Going Local, Saving Sex, & Other Readings
Jobs, relationships, traveling adventures, and the like are all good reasons for twenty-somethings to pack it up and make a move. But I think it’s also important to invest in each place even as we pass through it. It takes courage to put down roots in what you know are only temporary homes, but I’ve learned personally the richness of living locally, and immersing yourself in the community God has no doubt intentionally placed you in.
I reflect on this tension in an article in RELEVANT today, The Great Escapism: Why this generation needs to learn how to stay put
On a different note, I was interviewed last week by the editor of B (of the Baltimore Sun paper) who was doing a piece on abstinence as a reemerging trend for young adults. She contacted myself and another former intern of a non-profit that gives abstinence presentations in the Baltimore school system, and asked some good and fair questions. The final piece was published today and I’ll be curious to hear what you think.
You can read it here: Virginity in Pop Culture: Why do we care who isn’t getting any?
Also, don’t miss these two blog series I’ve been enjoying for the past few weeks:
Preston Yancey’s “At the Lord’s Table,” a candid collection of voices affirming the beauty of the church
Ed Cyzewski’s “Women in Ministry” series, a redemptive conversation of the giftedness of women to serve
What are you reading and enjoying this week, whether online or in print?
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Posted in Embodied Faith
The Church is Like a Soup Kitchen #ATLT
Today I’m honored to be posting in Preston Yancey’s At the Lord’s Table blog line-up, in his own words, “a series of over 50 posts from varying authors about the beautiful, mangled Church. Look for at least two new posts every Monday through Saturday between January 25th and February 22nd. Join us in the conversation? See you in the comments.”
Here’s the beginning of my post and I’ll see you over at Preston’s blog to read the rest!
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Posted in Embodied Faith
Tagged communion, forgiveness, grace, guest post, religion, the church
Is There a Line Between Physical and Spiritual Health?
This fourth week in January, we’re caught in a changing of the tide. For we who indulged in Christmas feasting and snacking now take a solemn vow of health and wellness, stocking up on protein powder and taking advantage of yoga mat sales. It’s a cliche, but it happens annually.
My pastor opened his sermon yesterday with some stats on the new year’s surge toward physical fitness, and offered up the logic that if we are going to be so intentional about building a plan that will have lasting benefits for our bodies, why wouldn’t we likewise create a plan to consistently pursue spiritual health?
When was the last time you heard a pastor affirm the body and its physical care? As I think on previous sermons I have heard, I can recall mostly warnings and polemics against the body as it leads into (usually sexual) sin.
But I was refreshed, this Sunday, to see a treatment of the physical and the spiritual that was not communicated as a dichotomy. The forbidden fruit in Eden, the manna in the wilderness, the water turned to wine, the feeding of the five thousand, the last supper of bread and wine…these are just some of the parallels used in Scripture that God uses to show His spiritual truth through our tangible experience. But for any of these metaphors to work, we have to affirm both elements.
God speaks to us as whole people, not ambiguous ratios of body and soul, tangible and spiritual, but as whole men and women made in His image. And we do damage to ourselves when we splice this image.
I did damage to myself as a teenager, committing myself to spiritual growth while hushing the hunger pains of my self-emptied body, serving two gods, one to which I entrusted my soul and the other which I alternately praised and detested in the mirror every day.
It wasn’t until I encountered the Incarnation that I began to heal. The God who was not transcendent but dust-rooted, who breathed through mortal lungs, like me. He was whole and holy, and I became hungry again.
How do you integrate the body and faith? How do you encounter God in your physical experience?
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Posted in Embodied Faith
Marriage Is…
Over Christmas I caught up with a friend over coffee, and the conversation of expectations and marriage came up. She asked me how I would describe our first year of marriage, and if it was hard. Marriage, and newlywed life especially, is a lot of things, but that would probably be the last word I would use to describe our first year together.
“Really?” she said, “You’re the first person I’ve heard say that.”
The first picture taken of Zach and I together. It's a long story. Maybe I'll tell it sometime.
It made me sad to hear that young married couples experience challenge and difficulty as the norm. I know that marriages can hit hard times. Any relationship worth fighting for will be hard, it will weather both tension and tenderness. We’ve experienced both in newlywed life, most of our conflict arising from the adjustment of welding two lives into one. And I can only speak from this small beginning that is ours, but overall, I would describe marriage in different words:
Marriage is hilarious—like when you both say a million-dollar word— “elixir,” for example—at the same time, or when you make a merry mess of the kitchen together attempting smoothie recipes.
Marriage is safe—like when you have the weekend from hell and your husband leaps to your defense in a tirade against all injurious persons and events, both at once cleansing you from the experience and making you laugh.
Marriage is fun—a 365-day-a-year sleepover with your best friend who happens to be super cute. I think that says it all.
Marriage is creative and playful—like when you happily trade in a traditional dinner date night for making snow angels at the park, dreaming and making life lists together, and taking late-night city walks. Love widens your imagination to a new scope of color.
Marriage is sweet—like when he made it all through college without drinking coffee, and then started brewing a pot daily when she was away in Amsterdam, because it made him think of her. Like when he’s going to have a beast of a day at work and she does her hair curly, just the way he likes it.
Marriage is friendship—a deep kindred knowledge of each other, in which he knows that she cries every time Fred dies in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that she drinks her coffee always with a straw. And she knows that he craves citrus when he’s sick and that his sense of social protocol cringes at taking pictures in nice restaurants. The best part is we’re always still learning.
Marriage is redemptive–in God’s astounding grace that allows us to rehearse His divine love toward each other in everyday liturgies of sharing a sink, table, and bed, as we share heart and soul.
What is your reaction when you hear people talk about how “marriage is hard”? Does that ring true or would you describe marriage differently?
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Posted in Millennial Culture
Tagged adjusting as a newlywed, marriage, newlywed life, real marriage, reflecting Christ in marriage
Why We Need Minor Chords in Christmas Carols
This year I realized that all my favorite Christmas carols consist of minor notes. Beneath the soaring major chords runs a thread of melancholy.
Because even in the Christmas cradle, there is a sword. Simeon spoke of it in the temple, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
The melancholy of minor chords in Christmas songs speak to me of a world straining under the weight of the fall. They resound to remind us that we are a weary world indeed, singing bittersweet carols with the pleading chorus of “Come, Lord Jesus, Come…”
We wait, sometimes crying, sometimes rejoicing. Here are three beloved Christmas carols, with minor chords in both lyrics and sound:
O Come O Come Emmanuel
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (My favorite rendition here by Sixpence None the Richer)
O ye beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.
Oh Holy Night
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appear’d and the soul felt His worth
A thrill of hope
The weary world rejoices
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Posted in Embodied Faith
Homemaking for Twentysomethings in Transition
In the past two years I’ve made many transitions–from a student to a professional, a single lady to a wife, an intern to a business owner, an apartment renter to a homeowner, and more. And in the hurricane of changes, the theme of home has become something near to my heart.
Today I’m over at RELEVANT magazine writing about “Our Transient Generation: the need to be grounded in a culture always on the move.” I look forward to hearing your thoughts and stories on making a home.
Here’s the beginning of the article…
For every twentysomething there’s a shift, somewhere along the way from college to graduation to career moves, in which we choose to stop calling our family’s house “home.” It can be subtle or sudden. We pause while filling out a job application at the line of our home address, we return to our childhood home on summer break to find our room evolving into a storage unit or we commit to serving overseas for a year and acclimate to a foreign culture which quickly becomes more familiar than our own.
This transitional time can be bittersweet, but our innate human longing for home is not ungrounded. As Kim Peterson proposes in her book Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life, “The Christian story of redemption … is a story that moves from home to home.”
Through many moves as a young adult—a dorm room, a city apartment, my childhood bedroom, a cheap newlywed apartment and finally to a cozy brick bungalow my husband and I are now privileged to call our own—I have found this to be true. Like many twentysomethings in transition, I have been vulnerable to emotional and physical displacement, but I have learned that the ache to belong is perfectly aligned with Scripture’s description of God’s people as rootless travelers, making the journey from Eden to Heaven, from home to home.
You don’t have to be homeowner to make a home. And if we build our homes with holy intention, whether home is a rented apartment, a starter home or your parent’s basement, the attention and care we invest in our physical spaces will make itself evident in our journey into adulthood and spiritual maturity as well…
Click here to read the rest.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Innovation and the Incarnation: A Dialogue on Digital Books
While growing up on a steady diet of children’s books and classics, my mom used to say I was addicted to print. And since the digital advent I’ve had to modify this slightly to feeding an addiction of both print and pixels. I work more with digital ink than print these days, and I believe there’s a respectable art to both mediums.
Digital Ink and the Incarnation
But personally, I still gravitate toward the sacrament of print. I’m still one of those traditionalists who see romance in libraries and print presses and coffee rims on cream pages. I love words. I love the way the Word Incarnate sprouted lungs and limbs to dwell with us, spirit-God taking human, physical form. Digital words, it sometimes seems, regress against this divine unfolding of word becoming embodied.
But then I conducted this interview with NOVOInk which effectively changed my mind. I was intrigued when John Hirst, who formerly worked at NOVOInk and founded Generous Mind, argued that digital reading is a move toward the Incarnation because enhanced, interactive book editions actually bring the content and the author back together.
In the industrial mass-production of the last century, he said, we’ve lost the personal connection with the author, which interactive e-reading is able to resurrect. John explained, “We are not so much in love with the technology of eBooks as we are excited about what eBooks can do to reconnect authors and readers in ways that will lead to life transformation.”
Hidden Costs of Innovation
I applaud NOVOInk’s approach to eReading, but I suppose I can’t expect all business media giants to bend to a theology of language and the Incarnation.
This morning The High Calling pointed me to David Wheeler’s blog, a brick and mortar bookseller, who warns against the costly trade-offs of selling out to Amazon’s digital empire and feels the pressure in his own bookshop of their tactics to dominate the industry. David writes, and this gave me chills,
“It has never been a small irony to me that Amazon chose a Bradburian name like Kindle and Kindle Fire for their e-reader, as they continue to set fire to booksellers, publishers, and writers alike.”
Throughout history, innovation without boundaries has resulted in dire consequences. What boundaries do you think we need to put around our technology, reading and otherwise, so that we make the most of it without it getting out of our control?
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Posted in Embodied Faith
Tagged brick and mortar booksellers, digital books, eBooks, ereadering, Incarnation, Kindle Fire, the danger of digital books, theology of language and words
Table Grace
Nothing evokes longing for heaven in me like a good feast. On my bookshelf is currently Season to Taste, the true story of a girl who is hit by car the summer before entering culinary school. She keeps all her limbs, survives and heals from all injuries, save one: the head damage she suffered from the accident stole her sense of smell, and therefore taste.
After despairing over her world of flavor turned muted and flat, I am savoring her slow return to nuance, color, and texture, her bittersweet reconstruction of nerves and sensory experience. And at one point reading on the couch one evening, during the scene of a dinner party, I looked up and said to my husband, “I just want a feast. That’s all I want out of life.”
I see grace unfold at tables. I see the table as the home’s native theatre for cosmic redemption, where divine hospitality plays itself out in the simplest of ways, conversation, warm gestures, table manners.
In this season of Advent, I’ll use an excerpt from Preston Yancey’s striking Advent guide, This Fearsome Thing of Grace, to illustrate the grace of the table. It’s not too late to start observing this rich season, and since Preston’s guide is structured with daily reflections and an eBook you can download with a keystroke, I heartily recommend it as a great place to start.
This is a reading from December 14, Wednesday in the Third Week of Advent, from This Fearsome Thing of Grace by Preston Yancey:
“…every one of you will invite his neighbor to sit…” -Zechariah 3:10
- In the morning: Psalm 119:49-72
- Zechariah 3
- Revelation 4:1-8
- Matthew 24:45-51
- In the evening: Psalms 49, 53
There is a balance to the mystery and wonder of Faith, which is to include. Though some things cannot be simply explained, this does not mean that we have been called to safeguard our lives. The coming of Christ, Emmanuel, God with us, was the profound and frightful moment in which God was, truly, with us. Not us in the neat and proper sense, but us sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, us gentiles, us liars, us thieves, and the list goes on. If Christ is truly our example, then what He teaches the most without ever speaking a word to point it out, is that we are to be present with the people who are in need of our presence. There is no safety in this, but there is goodness. It isn’t safe to reach out and willingly gift. It’s not safe to surrender. It’s not safe to be vulnerable. But it is good. It is good in the sense of Christ’s goodness.
And why do we do it? We do it because Christians have been called to build tables. We lay them out, meager as they may be sometimes, and invite the stranger and the broken over to share with us a meal. We make tables everywhere we can, we invite whomever we can, because in the end it is the one Table, the Table of the Eucharist, that matters the most of all. Everyone has been invited to this Table, but not everyone comes.
Mary and Joseph had a number of strange visitors during the first three years of Jesus’ life, from different social standings and lands, but we are told that all this Mary cherished and delighted in, for there is something about a full table, no matter who fills it, that can be a most holy moment indeed.
What shadows or symbols of grace do you find at the table?
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Posted in Embodied Faith
Tagged Advent, Christmas, cosmic redemption, feast, sensory experience, sensory faith, table, the Eucharist communion table
Learning to Keep Time with Advent
From Genesis’ prologue of all time, “In the beginning,” to Revelation’s final “amen,” our timeless God has accommodated human chronology. Finite beings with beginnings and ends, we live in intervals and hours.
But our God loved us so much that He went against the grain of the divine and submitted Himself to the constraints of the mortal clock. Subverting His eternal nature, He stooped to be born an infant God in the middle of our human mess.
If you haven’t noticed, human beings are pretty clumsy with time. We need help. Advent helps us keep the time. It helps us move slowly through a season of anticipation approaching Christmas. And the best way I’ve found to observe this rich season is to lean on prepared or guided reflections, such as Our Savior Come: An Advent Companion, which so beautifully begins:
“Centuries before marketers and merchants insisted on a long run-up to Christmas, various members in the household of faith advocated Advent as a way of unpacking the Incarnation. Not every part of the Church shares this tradition, but most of us feel instinctively the need to pause at this time of year. God becoming human? Surely that amazing, magnificent truth deserves our attention.”
Edited by Dan Schmidt and joined by a chorus of contributors, (including my sister! Full disclosure. She is awesome.) Our Savior Come is a treasury of daily reflections to lead you through the glowing days of Advent. It’s easy to hear the Christmas story with a detached familiarity, but I am finding new and astounding perspectives from these contributors, who in their various talented ways attempt to bring themselves as well as their readers onto their knees before the Child King.
“Might Advent be a season for recalibrating, remembering, rebooting?” Editor Dan Schmidt asks in his introduction. And before we can protest that we don’t have enough time, that we’re too busy shopping and partying and decking the halls, we are graciously reminded, “Ruminating on the Incarnation takes time—perhaps it will occupy us until Christ’s second advent—but it is time well spent.”
Do you observe Advent? What traditions or books do you find beneficial in walking through this season?
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Posted in Embodied Faith
Truth and Family Fiction
History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil’s Dictionary
* * * * *
“The Truth? You can’t handle the truth!”
A Few Good Men
* * * * *
If postmodernity can be trusted (and the verdict is still out on that), it has taught us one thing: perspective is crucial. Postmodern novels are populated with the observable narrator, the unique point-of-view, and the classic story retold. Postmodern movies brought the cameraman into the scene, put us inside the brain of John Malkovich, and introduced The 300, giving us a new version of the Battle of Thermopylae.
What is history, postmodernity asks, but one person’s version of the truth?
This struggle between truth and perspective has never been more apparent to me than during my recent attempt at writing my family history.
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When I think of the history of story, I think first of primitive people sitting around a fire. Hungry people. Exhausted people. No movies, no TV, no Internet: only each other, joined together in an immense struggle. Stories have, after all, been told for millennia, long before the existence of classifications like fiction, nonfiction, history, or poetry. Long before sentence fragments earned you a green squiggly line.
I imagine that the last question on the mind of the hearers of those fireside stories was:
“But did that actually happen?”
* * * * *
Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of family history is it’s meandering nature, the way it constantly dwells in this nebulous land between fiction and nonfiction. Except where the common family history intersects with recorded history (births, deaths, deeds, etc.), everything is up for grabs. The great-uncle who tells the most convincing stories, with the most conviction, becomes the source. The written words of the great-great-grandfather, who kept a journal, are accepted at face value as fact.
Which version of your own family history have you been convinced to believe?
* * * * *
While searching the mist of my own family’s legends, I realized that what I was creating was not a family history that could be read as such. What I was creating was a family mythology, stories that would be told around the fire (or dinner table) for as long as this book survives.
I think that’s something to be proud of. I think it’s a worthy gift to give a family.
* * * * *
What do you think about the relationship between story and fact in the context of a family history?
Shawn lives in Paradise, Pennsylvania with his wife, four children, four chickens, and a rabbit named Rosie. His most recent book, My Amish Roots, explores the roles of family, death, life, tradition, and legacy against the backdrop of his Amish ancestry. He blogs daily at shawnsmucker.com about writing, the strange things his children say, and postmodern Christianity.
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Posted in Creative Life
Tagged creative non-fiction, family history, family legend, fiction, guest post, storytelling, truth in memoir