Finding Redemption in Film

Here's Christianity Today's list of "The ten most redeeming films of 2007." I've seen about half of these, and with 12 inches of snow on the ground, I may go out and rent the other half this weekend!

Apologies

Hello dear readers. I apologize for my long absence. I started a new job on January 7--a 9-5 fulltime job. No more freelancing for me, no-sir-ee. And I'm actually quite happy about that. After spending five years in the corporate world DREAMING, SALIVATING, WAITING for the day that I could freelance again....I finally had the opportunity to freelance again in June of 2006 and realized, "Um, oops, I'm not happy with this arrangement after all."

I missed having colleagues. I missed getting up every morning and having somewhere to go. I felt lost and bored during the times when I only had a trickle of work. And I got tired of having anxiety attacks wondering if the work would pick up again.

The final straw was when David decided to go back to school to get a degree in counseling. Good decision. He's happy and working toward something that he's thought about for a long time. But that left us with no steady income, and that had to change. So the combination of all of these factors made me start contemplating a fulltime gig again.

Thankfully, around this time one of my freelance clients approached me. Good timing. Maybe divine? Who knows. But it's an agency where I've wanted to work for a long time. I love the work they do. The people are cool but not ego-driven. And I get to wear jeans to work everyday. You can read more about the agency here.

Check out the book they designed for the Dior exhibit at the Chicago Historical museum. Very cool. And they do work for the Morris Foundation -- which is all about animal rights. Right up my alley.

So I'm getting used to the commute (only 30 minutes on the train). I like having co-workers. I feel creatively challenged. And they pay me a lot. So it's all good.

And hopefully now we'll FINALLY get our adoption started! We're chomping at the bit, but felt like we needed to get ourselves into a more financially stable position before we got going full tilt.

So here we are. Now that I'm more settled into my new schedule and life, I hope to post more.

The Joys of an Imperfect Christmas

Seven years ago on December 23, 2000, as I drove my two-door Saturn along I-80 to visit my family in Iowa for Christmas, I complained to my friend, Loren, who had agreed to ride with me to Iowa City where his parents lived, that I was weary of the same old Christmas routine. At 36 and single, I typically drove to Iowa for the holidays, and spent a week absorbing my mother’s perfectionism and anxiety, observing my siblings’ families celebrate together, and mourning my singleness. I was hungry for a change in scenery – not just at Christmas, but in my life in general. And for some reason blamed this on my mother, who took upon herself a frenzy at Christmas, wanting everything to be perfect for her children and grandchildren, cleaning and decorating the house obsessively, shopping 24/7 to find the perfect gifts for every family member, planning the traditional holiday meals, and basically doling out packages of stress to everyone around her. Perfectionism – the gift that keeps on giving.

Mom’s Christmas frenzy was often hard for me to take. I wanted her to sit down and just BE. I craved peace at Christmas, not perfectionism. I now realize while her perfectionism drove her….so did her love. She wanted Christmas to be the perfect experience – for us. But at the time, I couldn’t see that. Seven years ago, she was the easiest one to blame for what I perceived as the sorry state of affairs in my life. I longed to be normal and married, like my siblings, who traveled to see in-laws every-other Christmas, leaving me as the pathetic “single” who hung out with her parents like an unpopular high-school student left at home to play Scrabble with mom and dad on prom night.

I think back on the conversation in the car with Loren and the guilt overwhelms me. I wanted things to be different. Be careful what you ask for. About an hour later my life changed irrevocably when my brother told me, as I talked to him on my cellphone in the frozen parking lot of an Amoco station, that my mother had died of a heart attack at approximately 11:00 that morning, as she was wrapping gifts to make our Christmas perfect because she loved us.

I thought about that Christmas seven years ago, as I do every year, as David and I drove to Dallas to visit his parent. Yes, I now have in-laws to visit, but it's not the scenario I imagined.

My mother-in-law has Alzheimers. I don’t think she knows who I am. At our rehearsal dinner the night before David and I got married 2 and a half years ago, she turned to me and asked “Is it somebody’s birthday?” I laughed as I helped her cut her pizza. It was sad and funny, but I was in too much of a wedding daze to let it affect me.

She has declined since then. She now lives in an assisted living home, recently broke her hip, so she can no longer walk. Someone has to help feed her. She barely talks, and when she does, it like an infant babbling. Her life has come full circle.

As David and I drove through sunny and flat Oklahoma, I thought about how much my Christmas routine has changed. To be honest, I was dreading this holiday. David and I were going to stay in his parents empty house (it’s going on the market soon), visit them in the assisted living home, and try to play peacemakers to his feuding siblings. Fun Christmas.

I had imagined a mother-in-law who would become a friend. I imagined Christmases with the two of us cooking up a meal in the kitchen together, and hearing stories about my husband’s childhood. Maybe even a confidant, a second mother with the luxury of less baggage than a biological mother. What I got was a mother-in-law who doesn’t even recognize me.

But there were gifts found in unexpected places throughout our week in Dallas. It was sunny and I felt my normal Christmas depression lifting as I sat out by the swimming pool and the sun warmed my face. It was too chilly to swim or sunbathe, but just having the sun on my face lifted my spirits. And the week was a lesson, for me, on learning better how to love. I knew it would be a difficult week. I wasn’t expecting much. So I took Anne Lammot’s words to heart: “We’re not hungry for what we don’t have. We’re hungry for what we don’t give”. So I decided I would do the giving.

On Christmas Day I offered to cook a squash lasagna. My sister-in-law, Kelly, and niece-in-law, Chelsea, are both vegetarians, so we collaborated to make some great veggie dishes for Christmas dinner. It was a gift spending time with them in the kitchen, as I got to know them better and all three of us talked about our love for animals and how we became vegetarians. We put together an awesome Christmas dinner, with lots of veggie dishes. We had brought David’s mom and Dad home from the assisted living home, and they seemed to enjoy the time with their family.

Then a few days later my niece-in-law’s daughter, who is only 2, spiked a high temperature and became really sick – so I went with the two of them to Emergency Room. We spent 5 hours there, and I got to know Chelsea, a single mom, a little better and fell in love with Rylie, her daughter. Rylie and I are now best buds.

On Friday David and I want to the Assisted Living home to visit his parents. Emma Lee, David’s mom, was sitting in a room full of basically catatonic Alzheimer’s patients. They were all fully dressed, and some were sitting around a table. We could tell all of the patients were cared for and loved. But what do you do with a room full of adults that can’t talk, walk, or even interact, really?

We wheeled Emma Lee into the hallway and tried to talk with her, which wasn’t easy. But she smiled occasionally and we struggled to make conversation. We sat next to a piano, and I tentatively started playing hymns from a Baptist hymnal. I can only play songs with no sharps or flats – and only the right hand notes. This after 7 years of piano lessons. My mother, who was an accomplished church pianist and wanted me to be one, too, would have cringed.

I started with a few Christmas carols, like “Silent Night” and “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful.” Then we moved onto old Baptist standards like “At Calvary” and “When We All Get to Heaven” and “Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded.”

Emma Lee tried to join in singing a few hymns. I saw a spark in her eyes, and she seemed to come out of her Alzheimer’s coma for a few minutes. David started crying.

And I felt my mother there with us – my head is filled with images of her sitting at the upright piano, playing hymns from the Baptist hymnal, much more eloquently than I was playing. It seemed fitting that my mother and my mother-in-law were there together at this utterly imperfect Christmas, as I eked out hymns about a Christ-child who gave us the gift of himself that we might have hope. Then I realized I no longer felt hungry.

Adoption update

Last night David and I went to a meeting at our homestudy agency, The Cradle, here in Evanston. It's the first step in our homestudy process. Yes, we're on our way! Next I have to fill out an application, and then they will match us with a social worker who will get to know us and find out if we're fit to parent. This part of the process takes 4 - 5 months, apparently. After that, our "dossier" will be sent to our other "placing agency," Wide Horizons for Children, who will send everything to Ethiopia and then we'll start the wait to get placed with a child.

It seems like it's taken us forever to get to this point. I'm just so ready to get moving and feel like we're making progress. And it makes me nervous that so many people are starting to adopt from Ethiopia..I'm afraid something will happen...like they'll start putting age restrictions on their adoptions, or the country will be too overwhelmed to handle all of the adoptions...or something. I have to keep reminding myself that we're not in control, and that if we're supposed to have a child, it will happen one way or another. It's all about trusting God...and it's so hard.

One of my adoption/online friends, Lori, and her husband just got their referral. Check out this referral photo on their blog. Okay, doesn't that picture just make you want to go to Ethiopia and adopt about 10 babies?!

Barack, The Holidays, and Hope

I've been trying to stay a safe distance from the presidential campaign and not get too dogmatic about my love for Barack Obama, because I think ultimately politics is not the solution to what ails us. But my dad, who lives in Iowa where he meets all of the presidential candidates every election and knows the ins-and-outs of all of their policies, keeps asking me why I like Barack Obama. "Oh, I don't know...he's just....cool and refreshing." Such a deep answer, I know, which I'm sure doesn't garner much respect from my father. He's probably just rolling his eyes.

David Brooks, my secret Republican crush, articulates me feelings about Obama in his column in the NY Times today.

I think what it comes down to, for me, is INTEGRITY and SELF KNOWLEDGE. Here's an excerpt from his column:

"Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.

Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall."

Okay, that's all I'm going to say about politics.

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Changing subjects: There's an interesting article in Salon.com today about why the new athiests are ignorant about God. You can read it here.

It's an interview with John Haught, a catholic theologian at Georgetown University. He has some interesting things to say about what athiests don't know about religion, how evolution and theology can be compatible. But what struck me was what he had to say when the interviewer asked him: "Why can't you have hope if you don't believe in God"

Haught says:

"You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don't have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason."

Believing Christ is the justification for hope is what I cling to during the holidays. My usual holiday depression has been kept at bay by my crazy schedule, a few days of sunshine, and Sufjan Steven's Christmas CDs. Oh, and the Lexapro probably helps a little, too. But our wonderful church, Old St. Pats, is the true salve. In church on Sunday I was wondering, really, what people do without God. During this advent season, each Sunday they have a member of the church tell his or her story. Last Sunday a woman told about how her husband died in her arms of heart failure, and 6 months later, her infant daughter died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. How do you find hope in the midst of that? I'm constantly amazed at the testimony of people who have been through the most horrific things that life brings. Sure, I feel beaten down by every day life. But these stories constantly remind me that there is something to this Christmas story. That if THEY can go through THAT and come out feeling loved by God....then yes, there is hope. Maybe that's what it means to being Christ in the world? Telling our stories of hope.

Happy Santa Lucia Day

For the past few weeks I've been donning a white gown and putting a glittery wreath on my head to celebrate Santa Lucia with the Chicago Nordic Choir. Every time I do this, I feel a bit foolish. I remember attending a Santa Lucia festival at my grandmother's Swedish Covenant Church a long time ago. The "Lucia" wears a crown of candles, and her young, virginal court follows behind her in a processional to celebrate the saint.

Now that I'm a member of the Nordic Choir, I've just been going along with this tradition, not really knowing what it means. Something about "light" and of course a saint named "Lucia". But a few nights ago we sang a Lucia concert at a Lutheran church in Evanston and one of the church members read the story of Lucia. Finally, I understood the meaning of the candles, white robes and red sashes we wear around our waists.

Here's the Lucia story:

"The origins of the Santa Lucia tradition are not in Scandinavia, but in Syracuse on the island of Sicily around 304 A.D. According to the Sicilian legend, Lucia's mother, a wealthy lady, had been miraculously cured of an illness at the sepulcher of Saint Agatha in Catania. Lucia, a Christian, persuaded her mother in thankfulness to distribute her wealth to the poor. So, by candlelight, the mother and daughter went about the city secretly ministering to the poor of Syracuse.

Unfortunately, this was during the last great persecution of Christians in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. The pagan young man, to whom Lucia was engaged, took a dim view of this distributing of her dowry, and denounced her to the prefect, Pascasius, who ordered that she be seized and tortured. Miraculously, when neither boiling oil nor burning pitch had the power to hurt her, she was blinded and slain with a sword. Her martyrdom is recorded in ancient sources and in an inscription found in Syracuse.

How or when this legend and tradition came to Värmland, Sweden, no one knows. With the coming of Christianity to Sweden shortly after 1000 A.D., missionaries and priests may have told the story to inspire new converts. Another possibility is that sailors from Sweden may have been captivated by the popular candlelight festival of Santa Lucia in Italy and brought the tradition back with them. A newer theory, requiring more research is that St. Birgitta (1303-1373), during her stay in Rome (1349-1373) in her effort to get papal approval of the Bridgittine Order for women, probably wrote home to Sweden telling of the Lucia legend which was widely known in Italy. As Lucia Day comes at the darkest time of year, the candies of the ministering Santa Lucia portend and witness to the True Light-the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. On the morning of the thirteenth of December, the strains of "Santa Lucia" are heard everywhere in Sweden as the white-robed maiden comes out of the night with her burning crown of candies dispelling the darkness. In honor of her martyrdom, It has long been the custom to donate money on Lucia Day to institutions working for the blind."

Now, when I wear the white robe and carry a candle, I will know that I am a witness to the True Light, Jesus Christ.

Thankful

It's often hard for me to be thankful. I'm a cup half-empty kind of gal, as my husband often reminds me. I pine for things I don't have, while overlooking all of the great things in my life. Someone once suggested writing something you're thankful for everyday. Maybe I should do that, just to remind me that, okay, I have it pretty darn good.

I'm reading a memoir my sister and niece both suggested -- "Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls. I bought it two days ago and am almost finished. It's good. Anyway, it's the story of life with parents who are irresponsible, selfish, and basically unfit to parent. Neither of them can hold down a job, and the four children end up fending for themselves, to the point of digging through the school garbage to find the remains of other kids lunches to eat. Their shack of a house has no running water and they can rarely afford electricity. Once Jeannette becomes an adult and becomes a successful reporter in New York City, the one thing she's most thankful for is a hot bath and being clean everyday.

So what am I thankful for? After reading this book, I'm thankful for a warm house, money to pay my electric bill, a hot shower everyday, parents who worked hard to provide for me.

I'm also thankful for a loving husband who makes me dinner and cleans the kitchen (among other things), good friends, a cute cat curled up next to my computer, siblings who are fun to be around, my 10 nephews and 3 nieces who have made being childless a little easier, my dad who taught me to love to read -- and encouraged me to write, and the Sufjan Steven's Christmas CDs.

Most of all I'm thankful for the hope that Christmas brings.

Here are a few photos from our Thanksgiving in Iowa.

Siblings who actually like each other.


Niece Ellie likes to cook. For the record, my waist was never this small.


David teaching my youngest nephews how to play "Casino". He's such a good influence.


The little boys adore their older cousin Alex.


There were 23 of us all together. We were only missing 2 nephews and a spouse. This i s a typical scene when we're all together -- some watching football, some getting ready to go somewhere (to the mall? To the coffee shop?), and basically just hanging out. I'm thankful I get to hang out with this gang.