Category Archives: church

Psalter and Soup

books, church, food and cooking, , , , , ,

This Advent season I’m participating with other women, organized by Sylvia, in reading the Psalter every day for the 40 days. Our Psalter is divided into 20 groupings each of which is called a kathisma, and every woman will read one per day.

There are more than 40 of us participating so that the whole book of Psalms will be read twice a day. Everyone who perseveres will end up having read the Psalter through twice before Christmas, as well! What a joy it has already been.

I’m also trying to read The Winter Pascha by Fr Thomas Hopko, which has 40 readings about this period in the church year that has similarities to Lent and Pascha. I read two days’ entries and now can’t find the book, so we’ll see how that goes….

We just got a good rain and everything is washed clean, the sky is blue, and the snowball bush is showing its glory.

It’s the season for soup! It’s easy to make a lenten meal in the soup kettle, and today I am putting in three kinds of beans and some winter vegetables.

I don’t often buy parsnips or turnips. When I used to read Down, Down the Mountain by Ellis Credle to my children, the vegetables the characters are so fond of must have seemed as exotic as boys and girls riding barefoot for lack of shoes to wear.

In the story, the mountain children carry a bagful of turnips down to the town, turnips they themselves planted and tended lovingly, in hopes of selling them for enough money to buy shoes. But everyone they meet along the way is hungering and thirsting for just such a delicacy, and when they arrive in town they discover that only one turnip is left in the bag.
 I’m afraid that after my first 15 years of family cooking, with its centerpieces of lentil soup and bread, I might have inadvertently started cultivating a taste in my family for fancier food. Fast periods are a good opportunity to repent and reform.
 But this plain food tastes pretty fancy after all.

Poem for the beginning of a fast

Advent, church, poetry,

(We Orthodox begin our Nativity or Advent Fast today.)

MATTHEW VI, FF

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as you call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.

We have deep faith in prosperity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably inessential.

It is true that we go insane;
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.

We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If you cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather you shoved off.

–Richard Wilbur

 

November and All

church, family, home, nature, poetry, travel

Today I burned a candle on the dining table at dinner, for the first time since Winter brightened into Spring many moons ago. Now our world is dimming once more, and a little extra light strengthens the heart, reminding us of Him Who is The Light of the World.

I wore my new wool tweed jacket for the first half of dance class, the hall was so chilly. And tomorrow I drive north again, where it’s even colder, at nearly 4,000 ft elevation, too.

Baby Daughter is with us for a few days, which is why we are journeying there, so she can greet Seventh Grandson, her Seventh Nephew. For the drive, we’ll take our umbrellas for forays out of the car, and poetry for hope and vision of the warm home awaiting us up the road.

The Mist and All

by Dixie Wilson

I like the fall,
The mist and all.
I like the night owl’s
Lonely call–
And wailing sound
Of wind around.

I like the gray
November day,
And bare, dead boughs
That coldly sway
Against my pane.
I like the rain.

I like to sit
And laugh at it–
And tend my cozy fire a bit.
I like the fall–
The mist and all.


Categories of First Lines

books, church, quotes, the language

Many of my favorite books do not have particularly memorable first lines. Some books that I will never read have clever, captivating, even brilliant openers, and among those are quite a few that are well known. If you want to test your knowledge of famous first lines, you can do so here. Thanks to my friend E. for that link.

In 2002 Jay Nordlinger on National Review‘s website mentioned a couple of his favorite first lines–not necessarily from favorite books–which led readers to send in nominations for Great First Lines. Many of those were also Famous, overlapping with a few in the quiz linked above, but often they were obscure. Warning to nit-pickers: Some of these are actually more than one sentence.

What makes a first line “great”?  Does it have to hint at what the whole book is about, or only hook you in? For me, I do like a good sentence (and I liked this article exploring the field), and if the first one in a book is well-crafted, it would make me want to keep reading, for pleasure. If it is curiosity-piquing as well, all the better.

One boring or poor opening sentence would not discourage me from reading on, but if the whole first paragraph or page is confusing or muddy I might lose patience. I am getting too old to fool around with the gazillions of pages by authors who need to practice more.

Whether one can search the archives of NR for Nordlinger’s blog posts I don’t have to know, because back then I saved all of the nominations in a document. Unlike much of my document collection, I am making use of this one, to bring a number of good first lines into this small light. Whether they are Great, I won’t judge; I will just give you a few that I liked. These are from books that aren’t my favorites, so I won’t be tempted to put them into the next List of Five. And I hope I haven’t put too many below and spoiled it for a blogger who wanted to use one of these in her own quiz-list.

Nordlinger includes this fact out front: “We have already decided — we, the great collective ‘we’: my readers and I — that ‘In the beginning . . .’ is the all-time champion. Everything else is competing for second place.” I’m glad they got that straight.

Now, a few of the competitors:

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” — Orwell, “England Your England” (an essay)

“‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” — Charlotte’s Web

“For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.” — George Burns, Gracie: A Love Story

“I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Southern Mail

“She stood on the fox until it died.” — Mitchell Smith, Due North

A good sentence is a thing of beauty. This afternoon Mr. Glad and I started taking books off the shelves, turning pages to the first line, perusing those words we had long neglected, but not wanted to get rid of. (“Get rid of” suddenly sounds so crude and unfitting.) So many good phrases and clauses, and some excellent ones.

This is not the end of the matter; what is a blog, after all, but words and sentences, and the will to keep spitting them out? Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life, “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

The way I see it, I might as well write sentences in a recipe.