Holy Week 2021 (1 of 2)

Even though our church has not met in person since mid-March 2020, the leadership has tried to build community. They dropped off Easter lilies last year, and when they brought poinsettias, the pastors filmed themselves lighting candles for a Christmas Eve video. The deacons have sent cards for major holidays, and for Holy Week this year, they painted a labyrinth on the church parking lot. That way, anyone can stop by to pray or meditate as they walk the path to the center, where the medallion reads "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." The kids made decorations that now hang in the trees, brightening up the space for us and our neighbors.

Carob Chip Cookies

Another weekend, another failed bid on a house, another baked good. What else is new? This Saturday we looked at a cute little house in Mount Washington. Then we picked up paninis from the local cafe to eat in a park while watching an adorable toddler playing with a stick. Next we walked through the neighborhood, enjoying the 74-degree sunshine and the vistas all along Grandview Avenue overlooking the Monongahela River, the Point, downtown Pittsburgh, and the Ohio River. We even got to experience a classic set of Pittsburgh steps (left); this is "Well Street." Below is the mural at the cafe of a stork delivering baskets of coffee beans from different countries.

In the late afternoon, I pulled up David Attenborough's A Life on This Planet while baking carob chip cookies. Funnily enough, just that morning I had read an article shared by a friend on Facebook about "how carob traumatized a generation" of children in the 1970s, when their parents jumped on the health-food bandwagon: "Poor carob ... [i]t never wanted to be chocolate in the first place." Dear Husband had purchased the imitation chips because he gets migraine headaches with even a little exposure to caffeine, so this was an experiment to let him enjoy a classic treat without suffering for it later. 

I decided to use the recipe on bag instead of the usual Toll House one. Interestingly, although it claimed to be "allergy friendly," it still called for milk and an egg. I substituted an equivalent amount of applesauce for the milk but left in the egg and used brown sugar instead of date sugar. After saving a couple spoonfuls of dough for DH so he could have the privilege of risking Salmonella poisoning, I chilled the dough balls on the cookie sheets for a few minutes in the freezer. Maybe I should have pulled the cookies out a few minutes sooner so the edges didn't get a crispy, but all in all, a passable substitute for chocolate chip cookies.

May Your Home Smell As Good As...

...a scented candle in the bathroom after a nice long soak in the tub with a book and bath salts from a friend.

Or as good as this cinnamon apple pecan walnut sweetbread I made. Here is the recipe. It almost wasn't sweet, as just before combining the wet and dry ingredients together, I realized I had nearly forgotten to add any sugar, because I was distracted by a comedy sketch by Australian actor Hannah Gadsby. I didn't remember opening the sugar container, and a wet fingertip of mixed dry ingredients only tasted like flour. Therefore, I deduced that I had skipped a step, added the sugar, and proceeded. 

The house smelled SO GOOD while this baked. It was nice to come in from picking up a plastic bag's worth of trash from along the major road that runs in front of our current rental to the wafting scents of cinnamon, Granny Smith apples, and sugar. However, I did find the batter dry. The apple chunks largely fell to the bottom, and much of the nut crust fell off the top. Next time I would cut those back from 1 cup each to 3/4 cup.

Walking the Labyrinth: Guide My Steps, O God

Today I walked a labyrinth. It's a spiritual practice I have tried before but now the Adult Forum at my church is reading Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. In one of the chapters we discussed this morning, Taylor describes the spiritual discipline of "walking on the earth," of being connected with the ground that holds us up. We had also discussed how easy it is to fall into "cow paths," worn ruts that are direct but also unimaginative.

The most famous labyrinth is probably the one in Chartres Cathedral. Our church is having a competition for local artists to design a temporary labyrinth that can be set up on the lawn for Lent. It reminded me of the Franklin Community Garden and walking prayer maze that Dear Husband and I had discovered on one of our many daily quarantine walks way back last spring. I decided to check it out.

As you can see, the setting isn't much, especially this early in the year. But the half-circle, quasi-mushroom-shaped path was clear. I prayed before I started that the stress of house-hunting would be lifted. And then I walked. Not too fast, not slowly, just steadily onward, looking at the ground. 

I could see that other people had piled small stones on top of the brick painted "LOVE" at the center of the maze. Probably they had picked up a rock on their way in and left it--and the burden it represented--before spiraling out of the center.

I was not carrying a burden today so much as practicing the discipline of walking in the prescribed path. I could have easily stepped over the low brick markers, of course, but I chose not to. I found myself praying, "Direct my steps, O God."

On my way out, however, I couldn't help but notice that some of the bricks had fallen slightly out of line. I nudged them back into alignment with my foot. Then I picked up a chunk of brick to one side and carried it with me to a spot that no longer had a stone. This meant I deviated a somewhat from the path, but no one was waiting to take their turn or to pass me, so it seemed undisruptive, maybe even helpful to those who might come after me.

A charitable reading of this would be to say that it was like I was co-creating with God and the labyrinth builders. The bricks were out of place, and I was able to re-place them. A critical reading would suggest that I can't help meddling, that I assume my ideas are the correct ones, and that I can't leave well enough alone.

I can't tell you which is the correct answer, and maybe there isn't one. But I spent a short half hour in the thin sunshine, and I plan to walk the labyrinths at Chatham University and at Third Presbyterian Church later this Lent.

What spiritual disciplines are you practicing?

What Time is It? It's String Time!

Our cat, Rosamunda, can look absolutely angelic while sleeping, but in the evenings she turns into a fierce huntress. For a while she would run after projectiles like balls and even the occasional pencil, if we threw them along the upstairs hallway. This would keep her relatively entertained with a minimum of effort from us.

At some point she stopped chasing them and decided she much preferred stalking and attacking a string. So at 7 or 8pm, she will sit on Dear Husband's armchair and look meaningfully between him and the top of the bookcase, where the string lives between sessions. She will meow at him. For a while she would nip him with her teeth, because often he would put her off until she felt that was the only way to get his attention. 

After putting her out of the room a few times and reviewing our parenting techniques, we decided we couldn't reward that aggressive behavior by letting things get so far before acquiescing. At some point she tried reaching out with one of her paws, and DH found it so totally adorable that he decided that would be the signal: a tap with her paw would lead to "string time." I haven't been able to capture sufficiently athletic or acrobatic footage of her leaping and chasing the string, but here's a snapshot of her asking him to play.

Editor's Note: You might appreciate these posts about her "many poses" and her "many faces."