The Joy Grows: an Easter post at The Lent Project

Today, I'm over at Biola University's Lent Project, writing about Jesus meeting Mary Magdalene in a garden:

Even when we did find our way into gardens, and were refreshed by the common graces of sunlight and rain, we dragged with us our cloud of pollution, dimming the light and poisoning the ground. 

There was light, but it did not purify. Fruit, but it did not assuage our bottomless hunger. Water, but it could not quench our endless thirst. 

Then the Son of God became Man. 

He was light, and no pollution could abide in His brightness. 

He became the food that could truly feed us, and He Himself was the living water—the water that could flow over the dead lands and call life out of them once more. 

He took our sin upon Himself, and burned it all away.

Please head on over to The Lent Project to read the rest.


And if you're interested in reading more about how to celebrate Easter (and the rest of the church year) in your home, consider picking up Let Us Keep the Feast!



Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell






This post contains Amazon affiliate links; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

A poem for Easter Sunday

I'm posting a poem and a picture for each day of Holy Week this year. 

Today's poem always starts sneakily singing through my head as soon as Holy Week begins, getting stronger and stronger as we go through the Triduum. And today? It's shouting.  Here it is, our song of joy, the joy of the redeemed, the rescued, the ransomed. 

from "Easter"

by George Herbert

I got me flowers to straw thy way:

I got me boughs off many a tree:

But thou wast up by break of day,

And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,

Though he give light, and th’East perfume;

If they should offer to contest

With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,

Though many suns to shine endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we miss:

There is but one, and that one ever.

Easter Hope

For the early church, Easter was more than the time of year to remember Christ’s victory over death. It was a time to welcome new people into the body, and a time to remember why, embattled as they were, they had hope. For those of us living post-Constantine, it launches us into the rest of the church year, reminding us of the joy that compels us to worship Him.   

-Lindsay Marshall, Let Us Keep the Feast: Holy Week and Easter

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.) 

Weekend Links: Easter, Feminism, and more!

"The City Podcast: How to Go from Fasting to Feasting": I really enjoyed this particular podcast about the start of Easter - and about the real meaning of Easter.

"Next Year in Jerusalem":

But for us kids, there was no incongruity: Growing up Hebrew Catholics just meant having much more FUN on Easter than anyone else. My Christian friends wore straw hats, ate jelly beans, and maybe dyed eggs if their mothers could abide the mess. We, on the other hand, whooped it up for an entire weekend as we prepared for and celebrated the Passover seder, the ceremonial feast which Jesus ate with his disciples at the Last Supper. At our seder, which we held on Holy Saturday, there was chanting and clapping, giggling over the mysterious and grisly ceremonial roasted egg and horseradish root, glass after glass of terrible, irresistible sweet wine, special silver and china that only saw the light of day once a year, pillows for the chairs so we could “recline,” and the almost unbearable sweetness as the youngest child asked, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

"Yes, we still need feminism":

This is why we need feminism. Because someone needs to fight back, to tell these people, men and women: STOP. This is not what women are for. This is now how it’s supposed to go. This is not how life gets carried on. This is no life, for women or for men.

"What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes about the Message and the Medium":

Bill Watterson undertook a number of worthy crusades during the decade in which he made comic strip history –what fan of the Sunday Comics section can forget his epic battle to get the funnies printed at a decent size?– and he railed against “the cheapening of the comics” on a number of fronts. But it was his decision not to extract his characters from their natural setting and transfer them to “bedsheets and boxer shorts” that provides us all with an unforgettable living parable of artistic integrity.

Finally, I love this video about bullet journaling. It's such a cool concept - I'm going to start trying it this week!

"Let Us Keep the Feast: Holy Week and Easter" - availabe as an e-book!

 I'm happy to announce that in addition to being available in paperback, you can now purchase Let Us Keep the Feast: Holy Week and Easter as an e-book. You can buy it on Amazon for Kindle, and at the publisher's website for Kindle and other e-pub formats - for only $1.99. Instant delivery, right in time for Holy Week.

Let Us Keep the Feast will show you ways to bring the rhythms of the church year into your own home, so that the celebration of the life of the church becomes part of your daily life. Pick up a copy today!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

What people are saying about "Let Us Keep the Feast: Holy Week and Easter"

I'm excited to say that the Holy Week and Easter edition of "Let Us Keep the Feast" is now available for purchase! Here is what people are saying about it:

Summer and winter, day and night, work and rest. We are all familiar with these rhythms of life. This booklet introduces us to the rhythms of Christian life as lived according to the seasons of the Church year, with its feasts and fasts, its high-days and holidays. Helpful, challenging, and instructive: I recommend it.
     -Dr. Michael Ward, author of "Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis"

Brilliant and illuminating: that is the what I have found living the Church Year to be and what this book is. 
     -John Mark N. Reynolds, Provost at Houston Baptist University

I am pleased to commend to you this wonderful little book on the Church Year entitled "Let Us Keep the Feast." It will be helpful to anyone who wants to better understand and experience the spiritual growth that comes from living out the Christian Calendar. Each chapter ends with a number of suggestions to enrich the season, and this provides a variety of resources appropriate for children and families at home - music, fun activities, poetry, prayers, Scripture verses, and other suggested readings. I highly recommend it for any parent who wants to enhance the Sunday morning experience at Church by supplementing it with what takes place at home during the week.
     -The Rt. Rev. Jack Leo Iker, Bishop of Fort Worth

The feasts and festivals of the Christian year contain such a plethora of practices and depth of richness that most of us can barely manage to scratch the surface. However, the Let us Keep the Feast guide for Holy Week and Easter brings together in one place a cornucopia of resources that will certainly enrich anyone's celebration of this important Christological season. From learned explanations on the theological significance of Holy Week and Easter to practical suggestions and resources for celebrating these events meaningfully and with solemnity, this guide is indispensable for use in both the church and the home. Seasoned liturgists and newcomers to the church year will both benefit richly from this excellent book. I commend the authors for putting such a useful guide into the Church's hands.

-Rev. Greg Peters, PhD, Associate Professor of Medieval and Spiritual Theology, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University, author of "Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of the Religious Life"

Consider picking up a copy today!



Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


This post contains Amazon affiliate links. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Gamgee's baptism

Lest you think I asked my son to turn his face away from the camera so that I could have a blog-worthy picture, let me assure you that all of them look like this:
The ceremony itself was wonderful, and Gamgee did a beautiful job - he even walked up and down the aisle with the bishop so that everyone could see him - and my favorite part was when he came back and said excitedly, "I get to take communion now!"

But though we talked to him about everything that went along with the baptism himself, and he obediently did everything he'd been told to do, we forgot to mention there would be pictures afterwards, and after a three-hour ceremony that started before dawn, well, it was just too much:

It was a wonderful morning though. And he perked up again at the post-church-service brunch. :D

Adam and I are on the left in these pictures, btw, and the handsome couple on the right is my brother and his wife, the proud godparents. I'll leave you to figure out who the guy in the funny hat is.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Yarn and Easter Egg Dyes

One of the lovely things about being a liturgical Christian is that you don't need to get all your holiday done on one day. Easter is fifty days long, and if you don't get all your celebrating done on Easter Sunday itself, it's fine.

We didn't dye our eggs till yesterday. And when we were done, there was, of course, dye leftover.

And I had this yarn:

Pretty, but I'm not really a peach person. I bought it along with something else I really wanted once upon a time on Etsy. So I cut off a couple of pieces and test-dyed them. Here are the little dyed bits sitting on the unaltered yarn:

Blue! Green! Much more me. So I started the dye process, assisted by a little girl with pretty Easter-egg colored nail polish on:

I ended up with this:
Turning it over, I found that I'd been overly-ambitious and that it wasn't such a good idea to stuff three skeins of yarn into one Corningware dish - see the undyed peachy stuff underneath?

So I added some food coloring and heated it again. I got most of the peach stuff out, though there's still a bit here and there. Here it is when I was re-skeining it over the backs of two dining room chairs:

The cool thing is, I did get the long color changes I wanted. Instead of being variegated, it actually has a long length of green and then a long length of blue and then a long length of purple.

Here it is all pretty and dry:

I admit that it's not quite the color I was hoping for, and still a little too pink to be perfect, but for a first try I'm pretty pleased!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

the Lord is risen!

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

-from Easter, by George Herbert

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

just in the nick of time! Gamgee's Easter vest

It is so bright. So very bright. But the boy likes it, and I figure a bright color is just right for Bright Week:

If you think of it, please keep him in your prayers, as he's being baptized tomorrow.

A good Holy Saturday to you all,

Jessica Snell

Links! Hobbit holes, Lars Walker, the sexual revolution, and more!

Do you want your very own hobbit hole? Check this one out!

I think I might have my husband hooked on Lars Walker's books. Here's his review of The Year of the Warrior. Given his reaction, may I suggest that if you're looking for a Father's Day gift, this might be a good one?

Anthony Esolen's essay, "Sexual Revolution: Defend It, If You Can", can be found here and is well worth reading. An excerpt:

Sex—both the distinction between man and woman, and the act that unites man and woman in the embrace that is essentially oriented towards the future—is a foundational consideration for every people. When we ask, “Will a man be allowed to have more than one wife?” or “Will husbands and wives be allowed to divorce at will?” or “Will unmarried people be encouraged to behave as if they were married?”, we are asking, whether we understand it fully or not, “What kind of culture, if any, do we want to share?”

Last week I mentioned that we'd enjoyed a great new vegetarian recipe this Lent, but then I didn't give you a link to the recipe. I'm sorry! Here it is, the super-yummy black-bean pizza. (I leave off the avocados, but that's just because I - heretic Californian that I am! - don't like them that much.)

"Dear Auntie Leila: I don't know what to do for Easter." Good stuff.

Also good: "Men of Easter: John".

the final Easter dress

I didn't get a good picture of the whole thing, but this should give you the idea:
I made a lining with a flounce around the bottom to help the skirt stand out a little bit:

Now I just have Gamgee's vest to go!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

lots of lace!

I've finished all three dresses!

Well, I've finished all the crochet-work; I still have to line one of them, so I have no good pictures of that yet. I lucked out on Bess' though, because she has a slip from another dress that fits perfectly under the one I made, which saves me making a lining. Here's the dress:

I made the skirt (see the pretty skirt?)

using Doris Chan's Walking After Midnight pattern. It's a pattern for an adult skirt, so I took out a couple of the pattern repeats in order to make the waist smaller, and then I added a bodice of my own design, stealing the shell stitch pattern from yet another book.

I'm really pleased with how it turned out. But Bess? she's pleased with how twirly it is:

Daybook

outside my window . . . a lovely day. Cool and sunny and the air still smells fresh from the rain earlier in the week.

I am listening to . . . More Mumford and Sons. How can I not love a song that starts "Serve God, love me, and mend"? That quotation from Much Ado is one of my life's mottos . . .

I am wearing . . . a long-sleeved, forest green shirt with a cowl neck. I'm enjoying my long-sleeved shirts while I can, because pretty soon the weather will take its summer turn downhill into the 90s and stay there for months, and all I'll be able to stand wearing will be sundresses and tank tops with shorts.

I am so grateful for . . . Lapsang Souchong tea. Smoky goodness. Also something that needs to be enjoyed before the summer weather begins in earnest.

I'm pondering . . . prayer and obedience.

I am reading . . . The Way of Kings, Hearing God, the Purgatorio, Acedia & Me.

I am creating . . . My eldest daughter's Easter dress. I'm on the yoke, which is the last bit to do, save pressing and lining it.

around the house . . . I have an amaryllis blooming above my kitchen sink. I picked up several flower kits (pot, dirt and bulbs) on sale for $1 after Christmas, and am planting them one at a time, spacing them out so that I always have flowers.

from the kitchen . . . I made black bean pizza last night. It's definitely our favorite new vegetarian recipe discovered this Lent.

real education in our home . . . We're getting ready for my daughter's first science fair. I'm so proud of her, because instead of just a project, she's decided to do a real experiment. She's making three different varieties of paper airplanes and testing them to see which will fly the farthest.

the church year in our home . . . Lenten cooking. Crocheting the kids' special Easter outfits. Having some serious theological conversations with our son, who is getting baptized at Easter vigil. I'm so excited for him.

recent milestones . . . I've got both of the main characters of my novel back to England (most of the novel takes place in France, but the dénouement takes place in England). Getting them back onto their native shores feels like an accomplishment to me!

the week ahead. . . We've got the science fair coming up and I've got a doctor's appointment, but other than that, it's a refreshingly normal week. I hope. :)

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Lucy's Easter dress! (modeled over ladybug leggings)

One down, three to go!

It's the weekend and I want to do too many things at once

I want to write on my real novel (the oh-no-war-broke-out-and-I'm-in-the-wrong-country one).

I want to write on my "fun" novel (the intergalactic space princess one).

I want to write on my other fun novel (the reality show romance - don't laugh. Or do. It's supposed to be funny).

I want to read the new Miles Vorkosigan book (this is probably going to win out).

I want to read the new Cooking Light I just got in the mail.

I want to read the other magazines I just got in the mail.

I want to crochet a bathroom rug. 

I want to cross-stitch.

I want to read every single Cat the Cat book to my kids.

I want to sing every single Easter hymn in the hymnal (yes, I know it's the wrong time of year, but Christ yet risen).

I want to make toffee (I'm not going to, it's not Christmas yet).

I want to work on a certain someone's Christmas present (but I won't elaborate on that here because said person reads this blog - ha! maybe it's YOU.)

I want to finish sewing the birthday dress I started for my poor firstborn TWO YEARS AGO.

I want to declutter at least three different places in the house.

This is how I feel, apparently, when I finish a really, really good workout.

(Miles? Miles, are you there?)

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Easter earthquake

I was just standing outside talking to some neighbors, when I started feeling slightly seasick. "Do you feel that?" my neighbors asked. And I realized I did, and it went on and on and on, a horrible rolling motion that made me feel like I was on a boat out on the open sea.

It was long, and then when we thought it was over, it started again.  And I said, "that was big, and it wasn't close," because when they're close, earthquakes are terribly jerky, and when they're far away, they roll. But if they're far away and they're small, you don't feel them. So something that easy to feel, with that rolling motion, had to be big and far. 

When I came in, I googled it, and came up with a 6.9 in Baja. Yep. Far and big. And then I thought, wow, it's weird to have been in SoCal long enough to know how to interpret earthquakes.

But my immediate next thought was the people in Baja, where it hit. It's only about 10 minutes ago that it happened, so I don't know if it was in a populated area or not, or how much damage it did. But now I'm praying for them on this Easter Sunday. Would you too?

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica snell

the Lord is risen!

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.
The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.
-George Herbert, from Easter

You've got to go over to Smithical

Right here, and read #3 on her Quick Takes list. It's about why she loves Lent, and it's short, and I think it's the best thing I've read about Lent this year. It's exactly right.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Ascension Day

It is Ascension Day tomorrow. Traditionally, on Ascension Day, you climb a mountain to remember Christ ascending into heaven. We climbed a very tall hill last year, and while I'm hoping next year to make it up a mountain, I think we're going to settle for a short hill this year, as we have four very small children to haul up it.

It's possible the twins will have a bad night and we won't make it, but I'm hoping to take the kids to the park on Saturday and find a small hill the toddlers can climb themselves, and then we can talk about how Jesus went away to prepare a place for us, and how he'll come back and receive us unto himself. "Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again." Thanks be to God!

I love the church year.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell