Mystics and Misfits is a newsletter for those who find a home in the intersection between art and faith. It’s for those inspired by mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and St. Francis of Assisi, and for lovers of fantastical stories, music, community, and talking about the deeper things in life—even, on occasion, death.

Thanks for reading!

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My eldest daughter was gone most of the summer, working at a wilderness camp and spending time in Europe with her touring choir. It was a delight to have her home again for a few weeks before she started her SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL!!

I won’t bore you with my “how did this happen so fast” “she was just a baby” “pass me another bowl of ice cream” “pass me another peanut butter cup” sentiments. You get the picture.

I have started grieving already. And one of the tricky parts is holding back my grief from her so she can soar. Because she will soar, she is a fabulous young woman, and she is super fun to be around. Which means, I will miss her all the more.

So as I wallow in my grief recover from the summer slides, I’ll just share a few things I’ve been into in the past few months.

Things I’ve been into:

Podcasts

• A few months ago, I wrote about Bryan Johnson’s self-experiment to extend his life. On a long drive last week, Matthew and I listened to this interview with him at the NYTimes. While the interview didn’t change much about my opinion of his strange life project, it did make him a little more human. And then afterwards, I cleansed my palette with this song by The Arcadian Wild, which was actually inspired by Bryan Johnson’s quest to cure humanity of death.

• Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Look, sometimes I enjoy celebrity interviews. This one with Anne Lamott was a special treat, especially since Anne and Amy talked about Jesus. Never thought I’d hear that!

Books I’ve been reading:

• Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. A humorous (and sometimes harrowing) look at how animals have behaved when humans have overrun their territory and how humans deals with animals who attack, break things, or generally become a nuisance.

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Set in a small town Ireland in the 1980s during Christmas preparations, a man makes a discovery that will force him decide if he has the courage to go against his community, the church, and his family in order to do the right thing.

• Once Upon a Broken Heart series by Stephanie Garber. A YA fantasy series with much dramatic teenage angst, a plucky romantic teen, a charming wicked Prince, and a lot of obstacles in their way.

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s told from the perspective of a curious and empathetic AF (Artificial Friend) who is bought by an ailing young woman and her mother.

Music I’ve been listening to:

• THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. by Raye. My sister and niece introduced this album to me when we were visiting them in Austin. We listened to Click Clack Symphony and WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! on repeat.

• The Arcadian Wild’s new album Make It Out Alive

• I’ve been going back to music from my teens and twenties and the nostalgia is lovely.

  • I am Sam soundtrack. Which is just some brilliant covers of Beatles songs

  • Thank you by Boys2Men…remember them?!

  • Vertical Horizon, Weezer, LIVE, The Cardigans, Jewel, The Wallflowers

• Our church is beginning a series on the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, and the youth have been encouraged to memorize all of it (there might be an incentive or two). So we made a playlist of music that either directly quotes Jesus’ famous sermon or was inspired by it.

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A few funnies

• For those of you who, like me, are preparing to say goodbye to your senior (or your third grader)

• Peer pressure still exists

• The Odyssey shot on IMACS

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Mystics and Misfits is a newsletter for those who find a home in the intersection between art and faith. It’s for those inspired by mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and St. Francis of Assisi, and for lovers of fantastical stories, music, community, and talking about the deeper things in life—even, on occasion, death.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe now

I’m currently in a rare week of the year when three of my four children are away. The younger two are at summer camp and the oldest is reveling in an adventure with her touring choir in Europe.

As my children fly in and out of the coop for the next few months, I’ve had some time to reflect on what it means to be a mother with spiritual needs.

My most recent mystical companion has been Teresa of Avila. I’ve been making my way again through The Interior Castle, her spiritual classic that describes the soul a castle with seven mansions, each mansion leading further into the center where God resides in and with you.

Each mansion in this castle has its own challenges, some of them obvious and some of them ineffable, and Teresa’s descriptions are both encouraging and frustrating.

There are moments in reading that I am moved to healing tears. Her advice to her group of nuns if they have unpleasant thoughts while praying speaks to me and other Christians who have struggled with scrupulosity or intrusive thoughts:

It is not good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts or to worry about them in the slightest; for if we do not worry and the devil is responsible for them they will cease, and if they proceed, as they do, from the weakness which we inherit from the sin of Adam, and from many other weaknesses, let us have patience and bear everything for the love of God.1

But the reading can also leave me frustrated. I know this interior castle is not literal and that the mansions aren’t goals—accomplishing tasks in one mansion so that you might move on to the next. Still, I’m left with the question: How in the heck am I supposed to get to the next mansion when my life is so consumed by my children’s needs?

One easy and unfulfilling answer is that I don’t have to worry too much about all that. These are all just metaphors for the spiritual life written by someone hundreds of years ago.

Another less easy but still sometimes unsatisfying answer is that motherhood can be its own domestic monastery.2 If humility is a necessity of the spiritual life then parenthood is a perfect training ground. You think you’re getting it right just because one of them sleeps well or has a sweet temperament but a few years later you’re down on your knees in bafflement at why your sweet little one is curled up in anxiety or screaming at you in anger.

Parenting is an exercise in humility.

But all of life, whether you have children or not, can strain your patience and humility muscles. And there are things besides children that take us away from learning our own souls.

Perhaps my problem isn’t so much that Teresa’s spiritual map is frustrating because I’m a mother but because I am a human and I am not very patient.

I want to know how to read the map. Right now. Is this map upside down? Can I take a quiz that tells me which mansion am I in? Or how I get to the next one?

Despite the map metaphor, If I learn anything from Teresa of Avila’s masterpiece, it is that the spiritual life is not linear. If it is a map at all, the map is upside down. Progress can look like regression. Success in one arena is failure in another. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. The kingdom is upside down.

So, what is there to do?

Teresa says that that we cannot progress until we know our own soul.

It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without first entering our own souls.3

And to know your own soul you have to engage in what she calls mental prayer. Hunker down in one quiet spot for a while and listen. Take those tentative steps into the meadow of your soul and sit down on the soft grass.4

You will probably encounter snakes now and then. Other times, it will be a little boring. One day you’ll find yourself in the sixth mansion, the next, you’re all the way back to the third. And then maybe, for one blissful moment you will see your own belovedness, the place where your soul is a shining diamond held gently in the palm of God’s hand.

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Things I’d recommend

A new book you should get:

A Zoom with a View written by my dear friend Jess Cannon: a cozy murder mystery set near my hometown in Texas.

Books I’ve been reading:

• The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley: classics, companion novels, set in the same world many centuries apart, written by a master of fantasy. I prefer The Blue Sword but both are wonderful.

• I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell: She is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors (Hamnet anyone?) but this book is a departure from her other fiction. It is autobiographical and reveals a shocking variety of real brushes with death, one of them especially shocking and disturbing. The book is unsettling but beautifully written, as any book about death should be.

• Wild Reverence by Rebecca Ross: a lyrical (non YA) fantasy

• As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes and Joe Layden: an easy and surprisingly delightful read, written with generosity and sweetness. Though the book was written many years before, the reading is tempered by the recent brutal death of Rob Reiner, without whom the movie would not exist.

• The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister: a supernatural novel that’s actually a sibling drama, dealing with themes of generational trauma and how we begin to recognize and heal from family wounds

Music I’ve been listening to:

• Prizefighter by Mumford and Sons: Just so good. And I get to see them in concert in a few days!

Things I’ve been watching:

• Hunt for the WilderPeople: every single member of my family adored this movie. And that’s a feat. In a nutshell, a boy in the foster care system is sent to live with a husband and wife in the wilds of New Zealand. That’s all I’ll say because this is a film by Taika Waititi—it’s quirky, heartbreaking, lovely, weird, and wonderful. Go Ricky Baker!

• The Other Bennet Sister: yes, it’s delightful.

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A few funnies

• I’m so glad the Trinity loves me

• It’s good to share with your kids but sometimes…

This morning, I read Isaiah 43:1-19 to get myself in the “belovedness” state of mind.

If you’ve read much of Isaiah, you probably know these words:

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.”

These words are spoken by God through the prophet to the people of Israel in Babylonian exile. They are offered as comfort, to bolster the people to have hope that they will be rescued.

What struck me most in this passage was the strange language God uses to speak of love. The rest of the chapter has gentler words of love, rescue, and care, but here, “you are mine” almost echoes like a jealous lover: aggressive, obsessive, staking a claim.

When I was a teen in the 1990s I used to read Christian romances by Lori Wick. I read her Kensington Chronicles over and over.

My favorite in the series was Who Brings Forth The Wind.

A synopsis from abebooks reads:

“Leaving the English countryside to spend the summer in London with her aunt, Stacy Daniels finds herself caught up in a new world of balls and teas and captures the attention of the handsome Duke of Cambridge, who is battling his tormented past.”

Classic.

Innocent stunning beauty attracts the attention of the mysterious brooding noble. They marry. He continues to be tormented. His inner demons shadow their marriage. Out of his pain, he humiliates her. She still loves him. She waits. Her love brings him back. He is sorry. And eventually he is redeemed by her unwavering love.

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The recent movie “adaptation” of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights —which purports to be a “primal” and “sexual” version—had a strong opening on Valentine’s weekend, despite mostly terrible reviews. I am fascinated by the hype.

When I read Wuthering Heights in highschool, I hated it. None of the characters are noble or likable, besides Edgar (I guess) and the younger Catherine. It’s not at all romantic even though some have considered it the greatest love story of all time. In truth, the novel Wuthering Heights is a sad tale of tormented, toxic people who destroy each other.

I preferred Emily’s sister Charlotte Bronte’s gothic novel Jane Eyre. No—scratch that—I didn’t prefer it, I adored it. I even wrote a paper on it for my senior English class.

Jane is a smart, strong, noble young woman willing to leave her love (even though she’s penniless) to stand up for what is right.

Just because I loved Jane doesn’t mean I didn’t also love the romance in the novel…Rochester loved Jane desperately and chose her, even though she was plain, poor, and little.

But, wait, isn’t Rochester toxic too? I know, I know…I get that now. He lied to and manipulated Jane and, yea, spoiler, locked his wife in a tower.

I guess that makes my point.

I longed for a man to see me, choose me, know me, and love me, not despite my imperfections but because of them. And I wanted us to have an everlasting love.

Emerald Fennell, the director of the “Wuthering Heights” movie said she made a movie that her fourteen year old self wanted when she first read Wuthering Heights (this brings up more questions about a fourteen year old wanting erotica…).

I’m not judging anyone for loving Wuthering Heights or romance novels or romantic movies. I love a good fantasy romance novel myself and, if I’m alone, you will find me rewatching any Jane Austen (or Jane Eyre) adaptation I can find. Also, the novel I’m writing definitely has romance in it.

I’m just wondering if some romantic books and movies can pull at a longing for something that still feels like it comes from the depths of a fourteen year old heart. Which, let’s be honest, is not quite ready for mature love.

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Strange as it sounds, these were some of my thoughts when I meditated on Isaiah 43 and my belovedness this morning.

I thought about those Christian romance novels I read as a teen, how I hoped my heart would be filled by the man who got me, who would see me, who would be transformed by my love.

I thought about how no man in the real world can fill that void inside me.1

I thought about how many a woman has been caught up in a toxic relationship because the man initially showered her with romantic sentiments, that a man wanting to possess her seemed romantic until it wasn’t.

I wonder if Emily Bronte knew that the kind of obsessive love many women desire, in real life, can end the way her novel does—in revenge, spite, and tragedy.

There is a long tradition in Christian mysticism of using imagery and language about Jesus that might make some of us uncomfortable. If we’re not used to it, it can sound weird, but for many mystics using sexual language was a way to approach what it might be like to have true union with God.

Think of Margery Kempe, a 15th century mystic who got married young and birthed fourteen children. Eventually, she asked her husband if they could refrain from sex…and really, who can blame her? 14 children in the Middle Ages?!

One writer reminded me that some of her visions “read almost like a modern romance novel” with language about intimacy and marriage to Christ. Kempe and other mystics actually viewed Jesus as their heavenly spouse.

Jesus was the only one who could love them fully and intimately.

Which brings me back to Isaiah and “you are mine.”

In his essay On Fairy Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien talked about fairy stories and fantasy as giving us glimpses of joy, of worlds beyond, of our deepest longings for God. I think romance stories also get at an unfulfilled longing in the human heart. They show us our desires, some good and some very unhealthy. They show us our longings for love, for completeness, for being seen and known by another.

Forgive me if I make a bold claim at this point but I believe God is the only one who can offer us the kind of love that will fulfill that longing, whether we are fourteen or forty.

Personally, I can’t withstand the gaze of obsessive love. I don’t think anyone can, really.

But I don’t have to withstand the kind of love that gives more than it receives, that—to quote another famous passage—is patient, kind, does not envy, does not dishonor, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs. A love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

That’s true love. And it is truly endless.

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A few years ago, Time Magazine ran an article on a man named Bryan Johnson. Johnson, a 48 year old centi-millionaire, has invested millions in a project he calls Blueprint.

A team of doctors monitor him day and night and give him a strict health regimen that includes a highly specialized vegan diet, daily exercise, over a 100 pills a day, and frequent collecting of stool samples.

Blueprint is Johnson’s baby—a life-extension system whose goal is to reduce his biological age to 18 years old.

Anything that impedes this goal is not to be tolerated—whether that means having something (or someone) in his bedroom distracting from his necessary 8 hours of good sleep or having a cookie (which he calls an act of violence)

Johnson sees himself as a prototype, an experiment for the people of the 25th century who will benefit from his developments.

“Until now,” he says “I don’t think there’s been any time in history where Homo sapiens could say with a straight face that death may not be inevitable.”

He’s gained quite a following through his YouTube channel which gives full access to many of his ‘stats’ and measurements, including images taken with a “small bowel camera.”

There have been dozens of meetups across the country. His spiritual followers go on hikes, have picnics, and wear black t-shirts with the slogan emblazoned across them in white bold letters.

“DON’T DIE”1

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This slogan couldn’t be further from the theme for today, Ash Wednesday.

This day ushers Christians all over the world into Lent, a 40 day season of repentance, where we prepare for the joy of Easter through prayer, fasting, and giving.

In world steeped in the message that we might be able to cheat death, the Scriptures of Lent, like Psalm 90, can be a shock to our systems.

“You turn mankind back to dust,” the Psalmist says.

“You sweep them away in their sleep.

In the morning they are like sprouting grass—in the morning it flourishes and springs up, by evening it withers and dries up.

For all our days have passed away under Your wrath.
We spent our years like a sigh.

The span of our years is seventy
—or with strength, eighty—
yet at best they are trouble and sorrow.
For they are soon gone, and we fly away.”

The Psalmists assessments of the human condition can seem pretty dire but they are clear: we are not going to live forever. Our lives are so short, in fact, that in the grand scheme of things, we are like grass that dries up the same day, like dust under the broom.

We are like dust.

At the hinge point of Psalm 90, the writer drops this gem:

“Teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

The Psalmist doesn’t say, “teach us to number our days so we can appreciate life more and live it to the fullest.” He says “teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

God, teach us to meditate on our death, to think about how short our life is. Teach us to number our days that we may be wiser and know your wisdom.

Eugene Peterson says the “meditated consideration of death is important because it teaches us….how to live as a human, not as a god.”

If you participate in an Ash Wednesday service today, you will be told some version of “remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” You will receive ashes on your forehead to remind you of your fragility, both physically and spiritually.

In doing so, you will be participating in an ancient story, in an ancient practice, not to try to cheat death or seek out the good life but to seek a life of flourishing in Jesus, not only for yourself but for your neighbors.

That life of flourishing doesn’t begin in a CEO boardroom, a brightly lit stage, an Oval Office, a war room, in front of a ring light, a camera screen, or under the supervision of a team of doctors trying to de-age you.

It begins in suffering and death. It begins we remember that we are dust and that God holds it all.

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Things to recommend:

The Injustice Report’s first hand account from Minneapolis.

The Raven Scholar, an epic fantasy and murder mystery by Antonia Hodgson.

The Artful Dodger on Disney Plus.

Preppy Kitchen’s peanut butter cookies (for after Lent, of course).

Mystics and Misfits is a newsletter for those who find a home in the intersection between art and faith. It’s for those inspired by mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and St. Francis of Assisi, and for lovers of fantastical stories, music, community, and talking about the deeper things in life—even, on occasion, death.

Thanks for reading!

Blessed Advent!

If you celebrate this season leading up to Christmas, I hope you are leaning into the beautiful and challenging mix of waiting, repentance, and hopeful joy.

I haven’t written much in the last few months because I’ve been busy with a long-term substitute teaching position that just ended. The days since have been spent catching up on things that have fallen by the wayside in my absence: Christmas preparations, laundry, teacher gifts, some dumb YouTube videos that really don’t need to be caught up on, and now, a year-end list for you, my readers.

I love perusing people’s year-end favorites to find book and music recommendations, fun video clips, and podcast episodes.

So, I hope you like this kind of thing too because I’ve got a few things for you.

Be sure to leave a comment at the end with your own “year end” favorites!

Most Memorable Books 📕

Magical: 🪄

1. Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

2. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies series by Heather Fawcett

3. The Ministry of Time by Kalimantan Bradley

4. A Sea of Unspoken Things by Adrienne Young

5. The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

Mundane 📖

(Disclaimer—mundane doesn’t mean they are dull and boring but rather they are more earthly and practical. Actually, scratch that—they are all magical in their own ways).

1. Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

2. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

3. All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

4. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

5. The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader

Marooned ⚓️📚—DNF books—ones I started but Did Not Finish.

(Book taste is so incredibly subjective so if you find a favorite on this list, I understand. And maybe I will try a few of them again one day in the future).

1. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Stunningly written but so unrelentingly brutal that I was having nightmares and I had to stop.

2. The Book of Love by Kelly Link. Four teens come back from the dead in a magical way and they have to figure out how they died. A great premise—but there were so many points of view that rehashed the same plot points that I started to tire of the—frankly unlikeable—characters.

3. The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza. A gorgeous heart-aching memoir…but when it was overdue at the library, I was ready to give it up.

4. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This was the second time I tried to make it through this book. Clarke is so talented but this book is so slow. And I was nearly halfway through when my copy was due at the library, and I just wasn’t interested enough to find it again and keep slogging through it.

5. Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maerer. This romantasy is very tongue-in-cheek and has a certain charm to it. But I realized about a quarter of the way through that the whole “hot anti-hero who murders and dismembers people but is justified because said people are awful” just didn’t appeal to me.

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Most Memorable Music 🎶

• Most listened to artist: Mission House

  • Listen to “Come and Rest”

• Most listened to movie soundtracks in the house (I have four kids): Mufasa, K-Pop Demon Hunters, Wicked:

  • Listen to “I always wanted a brother” from Mufasa

  • Listen to “Soda Pop” from K-Pop Demon Hunters

  • Listen to “What is this Feeling?” from Wicked

• Favorite movie soundtrack: Sinners. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m not sure I have the guts too—I struggle with gore—but the music is absolutely gorgeous.

  • Listen to “Pale Pale Moon” and “Will Ye Go, Lassie Go?”*

• Favorite music by a group I saw in concert this year: The Oh Hellos

  • Listen to “Second Child, Restless Child” and “Like the Dawn”

• Favorite roadtrip song: “Scenic Route” by The National Parks

• Favorite non-worship song that sounds like a worship song: “Surrender” by Mumford and Sons

• Favorite worship songs:

  • “King of Kings” by Brooke Ligertwood

  • “Day for Singing” by Mission House

• Favorite contemplative album: Jesus by Jon Guerra

  • Listen to “Where Your Treasure Is” and “In The Beginning Was Love”

• Favorite Advent music: Listen here…

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Miscellaneous Most Memorables

Podcasts 🎙️

• Good Hang with Amy Poehler

• Holy Post

• Imagine: A Guide to Jesuit Prayer

• Pray As You Go—Daily Prayer

Recipes 👩🏻‍🍳

(As you can see, we eat a lot of Pioneer Woman recipes. But truly, they are really really good!)

• Pioneer Woman’s Pumpkin Spice Muffins

• NYT Cooking: Turkey Burgers

• Pioneer Woman’s Chicken Tikka Masala

• Pioneer Woman’s Chorizo Smash Tacos

• Preppy Kitchen’s Chocolate Chip Cookies

• In Bloom Bakery’s Chewy Pumpkin Cookies

• Pioneer Woman’s Chocolate-Peanut Butter Pie

Visual Art 🖼️

My husband Matthew and I recently took a day in NYC and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here were some of my favorites from that day (but there was far far too much to see in one afternoon).

• Jules Bastien-LePage’s “Joan of Arc” (she’s having a mystical vision!)

• Paul Cezanne’s “Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert (born 1817), the Artist’s Uncle, as a Monk” (this painting was so striking that I crossed two galleries to see it)

• Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses (the colors…what else can I say)

• Peder Balke’s The North Cape by Moonlight (the use of light in this painting…)

Other favorite art/artists:

• Bette Lynn Dickinson’s Advent series (with Visio divina art videos)

• Christine Labrum’s Divine Hands series. This one is called “Surrounded By Songs of Deliverance”

If you made it this far, you’re a trooper! Be sure to leave a comment with your most memorables of 2025. Have a great holiday season and a Happy New Year!

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Happy Halloween!

I maintain that celebrating this holiday is a good healthy way to confront death, show hospitality, and meet your neighbors.

I wrote about my love for Halloween here and here. Or you can listen to this podcast episode I recorded a few years ago.

Here’s an interesting take from a Catholic who argues that Halloween was actually never a pagan holiday at all (if that’s true then I need to amend some of my research), and Christians should celebrate it.

Or you can listen to this episode from The Holy Post podcast. Skip to 47:15 of the episode where Skye Jethani makes a bold claim: that our American way of Halloween is more Christian than our American consumeristic approach to Christmas.

What do you think?

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For the last four weeks, I’ve been on a prayer retreat of sorts. I say “of sorts” because I’m not leaving home or going to a retreat center. It’s a ‘shelter in place’ sort of retreat.

A few months ago, Matthew began discerning whether or not to do a 32 week version of the 19th Annotation of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. When he finally decided to undertake it, his spiritual director told him about a shorter version—a month long retreat—and wondered if I might consider it.

I would be required to pray every day for 45 minutes to an hour, journal through my prayers, have an online spiritual direction meeting once a week, and meet over zoom once a week with the other retreatants.

To be honest, the hardest thing to imagine was an hour of prayer every day. I’ve had seasons where I’ve prayed a lot and seasons where I’ve gone without a specified prayer time for chunks of time. But I’ve never regularly prayed for an hour every single day.

I thought it would be a slog. After all, I’ve had to get up at 5am most mornings to fit it into my day.

I thought it would be a slog. But it was quite the opposite.

I just finished reading The Life Impossible by Matt Haig. (SPOILERS AHEAD)

Grace Winters, a woman in her 70s has just lost her husband and continues to mourn the untimely death of her young son decades before. She is lost, lonely, and numb when she is notified that Christina—an old acquaintance and very nearly a stranger—has gifted her a house on the Spanish island of Ibiza. On a whim, Grace leaves her home in England, travels to the Mediterranean island, and takes possession of the house.

Of course she will get more than she bargained for.

While trying to discover the mystery behind Christina’s disappearance, Grace encounters a glowing orb underneath the sea—called La Presencia—and is given the powers of prophecy, mind-reading, and telekenesis. Afterwards, for Grace the world outside is full of connections. Everything is newly alive and unified.

It’s an extraordinary story of a mystical encounter that leaves Grace both changed and bewildered. Except that, in the book, the encounter is more scientific and alien than mystical.

I didn’t intend to read a book about finding a deep spiritual presence that changes your life while I’ve been praying every day.

But it has felt as though I’ve been hit with a gentle wave of spiritual nourishment. In fact, I’ve tried to describe it several times with ocean metaphors. As if I’ve only just dipped a toe into a vast sea of spiritual connections.

La Presencia. The Presence.

Many mystics have described a mystical encounter as a sort of Presence. Thomas Merton famously had a mystical encounter on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky. He wrote of it this way:

“In the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers…I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

This is so very like Grace Winter’s experience after she encounters La Presencia. And I too can feel it under the skin of my prayers. Or rather farther off into this vast sea.

I can also sense that it will take time to adjust to the water. That there are endless discoveries ahead on such a spiritual journey, one that leads me deeper into the heart of God where God is always waiting with open arms.

I can’t wait to take the next step into the water.

I will leave you with Suspice—Latin for “receive”—the most famous of Ignatius of Loyola’s prayers.

Here is the prayer and a beautiful sung version by Mission House:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. All is Thine. Dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and Thy grace, for this is enough for me.

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“Oops! The page you're looking for doesn’t exist.”

Imagine my confusion. How could my book—which I clearly wrote, got a contract for, marketed, and published—not exist?

I wrote the publisher and asked what the problem was.

Where was my book? Was this a mistake?

When Awakened By Death was first published in 2020, I spent some frustrating months trying to get more help from my publisher with marketing the book. They finally told me that it was a ‘back catalog’ title, which I assumed meant that—while they were not going to be especially helpful in the marketing arena—they would at least keep it as a title when someone wanted to read more about the subject matter….i.e. death.

Nope.

Weeks after I kept getting that error page, I received an email from my editor apologizing for not alerting me sooner.

My book had gone out of print. There were no copies at the warehouse but if I wanted to buy some of them, she could look for them.

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And that was that.

Reader, I cannot say I was surprised. Awakened By Death—released in the middle of a pandemic—did not sell well. Even people who knew and loved me told me they were afraid to read my book because of the subject matter. Several who did read it said it took them a long time to get through it. One woman flat-out told me she didn’t like it, and I should go back to writing more books like Mystics and Misfits.

Tricky Content. Pandemic. Back catalog title. Recipe for OUT-OF-PRINT book.

But it still feels a little humiliating. Like, I couldn’t cut it as a writer.

At the moment, I’m working on edits for my novel and it is hard to maintain hope for one book when you’ve just seen another book disappear.

But I tell you this for a few reasons:

1. I feel grumpy about it and want to vent.

2. If you’re a writer in the same situation, you’re not alone.

3. It is a helpful reminder why I write, why we write, why writers write. We don’t do it for money. We don’t do it for attention (though a little attention is nice). We don’t even do it for love (though I sometimes love it). We do it because we have to. We can’t not write.

I went to an Open House this week at my high schoolers’ school. I slid into my daughter’s English class on World Literature and felt delight like a sigh.

I love English classrooms: books on shelves just waiting for a young reader to discover them, an eager young English teacher who, let’s get real, might be doing this because she found a way to be paid for reading books and talking about books. Yes, also, she cares about her students.

There was a quote on the English teacher’s slideshow presentation that I needed to hear.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

I hope it’s a real quote by Virginia Woolf (you can never tell these days). Either way, it meant something to me this week.

I write and write and write what I want to write because I must. My words may last for ages—wouldn’t that be nice—or only the hours I spend writing them. But it is not in my control. And, in a way, though I give myself some time to feel grumpy about an out-of-print book, what happens to my words is not really my business either.

We send our words into the ether and sometimes we see the ways they move people. And sometimes we don’t.

Both are a lesson and a gift.

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Things I’m listening to and reading:

Music recommendations

1. I don’t think I’ll ever see the movie Sinners but the soundtrack is fantastic. Especially this song and then this version of one of my favorite songs.

2. I heard this song on a random playlist and think it is so sweet.

3. I’m loving several songs by The National Parks but this one and this one made it to our Summer 2025 road trip playlist.

Books recommendations

1. My reading has been mostly light and fun lately. I read three sweet rom-coms by Uzma Jalaluddin, all of them set in Toronto (we got to visit there this summer). Ayesha at Last is inspired by Pride and Prejudice. Hana Khan Carries On has hints of “You’ve Got Mail.” My favorite of the three is Much Ado about Nada which references both Persuasion and—you guessed it—Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.

2. I’ve also been reading Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half, which is not light reading but is an important story. Aziza is a Palestinian-American journalist who weaves her near-death from anorexia with her family’s history and trauma of displacement from their ancestral homes in Gaza.

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   P.S. You can still buy Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons From the Mystics at Amazon and other online stores. But you better get it while it’s hot!

   P.P.S. My other book Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints seems to be going strong. At least it’s still on the publisher’s website.

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Our task: to carry four backpacks (two 120 Liters, one 95 Liters, one 75 Liters), one barrel that contains all our food for five days and weighs the most, and two 3 person canoes across 700m of trail to the next lake.

Besides our food, the bags contain our pots and pans, camp stoves and fuel, two tents, sleeping bags, minimal clothing and toiletries, a few books I couldn’t leave behind, an extra pair of shoes each. We also have canoe paddles, life jackets, and water bottles.

We have hired two guides for our first day so they can help us get the lay of the lakes and get us to our first campsite.

After helping us decide which shoes to pack, one guide named Paige tells us:

The first thing you need to do when you get out of the canoe is stick your feet in the water, boots and all. Your boots will be wet the entire time. Get used to it. That’s why you bring extra socks and shoes—so you have something dry to wear in the evening around the campfire.

When we get out of the canoes at our first portage, we gamely shove our feet into the water and muck, grimacing as they squelch.

The guides—long-time camp counselors at a famous boy’s camp that sends kids off on 40 day canoe trips—put the smallest backpack onto my eight year old.

I do my mother thing: I bend down to his level and ask if he’s ok with the weight. Paige politely waves away my concern with a “he’s got this” smile.

He does “got this.”

From behind, he looks like an ant: all you can see are his skinny legs, the attached life jacket and water bottles that swing as he walks, and the two canoe paddles he uses as walking sticks.

I feel like I’m following a little hobbit across Middle Earth.

Preparing our stuff the night before at the Outfitters, my face starts to warm and I have to fight back tears seeing all our stuff laid out on a long table. I take a break in our tent cabin and cry.

I’ve followed my outdoorsy husband around campsites, hiking trails, and adventures for 18 years now. But this, I realize, is far out of my comfort zone.

Plus, I’d just spent the last few weeks trying to schedule tests for the tingling in my feet and hands that has lasted for weeks and affects my sleep. How am I going to carry that bag across multiple portages? What will that do to my shoulders? Will I collapse the first night?

When they tell me I’ll probably be carrying one of the 120 Liter bags, I can hardly lift it off the ground.

Paige lifts the large green pack onto my back for the first time.

I take a deep breath and my legs begin to shake. Each step is a chore. My breathing is labored. This is the heaviest thing I remember carrying besides the weight of my babies. In fact, it might be equivalent to all the weight I gained with my last pregnancy.

After several rests on fallen logs, I make it across the first portage and when I get to the end and drop the bag, I feel like I’m floating.

Two more portages and hours of canoeing, and we reach our campsite.

There are smiles all around. Jubilation. We set up our tents, unpack our gear, say goodbye to our guides, and change into our swimsuits. The lake feels like bathwater.

My daughters and I shout into the echoes of the lake corners watching the sun set behind boys as they fish from a canoe.

Over the next five days, our teenage son carries a canoe across his shoulders, dropping it at the end of each portage and returning to the beginning to help with another pack.

My ten year old—who hates hiking—alternates carrying the smallest pack with our other son. She hardly complains.

Our teenage daughter steers a canoe from the stern, doing perfect J-strokes, learning the ebbs and flows of the lakes.

My hobbit son, bouncing on his toes despite the heavy pack, periodically runs back to me—I am the slowest of the group—telling me how close we are, welcoming me to the end of each portage, pointing out how you know its the end because you can see the blue sky peeking through the trees.

Matthew and I talk a lot about helping our children build resiliency. Maybe it’s small in the grand scheme of things but I suppose that dragging them across lakes and portages in the Canadian wilderness could be one way.

But the truth is, I am learning alongside them.

On the third day, I decide to carry that barrel of food—it’s gotten lighter as we’ve eaten but it’s still the heaviest pack.

I realize that the tingling in my hands and feet is gone.

It might come back. Of course it will. Aging—life itself—leaves none of us unscathed.

But right now, I am stronger than I thought I was. And that’s all I need to know to face the next challenge.

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A book release announcement:

This week The Women’s Devotional Bible: The Message releases into the world.

I have the joy of being one of many women to contribute writing to this devotional. With topical devotionals and profiles written by women of diverse backgrounds, vocations, and ethnicities, this devotional seeks to highlight the stories of women often overlooked in the Biblical story.

It’s a beautiful book and I’m honored to be a tiny part of it.

Book recommendations:

• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. A baby is born in Philadelphia. She is an alien sent from her dying planet to take notes on humanity to see if Earth is hospitable. For anyone who has ever felt like they didn’t belong and longed to discover that they were not alone.

• All the beauty in the world by Patrick Bringley. A former employee at the New Yorker leaves behind his office job to become a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offering touching meditations on grief, beauty, and what it means to be human.

If you want to check out more of my writing, I’m the author two books on the mystics and other miscellaneous writing:

• Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints

and

• Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons From the Mystics

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In Summer

It’s 10:45 at night and I’m enjoying the only alone time I’ve had all week.

Ok, I’m not actually alone. My husband is asleep beside me but it feels like I’m alone because I’m free of questions, complaints of boredom, and requests for untangling knots.

This is summertime with four kids.

Now before this post becomes overwrought with complaints about how challenging the summers can be, gosh, we live in a beautiful place:

An old red brick parsonage with a wrap around porch that overlooks fields and woods, a wooden fence with a creaky gate, and has plenty of room for a kitchen garden and for our chickens to eat all the grass and ticks they want (and there are lots of ticks).

We have plenty of rooms and beds and food on the table and money to spend on hobbies and freedom to leave the country and not be afraid to return.

And despite the ways these summers can weary me, we also have a lot of fun together.

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Summer Hobbies

This year, I insisted that each of my kids pick a hobby for the summer, something to work on for an hour each day. The teens chose woodwork, cooking, and scrapbooking. The seven year old chose cross stitch, and the ten year old chose knitting.

I didn’t fully appreciate that their hobbies would become my hobbies. That the summer hours I thought I could spend on writing would instead be taken up with ping ponging between children: rethreading a cross stitch needle, casting on stitches, helping a teen cook dinner, and untangling yarn.

I think there’s a sermon illustration in there. I’ll offer that to my preacher husband.

What I will say is that there is a certain peace and quietness that comes after the initial frustration of learning a craft.

I can see it in the way my daughter sits on the porch knitting a mystery object (will it be big enough for a baby blanket or too big for a scarf?) while watching the chickens bathe in the dust of my garden.

I hear it when my son cries because he’s lost his cross stitch needle and can’t work on his project—a piece of pizza with a smile on its face.

I feel it when I search on Etsy for my own cross stitch project. I can’t remember the last time I did cross stitch: high school perhaps?

I’ve learned, or rather relearned, a hobby.

And I’m recalling how much practice and humility it takes to relearn these particular kinds of patience:

• the patience of a teacher guiding a frustrated student

• the patience of a new student who doesn’t yet know the rewards to come as a result of her labor

• the patience of a person who keeps having to relearn the same lesson over and over again (It’s me, Hi!)

What would summer be without all the opportunities to learn and grow?

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Two very different books this summer:

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker—I confess that I only had a vague notion what this book was about. But it’s no surprise that remarkable novel won a Pulitzer Prize. Take note that it deals with sexual abuse, violence, and oppression.

• In Want of a Suspect (A Lizzie and Darcy Mystery #1) by Tirzah Price. A cozy mystery that gives us a different—but enjoyable—take on Lizzie and Darcy. Read Price’s Pride and Premeditation first.

Two songs for summer:

• Scenic Route by The National Parks

• Dreamers Dawn by Sam Kelly

What are you reading or listening to this summer?

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Like molasses

My brain likes to take its sweet time percolating through characters, plots, connections, or a good hook. I used to spend weeks on the unpaid blogs entries I contributed to an online journal. Until I realized that I just couldn’t worry so much about it.

I’m a slow writer.

So it was with great effort (and more than a year), that I finally finished the first draft of a novel, over 100,000 words. Mind you, it is only the first draft. I have a long way to go.

If you’re a slow writer too, you’re not alone (and if you’re a fast writer, I salute you and send you on to finish your tenth writing project this week).

Slow is not bad

I have to remind myself that slowness can become a sort of resistance to the cultural values of productivity and success. Cultivating attention by slowing down is a vital discipline in a world that rewards short attention spans.

Every writer’s process is unique

While I love Stephen King’s book on writing and this list of writing advice, we are not all looking to terrify people prolifically like he does. Prescribing a time or day or amount of words to another writer can be helpful as an example, not a rule.

If you’re a seat-of-the-pantser (with a tiny bit of plotting here and there) like I tend to be, then there is a sort of joy—and a lot of terror—in the creativity of discovery. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to plot everything beforehand or you will lose the thread of your story. Some of us just don’t work that way. I’ve tried, believe me.

If you’re a plotter or something in between, I’d love to be you…how do you do it? Can we have coffee and you share your secret knowledge with me?

Faster writing is possible but it is not necessary.

Sometimes, the more you write, the more you will recognize what is important and what is not.

Unless you’re a poet or Toni Morrison you do not have to make every single sentence a work of art.

On the other hand, if you’ve always been a slow writer and you always will be, take a page from, well, many famous writers who spent years or decades on their seminal works.

• Toni Morrison took a year and a half to write Beloved.

• To Kill a Mockingbird took Harper Lee 2.5 years to write.

• Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables in 10 years.

• J.R.R. Tolkien took 16 years to write Lord of the Rings.

You don’t have to get away on a writing retreat (although I really want to someday). You can write in a corner on the floor of your bedroom.

When my youngest was a toddler, I finished the edits of my second book while sitting on the floor and using a bench as a desk. And while it was terrible for my back and shoulders, it was all that I had at the time

Sometimes we write in our tiny bedrooms. Sometimes we have a desk in the corner. Sometimes we have an office. Sometimes we have children crawling all over us. Sometimes we have demanding jobs or responsibilities.

But we can all write, even if it’s in the nooks and corners of a day.

Whatever kind of writer you are, I salute you and wish you well on this maddening beautiful journey of the imagination.

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One writing tip

A great piece of advice I’ve read recently is to start a word bank for your writing.

Dear Writer author Maggie Smith suggests bringing a beloved book or poem with you to the writing desk. Before you begin writing for the day, read a poem or a page and make a list of the words that stick out to you. Try to use a few of those words in your own writing.

Here are a few words in my bank from Galway Kinnell’s poem Daybreak:

• daybreak

• mountain pool

• tidal mud

• receptivity

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(P.S. Sorry for putting out a Mystic Monday out on a Tuesday but yesterday was Memorial Day and my children were home…)

Last week, I wrote about Hildegard of Bingen’s visions and her place as a feminist icon. This week, we’re talking about languages.

Or rather, one “unknown” language.

A Secret Vice

Most languages develop naturally over centuries.

But invented languages are created for a variety of purposes. They can be used to study the way languages work. They can help groups to communicate if they don’t speak the same native tongue. For example, Esperanto is the world’s most widely spoken constructed auxiliary international language. It is used to help international groups communicate.

And then there are languages invented for artistic purposes or to enhance a fictional story, like the languages constructed for Star Trek or Ursula LeGuin’s fantasy worlds.

The term for someone who creates languages is glossopeist1.

The king of invented languages is, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien. He constructed more than a dozen languages for the world of Middle Earth. But Tolkien saw his language invention as very personal. In his essay “A Secret Vice,” he describes this dedication to language invention tentatively, almost as “private, obsessive, and slightly embarrassing—a secret vice.”2

Lingua Ignota

Language invention was not a secret vice for Hildegard of Bingen, at least not later in her life when she offered it as justification for her authority to give counsel to a Pope.

Hildegard created a language referred to as Lingua Ignota, or unknown language.

The words that we have from her invented language are mostly nouns. That didn’t mean there weren’t other words in her Lingua Ignota, like verbs, but they haven’t survived.

There are theories about the purpose of her language.

Was it for the nuns to whisper gossip to each other about a visiting bishop? Was it a language used for sacred purposes in the Divine Office? Or was something else?

Hildegard’s friend, confessor and scribe, the monk Volmar wrote a few years before her death, “Where then will the voice of your unheard language be?” Did he expect this language to be used more widely?

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Early scholars were quick to downplay Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota as a kind of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, and therefore not a serious language but “an ecstatic language associated with ‘hysterics’”

In her translation Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota, Sarah Higley, who is a glossopoeist herself, believes that Hildegard’s language was “a linguistic distillation of the philosophy expressed in her three prophetic books: it represents the cosmos of divine and human creation and the sins that flesh is heir to.”

In other words, Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota is not a result of spontaneous religious fervor (though there is a place for that). Instead, it is another way Hildegard intentionally communicates her remarkable theological output and her vision for the world.

Through various mediums, Hildegard found ways of expressing her vision of creation and the call she had heard from God. After much pain and angst, she finally wrote down her visions. She then commissioned images of these visions. She explained those visions theologically. She composed music. And then she went ahead and invented a language. All in the service of communicating that call.

Hildegard defies the expectations of all of the ways in which we might label her: woman, nun, chronically ill person. Her response to her place as a religious woman in a patriarchal hierarchy is to offer an array of rich and remarkable words that not only defy categorization but confront the things she views as corrupt in the world.

Letter to a Pope

In a letter in 1153 to Pope Anastasius, Hildegard wrote:

“O man, the eye of your discernment weakens; you are becoming weary, too tired to restrain the arrogant boastfulness of people to whom you have trusted your heart…You are neglecting justice, the King’s daughter, the heavenly bride, the woman who was entrusted to you.”

She continues with the proof of her own right to call him out:

But he who is great without limit has in our time touched a small tent {Hildegard} so that it might behold wonders, fashion unknown letters, and let an unknown language be heard. And it was said to this little tent, “What you express in the language announced to you from above will not be in the ordinary human forces of expression…”

She ends the letter with this bold but hopeful rebuke to the Pope:

“And so, O man, stand upon the right way and God will rescue you. God will lead you back to the fold of blessing and election and you will live forever.”

May we all be so bold in the face of power.

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Listen to a few words of Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota sung by Barbara Hannigan.

If you like what you’re reading, I’d appreciate it if you shared this post, subscribed, or left a comment. Even just tapping the cute little “heart” button at the bottom to show you resonated. Thanks for hanging out in this space!

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This is the way

I was approximately 42 years old and some months when I read that Hildegard of Bingen was that precise age when she was caught up in a vision of the One Enthroned.

God spoke to her: Arise! Cry Out! Speak!

O human, who receives these things meant to manifest what is hidden not in the disquiet of deception but in the purity of simplicity, write, therefore, the things you see and hear.

It comforts me to know that even though God straight-up told her to write a tell-all about the visions she’d been having since she was three, Hildegard wrote nothing.

Not until her headaches became so unbearable. Not until her friend Volmar insisted.

Isn’t that often our way? We won’t do the thing we know is best until we’re so miserable that it’s worse if we don’t.

She finally relented and began to record Scivias, a series of visions that would take a decade to finish. Scivias translates to something much like the Mandalorian creed: “Know the Way.”1

During those ten years, Hildegard’s closest companions—the monk Volmar who was her confessor and secretary for decades and Richardis von Stade, one of the young nuns in her care—aided her in transcribing Scivias.

Volmar can be seen in the image above. He watches as visions come upon Hildegard in tentacle-like flames from heaven.

Scivias made Hildegard famous.

Even before it was finished, word of her visionary prowess had spread all the way up the church hierarchy. Volmar told the Abbot of Disibodenberg (Hildegard’s home at the time), who passed the news to the Archbishop of Mainz. The Archbishop praised her at a synod in Trier, and Pope Eugenius was so intrigued by this prophetess that he immediately sent papal legates to Disibodenberg to request a copy of her unfinished work.

Thankfully, the renowned Bernard of Clairvaux was also at the synod. Hildegard had already corresponded with him, asking for his advice, as a humble lowly woman, about whether these visions were really from God.

Did she need Bernard? Well, yes. At the very least, having the fiery Bernard in her corner at a synod where powerful men of the Church might justify or condemn her based on their judgment of her orthodoxy was a crucial advantage. Bernard was known to be aggressive when it came to heretical teachings.2

Bernard came through for her. She was given papal approval. This would embolden her to write decidedly more critical letters to both the Archbishop of Mainz and Pope Eugenius, in time.

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A woman of her age

Reading Hildegard’s language as a woman of the 21st century, it’s easy to cringe as she consistently describes herself with words like humble, lowly, and sometimes filthy, emphasizing that being a woman puts her below men.

Was “humble” simply a necessary posture for a medieval prophetess hoping to keep her head (so to speak)? Or was she a woman of her age who knew exactly where her place was in a male-dominated spiritual hierarchy?

I think yes. Both and.

Scholars have debated this. Is she a feminist icon or not?

My “humble” opinion is that we should be careful not to overlay our contemporary ideas and sensibilities onto a woman from a time nearly a thousand years past.

When we see her as a woman navigating the complexities of her time, the sharpness of her courage and the ways she wielded limited power to achieve such overwhelming impact become all the more remarkable.

Hildegard clearly felt fear and doubt about her abilities. She suffered greatly from physical, emotional, and spiritual pains. She was also fierce, sometimes authoritarian and unbending, both to her community of nuns and the men she wrote letters to, many of whom begged her for wisdom.

Perhaps she really did see herself as a humble unlearned woman. But she also believed that God had chosen her, a lowly woman, to be a feminine warrior, facing down the corrupt generation of men who had let greed and pride corrode their work in the church and the world.

If we are people of our age may we all have that kind of impact.

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More to Muse On

Fiona Maddocks’ Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age

O virga mediatrix by Barbara Hannigan

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So, naturally, when we had our first date, driving around the city where I was living, I thought we should go to the park and read poetry to each other.

Dear readers, that was the last time we read poetry together at the park.

And while I have been known to read a poem to my husband now and then—I read Walt Whitman’s The Runner to him last night because he is a runner—poetry is not usually the genre he reaches for. In fact, I’m not sure it was even true that he ever read poetry in the park except to woo me when we were dating (I hope he will forgive me if I’m wrong…he did Minor in English).

And before we go any further, I’d like to say that our relationship probably works better because I’m the angsty poetry/speculative fiction reader, while he is typically reading lots of theology (he is a pastor after all), trail guidebooks, The Atlantic and, once every few years, A River Runs Through It or another realistic/outdoor/adventure-type fiction.1

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All that is to say that some of my favorite people don’t love to read poetry. But also, some of the wisest people I know are intimidated by poetry.

Poetry can be daunting. I once met an English teacher who told me that she didn’t love to teach poetry because it scared her.

Now, I’m no expert in poetry criticism but the thing about it is that you don’t really have to “understand” it to find delight in a poem.

Sometimes it is just the rhythm, the turn of phrase, the way the words click and clack on your tongue.

Sometimes it is one image from the poem that stays with me. Poems have the capacity expand our vision in the present but also change how we will see the things we thought we already knew.

In In the Grand Scheme of Things, Maggie Smith writes:

from here an airplane seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely

chalking a line between them

That line stayed with me for days so that when I saw an airplane leaving white trails across the sky, all I could think about was how it does look like chalk outlines.

Here’s a line from On a Painting By Wang the Clerk of Yen Ling by Su Tung p’o:

The slender bamboo is like a hermit

The simple flower is like a maiden

The first line stopped me. What does it mean? How is bamboo like a hermit? I thought for a few moments about my limited experience with bamboo and I still didn’t understand. But it was a nice way to spend a few moments, wasn’t it? And the image it conjured in my mind was lovely.

Michael Ondaatje’s poem Lock goes lots of places but I keep thinking about two parts. The first stanza:

Reading the lines he loves

he slips them into a pocket,

wishes to die with his clothes

full of torn-free stanzas

and the telephone numbers

of his children in far cities

I decided that it’s not the worst goal to have: that after you die, someone finds you with your pockets full of poetry and the phone numbers of your children.

Here is the second part that stayed with me:

Even then I wanted

to slip into the wet dark

rectangle and swim on

barefoot to other depths

where nothing could be seen

that was a further story

My ten year old and I read the poem together and as we talked about it, we came to think that the poem could be read as a poignant meditation on the things we really need when we die and the mysteries after death (she didn’t use the words “poignant meditation” btw).

I like reading poems just before bed (though I go through seasons when I don’t read a lot of poetry) but I also love reading them together with someone else, savoring both the images and metaphors and also the time you spend together thinking of words, mysteries, and all the things that other people help us see.

What are your favorite poems?

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Further reading OR where I got the poems I quoted:

• Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer: Pep Talks and Practical Advice For the Creative Life

• A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz

• A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

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My books:

• Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints

• Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons from the Mystics

My teenage daughter put up a tarp for a tent, my teenage son attached his hammock between the trees, and our 10 and 7 year old took turns guiding our chickens around the yard with walking sticks.

All that is to say that everything was perfect. So, I got it into my head that I would sit out on our porch and read poetry. Now, lest you think I do this often, I cannot recall the last time, and after only a few seconds of sitting there, I remembered why: my kids do not let me.

I have sometimes envied my husband who can sit in the midst of a chaotic family afternoon and read a book. I cannot and I have stopped trying. Because invariably, my four children, one by one, end up beside me, in my face, or even on top of me (if my seven year old can find any real estate on my lap, legs, head, or shoulders), talking, tattling, laughing, fighting, singing.

And last Saturday, the mere presence of Mom on the porch meant that they began to circle me, edging closer and closer until I had to put my book down and admit defeat.

Dear reader, I have to admit that I was annoyed and as soon as they sat down at the table, I gave them a rule.

I am reading poetry, I said. If you talk to me, you have to listen to a poem first.

Now, using poetry as a deterrent is probably not the wisest for a writer who wants her kids to grow up loving literature. But then the strangest thing happened. They listened. We talked about a poet’s use of words and what they could mean and about how beautiful is a poet’s eye: to show us the world through a different lens.

And then *gasp* they wanted to write their own poems.

With my mouth agape (it really wasn’t agape but you get the picture), I watched them spread to the four corners of the yard with paper and pen.

When they returned, we read our poems to each other, snapped our encouragement, and admired one another’s metaphors. I told them that, one day, they could each grow up to be poets.

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Yesterday afternoon, as I was leaving the library to head to my daughter’s track meet, a book caught my eye.

While I sat in the bleachers waiting for my daughter’s event, I began to read Dear Writer: Pep Talks and Practical Advice for the Creative Life by Maggie Smith. The book is a pleasant and highly readable set of reflections, poems, prompts, and gentle advice for those longing to create.

Smith shares about a poetry workshop she did for kids at an elementary school. After a few days talking about the elements of poetry, she was amazed by the images, metaphors and observations they came up with.

This took me back to the time I taught a poetry workshop and one of the children—a boy who, according to his teachers, struggled a lot in school—wrote a poem so beautiful that he won an award for it.

Smith told her kids: “there’s no such thing as poet’s eyes. Every child is born with poet’s eyes…People don’t become poets,” Smith explained to them. “They either, as they grow up, become not-poets, or they stay poets.”

What I had told my own kids on that beautiful Saturday was wrong. They weren’t going to become poets; they already are. All it takes to stay a poet is to keep your eyes open to the world: to the beauty and the horrors, to the mysterious and the mundane.

This morning I intended to meditate on Psalm 139 but I got stuck on the first line:

“Oh, Lord, you have searched me and you know me.”

As the phrase repeated in my head, I began to see myself from the inside and out, an outline being filled in. A presence swirled around inside of me, penetrating my thoughts, not like a judging, all-seeing eye, but a with a harmony made physical in swathes of color, light, and wind.

And the thought came to me:

God is a poet.

Of course, God is a poet, imagining and creating us, savoring us, knowing and searching us and then laying us out onto the canvas of creation with God’s own breath inside of us.

Can there be any act of creation more terrible and beautiful than that?

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Other things:

• Besides Smith’s Dear Writer, I’ve been slogging through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark. I started this book several years ago and never finished it. But so many people love the book that I thought I’d give it another go. Although beautifully written, it is still pretty slow, honestly, but I’m determined to make it through the 1000 or so pages this time. Fingers crossed.

• I’ve not always been one to call my government representatives but in the current political climate, it feels like a small thing I can do. I use the app 5calls or you can visit 5calls.org. They make it so easy to call your senators or members of congress about the issues you care about like ending the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the unlawful detainment of immigrants and legal residents, the cuts to PBS and NPR, etc.

• I’m excited to see that my friend Christina Hubbard, a poet and artist, is about to release her new photopoetry book Water in Her Tender Leaves.

Just for laughs:

• Creepy child stares

• Another Lord of the Rings meme

• Even Jesus forgets sometimes

The recording (I can’t quite call it a song), imagines what Hildegard would’ve heard in her visions, imprinting on our ears the intensity of searing light and flame. It was an artistic and unique choice and it moved me deeply.

It’s no wonder that the whole album is a collaboration between the ethereal vocalizations of Jocelyn Montgomery and the famous experimental, surrealist, and some would say ‘visionary’ film director and artist David Lynch.

They take some of Hildegard’s musical compositions and marry them to a dynamic auditory experience.

A week or so after I listened to the whole album Lux Vivens, I encountered God on a spiritual retreat.

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I’m not usually one for retreats. If I have a break from my kids and my life, I want to do something quiet like read or watch movies. Most importantly, I want to be alone (or with one or two of my closest people who understand my need to be alone). But my husband encouraged me to go and I trusted the retreat leader, an incredible artist and woman of faith who I’d immediately bonded with on matters of God and creativity.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations for what would happen there but a few weeks beforehand, I began to pray that I would encounter God.

After we’d settled into our rooms and had dinner on the first evening of the retreat, we were led through a Lectio Divina, a close and repeated reading of a particular passage of Scripture. The first passage was from Genesis 32 when Jacob wrestles with God.

As we shared the things we were discerning from the passage, I began to regret asking to encounter God. I mean, I read a lot about the mystics. I know what happens in those encounters. They aren’t fun but, instead, an overwhelming mix of a sense of belovedness and terrifying awe.

Jacob’s encounter with God comes after he sends the women and children in his life across the river alone at evening, awaiting a visit from his estranged brother Esau (who he is worried will kill him).

Jacob is left alone to wrestle with a strange person who comes to him. They fight until morning and Jacob refuses to relent until the stranger (who we are told later is God), pulls Jacob’s hip out of socket. Jacob will still not release the stranger until he is given a blessing.

It’s a weird story (like most encounters with God) and leaves many unanswered questions. But what it left me with was a reminder that, in keeping with the mystical experiences, an encounter with God leaves an indelible mark.

Our next Lectio Divina passage was from Exodus 33 when Moses encounters God. I was beginning to see a pattern here. And I was starting to get a little nervous.

This encounter comes after Israel has been punished for the golden calf episode and God has relented, promising to be with them. Moses asks God for proof of God’s presence and promise. He says to God boldly: show me your glory.

The second and only full day of retreat began with more prayerful gatherings, meals, great conversations and Scripture readings and then a time of silence where we were free to create, pray, or walk. I decided to do all three.

My final few hours were spent in prayer. I was working through some personal issues from childhood and I asked God—per a prompt—to help me see what I was afraid of and lean into that. What followed was an afternoon and nighttime of fearful thoughts, terrible sleep, and early waking in the morning in which I sat weeping and praying on a window seat.

I trudged through breakfast and our last gathering and prayers. I struggled to articulate what I had experienced because, despite the beauty of most of the retreat, I felt weary. Maybe it was self-pity but I was disappointed that I’d asked to encounter God and, in response, my final hours had left me exhausted and with a sense of sadness.

But over the next few hours and days, the feelings began to transform from a sense of confusion and sadness into something else: an assurance of God’s presence and love amidst the sadness and fear. I recalled that our last evening, some wise women had given me some wise words about a situation I was struggling with and then we’d laughed together for several hours.

God had shown me that even through my fears, God was sitting there with me. And I had a strong sense that God had answered my prayer gently, and that, in response, I longed to be closer to God.

There is ample evidence of God’s gentleness in encounters in Scripture. Instead of blasting Moses off the face of the earth for asking to see God’s glory—which is apparently what happens when a mortal actually sees God’s glory—God places Moses tenderly in the cleft of a rock and shields him. All that Moses can see is God’s back.

Jacob, selfish and impetuous, is offered God’s companionship and blessing, not because he deserves it but because he asks for salvation and blessing and because he is invested in the struggle. He is left with hip pain. A permanent reminder.

I don’t mean to compare myself to Jacob and Moses (although I am selfish and sometimes impetuous too) but it felt a little familiar: as though my encounter was a soft launch but it left a mark on me for days afterward.

Now, many of you know that I read a lot of the mystics and write a lot about the mystics. And I’ve always been interested in what it means to have a mystical encounter with God.

In that vein, I don’t want to imply that I had a vision, at least not in the way of the medieval visionary. But I did feel an overwhelming sense that God came to me in a way that I could recognize and then God gave me the tools to respond.

Our church has been going through a prayer course by Pete Grieg and one of the most powerful things about a relatively simple set of lessons is that all of us can hear from God.

It doesn’t have to be through flame or rock, through the sky opening up and knocking us over. We don’t have to be Moses or Jacob (and, really, thank God we aren’t). We don’t have to be Hildegard of Bingen or St. Francis of Assisi (again…no thank you).

All of us can encounter God. And, if we are willing to simply sit and listen, God can speak to us in ways that we can recognize. In fact, that is what God wants more than anything else: to be in communion with us so that the world might be healed and reconciled.

How have you encountered God?

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Speaking of reconciliation and the brokenness still evident in the world, I cannot stop thinking about all the immigrants who have been deported without due process—one innocent man (the Trump administration has admitted this and refused to do anything about it) was sent to a notoriously horrific prison in El Salvador—and the students who have recently been detained by ICE despite their legal status. I get to meet with ESL students and I see both their fear, their faith (most of them are Christians), and their courage each week.

• If you’re interested in calling your Senators or members of Congress, 5calls.org is a great place to start. It makes it super easy to call your representatives and speak out about the issues that are important to you. It even gives you a script.

• Kristin Du Mez’ substack is really informative and an important call to action for Christians (and anyone who is disturbed by what we are seeing in the Trump administration).

Podcast

• I’ve been listening to “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” by a British broadcaster who has been hosting interviews between atheists, Christians and agnostics for decades. It’s a fascinating listen.

Inspiration

• During Corey Booker’s marathon, record breaking speech before Congress, he spoke about his Christian faith.

Just for fun

• When men say they aren’t emotional…

And

• If you have a cat, you know.

I’ll leave you with a quote that perfectly sums up my experience at retreat. It’s from Come: God’s Invitation to Rest and Renewal by Christine Labrum. In it, she quotes Chris Webb:

“…the Bible resists us at every turn. It will not cooperate, it will not conform to our schemas, it will not be tamed. But then, of course, Scripture does not seek to be analyzed and understood. The Bible is not a theological textbook, a philosophical treatise or answer to life’s questions. It is a thin place through which the presence of God breaks into this world and bursts with unpredictable consequences into our lives. Even though it is not consumed, this book burns with unquenchable fire.”

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Orpheus…could move stones and wolves with his music, but Christ, the New Song…has turned stony minds and wolvish hearts into men. It is he who created the cosmos and the microcosm and ‘makes melody to God on this instrument of many tones…A beautiful breathing, instrument of music the Lord made man, after His own image. He Himself…the celestial Word, is the all-harmonious, melodious, holy instrument of God.2

This is a quote from Barbara Newman’s Saint Hildegard of Bingen: Symphonia of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations, the name of Hildegard of Bingen’s ordered collection of songs and compositions.3

Newman quotes the 2nd century theologian Clement of Alexandria but she is also exploring Hildegard of Bingen’s theology of music and its importance to God and creation.

Hildegard produced an extensive range of writing in a wide array of subjects: her visions from heaven, celestial music, a dramatic play, tomes for healing cures, and hundreds of letters to people as varied as popes, the emperor, and a local monk or nun. In most of her writing, she made a startling claim: that she was both a lowly woman and the mouthpiece of God.

Hildegard’s theology of music was mystical. She believed that “the very soul is symphonic,” a view not so strange for her time. The ancients, and later the medieval world, believed that the universe was ordered into three kinds of music4:

• Musica universalis or the music of the spheres—the music made by the planets and stars

• Musica humana—the harmony that binds the parts of the human together, body, soul, and spirit

• Musica instrumentalis—man-made music, any instrument including the human voice

• Later, religious folk would add on Musica celestis—the music made by God and God’s heavenly beings

Hildegard’s music emerged from an ethos that concluded that music was so powerful, with the power to heal and inspire or to damage and break, that making “dangerous music was immoral” and “to be immoral was to be unmusical.”

This didn’t mean that if you’re tone deaf, you were evil. After all, the music of the spheres was inaudible to humans (or at least we were so used to it that it didn’t register in our ears anymore).

What it did mean was that the universe, as created by God, was so full of God’s harmonies that to go against them made one dissonant with God. In this vein, angels were “pure spirit and therefore pure song” and the devil was “the ultimate unmusical spirit.”

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In much of her theology of music, Hildegard is echoing both the ancients and her contemporaries but she adds her own contribution when she writes about Adam and the fall. Before the fall, humans were in melodious harmony with God. Music was “quintessentially human; mankind was never meant to live without it.”

The one who came to save humans after the fall was Christ, the “musician, minstrel, lord of the dance,” or as Clement of Alexandria wrote, “the New Song…the all-harmonious, melodious, holy instrument of God.”

Where some of her contemporaries (as well as earlier theologians like Augustine) prized the words of music over the melody (and in fact, they worried that music could not only distract from the words/meaning but it could also be destructive and dangerous), Hildegard wasn’t worried about that.

She saw melody and liturgical song, in particular, as the medium through which the parts of the human being could be united in the way that Christ united the divine and the human in himself.

This way of seeing the cosmos as musical fell out of favor for a while, disproven (or so was thought) by later scientists and philosophers.

But more recently, astronomers and other scientists have seen a connection between the mathematical order of the universe and the music of the cosmos. Space exploration has discovered ‘sounds’ in space, “plasma waves ripple between Saturn and its icy moon Enceladus, the gas giant Jupiter cracks and booms constantly with lightning bolts and thunder.”

Nobel Physics Laureate George Smoot III commented that if “‘the universe is, at some level, music, then it seems only natural that we should study it with musical tools of thinking.’”6

Perhaps the ancients had a point.

For Hildegard, “all music was associated with prophecy and the nostalgia for Eden.”That’s why, she noted, we can have an emotional and physical response to the nostalgia of certain melodies. Our created selves recall the time before, when we were attuned to the “celestial harmony” of Eden.

What if we saw all creation and all creatures as musical? Would it change the way we treated the earth if we believed that our destructive tendencies interrupted the harmonies that God spun out into the cosmos?

Does it seem that some of our national and world leaders have lost the melody of the heavens? Would it change how we treated others if we remembered that each of us were made, like Adam, to sing “the sound of every harmony and the sweetness of the whole art of music?”

Listen to a recording of some of Hildegard’s music and let me know what you think.

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Books I’ve been reading (and loved):

• Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

• Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeiries trilogy by Heather Fawcett

• Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

• Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias, translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop

Miscellaneous things I’m into lately:

• No Write Way, a podcast by a writer, interviewing writers to tell writers everywhere that there’s no one way to be a writer.

• This conversation between artists Mako Fujimura and Lee Camp on the podcast No Small Endeavor was so touching. It made me want to go and make art of all kinds.

• The Injustice Report to get smart updates about the Trump administration’s policies

• The soundtrack to the movie Mufasa. Lin Manuel Miranda has done it again.

• My friends’ bookstores. We’ve been trying hard to wean ourselves off of Amazon so we use the library, try to find used books at abebooks.com, or support local bookstores. Try True Leaves bookstore in Illinois or Nooks in Lancaster, PA.

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And if not for my husband’s insistence (as well as a beautiful breakfast, gifts that lightened my soul, and a family dinner), I would’ve mostly brushed it off.

It’s not that I dread getting older.

It’s more that 47 feels like a bit of a shrug. How is 47 any different from 45 or 46? Except that I’m in my late forties now, I guess?

Besides the physical tiredness and a few unpleasant side effects, I much prefer being older rather than going back to any age. There’s freedom in a growing wisdom, in a lessening of care about things that don’t matter.

But there’s also a sense of impending death.

I don’t mean that in a negative way. Impending death does not necessarily mean impending doom. But the truth is that even if I lived to a ripe old age, I’m likely at least half-way through my life.

And every year goes by more swiftly.

This time of year always brings me to mind of preparing for birth. My son Jude’s birth happened in mid-December 14 years ago, the week after a below zero cold snap that brought quite a lot of snow, frozen ground and the worry that we might need to ride a tractor to the hospital (we didn’t).

We had much to do to “prepare him room.” Our home needed to be made ready. My body, already having gone through nine months of preparation, had to get prepared for birth. My husband, Jude’s older sister, our family and friends—we all had preparations to attend to.

Advent is an appropriate time to think about preparations. Author Rachel Mann says that Advent, is a time to prepare for “the cusp of joy and weeping that signals the realm of new birth.”1

Advent then offers a space to prepare, to make room not just for the birth of the Christ-child but also the birth of a new kingdom. One in which everything will be turned upside down. The wrongs will be made right.

On Sunday, my husband preached on Isaiah 61 (and a few Luke passages).

61 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;^[a]
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;^[b]
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;

He reminded us that these passages are a balm to some and an invitation to others. If we are afflicted with suffering, then Isaiah’s words about a new way of being where there will be joy instead of mourning, is good news.

For those of us who are pretty comfortable, wealthy, powerful…then these words are sobering. He noted how Jesus in Luke 4 quotes this passage in Isaiah 61 and leaves out that last line, the one we find pretty uncomfortable: the day of vengeance of our God. You know, the judgement part.

It’s not that Jesus says nothing about judgement…if you think that, go read Matthew 12:36–37 and John 5:21–25.

It’s more that this time, Jesus offers an invitation: It’s not too late to give your money away. It’s not too late to be in community with those who are suffering. It’s not too late to open your eyes to injustice and work toward a kingdom marked by shalom.

As I head into my late forties, the preparation of Advent hits differently. And my questions to ponder are different:

• How do I take Jesus’ invitation seriously?

• How can I be transformed as a follower of Jesus?

• What does it look like to give away the rest of my life?

Ron Rolheiser writes that, according to the mystic St. John of the Cross, our lives encompass three struggles:

• Getting our lives together

• Giving our lives away

• Giving our deaths away

Until recently in human history, most people died in their most generative years when they were actively giving away their lives (30s and 40s perhaps) and so a theology of giving away your death wasn’t necessary.

I’m not necessarily in the end stage, as it were. I guess, I’m technically in my generative years (if you can be generative and tired all the time).

But these struggles feel connected.

In light of the reality of death, how do I begin to live the rest of my life, however much life that is? How do I structure my life and my heart so that I am not the point anymore?

Are you looking for an answer? Because I don’t have one. I’m only just beginning to see that my personal pursuits are not as important as sitting with God in the mess of life. And preparing room for God’s work through me.

It’s not that my personal tasks aren’t important. On the contrary. I begin to feel narrowed in to those tasks. Asking that my whole life, my writing, mothering, singing, reading, cooking, gardening, listening, teaching, and speaking help me be more tethered to that which is eternal.

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The year in review

My most popular post in the last year was from August, just after we moved from Ohio to Pennsylvania, which tells me that, among other things, posts get more clicks when they have clicky titles like “A new chapter: We are moving!”

In my last post, I mentioned that my favorite go-to Christmas album was Kate Rusby’s Sweet Bells (I love While Mortals Sleep too). Afterward, a few people said they added her music to their Christmas playlists. I was thrilled! Finding common ground in these beautiful things is a joy.

Here is a playlist of some of my other favorite Christmas albums (that you Advent adherents will obviously wait until Christmas Eve to listen to, right?)

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Recommendations

Be warned: when you tell me that you liked one of my recommendations, then I might give you a few more. So, whether you want them or not, here’s a list of my favorites for the year. These weren’t necessarily things that were released in 2024. Just that they meant something to me this year.

Music

• Coldplay was my top artist of the year (according to Apple Music, at least) and their newest album Moon Music got a lot of plays. Now, this is likely because their song We Pray became the anthem of our school morning as I drove my kids to school for a few months. The above photo is from a Coldplay concert we went to in 2022. It was magical.

• The Arcadian Wild, Welcome

• Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour

• Mission House, many many of their songs

• Salt of the Sound, Meditations No. 5

• Sequentia, Hildegard of Bingen: Canticles of Ecstacy (This is the background music of my novel writing)

Books

Fantasy

• Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Novik is one of the best fantasy writers out there. I was delighted to find that several of my new friends in Pennsylvania count this book as one of their favorites too. I just read it for the third time.

• The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMasters Bujold. Truly one of the masters of high fantasy. This book (which is part of a great series) is hard to describe but if you love classic high fantasy, it is a must-read. I’m currently reading it for the third time also.

• The Heartstone Series by Elle Katherine White (a fun Pride and Prejudice retelling…if Darcy was a dragon rider).

• Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young. Murder mystery, folklore, an island with secrets and reuniting with lost love.

• The Unmaking of June Farrow also by Adrienne Young. Ghosts of the past, love, murder mystery, a generational curse that involves time travel.

• The Winternight Trilogy beginning with The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Set in a wintery Russian wilderness that teems with monsters, old magic, religion, and a powerful heroine who protects her family even when they underestimate her.

• The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown. A book that can open any door is bound (pardon the pun) to unearth all kinds of shadowy figures longing for its power.

• The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stievater (YA/teen fantasy, hard to explain but has a lot about dreams, a Welsh legend, magic, and crossing through thin places, nothing too explicit but might not be suitable for some teens)

Nonfiction

• We were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration by Jessica Goudeau. I wrote about this book in another post. But also check out Goudeau’s After the Last Border for some context and character-driven stories about what led to the current events in Syria.

• Art and Faith: A theology of making by Makoto Fujimura. I did a substack on this beautiful book about creativity and spirituality.

• The Art of Small Talk by Casey Wilson and Jessica St. Clair. The audiobook is read by the authors who are both comedic actors. Hilarious but not suitable if kids are listening.

And a little light murder

• Countess of Harleigh Mysteries by Dianne Freeman. Light murder in the Victorian era.

Random beautiful things

• If you’re looking for a place to buy books that supports local bookstores, check out Shawn Smucker and Maile Silva’s Nook on Bookshop. Buying from Bookshop gives their local Lancaster-based bookstore (and other independent bookstores) a percentage of the proceeds.

• My new favorite substack is Jokien with Tolkien, a humorous newsletter “concerning hobbits, faith, and culture from a lifelong Tolkien fan.” My latest favorite is a very tight argument about why the film versions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy are Christmas movies. Hint: in Tolkien’s world, dates in Middle Earth that correspond to important Christian holidays are no accident.

• I had the opportunity to meet artist and spiritual director Christine Labrum a few days after I had admired (and really wanted to buy) her art in a coffee shop. So, for my birthday, I splurged and bought a few of her prints. A few hours later, I opened gifts from my kids and they had bought me two other prints of hers! So, now I have a collage. They are images that combine my favorite things: the spiritual and the fantastical. I especially love her Divine Hands series. The tree in the picture below is one of Labrum’s pieces.

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And finally, a few little funnies

• The power of loving a cat

• For women of a certain age

• Mine. My own! My precious!

• More for Tolkien nerds

They see how much of a Christmas song they can play on my phone, sing or play on the piano before I mock-yell at them that they’re going to get in trouble if they play Christmas music too early.

Our house rule (loosely followed) is no Christmas music is allowed before we put up our tree the day after Thanksgiving. There have been years when I’ve actually tried to personally refrain from listening to any holiday music until Christmas Eve (unless it is specifically for Advent…see my playlist below).

When I’ve suggested we wait til closer to Christmas to sing carols at church, I think some people thought I was a bit of a grump. After all, we only have one time a year that we sing or play Christmas music. Can’t we just enjoy ourselves, enjoy the holiday merriment, enjoy the season?

This year, I’m feeling less insistent about waiting. I don’t know if I’m just tired of making the argument or just tired.

In her book on Victorian author Christina Rossetti, Rachel Mann reminds me that I might need to hold strong on some practices during Advent. On Day Two of Advent, Mann makes a connection between Rossetti’s poem “Dead before Death” and the practices of this season:

Our culture…has a troubling tendency to obsess over the ‘wonder’ of youth and vitality-without-end; it seems to have a terror of death, annihilation, and judgment.

She notes that, in this context, many modern readers might view Rossetti’s poem with lines like “All lost, all lost, the lapse that went before/So lost till death shut-to the opened door…So cold and lost for ever evermore” as morbid or “gloomy Victorian theology.”

A modern reader wouldn’t be wrong. The Victorians were weird as heck when it came to death. Developing understandings about the body and other sciences meant that they were more aware of how the body worked and how the dead body could be used to understand the living body (hence lots of dissection).

I recently saw this painting in the Philadelphia museum of art. Painted smack dab in the middle of the Victorian era, it is considered one of the greatest American paintings ever. Reflecting the British counterpart’s fascination with death and the body, it is a very large (and gruesome) painting of a doctor doing surgery in front of a crowd (and the patient’s mother).

The Victorian era was also the age of after-death photography, black clothes for mourning, and long periods of time away from social engagements when a loved one died.

With this in mind, why does Mann suggest that Advent should be a time to lean into to a more “‘Victorian’ treatment of death?”

I don’t think she’s suggesting we take up cadaver-photography or grave-robbing. We should be careful not to romanticize certain eras or approaches to death. After all the Victorians were in the unfortunate position of having a lot more knowledge about death and the body than their predecessors while, at the same time, not having enough knowledge to know how to stop epidemics like typhus and cholera.

But taking a look at the theology of people of faith during the Victorian era is an interesting practice. Especially when it comes to death. Writers like Christina Rossetti and George MacDonald (also a Victorian) experienced the tragedy of death and loss but they had no illusions, like we often do, that they could control it.1 This gives them a willingness to look at death more closely in the face and put it into a spiritual context.

Advent is the beginning of the year in the liturgical calendar…a sort of Christian New Years’. As with the secular approach to January 1 where we make lots of resolutions, Advent is a time to spiritually prepare our hearts for the coming year.

One of the ways we can do that is by looking at how we have experienced death in our lives, whether that is a big life change like a move or a divorce, a flood or a diagnosis, a failure or a disappointment…or an actual death.

The hope is coming, to be sure! A child has been born!

But to really appreciate that, to feel the true joy of Christmas, often means that we take time to recollect the heartaches too.

To contemplate death, both literal and metaphorical, is as much the work of Advent as looking forward to Christmas joy or the promise of the fullness of life in the kingdom.2

If you feel a little grumpy at this time of year, I get you. Maybe your body is just telling you to take a page from the Victorians (Heck, wear black until Christmas…that’ll start a conversation). Or maybe you’re just awake, noticing what Christmas has become in our consumeristic culture.

Sometimes our American way of Christmas can feel like the Capital city of Panem in the Hunger Games: all gloss, glitz, glitter, and glamour painted over to ignore and actively perpetuate poverty, violence, and death.

Advent is a time to remember that Jesus came not into a world of light but as the light of the world. Jesus came to rescue us because we needed rescuing from our materialism, our overconsumption, our violence, and our idolatry. Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted. And Jesus came so that death may die.

If you feel grumpy about the way we do Christmas in our culture, Advent is for you. Instead of jumping straight to the Nativity, wade a bit through the weird Advent passages about judgment and the Second Coming. Instead of singing “Joy to the World,” first sing a stanza of Savior of the Nations, Come.3

Instead of listening to “All I want for Christmas is you” ad nauseam until your ears bleed, save a little bit of the joy until Christmas Eve, then blast Mariah Carey. You might actually appreciate her extraordinary vocal gymnastics better if you haven’t been listening to it for two months straight.

Am I a grump? For sure. But am I right? You be the judge.

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Advent Recommendations

Books:

• Tsh Oxenreider’s Shadow and Light. We’ve used this book for years as a family and found it so helpful for short devotionals and adventures in new family traditions like St. Lucia Day.

• As I mentioned earlier….Rachel Mann’s In the Bleak Midwinter: Advent and Christmas with Christina Rosetti. If you’re intrigued by the poetry of Christina Rossetti, you’ll love Mann’s reflections on her writing along with commentary on biblical narratives.

• Sherah-Leigh Gerber and Gwen Lantz’s Comfort and Joy: Readings and Practices for Advent. Devotional meditations, poetry, spiritual practices and even recipes for the season.

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Music:

1. Joy of Every Longing Heart by Sara Groves

2. Incarnation by Sister Sinjin

3. Awake Arise: A winter album by Lady Maisery and Jimmy

4. Advent Songs by The Porter’s Gate

5. Advent Collection by The Brilliance

6. Waiting Songs by Rain for Roots

I’ve made an Advent Spotify playlist with many of these songs on them (and more):

Other things not specifically about Advent:

• This album is the exception I’ve always made to my own rule about Christmas music. Every year, this is the first album we begin playing as we put up our Christmas tree. Kate Rusby’s Sweet Bells.

• I’m just going to say it. We’re fully on The Chosen bandwagon. Yes, I could nitpick some of the theological leaps and historical depictions about how the Gospels were actually written (Matthew carrying around a notebook to write down Jesus’ words annoys me every time) but I understand that creative license is sometimes necessary for the arc of the story. And I appreciate what Dallas Jenkins is trying to do. Season 4 has a few controversial moments but in Episode 4 (I won’t spoil it)…the olive press metaphor and Jesus’ pain was beautiful and effective.

• My daughter and I could not stop laughing.

• A little bit of death humor.

• And finally: Gen Alpha Poet Laureate

My books:

Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints

Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons from the Mystics

It wasn’t until I was on the way back from my errands that I could read the scrawling cursive:

“Grab ‘em by the p…sy,” it read. Except that horrible word wasn’t edited.

I walked across the street to our voting location, which happens to be our church. I’m sure I’ve voted in a church before. Lots of churches offer their premises as voting locations. But, frankly, I was uncomfortable with the political signs lining the gym where our kids laugh and play and we have fellowship meals, but most distressingly, with some of the comments I heard in line as I waited to vote.

One man, obviously hoping for a laugh, shouted that they were checking IDs in the building and if anyone was “illegal,” he hoped ICE would come by.

The whole day felt tainted by ugliness.

***

There is a blurry picture of me in the collage of photos and images I tacked up in my office. In the photo from over twenty years ago, I’m standing on a rock in a creek bed, surrounded by fern fronds and other lush plants that dangle into the frame. And I’m looking up to the side, the light hitting my face from out of frame.

It might sound silly, a little self-referential, to have a picture of myself as inspiration when I write.

I’m not always sure why I keep it. My friend Jen took the picture back when you had to print out pictures to get a look at them (hence the blurriness), and when I saw it the first time, I noticed my perceived physical flaws and how eye-rollingly dramatic my pose was.

Still, I kept it.

The picture is situated up on a bulletin board surrounded by a photo of my mom at the same age, a Celtic cross, an illustration of the Celtic Trinity, a black and white photo of a relative’s grave, and a Franciscan cross my friend Amy bought me in Assisi.

Yesterday, I scrawled out the words “Let it be lovely,” and tacked them up beside the photo.

These words are from a song by Leslie Jordan that I often play before I start writing.

Let it be lovely is a prayer, a reminder of the ways my words have power inside of me and beyond myself.

I might have no control over how my words are perceived. I don’t always have control over the reasons that I write or even how my story shifts in surprising ways. But I do have power over the words that I send out into the world.

***

When I was a graduate student in Scotland, where that blurry photo was taken, I didn’t know the power of art in the world. I just knew I loved beautiful, fantastical stories and beautiful spaces.

I didn’t understand the significance of the privilege I had that allowed me to be in those beautiful spaces.

Beauty can be a way to hide from the world. I know, I’ve used beauty as a way to avoid thinking about ugly things. Or for getting lost in romantic musings to the neglect of the real world or real people around me.

There is certainly a place for finding refuge in art. But when I hear “Let it be lovely,” I don’t think as much about beauty as an escape.

I think about the beauty of a well-crafted story about a painful episode in someone’s life, reminding me that God is with those who suffer, that there is pain and sorrow in the world that is far outside of my experience. And that God doesn’t look away, even if I might want to.

Or a gorgeously wrought painting of a skull to remind me that I am finite.

A heart wrenching memoir by a man who is dying, his love letter to the child he leaves behind.

The beauty of someone coming with black spray paint to cover over ugly words on the road.

A quilt crafted by a sewing circle to send to those who might need a blanket.

In her song, Why it Matters, Sara Groves sings of a statue still standing in a town after war and violence has left destruction in its wake. The statue, a work of art left behind in a “war torn town” is important.

Groves calls this piece of art a “protest of the darkness and this chaos all around.”

And it “matters.”

***

Author Kristin Du Mez quoted a sermon by her pastor recently. He was preaching on Acts 17: 16-34, when the apostle Paul was in Athens, standing by the Areopagus. Paul is debating the leaders there about their idols.

The pastor says that in order to speak effectively, Paul had to understand his audience.

Paul wasn’t just reading the Bible, he was reading the great poets and philosophers of the culture. He was reading the newspapers and observing the billboards of his day. He knew that that’s where we find the soulful longings of a people, the glimmerings of truth they have in their hearts.

The soulful longings of a people.

This is often what we find in good art, whether it has been made by confessing Christians or not. We find the goodness and the ugliness, all that we desire, beating inside the human heart.

When we live in a violent and death-denying culture, when there are ugly words and unchecked power and unimaginative cycles of hate, the efforts of beauty and art matter.

Well-crafted words, sketches, good food, a poem, a journal entry, paintings, songs, quilts, stories, even photographs that are blurry. They matter. They matter not because one piece of art will change the world (or maybe it will) but because it matters that we still have the hope to create.

It matters that we see and witness to the truth of the human experience and that we still look for beauty and goodness when all seems lost.

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OTHER THINGS THAT MATTER

• I just finished reading Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time. The struggles of a man who ages so slowly that he has lived for many centuries.

• Joy Oladokun’s album Observations from a Crowded Room. Madeleine L’Engle says there is no sacred or secular art. Only good art and bad art. We all need good art that challenges our views of the world, that helps us see how others experience the world, that expands our heart in love and empathy.

• I’m listening to the audiobook version of The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods. I’m not finished yet but I love the lilted voices of the readers. Also, it’s full of old books.

• Read Karen Gonzalez’s latest substack on what she’s noticed about the ways people talk about immigrants and immigration both in the U.S. and in Mexico.

  “…we all have the need to belong, and all immigrants have historically suffered the pressure to abandon their own people, language, and culture and assimilate.”

• Jean Batiste playing the piano to a tune he’s never heard before…mesmerizing.

• A beautiful memory of my children.

• I’ve begun reading The Lord of the Rings series to my youngest children. In that vein, I fully believe this is excellent parenting (and a really good goal).

And finally, a live recording of my sisters and me when we get together (after being apart for several months).

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If you’ve been following this newsletter for very long, you might’ve picked up that this time of year is pretty meaningful to me.

In the midst of writing a book about the ways our Western culture navigates (or ignores) death, I grew to have a greater appreciation for Halloween, All Saint’s Day, and All Soul’s Day and how they can be important for a death-averse culture such as ours.

But this year is a little strange.

As we have been consumed with moving and adjusting to a new town, a new state, a new church, new schools, and even a new office, I haven’t been able to get my mind around this time of year.

We currently live in the country so, even though the view outside our window is a cemetery, there probably won’t be any kids coming to our house for candy. Most of our Halloween decor is still packed away.

So I’ve decided to repost something I wrote two years ago for Halloween.

As we head into the election (and boy oh boy are we headed there in this swing state), it’s a good reminder to me that evil is present in our world but it doesn’t always come in the forms we think.

You might not agree with everything I write here. I know, I’m changing all the time. And my fingers itch to delete or reword a few things…to maybe make it a little less snarky at points. Even so, I haven’t edited it. I think I stand by most of it still. But if you have some thoughts, I’m happy to hear them in the comments.

On to the repost…

In my childhood home, we celebrated Halloween with gusto. Dressed in homemade costumes (usually sewn by my mother), we took off trick-or-treating into the night (after dark), largely unsupervised.

If you can believe it, I grew up in a conservative Christian home in the 1980s—just after the “poisoned Halloween candy” scare and satanic-panic—and somehow, I missed the fact that many Christians felt that celebrating Halloween wasn’t, well, Christian. When I began writing about death and my own Halloween traditions, I started to understand that when it comes to Halloween—as my Texan grandfather used to say—some Christians are fer and some are agin.

I’ll admit that, in the past, I have been exasperated when Christians decried Halloween. I mean, were they the same people who wanted to ban A Wrinkle in Time because it “teaches occult practice?” I’m less inclined to frustration now because, even if I don’t agree, I can better understand why Halloween doesn’t sit well with some Christians.

I imagine that for some, the fact that Halloween is connected with pagan traditions can be troubling.1 Halloween has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain. Samhain was celebrated as the end of harvest and the beginning of winter when the world tilted toward death and the veil between worlds (and life and death) was thin. The tradition of going door-to-door bringing or begging food was associated with the appeasing of spirits, who were often portrayed by revelers in masks.2

In this same vein, there is a view that Halloween is a time when people flirt with the occult. Kids dress up as devils, witches, killers from horror movies and other characters often associated with evil. It’s a perfect recipe for fear.

So, let me offer some thoughts.

First of all, the church has known of the pagan roots of Halloween for a very long time. In fact, early Christian missionaries to the British Isles (think 5th or 6th centuries) were instructed by Pope Gregory not to avoid but to convert the local Celtic traditions into Christian traditions. November 1 eventually became All Saint’s Day (a day to remember the saints of the church who have died) and October 31 became All Hallow’s Eve, the night before.

When it comes to the forces of evil, I can’t write about the Christian mystics for a decade and not take evil seriously. I’m inclined to think that some people are more in touch with the places that evil seeps into the world. The mystics, especially my favorite medieval mystics, were pretty clear on the fact that there were evil forces in the world. If those forces are real, I think it’s true that some people feel more sensitive to them. And for some, that sensitivity can manifest itself during the Halloween season.

But let me offer a different way of thinking about these these evil forces. My view is that evil forces are often far less obvious than a kid dressed up as a devil or Harry Potter or a witch. If that is letting evil into our homes (and I don’t think it is…see my costumes below), it’s not likely to do as much damage as some other unChristian ideas.

As one friend pointed out to me while I wondered at the recent growing interest in pagan forms of spirituality (look at the Best Seller titles in your local Barnes and Noble), there are a lot of other ideas that have seeped into American life and, even Christianity, that are way more insidious, dangerous, and unChristian than a Jane Austen Tarot pack from Barnes and Noble.3 See racism and Christian nationalism, among others.

I also see Halloween a little differently. I see it as a time when our culture collectively agrees to take a peek at our mortality. We are a culture that is very death-averse and so Halloween and All Saints’ Day offer a time for Memento Mori, or remembering that we will die. At least, theoretically. I mean, most children dressed up as a Paw Patrol dog, a Storm Trooper (that would be my youngest son), or a blow-up dinosaur, are not thinking about their mortality. They are thinking about all the candy they will shortly be inhaling.

But some of us are trying to approach the idea of death a little more.

In my book Awakened By Death, I talk about a house down the street from us that goes all out for Halloween. This year, they have a skeleton as tall as their roof, a front yard filled with gravestones (or as my five year old calls them “gravystones”), ghouls in the windows, skulls on the fence. That house is the big draw for kids who come trick-or-treating on our street.

Incidentally, we literally live on Elm St (cue 80s horror movies). And we are the street for trick-or-treating in our small town. This year, our neighborhood put in a request for the city to shut down traffic for a few hours on Halloween to avoid any children being hit by cars. Our street is popular. And we only expect more visitors because our street closure made the local tv news (must’ve been a slow night).

During the pandemic, the house owners decided to go with a more muted decor and I heard several children express vocal disappointment. They had come to that house to be scared! And maybe we should let them be scared a little sometimes. They survived a pandemic. A little bit of Halloween gives them a chance to feel a “safe fear.” One neuropsychologist suggests that the increased adrenaline a kid can feel during these kinds of scares actually “intensifies feelings of alertness, energy, and strength.” In a time of deep anxiety and stress, it can actually be good for their sense of self and their ability to face their fears in a safe way. My young daughter was scared of the house down the street when we first moved here. But we walked over there together and talked about it and she was proud of herself afterwards for facing her fear.

So…if Halloween is painful or scary for you. If it feels wrong or invites evil into your thoughts, I get it. Step away. Do not engage. That’s fine. No judgement here.

But for those of us who tend to see it as a child’s holiday, or want to protect our children from facing their fears, I’m just suggesting you consider leaning in a little.

Look, I hate horror movies. I hate the gory/seriel killer/bloody costumes too. But a little scary house here, a ghost or skeleton there, a witch stirring around potion in a large cauldron…it might offer you or your kids a moment to face fears and give some ways for you to talk to your kids about the things that scare them.

Also, I doubt it will hurt anything to say hi to some kids who’ve looked forward to this night for a long time. Compliment their costume and give them a piece of candy. That’s it.

If that doesn’t stir you, think of Halloween as a good night to laugh at death. And maybe a way to remind ourselves that, in the end, death will also die.

Happy Halloween and Memento Mori.

Christiana

Memento Mori and other Amusing Musings:

• A throwback Spotify playlist I made when I was writing Awakened By Death.

• This album called Dream War by Ella Mine is on my current playlist as I write my novel (I know, I know…I’ve been writing it a long time). The vibe is perfect.

• I saw this gem at Michaels yesterday, two days after my wedding anniversary.4 I wish we’d had it when we started our podcast Til Death Do Us Part (which you can check out here or here). New episodes will be forthcoming when Matthew and I can get settled enough to record!

My books:

Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints

Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons from the Mystics