I had such a lovely afternoon today chatting with another mother. Our children played together while we talked,over delicious iced water, about our families, migrant issues, refugees and childhood memories . L is two years younger than I am, and earned simultaneous degrees in law and chemistry ,  did education work with Aboriginal peoples,  relief work in Nepal and competed in  ballroom dancing competitions.

And so, we started talking about the things we’d wanted to do in our youth, and how we’d never have imagined ourselves doing what we are doing now- being home with the children, working a little, and living lives so vastly different from what we’d expected.

And I was reminded of  a glorious poem by this woman poet called Linda Pastan: “I Married You”, where at first the reader is led to think that the poet will end with a complaint or lament over an unhappy marriage.

“I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.”

The surprise comes at the end, when she writes:

“How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.”

As we exchanged notes, L and I laughed over our youthful expectations. We laughed out of a sense of surprise, that we could say with all honesty-  that we have been happy, and that “it has been very good”.   What a shining afternoon it was.

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When I started taking up writing as a calling seriously, I looked at the situation I was in -children, family- and told myself that if I ever had to choose between doing what I love (writing) , and these iridiscent years with our young ones,  I won’t need two seconds to know which one I’d drop.  God knows, it’s not because I love writing or studying any less; but because I love my children and family beyond comparison.

I also told God, that if this was really something He was leading me into, and not some self-delusional feelings I had about myself, He’d have to enable me to work(write) in the midst of our situation.  I can’t afford weekly or even monthly retreats so that I can write, or sign up for courses- not for this season anyway. No.  God would have to enable me to find the creative spaces here, where I am- in the grease and grime of cooking, cleaning, caring, forgiving and loving.

And, I also believe, that we , as  mothers-daughters-wives, will not be diminished by the responsibilities and homeliness that we bear.  And that growing old- something I welcome with open arms- will not reduce who we are. Growing old can  enlarge our views, deepen our faith, sharpen our understanding of what it means to live, play, work and pray- if we let it.   And so, my writing, I believe , will be enriched by all this- the mess, the turning away and turning back, the struggling with fatigue, tempers, character, laundry and faith.

But the story of Abraham stretched far back beyond that moment on the mountain, back to Ur, back to that embarassing sojourn into Egypt, back to his refusal of the King of Sodom’s gifts, back to the night when God commanded him to count the number of stars in the  sky and promised him descendants as numerous as the night could hold;back to the covenant-making command marked by circumcision; back to the afternoon on the plains of Mamre when three visitors arrived and fellowshipped in his tent; back to Sarah laughing and then, conceiving Isaac though her womb should have been dry and dead; back to Beersheba when Abraham planted a grove and called on the “name of the Lord, the everlasting God”.  Abraham’s decision to trust God-that early morning as he saddled his ass, commanded his men and young Isaac to heave the wood onto the beasts-was based on those long, painful and wondrous years of walking with God.

As Paul put it in his letter to the Romans (italics, mine) , “He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief ( Abraham recalls the moment in his journey when God gave him the promise) ; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform, And therefore it was imputed him for righteousness.”

And this, I think, is faith- that long days’ walking with God,  so that when the moment of testing comes, we act on faith- not a “leap” into the dark, into some unknown territory- but a climb into new terrain, with the same Person who has walked with you till then, and has held you whole through pits, vipers and enemies stronger than you.

June marks the the end of our first homeschooling term. We’ve been taking plennnty of breaks in between; mostly because of fields trips, extra classes  and playdates. Those have been good interruptions, depending on whether you see them as punctuations in the whole composition that is homeschooling, or as part of the script.

We did manage to get several hands-on projects done- mainly those related to machines (pulleys, gears and levers) and chemistry (Noeo).   Our presentations for the World Studies Club has been sketchy to say the least- tepees, buffalo skin (brown paper) paintings, boats, and an art piece that was related to a certain land form. I should put those pictures on the blog, and I will soon enough. The children like to see them all nice and neat on the page.

But I intend to makes some changes. It was our trip to Singapore that prompted me to re-look at the stuff that we’ve been doing- mainly my scrambling to cover everything under the sun that’s to be covered, from fractions to birdwatching, from  sourcing for videos on the Yom Kippur war to marking copywork, which my 10 yr old, incidentally still does.

Changes? Well, for a start, to expand the way we have been learning/teaching so that, like a helix, it grows and bends in all directions instead of remaining flat.  So, away with the stacks of workbooks and filling in the blanks and worksheets. Well, away with most of them. And to get back on discussions, experiments, getting our hands dirty in the dirt, and fun.

How did we end up towing this textbook-workbook line, I ask myself? I started off homeschooling on a hope and a prayer that we would revel in discovery-based learning.  Why didn’t that happen for us the first half of the year? I think busyness has a large part to do with this: it’s so much easier to hand a workbook over to the child and let her “sort it out on her own”, than to sit down with her and to talk over the stories or history behind it.  So much easier, to assess a child based on marks – “Hey! You got 4 out of 10 right!”- than to ask her why she thinks a certain way about, say,  Saburo ( Paterson’s Master Pupeeter) and the decisions he makes.

At the same time,  I’m not a purist when it comes to learning: I don’t believe that any approach has got it all down pat.  Like most things in life, parents have to evaluate the approaches,e.g. classical and Charlotte Mason, and see how it fits the family and children.  Then, of course, that’s the part about integrating our cultural identity with whatever materials we’re using, as most of our sources come from the West – and by that, I mean , the U.S.

I suppose it’s distractions that I have to be aware of as a homeschooling mom, so that my energy doesn’t diffuse into a million directions.  And so, this comes back to priorities, and keeping a sense of focus on what’s important for the present ; and in Buber’s words,  being ” I and Thou”- present to the person before me.

Next week, my English classes begin again. I look forward to having the whole bunch descend upon our home each Friday morning. Also, there’s the monthly classes with the teens beginning July, and , God -willing, another weekly class for another age group.  I’m also a little apprehensive because it sounds like there’s more juggling of commitments to be done. Still,  it’s not really an option for us at this point, not to have me work. At least, that’s what I think, though Adrian, blessed man, begs to differ. We’re going to be 40 next year, by the way, and our journey together has been one that testifies to God’s goodness and grace. We are very different people, that’s why this has been such an eventful and love-filled experience- this oneness that was and is God’s idea, and will always be His to the very end.

It’s good that God allows us to make u-turns. In a way, this is repentance- a turning away from old habits and getting my feet (and eyes and heart) back on the path.

Not long ago, a writer came up to me and fervently said that experience was necessary in order to write well.  By experience, she meant traveling  and seeing places, interviewing people and spending days among communities whose lives are different from ours.  I look at the homeliness of my existence and wonder if this is a death sentence on my work as a writer.

My foray into writing began with the usual flippant tales of princesses, princes (groan), magicians and animals that could talk. I must have been nine or ten.  And then there were those angst-filled (and wonder-splattered) teen journals- books and books of them.  I’ve written for as a long as I remember, even when there was nothing worth much to write about.  Thus, to hear that my writing would be somehow stagnated by my inability to travel, and explore exciting places and cultures – all of which I would love to do, given the time and money- was discouraging, to put it mildly.

And so, when I chanced upon this quote, I was overjoyed!

“I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

That came from Eudora Welty, and I think she expressed for me, the essence of what I believe- that writing stems from seeing, and daring to see and hear in ways that may seem dull and painful.  This , for some reason other, recalls to mind what  Kierkegaard’s critics level at him, which was  that he made Christianity absurd and paradoxical.  Conversion is a “leap of faith”,  writes K as he argues a for a higher sphere of existence which requires a suspension of the ethical.  Genesis 22 becomes the backdrop for his arguments and Abraham’s decision comes with “fear and trembling”,  for on what rational grounds can he justify his action to Isaac, to the waiting Sarah at home,  to those under his ‘care’? And so, says Kierkgaard, Abraham takes a stand and risks everything for his faith that it is indeed God who has spoken to him, and not the distortions of the sirocco.

So it is when one writes.  You throw yourself into the story or poem swimming about you, and you push away the yelling of those inner editors all coming at you from different directions, and you plunge into the silence of the form taking shape before you- believing that you have heard something : the words to a song, a giggle, a footfall- and purse it, suspending the obvious flotation devices of geography, culture and space.  I believe that is what Eudora W meant by “serious daring”. And why my  friend was mistaken. No amount of exposure can do things to to you if it remains on the outside.

I don’t mean that journalism is impersonal; only that the journalist-commentator asserts her presence in the write-up, therefor posing this distance between the reader, commentator/reporter and the report or story.   And it is precisely this- the artifice of distance- that the writer of poetry or fiction, the makers of metaphors, try to diminish.

I wish I could say that I am reading Kierkegaard firsthand. What I have on my table is Duncan’s Soren Kierkegaard from our church library.  But it will suffice for now, until my mind is clearer and I am able to sit for hours in a chair and sink myself into the words on the page.

We also read Psalm 90, a psalm that Moses wrote and probably, sang, in the last years of his life. This man never had a real home from the time he was placed in that basket by the reeds, to those many years of dust and wind in the wilderness with the hive of muttering former slaves hanging on to him all the time.  Even though that was God’s will for him, it must have been pretty hard to swallow.  Wandering about the wilderness among the rocks and wily animals, watched by idolatrous nations.

So when he declares that God is “our dwelling place throughout all generations”,  he expressed, I think, the deepest desire of his being- and the deepest longing of the people he was leading: a longing for home.  By affirming that God was their home- that one permanent place and presence- in a landscape and existence that was ever shifting,  Moses ‘ words reminds us to look at the eternal, at that which lasts, instead of the temporal.

What a hefty reminder for the beginning of the year. I pray we will keep our eyes on treasures in heaven, and make wise choices that count for eternity.

As I get ready for my weekly housecleaning routine, my heart is filled with thanks for good friends .  Lately, I’ve come to realize an obvious truth: the company of a  real friend floods an entire room with treasures, adventures and words of life. Who needs a crowd of hangers-on when you’ve got these gems for the road?

Frost described this very well :

A TIME TO TALK

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall

The point is that I haven’t done much writing. Perhaps I haven’t done any for the past 3,4…5 days? So much for getting up at 5 am to write.

And tonight I will be spending the night with my husband watching some Angelina Jolie action flick called SALT. This entry therefore is an attempt to get back into some kind of writing momentum. Hmm. Hmmmm.

to get her toes in tangles in its jelly-soft

arms . If not for the stove, warm with warming

muffined pans, stewing pots, treacled puddings,

she’d  be there, among the periwinkles ,

starfished sands.

Yet she sings of the future.

She sings for she sees

her children wading in the

wildness of the ocean ,

hears their laughter shimmering

in the wind,

feels the surging waves rise

and fall within them.

So she

minds the fires and keeps the windows

open.

She sings.

I have a question. How does one go about writing Christianly? Should one go about writing Christianly and what does that mean?

I did a review lately on Gene Veith’s “Reading Between the Lines”.  He wrote that good Christian writing should reflect high aesthetic standards as well as sound biblical moral truths.  That sounds simple enough. But what if that kind of writing isn’t marketable ? That’s hard –going for those who write for a living.

A look at the bestsellers in our Christian bookstores tells us that what people want is something accessible (linguistically and intellectually) and relevant to their daily lives. We also want quick-bites of advice so we can scan through the lesson for the day and then go out there and do it; after all, didn’t James tell us to be doers and not just hearers, we hum to ourselves.

But that’s like saying, here, let me hammer that nail into the wall, and then you miss, not the nail, but the entire wall , because you have been gazing at the nail in  your hand and forgotten about why it is there in the first place.  In abbreviated form,  we’ve missed the big picture. When our sole pre occupation is with “getting it done right”- sticking to 1 hour devotions, attending prayer meetings,  following  steps 1- 89 of the “how-to-grow” manual-we lose sight of what God has called us to be – that is to simply BE who we are before Him.  We forget that the problem with the nail and the wall was that that we forgot the reference point: whose we are.  And when we remember whose we are, we recall that there’s no way we can make it on our own in the many, many years ahead, then we give ourselves up and surrender to His call .And we are called to lay down our frantic anxieties and rest. To put aside our harried  prayer requests and listen. To stop giving excuses for  sin and beg for forgiveness. To quit trying to put words to the song in our  heads and just worship.

Because of this, good Christian writing is first of all, an invitation to come. Come and fellowship.  Come and rest. Come and put your case before the Lord. Come and receive.  Come and see the cross and Jesus hanging there. Come and worship at the empty tomb.

Good writers write from who they are, not from who or what they are trying to be. The parable replaces the didactic moral sermon. The metaphor replaces the list of instructions.  If I am a Christian who follows the Lord,  my convictions will be reflected in what I write. Is a writer’s work any more Christian when she cites Scriptures and follows the formulaic “before/after conversion ” plot ? In that same vein, is a writer’s work any less Christian when these words- in black and white print- are absent from her book?

I suppose parallels can be drawn from the Christian music industry. Is a piece from Hillsongs’ any more sacred than Bach’s wordless compositions? Or Mendelssohn’s ? We know that both composers did not write for a specifically Christian audience, but see how the strains of their beautiful music have lasted through the years and proven themselves to be classics. Hillsongs..well…

Goodness. This sounds as if I worry about writing marketable books. That shouldn’t be the concern of a Christian writer, or should it? If it is a question of accessibility, should I then write material that everyone can relate to ? If so, then my role as a writer is merely to reflect their preoccupations, not to challenge the parameters of thinking, beliefs and  ortho-praxis. That doesn’t seem to be worth pursuing though. Neither does it seem biblical.

But a work must also communicate. As Moses and Jeremiah’s did. As John’s on Patmos when he gave us Revelations, which when you come to think of it, isn’t an easy book to understand. How can a work communicate without pandering to the hungry likes and dislikes of the consumer-reader? If I see myself, the writer, as a merchant, then my sole preoccupation is that my product had better be marketable to the consumers. But if I see my role of the writer as a prophet- lofty though this may sound- then, I am freed from the trappings of this capitalistic web. Well, a lot freer.

The Christian writer-prophet views writing as a vocation- a medium- through which God’s word is given to the people. Jeremiah used words, but not in the way that technology uses words to transmit information. The prophets used  metaphors to convey God’s message to His people. That makes it pretty tricky because metaphors both limit and widen  interpretations.

Metaphor also invites listeners and readers to reflect and to participate in-borrowing from Rosenblatt-”meaning-making”:  What does that mean? What else could it mean to me, to the other person there, to the world? Metaphor is at the heart of the narrative-story.

As a writer, then I seek to communicate God’s truth to a broken world through the metaphor- the art of writing.  The Christian writer’s  role is not to transmit – like a  recorder-commands, instructions and information.  The Christian writer’s vocation is to show God’s truths through variations of shade and light, beauty and the grotesque, sound and silence, and to be a voice in the wilderness that calls out, “Prepare ye the Way of the Lord”.

One of my dreams is to  live on a farm : extensive grounds to ramble through, hosts of animals- goats, ponies, dogs, chickens- and a 40 minute radius away from everyone else. Now, this might some both idyllic and unfriendly. But it really is not.

We live in the thick of suburbia, packed with houses, streets, highways under construction and malls. There are people everywhere and anywhere here : scrunched up in cars on the roads, boxed up in concrete termite mounds aka apartments and offices, pottering about in malls , churches, temples, Starbucks, Uncle (blank) Kopitiams. The effect of this infestaton is stunning. Claustrophobia. Loneliness. And earache. If crowds is an indication of friendliness, then this city should be the friendliest place to be in. Which brings us back to my farm. Or rather, the farm that is coming.

The farm is mainly a retreat from the kind of desperate -living mentioned earlier and from the  values that come with it: efficiency, performance, NLP and kopitiams that are plastic toy versions  of the original hometown kopis, yiu-char-koays and roti bakar .
A retreat is not a barricade against burnt muffins in the oven, misunderstandings, cancer and disobedient children. A retreat is not an escape. A place of retreat is , mostly, a place of refuge – a safe place, where you are more attentive to what God is saying about Himself,the world, about family, about yourself.

I learnt this last week when we were at a pastor’s home, tucked away in the forests of a hill. Here, CH  and his wife, L, welcomed friends . They walked us through their  orchard and ‘gardens’. They swept the floors, cooked, changed the water filter and held discussions with the lot of us. This earthy kind of spirituality captivates my heart. And I have also seen it in places dank with mold and reeking of faulty air-conditioning.

I suppose the heart of the farm is in the farmer just as the heart of earthy spirituality lies in the heart of the seeker. Give the same expanse of land to an industrialist and you will see  rows of smoke-belching factories or , uniformed ranks of terrace houses. Give the same country to corrupt despots and you will have the  perpetual construction  of mega-projects and burgeoning rot in the public sphere.

Both Adrian and I agree that the farm has to be situated in a place with cool weather. And we disagree as to the number of dogs we should have, and whether they (and their pups) will be allowed into the house. But, we both believe, that we can start preparing for this farm by listening, and listening correctly to what He is saying to us about the direction of our lives. And about  the land which we inhabit.

Today, our country turns 53. Politicians and mercenaries are tearing her apart with selfish agendas and destructive policies. Yet we have high hopes for this land.  We dream that she will fully inhabit that space – of mutual understanding, of peace, of justice, of compassion- for which she was birthed 53 years ago. We hope she becomes fertile soil where both young people and old folks of all races and religions will grow and flourish together. We pray she will be free from the clamour of wars and unrests that have ravaged so many other nations. We long to see her returned to the heart of her peoples- a Malaysia that gives room for all.

This is also our dream.