On conjunctions & Eastertide birthdays

An essay for when you just want one good day, links to picture books, amazing multi-cultural wedding dancing & a documentary on a Victorian woman artist who you have never heard of

Welcome to Just Beautiful a newsletter exploring places where beauty and justice meet - today I’ve got a longish essay for you (it was my birthday, so you’ll allow it) and some great links including clips of multicultural wedding dances- you may have to view online to see the whole email…. Also heads up, I talk about a car accident in this story. Onwards! xx Steph

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Being thirty-three and all, I feel I should be unresentful by now. I should have gained some sense of detachment from the wildness of this roller-coaster world. I should stop wanting things and just accept things. 

My birthday is usually in Eastertide, and I feel that birthdays (like Easter) should be special graces. A day (just one day) where you can let out your breath and take in the joy and say, “Yes. This is happy. This is how it is supposed to be.” 

Christ is Risen. It is my birthday. There are autumn leaves glowing like bits of golden stained glass flung above my head, there is breakfast in bed, there is a lovely date night with my husband, my people are together, I can just enjoy it. That’s really all I want. I know it is not heaven. My children will squabble, maybe my car will be low on petrol, or I’ll get stuck in traffic, but Christ is Risen, and so, you know what? A little traffic is not the end of the world. 

Hate me if you must, but my birthday is actually usually like that. It was this year in many ways. My husband and son made me supper the night before, worked all afternoon on an orange-chocolate cake, delivered darling presents in the morning wrapped with too much tape.

But the actual day had the feeling of a run-away train, where you can see from the beginning it is going downhill fast, and no matter what cheerfulness and goodwill and energy and internet searches for toddler crafts you throw at it, it just keeps going down. Not even signing my first book contract was enough to redeem it. Sick children, wheezing coughs. After a week in hospital I thought we were beyond it, but I could see the Emergency Room looming large in my future yet again with every passing oxygenation reading. By the afternoon, squabbling kids and the pent up anxiety of watching a three-year-old breathe found me ready to l snap, so I left the kids with the TV babysitting them (and their remote-working father, of course), and went for a walk in the botanical gardens. 

I tried to receive it. The dappled light, the chattering birds, the ability to walk as fast as I wanted with no one touching me. The huge expanse of air around me. The fractals of tree branches. I tried to tell myself, “This is for you. It is still real. Even when things are not perfect yet, they are still good.” I was trying. 

And then, driving to get takeaway (as a second-rate option to the babysitter we had to cancel because of, you know, our child not breathing well), I suddenly come upon a car accident a block from our house.

 I’m just going to get takeaway here. It’s my birthday. I can’t have perfection, I can’t have a night out, but I can jolly well have garlic naan. Except now there’s a body on the side of the road, glass everywhere, shell-shocked teenagers in school uniforms holding each other’s elbows, and a traffic cop trying to scoot everyone around a smashed up minibus taxi. As the row of cars inch along, I try to just focus on the road in front of me. I am going so slowly I could probably roll down my window and touch the wandering cows who have come to inspect the situation, the people with ghostly faces telling and re-telling their version of what happened to each other while more police cars arrive. But I am looking at the road because I can’t see a dead body on my birthday. I’m sorry, I refuse.

There’s a part of me that wonders if this is just the height of selfish privilege - choosing what to look at, cherry-picking reality so I can stay comfortable. Part of me wonders if this is wisdom - if the world is as wild and dark and broken as it is, maybe drawing a frame around the good, preserving innocence and joy is a discipline. 

My eyes are firmly fixed on the road, and yet there is no avoiding the long streak of blood sweeping across the tar where the body was dragged to the side. So much blood. 

My tires slowly crackle over bits of shattered windscreen, and when I can finally speed up again, I hope the takeaway place is running slow and the road is cleaned up before I have to travel it again. I collect our supper and slam the car door tightly, cocooning myself in silence. I snap my buckle into place like a prayer to keep it together and get back on the road. 

There are more police cars. The traffic is even more backed up. As I slowly make my way past the scene a second time, I can see the emergency responders have been at work. The glass is mostly cleared, the taxi is fully off the road. 

But there is a bone-thin old man who is dumping water on the road and scrubbing it with a eucalyptus tree branch broken off of a roadside tree. He is not in uniform. People from the traffic department are standing off to the side talking, not paying him any attention. He doesn’t even look up at the cars as they go past. He dumps more water and scrubs and scrubs. Is he the man who owns the house right there? Is he a relative? A witness? Is he in shock, searching for whatever he can find to wipe that grisly stain off of the road, unwilling to wait for the sanitation department? 

There is so much blood. 

Even on birthdays. 

Even though Christ is risen. 

When I get home, my husband knows more than I do. I saw it, but I didn’t understand. There was no dead body. 

The minibus taxi full of high school students collided with a construction vehicle. Nobody died. But the front passenger's arm was ripped off in the collision. 

But there was a passing cyclist who knew first aid, assisted in stopping the bleeding and called the ambulance. 

The body is alive. He made it. There was so much blood, but he made it. 

They tell me in therapy I need to change my conjunctions. Less “buts” and more “ands”. It is my birthday and I saw a body on the side of the road and there was so much blood and the body was not dead and it was missing an arm and the person is still alive and my kids are still sick and I am going to eat takeaway. 

I mean. “And” adequately describes the chaos of life, I suppose. The radical acceptance of reality as it is. The fact that we don’t control our days, that in this wild broken world we can focus on the road but we can’t control the blood splattered across it, that we are creatures and will still eat and drink and hope and go to the bathroom no matter what other crazy things happen.

Except that is not satisfactory. And doesn’t give any shape, any meaning to anything. And is just disordered chaos,  I am just drifting through. 

The hard edges of a “but” elbow in between the light and dark. But is angry that the dark has the power to ruin things. It is resentful that a day can start with joy and laughter but be poisoned by the stain of sickness and death. It’s more uncomfortable than and. It wants something.

I’m reading Eugene Peterson’s sermons on Revelation, and apparently when we see things the way God does, we see there’s a dead lamb on a throne. 

Like, a slaughtered lamb. 

Like, so much blood. 

But he is alive. 

And on a throne. 

It’s so backwards.

Here is the way I think about things: this thing was good, but now it’s ruined. People are alive, but then they are dead. The beginning was alright, but the end is now destroyed. But is a lament. A spoiler. 

Here is what Revelation is teaching me: maybe it matters where in the sentence you put that word. Maybe it is not only a lament, maybe it is a foreglimmer of hope.

Jesus introduces himself as the first and the last, the beginning and the end, he’s the frame holds all the scattered chaos of our days. Then he says, “I was dead, but I’m alive again.” Not “I was born and then I died.” 

It is the other way around. Read it slow: I was dead but now I’m alive. 

It’s backwards. 

Is it possible that when I look at my days I only read half of the story? Maybe the good days are ruined, yes, but maybe they are also redeemed. Maybe there are visits to the ER with sick children but there are also people who bring you supper and pray over you in person. Maybe there are crisp autumn days with car accidents, but also passing cyclists who know first aid. Maybe you’re missing an arm, but you have a life. 

Maybe the lamb was slaughtered. 

But maybe he’s alive, and sitting on a throne. 

Maybe one day all sad things will come untrue¹, and maybe it’s already begun. 

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Just Beautiful Links

• I will forever love anything that Priya Parker shares about creating multi-cultural rituals. How happy are these two examples of wedding dances where people show up with their whole culture and this awesome fusion occurs? There’s this Iraqi-Irish wedding, and this Indian West-African example. It reminds me of the story of the birth of tap dancing — it was really a combination of Irish jigs and West African step dances forming something new in America. It’s good to remember other alternatives are possible. Yes, the Irish immigrants gained acceptance in Northern America by becoming white, distancing themselves from their black neighbors, joining in their oppression. But tap is a glimpse of what we could have had if they hadn’t.

• This documentary (free!) about Lillias Trotter was fascinating. She was a protégé (maybe almost married?) the artist and philosopher Ruskin. She had to choose between doing art with Ruskin in England, or following a call to do social justice work among London’s prostitutes (and later, a call to North Africa). Beauty vs justice? The documentary is called Many Beautiful Things, and Sleeping At Last did the sound track.

• I already loved “The Rabbit Listened” and this picture book about what is going on beneath by Cory Doerrfeld looks adorable and sympathy-building. (Look below for a preview below via The Church Librarian instagram)

thechurchlibrarian

A post shared by Kari Baumann (@thechurchlibrarian)

• I’m currently reading This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be by Eugene Peterson (well, it’s a collection of his sermons on Revelation) as well as How to Inhabit Time by James K Smith.

Thank you friends! I have some creative projects that are building some momentum, and I’m excited to tell you about them soon! (Just have to sign some things first). But until then, thank you to everyone who reads and subscribes! Your subscriptions allow me to say no to other paid work and yes to creative work like this. Until next month! — Steph

1. I think I say this almost every newsletter? But in case you don’t know, this is Tolkien, not my idea.