little thoughts

gazing at the crucifixion

Posted on 2016-01-152016-01-14 by kristinabean

“You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.” – G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

It’s difficult to think long about the Crucifixion of Christ. There is someone we love, or at least respect, suffering incredible pain and humiliation. It is offensive, uncomfortable; the physical reality of it is raw and bloody, the emotional reality of it shameful and cruel. So much nicer, so much cleaner, to gloss over the whole event and focus on the empty tomb, the glorified and resurrected body of the risen Christ, the ethereal and heavenly realities of the Ascension, the vague spiritual dimensions of Pentecost.

But then, when our suffering comes, we’re left without an anchor, without a companion, without a guide to lead us through the vale, because we’ve never drawn near to Him in His suffering. It is the whole point of His coming: to suffer with us, to suffer for us, to become one with us in our pain and deprivation and shame, that we might someday become one with Him in His glory and joy and abundance. And until that someday comes, even our suffering can be given a higher purpose and beauty by unifying it with His suffering.

Stand at the foot of the cross, with Mary His mother and John the Beloved Disciple. Watch Him suffer, helpless to comfort or deliver Him; lament and mourn the injustice and cruelty of His death. Weep and let your heart be softened in gazing upon His suffering, that when you see the suffering of those around you your heart may be moved with compassion and pity for them as well. Weep and know that He weeps with you in your suffering, for the suffering of the world.

musings

decisions, decisions

Posted on 2016-01-14 by kristinabean

Sorry for the blog silence! We’ve had a strange virus going around the family, giving us all fevers and aches and speckly red rashes… no clue what it was but it seems fairly short-lived, and as the last one to get it I’m just riding out the tail end now.

I’ve been thinking about the way people make decisions, especially big decisions about identity, direction, and belief. I don’t think most of us pursue truth to the bitter end, without compromise; we don’t typically have the time, resources, or knowledge to do so in matters of theology, history, or ontology, even when we want our choices and beliefs to be founded in the truth. We end up choosing voices to listen to, people to trust, ideas to swallow whole, because we have to start somewhere.

Sometimes we just run with the ideas and values we were raised with, never questioning them, because they fit our lives or personalities fairly well and the effort to challenge or change them wouldn’t be worth the personal upheaval. Other times we run as far as possible from the beliefs of our parents, perhaps out of a desire to be different or independent, perhaps because our innate differences from our parents make their choices fit uncomfortably on our shoulders. Still other times we simply drift away from those ideas as we surround ourselves with voices speaking other messages, other opinions, other claimants to truth, and imbibe their messages without consciously realizing that’s what we’re doing.

I think too that our emotions often play a much larger role in decisions about what to believe and who to become than we care to admit. An intense feeling, an overwhelming emotion, an enduring obsessive irrational thought, or a powerfully moving event can influence us very strongly, no matter what we previously or rationally believe to be true or reasonable. Complicating it further, we have to decide whether or not, or to what extent, we will trust those emotional urges in our decision-making! We are emotional as well as rational beings, after all – but a life directed by emotion tends to end in poor impulsive choices and self-destruction.

And then, once a decision has been reached, how does one remain open-minded to new arguments, sensitive to the potential for error, while still living fully and passionately into the identity and purpose that have been decided upon? One the one side is apathy, the paralysis of indecision or the fear of making a mistake; on the other side is intolerance, bigotry, and irrational obstinacy. In the middle is the person fully alive, owning the choices he has made and honestly, completely, living them out – but ready to change direction with just as much passion and drive if convinced that the truth lies another way than he had thought before.

quotes

of heaven and hell

Posted on 2016-01-08 by kristinabean

“Nay, I will venture to say more than this;—it is fearful, but it is right to say it;—that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man. We know how unhappy we are apt to feel at present, when alone in the midst of strangers, or of men of different tastes and habits from ourselves. How miserable, for example, would it be to have to live in a foreign land, among a people whose faces we never saw before, and whose language we could not learn. And this is but a faint illustration of the loneliness of a man of earthly dispositions and tastes, thrust into the society of saints and angels. How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment. God cannot change His nature. Holy He must ever be. But while He is holy, no unholy soul can be happy in heaven. Fire does not inflame iron, but it inflames straw. It would cease to be fire if it did not. And so heaven itself would be fire to those, who would fain escape across the great gulf from the torments of hell. The finger of Lazarus would but increase their thirst. The very “heaven that is over their head” will be “brass” to them.”

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons

family life, phfr

{pretty, happy, funny, real} – Christmas cookies!

Posted on 2016-01-07 by kristinabean

One of my family’s cherished traditions is the annual Christmas cookie bake. Now, we make many different types of cookies for Christmas, but this tradition centers solely on the rolled and cut frosted sugar cookies, because it is such a monumental group effort to bake and decorate them all. This year my mom, my sister, and I rolled and cut the cookies, and then everyone pitched in to decorate some later in the day. Unfortunately I forgot to get any pictures of the decorating or the finished products… you’ll just have to take my work about the heights of our decorating abilities! 😉

{pretty}

My lovely sister (and my mom lurking in the background).

{happy}

Two of my favorite women – so happy to be laughing and doing life together over the Christmas season.

{funny}

His little jammies are just a bit small for him, and he doesn’t like to stay still, so diaper changes usually end with him running away with the legs unsnapped, like a little skirt. Even when I do get them snapped, the two snaps right by the diaper usually pop open after he crawls or climbs around for a while… drawbacks of using cloth diapers, I suppose!

{real}

I suppose my {real} is that this is as far into the process as I remembered to take pictures! Also I suppose the fact that it’s a secret family recipe so I won’t be sharing it with you 😉

Do any of you have fun family-specific traditions like this? I feel like it adds so much happiness to Christmas to have things to look forward to every year – things that are always the same through all the other things that change, pieces of familiarity and festivity that endure as time passes. They help bind us together with both shared memories and shared expectations.

Don’t forget to head over to the link up today at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

musings, quotes

a brief thought on contraception

Posted on 2016-01-05 by kristinabean

“Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any one contrive to talk of ‘free love’; as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he ‘drew an angel down’ and had to walk about forever with a seraph on a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation; and thence arises the family in its full educational sense.” – G.K. Chesterton, What is Wrong With the World

Nowadays we have the promise of contraception to hold back these “earthquake consequences” of the intimacy between a man and a woman – the ability to prevent the occurrence of a baby tying the two together and piling upon them that shared responsibility. So a man and woman can share their moment of love and not fear that a baby will come to demand their cooperation and attention, and they can afterwards abandon each other for new love without a corresponding betrayal of the new person they’ve created.

But do we avoid this treachery against our potential children by betraying our own selves? Do we avoid the creation of splintered families by splintering our own souls? When we set aside the natural purpose of an act that we might solely pursue our own pleasure, or even the pleasure of another, we do ourselves a great disservice, and sin against ourselves; beyond that, we frustrate the great powers that could work through us and in us for the redemption and beautification of the world.

It is good not to beget a baby only to abandon him. It is good not to form a family when there is no intention or desire to endure with and labor for the good of that family. But it is not good to pursue the pleasure that is meant to accompany the formation of the family while simultaneously refusing the family; it separates the act from its purpose, like the ancient Romans vomiting so that they could continue to enjoy the pleasures of the table. It damages our souls like prolonged vomiting damages the body – slowly, subtly, but surely.

(caveat – there is so much more to be said on this topic and this isn’t intended to be a complete argument – it is just a thought, a consideration, a part of the bigger picture of human dignity and sexual ethics.)

family life

before Christmas is totally gone…

Posted on 2016-01-04 by kristinabean

…I’d like to share some of our pictures from the season! (And knowing me, probably some random meditative thoughts as well…)

I had wanted to find a tabletop-sized tree for our home this Christmas, but it didn’t end up happening. However, the city generously provided us with a Christmas tree by putting one up in the center of downtown – conveniently located about two blocks away from our house 😉

It is, I suppose, the urban child’s equivalent of a tree out in the woods, uncut, decorated with a single candle perhaps, and ribbons, and cookies and popcorn for the birds – the sort of tree described in Temple Bailey’s exquisite Christmas story The Candle in the Forest. It is what we have, beautiful and special, and we make it meaningful by sharing our delight in it together.

(If you haven’t read The Candle in the Forest, you should remedy that as soon as you can. It is one of my favorite Christmas stories of all times, for how well it captures the beauty of simple traditions and family love and doing the best with what one has; I have never read it without tears.)

Even Limerick was sufficiently entranced by the lights and ornaments to cease his endless running (usually into the road) and examine the tree! And Rondel couldn’t get enough of it – he asked to see the tree everyday for at least two weeks after the city put it up.

The specialness, the difference, of the Christmas season stood out to him for the first time this year – for some reason everyone was making everything more beautiful, and baking special treats more often, and lighting different candles, and secretly collecting gifts to give. We read the Christmas story to him over and over again, revealing more of the story as the day grew nearer, and he delighted with us in the coming Baby because of whom all the celebration was taking place.

Babies are very precious things in the minds of toddlers – they are just about the only people smaller than toddlers, and so I think they evoke feelings of responsibility, power, and protective love: essentially, they give the toddler a foretaste of being an adult and specifically a parent, and the toddler finds it quite an exciting experience. Not that they could bear that responsibility for long, of course, and they don’t try to – but when you’re always the small and the weak, who needs to be helped and taught and directed and cared for, it’s nice to find someone even smaller and weaker whom you can help teach and take care of. Babies bring that gift, the opportunity to serve and be a blessing to someone else, to even the smallest children – and in becoming a baby, God reminds us of the importance of that gift. For He did not come to be served, although as a human baby He was helpless and needy; rather He came to serve us, with His life, with His death, and with His intercession for us before the throne of the Father for all eternity.

(more pictures to come in a few days!)

quotes

Learning

Posted on 2016-01-01 by kristinabean

” ‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.'”

T. H. White, The Once and Future King

musings

so the year ends

Posted on 2015-12-312015-12-31 by kristinabean

one calendar year ends and another begins.

it’s a rather arbitrary way to mark beginnings and endings in life, but it works as well as any – only I don’t feel like I’m ending anything significant, or beginning anything new. I’m exactly where I was last year, when 2014 ended and 2015 began: working at the same job, raising the same two children, married to the same husband who’s still going to the same school, living in the same house, involved in the same HOA, pursuing the same God, and wrestling with the same questions.

what thoughts do I have to take away from the year?

that accumulating more and more information doesn’t necessarily move me any closer to actually making a decision
that some of my worst parenting moments are when my routine is thrown off and I don’t have a backup plan, and my indecisiveness and uncertainty make everyone feel uneasy
that good communication is very important to me but I’m not very good at it
that relational discipline (as opposed to behavior modification) takes a lot of energy and effort but it really is worth it
that the joy two siblings can find in each other more than makes up for the squabbles and conflicts they also have
that if I could get my head out of the clouds and away from abstract ideas long enough to notice the world around me, I could be a lot more loving in my actions because I would observe the needs of others
that there must be something of value and purpose I can do with my dreaming and philosophizing but I don’t know what it is yet
that I desperately long to be holy but it’s going to be a long, painful road for me to get there (most likely involving death, since I doubt I’ll reach holiness this side of heaven!)
that prayer is more powerful than I had ever imagined

Any random thoughts you have as you look back at the year?

May your new year be filled with grace and blessing! Happy New Year!

musings

Christmas

Posted on 2015-12-262015-12-26 by kristinabean

I haven’t had much to say over the past week because I’ve been so busy being with people that I’ve hardly had time to think! It’s been very nice seeing so much of my family and my husband’s family, but it has been rather hectic.

After dealing with pretty intense PPD two years ago, and struggling with what was for me a lot of anxiety last year (probably partly because of the new baby!), it was incredibly nice to be mentally and emotionally myself this Advent and Christmas. It was nice to have that upswell of excitement when planning gifts for the people I love, rather than only a flood of discouragement and a sense of being overwhelmed. It was nice, too, that we’ve established more of a routine (as is necessary with two toddlers!), and that I was able to work a meaningful Advent celebration into that routine. Advent is my favorite time of year – something about the melancholy hope, the joyful sorrow, that it carries with it resonates with my heart – and being able to live it, sing it, talk about it, and teach it to my boys gave me so much happiness.

And now Christmas is here, and the first few crazy days of the brief festive season have passed, and the quiet enjoyment of each other is continuing, and a bag of presents for the boys (from neighbors, family, and the local thrift store) is waiting for Epiphany so we can share in their giving of gifts to the Christ child. Christmas is hard to live, because unfettered joy does not come naturally to me; I’m much more of an Advent person, painting even the fiercest of my joys with the shadows of sorrow and the remembrance of brokenness. How am I supposed to fully embrace happiness for the full twelve days of Christmas?

The boys help, of course – I am planning fun and different things for most of the days (small things, so they don’t get burnt out) to help continue the holiday spirit. We’re keeping the decorations up, and reading through the Christmas story each day, gradually moving the Wise Men closer to the Baby Jesus waiting in the stable. If I can maintain an atmosphere of peace and joy in the house, a feeling of delight at the birth of the Baby Jesus, I think that will help, even if the festivities themselves are smaller. It is like the birth of any new baby, I suppose – the feelings of happiness and wonder and joy persist even though the reality of sleepless nights and dirty diapers quickly manifests itself.

So Merry Christmas to all! May your Christmas season be filled with wonder at His coming, joy at His presence, and peace in His love, through all the difficulties and pressure the holidays seem to bring.

musings, poems

Peace coming

Posted on 2015-12-212016-03-17 by kristinabean

When will there be peace? When we look at one another and say,

“You are different from me, and I respect those differences. There is beauty in them.

“You are the same as me, and I rejoice in our sameness. There is beauty in it.

“Let us embrace each other, brother, because there is more that binds us together than divides us. You are human and I am human: you are my brother and my sister, my mother and my father, my daughter and my son.

“Let us sing in unison; let us sing in harmony; let even our dissonances be part of a greater beauty in our human song.

“Let there be peace, and let there be more than peace, between us, for this baby is come on Christmas Day for you and for me, in all of our individuality, to weave all the disparate threads of our stories into the great story of humanity, to lead us in the way of peace.”