Nature Study In The Ugly Places

I saw an article this week - Nature Study In Suburbia at the Afterthoughts Blog - and I love it!  Yes, yes!  Here is someone saying what I feel!  To not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, to embrace where you are, where God has placed you, and to see the beauty that He has prepared for you there!  So of course then I Googled something like 'Charlotte Mason Nature Study in the Inner City' or something like that, and I ended up finding two more great posts along the same lines.  How We Find Nature In The City at Mercer Homeschooling and 7 Ideas for Nature Study When You're Stuck in the Suburbs by Blossom and Root.  I don't want to just repeat all the same fantastic ideas these bloggers have, so I won't, but I'll add my two cents to the conversation.  And I suggest if this is a topic of interest to you that you check these posts out, because they are worth the read.

1)  One of my favourite literary exploration methods is the 'close reading', which is probably the secular kin to the Catholic Lectio Divina.  Essentially, a focused dedicated look at a small (sometimes just a word long) section of literature.  And this is a method that can be used for nature study as well, because if you don't have big nature, perhaps you have small nature?  And small nature can be really cool, too!  Forget the majestic trees - can you look at a leaf under a magnifying glass?  Can you look at a drop of water under a microscope?  We found our school microscope for under $10 at a second hand store and I have seen at least one other in the past few months.  And look at this!

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It's not just for children!  Haskell spent a year documenting the changes in one square metre of old growth forest and then he wrote a book about it!

2)  The sky!  Recording the weather was mentioned but if you can see stars at all, or even the moon, or clouds...  We have a basic telescope and I love Terence Dickinson's books on the sky.

3)  Forgotten nature is nature too.  That ugly bush over there - that's still a bush.  What kind of bush is it?  Those marigolds at the grocery store - those are flowers to look at and watch and examine.  Why are there bulbs for sale in the fall?  We forget that pigeons and gulls, ants and spiders in the bathroom, these are also nature, they can ALSO be interesting.  It's in how you approach the topic.

4)  The children have really gotten excited about their recent acquisition of old baby food jars filled with grass seed and dirt.  They picked them up at an event and the 9yo, at least, has run with the idea fully and gives his grass 'haircuts' and insists it smells like summer.  I mean, sure!  Why not!  You don't have a lawn, grow a lawn in a baby food jar.

5) Insects!  Listen, wherever you are, there are bugs and worms and flies and something, somewhere.  Look at them.


Oh I find this whole topic very exciting.

Leave The Dying Churches Alone.

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I read this article, about the epidemic of closing churches, and I have mixed feelings.  That probably doesn't surprise anyone.  I specialize in mixed feelings.

I've been a Christian for so many years now that sometimes I feel like I've heard every argument people can make, and this is nothing new.  There are lots and lots of things any organization *should* do - every organization under the sun, not just churches.

And to paraphrase H.L. Menken: "For every problem there is a solution that is easy, neat, and wrong."

And yet it's hard for me to say this because I love the easy answers!  Yes, so simple, so OBVIOUS!  Just bundle all the Christians together into one big, effective, vibrant church and then all the little churches can close and you can be financially stable and so forth.

This sort of answer just pulls at us, doesn't it?  The simple and neat and easy and successful?  Get rid of all the complexity of messy humanity and be a substantial congregation and fiscally stable and all that - I mean, who wouldn't want to look at it that way?  Well, God, for one.  God doesn't look at it that way.  I can't count the number of times I've said the following statements:  "God doesn't call you to be successful; He calls you to be faithful.", "No one intelligent enters the ministry with an eye on financial success in life", "(my husband's) 'boss' is not the congregation; it is God".  And so forth.  I have to say these things over and over again because...this is not what the world tells us.  And Christians, including this author, have absorbed similar ideas.  The church is intended to be successful, the church should close old buildings and focus on what will really work, the people who cling to those old buildings are doing so because they have nice memories associated with them, but we should pass over those feelings and get rid of that old stuff, because there is New! Stuff! Ahead!  Go forth!

That...isn't Christian.  It's very popular, and it's very appealing and it would maybe give you the results you desire...but it isn't Christian.

The fact of the matter is that God is the head of those churches, as He is the head of all churches that follow Him.  I don't know the churches that the author mentions, but I would be hesitant to support any suggestion that we know all that God intended them for - that His plans for those buildings, those congregations, that history and community influence, are simply done now because the church isn't financially affluent.

When a church struggles these days, we immediately start to throw newness at the 'problem'.  And believe you me, I have experience with churches slowly 'dying'.  We find new ministries, we gussie the place up a bit, we start new outreaches and such.  And if we are doing this because we feel as though our faith has grown stagnant and needs to be renewed then probably this is all quite a good idea.  If we're doing it because the other churches in town have bigger congregations than we do and we want the same outward signs of success and prosperity...maybe not so much a good idea.

I've gone to those little churches before.  My husband once did pulpit supply for a church so small that when we showed up we doubled the congregation.  And I don't know what to tell you.  Those churches, like all churches, serve as beacons of God's word in the wilderness, even if they do nothing else of value in the world's eyes.  They are the church that you drive past on your way home from work.  They are the church your grandparents went to.  And who knows...maybe they're the church someone goes to that Sunday when "I should go to church someday" turns into "Today is the day I go to church."

I get it, I get the desire to have the big, the shiny, the new.  I get the desire to want to look out over the pews and see them full, just BURSTING, with people, and new people, and eager people.  But these people are cherished souls, and the old, the tired, the ones who look nothing like that vibrant congregation of your dreams, they are also cherished, in their old grey pews, with their well worn faith and their adamant desire to not use an overhead projector.

Leave the little, decrepit churches alone.  Or rather, don't leave them alone.  Go to them!  Attend them!  Help them make coffee and offer to print off a nice Easter bulletin for them or at the very least talk to them, maybe they have something to teach you.  Listen.

Notre Dame On Fire

it was what she stood for,

            that Grand, Grey Lady,

it was what she stood there for that made the singing 

make you cry.

her reaching up to heaven tower

emaciated, down to bare bones, all the way down to the bones

of what she was.

the years peeled back.

the work of a thousand hands.

the work of a thousand backs.

all peeled back.

and God himself could look through the roof that wasn't.

Watch for the deer.

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Where I live there are a lot of deer, and there's this one spot next to the highway where the rocky sides are quite high, but the brush is cleared back, and people put out emergency deer feeding stations and so the creatures often congregate around there.  Practically every time you drive past that rocky patch there are does nibbling the ground.  They don't even look up, but just stand there, perfectly blending with the drabness around them.

I could never see the deer for the longest time.  Not there, necessarily, but in general.  I would stare out the window intently looking for deer or bears or any wildlife at all, but usually I didn't see anything.  The deer I saw were the ones in fields, in big groups, or the ones actually crossing the road.  The hidden, woodsy deer - well they just blended too perfectly for me.

Do you know that quote attributed to Michelangelo about the carving of the David?  It goes something along the lines of 'I simply took away everything that was not David'.  Over this winter, that has happened to my eyes in regards to the deer.

Somehow, and I don't know how exactly, I have become so accustomed to the shape, the colour, the curves, the very 'deerness' of the deer, that my mind 'takes away the trees' when I look into the brush, and suddenly I can see the deer now.  It hasn't happened with other creatures - I still peer absentmindedly around trying to find birds to identify for example, and if I stop looking for 'deerness' and instead look for deer, then again I lose my ability to see them blended into their surroundings, but still, how remarkable.

It occurred to me today that this is also a good way to picture seeing God in the world.  The Christian life is, in many ways, a method for drawing near to our creator, to know Him, to follow Him, to understand Him, as much as we frail creatures are able to.  One of the great blessings of the mature Christian faith is that you KNOW your God so well.  This is not your new passion, your new interest, which has that excitement and thrill to it; this is the well worn, but never shabby, mature faith, where you have seen Christ so long that your eyes can filter out what is not Him.

Our forest is the rest of our lives - the frustrations and anxieties and distractions - but He is there, in every forest, no matter how thick the trees.  And if we refocus our vision in that way you can only acquire by knowing Him so well, then there He is.  Look with fresh eyes into life and see Him.

Toilet Gratitude. Worst Title Ever.

At the risk of sounding like the sort of person you would literally cross the room to avoid at a party, here is something weird that happened to me this week.  And it involves a toilet.

This was a hard week for me.  There was a lot going on and I was worried a lot and I got a lot done but at the expense of sleep and sanity.  A few times I found myself thinking that there was just all too much stuff happening, I couldn't do even one more thing.  I couldn't think what to make for supper; how could anyone possibly expect supper from me in this crazy season?  What sort of insanity was this, that required the feeding of people multiple times per day?  What was God thinking when He invented such a time intensive nutrient delivery plan?

The phone would ring and I would think "Ack!  I can't get that!  I can't help that person!  I can't even find the phone!  I'm drowning!  I'm drowning!"  The smallest things were deeply, deeply infuriating to me, as they often are when I'm overwhelmed and stressed to the limit of my endurance.  The ice on the step outside wouldn't budge, and it haunted me.  I found myself doing other things thinking about that ice.  And yet, the getting of the shovel and the going over to angrily chip away at it seemed just completely beyond my capabilities.  Yes, much better to sit here and think about it.

This brings me to Wednesday.  On Wednesday I woke up early and went with another volunteer to paint the church bathroom.  At the same time I had all the children set up at separate tables doing their schoolwork.  And I was trying to stir the paint and it wouldn't stir.  And I was trying to get the cd player to work and it wouldn't work.  And I was trying to get the six year to Just. Write. The. Sentence. Down. in her spelling book.  And my husband was off at a doctor's appointment and then he was back to work at the kitchen table and then I was bringing the children back home and washing out paint brushes and trying to find lunch for everyone and then my husband had a video chat meeting which meant I had to take the children to the library for two hours and there was a lot of shushing.  And I left the expensive pork roast out after lunch and it was on the counter for a few hours before I remembered and I had to throw it out and I felt terrible and it was cold outside and that felt like a personal affront and I went to my 2:30 meeting forgetting the coffee shop we were meeting at was closed and and and...

When I finally caught up with my Wednesday meeting and we found ourselves another (open) coffee shop and settled in, I was hoping to feel that sense of vacation that sometimes happens when you sit down with a friend.  I had a worrisome doctor's appointment the next day, I had many miles to go before I slept, and frankly I wanted this break.  I wanted to feel that loosening of all the little knots in my brain that had tightened up over the past few days.  And to some extent I did, but I couldn't shake the anxiety and the weight of it all.  The too-muchness of a long, long week only halfway over.  

Some people thrive on this stuff.  I am not one of those people.  I like to do things and keep busy but I'm a creature of the shady, quiet places of the world, and not the hustle.  This is not my country; these are not my people.

At one point I excused myself to visit the ladies' room and I noticed in passing how new looking the toilet was for such a down country type establishment as the one we were frequenting.  And suddenly those little knots let go, and I felt that restful relief I had been seeking for several days.  What a nice toilet that was.  I'm so fortunate to be here, in this restroom.  It's so peaceful and the light is streaming in the window up there.  It's quiet - quiet for the first time in days.  And no one needs me right this moment and no one expects me to leave this room for at least another few minutes.  And frankly if you're going to have a moment of peaceful thankfulness I suppose there's weirder places to have it than in a clean, relatively nice smelling washroom.  Maybe.  

There's no blissful, fairy-tale ending to this story just like there isn't one in the real world.  I went back out and talked to my friend.  I finished my coffee and went to the grocery store and then home.  I went inside and handled making supper and cleaning up the detritus of the day and then shepherding all the children through showers and a game of Monopoly Deal and bedtime stories and medicine and, and, and.  The peace of the diner restroom did not stay with me; it was not a little quiet spot I could peer into when I was anxious in the evening and find rest there.  That's sometimes how those little glimpses work; that's sometimes how thankfulness helps form our everydays, but it isn't always, and it wasn't this time.

But that's not really the point, and it's one of the things so often missed by the proponents of 'counting your blessings'.  The blessing was that it happened at all, not that it stayed with me and gave me all the wonderful feelings.  The wonderful feelings are transient and unpredictable but the reality of that quiet restroom was real, a brief respite from it all, and it changed me whether I get to keep the emotional lift or not.

Stand Up! Stand Up for...terrible music

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Horatio Spafford wrote the hymn It Is Well With My Soul after losing four daughters in a horrific naval accident.  The second verse reads: 

                                    "Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,

                                    Let this blest assurance control,

                                    That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,

                                    And hath shed His own blood for my soul."

Alternatively, here's a verse from a popular worship song called Resurrecting, by the group Elevation Worship:

                                    "By Your spirit I will rise
                                    From the ashes of defeat
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    In Your name I come alive
                                    To declare Your victory
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    By Your spirit I will rise
                                    From the ashes of defeat
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    In Your name I come alive
                                    To declare Your victory (c'mon!)
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    By Your spirit I will rise
                                    From the ashes of defeat
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    In Your name I come alive
                                    To declare Your victory
                                    The resurrected king, is resurrecting me"

Some friends and I had a conversation this past week, not our first such conversation, about current Christian music in churches and how...different...some of it is.  And I thought these two examples would highlight that difference better than my own words could.

Maybe before I say anything else though I should mention that I actually quite like a lot of modern Christian music.  My car radio station is tuned to the three Christian stations I can get en route to the grocery store and I hear a lot of it and most of it is not awful.  It isn't all my style necessarily, but I can see past that and to the essential merit of the song itself.  And alternatively, I can see the merit in more traditional songs that are also not my style.

There are certainly reasons to dislike some contemporary Christian music, but style shouldn't be one of them from a purely detached viewpoint.

Here's something you can't sweep under the rug, though.  That second piece of music up there is complete rubbish.  It might be catchy, it might be upbeat, but it is categorically bad music.  It's stupidly repetitive, badly written, and theologically inaccurate.  In fact, it sounds like prosperity gospel set to a high school battle of the bands ditty that Todd figured out on the bass in his garage.

But...but WHY is this the case with more and more modern Christian music?  Well, I have a theory, which I haven't really researched or anything so feel free to disagree with me about, and it goes a little something like this:  Purpose.  What's the purpose of you writing or singing this song anyway?  And for a lot of these bands the purpose is commercialism covered in a thin veneer of Jesus culture. 
Beyond the pat standard Christian musician answers of 'glorifying God', what is the purpose behind these songs?  Does "The resurrected King is resurrecting me" bring glory to God?  No, of course not, it brings all the focus right back to numero uno.  Not to mention sounding utterly ridiculous because no, Jesus is not resurrecting you currently.  No he isn't, Todd.  

And if you're rolling your eyes at my nit picking well, I shall leave you to study your Bible and come back to me about the verse where Christ says "And verily I say unto you, you shall never be defeated or anything at all because by my spirit I shall make everything great!"

The thing is, if you live in the Western Christian world you are one of the wealthiest, most fortunate people on Earth.  You probably have food, you probably have some kind of shelter, you probably have access to education.  Four of your children are unlikely to die in a naval accident en route to England.  You aren't a sailor on slave trade vessels and so you could never write, as John Newton did:

                                         "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

                                         That saved a wretch like me.

                                          I once was lost, and now am found

                                        Was blind, but now I see."

Because you probably don't think of yourself as a complete wretch, even if you are one.  And maybe that sort of horribleness is what makes the great Christian hymns, well, great.  Not necessarily to everyone's musical tastes, of course, understandably, but still very much The Great Music.  You might not listen to Beethoven, but you're certainly not going to say he wrote bad music if you want to be taken at all seriously.  You might not enjoy reading Tolstoy, but he was an author of great and lasting importance and that's just all there is to it.

So maybe Elevation Worship and the like are writing from where they are - writing from their world of Big Southern U.S. Western Church Life.  And that's what they can write, because that's what they know.  I don't know and I'm not going to waste my time digging through the biographies of the band members because the point isn't that one particular song, which just happened to be one that struck me, but the problem of bad Christian music in general.  Maybe the question isn't 'shouldn't we aim for a higher standard?' but 'can we even write well anymore, now that we're so comfortable?'  

Seven Quick Takes - March 29th

1) It is time to buy bathing suits.  I want to say I'm having anxiety about this but upon further reflection it's actually closer to a sort of floppity apathy.  Like a fish.  A big ole bathing suit wearing fish.

2)  Here's the issue with bathing suits.  It is the ONLY BATHING SUIT ISSUE.  All other issues stem from THE bathing suit issue.  And this is it.  Are you ready?  Bathing suits are too small and too expensive but the ones that aren't too small are uncool and the ones that aren't too expensive are still too small.  That's it.  That's the whole problem with bathing suits right there.

3)  I mean, do I want to wear this?

Link, in case you DO want to wear this.

 Well, no, not especially.  I imagine there is a small market for such garments.  Actually, you know what?  Maybe I do want to wear this.  Then I could just shave my legs up to my knees.

4)  A few years ago I left the bathing suit purchases until the last minute and was faced with exactly what you might expect, except worse.  Strangely, one store had a suit that could fit me, and I bought it.  It was red.  Well, I mean, it still is red.  Because I still have it.  It has a halter top that detaches to make the whole thing strapless which...bahahahahahahahah!  Sniff.  Ah, that was funny.  Also it's red.

And it has ruching (spell check is insisting this is not a word but it's the little fluffily bits on the front that are all wrinkly) which I think designers must assume all women want at this point.  You either want a bikini or fake wrinkly fronts.  That's what on offer, ladies.

5)  And this year I decided I made it too easy on myself previously and so I went shopping while also watching my children tear apart a clothing display!  Hurrah!  I grabbed two suits, went into the change room, decided I didn't want to take my clothes off so stood depressingly in front of the mirror holding the suits up to myself, chose the black one, and bought it.  The cashier told me I could return it within something something amount of days but frankly I like to keep clothing that doesn't fit me in my wardrobe so that Marie Kondo has someone to dislike.

6)  The suit I didn't bother to try on does fit me but ALSO is very entertaining because it has some sort of modesty encouraging chest padding situation going on that I was unaware of.  Except the padding MOVES.  It's very amusing, as you might imagine, to be readjusting one's suit constantly.  I can just picture the peaceful beach days now.  Also it has jingly jangly bits hanging off strings on the sides!  And I already lost one in the dryer!

7)  There's no possible way I can wear the jangly weird chest suit to family camp, and the red one is starting to show its age.  I'm going to need to buy a third bathing suit.