Shoveling in the Dark

One evening in December Sara got stuck in the snow on the way home from Norwich. I called friends (who were coming over for supper anyway) to rescue her, since they had snow tires and I didn't. With a prayer for their safety, I trusted that Sara would be delivered home soon.

However, the situation left me tending the kids solo with a driveway that needed shoveling quick. So I put Micah down for his evening nap, bundled up Gwendolyn, and We Two Elder Ones went out to shovel the driveway. I set the baby monitor next to the front door and looked around for the requisite equipment.

"This is my snow shovel," says Gwendolyn, picking up her green plastic beach shovel.

"Yes, it is," say I, going for the steel-handled adult-sized one.

"I also use it for sand and dirt," she says.

"Yes, you do," I say, meditating on the completeness of my daughter's observation. That shovel has dug up earthworms in the garden and poured foundations for sand castles at the beach.

I start hoisting lumps of snow and tossing them off the driveway. Gwendolyn trundles out to the middle of the drive and starts flinging bits of snow into the yard. About three minutes pass.

"Daddy, this is my snow shovel," says Gwendolyn, pausing in her labors. It's dark, and she is illuminated by the outdoor flood lights glowing on the snow.

"Yes, it is," I say, reminding myself that deja vu is common for parents of pre-schoolers.

"I also use it for dirt and sand," she says.

Usually the deja vu is not this precise. "Yes, you do, my lovely."

She returns to her labors. I make another ten feet or so of progress.

"Daddy," says Gwendolyn in mid-toss, "I use this shovel for sand, snow, and dirt."

"Yep," I reply, wondering if she's working on linguistic permutation.

Ten more feet and the same exchange happens. Then again. Six times she informs me, simply and clearly, of all the purposes to which her green shovel may be put. As if making a sales pitch to an amnesiac. And shoveling all the time.

We got the driveway shoveled enough for safe entry and exit. Sara made it home safely with our friends (thanks, Jaindls, for the rescue!). That night it kept snowing, so the next day would mean more shoveling. But no worries: as my daughter made perfectly clear, we had fitting and versatile equipment. Not to mention hard-working and observant help.

~ emrys

Above the Books

While hunting Christmas gifts for my brother and his wife last year, I came upon the following sign while perusing River Read, a wonderful independent bookstore in Binghamton:

Philosophy, Gender, Sports. I know that it is unfair to expect a logical sequence in book categories. But seeing those three words up against each other made me wonder about the connection between them. And then I got to wondering about the possibility of cross-category genres: I almost began searching the shelves for the book(s?) that fit into all three categories. There's one I'd like to read.

Metacategorical analyses: just another reason to visit your local independent bookstore.

~ emrys tyler

Eat First!

"Help yourselves to food, and welcome! Once you've dined, we'll ask you who you are."

Spoken by King Menelaus to Pisistratus and Telemachus in The Odyssey (Fagles translation, p126, lines 68-69).

When was the last time you had occasion to say, "Eat first, then we'll find out who you are"?

~ emrys

Circle Marks the Spot

 In our early years, our parents used to offer variations on the process of opening gifts at Christmas. One was the "Russian nesting doll" variation: We opened a huge box found under the tree only to reveal a slightly smaller box inside, followed by a slightly smaller box inside that, and so on.

 Sometimes the core of the nesting boxes had a small gift inside. Other times, the smallest box contained a clue as to where the actual gift, which might be as large as a bicycle, lay.

 My favorite variation, however, was the treasure hunt. The initial gift (or envelope) contained a hint leading us to the next clue, found somewhere in the house.

 As we got older, the hints became little riddles in themselves. We had to work out where the next clue was, which process sometimes took some trial and error.

 (My apologies for the sideways photos here; Blogger is messing up my formatting.)

 This year Gwendolyn's main gift from me came at the end of a treasure hunt. Since she's not adept at reading yet, Sara had the brilliant idea of making it a visual hunt. On the reverse of every colored circle was a photograph of the next colored circle at its location in the house. When Gwendolyn identified where the picture was taken, she could easily find the next circle.

What fun to follow an excited three-and-a-half-almost-four-year-old around the house as she found the clues! It was certainly worth staying up late to put the construction paper circles in place.

Next post: what was behind the orange and green doors . . .

~ emrys

Deviation

For the past ten years, I have made an anniversary gift for my wife out of the material assigned for that year (probably by Hallmark in a grand marketing plan). Last year's gift was made out of tin; my list then begins skipping every five years--I did not have a material for the eleventh anniversary. (I have recently been told that the material is steel--oy!)

The day of our eleventh anniversary last month we were committed to the annual caroling event with the youth of our congregation, which does not make for an exciting anniversary date. So we postponed the celebration until January. Last week Sara I and went out for supper at one of our better local restaurants, then met up with friends at another local joint for the best desserts in Afton. While we were together, I gave Sara her anniversary gift this year, something I've been planning since last winter: a Silver Star.

For eleven years I have been proud to be married to such a wonderful woman, full of dedication, industry, smarts, and love. Her superb sacrifice for the community after the flood of 2011 gave me an excuse to honor her a bit extra. Because the image and symbol are handy, I used the military honor of the Silver Star to mark it. Here's the text from the award that hangs now on our wall:

"In September 2011 Sara coordinated flood relief efforts operating out of Nineveh Presbyterian Church, working long hours under stressful and exhausting conditions. Meanwhile she continued to provide for the needs of a household which included one busy husband and one energetic toddler, all while in the throes of early pregnancy. She showed a character of perseverance, compassion, and patience under all circumstances. For these inspiring acts which would make any other husband jealous, Sara Jane Tyler is awarded the Silver Star."

Thanks, Sara Jane, for eleven years!

~ emrys

Just Watching

It's Monday morning. Sara's asked for time to work, so I've got the kids. Micah is down for his morning nap.

The morning has been the familiar inexhaustible litany of requests, exclamations, and cries from Gwendolyn. Then: something unexpected. She points to her gingerbread house, made with Granny in early December, which has been sitting on our counter for a month. I can't help looking at it and seeing mouse attractant.

"We have to put this outside for the birds and the squirrels." Squirrels still comes out like krurruls from my three-and-a-half-almost-four-year-old's lips.

I have no idea where she came up with this idea. I try not to let my happiness seem excessive. "Really?"

"Yeah." Matter-of-fact. As if everyone puts out gingerbread houses on January 14th for local fauna to eat. As if it's a Catholic feast day.

We don our boots, hats, and mittens. The air is cold. Right there, outside the kitchen picture window, we lay the cookie abode to rest, a hapless victim of nature. Then we come inside.

Without a word Gwendolyn retrieves her "oggles," binoculars made out of two mismatched paper towel tubes glued together and decorated with princess and butterfly stickers (magnification: 1X). She perches on a chair next to the picture window and peers through her binoculars at the gingerbread house, six feet and a world away on the other side of the triple panes. I sit next to her, gazing into the cold January sky.

"Daddy, you need your oggles."

I reach over to the counter and pick up my pair of toilet paper tubes with DADDY inked on one side. Gwendolyn made a pair for every member of the family, including Micah, how sees cardboard only as a fantastic chew toy.

Now we are partners in the watching, our worlds divided evenly into two circles.

 The gingerbread house sits alone against the pale green and brown of early winter, a steel blue sky showing no sign either of birds or squirrels. But we watch.

For ten minutes we sit in silence. Ten minutes: a blessed eternity in my life with a whirlwind preschooler, with no words, no whining, not even the quiet contemplative singing she often does. She is too focused to speak, riveted by the expectation that at any moment a flock of birds or warren of squirrels will appear in the field of her binoculars. The moment is full of gravity and hope. We are watching.

Just watching.

She is watching for the hidden beneficiaries of this unexpected winter treat.

I am watching, silent with joy, yet another facet of this ever-new life lit by our winter window.

We are watching, together.

~ emrys

Christ's Bounty

Four or five years ago, one of the departed saints of Nineveh, Doris White, began a program that she called Christmas Town. It has since come to be called Christ's Bounty, but the content is mostly the same: a winter giveaway of food, clothing, and toys to local families in need. For the first week in December, the sanctuary fills up with boxes of food. It turns out that the pews are the best staging area for the boxes before they're given away on a Saturday morning.

 Christ's Bounty is probably one of the top two or three programs done by Nineveh Presbyterian Church in terms of participation (not counting Sunday morning worship). And it is one of our actions that comes closest to James' description of "true religion" for the early Church (James chapter 1); for this I am proud of our little congregation of saints. God certainly does good work through them.

There are corollary benefits, as well. You may be able to make out my son Micah being carried on his mother's belly as she works amidst the other box-loaders. Gwendolyn, too, loves to be a part of the set up for Christ's Bounty, in no small measure because she likes to ride on whatever cart is currently carrying goods from here to there. But in the meanwhile, they are being exposed to a central mission of the Church: to  care for the poor, the widows, and the orphans.

It is my hope and prayer that this work will become a core part of their Christian spirituality as adults. Christ's Bounty, I think, gets them off to a good start.

~ emrys

Gifts from Friends

A colleague of mine is an avid textile artist, and along with a couple of other colleagues from my presbytery, enjoys producing works of art for members of the next generation as they appear. Here are the jacket and cap made for Micah--fitting just right his six-month-old frame. (Big Sister could not help but get in the way of the camera's eye.)

Thanks, Barbara, for your gorgeous work!

~ emrys

Lay of the Land

Two resources were always available in my dad's house: the Encyclopedia Britannica (the full set) and a globe. These things had a more certain place in Dad's abode than a home-cooked meal or sufficient toilet paper. When my brother and I came to Dad with an off-the-wall question (and there were more than we could count), Dad never responded by saying, "I don't know." If our question started with "Where is . . ." then Dad took us to the globe to point to exactly where Timbuktu, Beijing, or Nicaragua was. If the question began with "What is . . ." then we went to the Encyclopedia.

Perhaps as a result, I have always loved maps. During my Dungeons & Dragons days, my favorite part of my Dungeon Master's work was creating maps. Maps provide the opportunity to see history, movement, and possibility laid out in brilliant lines and color. Geography is so important, in fact, that some students of the art, like Jared Diamond, have asserted that the most powerful guiding force in history and culture is the lay of the land (see Diamond's book Collapse).

When I inherited my part of Dad's estate, I took into possession Donald Matthew's Atlas of Medieval Europe (1986). It sat on Dad's shelf all of my high school and college years; over the past few months I finally read it. Far from an "atlas" like the ones we used to buy at Walmart to navigate US highways (before the Garmin made paper obsolete), the cover of Matthew's Atlas boasts 75,000 words of text and 25,000 words in captions (with a relatively sparse 64 maps). The book reads more like a survey of medieval history with a heavy seasoning of maps.

I shan't review the book here. If you are not presently yawning at the idea of this Atlas, then it's for you. All others would probably find the dizzying survey of place-names, persons, and historical events to serve only as a cure for insomnia.

What impressed me about Matthew's work was its sheer scope: the book offers a "view from space" over the shifting landscape of one thousand years of European history. (He does well, by the way, to include the oft-neglected Arabic side of the Mediterranean.) And over the course of its pages I re-discovered one of the blessings I glean from reading history: the present comes into better perspective. I don't mean here a trite "lesson of history" that may keep me (little singular me!) from falling over some great precipice of cultural error. Rather, I take comfort that the great vicissitudes of human events that seem, in a moment, to threaten everything we live for, have in fact been going on for a very long time. Though media pundits would have us believe that today's election, today's crisis, today's war could be the pivot-point of all civilization . . . none has been so. Neither will this one be. We humans are, by nature, slow; the God who created the globe is a slow God; even the fulcrum of human history--the resurrection of Christ--takes years to change a single generation. Until the moment when Christ returns in glory, everything will take longer than we wish, or than we fear.

The silent backdrop of geography, when one allows the scurrying ants of humanity to fly across it in time-lapse acceleration, reveals the geologic nature of great change. Time is a river into which one can only set foot once; history is the river's sediment which takes eons to make new land.

Go in peace across this soil; it was long before we set foot on it, and it shall claim us before we have even scratched its surface with our plows.

~ emrys

The Shadow

Last week I had the privilege of viewing part one of Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit. Among so many other things, Jackson’s works capture on screen one of the characteristics of Tolkien’s work that I find so appealing: they are epic. In scope of timeline, breadth of detail, and depth of meaning, the Tolkien/Jackson fusion is epic. Epic works have, in the short-attention-span theater of our present media climate, become almost antiquated. The reductionistic assumptions of contemporary intellectual and artistic endeavors look askance at attempts to paint the world with anything but pointilistic strokes. Today’s commentators speak of overarching metanarratives the way historians refer to the naming of “The War to End All Wars.”

I have been influenced by this reductionistic tendency. I gained sharper awareness of this when I watched Ian McKellan’s Gandalf the Grey sit at table with Saruman, Elrond, and Galadriel. As he tried to convince them that a greater darkness then the Pale Orc loomed over Middle Earth, I felt my soul shudder under a foreshadow of world-consuming evil. And then it occurred to me that I may have been lured into something just a bit over-the-top. A nameless necromancer who seeks to take over the world? Melodramatic, said my inner postmodern critic--or at very least maybe a bit too much.

Perhaps--until yesterday, when a man shot his mother and drove to a local elementary school in order to murder unsuspecting teachers and young children.

The social, emotional, and legal contours of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine remain too fuzzy to define well. Perhaps they will become clearer in the future, but as far as I am presently concerned, they are beyond speculation. What has become clear to me again is the shadow whose reaches extend farther than we are aware until we look up from our reduced microcosms. Tolkien had his inkling finger on something inescapable: evil has epic proportions.

The fact that we cannot discern clearly the emotional and social roots of the behavior of those like Adam Lanza, and the fact that the scene at Sandy Hook bears an appalling resemblance to the news from northern Mali or the Lord’s Resistance Army, bear witness to the fact that the depths of evil are beyond our comprehension. They give the lie to trends of contemporary voices who would prefer to treat evil as only so much lint which may be easily cleaned out of our own navels, if we would just examine them long enough. The terrifying hiddenness of these atrocities choke us up with the possibilities that my neighborhood may be cultivating future shootings, that my family systems may be empowering the next shooter, and that I may tomorrow find myself to be, if not perpetrator, then victim.

We mourn not just the loss of life and innocence, but we shiver under the cold Shadow from which the Balrog emerged and whose presence heralds the work of a Necromancer.

But—and I write all of the above only as preamble to this—we do not mourn as those who have no hope. When, according to Matthew’s account, King Herod of Judea slaughtered the children of Bethlehem, he did so in order to extinguish hope. Yet Hope persisted, growing in the person of Jesus, until his innocence was finally slaughtered by unjust execution three decades later. By then, however, Hope could not be quenched. Jesus Christ rose from the dead to reveal that despair cannot conquer Hope, that the Shadow cannot grasp the Light no matter how far its reach, and that death does not get the final word over Life. The only question that remains, to those of us who reduce life and death to disjointed icons in a shattered world, is: Do I believe in the epic Life of Christ?

To say Yes is not to oversimplify the massive challenges before us. The tragedies of Sandy Hook, Oklahoma City, Martin Luther King, Matthew Shepard, and Malala Yousufzai--just to name a few--will not brook glib platitudes designed to administer opiate for our souls. Christ is not palliative care for a society on hospice. To say Yes to Hope, Yes to Resurrection, Yes to Christ’s unquenchable Life means penetrating pain like smoke jumpers into the fire. Saying Yes means venturing into the mazes of society to slay dreadful minotaurs. Saying Yes means choosing to enter the Shadow of Mordor armed only with Hope that Gandalf the Grey will indeed return as Gandalf the White—in time to save us from the armies of darkness. Saying Yes means volunteering to suffer our own executions for the sake of those who did not choose theirs, because we know that someone greater than our own lives is at work here.

We cannot escape the epic character of evil. We can, however, embrace the epic Good which has been offered to us.

~ emrys