Welcome to the Just Beautiful Newsletter where I write about making space for beauty and justice to meet, share about our journey from tinyhouse living to a home on 3 acres, and give you too many links. Right now, I’m focusing on making space for creativity in the midst of motherhood and other such chaos. If a friend forwarded you this email, hit subscribe to get the newsletter each month.
Excessively cheerful or optimistic. That is how the dictionary defines "Pollyanna". In other words, ANNOYING AS HECK. Us sophisticated folks roll our eyes along with the 1915 critic who said the good thing about the book Pollyanna is you could shut it when the heroine got too annoying.
I did a mini-term at Oxford studying 19th Century children’s literature. This is one of the big criticisms of children’s books at the time. They were written by grownups to stuff moral virtues down the throats of unsuspecting children, and as a result, the characters are unbelievable and irritating. The problem with this purely critical view is that, actually, lots of kids like these books. They don’t find the characters irritating. They still believe it is possible to be good. There are some characters beyond the pale, maybe (I’m looking at you, Elsie Dinsmore) - but for the most part, the characters in the books that have survived until today had a bit of complexity to them.
As to Pollyanna’s annoying glad game, author Eleanor H. Porter said, "You know I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books. I have been placed often in a false light. People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was 'glad' at everything," she said in one interview. "I have never believed that we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil; I have merely thought that it is far better to 'greet the unknown with a cheer.'"
It’s true. Pollyanna isn’t instantly glad. She works for it. Positive psychology is essentially one big “glad game” — training the neural networks in your brain to focus on things for which you are grateful. It’s a skill. It takes repetition. It takes work.
There is a literary tradition that is incredibly skeptical of goodness. When you study literature, you’re studying to be a critic, to pick apart these characters and judge where their edges are wobbly or the plot lines weak. These fictional characters who are so cheerful may seem fake - but does that say more about them, or about us?
The Christian tradition can be accused of paper-thin goodness. Of spiritually bypassing people’s pain and shaming them into silent suffering with cliché Bible verses and statements like, “God has it all under control! Cheer up!”. Christians dealing with depression or mental illness have been told their illnesses are sinful, or weakness. This, of course, should be rejected as the antithesis of the Christian story, which affirms all of our human emotions, and reveals a God who suffers with us.
And yet, sometimes we have ordinary, run of the mill bad days. And sometimes, the world outside our walls is filled with violence and disaster, and dark things which are out of our control.
Perhaps sometimes the work is greet the unknown full in the face with good cheer as an act of defiant courage.
Sometimes maybe our task is to exert the energy to find the good, the grace, that is there somewhere, and stare at it. Because God has not abandoned us.
Maybe sometimes we are called to turn the clouds inside out, shake out their pockets, and find the silver threads of grace lining them. To pick flowers, to paint red stripes (or help a friend paint them!), to look at the candle on the nightstand and other good things which are there, REALLY THERE, even in a world of gun violence and petty irritations and a month of no showers.
The resurrection says the good is more real than the bad. When we muster good cheer in the face of darkness it is not denial. It is refusing to let the darkness write the story, to have the last word.
We must mourn, but this walk towards justice is a long, long road. And it's spotting the beauty, seeing the good in the rubble that will help us keep going.
Windhover news:
Yes, we are calling our new property/house/3acres/whateverItIs Windhover from this Gerard Manly Hopkins poem despite the somewhat ambiguous pronunciation. We’ve had many challenges this month: no water for about 3 hours a day, no car, no electricity for large portions of the day, battling municipal transfer fees… the list goes on. But, in the spirit of the glad game — we also have received meals from friends, painting parties, used furniture (furnishing a house after our tinyhouse is not a joke!) and 2 house mates. And next month it looks like the first Windhover project will begin… free range chickens are going to arrive!
Just Beautiful Links
Here is the article by Ruth Graham I drew from for this Pollyanna essay. Worth a read!
Related to last month’s essay: I am kicking myself I didn’t include my thoughts on Jon Baptiste winning 5 Grammy’s and how EXCITED the world seemed for him… because people think he is a nice guy. People wanted him to win because he cares about his wife, he cares about including people in the participation of music (turning the end of his concerts into marching band street parades!), and he just really, really likes music, and likes making it for people to enjoy. “Doling out awards, he said, seemed to go against the way people make music, which he called an act of inheritance and of community. “I believe this to my core: There is no best musician, best artist, best dancer, best actor,” he said. Music is “more than entertainment for me, it’s a spiritual practice.” This article talks about his music might seem “saccharine” from the outside, but he’s actually an authentic interpretation of his New Orleans musical roots.
I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I think if you liked this essay you will like Joy Clarkson’s new book Aggressively Happy. The post below talks about enjoying things unironically. “I find the way we police our own and other people’s enjoyment utterly fascinating. By nature, I am the opposite of the enjoyment police; you could call me an enjoyment anarchist. I tend to think that life is hard, and wherever we find innocent enjoyment, we should lap it up, suck the marrow out, and give thanks to God.”
I love me a controversial title, and this article on hospitality from CT “The Gospel Doesn’t Always Have to Come with a House Key and the benefits of introverted hospitality was interesting.
I’ve been writing stories about our daily life on instagram over here:
This article on community, injustice, and beauty from A Life Overseas about how to move forward in the wake of the SBC abuse scandal seemed right in our wheelhouse.
Still thinking about concepts from this book, The Art of Gathering and wondering about how to make our gatherings more meaningful.
As always — thanks for reading! As I keep plugging away at building a “platform” for my book proposal on mother-writers (who wrote before washing machines) — I’m grateful for all of your comments, shares, and encouragement!
If you want to support my writing work — share this with a friend!
Until next month,
Steph
Shall we all be Pollyannas?
I love the image of staring at the good. Just recognizing the good without forcing any other feelings can be a start to something deeper.
I also love the stripes!