children’s books | Gladsome Lights

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.

What is it I love about the desert? Not the heat—I usually manage to avoid it during the summer months. But in the last 30 years our travels have taken us through the desert every other year or so, and the beauty is always overwhelming. Perhaps the reading I did with the children years ago created a fondness in me, preparing me for the real thing. Along Sandy Trails by Ann Nolan Clark, a library discard, was given to them by a neighbor long ago, and the loving descriptions of the plants and animals thriving in the arid soil of the Southwest make you feel friendly toward these hardy creatures and their home.

“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes,” said Emerson. Montana may have the nickname to go with the phrase “big sky,” but the whole Southwest gives a feast for the eyes. Plenty of sky, plenty of space generally. In New Mexico the sky and the air were the aspects that demanded my constant attention and made the place so stunning.

As for the land, when you stand on a peak and look over the broad expanses, the first impression is often of brownness and barrenness. That’s where you are wrong. Get close to the ground, and you will see darling quail scurrying about, a graceful ocotillo, or the cholla cactus that seems always wrapped in a halo. The desert is always brimming with life, and sometimes blooming as well.

More spiritual lessons could be had from this large section of God’s creation than I will notice. (Even if, as some have said, there was not a desert in His original plan; Christ came into a world already changed and containing deserts, so even they are blessed.) We’ve been back home from our latest desert excursion for ten days, and after wrestling the whole time with possible connections to the heart’s topography, I feel stupider than before.

Perhaps the desert is compelling because there is something about it that draws me into the present. Certainly it doesn’t appear to be a crowded place, which makes it easier to focus on the details, the bits of Creation so exquisitely made. The next step is to glorify the Creator, and there you are in the moment of God’s presence.