real ones.

"It is the sweet, simple things of life
which are the real ones after all."

- Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Ozarks by Hines)

still wanting to live as an ordinary radical.

i just had a great reminder about the kind of person i want/hope to be.
yes, the person i hope to become. but also the person i hope to be today, even now. through sharing life with other people. no solo trek here.

loma invited shane claiborne to share (preach? speak? story-tell?) about some of his convictions and practices with the campus yesterday, and the audio file from that chapel is already posted online. some eunc (european nazarene college -- where i presently live) friends and i gathered just now to listen to it together. good, good stuff. always more to dialogue about. and live-out. so let me know if you were at that chapel (or the monday evening q&a!!), if you listen to the file linked below, if you're still wrestling/processing/continually trying to apply convictions and practices that were provoked/inspired by reading the irresistible revolution: living as an ordinary radical, or if you're just wondering, 'what the heck is this all about?'

let's share.
together.

to listen to the chapel audio file, go here: http://www.pointloma.edu/CampusLife/Chapel.htm

Instructions: Find the chapel date you would like to hear [November 9th, 2009 - Shane Claiborne] and simply click the title to start the player. To download a copy of the mp3, click the download button next to the chapel title or double-click the title and select "Save File".

To filter the list, select the year and semester you would like to view. To filter by a particular speaker, type that speaker's name in the box.

food for thought. pun intended.

today i woke up at 6:30am with no alarm. but this is actually an improvement from waking up at 4:30am yesterday and 5:00am the day before. oh the joys of jet-lag. actually, i kinda' like jet lag at this time of day when i feel super energized in the wee morning hours; my dad is already off to work, but the rest of the house is still asleep...

once i'm awake, it's hard for me to go back to sleep, so yesterday i enjoyed a colorado sunrise with my favorite morning treat: vanilla soy milk and 'special k fruit & yogurt'. the simple pleasures of life. today i warmed up (colorado has been rainy and cold so far -- not the july i was expecting after leaving the same rain and cold in the büs) to green tea and one of my favorite reads from last summer: 'take this bread' by sara miles. ahhh, so good. after i read a chapter or even just a page or paragraph or single sentence, i have to pause and reflect. her story woven into the greater story of sacrament and action gets me excited about life. about calling. about people. about food. about bodies. about sharing. about learning. about faith.

there are too many excerpts i would choose to include in this post, but here's one to savor for now, from the prologue (xv-xvi):

"...at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right. What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely, that upsets established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.

This theology isn't mine alone. It comes from conversation with other believers, tradition, and Scripture; books and prayer and liturgy. It comes, even more, from my years outside church: from unbelieving and unbelievers, from doubt, from questions that still echo unanswered for me. Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical "proof." It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act."

whew. such good stuff. i affirm so much of this. i want to eat it up. and i presently am. miles' book centers on Eucharist: on food as gift. thanksgiving. of broken bread and poured wine. after walking into a church and joining in communion, miles' own life became embedded in the breaking of bread as well as the sharing of bread with her neighbor. in her mind and experience, the elements were inextricably linked to feeding people. She writes,

"The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all but actual food--indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become a part of a body, I realized that what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people," (prologue, xi).

along the same thought-track, i've been researching everything i can about the 1987 danish film babettes gæstebud (known as babette's feast to english speakers). while enjoying npr in the car on tuesday, i caught a story titled food on film: the famished and the feasts. npr describes this film by saying,

"It's a French cook's extravagant "thank you" to a tiny church congregation that has sheltered her as a refugee in frigid Denmark for years. The problem is, the elderly congregation believes in self-denial — believes that pleasure must be reserved for the hereafter. So while they agree to eat the meal so as not to hurt Babette's feelings, they vow to each other that they will not enjoy the meal, or even talk about it.

This is much to the astonishment of a visitor, who can't believe what he's tasting — genuine turtle soup, great wine, and all around him, the congregation is silent. From the embarrassment in their expressions it's clear the others, despite their best efforts, are enjoying the meal, but no one in the congregation will admit it...."

... it's "all tied up in the spiritual: food as a gift, specifically Eucharistic in nature, for a religious community that has denied itself pleasure for decades.

And it is transformative: old loves are rekindled, long-simmering feuds are forgotten, redemption has a seat at the table."

npr says 'fabulous' and i agree. so has anyone seen babette's feast? tell me if you have. i can't wait to watch it soon and to keep thinking about food and the sharing of it as well as the savoring of it... with it all wrapped up in gift, gift, gift.

the subject of mushrooms

Last summer when I returned from Europa, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life both challenged and inspired me to live more local with more sustainable eating practices no matter where I may call home. [Note to prospective readers: at points you have to push yourself to keep reading, since Kingsolver can and does spend pages just describing asparagus, but the journey with her family to deliberately grow/eat locally for one year is absolutely worth it.]

Now, after living in Europa for the past six months, I've returned multiple times to a Speaking of Faith interview where Krista Tippett talks with Barbara Kingsolver about this year of food life. Such good stuff. Here's the full podcast, if you want to listen in for yourself: The Ethics of Eating

Below, taken from the podcast, describes a bit of what I love about Europa -- just one of the things I hope to glean from my time spent here...

Barbara Kingsolver: It's so interesting to me when I'm in Europe and spend time with my Spanish friends or Italian friends, and they are working people too. They're women who are working in offices or, you know, they're editors or are laboratory scientists. And as soon as they're out of work, they head straight for the market. And they go down to see what fish has come in or what greens do they have now at this season. And even at high-powered business lunches with editors in France — this has happened to me so many times — these women in their fashionable shoes and business suits will stray from post-colonial literature over to the subject of mushrooms. And, you know, there's no shame in their enthusiasm for cooking. They feel that cooking for their families is a really important part of who they are. This, I think, is that, at the heart of the problem for a lot of us, anyway, I think I belong to the generation of women who grew up thinking that walking away from the kitchen was walking away from some kind of slavery, you know? It's how we think about it.

Krista Tippett: Yes, you're right. If we thought of cooking as this great pleasure that we could look forward to at the end of the working day, I suppose that would change it.

Barbara Kingsolver: If we look at it as family time, as entertainment, as a spiritually enlightening even, you know, if we look at it as a destination rather than a rock in the road, I think we would do more of it. And not every day, maybe not on Monday nights, OK, but definitely on Saturday.

twelve-foot mountain trolls

I recently began reading "Harry Potter" [hopefully you inserted a British accent as you read his name] on my lil' trip to London -- a fitting place to delve into the series, wouldn't you agree?... Yeah, I know, I'm lagging over a decade behind on this one... no time to start like the present though, right? Especially when the present (at this particular juncture in life) means I have the freizeit (free time) to generally do as I please and read each day simply for leisure... because I sure do like a good read. : )

Everyone who has recommended the series to me since middle school is right; these books are quite good! J.K. Rowling is such a clever writer; I especially enjoy (what I would interpret to be) her definition of what it means to be family, to be in community with one another:

"From that moment on, Hermione Granger became their friend. There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them."

-- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, pg. 132

Even pulling that quote out of context still does it justice, because it's true.

We often make the assumption that those who we share very little in common with/those who might tend to annoy us (like in the case of Hermione & Harry) can't really be our friends. I know I've had that thought before. But, after walking through a particularly difficult circumstance together, (for instance, knocking-out a twelve-foot mountain troll), we end up not only tolerating each other but we even like each other.

And isn't that a good and right thing?