The waiting year
| |

The waiting year

“Heap on more wood! The wind is chill;But let it whistle as it will,We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.”Sir Walter Scott When I was little, my mother quilted an advent calendar. It was a pre-printed fabric scene – chipmunks making popcorn chains, I believe – that she made three-dimensional with batting and stitches, and 24…

Giving Thanks at a Bigger Table
|

Giving Thanks at a Bigger Table

Happy Birthday, Christian Courier! Isn’t it lovely how this aligns with Thanksgiving? A very fitting coincidence. In these days of counting our blessings and holding on, it’s wonderful to have a real celebration like this to mark. We may be restricted when it comes to physically sitting down at extended family tables this Thanksgiving, but this…

Knitting New Circles
| |

Knitting New Circles

Ten years ago, we were going through a huge family change. Job loss, relocation, back to school, small kids in tow – the whole shebang. Part madness, part adventure and a heap of faith in a pilgrim life. And with that upheaval, I picked up the knitting needles. I’d first learned to knit as a teenager and knit myself a huge blue shawl-collared cocoon to hide in, then moved on to smaller things like mittens for boyfriends.

Waiting Days

Waiting Days

Here they are, the waiting days. Worried days. Shut-down, locked-down, up-and-down days. We are stilled. We flare up. Fret. Rage. Are stilled again. At my house, we’re five all together at home, and we know that’s lucky. We have friends who live alone, and we know that must be hard. But this is hard, too. These days are hard for everyone. These virus days are different in different places, but it’s all one story because nothing is the same and everyone is waiting for normal to return.

Counterintuitive Love

Counterintuitive Love

A Sunday morning snapshot of our locked-down life. Three Sundays now away from church. This feels wrong. We see the spire when we go out for a walk, but the doors are locked and we know that, so we don’t go close. It’s strange to think of it sitting there empty without us, like a drydocked boat, waiting for things to begin again.

A Stone Church

A Stone Church

It was a family long weekend and we headed out of town. They say that in Cornwall, the toe tip of Britain, spring comes early. Maybe we’d find good weather. Sunshine. Warmth. Well, that was optimistic, and we did get soggy, but we also saw fields of daffodils, a church with a cross made of surf boards, and seas of every shade of blue there is. I’d assumed summer sun made the Cornish seas lovely, but it must be the stone instead because even in the rain, the water was incredibly blue.

Cabbage Days

Cabbage Days

February. Who can think warm thoughts in February? It’s bleak, grey and hard to get through, despite its brevity. Margaret Atwood described February in a poem as the “month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre.” I know what she means; I, too, come from Ottawa. But maybe it’s healthy to remember that poets like to exaggerate. Cold February might be less about grim despair than simply keeping going. In Old English, February was called kale-monath or cabbage month. It’s a month for persistence and daily, ordinary life.

Lighting Candles In Smoky Times
|

Lighting Candles In Smoky Times

A new year and the same old aches. The headlines change, and the photographs are different, but we still watch and worry, adding the names of far-off places to our church prayer lists. This year began with Australia’s massive bush fires. How do we answer? With prayer? Grief? Action? Donations? As with news of any disaster, it can be hard to know where to start. In October, I wrote in my column about trying to find a faithful response to the world’s hard news.

New Year’s Light
|

New Year’s Light

After all the gifts, one more. A new year ahead. A fresh start, if you want that, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to change anything. You can just keep going. There are loud voices at this time of year crowing about all the changes we can make. Be stronger, be thinner, be greener, be better. But newness comes with or without our effort. Newness is a gift.

Love Up Close
|

Love Up Close

My mother came to visit. This was a big deal because these days we live five thousand kilometres apart and I hadn’t seen her since I was home last year when my dad died. We email and video-chat fairly regularly, but that isn’t the same. It isn’t face-to-face. She came at the end of September and stayed with us for a month. When I told friends about this visit, they paused, then asked rather deliberately how it “actually” was. A whole month with your mother in your house?