Life

The ways of wisdom have in them a holy security, as well as a holy serenity; and they that walk in them, have God himself for their shield and sun, and are not only joyful in the hope of good, but are, or may be, quiet from the fear of evil.
The paths of wisdom are not like walks in a garden, which we make use of for diversion only, and an amusement; but like tracks in a great road, which we press forward in with care and pains, as a traveller in his journey….till we come to our journey’s end. We must remember, that in the ways of religion we are upon our journey, and it is a journey of business — business of life and death; and therefore we must not trifle, or lose time….and not take up short of the end of our faith and hope, not take up short of home: and though the journey is long, and requires all this care and application, yet it is pleasant, it is peace notwithstanding.
Matthew Henry, The Pleasantness of a Religious Life
(from www.femina.reformedblogs.com)

Thanksgiving Preparations

This is something I wrote for an assignment this week.

Roberta Dahlin, 11/08
One turkey furls its feathers like porcupine quills, holding its breath until its comb and whole head turn blue. The head of another snakes out to grab your coat zipper. It lurches when you catch it, flapping and flailing its bulk against you. Scaly, off-white feet with sharp nails scramble to tear something, and warmth comes through your gloves where you grip near the wing joints.

We don’t use a chopping block and a bloody axe anymore, with poultry running around headlessly colliding with things. For turkeys, we have five gallon buckets set up with holes in the bottom that their heads stick out. Getting them into the buckets is the hard part; then, wings held tight against their bodies, they die patiently, throats cut and blood dripping to the ground.

Once dead, they are cleaned, from the huge drum with rubber fingers that remove most of the feathers, to the long silver table with flashing knives, to the oval tanks deep with icy water where the birds rinse and soak until completely cool.

It comes out stiff and clean and white, and drips while we check for missed pin-feathers and bruises. We close it up in a big plastic bag and set it on the scale, marking the weight on the plastic with a sharpie.

The Monday before Thanksgiving is one of the longest days of the year. Fingers ache in the morning air setting things up and catching the birds, and we’re cold to the bone by evening. Knives cut through skin, flesh, gizzards and joints, and we swipe them across stones and steels to re-sharpen them. We’re spattered with blood, feathers spun out of the picker, and little bits of white fat, but you don’t hose one another off in 20 or 30-degree weather. The radio gives out scratchy songs that we sing along with or make fun of. Some of us won’t stop for lunch unless they can be done and in clean clothes; others scrub to the elbow and forget the gore long enough to recharge with coffee, chocolate and food. As we work, we talk. We talk about people, quote movie after movie, play matchmaker, plan Christmas shopping and food, and tell horrible jokes.

This is part of our Thanksgiving tradition, the turning of turkey the beast into turkey the feast.

Quoting G. K. Chesterton on Women

"Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school-mistress, but not a competitive school-mistress; a house decorator, but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman’s professions, unlike the child’s, were all truly and almost terribly fruitful."
You really must read the whole essay “The Emancipation of Domesticity” which originally appeared in What’s Wrong With the World and is included in the book Brave New Family.

Pasted from Nancy Wilson's blog, www.femina.reformedblogs.com

Good fat book quotes

I have a quoting urge.

I apologize for how long this might be, and for the fact that I must elide between a few important quotes... if you want to see the rest, read the book! We are reading about original sin and he delves into a discussion of community here.

"Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals but an organic unity, one race, one family. Angels, on the other hand, all stand side-by-side, independently of one another...God created all of us from one man (Acts 17:26); we are not a heap of souls piled on a piece of ground, but all blood relatives of one another, connected to one another by a host of ties, therefore conditioning one another and being conditioned by one another."

(a couple pages later)

"All the members of such a body can either be a blessing or a curse to one another, and increasingly so to the degree that they themselves are more outstanding and occupy a more pivotal place in the organism. Fathers, mothers, guardians, caretakers, teachers, professors, patrons, guides, princes, kings, and so on have the greatest influence on those under their jurisdiction. Their life and conduct decides the fortunes of their subordinates, elevates them and brings them to honor, or drags them down and pulls them along to destruction. The family of the drunkard is ruined and disgraced because of the father's sin. The family of a criminal is widely and for a long time identified and condemned along with him. A congregation languishes under the faithless conduct of a pastor. A people decline and are eventually destroyed as a result of the foolish policies of a king. 'In whatever thing the kings go crazy, the Achaeans [homer's greeks] are punished.' Among people there is a solidarity for good or ill: community in blessing and in judgment. We stand on the shoulders of earlier generations and inherit the things they have accumulated in the way of material and spiritual wealth.
We enter into their labors, rest on their laurels, enjoy the things they have frequently aquired at great cost. We receive all this undeservedly, without having asked for it. It is waiting for us at our birth; it is bequeathed to us by grace."

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ, 102 and 104

Rum colored sun and warm buttery leaves

Is this still Indian Summer? Or just a dry, lazy fall when the sun shines with moderate warmth almost every day, but the frost creeps over everything at night? The leaves have most turned from green now, some yellow, some orange, some red, and a few millions of them shades in between: tumeric gold, lime mixed with lemon, russet red, bland pie-crust tan.

Maria and I walked to the university library yesterday, in fleece jackets that we unzipped once the hill blocked the wind and the sun was on our backs. The sidewalks were warm through the soles of my shoes, and the dried grasses along the walk crumbled crisply when I fingered them. It felt good to scuff the layers of cottonwood leaves underfoot and the wind played with us, grabbing handfuls more from the branches and scattering them over our rumpled path. Then a car would hum by, and a drift of dry, weightless foilage swirled after it in a quiet wake.

I want to decorate for Thanksgiving. I see fat miniature pumpkins and fragile maple leaves, dried to perfection. I want to trace my hand and try to turn it into a turkey. We need to warm up the apple juice and add cinnamon sticks, to make desserts full of walnuts and pecans and pumpkins and squash. We should rake the leaves and scatter them again, we should carve a pumpkin, just for fun, and let the candle-light smile at us while the seeds brown in the oven.

Poem for my mom, and pretty much everyone in my family

To Be Of Use by Marge Piercy

The people I love best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and wim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and themuck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that hels corn, are put in mueums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.