Brass candlesticks, bird watching, & prayers in the night
Granny hobbies, Theodicy & the Resurrection. Also a poetry book review & my Gandhi book is out!
“I have come to see theodicy as an existential knife-fight between the reality of our own quaking vulnerability and our hope for a God who can be trusted.
- Tish Harrison Warren. Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
I am a bit late to the millenial bird-watching craze. Apparently now that I am old enough to have kids in school and lower back pain, I’m supposed to be overcome with a need for a granny-hobby, and since I refuse to partake of hobbies that require measuring1, I’m left with gardening and bird-watching.
Obviously my favorite hobby is reading, but sometimes one needs a hobby that doesn’t require looking at a screen (most books are on my kindle). I was recently visited by a family member who is actually a bird watcher. Like, with real binoculars and a birding app. Like the kind who will wake up at 5 am to go to a birding hotspot kind of birder.
I would say I am the more casual, “Let me drink a cup of tea on my veranda and notice what birds are going by” level of bird watching. This started, like most things in this season of my life, because of my kids. I had fallen too far down the Charlotte Mason homeschool internet mother writers2 and had been struck with a desperate need to start observing nature more. So I got the bird book and made big plans to sit on my veranda every morning and watch.
I like to make fun of myself for this early and shallow enthusiasm, but actually, my budding interest in birds co-incided with listening to a podcast about the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’s commands to “look at the birds of the air.” The speakers made the point that Jesus can be taken quite literally here. It’s not a metaphorical thought experiment. Literally, if you are worried, go outside and spend more time looking at birds. When you stop and pay attention to nature, you start noticing God’s care. His attention to detail. His sense of humor.
His presence.
And learning to name the birds around me, even if it is a common Piet-my-vrou or speckled mouse-bird, is a way of placing myself. Christie Purifoy talks about learning the names of the trees in her neighbourhood. She could walk past “that one that gets pink flowers in autumn” every week, and it was familiar. But once she knew its name — suddenly it became a friend. It belongs there. And naming a tree makes you feel like You belong there, too, on that street, in that neighbourhood. You are not a stranger.
Learning local bird names and paying attention to their habits (these ones start tweeting after the rain, these are always fighting over the berry bush) — somehow places me in a context that is bigger than myself. I’m part of a bigger story of creation. The God who cares for these birds cares for me.
Except when it seems he doesn’t.
The late, cold summer, the shifting climate. Before, I wouldn’t have cared if the Piet-my-vrou’s were early or late this year. But now I am listening for them. Once I know when the purple bush in the bottom of my garden is supposed to be blooming, I have a whole new level of anxiety when suddenly it’s not. Paying attention to the natural world is not only life-giving, it is terrifying.
I love the concept of “beauty” as an answer to theodicy (theodicy being the problem of how a loving God allows such evil and pain to exist). It is a spiritual discipline to pay attention to the light, the birds, and the flowers, when there is darkness and suffering. And yet… sometimes the beauty and suffering are so intertwined it’s not exactly comforting to stop and pay attention.
Tish Harrison Warren writes about this dual nature of beauty and cruelty in the world in her book Prayer in the Night:
“We cannot hold together human vulnerability and God’s trustworthiness at the same time unless there is some certain sign that God loves us, that he isn’t an absentee landlord or, worse, a monster. But we cannot divine such a sign from the circumstances of our lives or of the world. We have to decide what we believe about who God is and what he is like. We have to decide if anyone keeps watch with us. It is unavoidably—even irritatingly— a decision based on doctrine, the first principles we return to again and again, the story we define our lives by.”
Our small group was talking about looking for signs of God’s presence a few weeks ago. We had read Gideon’s story, and talked about how we often think it is a story about someone trying to figure out direction (“What should I do? Where should I go? Show me a sign!”). But it is actually a story about someone trying to figure out if he can trust God. Is God really with him? Can he really do this thing God is telling him to do? Is he all alone? Or can God’s words that he will be with him really be trusted?
How do we know God is with us in this terrible, beautiful world?
I suppose that is why I am grateful for Easter. Here is how we know God is with us and for us- Christ laid down his life for us. Here is how we know everything will be okay- God raised him from the dead.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end3.
As Tish Harrison Warren writes,“Jesus’ resurrection is the sole evidence that love triumphs over death, that beauty outlives horror, that the meek will inherit the earth, that those who mourn will be comforted.”
This week, we polished our brass candlesticks to a shiny golden glow. We bought Easter eggs and tried to ready ourselves for the horror of Good Friday and the joy of Resurrection Sunday. We also sat in the hammock and looked for birds.
BOOK NEWS! How to Stop a Train: The Story of How Mohandas Gandhi Became the Mahatma is out in South Africa!
In April, the book will be Exclusive Book’s featured children’s book, and it releases as an e-book in the USA on April 13th. So I’ll be sharing more book news & some of the back story with you all next month. But I mostly wanted to say a huge thank you to paid subscribers! The income from publishing picture books (even with a large publishing company like Pan Macmillan) is laughable. But getting more stories and “living books” about people in South African history is super important! And so your paid subscriptions really help me take the time to pursue creative projects like this with experts like Dr. Kathryn Pillay, my co-author. Thank you! To everyone else - go buy & review the book please😁 🙏🏽 - librarians, teachers, and parents find out about books like this and choose to read them to their kids mostly through word of mouth and recommendations. Thanks for helping me spread the word.
A poetry collection for moms who are looking for words about transition, grief & friendship
I was lucky enough to read this collection before it came out (and SO SLOW at sharing about it!) - but the good news is you can now get this wherever books are sold or online (or online directly from the author!) If you read my substack, you will have probably read Grace’s poetry before as I often share it on my instagram! I feel like she as put words to so many human experiences, but in particular I kept thinking of other moms I know know who have moved, or live in other cultures and countries, and thinking that her words are a balm for all of us. Like, this excerpt from “A Friendly Face” where the speaker goes grocery shopping late at night.
and I wept
as I loaded my bags in the trunk of my freezing car,
balancing the broken trunk door on my head
because it never stayed open in the cold.
if someone had asked me that night -
“did you find everything
you were looking for?”
I would have said,
“no.”
I hadn’t gone there for bread.
not really.
Just Beautiful Links
Thanks to everyone who is a paid subscriber and keeps me writing! I’m so grateful for each of you - below is a list of links to books, audios, articles that are about justice & beauty (or, frankly, just something that I wrote somewhere on the web). Thanks for making this work possible. As always, if you can’t afford a paid subscription but would like access to this part of the newsletter, shoot me an email & say, “I’d like the links”, and I’ll set you up for a free year, no questions asked.
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