five-sense Friday

Today I'm...

tasting: Cool Ranch Doritos...I know better, but still I adore them and eat too many if there are any around; decaf to trick myself into thinking I'm caffeinating my brain

smelling: paper and old books

feeling: surprisingly chilled in this basement apartment, while outside I know it's warming up beautifully (also: a need to get outside later!); mostly focused on my work

hearing: 8tracks on repeat, coffeehouse mixes full of indie folk acoustic to woo me into writing; my Pomodoro timer telling me this break is over!

seeing: words filling pages; books annotated to the nth degree; sunshine spilling over the sills

And then some days are disarmingly beautiful. Winter holds us in its terrible grip--for six full months, and more--and then lets go, and we tumble into suddenly green grass and breezes riffling budding branches. Our toes, swathed for more than 150 days in wool, peek into the sun. Our limbs stretch up towards the blue sky, unimpeded by jackets and sweaters and scarves.

The sunlight woos us into wakefulness before six in the morning, lingers until nearly nine at night. I drove through balmy dusk last night in the small town we're about to move to, and the streets were full of friends out on walks, riding bikes, families pushing bedtime back to take it in, school night worries pushed into the cupboard with the mittens.

Back in the city, the ground-cover plants between our house and the neighbors' are pushing up through layers of matted dun-colored leaves, tiny and insistent and startlingly green. We have cracked open the windows and listen to the wind. The backyard, seeded last fall, is a shimmering promise of grass hovering over dark soil.

All things are coming to life. Later than I'd hoped, but just the same, I can't help but say Hello. Oh, how I missed you. I will do my best to pay attention, now that you are here. 

five-sense Friday

Recently, I've been...

seeing: dirt! under the snow! an amazing realization; spring clouds; the uncanny dancing of shadow-plants against the living room wall, reminders that the sun keeps setting later and later

feeling: wind against my ears; thirst; this tiny mystery pitching and rolling around inside my belly; the urge to stretch my muscles / self again

hearing: alternations of silence and jazz; the quiet of a college emptied of most of its people; birds

smelling: last night, a roasted chicken laced with garlic and rosemary from our windowsill pot; earlier yesterday, a saskatoon berry pie (my first!)

tasting: said chicken and pie and twice-baked potatoes; yeasty brown toast dripping butter and honey; two apples a day; spicy teas; decaf coffee (my taste for it has returned!); anticipation

five-sense Friday

Friends! I have not forgotten you! I am just swimming through stacks of grading like Scrooge McDuck through his piles of money, and it's hard to pull myself out of the pool. Also, a baby is swimming around inside of me, and while I am feeling so much better than I was a month ago (and eating so much better, too), I still often find myself falling asleep at 7:00 p.m.

But here we are, on a Friday afternoon, and I am taking a break from the purple pen to return to the good old exercise of paying attention. I'd love for you to play along in the comments.

feeling: the cold seeping through the large front window above my head, all stubborn and assertive and grey-toned (April! where is the pretty?); a wool neck-warmer warming my neck, over three layers of shirts; the strangest, faintest, most mysterious flutters in my belly

tasting: apples (thank goodness); hibiscus tea (which I'm apparently not supposed to drink); granola with walnuts, sesame seeds, honey, applesauce, and cinnamon--the best breakfast ever

smelling: snow; ginger steam from my mug; citrusy lotion; snow

hearing: French pop on the radio, which always amuses me; I sometimes break out laughing when I hear French rap, too; it's a nice bright spot in all the grading

seeing: snow; my students' brilliant insights into literature; the spines of about two dozen books all calling out for me to read them at the same time; visions of spring in the Midwest; notes from friends that make me smile; snow

just finished: The Testament of Mary

I picked up Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary a few weeks ago and read it all in one go on a Saturday morning. It's a fairly short book, fewer than 100 pages, but its power is perhaps disproportionate to its length. I'm still thinking about it.

The book's premise is fairly simple: an aging Mary, the mother of Jesus, gives a haunting first-person account of her life, an account that insists on honesty about her doubts, her fears, even her visceral distaste for her son's followers. Several of these followers act as shadowy figures throughout her narration, not only in the days leading up to the crucifixion but also in the present, as they hover around her life (ostensibly to protect her) and stubbornly record whitewashed versions of the stories she tells them for the Gospels that will eventually enter into our canon.

This is a bitter Mary: she has lost her only son. She has lost her dear husband Joseph. She has lost her community, her safety. She has lost the holiness and peace she felt, in earlier decades, celebrating the Sabbath (the passages in which she reminisces about these days of rest are among the book's most beautiful).

Mary does not outright reject the miracles she hears of and witnesses--perhaps because she lives in an age of enchanted imaginations. But the miracles are not unambiguously good: she sees Lazarus, raised from the dead, as a frail and devastated shadow of his former self. As for miracles less tinged with pain, Mary does not seem to outright believe, either. Her concern, in all these events, is of the spectacle her son is making of himself. Her concern is for his safety as a troublemaker in a politically volatile time.

This is her concern at the terrible crucifixion, as well--her son's safety and, when a rescue ultimately proves impossible, her own safety. The whole ordeal is overshadowed by a sense of conspiracy, of uncertainty over who is trustworthy, who is involved in the plot to kill Jesus and those involved with him. By Mary's shame-filled account, she runs away from the crucifixion with two companions who are also at risk, even going so far as to terrorize families to procure food and donkeys during their panicked flight.

The resurrection, per Mary's view, seems to be wishful thinking on the part of demoralized followers: they derive it, in part, from an uncanny dream she and another woman share and report. Jesus's heavenly origins, likewise, are later extrapolated from Mary's descriptions of her sense of mystery and holiness in the early days of her pregnancy, a sense that she suspects many women feel. Those around her are insistent on taking the events of her life, of her son's life, and recasting them in light of redemption, in light of divinity. Mary does not see redemption: she sees foolishness and pain.

Tóibín seems to be writing against something, against the cult of Mary that holds her up as mediatrix of grace, endowed with a superabundance of faith, honored by heavenly proximity to the Father and the Son. In The Testament of Mary, the mother of Jesus is an embittered doubter, a staunch materialist with no hope of an eternal future, her eyes open only to the political and religious spheres of men that stole her greatest joy.

I imagine that the book is harder to swallow for Catholics than for Protestants, who don't generally share the deep veneration of Mary and her exemplary faith. My Baptist Bible training does call to mind the Magnificat of Luke 1. But it also calls up Mary and Jesus's family coming to take him away, their fear of his apparently unbalanced and risky behavior outweighing any sort of faith in his mission and divine origins. Mary's frankness, her doubting, might even be looked upon as a refreshing portrayal of a truly human response to radical loss. Indeed, the book's willingness to venture into the depths of a mother's grief is perhaps its primary strength.

But I feel as though we miss something important with Tóibín's Mary, both in terms of characterization and in terms of gender politics. His representation of her anger and regret renders her character all too thin--where is the love, the tenderness that justifies such a depth of sorrow? Imagining the picture of Mary the faithful (present at the cross and in the upper room with the eleven, agreeing to become the theotokos, or God-bearer) as a later construction of men who twisted her stories, imagining her as turning away from her Judaism towards Aphrodite, imagining her as loathing even the scent of men--these are secularist visions, but they are hardly feminist. Instead, they contribute to an unhelpful binary that sees the church as a wholly male enclave, with women left beyond the pale.

For those of us who seek to follow in the Way of Jesus while rediscovering the often overlooked biblical and historical roots of women's participation in the faith, The Testament of Mary steals away one of our exemplary figures, flattening her dynamic blend of faith and doubt--a blend we see in nearly all the Bible's (and history's) accounts of Jesus's disciples. Per Tóibín's perspective, it seems to be a compliment that Mary is not counted among the (dubious) faithful. But my heart is stirred with the crazy hope of resurrection, and so I can't help desiring a Mary whose life, like mine, is a stew of competing sorrows and joys, losses and budding love.

Perhaps that's the most honest final summation: it all comes down to desire. We are always left to use our imaginations when we seek to make sense of this woman, for the Bible tells us only so much, and the churches' traditions are rich with contradictions. Colm Tóibín has imagined a Mary with her own sort of moral integrity, a refusal to accept a logic of redemption that is repugnant in the face of radical suffering. I can admire such integrity. Still, I'm rooting for redemption.

an acceptable fast: Lenten Morning Sickness

Gracious and merciful God,
you see into the secret places of our hearts,
where we mourn our sins.
As we turn again to your grace, receive our prayers.

Look with mercy on our contrite hearts,
wash from us the stain of iniquity,
and create a new and right spirit in us,
that we may declare your praise
and offer an acceptable sacrifice in these Lenten days;
through Christ Jesus, who bore our sins on the cross. Amen.

(from the Revised Common Lectionary Prayers for Ash Wednesday)

I discovered Lent in adulthood. I was struck by the strange beauty of fasting for forty days; of living through the theo-drama of Christ in the desert; of submitting myself, body and soul; of learning to trust in God's provision and comfort rather than the distractions that usually calm (and claim) me. I looked forward to the lean days, the pared-down days of prayer and penance that gave meaning to the bleak late winter and prepared me more fully for the joy of Easter.

In the years since finding Lent as a life-giving discipline (rather than the grace-fogging superstition I suspected in my youth), I have been challenged through fasting from various pleasures: chocolate, refined sugars, meat, blogs, online videos. I have found deep goodness in developing new habits of prayer and study.

This year, however, my fast chose me. I have given up many of the delights that normally shape my life: coffee, tea, most vegetables, chocolate, eggs, apples, cooking, social gatherings. If you know me in the slightest, you know the weight of this asceticism: I have not been drinking tea. I have not been eating salads. I have not been working in my kitchen. But before you praise me for my discipline, for the rigor of my fasting, know that these normal delights hold out no pleasure to me. I have no twinges of longing. It is hardly a sacrifice.

And know: I ate donuts (plural) on Ash Wednesday. I ate french fries on the way to the evening service. I played music during the imposition of the ashes with a glass of Sprite stashed under the piano.  Toward the end, Josh approached me with sincere eyes, formed a cross on my forehead with his ashy thumb, whispered, "Cindy, take up your cross and follow Jesus." I nodded, turned back to the piano, took up my glass and swallowed sweet fizz.

I greet these Lenten mornings with a mixed-berry smoothie. Later: oatmeal muffins slathered in butter, whole wheat bagels thick with cream cheese, bananas, cinnamon applesauce, salted almonds. Every two hours, these days of Lent, I eat. I tuck into fast-food chicken sandwiches. I fill my pockets with peppermints. I end each day with frozen yogurt.

This is not the feminist fast of facing down a terror of food (though I do commend such a fast). This is not a Lenten discipline of abundance. The hollows under my eyes and fog in my brain hint otherwise.

My discipline is sleep. My discipline is trust that the bland foods I put into my belly will calm its quailing. My discipline is hope that the weeks--the months--of feeling like a wrung-out version of myself are for some greater good, invisible to me now but evidenced by the aches and toilet-hugging and exhaustion. These days, my thickening middle presents a little more evidence, but still I must remind myself: faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

And here is the object of my faith: in the secret places of my body, God is creating a new spirit. The Brooding Dove is at work renewing my spirit, as well, but what I mean here is a new person.



The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus recommending secret fasts, and in the secret places of my heart I have held this Lenten devotion close and quiet. Not so much for the spiritual benefit of secrecy (after all, I am telling you now), but for the pragmatics of waiting to see if this little one plans to stick around. We have known loss before, Josh and I. We've welcome this Stranger with extravagant hospitality, sitting on the edges of our seats, begging, "Please, make yourself comfortable. We're so glad you're here. Stay a while?"

We heard the little peach's heartbeat last week, strong and quick and submerged-sounding. We are feeling more confident our Guest is feeling cozy in the deep-down place of me.

The terror of learning to love a possibly fleeting visitor, an Other suspended in paradox, longed for but also surprising, an Other who, tiny bud of cells, spins me out into a realm where I have become strange even to myself--leaning into this terror has been my Lenten lesson. Praying the Psalms each morning, asking to be seen, to be heard, to be preserved, not just for my sake but for the sake of this new spirit within me--asking to be renewed, to be purged of the sins that beset me because this tiny person will nestle into my heart and arms and breast and gain and learn life from me--oh, what a mystery. Oh, what a joy. And oh, what a commonplace reality for women all over, this desire to be better for the sake of  the coming child.

My Lenten fast is most profound in that it is not so special, not so unique. (How many have watched with knowing eyes as I sneak a saltine between tasks? How many message boards have I read with everyday women around the world pausing from their everyday lives to offer support and tips--ginger, lemon, carbohydrates, peppermint, acupressure bands?) This morning  all-day sickness is a usual fast, but it is one doubtless acceptable to the Most High whose wings overshadow, whose creation knows the pangs of labor, whose Spirit comforts and challenges and ushers us through the canals of a new birth.

Perhaps I will be feeling better by Easter? One can only hope. In any case, I will celebrate Resurrection, praise Jesus for life springing up from where no life seemed to be. Even if snows still blanket the ground. Even if I'm dropping crumbs between the piano keys.

evening sun

Nearing suppertime, and the sun is announcing itself through the front window like the boisterous, best kind of dinner guest who brings along dessert. These past winter weeks have been difficult, and full, but the sun is insistent against the table, bold against the wall, bearer of brightness and shadows of bending branches. The snow is still drifted knee-high, but the day is no longer hibernating. Spring may be months off, but I trust its coming more today than ever.