We will all go together when we go (when we go)

Today I read Michael Rowe's fascinating blog on the Huffington Post about Anne Rice's decision to renounce the title of "Christian." Two things strike me at once: First, that I cannot renounce the name of Christian. And second, that Evil's purpose to scatter the sheep is becoming more evident with every breath.

I know, as does Rowe, what the title "Christian" has come to mean. And so do you. So, I won't elucidate here. But I must say that as long as He strengthens me to do so, (remembering Saint Peter) I must bind to myself the name of the Savior who lifts me out of the muck and the mire. Who gives my feet a firm place to stand and enables me to do so confidently in the presence of an altogether Almighty God. What they called Him, they will call me. How they felt for Him, they will feel for me. What they did to Him, they will want to do to me. And I must count it as gain.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy on me.

And I am reminded at the same time that as Christians, oh my brothers and sisters, as Christians, we cannot forsake assembling together. As for me, my feet had almost slipped in the matter. I am thankful for the process of redemption. We cannot - as meddlesome and altogether vexing as they are - forsake other Christians. Their sin is repugnant to us. The smell of it lingers in our nostrils like the smell of burning death. Yet, it is no worse than ours. We must awake to the realization of the little foxes in our vineyards and understand that we all stand together, before God, utterly condemnable. Amen? Amen. We need the fellowship of the saints. An orthodox faith doesn't stand alone.

I know you already know, but I thought it worth restating.

Photographic Evidence (of a really good night)

Literary Leanings

Like every great reader, I have a list of favorite books that I read and re-read over and over and over again. I generally go through several paper-back copies and reserve a hard-cover in case of calamity. (I don't want to be without a good read when the Apes take over the world.)

Few of them could really be labed "classic," although I'm sure at least one will pop up on our children's summer reading lists. (That is, of course, if they're still teaching reading at our local gub'ment sausage factories when our children finally get there.) Since I first read them as a child, it's hard to say if I love them because they appeal to certain dearly-held sensibilities, or if they actually created them in the first place.

I find myself returning to these stories at the times when the bottom of my world seems to drop out from under my feet and I find myself, arms flailing, reaching for something solid and true around which to wrap my mind. So, I suppose in that sense, they're something of a religion. Of course, I still believe in an Omnipotent and Loving God, it's just that I know he exposes His own to suffering like a doctor breaking the leg of a child only to set it right again. (If He were not ultimately Merciful, what would we do? My books are far more predictible.)

I read them during the mad whirl of my upheaved adolescence, during the unsteady squash-and-cucumber summers I first spent away from home working in a kitchen in North Carolina, after my first real heartbreak, shortly after I was married, when my grandmother died. When I lay awake at night during my first pregnancy, round as a melon and uncomfortable with impending labor, my husband read them to me. It's one of my sweetest memories. I'm reading them now as the uncertainty of the future presses around me like a slew of strangers in a close elevator. Every time I read them, I understand them on a new, if not deeper, level.

From these stories, I've learned the import of purpose, of quotidian pleasure and of animal compantionship. I've learned what it is I aspire to and what it is that brings lasting pleasure. I find myself writing in the voices of the characters I love and making mental narrations that cushion difficult circumstances in bearable frames.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a bar in Connecticut in the uncomfortable position of explaining my relationships with books to some of David's business associates. (A position, it must be said, that he put me in solely for the pleasure of seeing me vexed.) I tried to explain the difference between the deliciously cerebral delight of constructing a 20-plus page article on some obsure aspect of a dusty old text and reading. The first is the clinical, albeit frequently grubby disection of literature. It's the fascination of seeing a beating heart during surgery. The second is the untidy and almost lascivious consumption of literature and the accompanying pleasure brought by the beating of your own heart as you experience the world first hand.

I love them both. I'm a lucky girl.

My short list, in no particular order, is as follows:

The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

All Creatures Great and Small, James Heriot

All Things Bright and Beautiful, James Heriot

All Things Wise and Wonderful, James Heriot

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

Answered Prayers for Owen Meany, John Irving

A Child's Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson

What's yours?

Captive Israel (Or, O Come Immanuel)

Kyak off a Hunting Island, S.C. beach that doesn't exist any more.

Strange days, these. For some reason, the yellow smog doesn't hang as heavy upon this city this summer. Not yet, anyway. As I push the stroller down the buckled sidewalks, I feel like I'm more focused on the cracks and pits in the sidewalk than on what's going on around me. I don't see quite like I used to and I wonder if I've entered the ranks of the voluntarily blind.

I saw a woman in a headscarf making her way past a row of mouldering houses on her way to a neighborhood supermarket known for having a selection of Halal meat. She swung an empty Whole Foods bag as she walked. Pecking her way down the street. First on the sidewalk and then, in the gutter as the terrain warranted. I wondered at the similarity of our daily lives: See him off. Make the breakfast. Change the diapers. Wash the dishes. Wait for his return. Amen.


I followed her not because I was interested, but because I didn't want to manhandle the 50-plus pounds in the stroller up the steep and broken grade going another way would have dictated. I've gone lazy. And I can't help but compare the me of the present to the me of the past who would have followed with greedy and journalistic eyes longing for a glimpse of the strange color or even suffering I thought lent authenticity to my neighborhood, my companions, my life.


Like Aslan on the table of the White Witch, my idealism has been sacrificed, transmogrified, and reborn. I see the real. The truth will set you free, but it will kill you first.


I remember somewhat fondly, actually, the relish with which I absorbed the grit of this neighborhood. I saw the drugs, the prostitutes and the cops they attracted. Strangely, it's a much quieter neighborhood now and I wonder if all the action has just been pressed down the street, or if the economy has effected the street commerce. I almost think it's the latter. The hos and pimps had to get real jobs. They really needed the benefits.


Even the 100-year-old beauties of my neighborhood have gone shabby with the sub-prime crisis. The Jemison house needs to be painted in the most desperate way. And it breaks my heart. Even in my parent's neighborhood, there is a house with boarded-up windows. It's something marvelously out-of-place there, almost like a 1954 Packard in the driveway or something. You know the Packard? A great steel megalith of a car with a frowning grill looking as if it has just eaten a monstrous sausage and is experiencing the most vile dyspepsia.


I liked being a tourist of suffering. I liked being able to take it all back up over the mountain for dinner. I liked being "among them, but not of them." But these days, I confess, I feel the weight of the suffering everywhere. It seems to pour down the drainpipes off the roofs of the world and trickle maliciously into the attics of every house in the city. Housewives feel it drip on their faces as they pour the coffee. Businessmen scan the skies as they drive to work. Uh oh. Here it comes. There isn't a home here that hasn't suffered. Rain falls on the just and the unjust, and these days, I'm not so sure that money provides any sort of flood insurance from the onslaught of suffering. It drones through the evenings like a twin engine Cessna through a cloudless summer sky. (A sound that to me, means lonely.)


Last night, I felt again the whisper of the still, small voice saying "peace, peace" when there is no peace. It was as if the peace was being birthed. It wasn't so much a restatement of what existed as a creating of what was not. It moved, making a way in the wilderness. Tying up all the loose ends and spreading a table for me in the presence of my enemies. (And Tom Bombadil. Why not?) My grandmother came to me in a dream with rolled-up jeans and an enamel bowl full of blackberries. Everything, she said, is so beautiful here.

Oh Come, Oh Come, Immanuel.

And ransom Captive Israel.

Who mourns in lonely exile here.

Until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Immanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

New Thanksgiving Traditions

This Thanksgiving, we're away from our extended families and are enjoying making some new traditions. Being that we're both the babies of our families, we didn't get a whole lot of say in forming traditions. We kind of had to take what was there. This year, we woke up and stayed in our jammies until noon. We ate cheese grits and eggs for breakfast and went to the park after an abbreviated luncheon. We also made some new food traditions for our good old-fashioned Grizwold Smith Family Thanksgiving:

This year, bone-in, grass-fed ribeyes. Big fat, ribeyes. With (of course, there is a with) sautéed portabella mushrooms, roasted Yukon Gold potatoes, roasted fresh Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes. (I know, mom, the CARBS!) We're also having apple pie with ice cream. Burk had milk. Because that is all Burk ever has and we all feel sad for him. Carrie is having cheese grits and raspberries with ice cream and sugary baked apples. And Brussels Sprouts. Seriously. (I KNOW mom, the protein. She did eat a little bit of deli turkey.) But the kicker...the absolute BEST PART is s'mores on the grill! I am so excited, I'm liable to pee my pants, y'all!

P.S. Today Carrie dropped something and when I handed it back, she looked up at me with a face of the utmost gravity and said "Da tu Mama." Perfect ending.

I love this.

tree of thanks

Helpless, but Healed.

There's something all at once cute and pitiful about tiny hospital gowns.

If God is teaching me anything, it's that when He ordains difficulty in our lives it enables us to regard the suffering of others with greater kindness and respond to their needs with a gentle spirit. My high-risk pregnancy required me to undergo weekly contraction stress tests at the hospital. Every week, almost without exception, I sat behind the curtain in my little cubicle and heard another woman receiving bad news about her pregnancy. It got to the point that I understood what was happening in the next cube before the nurse actually vocalized it. And yet every week, I received good news about Burk. He arrived at 39 weeks, fat and full-term, despite even my O.B.'s doubts that we could make it so far.

This weekend, Burk underwent surgery at Children's Hospital to correct infantile pyloric stenosis. Seeing my month-old newborn undergo surgery and all it entails was one of the more difficult trials of my life. Yet, for the surgery team and the nurses who cared for him, it was routine. No one expected complications and the prognosis, as it was explained to me many times, was that he would get the surgery and recover. "We'll do this procedure and that will be the end of that," is how his surgeon explained it to us. And it's been true. On Friday, we took our dehydrated baby for a diagnostic ultrasound. On Sunday, we were home feeding a milk monster all the formula he could drink. It's starting to sink in now that it's over and I'm teary and tired.

But as we wandered the halls of the hospital looking for a late-night cup of coffee or just trying to blow off steam, we met some of the parents who inhabit the hospital. "Inhabit" isn't an inaccurate word, either, as some of them are there for months on end only to expect to return again after a few short weeks at home. In the cafeteria, I met a father there to see his 14-year-old daughter undergo a knee transplant after chemo had destroyed her joints. (She is Jaden. Remember her.) In admitting, I met a young mother admitting her son for the umpteenth time for an intestinal blockage. She knew every surgeon and his or her staff personally. (Her son is Aiden. Please pray for him.)

We stayed on the seventh floor just down the hall from the NICU. I watched parents wander the halls in the pajamas like ghosts knowing personally how adrenaline is to sleep like soap to oil in water. The difference is that I went home after two sleepless nights. They won't go home for weeks.

And I contemplate this and realize that God doesn't always spare our children. Sometimes, good parents lose their children. I don't understand it. So many people contacted me over the weekend expressing how sorry they were for what we were going through and wondering how they could help. I couldn't explain how little we really were experiencing compared to the suffering of others. Yet the strangest thing to contemplate is that our suffering not only gives us gratitude for the mercy God has bestowed upon us, but it also makes real the smaller (relatively, of course) sufferings of others. God wields the tool of difficulty to give us hearts turned toward mercy.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I can't stand the rain against my window...

Burk on his birthday.

Contrary to how it may appear, the rain is not falling from the sky. It's pushing upward from the ground and flowing out of the storm drains like some kind of horror-movie creature. I'm enjoying it with a cup of coffee because both of my children are sleeping. Burk will be one month old tomorrow.

My body is healing slowly from his birth. It's amazing how quickly you can recover from a c-section, but I'm still working to heal from the epidural. I'll start at least six weeks of twice-weekly physical therapy on Monday. Childbirth isn't pretty sometimes. But I think it was beautiful.

I'm a little worried that I won't be finished with P.T. in time to get back in school in January. These days, I can't only focus on one thing at a time. I look forward to steak on Thanksgiving. I look forward to my very first fly-fishing lesson. I look forward to Christmas. And a trip to New York in the spring. (I hope.) I look forward to next summer when both of my children will swim.

I'm looking forward to Burk's baptism.

I wish I had the time to sink down into the mood to write like I used to for this blog. It takes a few drinks sometimes. But I do have time to chronicle what happens in the quotidian. (OH, what a delightfully pretentious word.) And what I am learning in the quotidian—as I battle what I battle day in and day out—is that the war is won in the minute. That is, most of us long for a kind of William Wallace glory moment. (FREEDOM! right?) But no one knows where most warriors fall. We win or lose in the way we consider our neighbors, care for our children, cook our suppers and love our families. The battle of the moment is a battle of years and the light of our glory is hidden under the bushel of the quotidian. And we are all warriors.

Can I get an amen?

I'm the boss. Need the info.

Do any of my medically-inclined friends have any info on the incidence of arachnoiditis following epidural anaesthesia? Not as the result of a dural puncture and not preceded by any epidural compromise and not accompanied by arachnoid cysts. Thank you muchly.

When D. Gets Tired of Trading Mortgages.....

I think he should trade cows. It's like Jeff Boomhauer on speed.

"It was not courage...I was compelled...."

Bishop Rucyahana

The house next door to ours has been foreclosed upon. Of course, this isn't a particularly unusual happening these days and being that the house was owned and "maintained" by a slumlord, it isn't particularly upsetting. For the past few days, I've been watching the men employed by the bank as they cleaned truckload after truckload of junk out of the house and carted it away. They told me a little of what they found inside, though, and that was something I did find somewhat upsetting. They found the usual rotting food and filth, but they also found evidence of (I know the neo-pagans would disapprove of this moniker, but it is what it is) witchcraft and black rituals. They removed spell books and Voodoo dolls and at least one bag of animal carcasses. I don't think this happening deserves too much attention, but I do believe that there are forces in the world that act as opposition to us as we try to walk with Christ and share something of his Light with the world. Even if we are woefully negligent in doing so.

Our beloved priest and his equally beloved wife (who happens to be our deacon) prayed for us and blessed our home before we even knew what was happening outside. And God heard and delivered us.I recite a litany of faithfulness. I proclaim the faithful hand of God my Father on my life. And that he has cloaked my in His protection and favor is especially evident in the unfolding of these circumstances.

This morning, I was reminded of God's faithfulness again at church when we were blessed and anointed by our Rwandan Bishop (yeah, I'm that kind of Anglican) John Rucyahana. He spoke powerfully about the failure of the Church to withstand the pressure of culture and

boldly proclaim Christ and his faithfulness. It was humbling and it was powerful.

Then, I read an excerpt from this article in Christianity Today in which another Anglican bishop

recounts some of the problems he's observed in what has come to be known as the emergent

church. Here it is:

First, the emergents are so sensitive to issues of community, relationship, egalitarianism, and being non-utilitarian in their relationships, that evangelism has simply become a synonym for manipulation—a foul ball, relationally. If you and I were work colleagues and I built a relationship in which I could influence your journey toward Christ, that would be considered wrong in these circles. I cannot be friends with you if I intend to lead you to Christ.

Second, after 10 or 12 years of the emerging church, you have to ask where anything has been built. Evangelism has been so muted and the normal building of structures and processes hasn't moved forward because there's no positive, godly imagination for doing either evangelism or leadership. Such things are by definition utilitarian, and so they were made especially difficult.

And while I wholeheartedly agree that this is definitely the case in some of the modern churches who embrace the faddish appeal of the liturgy yet deny it it's power to transform, I must admit that some of these characteristics have been the hallmark of my own journey. This kind of Christianity lead me to near spiritual starvation and I've been in a kind of spiritual intensive care ever since. And I repent.

I feel somewhat compelled to share the words that our bishop gave to us this morning. If you're interested, you can find the mp3 here.

(And I have NO IDEA what is going on with the font in this post.)

"Autumn is a second spring, with every leaf a flower." Albert Camus

Carrie in the roses on her very first birthday.

This morning, I feel like I've just woken up from a very long sleep in a very dark place. It's taking me a minute to fully come-to and remember where I am. I can tell that my writing has gone musty and frayed with misuse like the quilts I stack on my hope chest during the summer. I need to shake it out and put it to use.

This summer—this interminable summer—is finally fading away and leaving me as completely ready to see it go as I ever have been. I wore it out like a good pair of jeans. By the Labor Day horse show in Tennessee, it was soft and broken in and unfit for public wear. So, I let it go. And felt grateful. I spent two weeks at the beach at the end of August recovering from pneumonia and enjoying beaches that spread out like Caribbean travel brochures under an uncharacteristically cool sky. I made it to Lake Martin for a weekend and reveled in the way the water smells (and unfortunately, tastes) like decades of fishing and skiing and lazy Bourbon drinking. It was a beautiful summer. And it surrounded one of the hardest times of my life.

This summer, we seemed to go from difficulty to difficulty. My pregnancy became decidedly high-risk somewhere in mid-July and I've already been in the hospital three times. Our Golden Retriever has been diagnosed with untreatable lymphoma. And our spirits have been tried with any number of smaller troubles and clogs that probably wouldn't bear mentioning even if I could remember them all. It was a strange fusion of sweet and sour. To say the least.

But we have thrived in this rocky soil and we find it hard to attribute it to anything other than the grace of a benevolent God and the trials he wields like a surgical scalpel to dissect our sinful spirits. Whereas I began the summer in a perilous state of unbelief and rebellion, he has used difficulty to bring me back to faith and to further reveal and heal the collateral damage caused by too long a time in too dark a place.

These last few weeks (days?) before the baby's arrival are pearls He has given me to savor and admire and enjoy. And I am grateful.

The end.

What a difference a year makes...

This year, I watched the fireworks TRIUMPHANTLY. (And cried like a little girl.)

I don't wanna be a good girl scout...and love for each of these, my two babies.

There was a time in my life when I realized I might never have children. And as my grief started to subside (or perhaps in order to kill it) I became intoxicated on the easy indolence of childlessness and on the redemption of graduate school and on all the hedonistic pleasure I could muster. I set aside two hours of every day to sit on my front porch and relish good beer. I gloried in the roughhoused messiness of this neighborhood and on the freedom offered by a little bit of money in a good economy and the opportunities I had to eat and drink on the long-fabled (and now sadly diminished if not entirely extinct) investment banker's expense account. And I made art. Not good art. But art nonetheless.

And then, I found out about Carrie. And everything changed. It has taken me some time to get back on my feet, so to speak, and to begin to make sense of my position as mother. Soon, B. will be here, too and I'll have to make some more adjustments not so much to who I am as to my perception of myself.

This is part of a much longer post, but for now, I remember who I was and accept who I am and relish the idea that the two are reconciled. At least for now.

Someday, I'll suit up again and pour some iron. But for now, there is Tom Waits. Who I hope to introduce to my babies. Here you go, babies.

Had another ultra sound today....saw parts. And OH my poor poor uterus and its adhesions. It is punishing me for making it work overtime. It is telling me that it needs a break. I can't believe its already been 16 weeks! I learned today that it is difficult to find an "I'm the Big Sister" t-shirt in a size as small as the one I'll need.

The TMI post. So, stop reading now if you aren't feeling compassionate.

So, I think most of my friends now know that I am going to have another baby in October. That's right. I have a 9-month-old. They will be 15 months apart. I don't think I've blogged directly about this subject, frankly, because I don't blog about painful subjects too often. Moderately painful? Yes, but seriously painful? Not too much. I had a vision of some beautiful eloquent blog about my birth experience. It ain't going to happen, though. So, sorry. Here's what I've got:

When I was pregnant with C., I had a problem with P.I.H. that resulted in an induction at 38 weeks. Medically, it was a sound decision for my doctor to make. I wasn't pressured or pushed or compelled to go into labor so my doctor could go on vacation. I had a pretty good experience. Spent the night in the hospital and by three the next afternoon, I was minutes away from delivering. But, a totally unpredictable complication arose and I wound up having a very emergent c-section. The time from "decision to incision" was less than three minutes. Carrie was born in less than 7 minutes. My OB saved my baby's life. When she had finished repairing my incision, she came over and gave me a kiss on the head. We've kind of had a weird bond ever since.

But, what I remember about my birth experience is having a nurse jump on the bed with me and running down the hallway to the O.R. I remember the frantic instructions being literally shouted back and forth between the medical staff. I remember feeling the tug of the incision before I was all the way on the table. I remember the bright lights and the way I spread my arms out so the anesthesiologists could get the lines they needed. I asked the doctors if I was going to die. But, all that was really ok. I didn't mind not having a "normal" birth experience too much. I was grateful to have received the care I needed.

The hard part came after everything was over. I didn't get to see my baby because I was upstairs with a morphine drip and she was downstairs in the NICU. As I write this, I realize I'm not ready to write about the details yet. Suffice it to say, it was hard.

I was shocked at how many people have some pretty mean things to say about C/S in the U.S. Doctors are blamed (a lot) for doing unnecessary surgeries and inductions. It seems that all of a sudden, some people don't even believe in the possibility of a needed intervention. And people come out of the woodwork to criticize your decision (except for that I didn't really have a decision) or to let you know that if you had chosen a different kind of health-provider you wouldn't have had the experience you did. So, it becomes your fault that you had an emergency c/s and a baby in the NICU. And it sucks. (And this is not to say that whatever you did or whatever you choose is awful. You have freedom, too. It's just to say that I wouldn't have a baby if I had made another choice. And that is black and white.)

What has also been hard, though, is that I am now faced with the prospect of going through the whole process again. But this time, I have the choice whether or not to have a C/S again. And it's a choice I've made. And I'm feeling okay about it. But it's pretty soon to be making that choice again. And I'm not going to lie and say that this is going to be easy, or that I'm not nervous.

And that is all. Except for this: I don't have a scar. Not even a little tiny scar. I mean I have NOTHING to show for all of this trauma. Who comes away with a 7-inch incision (emergency c/s incisions are large and uneven) with NO SCAR? I do. Thanks, wonderful OB fairy.

From USA Today

"A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic President supports abortion and supporting him 'constitutes cooperation with intrinsic evil.'"

Well, he might be celibate but he's...um...in tact.

le pain quotidien

1. Icy water in a soft-spouted sippy-cup is nice when you have a new tooth coming up.

2. I relish the idea of taking two semesters off to spend with my Big Baby and my Little Baby and David. I eat and breathe literature, but I need some time just to be a reader and not a student. My little one will be four months old when I go back, and I'll be ready.

3. My mother-in-law said that being in graduate school, toting around a 9-month-old, selling a house and being pregnant is a lot for one girl to do. That validation was like honey.

4. I have decided to forego the organic co-op in light of the fact that the farmer's market will really be kicking it up before too long.

5. It isn't popular to say, but this little family really is the work of my life. Obviously, not the only work of my life, but the sweetest.

6. A meal from Chez Fon Fon would feed more than my body right now.

Caro and the Cheerio Bib

My Aunt Sister gave me a Cheerrio bib. I can keep my Cheerios in the little pocket at the bottom and eat them up when I'm feeling hungry. I might like to eat them in church and smile at Father L. I can always make him laugh when he is trying to deliver his sermon.

What? Are you looking at me?

Today, we had the unexpected chance to have lunch with D. at his office. C. and Corduroy loved eating the grass and I loved spending time with D. Somehow, I can't get tomato pie out of my mind. Time to plant a bucket-o-basil.