Goodness Round-Up December
December's collection of goodness, light, love and hope: may you be inspired, uplifted, comforted, loved. May you know rest.
I’m reading
Non-Fiction
Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People by Nadia Bolz-Weber.
I love Nadia’s books because it’s pretty much one story after another and I’m a sucker for a good story and Nadia is a natural-born storyteller. Each story showcases something about God’s love, grace, kindness and the power of community for showing us God, and growing us to be more able to extend the love, grace and kindness of God to ourselves and others. Nadia’s courageous and vulnerable authenticity in sharing her own moments of human failing inspires me to be honest with myself about my own shortcomings- not in a depressing way- but with a sense of solidarity, grace for others and myself, and hope for us all. It’s a pretty easy read if you’re after some lower-key non-fiction for your holiday break. So many quotes to choose from, but in this season of Advent and global power-mongering, I loved this one…
[Jesus] came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Fiction
Foster and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.
Small books that say very big things about kindness, generosity and relationship, set against the beauty and complexity of Ireland-past. It is astounding that Claire manages to write such robust characters and convey such depth in so short a story. The writing is beautiful and the stories poignant, haunting in all the right ways.
“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
Poetry
Wage Peace By Judyth Hill
Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.
I’m listening to (and watching)
Evolving Faith Conference 2023:
A few friends and I went in on a Digital Access pass this year. We gathered in Wellington at the end of November to watch together. It was such a significant time for me: spending time talking and sharing together, finding common ground and community where I have experienced so much alone-ness (outside of the online world) in recent times. There is so much thought-provoking goodness in the conference content, I’m having my turn with the access and rewatching it all.
Music
These playlists on Spotify: Evolving Faith 2023 and The Advent We Actually Have.
And Xavier Rudd because he’s my summer gardening go-to.
I’m watching
Virgin River, Season 5, on Netflix
I love this show. I know it’s pretty much a soap. But it’s the beautiful setting. It’s the small town thing with it’s cast of likely characters and all those intertwined relationships. It’s the beauty of community. It’s the ridiculous constancy of the drama. It’s the privileging of female perspectives of abuse and pregnancy loss. It’s the processing of change and losses related to illness. And, of course, how could you not love Martin Henderson, Kiwi-boy come so far?! It’s the pure, glorious escapism of it all. Sunday afternoon rest until I run out of episodes (which might happen today).
I’m eating
Cauliflower!
I have yet to master the art of a little-and-often daily harvest with respect to my food gardens. We still operate on the glut. Currently: cauliflower. I am inordinately proud of the glory of these cauliflower…
…but we are running out of ways to eat them! Our favourite is the somewhat high effort, not exactly healthy, but always beyond-delicious tempura cauliflower! This salad from Two Raw Sisters is also always a (grown up) crowd-pleaser.
Then there was the triumph that was Clay’s macaroni cheese-inspired cauliflower cheese…
(I’ve also traded a couple with the neighbours for lettuces and limes. Which feels like the way I wish the whole world worked…)
I’m loving
The rivers of the Wairarapa
I’m embracing
Community
I’ve committed myself to attending church every Sunday of Advent.
(I did this by offering to deliver an Advent blessing each Sunday but that still counts, I reckon…)
I know where both the bible and science stand on the importance of community across the board, but for my own part I just prefer quiet and solitude. I like staying home. I often feel spiritually lonely at church. And, if I’m honest, I prefer not to be confronted by my own tendency towards being judgmental, prejudiced, grace-less and selfish. Community of any sort does have a way of bringing my shadow side to the fore. Most of all though, I fear being disappointed and hurt (again) by the other, fallible, humans that make up said community.
But. Earnest idealist that I am, I also want to believe that a community of people who listen to, respect, love and support each other can exist even when they have little in common, wildly different views on theology and politics, and perhaps don’t even like each other that much. I think this points powerfully to a God of love and grace.
“Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”
Jesus
John 13:34-35 (MSG)
I want to put my money where my mouth is on this one. And that looks like continuing to show up to church; continuing to use my gifts for the benefit of the community; continuing to serve and give generously of my time and resources; being brave enough to trust my community with the real me.
And then there’s this inconvenient truth which I want in on…
My friend Sara says that the really inconvenient thing about being a Christian is the fact that God is revealed in other people, and other people are annoying. I understand the impulse of not wanting to be in community… But I think the experience of bumping up against other people has changed me in ways that I never could have changed if I was just reading books and practising meditation.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
I’m finding hope in
Advent
I wasn’t raised in a high church tradition but I have come to love Advent. I think it is something to do with how different the Christmas season is for mothers. I need an antidote to the frenetic pace, to wearing everyone’s end-of-year tiredness, to the inexhaustible to-do list and the particular brand of overwhelm that accompanies the selecting, purchasing and wrapping of gifts.
Over the past few years I have developed the custom of completing my Christmas planning, shopping, wrapping before Advent kicks off. That way the lead in to Christmas feels restful, contemplative, focused.
I love what Advent stands for: waiting, anticipating, believing into and hoping for Jesus to come and make all things new; a God who came to be one of us, with us; a God who remains with us still, and a God who will be with us again, bringing with Them perfect peace, justice, wholeness, rightness. My heart is so broken over the state of the world, of our own post-election nation, that I have such a deep need to sit with these meditations right now.
He bared his arm and showed his strength, scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold.
Mary
Luke 1: 51-53 (MSG)
I’m loving what Sarah Bessey and Micha Boyett have to say this Advent, and have been following a daily advent devotion, Bless The Advent We Actually Have with Kate Bowler.
I wish you all rest and God’s presence this Christmas season. Thanks for being here with me- it means so much to me.
oh I didn't know Kate Bowler had an Advent devotional ... I'll be playing catch up!
Love that quote from the Bolz-Weber on Community. I too often find my instinct is to stay home/be alone - and I think we are not alone in this. Especially among those with a newly complex relationship "church" or who are wrestling with what it is vs what it could be or should be. There's very much a "take it or leave it" - come when you feel like it - stance taken by many at the 11am service I have been attending. Which I very much get and empathise with ... I'm so oppposed to the dogmatic "committment" and sense of obligation to attend come rain, hail or shine. But have been talking with a friend a bit also on the value in community and the communal aspect of valuing that regular practice or ritual of coming together. It's an interesting one indeed.
I wonder, have you watched "Julia"? I think you'd enjoy it ... serialised story of Julia Child (available on Neon).
I think we may have just finished our last Cauliflower (have loved them - as we've pretty much just roasted it all) but that Two Raw Sister's recipe looks sooo good!