Family Friday: New Year 2016

   Not a lot of resolutions going on here this morning. I spent New Year's Eve sick on the couch with chicken soup and watching funny bits from interviews with British actors before an early bed - still better than wearing adult diapers in Times Square! 

   Therefore I am not jumping up to wave at my kitchen with a sparkling wand and lay my relationship with dirty dishes to rest. I might be considering slowing down on the Christmas goodie consumption, but not with an awful lot of commitment. But when I did try to think of what might be a theme to our lives in this upcoming year, my mind rested on Family.

   Without too much explicitude (ha - a new word! feel free to adopt, people!), I believe that we will probably be re-figuring out the role of extended family in our lives - not a bad one, I hope - we love you all dearly - but at the same time finding our identity more as our own family unit. Dad, Mum and son. Husband, wife and the love-made-flesh between us. Team Bee.

   When we married, as Fr. Hattie pointed out in our prep classes, we gave each other new identities that we hadn't had before. When Perrin came into existence, he gave us new ones yet again. We have the ability to embody Love in the world in our own unique way, and for that we have to be able to be there for each other unshakeably, no matter what massive waves there are to ride. If we bury our own selves, wounds, joy and all, into the core of our definition in Love, then hopefully we will find a way to reach out again to our loved ones and all the wounded who show up in our lives.

   With any luck we might find something even more worthy to attempt than clean-kitchenliness.

  A Happy and Fruitful New Year.

 

Welcome Christmas!

Thoughtful Thursday: What Child is This?

A Blessed Christmas Eve to One and All!

   This year, celebrating Christmas for the first time with a child of my own, I was thinking about the day to day reality of Christ becoming a little baby. An actual baby, not just a cherub on a card, a picture-perfect infant with a halo, but a real live newborn.

   Such practical questions as "How did Mary and Joseph wash the swaddling cloths?" and "Did they have multiple ones to use while the other ones dried?" have been circling in my mind.

   I get a more concrete sense of the Incarnation when remembering that Jesus would have cried, spit up, hiccupped, cooed, gooed, giggled, pooped explosively, pulled off the breast making milk spray everywhere, and made hilarious baby faces to the constant amusement of his parents.

   He became man. He took on our humanity and all the nitty gritty beautiful difficult mess that comes along with it. He jumped right into the thick of it, out of total and utter love. Right into our helplessness, our vulnerability, our weakness - starting as one of the tiniest and least, unable to control anything, even His own feeding or cleanliness.

   In the midst of whatever sufferings we are struggling with this season, here is the greatest consolation, that He is right here along with us, embracing our human condition with all His dear heart in order to raise us up with Him in the Resurrection. And there are baby smiles to delight along the way.



 
 

Jumping ahead to 2015

Living in Corner House (on a tiny lake in Combermere), lots of laughs with my hilarious hubby Benedict, raising meat rabbits, trying to survive winter, and lots of energy going to growing the little baby tucked inside my belly.

How do only two people produce so many dirty dishes? Something to ponder...

Every season is an inextricably woven mixture of joy and suffering, in ours and all the lives around us. I'm not sure it's remotely possible to make sense of, but hopefully that's not the point. Accepting changes as they come, without ever letting go of hope, growth in wisdom, and doing our best, is our attempted outlook. And savouring the little things, of course.

Christmas archery