Weekly Links: Warlike Hymns, the Work-Work Balance, and more!

SOME GOOD READING FOR YOUR SUNDAY AFTERNOON...

Faith

-"Are Our Hymns Too Warlike?" - Such a good explanation of (and defense of!) battle imagery in Christian music.

-"The Work-Work Balance" - Just Anne, being awesome again.

-"I Am Overweight":

This Lent, I decided to move my body more. I believe that God created us as whole people, not as brains-on-sticks, and I want to live into that conviction. That means taking care of my body.

-"What Could Possibly Be Wrong with Christian Masturbation?" - I don't share the author's Catholicism, and hence I don't agree with her entirely, but this is a very thoughtful take on the topic, and I appreciated reading a thoughtful take on something we don't want to usually bother being thoughtful about.

-"Lent and the Preschooler" - It's so fun to see someone using the suggestions from "Let Us Keep the Feast" (and from other awesome resources) in real life!

Family

-"Three Views of Marriage" - good stuff.

-"On the Good of Sleeping with a New Woman Every Night" :

So there is always a new woman beside us, and one at least partially of our own making, as we are at least partially made by her. But it is naive to think that we know her, or she us, just because we live together. To find her again, you must do what you did when you found her at first: you must pay court to her. Not always and not every day, for that would be a bore of a different order and would lose the element of surprise. But from time to time, you must rediscover this woman who is both the same and different from the one you married.

Fiction

-"Transitional Forms": I enjoyed this free piece of fiction from Lightspeed: it offers you a bit of the Old West with your sci-fi.

-Finally, there's a new movie about Biblical events that's just come out, "Risen", and I appreciated both of these (very different) takes on it:

     -"'Risen' Reflects the Subversive Power of the Resurrection"

                      and

    -"Risen: Movies, Faith, and the Bible".





Hope the rest of your weekend is restful and good!
-Jessica Snell


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Brother Ass

Pieter Lastman, Balaam i oslica, PD, via Wikimedia Commons

I've been thinking a lot about how we carry our emotions in our bodies. We feel fear as a knot in our stomach or a race in our pulses. We feel joy in the sudden rush of adrenalin and a glow on our faces.

But so often we ignore the emotions. (Which we can't do. Not really.)  We don't want to feel them, especially the bad ones.  And sometimes we don't want to feel the good ones either, because we're scared of loving them too much before we inevitably lose them.

So instead, we run from our emotions, or fight them, or try to push them away. And where do we push them? Into our bodies.

I think. This is a theory I'm working on, anyway. I think we let our bodies carry the emotions we won't feel. (Or can't bear to feel.)

Like Balaam's Ass carrying the prophet, our bodies carry our feelings.

And sometimes the burden gets too heavy, and our bodies suddenly refuse. They stop, and fall down on their knees, and crush us against the wall.


Our bodies can carry our emotions for a while.

But not forever.

Eventually, we have to face what's in our hearts, we have to face the structure of our minds (that grew well or stunted in our youth), we have to face the formation of our souls.

And we have to begin the slow, hard work of learning what was bent in us, and how, and why, and where-do-we-go-from-here.

And it's to be hoped that we have wise counselors, mentors, psychologists, pastors, friends, spouses, etc., to help us in the process.

But you can't ask your body to bear your burdens forever. Eventually, everything you are will come out into the light.

Whether you want it to or not.

Your body can't bear it forever. It's finite. It just can't.

It will break down.

This is the way of bodies.


But these bodies are not forever.

By the grace of God, by faith in Christ, our hearts will be whole, and they will have whole bodies to bear them.

We hope for a better resurrection.

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.  Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,  in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.  When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

“O death, where is your victory? 

O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

-1 Corinthians 15:50-58 




Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

on dressing identical twins identically

My two youngest daughters are identical (or, monozygotic) twins. They look an awful lot alike.

(And for the record: yes, I can tell them apart, but, yes, sometimes I mistake one for the other. Not often though.)

(Unless you count mistaking them from behind. That does happen more often. Their backs are much more identical than their faces!)

So, do I dress them identically? Sometimes.

The strongest current thought on identical twins – the advice you read in every book about parenting twins (all of which seem to be mainly concerned with fraternals, and only deign to give a paragraph or two to identicals) – seems to be to make sure, sure, sure they know that they are separate people. Make sure everyone knows they are separate people.

To which I think, well, of course they’re separate people. I’ve noticed. You’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to. But they’re also twins, and isn’t that allowed to be part of their identity too?

Like many things in life, my guess is that for them, handling their identities is going to be a sort of dynamic balance: I am myself, and that’s most important. But one of my important characteristics is that I have, from before birth, also been intimately related to her. Which makes me no less myself. In fact, it makes me more.

I recently read a book on identical twins (so good to finally find one!), written by an identical twin, that made me think the above is really true.

So do I dress them identically? The answer is: sometimes. Usually, they’re dressed differently, because they are, apart from being twins, younger sisters. Which means that they get their older sister’s hand-me-downs, and there aren’t a lot of matching outfits in there. 

But they’re also given matching outfits fairly frequently, and they look awfully cute in them.

And I figure that as soon as they care about what they’re wearing (probably in a year or so), I’ll let them choose for themselves whether or not they want to match. For now, I’ll dress them in matching outfits sometimes, and sometimes not (today’s a not).

The other thing about matching outfits is that (and I’ve noticed this is true of kids wearing school uniforms as well), sometimes they look more individually distinct when their clothes matches than when they don’t. When there’s no distinction made by clothing – let alone by coloring or height – what really makes the person individual stands out more strongly.  You can’t go by the easy things when everyone’s in uniform, you have to look deeper.

 And in some ways, though it’s been harder to get to know my twins (especially because of the exhaustion effect of twinfancy), I feel like I’m getting to know them at a deeper level than that at which I first got to know my singletons. I can’t know them just by their age or their gender or their developmental stage, because they match in all these things. I just have to get to know each one as herself.

And that’s kind of cool.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

exercise

So, one of the bugaboos of modern life is that, with all these energy-saving machines (like, ahem, CARS), we don't move half so much as our ancestors did. I mean, can any of you who've read Farmer Boy (one of the Little House books) imagine Almanzo's astonishment at the idea that one might have to make exercise a separate activity from the normal chores of the day? (More than any other, that book taught me that my forebearers WORKED for a living.)

I don't have forty acres to plow though. But I have a library and a grocery store within walking distance, so I try to walk there instead of driving. And I have kids to be carried, so I try to carry them often. And I have weeds to pull, so I try to pull them regularly. I have a neighborhood that's safe to walk in, so I try to take regular evening walks with my husband (kids on back or in the wagon).

And sometimes I do an exercise DVD. But there's something more harmonious about exercise in the midst of other things. Things like gardening, and child care, and evening walks. I like it when life feels all-of-a-piece. I like having a body, and I like using it. There's a temptation in modern life, I think, to feel all mind and no matter. But so many good things - like cooking and eating and hugging and jumping and gardening - can only be experienced through our physical selves.

What about you? God made us creatures in bodies. Aside from the private joys of marital love (family-friendly blog, remember!), in what daily ways do you find yourself enjoying being corporeal? Does anyone else notice this, or am I just weird?

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica