Muffins Like Cake

Rick Warren just tweeted that he doesn't blog, because when you do, it tempts you to think that everything you say is important.

This is not an important post. If you're looking for profundity, look elsewhere, because sometimes a post about muffins is just a post about muffins.

Which means it's important to me and to those who might eat a muffin that I've made, so that's four people, tops. I did, however, figure out how to post a picture to the blog, so that makes it, yeah, still just important to me.

Anyway, about the muffins. I keep making blueberry muffins using muffin recipes, over and over, searching for one I like. And after multiple, unsatisfying, batches (all of which seem to disappear anyway), it struck me this morning that what I want holding my blueberries together is a cupcake-like muffin, not a muffin-like muffin.

So I'm off to the recipe books to come up with a blueberry cake-muffin. One strong enough to hold the blueberries up like a muffin does, without being an actual muffin. My cousin Marsha used to make a cake that was a mix of Jiffy Cake Mix and Jiffy Corn Bread Muffin Mix. That was about the right texture. So I know what I'm after, it will just take more trying. Fortunately my boy's home, so I'm not worried about having to eat all of my mistakes.

June 6, 1944

This was posted over Memorial Day by a virtual friend, as my husband calls the folks I know in the Anglican world that I haven't met (yet). I loved the language and the depth of emotion involved. It resounds so powerfully, sixty-seven years later. When I grow up, I'd like to write as well as whoever wrote this for President Roosevelt.

“My Fellow Americans:

“Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

“And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

“They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

“They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

“For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

“Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

“And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

“Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

“Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

“And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

“And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

“With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

“Thy will be done, Almighty God.

“Amen.”

And Can It Be, That I Should Gain

Now and again I post a hymn here. I get overwhelmed with the words and need to say something about it. Mostly this happens whenever I hear something by Wesley and I get caught in a fit of nostalgia and gratitude.

I grew up in the Methodist Church. It was our touchstone and home no matter where we went or how often we moved. Which was a lot.

Every two to four years, the boxes would come out, a huge van would pull up and pull away with our stuff. My first swat on the rear end ever came during moving time when my dad caught me busily unpacking the boxes he'd just finished packing. I was little, in my defense, and probably thought it was funny. Hindsight being 20/20, I now know that it was not.

Anyway, we'd move and, no matter what time we'd finished unloading the Saturday night before, we'd be in church in our church clothes (suits for the boys, dresses for the girls)Sunday morning. Our church clothes never went into the moving van, they came along in the car with us, the dog, and the china and silver.

Dad would stand up during announcements, introduce us all, and we were in. Dad onto finance, Mom into children's education somehow, and choir. Me into choir. I don't remember if my brother did choir. In the world of Methodism, there were lots of choirs. If you're into that stuff, and we were, the Methodist church is the place to be.

I'm no longer Methodist, having found Anglicanism in a compromise move between Catholicism and Methodism. And I love it and haven't pined for what I left in a long time.

A couple of weeks ago we were back into the Methodist church for my niece's confirmation. I was excited to go back, as I'd loved the music. But we didn't go to the traditional service, we went to the contemporary one, and I'm not a fan. I do like contemporary Christian music, but I was looking forward to the Methodist hymns.

So earlier today, when someone linked to one on a website I was looking at, I followed the link and watched the folks singing it. They were singing their hearts out and the look on their faces was one of pure joy. The words are old, but the theology makes you want to weep with how sweet it is...my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Man oh man, did God ever give that Charles Wesley a gift...

1. And can it be that I should gain
an interest in the Savior's blood!
Died He for me? who caused His pain!
For me? who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Amazing love! How can it be
that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

2. 'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies!
Who can explore His strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
to sound the depths of love divine.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;
let angel minds inquire no more.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;
let angel minds inquire no more.

3. He left His Father's throne above
(so free, so infinite His grace!),
emptied Himself of all but love,
and bled for Adam's helpless race.
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!

4. Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
fast bound in sin and nature's night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

5. No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus, and all in Him, is mine;
alive in Him, my living Head,
and clothed in righteousness divine,
bold I approach th' eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ my own.
Bold I approach th' eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ my own.

Have Mercy On Me, A Sinner

"They" say that the older you are, the more folks you know who are dying or sick or having trouble. And I am at the point in life, 48 birthdays in, where I and lots of my friends are going through stuff. Not the easy stuff - your kid's getting a "C" in English or can't ride a bike yet. Which isn't easy stuff while you're in it. But it's stuff they grow out of, generally.

The stuff we are going through is the crappy, life-changing kind that means that the way you pictured your life before the stuff hit, yeah, that won't happen. And the reality is that we all go through it, some more publicly than others, and none of us will come out on the other side of it unscathed, for better or for worse. And there are many forms the stuff takes - parents' health going down hill, kids on drugs, girlfriends from hell, spouses who are failing in many forms, job loss, divorce...the list goes on from there, but it gets more and more depressing every time I think about it, so best stop listing.

I don't have solutions, many times, for my friends or for myself. We're wading together through the stuff, holding hands and trying to keep our heads above the muck, because some days it is all you can see.

But in the midst of the muck, I do know one thing, as I listen to them and seek their counsel for myself and my stuff, and it is this: you have to pray. There is nothing else. Pray like there's no tomorrow, which is risky to say given the recent Camping thing about the world ending, and yet not, because it could end tomorrow. Come, Lord Jesus, come. I won't come out of it unmarked, neither will they, but we can come through it marked as Christ's own.

Last week, while cleaning before company came over - or better said, trying to maintain the pretense that my life involves cleaning regularly - I read an article in Christianity Today magazine. I was cleaning, understand, just the kind that looks like reading. The article was about a guy who was dying and as he was, he was singing an old hymn. And the author talked about how she was praying the Jesus prayer - the one that goes: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Over and over again. Her thought being that, when old age robbed her of all else, that would be so deeply imprinted that it would still be there, on her lips.

And in God's providence, I read the article last week. Because this week has been filled with "stuff" dumped in my lap, and the Jesus prayer is what is rising to my lips. I don't know if that's what the author meant for me to read in the article, but what I read was that I should pray this prayer so often that it is what comes out of my soul when my body is not as under my control as it was before.

And that's what I'm trying to do now. Because the stuff is not in my control, my friends'stuff is not in their control, and it's got nothing to do with how we behaved or what we asked for or how we parented or anything. What is in our control is how we deal with it. And my vote is with prayer.

I hope that it is what will rise to my lips as I am dying. I'm very worried that all the opinions I've withheld from people who so badly needed to hear them (all the while being very, very proud of my self control - another thing to ask mercy for)will spill out. And, more worrying is the thought that some of those folks might be around caring for me to hear them.

Which brings me back to asking: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Amen

It's a Lovely Day in May

I'd thought about titling this post "The Month of May!" after the song from Camelot - loved that musical, saw it when I was 16ish with Richard Burton. But I went back and read the lyrics. This is a post about planning and gardening, not about all the stuff in the song. Made me want to watch the movie, but not name a post after it.

It's May and finally nice enough to be outside. Actually too hot to be out for long, we found this morning. Projects for this week include planning my parent's 50th wedding anniversary and reworking the front garden, which requires ripping out most of my wild geraniums. I am finding the latter to be perfectly therapeutic after spending time doing the former.

I don't know why the flowers are called wild geraniums exactly. I paid for them at the local nursery and brought them home in pots. They have a lovely magenta colored flower and they bloom a lot. They had a name - Cranesbill Geraniums. But people kept admiring my wild geraniums. They have a name, I'd say! They are not wild! But then they ran amok, spreading across the walk up to the house and somehow winding up on the other side of the driveway. I've stopped defending them as "not wild" and am now going after them with a vengeance.

Also on the chopping block are the purple cone flowers. I thought I'd bought short ones. I did not. They are huge, practically a shrub, and are not lovely to look at. They are supposed to add "winter interest" to my garden. I don't know who'd find them interesting, excepting the folks that write up the descriptions in flower catalogs, which are meant to lure you into buying. So caveat emptor - "winter interest" translates to sharp prickly black lumps on the end of long stalks that catch on your clothes as you walk by. I guess that might be interesting to someone. I'm not that someone, and so my spade and I are going to dispatch them posthaste to the great recycling pile in the sky.

In the place of the soon to be gone flowers, I'm planning basil, tarragon, thyme, and rosemary. The list gets longer the hungrier I get. I start thinking of all the things you can cook with herbs, and off I go. I'd also like to plant some peppers and tomatoes, but will likely save those for pots in the back yard. I had cherry tomatoes in front a few years ago, some of which came back from seed the next year, but two years was their limit.

I also need to look up how to prune my grape vines. There's apparently a trick to it, given the type of grapes I have, which I'll also have to look up. I kept the tags, but they are in the "kept tags" pile, and I'm not sure where that pile got cleaned away to. Whatever they are, they can't stay as they are.

This year, I'm planning to actually eat some of the grapes, rather than let the birds get to them before I do. Same applies for the raspberries. The seem to be spreading, which means my family may get a couple. I tend to go out in the morning with the dog, pick some berries while I'm waiting for her, eat them on the way in to the house, and then not bother to tell my family how good they were. I just put on my martyr face and go take out the dog...again. No, no, I say, I'll do it...ha!

So this lovely day in May is for planning: an anniversary, a garden, a pot of sweet tea, and a vacation or two. There's lots more going on all around me, in my church, my family and the extended world. But for today, I'm going enjoy to luxury of going to ground (literally) and doing some thinking. The rest of my life goes so much better when I do that now and again.

His Mother

In church on Sunday we had a visit from Bishop Alberto Morales, of the Diocese of Quincy, who came and gave a sermon on Mary.

As a Protestant, I was raised not thinking about her much. Not that all Protestants don't think about Mary, but in the churches in which I was raised, she was trotted out at Christmas - gently holding a baby, quietly wrapped in a blue and white shawl. Sometimes we saw her at Easter, just to the side of the cross, looking sad. If we saw her elsewhere it was because Jesus was telling her to go away or that it was not His time yet. If the Roman Catholic Church had gone too far one way by deifying her, we were certainly going to provide balance and go too far the other way.

Now as I've grown during Bible study, and become a mother, I've felt myself wishing to have known more. I've found myself wondering how she might have felt, watching her son up on a cross.

Sunday, Bp. Morales began with Mary's discussion with Gabriel. Which began with a "how" and ended up with a "Let it be unto me"...and he proceeded through to Jesus' testing moment in the Garden of Gethsemane. From His request that, if it were possible to "let this cup pass"...to His "let it be".... How neatly it was tied together, how Mary had influenced Jesus. Years of being taught to discount her, as if she'd never existed, are being quietly questioned, assumptions are being shaken and often laid aside.

For years I've struggled with how some people prefer Mary over Jesus. How she's related to by both men and women, and why people would pray to her. A parent of one of my friends told me once that he prayed to Mary instead of Jesus. Didn't want to bother "the Big Guy," and he liked Mary better. I still don't understand how one could see her as being co-equal, but I'm getting how and why people love her so much.

Because if you love Jesus, his mother has to be a part of that. And you can't put aside the one who held and loved him as a baby, who watched and remembered, and who stood, unable to save him, as he died. You can't put aside her influence on His humanity - anymore than you can refrain from chuckling when you hear something you've said come out of your kid's mouth. That's when it really strikes you - the influence, for better or worse, that we have on our children is immense. And her's wasn't less so. Not if Jesus was fully human. It couldn't have been.

I know there are a lot of books written about Mary. I'm not sure I'm interested in those. I'm focused right now on reading the gospels and seeing Mary through the single lens of Scripture.

What I found lovely about Sunday's sermon, apart from the sermon itself, was the timing. As I've been delving into the gospel of John, I've been coming to terms (an ongoing thing, I'm afraid) with the humanity of Jesus. I find myself quick to look at Him as God, rather than as man. Looking at His mother, thinking about the influence she'd have had on Him, and seeing the parallels between her conversation with Gabriel and His with His Father, well, very cool week for the brain.

Wishing I'd Met Avis DeVoto

The other day I read something that is so perfectly reflective of where I'm at that I couldn't wait to share it. So I wrote up a post and then looked at the front of the book, which had, as most books do, a little warning about reproducing without permission. Dagnabit. Partially because I'd already written it up and partially because there's no way I'll be able to summarize what they wrote in a way that comes even close to how wonderfully well they wrote what they did.

I got the book As Always, Julia The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto Food Friendship & the Making of a Masterpiece because I love to cook and have been using Julia's cookbooks forever. Their correspondence began when Julia wrote a response to an article Avis' husband wrote on American knives. Julia sent him a French knife and Avis, handling her husband's correspondence, wrote back. They ended up writing for years and their letters covered politics (McCarthy era), publishing, cooking, travel, families - everything. That initial letter lead to the eventual publishing of Mastering The Art of French Cooking.

They have a lot in common: both women are Democrats; both are very political; and both love food. They are, to use their terms, egghead intellectuals. Avis is 48 and Julia 40 when their letters begin. And the two women forge a lasting friendship on the chance writing of a letter.

While I've found the food discussion interesting, it is Avis, rather than Julia, who truly fascinates me. She has two sons, one of whom's still at home during the correspondence, and one of whom is returning from military service in need of help. He has what sounds like autism to my only partially educated ear. Her description of their life with him is honest, loving and despairing, and very human. She is like an amalgam of many of my friends, and yet enough unlike them as to make me want to know her, specifically. She is a wife, mother, editor, writer, encourager, helpmate, friend and, later, widow.

Mid-way through the book there's a section where Julia's busy pigeon-holing people into groups. She's got groups she dislikes, one of which she labels UMB - Upper Middle Brow, most of whom are Republicans and reside in the mid-western and western states. She describes them as basically nice, but, given their lack of intellectualism and achievements, a waste of human material. She's being flippant and not a little derisive, and Avis calls her on it, telling her that she's being too quick to categorize people and that these Republicans are apt to occasionally have answers that are better than those of the eggheads. Avis goes on to say that she's continually surprised by good things about these people...and that some of the intellectuals that she knows can be the "awfullest fools."

Avis then shares with Julia her take on a family she knows who publicly present a wonderful face, but who are dealing in private with something that turns them into a "mass of well-concealed panic." She tells Julia that she admired this family, thinking it ideal, until she really knew their story. And that the complexity of people caused her to love them, turning her "to mush."

I love Avis' response. Because the older I get, the truer her response rings. In terms of understanding and sometimes being awed by the complexity of humanity, Avis DeVoto nails it.

Avis died in 1989. And I was pretty sad to read that part, as I'd like to have known her. She'd not make a comfortable friend, but you'd be a better person because of her friendship. Julia Child certainly was.