Deanna's Journal

I gave this talk Sunday evening, October 30th, at Hope Cafe, !st United Methodist Church of Rochester, New Hampshire. Scripture quotations are from the New International Version of the Bible. “Petition” appears in Notes On a Flight Home, Creative Team Publishing, 2008.

God’s Renovation

[Hope Café, October 30 evening, 2011]

I am here to tell you that God loves you.

You do not seem surprised to hear this.

God loves you passionately. He wants to be near you. He wants you with him—

—-and he wants more than that: that you be like him. Yes! That you become transformed, to be more and more like his Son, Jesus. To resemble your Father as Jesus the man resembles his Father—because now you and Jesus have the same Father.

You already bear in you the Image of God. Because God created you in his own image.

His image in you is blurred, obscured, by a sin nature that you inherited from, ultimately, the first two human beings, who decided they knew better than their Good Creator God how to conduct life. You did not do anything to bring this on; you just inherited it by being born. In your heart, right alongside the Image of God, there is this sin nature.

God knew that this would remain the situation with all of us unless he intervened and provided a Way for his human beings to return to their intended, created, unobscured godly condition. This Way he provided in Jesus Christ. You know the true story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, his invitation to new life in him, and his promise to be with us always until he returns–which promises he is keeping and will keep.

To inherited, natural sin, you have accumulated sins of your own over time. Your sins, in Christ, have been forgiven. But your sins, though forgiven, and the effects of the inherited sin nature, have left their mark on your soul. Habits of thought, of attitude, unredeemed fears and ungrounded worries, some of the ways in which we conduct our bodily life, all those things that are un-Christ-like.

So one day I accepted what Jesus did on the Cross for me, and experienced the New Birth. It was a radical, revolutionary experience for me. I had denied that there even was a God, never mind the God of the Bible and his revelation in Christ, for 13 years. Many of you have met Christ by faith also. If you have not, accept Christ’s offer of abundant life.  Once belonging to him by faith, I find that this is unlike any other change in my life. This is not just joining a group or engaging in a hobby: this is radical inner life change brought about by a Living God. And I am no longer alone. He actually lives in me by his Holy Spirit.

I discovered almost immediately that I was not alone within– and that I was not the same as I had been.

As I have come along in my new life, I have discovered this additional joy of following him more closely by contemplating him, “beholding“ him, developing a deeper awareness and knowledge of Him, a living relationship — setting my roots deeper in Him.

That’s what I am here to tell you about.

God , besides loving you passionately and delighting in your company, has a deep desire to see you transformed, desires to replace those unchristlike ways and thinking with the ways of the Son of God. Replace them with his nature and mind, his way of thinking. He has saved us and rescued us to give us life in abundance! his kind of life. For this you were born anew.

Did you ever hear a Christian say,” I’ve got to try harder to be a good Christian.”? Or when asked if someone is a Christian, hear them answer,” I try to be.”   Or, “I bet God is disappointed in me.”

Maybe you have said that.

Part of the Good News of the Gospel turns out that the way to be like Jesus is not to try hard, but to remain close to Christ and nourish his life in you, and love him, so that his life increases in you, and you find inside that you are changing to think more like him. Your responses to circumstances and other people are changing—and you are not the one changing them.  He is. “Resting in Christ” takes on a new meaning for you. “Trusting God” now consists in deepening your nearness to him, looking to him continually, and listening for him, rather than trying hard to obey a far-off power somewhere.  It becomes familiar. He becomes more and more familiar. It is not like following far behind a leader who is way ahead of you. Jesus is here—in your heart—living in you. He will make it possible to follow him from inside your heart.

Of course I speak of the Jesus of the Bible. There are other “saviors” out there—other spiritualities that are in conflict with what Scripture states.  God calls them idols, false gods.  The Bible, being given of God to you, is the standard. Compare with Scripture when “other Jesuses” are presented to you, in conversation, in movies, in songs…choose the real Jesus, the One of the Word.

How to be close to him? How to stay near him? How does this take place?  Does God accomplish it all, like salvation? Do we do some of it? How do we do it?

Spend time with him. There is no other way.

There are many practices or disciplines that can facilitate drawing close to him. Disciplines are for disciples: we observe what our teacher does, and thus learn to do as he does. We act as disciples.

My article Until Christ Is Formed in You in the August “Messenger” church newsletter—did you see it?

From that article:
“To equate discipleship and formation with exclusively active disciplines (and activities) however, endangers us spiritually: easily we are drawn into taking control of ourselves and our spiritual growth, and our practices become about our holiness instead of God’s.”

It is true that there have always been some who, while remaining outside faith in Christ, refusing to believe that Christ is the Son of God and refusing his life, but who have appeared to be deeply religious, have performed great service to others, and even in some cases amazing signs and wonders. To them Jesus said he will one day say, “Depart from me—I never knew you”.

From Matthew 7:23– “Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?”  Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!”

“I never knew you.”

Now, we who have believed in Christ need not fear his rejection on That Day, even if we appear to be like the ones Jesus speaks of in this passage, giving all we have to the poor or working tirelessly to serve others. That is because our roots are in Christ and he is our motivator, not our own gain or fame, as those who make a show of being very religious but do not know Him.

But we are at risk of something else serious, though not fatal, something that can harm us even though we are ultimately safe in Christ:  that is living a life that goes on much as it did before, a life that is less than fulfilling in Christ, less than he meant us for, less honoring of him and of our own created self than it can be. A life lived as if we were nearly independent of him. A life lived nearly without deep connection to Him. A life that may even look very religious and very busy for God! –but inside feels lonely, not peaceful, not joyful, anxious, dissatisfied, because we are striving out of our energy and judgment at a distance from God. As if we had to seek his approval by trying harder.

Do you remember the man that Jesus told about who swept his house clean of an evil spirit, but it returned manyfold because he did nothing to replace it?

From Matthew 12:44:

“When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. “

“Unoccupied.”

You and I can wind up like that man unless we—having had God come and clean out our heart and set us up for order—do not replace the unchristlike thinking  patterns we had B.C. with new, good habits of thought and practices, inviting the presence of God in every aspect of our being.

A couple ways you can be close to the Lord, and stay close to Him, so that He can transform you:

1.      Read and savor the Bible to know more of Jesus. Instead of always covering as much ground as you can, read slowly and watch Jesus. Watch what he does and listen to what he says. Sometimes you will be surprised and wonder what he meant. Take time to ponder and pray about it. Watch for him in Scripture even where his name is not mentioned; he is everywhere. This book is his gift to you.

Maybe you do not have a Bible, and find it hard to buy one right now. Maybe you haven’t read much of the Bible you have, and you could use some guidance where to start. Ask a believing pastor or another Christian who reads the Bible.

2.     Then, besides reading and savoring  the Scriptures, which he inspired, pray and sit with him in quiet for longer times, often, just being with him personally,  to know him better–and so, being with him, to become like him. You voluntarily place yourself spiritually where he can love you. His love will change you.

“And so we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

[2 Corinthians 3:18]

This passage references a story from the time of Moses’ leadership of ancient Israel that Paul’s’ hearers knew. We may not all know it. It is from Exodus 24:29.

The story was that after Moses went up on the holy mountain to hear God at God’s direction, in the wilderness after God had him lead all of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, and he was there for forty days and forty nights writing down the commandments that God spoke to him, “When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant, because he had spoken with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him. “

But they came near to hear the commandments when Moses invited them closer. “When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face. But whenever he entered the Lord’s presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, they saw that his face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil over his face until he went in to speak with the Lord.”

This is what happens to you, within you, as you behold the Lord and speak with him: you reflect his radiance and are being transformed gradually into the image of Christ.

Now, I am not offering that you spend time with Jesus so you can amaze your friends because you glow in the dark. I am making the invitation to you to become transformed by God’s loving action in your spirit, by spending attentive time in the presence of Jesus.

I wrote a poem about the struggle of nearing God and staying with him even through painful times. Especially through painful times.  I named it “Petition”; it is on page 215 of my book of poetry, Notes On a Flight Home.

Petition

Do not allow my weeping eye the faltering

Candle flame to quench, no more than soul

To Spirit grieve, nor courage fail.

I would choose to be of that other people

Set aside in you; that though the darkness

All our past, now all our life is you.

O how, having chosen, you bear down on me,

Pressed pitiless against my heart

To force both truth and love from it.

Or is your unrelentingness a kind

Of pity heretofore unthought of

By the cowardly?  Bearing you, I weep,

While you in mercy crucify, a nail for every

Faulty love.  Bearing you, I kneel,

And war, the reality of my need of you

Of your love for me, of mine for you,

Rekindled.

O let me live out with passion to the end

Your life in me, that when every

Evil hour comes, I will be found

To have been

With you.

What is the difference between my being self-controlled in the Spirit of God, and my trying hard to follow Christ? I am still paying attention to learn this one.

But Jesus has the answer: I am the Vine—abide in Me:  John 15: 1-4;8

“I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.  Remain in me and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. …This is my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.”

Some Christians have taken Jesus’ words about bearing fruit here to refer exclusively to the converting of others, the winning of souls.  I and many others understand him in this context to have been referring to life fruits, spiritual fruit in growth and loving God with all our heart, mind, strength and soul, and a love of neighbor as ourselves that exhibits God’s love in us. The “fruit” is in us: our transformation to be more like Jesus.

The branches that bear fruit are not trying harder to be fruitful. They are remaining in the vine so that the vine nourishes them and causes a good yield of fruit. You do not ever see a little berry branch straining, grimacing, puffing, and trying with all its might to produce berries. No. As long as the branch remains connected to the vine, and is well nourished by the Lord, and well-watered, and carefully pruned, and shone on by the sun, eventually it will produce berries. The same is true of us.

There is some pruning that is painful, that we experience as disappointment, or loss, or just baffling. He is Love. He never deals with us to harm us; in fact, his are the best Hands to be in. He has only our good in his heart.

He knows the way that you take. He knows where you are, and how you are, and he never takes his eyes or his heart of care off of you. There is always mystery about God for us, but remember that he has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ, because he wants us to know him.

Job, who knew all about pruning, in the Book of Job 23: 8-10:  “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.

But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”

There is story told of a man long ago who visited a friend who had a gold refinery. This man had been struggling lately to understand and accept the painful passages of the Christian life, to understand what God was doing in him. The refiner led him to a sizeable vat of gold over a hot fire, heated to a degree so high that the gold had melted. The refiner had a long-handled skimmer with which he skimmed the sheer surface of the molten gold, removing the bubbles of scum that continually formed on top. He skimmed and skimmed it for quite awhile as the visitor watched. Finally, the man asked his friend, ‘When do you know the gold is purified enough?” The answer came, “When I can see my face reflected in it.”

He returned home rejoicing with new understanding! God was purifying him out of love, until God could see himself clearly reflected in him.

Am I telling you that you are God’s gold? Absolutely, yes, I am.

Let me leave you with a picture from C.S.Lewis.

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild the house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains straightened out and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different sort of house than the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage, but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Of Silver Spoon, and Somber Spade

With silver spoon and velvet bag,

I walked across the green expanse of our country yard

With John, of a summer dusk the year my uncle died,

To the little beech and its neighboring red maple.

With his somber spade my husband wounded the earth

Beneath each tree. I lifted the velvet’s burden

THIS BOX CONTAINS
THE EARTHLY REMAINS
OF HARRY GARDNER NICHOLS

And poured one silver spoon of its ivory fragments into each gash.

We held hands as last light ebbed, and prayed our thanks

For this one who planted a laurel long ago in his city yard

For my 21^st birthday. Now some of him will strengthen

A little beech that glows gold half the Winter,

And a tall red maple that fulfills its name each Fall.

Copyright ~ Deanna Harrington Christiansen

August 7, 2011

Barrington, New Hampshire

The article Until Christ Is Formed In You appears in the August Messenger, the monthly newsletter of the First United Methodist Church of Rochester, NH.

When you go to the church’s webpage, click on Newsletter at the top of the page, and select August Messenger.

http://firstumcrochester.org

…and surrounded with nourishment, yet without appetite?

Recently, I experienced something odd for me. I was browsing with mild curiosity in the aisles at our wonderful little library with my husband John. He had gone to check out a few more audio books on CD to keep him company on his last remaining  long commutes back and forth to Massachusetts, and I was just looking while I was there.

No borrowed books needed for me right now:  I have one borrowed to teach me how to knit in child’s language–accessible, I hope–I have just bought 2 more books which I have begun to read; I am already reading 2 other books which seem difficult for me to pick back up; and I own more unread books than a small bookstore could accommodate.

Now, I love books.  I love even just being around them.  So I love libraries and bookstores and book sales. The sight and titles and colors of their bindings excite imagination and intrigue me toward pursuit. I touch them, open them, decide which I cannot leave on the shelves, and–until recent years–read voraciously.  Except for those I have set aside. My reading, it is true, has slowed. My consumption has turned more to savoring.  Slowly.  More often not even from books: articles, now, excerpts, passages. Memories. Revisits.

But that day I felt no characteristic draw to the books, and did not take any down from their places to glance through. I had no starting point there.  I stood mid-aisle feeling like a vaguely hungry person surrounded by nourishment, but with no appetite.  Like one recovering from an illness, or a grief: a  returning hunger, but no offering held appeal.  Like one remembering  engagement with stories, but finding interest in taking them back up simply absent.

Was I losing interest in creative words? –in important things? Had I achieved a foreign self-discipline in the insatiable buying and borrowing of books? Or had I reached surfeit of input?
It left me pondering.
I returned home and read.

Copyright Deanna Harrington Christiansen June 2011

From the White and Silver Woods

From the white and silver woods the world

Is not what it had seemed, seems other

Wise now, impenetrable green now lace and birds,

A single racing fox, one golden tree,

The beauty of the human to God.

© Deanna Harrington Christiansen

February 2011

On the evening of January 27th, 2011, after living in New Hampshire for all of a year and 2 months, John was heard to sigh pensively, “I do not love Winter anymore…”

The world slipped on a white gauze gown,

Yet-green ground showing through, autumn oak outlined

Midafternoon against dim sky.

Not cold, air stretched the pale warp gracefully

Over evergreens, interlacing with their sparkling weft

First falling snow’s deep quiet.

That same dawn the sun had briefly stretched

Glowing gossamer, as if to reclothe in the just-passed golds of Fall

Every bare tree lining the road westward.

Copyright Deanna Harrington Christiansen

November 27, 2010

A new October in New Hampshire. Flaming thrillingly at first, then gradually subduing into the spare neutrals of November. The hard enervating heat of this summer is finally over, the waning and dying of abundant, verdant gardens poignant– yet on time. The sudden pang of sadness at the passing of a season,  and the foreboding of the ice and heavy snow just weeks away, is swept away in reveling in restful cool nights and by the sight of a land ablaze in color as if lights have been turned on inside the trees– glowing reds, golds, russets, burgundies and daring roses, oranges, yellows, against greens and the beautiful lines of gradually appearing  black branches. You feel you have been introduced at last to the trees’ true selves, now that the frosts have stolen their chlorophyll disguises. Other plants turn dark brown, or deep red, or faint tan, standing as relief. We bring out our warmer clothes. We make heartier meals and start planning for Thanksgiving and Christmas. John orders firewood to last half the winter, stacking the logs in the racks out back, hard work. We have the joy of lighting our woodstove in its new location in the dining room, surrounded now by gorgeous wide-veined dark red and sand tile. John’s heavy summer work cutting and splitting trees from our woods has not been wasted; most of that wood will season for next year. Thus the signs that rural living has different, longer rhythms than city.

In the ongoing  moving in to our country house, I came across a treasure, a small notebook in which I kept notes during a rare trip I made in 1979 to Massachusetts. I flew from San Diego, my then-new home, and spent a day first in New York City visiting my best high school girlfriend–  ill, and since deceased. The next day I took the train from Penn Station to Boston, where my parents met me.

Here are those notes, transcribed for you, too, to savor.  Other Notes on a Flight Home….

The poem I mention at the end is “October in New England”, by Odell Sheppard. The two first lines–”October in New England, and I not there to see”–came to mind every Fall, saying what my heart, away from New England in the end for 46 years, longed for through those years.

In light of my precipitous return — first living in New Hampshire–in 2006, and my soon-after connecting so profoundly, falling in love with and marrying my pronouncedly New England high school sweetheart, John, it touches the heart to read my self-asked question in this notebook 31 years ago, “Will I ever come back to stay?”

Here too is that nostalgic poem, which I had lost but for the opening lines, and could not find in any search. Thanks go to my great brother, Jim Harrington, long of New Hampshire, for finding it so I could share it with you.

October in New England

October in New England

And I not there to see

The glamour of the goldenrod,

The flame of the maple  tree!

Vermont, in robes of splendor

Sings with the woods of Maine,

Alternate hallelujahs

Of gold and crimson stain.

–Odell Sheppard 1884-1967

American writer and educator

******************************************************************

October 20, 1979~Train to Massachusetts

Notes on a train ride from New York City to Boston, on my first visit home to New England in 14 years

New York City

My cab driver to Penn Station was Chilean.  He studied French in Chile for 5 years expecting one day to visit France, the native country of one set of his grandparents.  He got as far as New York, speaks English, has found a large community of Chilenos in New York, and says, “Now I would not trade New York for anything.”

The New York telephone operators astonishingly say, “Thank you, have a nice day, Deanna.”

Squirrels under the oak trees in Central Park.  I couldn’t find one single acorn.

“Vote for Kennedy” finger-printed in the grime on the back of a sanitation truck.

A used old teddy bear “sat” on top of a refuse container in a dump.

On coming in: a 2-mile-long stretch, both sides of the road, of a cemetery full, crowded with ancient, old, and new gravestones.

The long line of spout fountains in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The announcer in Penn Station sounds like a prizefight announcer–professional, and clear, and funny.

Rye, New York

High rocks by the side of the railroad covered with green, moss, and trails of vines changing color—old rocks, not newly blasted, or like concrete, old, slate color, and covered with moss.

The first little inlet of ocean, dotted with little sailboats with thin masts, colorless sails furled.

Stamford, Connecticut

The first truly colored leaves. In New York it looks like Fall but the colors are mild and generalized, not bright yet. My eyes fill with tears, and I clean them away, and when I look back and see again, the tears come back.  The small, tall wooden houses set in wild fields of colored plants move me as the face of an old, old friend remembered and missed but not seen for years.  Black tree trunks and limbs and branches against red, dusty orange, yellow and green leaves.

Weeping willow.

Black and white birch.

New houses going up, one here and one there, in the exact same design as the old, tall, narrow, wooden ones.

Fairfield, Connecticut

Marsh grass, old houses, old short wide trees, poison ivy, maple, aspen, no visible traffic, a few people hanging clothes or talking on the street. Factories that look like schools. The bus station sign that says “Motor Coach Station.” Small placid rivers and marshland. An inner tube swing suspended from underneath a huge railroad overpass!

Brick housing projects with kids raking leaves.

Bridgeport, Connecticut

A poster of the San Francisco Bay Bridge on the bridge in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Jai-alai! In Connecticut!

A beat-up, rusted, old-designed, paint-chipped, window-broken ferry named “Miss New York”.

A Catholic school, brick, with a white statue out front of an apostle—holding a small American flag.

New Haven, Connecticut

In the snack car, waiting to buy raisins, cheese crackers with peanut butter, and hot coffee, I hear all the accents are New England. I bump someone accidentally and say “Pahd’n me”, politely.

The cars in the automobile graveyard are much older than the cars in the graveyards in California.

Factories that look like factories—in a war zone.

Old Saybrook, Connecticut

Many branches here are bare and mostly bare. Greys and browns mixed with dirty colors and flame spotted among them. Sunshine dappled through trees comes from a misty-looking sky, not cloudy but hazy grey blue.

The boulders are so old, so obviously and so very ancient.

Pulling into the station past 3- and 4-story wooden clapboard houses, I see red, silver, and blue striped windows on all of them as the train cars pass them.

Saybrook, Connecticut

A little bay with a few white boats reminds me of Oakland, California; plain flat brownish-green  grass growing right up to the quiet water and not many trees.

A flock of tiny sparrows! There are no flocks of sparrows in California!

The ocean. The Atlantic beach, sand, barefooted people wading—on October20th—and waving at the train. I wave back.

I have not seen the Atlantic since Coatzacoalcos in Mexico in 1973. I have not seen the New England Atlantic in fourteen years.

New London, Connecticut

A lovely white yacht named Munnatawket. Wooden piles and fishing shacks. A Revolutionary stone and mortar obelisk.  A tiny, tiny tugboat, and stone walls right at water’s edge. No high cliffs. A gray warship.  Leaf-covered stream and pool beside a ferry bridge.

Mystic, Connecticut

Kites flying over a small inlet with New England-style houses and a miniature but authentic lighthouse, fishermen, marsh grass, evergreens, ocean, seagulls, shadows. My cup runneth over.

Westerly, Rhode Island, and Kingston, Rhode Island

Some small tree limbs here are gray, dormant looking, leafless. I wonder if the snow showers a couple weeks ago took the leaves away just as they may have been turning.

Two boys in plaid shirts slowly paddling a red canoe look up from a small slow stream just as our train passes. The train is very, very quiet and comfortable and steady. The sun is sinking into late afternoon.

Providence, Rhode Island

Providence.  In providence the Lord made all of this lovely, touching New England. Will I ever come back to stay? To stay at least until the Lord Jesus returns? Would I cease to see if I were here permanently? And I must see as well in San Diego, humbly see, explore patiently, give thanks and remember, remember.

The Slocum Grange.  Greyed silvered brown two-story shingle houses.

A pine forest—small of course. A tender couple of trees blooming in fluffy white flowers?

The trainman now collects my ticket from overhead in its slot. Heading into Massachusetts! Soon I will see my own home state.

There’s a poem that begins

October in New England

And I not there to see…

This October I am. Here to see.

Deanna Harrington Christiansen   Copyright 2010

Recently, John and I took a day off from homestead tasks, and spent it in nearby Portsmouth doing something restorative for both: looking through historic houses. At the John Paul Jones House, in addition to information about the daring admiral, and, fascinatingly, the signing of The Portsmouth Treaty of 1905, hosted in that city by then-President Teddy Roosevelt, ending the Russo-Japanese War — is an exhibit from the 1800’s of embroidery samplers, most done by young girls. Two, particularly, were not only beautiful work from so-young hands, but displayed startling, touching verses as their centerpieces—surrounded of course by evenly ornate alphabets, courses of numerals, sentiments to teacher or grandmother, houses, trees, and baskets of flowers, so perfectly and creatively designed and formed that the youth of their makers just astonished.

The Wish

Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand

     As the first efforts of an infants hand

And while her fingers o’er the canvass move

     Engage her tender heart to seek thy love

With thy dear Children let her share a part

     And write thy name upon her heart

                                  Harriet Ann Dockam    1825    Age 10

The Grave

There is a calm for those who weep

A rest for weary pilgrims found

Thereof they lie and sweetly sleep

                         Love in the ground.

The cloud that wrecks the wintry sky

No more disturbs the sweet repose

Than summer evening’s latest sigh

                           That shuts the rose.

                             Ann Elizabeth Ham     1826   Portsmouth, New Hampshire

She was 11 years old.  I am nearly seven times their ages then, and will never have such accomplishment in handwork as they at 10 and 11. In any home-making and hospitable skills, save perhaps cooking.

I acknowledge soberly that middle- and upper-class girls and women of that time and culture on both sides of the North Atlantic were channeled into domestic arts and skills, and curtailed to them for life by authorities other than their own hearts and minds.  Yet in women’s preserved diaries and letters are their records not just of fatigue, suffering, or some loneliness, but also of deep satisfaction and joy in providing for family needs, in creating beauty, graciousness, nourishment, cleanliness and comfort of surroundings to body and spirit, with excellence and affection.  Their sacrifice did not come in being that hard-working, skillful resource for loved ones and community; it came in their being denied against their fullness and wills from developing others of their gifts, too. “Sacrifice” exacted by another—is not sacrifice, further. Is it not, more truly, violation.  Sacrifice is voluntary, for the good of another.

There are today many women, I included, who experience deep satisfaction and joy in home-making, for our own and others’ living —the well-placed vase, the beauty of fabric, the strengthening yet enticing meal, the restfulness of a clean bed–  intertwined with other endeavors we love and choose with such excellence and love as we have.  And I wouldn’t ignore that some women of that period emerged against imposing oppositions  as courageous and brilliant leaders in fields far from private homemaking. The English monarch whose name that long era bears was, ironically in view of the contrasting common lives of contemporary female subjects, a woman.

Yet even the masterful accomplishment in needlework alone of these two little Portsmouth girls –-learning required of them yet resourcefully, inventively executed—I do not assume encompassed everything about who they were or were to become.

Nor may what accomplishments any of us can name similarly be assumed to define all of who we are. Or are yet to become.

© Deanna Harrington Christiansen   2010

This Salem [Massachusetts] News Valentine’s Day 2009 front page story of John and my reacquaintance after 48 years, and subsequent love and marriage in 2007, is now reproduced on the “About” page of this Journal.  Click on the “About” tab at the top of the page and scroll down to read it.

Rejoice with us, for the blessings of love deepen, now in 2010!

(c) Deanna Harrington Christiansen 2010