Window light

Window light envelopes

the metal coffin, white,

in front of the altar, leaving

minds in darkness, and hearts.

Brain synapses fail to connect,

the flow of blood constricts.

We remain, left with only

the window light enveloping

the metal coffin, white,

in front of the altar.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Mom in the Mirror”

I read a book that’s aimed at women, mothers, and young women. And it’s a book that should be read by men, fathers, and young men.

It’s a book about women and their attitudes about their bodies, before, during and after – even long after – their pregnancies. It’s about the culture we live in, and what it tells women they should think about their bodies. It’s about what women will do to meet those cultural expectations. And it’s about a different path women (and men, indirectly) can take, and likely should take.

Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty, and Life After Pregnancy, by Dena Cabrera and Emily Wierenga, is the book. It’s important to read. I learned things I didn’t know, about my own mother, my wife, and my daughter-in-law.

“We live in a society that demonizes fat,” they write; “meanwhile, we are more overweight than ever before. Every day at least ten million women deny themselves acceptance and love by abusing food in some way, shape, or form. Clearly, something is wrong.”

Something is wrong, and it’s not a simple fix. Cabrera and Wierenga walk the reader through the complexities, which can include eating disorders, the influence of a woman’s own mother, anxiety, the changes a woman’s body experiences, the demands of pregnancy and childrearing, the stages a woman’s body goes through from childhood to adulthood, competitiveness with other women, balancing marriage with motherhood, and many other aspects. And they offer encouragement, guidance, and resources on how to get help.

And their underlying message is itself about encouragement and hope: learn to love, starting with yourself.

Cabrera is a licensed clinical psychologist and eating disorder specialist, working at the Rosewood Centers for Eating Disorders in Wickenburg, Arizona. Wierenga is a married mother of two living in Canada, who battled anorexia and told her story in Chasing Silhouettes. (I reviewed Chasing Silhouettes here and did a two-part interview with Emily for The High Calling and here.)

Mom in the Mirror is a book whose time is now. Women and mothers need it. So do men and fathers.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Self-Directed Kindergartners

When our oldest had completed his first year of middle school, we decided the time had come to change schools. We had become increasingly concerned with the direction he school district was going. And then came the 6^th grade English teacher, whose notes from school included spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. For seventh and eighth grades, he attended the local Catholic school (and we’re not Catholic).

Then came our youngest, eight years behind his brother. He had attended a local pre-school, and it was time for kindergarten. We had him on a waiting list at the Catholic school, but the odds of getting him in were long. We weren’t members of the church, and the early grades were the most crowded. So we expected to send him to the local elementary school.

A friend who was a teacher aide at the school had warned us about one particular kindergarten teacher, the one who believed in and practiced self-directed education for kindergartners. He class was chaos, the friend said, and children learned nothing. The previous year they had “self-educated” themselves into learning to play with toys better.

The letter assigning our youngest to a class arrived. It was that teacher. I called the Catholic school principal in desperation. Was there anything at all available? Anything?

It just so happened a spot had opened up that very day in the kindergarten class. A family had suddenly been transferred to another city.

Sold! I said.

The chaos of a self-directed kindergarten class was almost too painful to contemplate. To throw a child into a class where he or she had no previous relationship with the teacher, might know a few of the other students, and be told to develop their own education plan was a bit over the top, even for some of the experimental things being tried in the school district at the time. (This craziness was generally abandoned once the first grade teachers discovered the problems of self-directed kindergartners becoming first graders.)

There was no relationship, and no rules. There was chaos.

We don’t normally associate relationships with rules, but as Andy Stanley points out in The Grace of God, rules followed relationship in the Old Testament. We thing of the books of Moses as crammed with all the rules, regulations, shalt nots and do nots. And they are. But they came after God provided relationship. And the rules, also known as the Ten Commandments and the Levitical law, were designed for a people who had not been a nation for 400 years, who had previously been slaves, and did not have the first notion of how to govern themselves as a people.

The rules followed relationship. Grace was there first, before the law. In profound ways, the law was a demonstration of God’s grace. The law was not a tool for God to micro-manage their lives, but to help people live and work together.

God saw what happened with the people while Moses was with him on Mount Sinai. The self-directed Israelites decided to build themselves an idol, like the surrounding nations and tribes had. They whined and complained and pitched temper tantrums. They wanted their toys, and they wanted them now.

Imagine what their first-grade teachers would have thought.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re discussing The Grace of God. Too see more posts on this chapter, “Redeemed by Grace,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Peter Pollock’s “Web Hosting for Dummies”

My day-to-day job involves just about everything online – social media, web sites, blogs, online news sites, news portals, discussion boards, and basecamps of one sort or another. Outside of work, I’m involved in two online sites and this blog.

That said, I’m not a geek. My understanding and knowledge do not extend to all the terms, phrases, systems, and processes associated with the online world. Ask me how Twitter or Facebook work as relationship and communication channels, and I’m all over it. Ask me about the databases that sit behind Twitter or even my own blog, and I will likely give you a blank look.

I don’t program TV remotes, either.

And then I discovered that Peter Pollock had written a book for me, Web Hosting for Dummies.

No, I’m not looking to host my own blog site. But I deal with people who do host blogs, and web sites, and news portals, and I deal with them every day. Now I know what questions to ask to make sure I’m getting what I pay for.

What Pollock has done here is to take all of the technical underpinnings for web hosting and provided a comprehensive summary of everything you might want to know and everything you need to know.

And it’s written in plain English.

If I had read this a month ago, I would have understood a conversation two tech people were having about SQL inquiries, and why it was important.

Web Hosting for Dummies provides all the essentials – what it is and how it works; what’s essential to make it work (like databases, logs, and possibly scripts) (and what all those are); how to manage security (absolutely critical in this age of hackers and online thieves); troubleshooting; and what kind of server you should choose. And then the book gives a list of free apps, what your host won’t do for the money you pay, and some really good resources.

Pollock, who lives in California, is a blogger, web host, speaker, and all-around subject matter resource. I know enough to know he knows what he’s talking about.

Did reading the book make me an expert in all these technical things? No. But it did provide an base of understanding for the next conversation with the IT guy about issues with my blog site. So the next time I hear something about UNIX, I’ll know why it’s an option.

Peter Pollock, you have done the communications community – the non-technical side of the communications community – a real service. PR people, marketers, advertisers, authors, and writers owe you a debt.

(And for the record, the SQL noted above, short for Structured Query Language, is “a way of storing large amounts of data abd quickly retrieving, searching and storing that data.” It’s in the book’s glossary, not to mention a hefty explanation in the text itself.)

Twitter Poetry: Spinning for Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 2

It takes time to sift through the contributions to our Tweetspeak Poetry jams on Twitter, time to make sure all of the lines are, first, grouped together, and then, second, arranged for editing. People think and respond to the prompts (and each other) very differently, and that diversity is one of the strengths of these poetry jams. It also requires some careful editing.

For our most recent jam, all of the prompts were taken from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel: Poems by Annie Dillard. To see the next six poems in the series, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Photograph by Petr Kratockvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I Can’t Do That! I’m Presbyterian!

Some time ago, our church started something at the 11:15 service (the worship isn’t “contemporary” but something more akin to “new litgurical). What was new was the encouragement of the use of hands in the service, in addition to what we might to do pray.

While some (many?) might laugh at this being a radical departure or innovation, it was something like that for us. After all, we’re evangelical Presbyterians. Aren’t the use of hands in worship meant for (gasp!) charismatics?

Well, no.

I have to admit that when it was first discussed and undertaken, I sat on my hands (figuratively, not literally) (I couldn’t resist the pun). Most of the people in the service did as well. I didn’t rush to the Westminster Confession of Faith to see if it was either okay or some new heresy; I suspected the confession wouldn’t have much to say on the subject. I took a wait-and-see approach.

Months passed. People, even young people, didn’t rush into acceptance and implementation. We are Presbyterians, after all. But a few “early adopters” began to use their hands at critical points, like during songs and hymns.

One Sunday, at the end of the service when the pastor gives the blessing to the congregation, I lifted my hands. Not way up in the air, mind you, but enough to receive the blessing.

The world didn’t come to an end; the church building was left standing. It actually seemed like something natural. It was okay, and it was part of worship.

“We use our hands to reach up and cry for help, to tell of our soul’s thirst. To bless the Lord and to praise his holy name,” write Valerie Hess and Lane Arnold in The Life of the Body: Physical Well-Being and Spiritual Formation.

It’s what I do now. And I’m still a Presbyterian.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading and discussing the Life of the Body during the month of May. The section included three chapters, including one entitled “The Theology of Food.” Marcus Goodyear is tackling that one in the main post today. I almost tackled that one here today, but decided to hold back.

Suffice it to say that I have a problem with the whole idea of “A Theology of Food” and suggestions that a proper theology includes natural, organic and local food, and excludes everything else (everything else is 99 percent of the food supply). The chapter also said organic food is pesticide-free, which is an understandable perception but understandably wrong. I might have had less of a problem if the chapter had been called “The Politics of Food” instead of “A Theology of Food.”

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads: Mary Harwell Sayler

I connected with poet and writer Mary Harwell Sayler online like most onlne connections happen – someone’s blog post comments, or someone’s Facebook page, or someone retweets someone. In Mary’s case, I think it was via Facebook. But I had been following one her blogs, Poetry Editor and poetry, for some time before that.

She lives in Florida and attended Florida State University. When she says “Christian poet” she means exactly that – poets of all Christian faiths – Catholic, evangelical, Protestant, and Orthodox. All are welcome and all are honored.

Mary is deeply involved with poetry – writing it, encouraging it, promoting it, encouraging poets, and writing about it. One her activities is administering the Christian Poets and Writers page on Facebook, and maintaining a corresponding blog called Christian Poets and Writers.

We had a conversation the other day about Joseph and Judah from the Book of Genesis, and she mentioned that she written poems about the Joseph story. I asked her for links, and she provided them: After Selling Joseph into Slavery and Choosing Judah.

Check out her various blogs, her poetry and the Facebook page for Christian Poets and Writers.