Puritanism: a piety of joy

Today I discovered something exciting - well, exciting to me (and perhaps to no-one else except my mum). The one and only article I wrote about the Puritans is online!1

The Gospel Coalition has published all the old issues of Kategoria, a quarterly journal edited by Kirsten Birkett and put out by Matthias Media from 1996 to 2004.

There, in issue number 10, published wa-a-ay back in 1998, shortly after I finished my PhD and just before my daughter was born, is an article by yours truly:

Puritanism: a piety of joy.

For me, reading it was like visiting an earlier self: a scholarly pre-child self, who had forgotten more about the Puritans than I will ever remember, and who spoke (or wrote, at least) with long footnotes and a knowledgeable tone.

I enjoyed the article. It's not a bad read. You might enjoy it to. You'll find it here, on page 11. Here's a quote to whet your appetite, from the Puritan preacher John Collinges' sermons on the Song of Songs:

Is Jesus Christ precious to you? Is his name to your soul like an ointment poured forth? Is your whole heart filled with the sweet smell of Jesus Christ? Are you ravished with his love? Does the very thinking of Christ ravish your heart? Does the naming of him carry your soul almost above itself in an ecstasy of love? Is he like an apple to your taste, that your mouth is filled with the sweetness of his juice? Are you melted with his love?2.

And if that doesn't puncture your pre-conceptions about the sober-minded, black-hatted, joy-squashing Puritans, nothing will.

I might bring you some more quotes in coming weeks.


1. Thanks, Lionel, for letting me know, and Sandy for drawing his attention to it.
2. John Collinges, Five Lessons for a Christian to Learne, 1650, sermon 1, page 49.

what I'm reading: hiding death and grief from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

Something that struck me as I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking was how attitudes to dying and grief have changed. Death once happened at home and touched every household, and every adult was expected to know how to deal with it; now it happens in hospitals, away from public view, and grief is something to be hidden. Joan Didion writes,

Philippe Aries...noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes towardes death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden."

The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Goer, in his 1965 Death, Grief and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself”, a novel “imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.” In England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as a morbid self-indulgence", and to give social admiration to the bereaved who "hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”

One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition...the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable...The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively, with its aftermath. When someone dies, I was taught growing up, you bake a ham. You drop it at the house. You go to the funeral.

image is by José Goulão at flickr

an easy volcano cake that almost worked...

This volcano cake was one of the easiest we've made, and almost one of the most effective...;) Okay, so it looks kinds of pudding-ish. But Thomas and Andy, whose birthday it was, didn't mind!!It's super-easy. Here's how we did it:

We baked a butter cake in a pudding basin,
made some chocolate butter icing,and iced the cake.We made runny red icing,runny orange icing,and runny yellow icing;then poured them on the cake - first red,then orange and yellow.We put some dinosaurs around the sidesand stuck in some sparklers.Voila! One volcano cake!

a question about reading the Bible with kids – even the hard bits

There was an interesting comment on my post Reading the Bible with kids - even the hard bits.

A mum who’s thinking about how to read the Bible with her family said, “I’d love to see a follow up article about tackling the other types of difficult passages of the Bible – the particularly gory or sexual bits.”

I’ve been giving some thought to this, and I hope to write something in response; but I’m interested to hear your thoughts first, since I think different people will rightly handle this in different ways.

I think there are two important issues:

• how do we deal with these passages with our own children?


• how do we deal with these passages with other people’s children, for example, when teaching Sunday School?

What do you think?

You can comment here or at The Briefing.

what I'm reading: Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

When my friend lost her father, she shared with me some books about grief. One of them was The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's account of the year after her husband died. It's not a Christian book, but it will help you understand what it's like to grieve and may help you when you grieve.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a stunning book, a picture of grief from the inside. It's written with unflinching, sparse language that won't let you look away. The 'magical thinking' in the title refers to the way grief disorders your thinking: how there's an irrational conviction that if you do this, or don't do that, the person you grieve for will be able to return.

Here is an excerpt - a desciption of grief.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined event. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In this version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing'. A certain forward momentum will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place...We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself. (pages 188-189)

shown up again!

On the rare occasions he steps in to teach Sunday School for me, my husband always shows me up.

After a Sunday School class in which, with little-to-no preparation, Steve managed to incorporate a simple biblical theology ("Jesus is better than Moses") into the story of Jesus feeding the 5000, and entertained the kids with riotous games which they clearly preferred to my quiet crafts, eight-year-old Thomas bounced in the door and declared, "That was the best Sunday School class ever!"

Then, sensitive to my feelings as always, he stopped and added, "Daddy is the best in Sunday School, but you are the best in love, Mummy."

And then, in case I needed a little extra reassurance, "I love you and blankie best! I do, Mummy, I do!"

Well, that's a relief.

in my weakness, your growth

None of us wants to be the cause of another person's sanctification - at least, not unintentionally - and yet, so often, that is what we are.1

Is this one of the reasons that God allows us to become weak, dependent and forgetful as we grow older? Is it so we can place a necessary burden on those who were once dependent on us: a burden of forbearance and loving care?

Is this one of the reasons we may have to bear chronic illness or long-term disability? Why we may fight depression or suffer from mental disorders? Why we experience unemployment or material need? We may not want to receive others' charity and compassion, but in giving these, they grow into who they should be.

Is this one of the reasons God gives us personalities both winsome and challenging, attractive and off-putting, charming and awkward? Which of us would choose to have a 'difficult' temperament? But it's our unappealing qualities - uncomfortable thought! - that help others learn to love someone who's hard to love.

Is this one of the reasons we're not yet made perfect; one of the reasons that transformation happens so slowly? As we live with imperfect people, we practise forgiveness and forbearance, giving to them what God has far more generously given to us.

Speculation, I know, and raising all kinds of questions about God's sovereignty and our responsibility (yes, I am responsible to grow in godliness, not to persist in my ungodliness because it might help you grow!). In adversity, faith fixes its eyes on Christ and chooses hope, courage and love, not self-centred neediness (Hebrews 12:1-3). But it doesn't do this by a proud denial of need.

My instinct is to conceal my sin, make excuses for my faults, play to my strengths, and deny my dependence. What if, instead, I admitted my weakness, and gratefully accepted your generosity and grace? What if I served, even when the service wasn't perfect? What if, during times of helplessness and need, I practised contentment and received your help with gladness?

We are not strong; we are weak. We are not sinless; we are sinners. In our attitudes towards those who love and bear with us, we can choose to grow in humility, self-forgetfulness and joy. As we do this, we practise something far more significant: an attitude toward God that helps us to humbly receive his grace.


1. This odd little thought popped into my head while I was vacuuming. I suspect it has its roots in some novels I've been reading by the Anglo-Catholic author Elizabeth Goudge. While there's lots about her theology that I don't agree with, I am often encouraged by her moral insights.

This post first appeared in The Briefing yesterday.

image is by SanShoot from flickr

a question for you: a book for someone who's grieving

Penny has written in with a question for you:

I just wondered if you or your readers knew of a good christian book I can give a friend? She is in her late twenties and her husband has died. She is a new christian (has no children) and would love a book addressing her situation from a Christian perspective.

Does anyone know of a book Penny could give her friend?

a favourite quote: CS Lewis on "My time is my own"

This quote from CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters has been running round and round my head for some reason.

It's a great reminder that, if Jesus demands nothing more taxing of me than bearing with an irritating visitor, who am I to say no? Yet take away an expected hour of rest or day of relaxation, and I feel hard done by.

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.

It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-а-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption “My time is my own.” Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employer’s, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon his chattels. He is also, in theory, committed a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said “Now you may go and amuse yourself.” Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day.

CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters

image is by Ingorr from flickr

what's happening with me

Hi, everyone! I thought it was time I dropped in and let you know how I am.

A week ago, I handed in that big editing job I've been working on for much of this year (it's a training manual for MTS, for those of you who are interested). After months of trying to juggle long working hours with raising 4 children and managing a home (poorly), you can imagine what a relief it is to be able to focus on my real job again!

Why did I do it? To save up for our seven week driving trip to Cairns, which, as you know, we did during Steve's long service leave. It was worth it: we came back refreshed, and with family bonds strengthened, in that vital time when your children are on the edge of becoming teenagers.

Since then, I've run a birthday sleepover for a thirteen-year-old and eight of her friends, dealt with one major health scare (thankfully, it looks like being nothing), and we've all gotten sick. Hmmm. I'm writing this with a sore throat, aching muscles and grainy eyes.

Writing for The Briefing - the only kind of writing I've been doing recently, as no doubt you've noticed! - has been fun but a little demanding, which is one of the reasons I haven't been writing much else. I'd like to get back to those rambly posts about books and our family now that my job has finished, so we'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, I'm playing lots of games of Carcassone with my sick boys, trying to wheedle my newly-teen daughter out of her room so we can spend some time together, and hosting lots of meetings at our house (if 'hosting' isn't too fancy a word for providing some chairs and Tim Tams).

We're having take-away chicken tonight, the gluten-free kind! A satisfying conclusion to a very lazy day.