Safe Bet

As I was going about my preparations for Christmas, I found I was lacking a source for food inspiration. Normally we've had the cable upgraded throughout the football season, and I've been gathering recipes and ideas there. This year we decided it just wasn't worth it, even for the Wolverines, and I was struggling to get inspired about menu planning.
Some of my menu planning is automatic. Kurt and his brother Peter always make us great pizza on Christmas Adam. My mother-in-law treats us to a dazzling array of pies--my favorite is raspberry. Stuff like that I can just pencil in and forget. The rest of it takes some planning.

I tried browsing Food Network's website, but it didn't have the same appeal as watching The Barefoot Contessa or Good Eats. Sam's Club has an excellent selection of cookbooks, some of them a bit off beat like the above, Church Suppers cookbook. In it I finally found a recipe for a blueberry, cream cheese breakfast casserole that I'd seen on Good Housekeeping and not gotten written down. My Kurt loves blueberries and I can't imagine a better treat for Christmas than a breakfast featuring his favorites. It also has an intriguing recipe for gingerbread waffles that has me thinking. However, all this stimulation just wasn't having the same affect. I needed more.
My favorite PBS cooking show is America's Test Kitchen, but we're in the middle of the local station's fundraising efforts and the schedule is all screwed up. (I want my Masterpiece Theater back! It was just getting good.) I have their Family Cookbook, but I've mined all the sorts of things I do for Christmas out of it. Fortunately Barnes and Noble sent me a coupon for a members extra 25 percent off, so I went cookbook shopping. I found The New Best Recipe Cookbook which is authored by the same group as the America's Test Kitchen guys. It is even better than the Family Cookbook. Each recipe includes an account of their trial and error testing that I find fascinating and the recipes are sensational. I'm now ready to finalize the menu and draw up the monumental shopping list.
I haven't done any baking this year. It's my concession to pregnancy. My hope is to get in the kitchen after the holidays and catch up. Kurt's taken an extravagant vacation this year, so I'll have another week after the big day to pursue holiday pleasures. Here's hoping you are having a very inspired Christmas, and not just about the menus!

Step Two

It's only the second post on this topic and the numerical approach is a farce. I was hoping that I'd fall into some sort of orderly approach, be it chronological or logical, but no such luck. As I tease the strands of my conversion apart they come off in their own peculiar order that can't be helped.
The next step I've settled on was my father's father. He was a gruff old man who built his own house and refinished furniture. He would drive from West Virginia to Pennsylvania just to enjoy a dinner at a nice little family diner he liked--usually with a load of grandchildren in the back of his pickup under the hood. He drove the whole way around 35 mph. He let me do things others didn't think I was ready to do, like scramble eggs or operate a lawn mower. He always asked me--"Who says,'Abu'?" Since my mother's mother had a weird problem with nursery rhymes, he was the one who taught me all those ancient poems, mostly by singing them to me. He usually swore in Yiddish when I was around, and we ended every visit with our own little ritual. He'd open his arms wide and say "I don't need no kiss." I'd going running into his open invitation and kiss him good. He smelled like tobacco and the outdoors, and he loved me very much.
Granddad had had an interesting childhood. His mother died when he was around 8, and his father couldn't keep their family together without her. The kids were all split up, and my grandfather ended up in a convent orphanage where the nuns raised him until he was around 13. My great-grandfather got a great job for about a year and was able to reunite his family for that time, but the Great Depression hit and once again they were all farmed out. This time, Granddad ended up apprenticed to a Jewish family that made sure he got a high school diploma while he did work for them in their store and home. Somewhere in high school he met and fell in-love with my grandmother. She was a Free-Methodist who wouldn't marry him until he talked to the preacher and had a conversion experience. As you can imagine, this left him with a unique perspective on faith.
My childhood was much neater. My father enthusiastically converted to my mother's brand of Baptist before they married, and I was raised with a fairly single-minded kind of faith. A large part of that faith is "concern for the lost." First the push was on for me to convert, which I did very happily at the age of 3 almost 4, then the focus became for me to convert others. Since my grandparents by this time had fallen into comfortably "backslidden" habits such as not attending church, and so on, they were prime targets for our family to pray for and seek to "convert." For one short year when I was five we lived near my grandparents, and I saw them more frequently than all the rest of my life. I did a lot of praying for them, and finally I felt that it was time to broach the subject. Granddad and Grandma were out in the sideyard getting ready to say goodbye as Dad and I left for the day and I took my opportunity. I asked Granddad if he was going to heaven or not while my dad stood back hoping for a breakthrough and my grandparents looked as if I'd stabbed them.
Granddad loved me and he wasn't going to yell at a child for doing what she'd been taught to do, but he went into a monologue I never forgot. "I've talked to the preacher, and the rabbi and the monsignor and they all say I'm on the escalator to heaven, so don't you worry about me." None of those responses were in my programing, so I pushed for another answer. I don't remember much else about the rest of our brief conversation, but I do remember my grandparent's grief at the way I spoke to them. I believe truth has its own sound, and the sound of their grief at my narrow and judgmental view of how a person comes to salvation had more truth in it than all of my Sunday school training. I felt admonished and instructed, and I've never outgrown that awkward moment in my grandparent's yard.
When it comes to salvation, one size does not fit all. While I do believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, I also believe that he's the final judge of all the ways we come to him. My granddad taught me that.
Step One can be read Here. Step Three continues Here.

Happy 1/5 Birthday to Harriet!

I just finished typing up the last few pages of the first section of my novel. This means that roughly a fifth of my rough draft is completed. I can already see that major revisions will be necessary, but it's good enough for now. I'm excited about moving on to the next section where Harriet will be a little older and the themes a little more complex.
The longer the manuscript becomes, the more this project takes on a feeling of certainty. I may never publish Harriet, but I'm very likely to complete the rough draft. Once the rough draft is completed I know myself well enough to know that I will be unable to resist editing. I love editing. It's a bit of a challenge not to dive into the editing of the first section now, but if I do I'll regret it. The other parts of the book will let me know where I need to bring certain characters forward and other things that I don't know now. In any case it's very pleasurable to watch the spiderwebs of plot and character become an ink and paper draft. I could get into this.
We found out that my other baby, the little one kicking around in my womb, is a boy. The pleasure his little antics give me is something I'd forgotten about pregnancy. This is our first surprise, and I'm discovering that surprises can be very sweet.

Crazy for God

This book is wonderfully honest. I recommend it. It is Frank Schaeffer's memoir about being raised at L'Abri and the rest of his life. From one back-stage kid to another, you tell it Frank.
You can find out more at this Amazon Link.

Step One

I've been thinking that eventually I'll need to explain to somebody, somewhere how I got from where I was to where I am, in other words, how I became a Catholic. At the moment it's rather a complex beast and teasing out the individual strands is very worthwhile, so I'm going to think the process through here--step by step.
I'm using the metaphor of steps, not in the sense of how-to steps, but rather as steps along a path. In this case the path is the unique shape of my life, not a general path to conversion for others. It is not always a logical path, which causes me little grief, but I mention it so that those who will be tempted to argue with me based on logic will not be surprised when I don't care. I'm fairly satisfied that the resulting decision is logical, and so the logic of the process is incidental.
Let's begin in the fifth grade with a play about the life of Martin Luther. The play was meant to lift Martin Luther up as an exemplar for all of us children, and help us to understand why we weren't Catholic. I think it did a fairly good job, but it introduced me to Martin Luther as a person rather than as a set of ideas. Martin Luther as a person did not impress me--at any point. Let's begin with the story of his decision to become a monk. One thunderstorm and a hasty promise and he's turned his entire life inside out. Now, if there'd been a light and a voice from heaven like St. Paul, then such an amazing transformation would at least have precedent, but even St. Paul was instructed and did some soul searching before he took up his new place in the body of Christ. It did not seem surprising to me that Martin found his new life as a monk unsatisfactory.
Martin's obsession with confession and perfection did not seem to be imposed upon him from the outside. It seemed to be a fault of his personality. In fact, the play documented the efforts of his superiors to help Martin out of the slough he'd fallen into. His behavior was worrisome and not accepted as normal by the group he was a part of. I do believe that as Martin fought his way to a healthier understanding of sin and salvation that he discovered many flaws in then current Christian practice. I also think excommunication was a bad decision particularly as it forced Martin to leave the church body.
That moment of separation provided justification for leaving the church on the basis of conflicts with the individual conscience, and it led to the now current idea that leaving a failing/struggling church is not just an option but a moral obligation. I think responsibility for this must be shared between the Catholic Church of the time and Martin Luther, but its negative effects can be clearly seen in the ever-splintering body of the church.
Step Two can be read Here.

Can't Wait for Prince Caspian!

I understand the decision to release later in the year, but what a grand Christmas present this would have been!

Hurtling Forward

At Christmas time seems to hurtle by. So many aspects of my life crash into each other and insist on being paid attention to. There is the practical aspect of collecting gifts, cleaning for company, menu-planning and other details of pulling off a successful family holiday. Then for me finding time to really appreciate the true meaning of Christmas by attending Mass, praying, reading inspirational stories (I love Frank McCourt's Angela and the Baby Jesus), watching old and new movies, and journaling, is non-negotiable. Otherwise Christmas becomes a holiday for children, and I am just the facilitator of their experience, but if I find the time to contemplate what happened there in Bethlehem, Christmas retains its magic. Extended family and all the complex issues that arise as one prepares to once again reenter your baptism of communal human relationships force themselves from the comfortable background noise of the nearly forgotten into the immediate foreground where they must be faced or be in your face.
Suddenly all of that has a time-table and has to be planned for or simply survived. My mother just had her 30th birthday ;) and we celebrated it on Saturday here at my house. Now we can focus on getting the tree, decorating, baking, advent activities, and all the rest of it. I find myself wishing that I could somehow squeeze extra time in somewhere. I miss the endless waiting of childhood. I wish the rocket of Christmas would either slow down or let me off, because real Christmas is eternal. Sometimes our celebration feels overwhelmingly temporal.

I take it back.

Ok, there is something wonderful about being pregnant around Christmas time. All the physical things aside, there is such a deep connection with the Christmas story that only comes from sharing Mary's predicament. We watched The Nativity Story last night as part of our celebration of Advent, and I viscerally felt for her as the time was at hand and there was no place to go. That's a great thing.
I guess I wouldn't have so many children if I didn't love new life, and watching it grow.