In Reality...

I've got a post in my drafts that I've been working on for awhile (and will continue to work on for awhile) about why I'm Lutheran -- the "why" being mainly the Sacraments. I have long desired to spell out my reasons in detail for my confused family and friends, and I am better able to do that in writing better than in conversation. In the meantime, Rebellious Pastor's Wife discusses with a Baptist how baptism now saves you also (1 Peter 3:21)

The title of her post calls to mind one of the turning points for my husband and I in our conversion. The footnote to 1 Peter 3:21 in the NIV Study Bible begins, "In reality..." and goes on to explain how "baptism now saves you" doesn't really mean that baptism saves you. How can you begin a study bible footnote with "in reality"? It belies a fundamental lack of faith in the words of Scripture, as if the Apostle Peter were a bit mistaken about reality and needs the commentator to help him out. That was when the scales began to fall away from our eyes. As evangelical protestants, we claimed to possess the highest view of Scripture, taking the words on the page at face value. But -- in reality -- we were reading our theological presuppositions into the text.

Presuppositions like: baptism is a human work. Human works cannot save. Therefore, baptism cannot save. So, almost unconsciously, we read "baptism" as "the spiritual reality that baptism symbolizes" -- or even "spiritual baptism".

But St. Peter, far from being out of touch with reality, goes on to clarify: "not as a removal of dirt from the body" (because he is talking about an actual physical washing with real water, he specifies that its effect is not ritual outward cleanliness) "but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience" (the remission of sin and guilt). How can water do such great things? "...through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to Him."

First Butterfly

Today the first of the swallowtails emerged from its pupa in our butterfly house:

We set him free in the back yard this afternoon. He fluttered across the lawn and visited two rosebushes before leaving the yard for the big world beyond. You can see one other pupa on the back wall in the photo. We still have plenty of big fat caterpillars devouring dill and parsley and pooping at an astonishing rate. (I had never really considered the scatological implications of keeping the Very Hungry Caterpillar in a small enclosed space!)

By the way, we ended up building a very different butterfly house from the one pictured in my previous post. This one is made from a cardboard box, with pieces of fiberglass screen taped into place over the windows. (The instructions can be found in Nature Smart by Gwen Diehn.)

One thing that I haven't been doing that I need to start doing is lining the bottom with paper towels so that the poop (frass) doesn't build up, creating a moldy environment. I keep their greens in a small vase, narrow necked to prevent any caterpillars falling into the water. A second vase is handy for replenishing the dill/parsley every few days. I take out the old vase full of greens, caterpillars and all and set it on the kitchen counter. I prepare a fresh bouquet in the second vase, then I carefully transfer any stems with caterpillars on them to the new food supply. (It's important to move the caterpillars by cutting off the stem or leaf they are standing on and carrying that. Pulling them off the branch with your fingers can tear off their prolegs, the false legs at the back of the caterpillar's body used for gripping and climbing.) Then the old vase is washed out and ready for the next feeding.

Color by Numbers

About a month ago, we learned that Aidan has some "color deficiency", as the ophthalmologist put it. Poor guy -- he was squinching up his eyes and glancing alternately at me and the doctor unbelievingly as he tried to see the image on the card that we assured him was there.

This week, Erin asked me, "Mom, why do numbers have colors?" My eyes got round as I questioned her further; it appears that we have a synesthete in the family.

All this is making me wonder about my own genetic weirdness -- both of these are X-chromosome linked traits.

Punk Pastoral Care

So yesterday was the Fourth of July. We had a good time at the city's hot dog feed at the park, and met up with several of our parishioners there. As we were saying goodbye, M. said to my husband, "See you Sunday, Pastor!"

To which the Man in Black replied, "Do I need to get out to the golf course for that?"

This isn't the first time Punk Pastor has gotten away with this sort of thing. When we were on vicarage, he visited H., a parishioner who hadn't attended church since anyone could remember, in the hospital. Now, this was in southern Arizona in the summertime, and temperatures were soaring into the 100s. The sidewalks were like the walls of an oven, and H. was in the hospital for treatment of second degree burns on his hands and thigh that he gotten falling on his driveway. "It was hot like hell," he told the vicar.

With holy love and almost-apostolic authority, the vicar speaks. "Hmm. Let that be a warning to you, then."

Blame the office of the Holy Ministry. "That must have been my office talking," he told me later, "because it wasn't me!"

Remembering Rich Mullins -- Ten Years Later

I don't normally listen to CCM, but a couple of weeks ago I was driving home from some activity in another town, surfing round the radio dial, when a familiar, much-loved song that I hadn't heard for a few years came pouring out of the airwaves. It was Rich Mullins' Calling Out Your Name. It's a song that has always resonated with me, but listening to it while driving across the grasslands at sunset brought tears to my eyes. No wonder. The song is about the very same wide, empty corner of the world I was driving through. Or very nearly. Rich was "raised on Indiana clay" (where we spent most of the past four years), lived in Wichita for eight years and attended Friends University, and afterwards resided in New Mexico. He must have driven through our neck of the prairie to get there.

I believe in God the Father
Almighty Maker of Heaven and Maker of Earth
And in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, our Lord
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit
Born of the virgin Mary
Suffered under Pontius Pilate
He was crucified and dead and buried

And I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am
I did not make it, no it is making me
It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man
"Creed", R. Mullins & Beaker


Though we're strangers, still I love you
I love you more than your mask
And you know you have to trust this to be true
And I know that's much to ask
But lay down your fears, come and join this feast
He has called us here, you and me

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls
This drought has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In the Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

"A Communion Blessing from St. Joseph's Square", R. Mullins

Reading about his life I was both shocked and baffled to learn that he was a lifelong . . . Quaker???!! "I was twelve years old in the meeting house...listening to the old men pray..." Still, that didn't make sense. His music was so creedal and sacramental. It was one of the subtle driving forces, in fact, in my conversion to creedal, sacramental, catholic faith. Friends consider creeds and sacraments human inventions and shy away from them. But further searching revealed the answer to the mystery: Rich had been preparing for and was ready to receive communion in the Roman Catholic Church immediately prior to his death.

We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made
Forged in the fires of human passion
Choking on the fumes of selfish rage
And with these our hells and our heavens
So few inches apart
We must be awfully small
And not as strong as we think we are
"Not As Strong As We Think We Are"

Rich Mullins' music shaped my faith as a teen and young adult in a multitude of ways. His music is profound and poetic, but what really gives it substance is the rich theology behind it. Before I knew what to call it, I learned the Theology of the Cross from Rich's music. He deals much with human frailty, with the "not yet" of the Christian life.

Why do the nations rage?
Why do they plot and scheme?
Their bullets can't stop the prayers we pray
In the name of the Prince of Peace

For the Lord looks down on the sons of men
To hear the cries of the innocent
And the guilty will not stand
For the day of reckoning soon will come
And the whole world will see justice done
By the Lord's almighty hand
"Why Do the Nations Rage?"


So I'm telling you the just shall live
I know the just shall live
I know the just shall live
By faith

And You will raise them up
I know that You will raise them up
That You will raise them up
On the last day

And the prayers stand where the fighters fell
And time testifies with the tale that it tells
That the meek shall inherit the earth
And the Church advances on the gates of hell
And she clings to a light that will not be quelled
By the kingdoms of this world
"The Just Shall Live By Faith"

His songs are replete with recurring themes of social justice, of identification with the poor and lowly, of the incarnation, of the glory of God revealed in the creation, of the church and her calling, of suffering and death, and of hope in Christ. He lived what he believed, teaching music and Christian faith to Native American youth on a the remote reservation where he made his home, mostly unaware of how successful his albums were because royalties went directly to his church, which paid him a modest salary and divided up the rest among various charities for the poor.

This life has shown me how we're mended and how we're torn
How it's okay to be lonely as long as you're free
Sometimes my ground was stoney
And sometimes covered up with thorns
And only You could make it what it had to be
And now that it's done
Well if they dressed me like a pauper
Or if they dined me like a prince
If they lay me with my fathers
Or if my ashes scatter on the wind
I don't care

But when I leave I want to go out like Elijah
With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire
And when I look back on the stars
It'll be like a candlelight in Central Park
And it won't break my heart to say goodbye
"Elijah"

Rich Mullins left this life on September 19, 1997, in an auto accident on his way to a concert in Wichita, Kansas.

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human? I cannot help but suspect that at one time in the history of thinking that people believed that it meant that we were spiritual and that we could make choices and were capable of aspiring to higher ideals... like maybe loyalty or maybe faith... or maybe even love. But now we told by people who think they know, that we vary from amoeba only in the complexity of our makeup and not in what we essentially are. They would have us think as Dysart said that we are forever bound up in certain genetic reigns - that we are merely products of the way things are and not free - not free to be the people who make them that way. They would have us see ourselves as products so that we could believe that we were something to be made - something to be used and then something to be disposed of. Used in their wars - used for their gains and then set aside when we get in their way. Well, who are they? They are the few who sit at the top of the heap - dung heap though it is - and who say it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. Well, I do not know that we can have a Heaven here on earth, but I am sure we need not have a Hell either. What does it mean to be human? I cannot help but believe that it means we are spiritual - that we are responsible and that we are free - that we are responsible to be free.
R. Mullins, "Introduction to Higher Education and the Book of Love"

Homeless Man: Rich Mullins (on YouTube)
Wikipedia bio
Lyrics
An interview
I love what he says about the illusion of choices and about politics.

More quotes:
On mourning

On family values:

This whole "family values" thing is hugely misleading. It sort of implies that what your life is about is being happily married and having a beautiful family. And I go, "Wow, that's not what Jesus said."

You can have a wonderfully happy marriage or you can have a very successful experience with singleness and still not have anything at all when it's over. When we're dead, we're not married or single. And who we are is who we will be when we die. I think everyone should keep in mind that we will be dead very soon and live our lives in light of that. And your identity has to be something other than your marital status or your income.

On identification with Christ:

Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken. speech begins at 7:40 of the video

Use Real Words

A few weeks ago, some teen-aged friends were asking my 6-year-old son what sports he liked to play. "Basketball, "was the reply.
"Oh, do you have your own hoop?" they asked.
"Yes, we have a little one on the trellis," he said. The two teens looked at each other in dismay. "What's a trellis?" they whispered to each other.

My husband and I both have post-graduate training in applied linguistics, and we have always operated on the notion that to little children, words, big or small are "just words", and they love to learn new ones. It is a fact of human mental processes that we cannot think about things until we can name them. That is why the first phase of the trivium, the grammar stage, involves identifying and naming; that is why Montessori education has so much material for nomenclature. That's why we use real words when we talk to our children.

Words are the means by which engage with the abstract realities of our world. I couldn't begin to understand or discuss an airplane engine or an oil rig or even a game of golf (things about which I know precious little) without first learning a lot of new jargon -- words.

That said, I think vocabulary is best caught rather than taught. Good books and a good dictionary are really all that's needed. I had to do "vocabulary building exercises" in school; I'm sure I benefited and learned some new words from it (like "donned his attire" -- I remember that one!) but I'm also sure that most of my vocabulary skills came from my dad -- who uses real words -- and from reading.

Provoking my thoughts on vocabulary --a thoughtful post at Dewey's Treehouse: "It Pays Makes-Some-People-Very-Nervous-That-You-Want To Increase Your Word Power"

Letting Go

Yesterday at the pool, I waited at the bottom of the waterslide for my oldest to come shooting out the flume. My kids love the waterslide, but are not yet strong enough swimmers to swim to the ladder without help. But that changed yesterday. Erin hit the water paddling like mad. I reached out to put a hand under he belly as usual, but she shouted, "Let go, Mom!" So I let go, and she paddled on, all the way to the pool side. Of course she just had to tell the story to Dad when she got home.

Today I put her into somebody else's SUV with three other kids and sent her off to 4-H camp. I waited around until they were ready to leave. Then I told her goodbye, got in my van, and drove home with tears in my eyes. It is her first time to go to camp. It's her first time to spend a night away from home any place other than grandma's house.

Last night I checked over her bag. She had packed it herself, and there were a few things missing I knew she'd need. A flashlight. A bathrobe. Sunscreen. I tucked in her camera. And I found her swim goggles in the closet -- she'll wish she had those, I thought, and put them in the bag too. This morning she noticed the extra items. "Thanks, Mom," she said. "You're nice."

Sometimes people think that homeschool parents do what we do because we are clingy, or controlling, or overprotective. That we don't want to let our kids be independent and try their wings. That we're avoiding that universal milestone of putting our children onto the school bus for the first time and telling them goodbye. But the truth is that parenting means letting go. It's going to happen sometime, somewhere, some way, regardless of the choices parents make for their family. And it's always bittersweet.

I want my kids to try their wings. But I want to make sure they have roots as well.

Erin's going to have fun at camp. I can't wait to see the pictures.