From a book of George MacDonald quotes, extracted and titled by C.S Lewis: 

Easy to please and hard to Satisfy

That no keeping but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my heart and strength; but that there is none else He cares for, is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be pleased with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?

I thought of this quote recently while reflecting on the proper bearing one should have towards children (thinking specifically of the young wags in my charge.) I have often confused pleasure in my students' progress or personality with satisfaction in their work and character, and it has led me to be too harsh at times and too soft at other times. And of course, when one considers one's own growth towards holiness and wholeness, this confusion between satisfying and pleasing God can lead to despair that one will never make it or pride that one has already reached the destination.

 It's a good distinction to remember during Lent: the standard is impossibly high (because it is embodied by Christ himself,) but the Father smiles and refreshes us at the end of every effort.

Here are two legitimate reasons to get discouraged if you're a working parent trying to follow the Nourishing Traditions diet:

1. When do you have 12 consecutive waking hours in which you can dry soaked grains or nuts in the oven?
2. Likewise for simmering broth on the stove top, except here you can use a crock-pot.

Everything else in her regime simply takes a little bit of planning and not that much extra time. I am trying to make granola with the frozen and then thawed spent grain from Matt's brew day several weeks ago. Soaking is no problem because you can walk away from it for a day at a time, but drying the granola is difficult to pencil in. I am prudently afraid to leave the oven on, even at 170 degrees, overnight or while I'm at work.

I think it's going to be really good, though. The sharp spiky bits of the barley hull have softened completely by being frozen, thawed, and then soaked again, and the grains smell sweet and beer-y. I'm going to test a small batch with very little sweetener.

I have felt so happy and peaceful since I got off Faceborg again. Maybe it will be for good this time. But everyone would be sad for at least 4 minutes when they heard that I had a baby and didn't put pictures on Facebook. That adds up to about 2400 minutes of sadness!! Could I bear the culpability? Matt doesn't really have a FB problem so it's spiritually safe for him to keep his account, but he's not friends with very many people, so his account is sort of useless for communicating big news to more than like a hundred people. Perhaps we don't want to post pictures of our baby on the internet, though. I wouldn't want to grow up with an internet identity before I even chose it for myself. If you, reader, want to see pictures of my baby, ask me and I will email them to you, provided you display the proper credentials.

A funny thing has happened since ditching FB this time; I've lost my taste for NPR. I couldn't say exactly why, other than to speculate that perhaps I don't feel the need to have an opinion about the news right now, since I don't have access to anyone else's opinions about it. One does hear interesting things on the radio but it's mostly unhelpful, and often annoying.

Making a baby shower registry is stressful and makes me feel simultaneously warm and fuzzy AND avaricious.  Warm and fuzzy because the stuff is so cute, avaricious because I WANT IT ALL. Except the things with monkeys on them! I do not like monkey motifs, or monsters! The jungle theme in general is not appealing to me. I would put bees on everything if you asked me at gunpoint what images I was going to swathe my child in. Anyway the whole baby registry thing feels a little bourgeois, n'est ce pas? After growing up Goodwill, asking people to pay full price for new shiny things makes me a little uncomfortable. Oh well. People want to do it for you, and it will probably never happen again. And this stuff is really cute...

My husband has gotten into two schools so far! One might give him some money, although probably not enough to live on in the extremely dear city where it is located; the other doesn't have any money to give him so we will not be going there. But it is nice to have two acceptances still. Waiting to hear from the three others, one of which is the dreamiest option. If worse comes to the very worst, and he doesn't get any feasible offers, who knows? Teaching in a good high school is still attractive to him (in fact he would like to do that after getting a PhD anyway) and that might be where we'd look next. In the meantime our child would have a bit more time here with its grandparents so that would be good in a way too. God knows!

spring, i don't trust you!

I have made four things recently that I'm really smug about.

1. GRANOLA. It's actually still not done. Whenever I have to dry something in the oven at the lowest temperature, it takes me five days because I have to pause the process to bake something pretty frequently. We might eat it all before it's even done!

2. HUMMUS. just using canned beans, nothing to write home about, even though that's what I'm doing right now.

3. OLIVE TAPENADE. It was so easy! Just use the food processor to chop up about a cup of kalamatas, a few anchovy fillets, some capers, garlic, olive oil, and thyme/herbes de provence. Since we buy kalamatas in a 4 gallon barrel and the other ingredients were cheap, this recipe is way more economical for us than the tiny jars you get from Trader Joe's. Like you could actually make enough to take to coffee hour or to give as a gift. (The only thing I didn't like about it was pitting a cup of olives, because your fingers get too oily to grip the sharp knife. If anyone has any tips about pitting olives, I'm open.) It is so good with the hummus! You fasting people must try it! On....

4. BREAD. I finally got inspired to go to the library and get a copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day. And let me tell you people, it is everything it promises. I might even buy it. All week my family and I have been simply agog that with so little effort and recipe following ability I have been able to make such great bread. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR MY WHOLE ADULT LIFE. You literally dump yeast, flour, water, and salt into a plastic shoebox, let it hang out for a couple hours, keep it in the fridge, and rip off a chunk of dough when you need some bread. And it is so much better than anything we could ever buy in this town.

I wish it were sourdough, but you know what, it's awesome homemade bread without any crap in it. It's a big improvement health and budget-wise over the stuff I was relucatantly buying in the store. I read somewhere that you can add a cup of starter to the dough with no adverse effects. I might do that. But I don't have any starter and I don't have that much room left on my counter for bacteria projects. (Could my kefir have been bullying my sourdough starter? C'est possible!)

I promise I'm going to write about something besides food some day. I have been waking up earlier than usual so that I can be a little more leisurely in my preparation for the day. This gives me more time to have interesting thoughts, but I don't usually have time to write them down before I have to go to work. Once I'm there, I'm in a room full of computers all day. For some reason blogger won't let me write a post from my work computer, and when I get home, I don't want to use the computer for anything but recipes, music, and Search the Scriptures. So posts aren't happening too often.

That's what I hate about having a jobby job. It steals the best hours of your life. Or at least it doesn't pay you enough for them! (How much would be enough, though, for my most fertile, clear thoughts?)

By the way, if Fr. Josiah Trenham kind of bummed you out or gave you the heebie jeebies with his lectures on the Good Wife and/or Good Husband, try this episode in Dr./Presvytera Jeannie Constantinou's Bible study. The topic is the effect of the Fall on woman. I almost cried when I listened to it because I was so relieved. I would like to write more later about it, but I'll just leave you with a tiny quote:

"The ideal for Orthodox marriage is not a hierarchy, but an equal partnership."

She is just as highly credentialed a scholar of Patristics and the Bible as Fr. Josiah, and is somehow coming to completely different conclusions than he did. Interesting...

The part that made me almost cry was when she told how her husband, a priest, is the one who encouraged her to get her Ph.D, even though it took away time from him and from the family, because he knew that she had a talent that the world needed, and he wanted her to learn and grow as a person as much as she could.

If you were edified by TGW/TGH, I'm really glad! If you were somewhat put off and wish for another perspective, try Dr. Jeannie. (That makes her sound like a Dr. Ruth or Dr. Laura! But I'm tired of writing her whole name.)

Three quick bean tips

Beans are a staple for many people during Lent, but sometimes they make you feel like you've been eating staples. Here is what I have been doing. So far, so good.

1. Soak the beans overnight in water with a splash of apple cider vinegar, or any other acidic stuff.

2. When you first start to cook the beans, a bunch of scum will probably rise to the top. That stuff will make you fart. I tried for a long time to skim it off but never felt confident that I got it all. So now I just dump out all the water and scum from the first boil, rinse, and start over again. (I do this with bone broth too, by the way.)

3. Throw in a small piece of "konbu," a Japanese dried kelp. We got a package that should last us for a few years from our international store. Don't eat it, because it doesn't taste good. Just boil it in your beans like you would a bay leaf. It will supposedly impart lots of minerals to your beans.

If you are eating canned beans, I don't have any tips.

  Here is a nice video of some Byzantine Rite monks in France singing "Beneath Thy Compassion."

Smoothie + I'm boring

I was never a smoothie person, but when my midwife told me that I wasn't eating enough I started experimenting. My favorite so far is PB + Choc + Banana. Here is the basic structure:

Two tablespoons of PB
Generous tablespoon or more of cocoa powder
1/2 to one whole banana (the riper, the sweeter and the frozener, the colder, obviously)
Milk

That's all. You could enjoy this during Lent if you use coconut milk or whatever. It's a good way to get outside of some peanut butter without having to eat another sandwich. I throw in some yogurt these days and I have been very naughtily sneaking in a spoonful of Nutella because I'm trying to get rid of it before Lent. But to balance out the naughtiness I also have been including:

-Liquid whey left over from cheese making (I don't have to tell you how smug I feel about being able to say that... don't get too impressed though, all I did was dump old kefir in a t-shirt over a bowl.) Whey is pretty much pure protein which is why muscle people take it. It's also probiotic since it's from kefir.
-Nasty sweet Omega 3-6-9 oil that I must take for my baby but hate to slurp alone
-Elderberry syrup, which is very sweet and delicious but also very good for you, so I think I won't stop taking it during Lent (because it's MEDICINE)
-Whatever fatty or fermented dairy is in my fridge
-A raw egg yolk (pastured! fresh! local! don't hit me!)

It basically tastes like a milkshake and makes me feel like a champion. It's a pretty enjoyable way to get some protein, and other than the Naughtella there's nothing in there I wouldn't feed to my own child.

I thought I had something to say that didn't have anything to do with food but now I can't think of it...

Looking forward to watching a college production of the Scottish play this weekend, having some girlfriends over, and going to really long services with lots of prostrations every day next week! The Canon of St. Andrew comes but once a year...

I'm reading Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives by Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica. It's very good, although I have a hard time concentrating on spiritual writings. It takes a different kind of attentiveness than writings which develop an argument. It requires more meditation than ratiocination, and I'm not very good at that.

a proposed lenten diet for pregnant cook and non-pregnant eater; filthiness of past eras

Matt and I are trying to figure out how he can fast for Lent when I'm not. The Nativity fast was weird. At first he tried just fasting during the day when we were not together, then eating whatever I made in the evening, but he said that it's pretty hard to get into the swing of things that way, and eventually we just stopped trying. We both felt rather disconnected from the rest of the parish without fasting. Lent offers more opportunities to go to services and eat with the rest of the church, and there's not that whole distracting secular Christmas preparation thing, so I think it will be better. But we both still want to make some kind of effort. As for me, I don't think it will hurt my baby a bit for me to stop eating sugar and checking Facebook. Matt feels that this is rather a low bar for him, though, so we thought for a while about how he could fast to some extent without feeling like we're on totally different programs.

We came up with an idea that might work. I'll prepare some chicken and ground beef and freeze it in individual portions, which I can then add to the leftovers I eat for lunch at school. I don't really need to eat meat more than once a day, if even that, especially if the rest of the meals that I prepare are high in vegetable proteins. There's nothing unhealthy about the way we eat during Lent, since it's mostly lots of vegetables and legumes, usually cooked in olive oil or coconut oil. It's just that I don't want to omit dairy and meat products. In fact I think that I'll probably end up eating more protein this way than I am now, since I will eat the beans and stuff I make for Matt as well as the meat I make for myself.

This seems like a good way for me to get the protein etc that I need from meat, without torturing Matt by roasting chickens and broiling lamb racks willy-nilly.

By the way, 100 grams of protein a day? Good lord. That's one recommendation that I just read. (Others say 70 grams.) A can of tuna has 40 grams, an egg has 6, a glass of milk 8, a 4 oz hamburger 28. Most beans are 7-10 grams for a half cup. It seems to me that it would be pretty hard to get enough protein on a vegetarian diet. It would be possible but I can't imagine eating that many beans. Soy could get you there, but I have beef with soy and hardly eat any except tofu once in a while.

On the reading front, I finished The Hunchback of Notre Dame a while back. After you get through all the architecture stuff, which I told Matt reminded me of my anxiety in reading the damn catalog of ships in the Iliad ("Am I going to need to know what boat this guy came from later? Will this flying buttress be used in a metaphor about someone's soul?")  it's actually a pretty melodramatic, romantic tale. I would even call it "pathetic" in you know, the other sense of the word. I was surprised at how quickly it read. The main impression that I was left with is that medieval people were pretty savage. I could have been ready to receive that impression because I was also reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals at the same time, in which he rhapsodizes (I won't say "argues") that morality and society have much darker origins than we like to think. But Hugo shows you so many scenes of the masses enjoying public tortures or executions that I don't think you need Nietzsche holding your hand to come to the conclusion that 14th century Paris was not a very nice place.

The older I get the less romantic I am about the past, and the more skeptical of any "golden age" mentality. I think when we look back at classical Greece, Holy Russia, American pioneer days, or whatever era strikes our fancy, we should not imagine that the people of that era were basically like us. Although we are often pleasantly surprised by the freshness and familiarity of ancient writers, for example, in many ways they were probably shockingly different from us. Most of the great authors whose works have lasted a long time are writing from a place of great privilege, and you just can't underestimate the chasm between democrats like us and aristocrats. Just read Democracy In America and you will see how even as late as the early 1800s, a man from a country as similar to ours as France found many of the American characteristics that we take for granted remarkable enough to... remark on.

Most of us would be very sad and confused if our time machines broke and we were stuck in an era without separation of church and state, legal enfranchisement of women and blacks, great tolerance and general equality, centralized government, and almost religious respect for individual liberty, among other luxuries like shampoo (however much we complain about the ill-effects of those things these days!) I know this sounds like a very simplistic progressive stance, but I've come to it through long periods of disgust for the postmodern era as well as flirtations with primitivism, so I feel qualified to say that although every pendulum can swing too far, things are actually not so bad now! We've lost some good things, but we've gained some good things too. We may have thrown out some babies, but some of that bathwater was really bad.

We can all at least agree that we are glad that we do not live in Hugo's Paris of the late 1300s, which was very dirty, disorganized, and cruel.

Also, I'm trying to finish Being as Communion by Met. John Zizioulas. I started it when I was a catechumen (so that's ... 6 years ago?) and I keep trying to finish it, but it might just take the stupid courage of my baby brain to brazenly succeed. It ended up being more technical than I thought it was going to be based on the first part, and I'm not sure how interested I am in it any more, but I WILL finish it. Then I would like to read St. Basil's Hexaemeron (on the six days of Creation) for Lent. Recent conversations and the Search the Scriptures podcast have rekindled my interest in the patristic interpretation of the creation accounts, and it's actually rather timely for Lent.


Also, I am trying to figure out how to get the Charlotte Mason books on education onto the Kindle. I read them online at school, which is an extreme juxtaposition. I enjoy them so far. A reader recommended them when I complained that there was nothing for a dame like me to read between the inanity of modern baby books and the insanity of Enlightenment philosopher's ideas about education, and I think that Charlotte Mason pleasantly fills that void for me so far.

Descent into Hades

When I was growing up a nebulous evangelical, the story of Easter was thus: Christ died (which was the way that our salvation was effected,) and then he rose again (which is cheering, isn't it?) There was nothing said about what happened in between those two events, although I did wonder about it as a kid. It's funny to think about it now because the Descent into Hades is THE icon of Pascha for the Orthodox. I embraced that fully and found it oh so much more meaningful than the "Penal Substitutionary Atonement" reading of the crucifixion, but always kind of wondered how the Church knew about the Descent into Hades, since it's not mentioned in the Gospel. Well, I should have read my Bible, because it's right there in 1st Peter 3:

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah....

It's very explicit that he encountered spirits of people from the Old Testament. But just in case you thought Peter wasn't talking about dead people:

For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God.

Now I know that the apostles preached the Descent, but I still don't know how exactly they knew about it. A likely conclusion is that it's one of the things Christ told them between his Resurrection and Ascension. It's very exciting to think about all the things he told them during that time. How awestruck they must have been to hear him speak about this event in particular. That would really give me hope that the Resurrection wasn't just for the God-man, but for me as well (just in case the graves opening up in Jerusalem and dead people walking around wasn't enough.)