Granola, Roots, Reality, and Creeds

I jokingly asked my sister how she felt about me becoming 'granola'—washing my scalp with honey and making my own toothpaste with four simple (safe) ingredients. The more I hear about what ends up in our food (even in the flesh of produce, which should be 'clean' but is poisoned), the more granola I become. My sister's reply was that she was fine with my granola-ism, as long as I wasn't becoming [politically] liberal. 

My working hypothesis is that everyone who loves and serves God should be both conservative and liberal...not in the realm of politics, but in many areas of life: 

Be a liberal giver of time and money and love. 

Conserve water and electricity and land. 

Liberally feed your neighbour—feast in times of joy, and in times when joy seems too far away to recall. 

I'd like to say we should be conservative when it comes to how often we give our opinions and complain... But the thing is, while it's fine to have varying opinions, absolute truth still exists and should be our standard—and the Bible talks about doing everything without arguing or complaining.

Something I've been thinking about in recent months is discerning truth from lies, knowing a genuine, untainted product from something cheap, imitation, or poisoned. It seems harder and harder to find candles, clothes, toys, furniture, textiles, or even food made from sturdy, real things—things untainted by plastics, poison, heavy metal, toxins, etc. I can't just go to a different store to find clothes made out of real fibres—woven, pieced, and stitched by someone who was not forced into labour as a child or as a religious/political slave. Even if I could somehow sew my own clothes (trust me, no one wants to see how that disaster would go), where is the fabric coming from? It feels impossible to find solid, real things in our ever-shifting world.

The same goes for those in governments, agencies, big tech, big pharma, media, education, etc. It seems that their native tongue too often is lies—to the point that they can't stop themselves from believing their own deception. Who can we trust? Are the people we trust in giving us the whole truth, or just the portion of information they want us to see to paint a certain image of a person or our world? It all feels surreal.

So I find myself coming back to what I know is true and real and beautiful: Jesus the Messiah is King and Lord. Of all of creation itself. Of individuals. Of His Kingdom in Heaven which is breaking into Earth... Jesus is real—the Son of God the Father, co-equal in power and majesty with Him and with the Holy Spirit. When we say the Nicene Creed at church every week it is a moment of time that transcends clock time, rooting me and those all around me into reality. There is real wood. Real earth. Real flesh. Real blood. Real Truth. Realest of real Life. 

It's been a long while since I've practised the spiritual disciplines, and my soul feels it. I need solitude. I need simplicity. I need quiet. I need prayer. I need to meditate on Scripture—to savour it, not just to hear it and have it snatched away by the cares of each day.

Ephesians tells us to dig our roots down deep into the soil of God's love, being filled with the fullness of the Father:

"...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." (Ephesians 3:17-19 ESV)

Let us be rooted and built up in Truth. To rest in the Real. To cultivate depth. Let us meditate on God and who He is...

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, 

Maker of Heaven and Earth, 

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, 

the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,  

begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.

Through Him all things were made.

Who for us men, and for our salvation He came down from Heaven,

And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit through the Virgin Mary,

And was made man.

For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; 

He suffered death and was buried.

On the third day He rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; 

He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 

He will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, 

and His kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, 

Who proceeds from the Father and the Son. 

Who with the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.  

—Amen.

Old-Fashioned Virtue amidst Newfangled Technology

Cricket songs in full thrum and twinkling hosts of fireflies—that was the world I lived in as a child, until either the mosquitoes or my mother corralled me into the house. Then there would be stories with Dad, during which I would draw horses or a poor replica of the Dawn Treader—or whatever else happened to be the subject of the story. We had a Saturday night show or two that we would watch as a family; there were stints of Captain Kangaroo, Reading Rainbow, or Disney afternoons, and the occasional film. Yet, by and large, my childhood was spent out-of-doors, riding my bike, playing ‘pioneers’ or ‘office’ with my neighbour girls, drawing, or reading.

Screens entered my daily life in high school, when we obtained our first family desktop computer. I started typing out my stories and editing a magazine for some school fellows. When dial-up internet made it to our home, I stayed up until the wee sma’s instant messaging friends or keeping up long e-mail correspondences with comrades scattered across the country.

Some parts of my imagination were laid to rest about the time I began having a screen in front of me often. Playing ‘pioneers’ with the neighbours was abandoned and I sorely neglected my model horses. I began writing stories instead of acting out the plots I had read or thought up with my friends. This may have been a natural shifting point for my imagination, but natural or not, technology facilitated the change. I had taken a step away from tangible reality, putting up a screen between myself and a first-hand experience of  life.

I was—and admittedly, still am—drawn to that flickering blue light like a moth to a flame. Yet something in me rebels, too. I have tried, in recent years, to take a child-like step backward. Now I often take the screen from betwixt myself and the colourful, sparkling,real world around me. I have a cell phone—a flip phone—that I turn off when I don’t want to be bothered. I read real books and write letters by hand. My upbringing without much ‘screen-time’ resonates all these years later in what feels life-giving. Though work and leisure often involve some form of glowing technology, when I write by hand or take an evening walk, or when I make dinner or fix my car, I feel more alive.

Screens seem to eat away at imagination and ingenuity. Sometimes it frightens me how prevalent screens are—I can’t hide myself or my yet-to-come children from them. But I have learned that there are ways to encounter the tactile world without the screen-barrier. Though we live in a different age than the technologically limited one in which I was raised, when I have children, I still want them to know the smell of a rose before they see one on a tablet. I want them to learn to roller skate and ride their bikes; to love going to the library for good books to read together; to want to colour or draw rather than watch a cartoon; and to know that if they say “But I’m bored!” they can do chores, not watch television.

This does not mean shunning technology; it has its place as a useful tool. The fact that I can call home whenever I want to without long distance charges is wonderful. My computer aids me in all kinds of endeavours—from looking up recipes and getting driving directions, to listening to music or audio books. Still, I want my children to learn how to use a map before they learn to use MapQuest; how to play music as well as listen to it; how to cook by ‘eyeballing it’, as well as by measuring every last thing; and how to read out loud proficiently, by listening to others and by practising the art themselves. I would like to have a big enough piece of the out-of-doors to let my children run around. A place to try to catch a squirrel through their own inventiveness (as I amusingly watched my neighbour children attempt recently).

You see, my desire is that ages and ages hence, my children will send handwritten thank you notes for gifts, and that they will text to let me know they made it somewhere safely. I want to be part of raising inter-dependent adults—persons who can use common sense in taking care of themselves and their possessions, but who know they are part of the Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints. I want them to have ‘old-fashioned’ virtues and to know history as they walk among ‘newfangled’ technology and speak truth into the present.

*This essay originally appeared at HumanePursuits.com

I Went to the Woods Angry...

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”1

—Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I was angry. Hot tears threatened to spill over long-lashed rims and I did not quite know why. When I began throwing kitchen utensils, however, I knew one thing: it was time to hammer the ground with the soles of my feet in hopes of calming my soul. The two young men I passed in the Summer dusk of late-o’clock did not even attempt saying hello. I’m sure my face was stony, or at least, set like flint toward the direction I was steadily aiming.

My frustrations were many small things from recent days, weeks, and relationships that all came to roost after a particularly trying day at work. I came home looking for a relaxing long shower, only to find that without warning, my shower did not work. I snapped. I told myself that my anger was unwarranted—unreasonable, even. I spent some on-the-edge minutes at home thinking of all the good things about the day and week—and there were many good things. But no, the monster that changed all I could see into wave after wave of red tide swelled in my head, depleting oxygen from my brain and gratitude from my heart. On went my running shoes. Off I stalked in the late twilight.

Rain had beaten the tall, tender grasses into gentled submission, leaving plump droplets lying on those green beds. The rush and roar of the swift-racing stream pounded in my ears, faster than my feet could pound time on the earth. The pulse and throb of the world shifted as I stepped onto the dirt trail, smelling green summery smells, catching glints of fairy flickers along the path. Long I stood by a small stream laughing and chattering in the darkness, running to meet that swollen rush below. Long I listened to a solitary bird, echoing in the night. Ragged breath after breath was filled with the tang of the spicy firs. After some time of pouring out my heart to the Creator, those breaths came more slowly.

My feet found a rhythm in the evening dance. A slower, steadier pace, yet one often stopped. Once, by a host of white fairy-flowers, swaying with a gentle breeze. Again I was arrested by the change of smells as I rounded a bend or rose to a level mountain meadow. Scuffling and crunching on the hillside halted me—I caught three dim shapes, mule deer, putting a safe distance between us. The moon rose above the piney brow of the nearest foothill, shrouded in a veil of lingering clouds from an earlier storm. The diffused light rested on the clinging drops of rain, burnishing them to silver beads on grey-green strands. The Father of lights was arraying the world about me in all her glory and evening splendour.

Dark clouds engulfed the moon, the deer moved into further shade, the smells of the field sweetened and deepened. I turned back along the path, homeward bound, with a stillness inside that blossomed like those delicate, dancing flowerlets. I don’t know where I left my anger, but somewhere in that ramble it rushed away, like the stream after a storm. All that was left was Beauty and stillness, seeping into my senses through every pore. All along the path I was thankful for night flowers, fairy rings, the incense of the woods, and bird’s hymns.

I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life. I thought of that line as I padded home—having long loved the idea. But unlike Thoreau, the woods themselves are not my life-source sort of sustenance. My Light and Life lie in their Maker. He is the One who quiets my soul from things outside, his Spirit from within. He is the One who replaces anger with Shalom—perfect, peaceful well-being. He reminds me how small I am under the dome of stars or the great, dark boughs of the majestic pine. He shows me that just by doing bird things and signing bird-songs, the birds praise him because they are being what he made them. I am still learning to be human—a good and glorious thing—trying to know the uncracked, unfallen Son of Man in all of his glorious humanity.

I want to live deliberately, fully. I want to put away wrath. To do so, sometimes I have to  head for the woods; walking hard, breathing rough, and seeking the One who made both the forest and myself. He is in all places, of course, but I can’t always hear Him—my ears get deaf in the roaring whirlwind of everyday life-cares. I am thankful for the much needed evensong of wilderness and wet—let them live long, as Hopkins once said:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.2

_________________

1. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (New York: Penguin Group), 72

2. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems and Prose "Inversnaid" (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd) 51