Wonderful

Wonderful: Holy Laughter

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

I don’t always appreciate puns, but I love this book title: Between Heaven and Mirth. Appropriately, given the title, it’s about Why Joy, Humor and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life. I requested this book after seeing the author on the Colbert Report. It’s wonderful: full of jokes, but also discussion of why Christians have often thought they needed to be dour, and analysis of Scripture to restore what would’ve been funny to the people at the time.

It also reminds me of one of the best prayers I’ve been part of. When we lived in New York City, we belonged to All Angel’s Episcopal Church and were part of a great small group that met once a week for talk, Bible study and prayer. This night, we’d broken up into smaller groups for prayer. I was with two friends in a little hallway by the washing machine. One friend was praising God for His sweetness, which was lovely, but when she went on, “for your sweetness, your gooeyness, your frothy goodness,” we cracked up. Our friend was trying to give up sugar and, momentarily related all goodness to desserts. We couldn’t stop giggling and ended up thanking God for laughter and calling it a night. That prayer makes me happy every time I think of it.

Several years ago, on a tough Sunday of children’s church, unstoppable laughter during prayer was exactly what I needed. It was the first Sunday for a new three-year-old. A sweet little girl who didn’t care at all about what we were doing. She just wanted to do her own thing and explore the room and talk constantly about what she was experiencing. Which would have been fine, except that I also had to deal with 9-year-olds in the same group, and try to tell the story and keep order. I also believe no teenagers were in church that Sunday, so I didn’t have a helper. By the end of the service, I was frazzled. And then, during our intercessory prayer time, that same little girl burped. It was such an adorable little noise that I laughed. And, of course, the kids laughed. It was a cleansing laugh. I thanked God for it at the time, and I still do.

More recently (and before I read Between Heaven and Mirth), I went against type in my portrayal of the prophets in the David and Saul book. The usual image of an Old Testament prophet is of an angry man yelling at people to repent. My prophets are lighthearted and quick to laugh, not out of frivolity, but out of security.

David has escaped out his back window in the middle of the night and run away from King Saul, straight to the prophet Samuel. Saul figures out where David is and sends soldiers to capture him, but things take a surprising turn:

Samuel and Caleb strode towards the well, gathering other men along the way. There were fourteen of them by the time they reached Ramah’s outskirts. As the soldiers got closer, all the prophets did was stand arm-in-arm in a circle and sing. David couldn’t tell what they were singing, but snatches of melody made their way back to him and raised the hair on his forearms.

The army commander gave the signal, and the soldiers spread out in formation and unsheathed their weapons. The bronze and iron glinted like lightning in the sunshine, but the prophets didn’t acknowledge the soldiers in any way. When Saul’s men were mere steps away, the prophets broke apart and formed a line, but it was like no defensive line David knew of. Some of them stood with their arms raised to the heavens, others fell on the ground, pounding the earth with their fists, and still others whirled in wild circles, the hems of their robes flashing above their knees.

David watched, slack-jawed, as, one by one, the soldiers dropped their weapons and joined the men of God in their worship. Tears fell unchecked as he watched these rough soldiers be overcome by the Spirit of the Lord.

And then he laughed – not because the soldiers were making fools of themselves, but out of utter security in the Lord’s protection.

Anyone got any funny church stories to share?

 

 

Varied Creative Outlets

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I do a lot of big creative things: writing novels, choreographing dances, developing children’s worship curricula, maximizing the small spaces in my house. But there’s one thing I do for fun. It’s small. It only takes a couple of hours once a month or two.

I do the library bulletin board at my kids’ school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The words on this are “O wild west wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind,” from “Ode to the West Wind,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I had big plans to cover the books with a bunch of “snow” to coincide with an actual snowstorm, but we never really had one.

Library bulletin board, September

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I should’ve gotten a big, hairy rubber spider to staple up.

Library Bulletin Board -- Oct./Nov.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gotta love the 70% off sales at the end of a season — all those nuts and leaves cost my $2.

This month I was given an Olympic theme, plus the phrase, “Go For the Gold,” for reading month. I drew a giant open book at the bottom of the board and stapled silhouettes of Olympic athletes coming out of the book, added gold Olympic rings in the middle, tore apart a little picture book about reading and stapled four of the pages across.

The librarian loves it, because she doesn’t have to think about what to do. I love it, because it’s a little crafty thing with big impact. I already have plans for April, something with an umbrella and rain.

What little creative things do you do?

 

Allowing Yourself to Be Seen

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about loving those moments in a novel when a character is seen, truly seen for who they really are, by an unlikely character — those moments when there is evidence of deep and abiding love and understanding.

There’s a flipside to being seen, and that’s allowing yourself to be seen.

A TED talk by Brene Brown has been floating around a lot this weekend, shared on FB by multiple and unrelated friends. It’s about what a researcher was dragged, kicking and screaming by her research, to discovering was the bedrock of human connection: vulnerability.

She talks about how we are our own worst enemy when it comes to connection. We deny uncomfortable truths or emotions. We try to numb those things that make us feel vulnerable and wind up numbing all emotions. We work to perfect the imperfectible. We turn a mere vulnerability into an occasion for shame, which spirals us tighter and tighter into ourselves and farther and farther away from God and others. (This last one isn’t entirely from the talk, but from a book I read in college: Shame: The Power of Caring, by Gershen Kaufman.) We do not believe we are worthy of love and belonging.

I think back to every small group I’ve been involved with — whether it’s Bible study, house church, or book club — and I can pinpoint the moment someone was vulnerable enough to tell the truth about his or her life. Those moments changed each of those groups forever. After that, there was no need to put the shiny face on. No need to mince around and almost say what was going on. We could be real, because someone had the courage to be real first. Someone admitted that things weren’t perfect and were vulnerable enough to show that this bothered them without trying to laugh it off or put it into humorous context. Someone admitted that they made an error of judgment and asked forgiveness for it.

I can pinpoint that moment in a number of friendships. Someone who was really irritating the living daylights out of me told me she was lonely. Flat out. I was lonely, too. And we became friends in that instant, because she was, for the first time, a person to me. I took it as a sign that I told things about myself to my now-husband after two weeks of dating that I’d been afraid to tell a boyfriend of a year: I had the courage and the trust in him to let him see me.

None of those groups or relationships would have been so deep and meaningful if someone hadn’t had the courage to allow him/herself to be seen, bruises and warts and tears and snot running down the face and all. Those moments let the group live wholeheartedly.

That’s Brown’s phrase for how people live who do not deny or run away from their vulnerability. The wholehearted. They experience human connection because they believe they are worth of love and belonging. They love with their whole hearts, with no guarantees. They are compassionate both to others and to themselves. That sounds good. Really good.

I needed to hear this, need to practice allowing myself to be seen more often. I’d rather live wholeheartedly than half-assedly. I need to pray for courage.

 

 

Wonderful: The Moment of Being Seen

~ Natalie Hart ~ 3 Comments

I love it when a character who’s been presented as mean, tactless, heartless, or downright cruel reveals that he or she sees the main character with perfect and loving clarity.

This often happens in historical romance novels, particularly between noble sons and their cold, distant fathers. I’m a sucker for it every time. And it happened in the mystery I finished yesterday.

In Alan Bradley’s novel series, Flavia de Luce is an 11-year-old chemistry buff and poisons expert living in a big pile of a house in 1950s rural England with her father and two older sisters. In the second book, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, her father’s sister comes to visit. Aunt Felicity is a blowhard of the first order. Every word out of her mouth is an insult to someone, especially to her brother about his house, his finances, and how he’s raising his daughters. She’s bossy, controlling, and Always Right.

But one day, she makes Flavia carry her painting equipment to the island of the ornamental lake behind the house so she can paint the folly (fake Roman ruins). Once there, she tells Flavia tales of her own childhood at that house, playing with Flavia’s mother. Harriet had died the year after Flavia was born, and her older sisters had always told her that she had, through being so disappointing that she’d driven their mother to go all the way to Tibet to escape her, killed their mother. And her father is constantly present, yet too absent to correct this impression.

So Aunt Felicity’s words change Flavia’s beliefs about herself in a heartbeat. “Good heavens, child! If you want to see your mother, you have no more than to look in the glass. If you want to know her character, look inside yourself. You’re so much like her, it gives me the willies.”

Aunt Felicity goes into detail, particularly about their mutual love for chemistry. But then she, who is presented as aggressively conventional, talks to Flavia about her passion for ferreting out information, particularly about murders. Because, really, what good would it be to be an under-supervised 11-year-old poisons expert if you couldn’t run around the village solving murders.

“You must listen to your inspiration. You must let your inner vision be your Pole Star…. You must never be deflected by unpleasantness…. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You much follow it, Flavia…. Even when it leads to murder.”

And then this, which is amazing advice to anyone: “If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.”

Stuff like that gets me every time. It does in love songs, too. The chorus of Alanis Morisette’s “Everything” sums up why:

“You see everything, you see every part
You see all my light and you love my dark
You dig everything of which I’m ashamed
There’s not anything to which you can’t relate
And you’re still here”

So it isn’t just the moment of being seen, it’s being seen and also loved, appreciated, embraced.

That changes a person, gives them courage to be who they always wanted to be, but were afraid of what others would think. So even though the moments are just that, momentary — Aunt Felicity goes back to being a bossy blowhard. Spouses drift around each other. Friends take each other for granted. We repeat lines in the liturgy unthinkingly — what we believe about ourselves has been changed. And hopefully our actions will follow.

That moment of being seen can be pretty momentous. And now I’m getting as sappy as if I’d just read one of those scenes.

Voice: 12-year-old me

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

What did you love more than anything on earth when you were twelve?

Here are some things I loved when I was twelve: horses, Jesus, my friend Elizabeth’s older brother Dan, sitting on my window sill and reading L.M. Montgomery, pretending I was a baton twirler with a broomstick in the basement.

I loved my period. Somewhere, there’s a journal entry that waxed rhapsodic about how it was a wonderful gift from God. I keep looking for it in my papers, but I think I threw it away in my teenage years in a fit of eye rolling over my childhood earnestness.

I loved my phone, which I’d gotten by keeping my room spotlessly neat and clean for six weeks. My parents had read that doing something for six weeks made it a habit. Not so much. I got the phone and quickly went back to my extreme slobbish ways.

I loved my independence. By 12, I’d been riding the subway to and from school by myself for over two years. It was my job to take a first-grader along on that trip and I was starting to babysit in the neighborhood, so I had my own money. My mother hated clothes shopping with me, so she gave me a clothing budget of $12.50 a month and let me take charge of my own wardrobe. I’d been in charge of doing my own hair for a few years, which resulted in periodic rat’s nests in the back, but I made them (through neglect) so I fixed them. My friends and I roamed the city on our own, hanging out in the beautiful Mt. Pleasant cemetery, freaking ourselves out, or going from corner store to corner store buying candy and chips.

This independence wasn’t always great. I was only 9 or 10 the first time an adult approached me and made comments about my looks and asked whether I’d have sex with him. Sadly, this wasn’t an isolated incident. With all the hundreds of people out on the streets in Toronto, a lone, very blonde girl was an easy target for harassment.

That experience makes it difficult for me to give my daughter independence out on the street. I didn’t let her go to her best friend’s house on her own until the summer after she turned 10, and I’ll only let her go by bike, not on foot — my reasoning being that a kid on a bike is faster and more difficult to bother. And I took that privilege away quickly (but briefly), after she and said best friend wandered way farther than approved at a public event. I know I’m going to have to increase her independence, but it’s hard. I don’t trust people on the street.

What did you love when you were twelve?

 

Weekend Voice Exercise: Accents

~ Natalie Hart ~ 8 Comments

1. Where did you grow up? What are the Old World or native languages that predominate in that area? Any special accent?

I admit it. I am only starting with this exercise because the of the one word that appeared on almost every report card: conscientious. I am a conscientious student. This particular prompt doesn’t seem as interesting as others further down the list, but if the teacher tells me to start at the top, I’m going to start at the top. I’m going to trust that the teacher knows what she’s doing, and there’s a reason for starting here.

I grew up in Toronto, Canada and Brisbane, Australia — both lands of long vowels.

The Old World accents I remember most are Dutch: my Oma (grandmother), our minister, older church members. Every kind of Old World accent and language can be heard in Toronto, and I remember noting how similar Dutch-, Italian- and (for lack of a better descriptor) old Jewish-accented English is. But for the purposes of this question, the voice I hear most in my head is my Oma, Wilhelmina Hart’s.

“Hhya. You haff to lawff.”

Perhaps someone more talented in phonetic spelling could capture the simultaneously breathy and guttural sound of that speech. The “Ya” at the beginning is soft to start, but builds into a more explosive exhalation with not much of a “y” sound, but not so much that she sounded like she was in karate class. The “h” in “have” is soft. In the middle of “laugh” she’d go way in her throat; when I imitate it, I duck my chin a bit. Her laugh, itself, was very low in her throat. She loved to lawff.

My name, always spelled, “Nataly”; those “a’s” were soft, like a combo of “aw” and “ah,” with the last vowel a chin tuck, again.

“It comes handy-in.”

“It’s an unicum [oonickum].”

“I simple cannot.”

“Sort of so.” or “Sort of dat.”

When she wanted a little “Maria Tia,” she might ask whether there would be “spirituals” after dinner.

Charlottesville was four syllables: a hard “Ch” as if you were saying “cheese,” and the “es” is a syllable all on its own (said as if you were saying the name of the letter S).

All kinds of switched sounds: j’s are y’s, th’s a t/d combo, wh’s a v/f combo (i.e. to say “What nice, hey,” say a combo of “vat” and “fawt”), slight tongue roll at r’s.

She was a frugal Dutch woman who loved, and I mean loved a bargain — “bargain” said with a bit of a chin tuck in the first syllable. In later years, she’d poke things with her cane, wrinkle her nose as if it was distasteful that she was even considering this, and talk store managers even further down in price. I still have the urge to tell her when I get a great deal (like the winter coat I bought for my daughter last night, originally $120 for $35).

The ends of her sentences were so definite, with character. She didn’t trail off, although, in conversation, you might not be sure where one sentence started and another ended because she talked so much. Seriously. It was nonstop. It was wonderfully easy to visit her, because you were just folded into her ongoing conversation with herself.

And now I see the wisdom of the teacher: I started out reluctant, but wound up in tears, writing a love letter to my Oma.

Speaking of which, I found this letter from her, written when I was in college. Most of my letters from her were brief notes so she could send me the church bulletin, but this one is very personal. I had just spent Interim (a January term of study) in Toronto, and returned to Grand Rapids to, soon after, break up with my boyfriend at the time. He’s the son of one of my mother’s favorite professors when she was at Calvin, and he’d come up to Toronto over Christmas and met a lot of family. I’m going to transcribe it here, mostly for my own pleasure, but if you read on, imagine lovely old-lady cursive, slanted at a consistent and perfect angle to the right. All quotation marks are done with the first one at the lower left corner of the word, and the second in the upper right. And most periods look like low dashes.

March 7, 1987

Darling Nataly,

Is it not exciting to get such a lovely vase of flowers from Claude Monet (more than 100 years old) a wonderful painter!

Thank you so much for your visit by letter and giving me a glimpse of your life in Grand Rapids.

Naturally it is a big adjustment after your exciting interim to be back in the normal running. On top of it you broke your “budding” relationship.

No wonder my granddaughter is a bit in “mixed feelings.”

Was it the right thing? Hard to tell. I found him a charming [slath? can’t figure this word out] young man and enjoyed the evening in his company.

Listening to each other is certainly not to get to know each other and it has to come from both sides. Also it takes time to show the “utmost” for each other — are you ready for that? [Note: I wasn’t talking about sex here, but she sure makes it sound like I was!] It might change your whole outlook and how your coming years will develop. Even the knowledge that God is always listening to us brings sometimes no clarity in our thinking.

I am looking forward to your “meditation.” Usual this kind of writing is also a blessing for yourself.

Wonderful that you have such a bond with Amy again.

I received a letter from Steve who is looking forward to his Toronto adventure. He is satisfied with his courses and I think you too on the whole. [By this she means that I also seem satisfied with my courses, not that my cousin seems satisfied with me — how could he be, he was in Arizona.]

It would be so great to have you home at Easter. Springbreak here starts next week and will be short.

Uncle Bill and Carroll just returned from Cuba (2 weeks).

Maaike’s tonsils were removed last week. She was very brave. She had to stay home from school for 10 days.

Uncle Dirk gave me a call this week from Philadelphia. We will hope Rodney’s operation is a succes [sic] – he was 3 hours in surgery – most likely they will return this weekend.

I was very proud to read in “Calvin Today” that 4 Taunton Rd students earned substantial grants. “Congratulations!!!” Well done.

Letter writing is still an effort for me. So is church going, reading and … walking. But I am coming along. I am thankful for all the support and love. Wonderful blessings from the Lord.

A bug hug from

Oma

Her faith was deep and real, so she could admit this truth, “Even the knowledge that God is always listening to us brings sometimes no clarity in our thinking.”

I would love to read any responses with stories of your grandparents. Let’s have a big old cryfest here on won·der.