Summer Sewing

I suppose it is about time to do something with this blog.    Here is something of what I have been doing this summer--partly on my own, and partly by collaboration with the interested parties:

Here we are with the bonnets. . .

And here we are without them.

Mine is the first truly period-accurate dress I have made.  Gretchen's is a remake from the fabric I used for a different dress. Our friend's is all new except for the lace that I tatted a long time ago.  She did a good bit of sewing on this dress--and she has known how to use the sewing machine for only two weeks.

We had fun. 

My family is crazy.

We have debates around the table set off when a member of the Grammar Gestapo catches a non-member in the act of mangling the English language.

We get giddy from laughing at puns and hilarious misunderstandings.

We delight in startling shrieks out of Debra and Laurie, and take even more delight in parading our own imperviousness to such surprising.

Some of us get our exercise from jumping up and down the stairs, Dufflepud style.

One of us gets no end of mirth out of pinning clothespins to Debra's hair and waiting to see how long she goes without noticing them.

One of us can make the "bunny trail" sign with such intensity that the rest of the family breaks out laughing.

My family is crazy - but I love it.

If you give a Juli a cookbook. . . .

 She'll probably ask to make something.

So you take her to your kitchen and give her flour.  She'll make pie dough and borrow your tart pan.

Then she'll get so involved with your pastry cookbook that she will make two kinds of tartlets--

Alsace leek-and-onion ones with Gruyere, and

Wild mushroom with Fontina ones.  Since she will have lots of onions to spare, she will ask you to get out your sherry and frozen fresh thyme so she can make French Onion Soup.

[No picture of that, unfortunately.]

Cooking with such good-quality tools will remind her how much fun it is to be in a private kitchen.

She'll ask you whether she can come over and make something again, and

Chances are, if she asks to make something--

She'll want one of your cookbooks to look at it.

Currently Messiah (George Frederick Handel) London Philharmonic Orchestra By Handel, London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Alldis How Beautiful are the Feet see related

On Holiness

I am still trying to accustom myself to a few of the liturgical practices at St. Peter’s.  Infant baptism is not really on my mind right now, since I am not a young wife; the issue affecting me right now is the practice of bowing before the altar as one walks up the aisle.  I have been told that we bow before it because that is where the presence of God dwells particularly in the elements of bread and wine, and my intellect understands the argument.  I have a hard time actually making myself bow before the altar as I walk up with the rest of the choir, though, and have found myself doing whatever I can to avoid bowing when on my own (going up the side aisle, getting someone else to go up and do whatever errand, etc.). 

Why?

Nothing in Scripture says “thou shalt not bow before the altar.”  We bow not because we worship the physical elements of pitas, port, wood, and cloth—we bow because God has pleased Himself to dwell in the peculiar elements of bread and wine and is present there in a way more apprehensible than He is in other parts of the church.  I suppose that even low-church Protestants experience God’s presence powerfully in certain situations and not in others—church services in which the Spirit moves powerfully, devotions when something clicks and the person is overwhelmed by the presence of God, etc.  But the traditions in which I have grown up do not make a practice of observing God’s presence in a special way in a special place.

Have we lost a critical help to understanding God’s holiness?  I think back to C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces—Ungit’s house was holy, it had a holy smell (granted, a smell based on a sacrificial system), and Orual was terrified of it.  I have discovered that I feel the same way about honoring the altar in a special way.  Bowing is a universal sign of submission.  Why should I be submitting myself to the presence of bread and wine?  Mostly because I do not have a high enough view of the Eucharist.  Even rejecting the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the bread and wine turn into physical flesh and blood), the mystery of Communion is great and full of holiness.  Holiness is scary.  Holiness speaks against my sin, condemns me for my black heart, is high and unattainable.  Think of the hymn “Immortal, Invisible.”  God is Holy, Holy, Holy. 

From Julius Caesar, I.3.102-105

And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?

Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf

But that he sees the Romans are but sheep.

He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.