On Knitting Season

It all starts with the weather…. Through the woodsmoke season that opens all hearts’ doors into kitchen industry and soup on the stove, the signs wink at you from everywhere: sticks of kindling, brushstrokes of snow on branches–this is the whole world calling you to take up your paired swords against the coming freeze.

Barbara Kingsolver, “Where It Begins,” in Vogue Knitting, Fall 2022, page 24. 

Editing the Final Details of One's Life

EDITING THE FINAL DETAILS of one's life is like editing a story for the final time. It's the last shot an editor has at making corrections, the last rewrite before the roll of the presses. It's more painful than I anticipated to throw away files and paperwork that seemed critical to my survival just two weeks ago, and today, are all trash. Like the manual for the TV that broke down four years ago, and notebooks for stories that will never be written, and from former girlfriends, letters whose value will plummet the day I die. Filling wastebasket after wastebasket is a regrettable reminder that I have squandered much of my life on trivia.

Jack Thomas (Source) 

Write in the Process of Figuring Things Out

 I’m still sitting on a bunch more material and drafts in that vein [what he used to write about], but the truth is I’m finding it hard to get excited about. It seems like it’s best to write about things while you’re in the process of figuring them out, because they start to feel stale by the time you’re looking back in hindsight.

Richard Meadows 

Deep

 Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

Richard J. Foster in Celebration of Discipline, 1978. 

Understanding Backwards; Living Forwards

The problem with posting anything remotely religious is that one gives the impression of believing / embodying / BEING what it is that has been written – and that impression may not exactly be true.

Having said that, I am posting this as a record of what struck me on a Sunday in July as I was practicing getting the phrasing right in a hymn for a substitute organist “gig” at a local Presbyterian church:

Hast thou not seen How thy desires e’er have been Granted in what He ordaineth?

(By Joachim Neander, 17th century German Reformed Church)

Then, as part of the sermon from Acts 22 about the second recounting of Saul’s/Paul’s conversion experience, the pastor quoted from Søren Kierkegaard's journals: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

The full quote is:

It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.

(See documentation of source.)

Later, I was sent this article (written by a 21 year old woman):

Even if we exhausted our own abilities to serve the Lord in our lifetime, we could never do for the world and the kingdom what our families—what our children and their children and their children—will go on to do.

In Luke 13:19, Jesus says this about the kingdom of God: “It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches.”

As we prepare our students for being agents of massive, earth-shattering revival around the world, let us also remember that Jesus says the kingdom will grow slowly, even subtly, from something seemingly insignificant, like a tree from a seed...and like families.

Finally, I read a post by my cousin’s wife about another Soren that made me want to cry—and which is a perfect REAL HARD LIFE illustration of what the 19th century Søren wrote about:  Although, just when the understanding might come is not clear.

To Do: List ways in which I have seen my desires granted “in what He ordaineth” so that life can be lived forwards NOW.

How about you?

Real

We make ourselves real by telling the truth. –Thomas Merton

As quoted by Elizabeth Esther.

On reading (again)

All we need to know is how to recognize God's will for the present moment. Any reading we might choose without regard to the will of God is harmful to us. The will of God and obedience to His leading brings [sic] us grace, and this grace is what does the work in the depths of our hearts through reading or anything else we do. Without God, books are but vain appearances, deprived of God's life-giving power as far as we are concerned, and they only succeed in emptying the heart by the very satisfaction our reading brings to the mind [emphasis mine].

From The Joy of Full Surrender (Paraclete Essentials) by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, page 18

Another in the occasional series on reading and books.

Truth

Truth comes only to those who must have it, who want it badly enough. And gifts of healing come only to those willing to change. Jesus had his demands even for the blind and leprous. Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam. Show yourself to the priest. Sin no more. He had larger demands for the rich. Sell all and come.

There is hope for us but no easy healing. There is truth but never without search.

There is beauty but only in the exercise of discipline and the control of waste. Our lives can be redeemed but only with lasting commitment to live under God's judgment and grace.

By Doris Janzen Longacre in the Foreword to Living More with Less page 15.

And, at the spring-time beginning of this new year, a re-posting of Flannery O'Connor's unadorned statement:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

True fasting

It is necessary most of all for one who is fasting to curb anger, to accustom himself to meekness and condescension, to have a contrite heart, to repulse impure thoughts and desires, to examine his conscience, to put his mind to the test and to verify what good has been done by us in this or any other week, and which deficiency we have corrected in ourselves in the present week. This is true fasting.  - St. John Chrysostom

 As quoted by Molly Sabourin.

Prophets

If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation it must be by other means than any now being used. If the church...is to recover from the injuries she suffered, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting. Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will not be one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. - A.W. Tozer

As quoted on Hebrew for Christians.

A false dichotomy:

Dayton's point in this chapter [of Discovering an Evangelical Heritage] is to question the kind of evangelicalism Billy Graham represented in a comment on the Vietnam War in 1973: "God has called me to be a New Testament evangelist, not an Old Testament prophet! While some may interpret an evangelist to be primarily a social reformer or political activist, I do not! An evangelist is a proclaimer of the message of God's love and grace in Jesus Christ and of the necessity of repentance and faith" (8).

From: Ken Schenck, March 21, 2010.

Truth

Another in the series "Quotes Found on Sidebars":

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. - Flannery O'Connor

From: Close to Home
HT: A Circle of Quiet

Grace

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor , p. 307. December 9, 1958, letter to Cecil Dawkins regarding "people's questions about religion" and the faults of the Catholic church. Pages 306-308.

New lands

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

André Gide (Quoted in The Artist's Way, page 199.)

Hot milky drinks

Maybe I'll start a series of blog posts with quotes found on the sidebars of others' blogs. Here is today's.

"What a pity we can't make some Ovaltine, was her last conscious thought. Life's problems are often eased by hot milky drinks."--No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym

From Frisbee: A Book Journal

Growing up, my favorite hot milky drink before going to bed was Milo. Now, I mix two teaspoons cocoa and two teaspoons sugar in milk and heat on the stove. I need my calcium, after all....

A brand new ending

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
Author Unknown

From the sidebar of Firefly Cottage.