I had the time to see and know this place.  The broken things I saw, whether weapons or windows, frightened me, but gave me prayers for my neighborhood. The trees and the people and the goats became familiar and beautiful.  Eventually, the women on their porches or the guys working on their cars would say hello, asking me, “You goin’ to church?”

I never did learn the story behind the pony. 

Walking used to be my primary mode of transportation--not only to church, but to school, the grocery store, or any other place I needed to be. In college, my church was on a hill, and I would let myself wander for miles in any direction, knowing I could find my way back once I caught sight of the steeple. Both in Indiana and Tennessee, I often walked to the places where I worked, studied, and shopped. While dating both my high school and college boyfriends, we spent most of our time together rambling through neighborhoods around our houses.  These walks always lasted for hours, and even now I somehow expect to see those bright boys whenever I return to one of those Indiana streets. 

But there is something particularly beautiful about walking from house to church, knowing that with every step I am treading both to and from home.  I used to joke that living alone took all the fun out of being an introvert, but my Sunday walks invariably restored the joy of solitude, blessing me with the tension between walking alone and worshipping together.

Perhaps I can put this all another way: home is a place I reach with weary feet, a place I rest and realize that my hair smells like a February wind. Home is a place I leave in order to arrive. Home is a place I am content in solitude and in community. Home is a place I know what is ugly and notice what is beautiful. 

Home is a place it takes a long time to reach, a place I can see and name long before I arrive.  

Making it Home: How Does Your Garden Grow?

It runs counter to my Midwestern intuitions to reflect on gardening during the “dead” of winter, but I live in Texas now, and last week's enormous harvest of collard greens reminded me that I have been planning a post on gardens for several months.  

In 2010, I learned that home is a place we plant gardens. Although the daughter of a man who revels in dirt and seed and harvest,  I had done little more than tend houseplants (and poorly, at that) until last year.  My church began a Community Garden in February, and later in the spring, some friends and I began our own plot in a spare corner of our apartment complex’s property. 

These earth-experiments attracted me for several reasons: I thought participating in a garden would support my efforts to eat only in-season produce; I needed a  reason to spend more time outside; and I looked forward to working with others on a shared project.  A less conscious but more powerful reason, however, is that I cannot remember a time when my childhood home did not have a flourishing garden in the summer. Ironically, for most of my childhood I disliked tomatoes, squash, and many other good things that grew in the garden, but my pickiness did not undermine my association of “home” with a place where things grew and were eaten, where summer nights were spent seeking ripe tomatoes, and where my father would often walk a wheelbarrow full of vegetables to our church so friends could take as much as they pleased.

Those Indiana gardens manifested some of the best things about my father--his love of growing things (both botanical and human), his delight in nature, his generosity--and as I reflect on my novice dirt-dabbling, I find that many of my experiences finding a home in Waco have parallels in the garden. 

With my father in the garden, circa 1987

Both gardens have reminded me how thankful I am that my home is also the home of others--definitely-kindred, remarkably-unlike-me others.  The day we broke ground for the community garden, I enjoyed a perfect balance of solitude and community, sometimes concentrating all my energy on clots of wet soil I was breaking up, and at other times discussing everything from theology to television with the person working next to me. The apartment garden was a joint project between me and two couples--Jon and Steph, Taylor and Rachel.  Working with Jon and Taylor on the garden was a study in personality differences--had I been making the garden on my own, I would have planned for months, fretted over asking permission to use our complex’s property, and probably never would have planted anything at all. Taylor and Jon, however, wasted no time, and they were tilling the soil long before I had finished debating whether it would be better to call or write our apartment manager for permission.  We planted our first rows on an unusually cool day in May, and as I made mounds for squash and Jon prepared rows for corn, with Taylor hacking away at the tall grasses that obstructed an inlet of the river, I was both proud and thankful to have such friends. 

The gardens have also reminded me that being really at home in a place involves constant care--housekeeping, if I may use the word broadly. Until we realized there was a hose and spigot within reach of the garden, we watered our plants with buckets of water drawn from the Brazos river.  The river is about thirty or forty yards from our plot, and it usually took me three buckets-full to water everything. I would lean out from a concrete pier, toss my bright pink bucket four to six feet down into the water, and then haul it up with a rope. It seemed to be an absurd amount of work for a few rows of parched vegetables, but as I labored with those heavy, sloshing buckets, I realized that I was experiencing something very ordinary for most women throughout history--the difficult and even dangerous work of collecting the water needed to sustain a home and family. My great-grandmother, a teenage bride on the Mississippi delta, had to walk for miles to gather water from a reliable well, and all over the world today, many girls and women spend hours of their days carrying water.  Although even I am not Luddite enough to prefer buckets to hoses, I appreciate learning from my sore muscles and unsteady bones that home, like any other garden, must be tended consistently and carefully. Furthermore, in order to tend it, one must often defy distance, impatience, and even gravity.

These gardens have also taught me that the harvest is not always what we expect, any more than the homes we build as adults will resemble the pictures we carried or created from childhood. For most of the summer and fall, our apartment garden disappointed dreams of lavish salads and salsas: we gathered pitiful tomatoes, scanty bell peppers, and a pittance of purple-hull peas. The only thing we had in abundance was okra, the titan of our little world, overshadowing everything else. Far more satisfying was the harvest of neighbors our project brought.  We live in a quiet apartment complex, and, as in many such places, the residents do not go out of their way to meet one another. However, the garden provided a wonderful way to meet our neighbors. Sheila, a grandmother who lives on the first floor, joined with us and contributed several squash plants. Several times while weeding, I was hailed by Sophilia, a law student reading on her balcony.  She had noticed the plot and knew Taylor and Rachel, and when I explained what we were doing, she exclaimed, “Oh my gosh! You guys are such hippies!” For the rest of the fall, I would look forward to talking with Sophilia and her roommate on my way to the garden. Daniel, who was using the hose to wash his kayak when we first met, now brings the hose down to me when I am among the peppers and greens, making suggestions for our spring planting. Les and Katie, who have four children and coach youth baseball, ask how the peas are doing when we meet at the mailbox. From these small but precious encounters, I am reminded that people are more at home with one another when they have some common thing--whether a tiny garden or a book or an ideal--to consider, to protect, or to love. 

And now I am enjoying a winter harvest--something I never experienced from my father’s northern garden. In spite of the dislocation and uncertainty that have shadowed my efforts to build a home in Texas and in my twenties, suddenly I am faced with a marvel: in a season I once thought dead, food flourishes in the dirt.  I never thought collard greens could be so profound.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. (Jeremiah 29.4-5 ESV)

Do you keep a garden? What do you grow? 

P.S. In honor of these gardens (and of National Soup Month), I am sharing the recipe I invented to use the greens I now have in abundance.  This was a use-what-I-have-on-hand experiment, so feel free to adjust according to your pantries. If you don’t have wheat berries, you might try using barley or pinto beans. 

Collard and Potato Soup

1 T olive oil

5 cloves minced garlic

6 cups vegetable stock 

5 small potatoes, peeled and sliced

1 cup wheat berries 

6-8 large collard and/or chard leaves, coarsely chopped (about 2-3 cups)

1/2 - 1 T Worcestershire sauce (adjust to taste)

1/8 t cayenne pepper

1-2 t sea salt or kosher  

fresh ground pepper

Heat the olive oil in a large (4-5 qt) saucepan or dutch oven. Add garlic and saute until golden. Add broth and bring to a boil.  Add potatoes and wheat berries. Reduce heat and simmer until wheat berries are tender (about 45 minutes). Add Worcestershire, cayenne, and salt. Adjust seasonings to taste. Add greens, cook until wilted (about 10 minutes). Garnish with pepper. 

Christmas Storytime: The Snow Queen, Conclusion

I fully intended to conclude my reading of "The Snow Queen" within the Twelve Days of Christmas, but I was happily busy with contemplation, family, and travel until Epiphany.  However, since neither my conscience nor my aesthetic has much patience for unfinished stories, I am now posting the remaining installments of "The Snow Queen." These were recorded back in Texas, in my kitchen on a cold and rainy January night.  I hope you enjoy these. I'm especially fond of Part 5, which features a little robber girl who is both murderous and kind-hearted.

The Fourth Story, In Which Appear a Prince and a Princess

The Fifth Story, Which Is About The Robber Girl

The Sixth Story: The Lapp Woman and the Finnish Woman

The Seventh Story: What Happened In The Snow Queen's Palace and Afterward

What do you think of the conclusion of the story? What do you make of Kai's "game of reason" and Gerda's power to rescue him?