Greet This Day In Peace

Because she has been blessed with a true gift for communicating and an art for utilizing language; and because what she has to say is well worth listening to and made both Jared and me teary; and because she is godmother to those feet and one of our dear, dear friends; and because we love her: We invite you to listen to Molly Sabourin's most recent podcast.

Greet This Day In Peace

This is the first in a series and we will post the rest as they become available.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

"Tell me yourself, I challenge you-answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature-that little child beating its breast with its fist, for instance-and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly...

It was a Sunday evening. I sat alone, propped up against the bunks in my room on the sixth floor of Houghton Hall, my college dorm. Outside, the noises of the city and the voices and laughter of young woman, filtered into my silent space, and I encountered the above words from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for the first time. It was one of those moments (and I had several in college) in which everything I had staked my existence was rent from me. I felt as if my heart had been ripped out of me, chewed up, and spit into a thousand pieces upon the floor, and somehow I was to put it all back together. Feeling abandoned and nauseous, I wept.

How can a benevolent, loving God allow suffering? Where is He when His creation seems to reek with misery? Frankly, in my opinion, there is no good answer. But what I have come to accept over the course of the years is that suffering is inevitable; it is part of the very fabric of our lives, and not one of us will escape its claws. But I have also come to believe that we each have a choice: we can either lapse into bitterness because of it and become less than human or we can acknowledge it as a gift which enables us to transcend our selves so that we can become what we were truly meant to be.

Moreover, at the heart of Christianity, is the Incarnation. Though God, Jesus Christ became man and lived in the very flesh in which we live, that flesh which often seems so cumbersome, that flesh which feels pain, bleeds, and dies. And so over the years I have come to recognize and more fully believe that God is still with us. To draw from St. Patrick, He is within us, beneath us, above us, beside us, around us. He is in the heart of all who love us and in the mouth of friend and stranger. He suffers with us and comforts and restores us.

Today is poetry Wednesday. My choice for this week is John Updike's, "Seven Stanzas at Easter."

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that- pierced-died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us now seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

Be Grateful

"April is the cruellest month," T.S. Eliot commences his work, "The Wasteland," and throughout the duration of the last several weeks, I have oft repeated this line but with a protest and a query, "Should not January receive this portrayal, Mr. Eliot?" I have long since forsaken any attempts to conjure up feelings of gaiety with the launch of a new year. While in theory I laud the practice of resolutions and a chance for a fresh start, in practice, I tend to feel a little melancholy, a little restless, a little detached.

Upon reflection, I understand that my tendency to experience a lackluster spirit around this time is partially due to the reality that many of my loved ones encountered death in this month and that despite the years, loss continues to permeate my being as memories abound. Moreover, within the last twenty-five days, many of those close to me have endured losses of their own - a mother, a brother, a grandmother, a daughter, a sister, an unborn child - and I mourn with them. And then of course, there is Haiti and her people. With so much suffering and tragedy, the temptation to acquiesce to feelings of despondency and sink into lethargy is real. Yet, we must stand vigilant and wage war against these venomous seeds lest they take root and destroy our very selves. After all, despite the death, there is always the resurrection.

Last Saturday evening, as my husband grocery shopped, my eldest son created new Lego ships in the living room, my youngest son slept, and I cleaned the basement, Natalie Merchant's "Life is Sweet," popped up on Pandora. Merchant's vocals never fail to elicit some form of emotion within me, and as I stopped wiping the layers of dust off our furniture and listened to the words of this song, I scooped my middle son, who was quietly sitting on the couch gobbling down a bowl full of goldfish crackers, into my arms and just sat with him, confessing all for which I have to be grateful.

New Morning For The World

In 1982, American composer and educator, Joseph Schwantner debuted New Morning for the World: Daybreak of Freedom, a work honoring the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As part of the piece, Schwantner included narrations which drew from a variety of Dr. King's speeches spanning a ten year period. Last November, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra performed New Morning and Jared, Thomas, and I were present. Though vacating our rather good seats for the balcony because of Thomas' inclusion into symphony attendance, Schwantner's work and the powerful words narrated by a local African-American social worker who grew up in one of Rock Island's public housing developments, left both Jared and I awe struck and a bit weepy.

Today our family paid homage to Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and all those countless others known and unknown, who were willing to take a stand against the cruel injustice and inequality that suffused this land- men and women, black and white, who were willing to endure beatings, imprisonment, loss of status and reputation, and even their lives because of their dedication to civil rights for all people. Today my sons and I read and talked about Dr. King's life. We viewed images from vintage Life magazines of Freedom Riders boarding buses destined for hostile territories, African Americans being pushed and beaten though unarmed and utilizing tactics of non-violent resistance, and National Guard troops standing in front of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the school prepared for desegregation. And we returned to Schwantner and the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

There comes a time when people get tired-tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.

We are going to walk non-violently and peacefully to let the nation and the world know that we are tired now. We've lived with slavery and segregation three hundred and forty-five years. We've waited a long time for freedom.

Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries, our foreparents labored in this country without wages-and built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation. And yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

When the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our challenge and our responsibility.

I have a dream. The dream is one of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men do not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a place where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality, and men will dare to live together as brothers. Whenever it is fulfilled, we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into this bright and glowing daybreak of freedom and justice for all God's children.

Stirring My Blood

In his forward of the second edition of poet Rabindranath Thakur's work, Song Offerings, Yeats wrote that Thakur's 113 poems, "stirred my blood as nothing has for years." The poet and his work are new to me, but the poems are lovely snippets, pregnant with beauty and wisdom reflective of a heart searching for God and the abundant life. Enjoy!

O now beneath your feet's dust let
My head kneel on the ground.
Yield up my arrogance to tears,
Let all my pride be drowned.
If glory to myself I offer
It is self-insult that I suffer-
And then I die within myself,
Turning around, around.
Yield up my arrogance to tears,
Let all my pride be drowned.


Let me not advertise myself
In various things I do-
But let my deeds fit your desire,
That your will may come through.
O for your true peace is my longing,
And your dear image's belonging.
Within my heart of lotus petal
May your shield be found.
Yield up my arrogance to tears,
Let all my pride be drowned.


"Strong Mercy"

My desires are many and my cry is pitiful,
but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals;
and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple,
great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked---this sky and the light, this body and the
life and the mind---saving me from perils of overmuch desire.
There are times when I languidly linger
and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal;
but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by
refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire




"Little of Me"

Let only that little be left of me
whereby I may name thee my all.
Let only that little be left of my will
whereby I may feel thee on every side,
and come to thee in everything,
and offer to thee my love every moment.

Let only that little be left of me
whereby I may never hide thee.
Let only that little of my fetters be left
whereby I am bound with thy will,
and thy purpose is carried out in my life---and that is the fetter of thy love.


"Beggarly Heart"

When the heart is hard and parched up,
come upon me with a shower of mercy.
When grace is lost from life,
come with a burst of song.
When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from
beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner,
break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.
When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one,
thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.


Click here for more poetry Wednesday.

Melkan Genna

That would be, "Happy Christmas" in Amharic, the language spoken in Addis Ababa, the capitol city of Ethiopia. As old calendarists, Ethiopians celebrate Christmas on January 7th. This year, our friends Tesi and Zach invited us to celebrate Ethiopian Christmas with their family and friends. Besides enjoying an incredible meal of some traditional Ethiopian dishes and homemade pizza and ice cream, the Johnson crew had a great time getting to know our friends and their loved ones better. Thank you Klipsch's!

These three are just too cute. For sure, we will have Ethiopian outfits next year for all our boys and our little girl. And from the pictures below, you can see Thomas, Trysten, and Tariku enjoyed a whole lot of wrestling.

12+ Days of Christmas

The first of many Star Wars toys Thomas received. Thank you, Grandpa Johnson!

Don't worry, Elliot really loves Uncle Dan's and Aunt Sarah's dog Charlie.

Elliot, wearing his birthday suit for Christmas

Typical Jared morning hair

Russell really loves to say, "Cheese!"

Russell on Christmas morning

Elliot with a new copy of I'm A Little Teapot. This copy is strictly off limits without parental supervision since the Wonder Twins literally pulled apart their last copy.

Russell with another new copy of Drummer Hoff - another book previously destroyed and also off limits.

Yes, we had this one too. Now we have another. What can I say, my two little ones really like to pull things apart.

All the boys received new Spider Man umbrellas in their stockings.

Thomas' favorite present of all - bubble wrap!

Each day throughout Nativity, the boys and I lit a candle as we read the a small portion from the life of the saint of the day. Here's the completed wreath with all 25 days.

Christmas Day at Grandma Johnson's! No, Elliot did not receive a colander as a gift.

More Star Wars Legos

I have absolutely no idea about this photo.

On the 26th, my sister, Rebecca (we in the Midwest call her Becky), my brother-in-law, John, and nephew and niece, Joey and Ali, arrived from New Jersey. Here's Thomas and cousin Joey playing football.

Grandpa Swanson and Thomas probably watching yet another Wallace and Gromit.

The Family

The 28th. My 37th birthday. Just call it 40.

Uncle Jared and Joey playing an old favorite, Monopoly.

Russell

Russell with Grandma Swanson. And good news, my parents are having someone come to measure the kitchen for a new floor. Really, that floor has been in that kitchen my entire life. Too long.

Elliot pulling out an oldie but goodie - "The Pirate."

The cousins

Elliot wearing Jared's 3-D glasses from Avatar

My sister-in-law and brother-in-law (and baby Grimm in utero) arrived from their home in Sheboygan, WI, for New Year's Eve at Grandma Johnson's. Here's Elliot getting ready to party. We had to keep reminding my children that it was not that kind of party.

Russell and Uncle Dan

Aunt Sarah and baby

Let Them Eat Cake!

"The true light has appeared and bestows enlightenment on all. Christ, who is above all purity, is baptized with us; He brings sanctification to the water and it becomes a cleansing for our souls…. Salvation comes through washing; the water, the Spirit; by descending into the water, we ascend to God. Wonderful are Your works, O Lord, glory to You!"

Originating in Egypt during the third century, the Feast of Theophany/Epiphany is celebrated on January 6th and is a more ancient feast than Christmas Day. In an apparent effort to combat a pagan holiday to the Egyptian sun god during the winter solstice, Christians began to celebrate a feast commemorating the epiphaneia of the true Savior. Initially, Christ's birth, the visit of the Magi, and Christ's baptism in the River Jordan were all celebrated in this one feast as all were viewed as manifestations of Christ's divinity. While most in the west have come to emphasize the arrival of the kings from the east on this day, the Orthodox world commemorates the baptism of Christ by St. John the Baptist. Over the years, I have come to love this feast and all it entails- the blessing of the waters, carrying home bottles of holy water from church to use in times of need throughout the year, and our annual house blessing. Even after celebrating for the whole of the Christmas season (that would be the twelve days between December 25th and January 6th), I still seem to be confronted with the post-Christmas blahs and the seeming bleakness of the bitterly cold winter months ahead, and am desperate in my attempts to recollect myself after the busyness of the last month. What grace the Feast of Theophany is to me personally. Watching the blessing of the water by our priest last Tuesday evening and then receiving a splash of the holy water on my head as we venerated the cross provided this sinful vessel with hope. By entering into the River Jordan and being baptized, Christ not only identified with the mundane like me but also commenced the renewal of all creation. Transformation is possible. Because the divine took on flesh, the flesh can taste of the divine. What a gift.

In honor of the arrival of the kings from the east, the boys and I baked a chiffon cake with whipped cream frosting. The cake was supposed to look like a crown, which it didn't, but we tried our best by using M&Ms as jewels.

This is Elliot acting as one of the kings, wearing an ever-disintegrating autumn crown. Isn't he so sweet?

The M&Ms were the first choice of all the boys but Russell clearly enjoyed the rest of his dessert.

Traditionally a bean, coin, or trinket is hidden in the cake and the person whose piece contains the hidden treasure is declared the king or queen of the feast. Though I forgot to bake our bean and had to shove it into the cake post-baking, it worked. Yes, Thomas was the King of the Day and was able to forgo bed-making and laundry duties as a result of his reign.

Thomas was so tickled by his very silly daddy, who kept yelling "The king says..." and then repeating every word and/or noise Thomas uttered, that at one point he had to run out of the room because he could not contain himself. Boy do I love that face!