Leanne Shawler, Artist

Sorry for the delay in getting this post out. Helena and I finished our icons last weekend and I get to pick up mine from her place, hopefully Saturday and then get it blessed. It's been a busy last few days preparing for the family gathering on today, Christmas Day, and I still have a little bit to do for that, but first, the icon update. After abandoning the whole borders idea, we still had to use the ruling pen (with watered down red paint inside! terrifying!) to put down the lines for Jesus' halo. This is Helena at work: (PS: Not sure how these videos are going to work ... ) My icon, ready for varnish under the glow of a lamp Helena's icon, ready for varnish, under the lamp Shiny, eh? Well wait, there's more. The magical transformation that occurs with varnish. Watch the magic (sound effects are all mine): I feel I could write something about the transfiguration of the icon at this point, but the excitement level is still a little too high ...

And I've been meaning to post them ... so here they are: An Open Letter to my Sisters in the Suburbs by Osheta Moore Perfect Pie: a Bakers Dozen+ Tips from Flourish, the King Arthur Flour blog The brilliant How hard can it be to find a handmade, fair-trade, biblically-accurate, ethnically-realistic, reasonably-priced, child-safe nativity scene by Rachel Held Evans I have a couple more but they are on the theme that I've been trying to settle my mind around: incarnation. Maybe more on that later this week.

There is this meme going around Facebook about listing 10 books that have stayed with one in some way. Nobody tagged me, and even if they did, I wouldn't put it on Facebook because I have never been a fan of chain letters, or guilting people into doing something (unless of course they are my little brothers, in which case all bets are off). In other news, I've been reflecting on incarnation thanks to some amazing sermons at my church  (December 1 and 8, 2013) but haven't found words for this yet. Or time to really dwell with it. And so I haven't posted. No progress on the icon either. But I have almost finished the giveaway paintings. Here's my list of 10 books that have stayed with me in some way. With commentary. Naturally. Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte Would it be crazy to say this was my scripture growing up? Not really. I come back to it again and again, and as I mature different moments and thoughts resonate with me. One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Li...

Frequently during my 31 days of blogging, I mentioned EfM or Education for Ministry. Although the school year is well underway, I thought I would write about it. It's a four year course for lay people. The course has recently (finally!) undergone some revision, including new texts, but I think the basic outline is the same: One year Old Testament One year New Testament One year church history, theology and tradition (up to American Revolution) One year continuing church history, theology It looks like these last two are the most overhauled, as I checked out the new texts and it looks like they've finally made it to the 21st Century. But that's the worst I can say for my EfM experience.  The best was learning to be part of a new small group, of learning to discern together, and to support each other through our faith crises. And yes, each of us in the group struggled with a part of the Scriptures or theology as our mostly child-formed theology met ...

Here it is, my 500th blog post here on Provoking Beauty. Before I announce the winner, I thought I would share what I think is in store for this blog in the months ahead. more Judaism reflections more exploration of early church and what that means for my worship experience today a series on the Magnificat, one line at a time (anyone want to guest post?  I plan to do 2 "lines" a month) a finished icon (!!!) more on God's blessings and healing the world And the winner is: Lory and my Mum! (as they were the only two that entered!) Maybe next time I should have that piece of art finished so folks might be inclined to enter. The goal is to get the two pieces done this weekend, but first I have to go cook a Thanksgiving feast! Oh and JewishBoston.com has free e-cards to send over Thanksgivukkah! There's a really pretty blue one, but I don't think I have permission to post it here. Go take a look and send one to a friend :)

And we're not done yet. (Did that spoil the ending?) No first both Mary and Jesus needed facelifts: blurry photo, sorry Actually, we've secured a bit of a CD so that the compass doesn't dig a hole into those beautiful faces. We laid the gold leaf onto the halos. Not without mishap. I ended up with several holes where I'd either didn't put the glue on or it lifted somehow. tattered halo Again, I turned to our past workshop teacher, afraid that if I put glue down it might ruin the gold already there ... Meanwhile, while we waited for her to email us on her day off (sorry, Paige). We prepared to lay down the red outline of the halo. It's putting diluted red paint into a ruling pen and then drawing the compass in a partial circle. It's terrifying. Especially when we couldn't get the consistency right and in our practice arcs the paint just glomped out. But Helena finally got it right and away we went. End of Day November 23. ...

... while everybody is jumping on it. It's kind of baffling me. I grew up watching "Doctor Who". I was upset when it was pre-empted by cricket. I grew up with the Doctor of Tom Baker, and was faithful to the program until it was canceled (and/or I emigrated to the United States and couldn't get it any more, but I think it was already canceled by that point). I was so excited when it was resurrected with Christopher Eccleson in the title role. And it was awesome. Up to and including Matt Smith. Got the life scared out of me by "Blink". But somewhere it went wrong. It didn't help that BBC America forgot to mark a bunch of episodes as new so I missed a few David Tennant episodes, but I kept watching. When the Ponds exited, so did I. Not because they were the companions and there are no other but because I was fatigued. Watching Doctor Who stopped being something for fun and began to be a struggle to watch. And I persevered through the writers t...

I was feeling exhausted at work, which at first I thought was because this is the first time I've worked full time in a long time. But the exhaustion didn't go away after a couple of months so I did some reading especially as I was already taking Vitamin D per my doctor's advice. And let me start out here by saying: if you're feeling exhausted, there's a reason for it. The one I'm about to share that was mine, may not be yours. I am sharing my experience and am not a doctor!  I read that one of the things to feel more awake is to protect your Circadian rhythms. We have two neighbors who live behind us who like to keep their exterior lights on all night. It is like a full fluorescent moon every night. So I tried an eye mask to fully rest the eyes and it seems to be working. My exhaustion is pretty much gone with the occasional days of still feeling tired and there's even some energy left at the end of the day. Before I started trying to ...

In a few days my 500th post on this blog will go live. I've noticed that the thing to do is to have a giveaway and do a retrospective. So first the giveaway. It will be a piece of art (no, not an icon!) that I have made. I had this idea (may even have blogged about it) which never came to fruition because that happens with ideas sometimes. So it'll be a 5"x5" canvas piece and will probably look something like this: But more detailed because I haven't say down to paint it yet. So if you would like to win it, just leave a comment, maybe about what your favorite post here has been, but it can also be a comment that says: "ooh! A giveaway!" Please be sure to leave an email I can contact you with, if you don't have a profile with an email address. After 12 midnight on Sunday 24th November, I'll pick the winner! Retrospective This blog started when I migrated from livejournal and wanted to share pictures of whatever I...

I mentioned during the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism about the concept of tikkun olam , or healing the world. There are many ways to do this, and this might become a recurring theme on this blog, but the first way is perhaps not the most obvious. I'd like you to join me in sponsoring a child through World Vision. It's an act that makes the difference for not just a single child, but for her family and her village. It'll transform you, too. It took me a long time to decide to become a child sponsor. I worried about the overhead costs, and how much benefit it would really have. (Rachel Held Evans did too , but promise me you’ll come back and finish reading this post!) But then God slowly worked to change my heart. It was a woman speaker at a conference (I wish I could remember who -- it was in Orange County) who talked about meeting the child whose photo was on her fridge. It was fellow bloggers who wrote about traveling to these places where child sponsorsh...

This Sunday I'm leading the adult Christian education session at Good Sam through a book that profoundly impacted my life: how I see the world, and how I respond as a follower of Christ. I started this back in April with three sessions, and now in November will finish with the last two videos (the author’s publisher released a DVD study), plus a catch-up session, with some additional new material for those who came in the spring. The book is Ann Voskamp’s "One Thousand Gifts", a New York Times best seller. My mum introduced me to the book and it took a while for me to actually start reading it. It's Ann's journey of gratitude -- how seeing and writing down God's gifts transforms an ordinary, dull day into one filled with God and his delight and love for us. Ann's book has changed me. Writing down God-gifts reminds me to look for God every day, even when times are troubled or hard. And when I forget to look? It’s like the light has gone from ...

... as Helena caught up on her painting of white spots, I hung out with Mary and baby Jesus... and discovered that our premixed hair, parchment, etc colors had dried out.  So I sat and mixed paints  ... and squealed as carbon black went everywhere! Helena insisted I replicate the look on my face: then we went and had lunch and decided not to do a border (sorry, Paige) and so we painted the edges of the board. But I did do one other thing, can you spot it? To be fair, it was only a little bit of outlining. Next time, (hopefully next week) we'll do the gilding and swing the halo, although I think I said we were going to do that last time

This was originally part of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism (see  here ). But then I came up with too many posts, so I've saved it for a Faith Friday. This isn't a current Jewish practice that I know of, but did you know that converts to Judaism went through a baptism to cleanse them of all things pagan? And that the early Christians borrowed the practice for their converts? (Source: In the Shadow of the Temple) Neat, huh. Water is still used in parts of Judaism for spiritual cleansing. If you remember, Leviticus is squicked out my menstrual blood and childbirth. Giving birth to new life is also considered holy, so the mikveh is used, the woman immersing herself in living water. Many Christian groups have moved from a baptism by immersion to sprinkling water on the head so in this the two faith traditions today have largely moved away from this commonality. I'm still geeked about it as a (to me) discovery.

This was part of the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism ( here ) but I came up with yet another post that pushed this one out, even though I like this post immensely. The psalms are at the heart of Christian monastic practice. As an Associate of the Order of Holy Cross, I am a little hooked on the monastic way of life. For those of you who are new readers of my blog, I keep a rule of life which means I pray morning and evening, among other things. While one could very safely say that the Torah is at the heart of Jewish practice, the psalms have a place too. I got a thrill seeing my favorite psalm used in the Saturday morning liturgy. That would be Psalm 150 which is my favorite because: a) it's short; and b) the tones used by the Mt. Calvary monks used to chant this are just lovely. I'd chant it quite happily around work, except there seems to have been this compulsion to add a verse on the Trinity to the end of every blessed psalm. You know, just in case Christian monasti...

I waited too long, a couple of the blog posts I wanted to share fell off my feedly stream. I'll see if I can find them, so to save the rest of them.... The Sacrament of the Present Moment by God in All Things One of the Most Important Grace Stories I've Ever Told by Jennifer Dukes Lee -- this one is making me think and maybe dream a little of what radical hospitality could look like in my household... and I started thinking this before the teary ending...  Rachel Held Evans preached at an Episcopal church, from the lectionary, and t his is her sermon  (which is awesome) I confess, I started skimming this post after a while when she started focusing on the evangelical church, but I found the first half  Saved By Being Right: Christianity and Dogmatism by Wordgazer's Words compelling and echoed some of my recent thinking in a way -- and I'm not even from an evangelical church. Laura Boggess as part of her 31-ish Days of Prayer shared Thomas Merton's Praye...

I thought it might be interesting to review what it was like to participate in the 31 Days challenge ... I didn't write on a daily basis. I knew I wouldn't have the time nor energy for that. I wrote in batches, maybe five or six posts at a time, I wasn't really keeping track, some of them typed straight into Blogger (which means I need to do a back up somehow) and some in the Notes app of my iPhone. It sort of reminded me of the days when I wrote novels while working. I can still crank out the words! I finished writing my 31 posts two weeks before the last day. Which gave me the flexibility to insert other posts if something came up -- that happened a couple of times in this particular challenge and you'll see the posts that got "bumped" in coming weeks. There were a couple of posts where I got stuck as what to write, and they got pushed further back into the month, and one of them just ended up being a really short post. Most of them were without pi...

This is the last post in the #31days series, although this might technically be post #32, depending on whether or not you count the index post. You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . Sometimes Christians forget Jesus was Jewish ... ... is Jewish ... ... and will be Jewish ... His words of wisdom have been compared to Hillel, the Jewish sage from 1 BCE, particularly in the area that loving God and loving your neighbor are paramount. His criticisms of those in the Temple, remind me of Jewish thought today: if it's a choice between keeping one of the commandments or saving a life, you save the life. And yes, some of his sayings are quite unJewish, like turning the other cheek and bread being his body... The question is for me, as a Christian: how do I pray to a Jewish Jesus? A Jesus that both called the Jewish people to repentance and to go back to the way God wanted things (to love God, love your neighbor) and radically saw Judaism movi...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . One of my new duties as the senior rabbi's assistant is to help with the Introduction to Judaism class. I got to chatting with someone about how they keep Shabbat. They have friends over for dinner and there is a place for both ritual (like the candle blessing) and conviviality. This is how the earliest Christians gathered: to bless and break the bread in commonality with the Jewish tradition to which they still belonged. His description of a Shabbat dinner inspired a deep longing in me. Putting together a dinner is quite possibly the least fun ever for me, but if the point is ritual and the blessing of being in community together then it is less about stressing out about food prep and more sharing and enjoying. The question is whether I will follow through, like I haven't really done with answering my home phone with "Shalom."

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . Rachel Held Evans' book "A Guide to Biblical Womanhood" and her blog first introduced me to: (A) the (generally) evangelical Christian belief that Proverbs 31 is a model for the Christian wife and mother at home; (B) that this is not how Orthodox Jews use this text. I can say it no better than this interview Rachel had on her blog, so please read it.

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . OK, how cool is this: when I was buying siddurs for myself: one for Shabbats and weekdays and the other for the High Holy Days (which maybe now I'll be able to read as not everything is transliterated in the latter prayer book), I came across this edition: Sorry, these are less than brilliant pictures. I used my iPhone to take them in the early morning before heading off for the day. This is the journal edition. The introduction says it's aimed at youth, but I think this is a brilliant idea for all ages to use, and in fact, the Episcopal Church should steal this and use it for the Book of Common Prayer. This journal edition of the Mishkan T'filah isn't identical to the prayer book of the same name. It has sections and pages removed to make space for the journaling. My current plan is to write my responses in pencil on the page, and then to go over the top with pen illustra...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . Once upon a time, I would have answered that question with up in heaven, beyond the clouds. I would have answered it that way fairly recently. But since EfM (Education for Ministry. I go on about that course a fair bit, I should write about it after these 31 Days are done). Anyway, since EfM and further reading, my understanding of God's kingdom's location has changed. Jesus in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) said the kingdom of God is near. He meant the fulfillment of God's kingdom being restored on earth, and he meant it in an apocalyptic, end of this Age sense. In the Jewish tradition, it is up to the people of Israel to be co-creators of God and restore God's kingdom here on earth. In Hebrew, this is known as tikkun olam , healing the world. Recent Christian thinkers, like Brian MacLaren, have echoed the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John where He declares the kingdo...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . Did you know that the Our Father, also called The Lord's Prayer, is Jewish? And not just because Jesus was Jewish (but yes, he is). It's a prayer christians may say while alone but most commonly we say it as a part of corporate worship: whether it's a Sunday service or as part of a bible study or small group session. It is not my Father in heaven, but our Father. According to Rabbi Benjamin Blech, Jewish prayers are written to be prayed together. Hence the "our"... Also as John Dominic Crossan pointed out in a way less vitriolic book " The Greatest Prayer" , the Our Father is written as much good Hebrew poetry is. Take a look at the psalms: how the second half of the verse restates and changes the first half ... Listen  to my words,  Lord ,      consider my lament. 2  Hear my cry for help,      my King and my God,  ...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . The first Hebrew word I learned (putting aside words that turn out to be Hebrew in origin and I just didn't cotton on to it, like, you know, Hallejulah...) was: ruach. The breath of God over the waters of creation. The Holy Spirit there at creation. I learned it in EfM as we studied the book of Genesis. Holy Spirit. Holy holy holy. The Sanctus has been prayed in Christian services for a very long time. It is in Catholic, Episcopalian, Orthodox liturgies: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. So imagine my surprise when during the Bat Mitzvah service (my first Jewish worship service) and I hear: Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh. Everyone lifts up on their toes with each word. I feel slightly unbalanced and my eyes skip to the English translation ... holy, holy, holy ... could it be? The English translation in the Mishkan T'fi...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . We're going to heark back to the Sh'ma today. Belief, in the Christian tradition, us knowing something is true, with or without sufficient evidence. It is also most commonly stated in the Creeds, which was the early Christian Church's way if defining what was and wasn't heresy. But there is a mystical side to it as well. The first word in the Sh'ma prayer is ... Sh'ma. It is translated as "hear" or "listen", but according to "Walking in the Dust of the Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewish Words of Jesus Can Change Your Life" by Lois Tvarberg, the word means more than being attentive to what God is about to say. The Hebrew language is rich in meaning. The syllables that make up a word add deeper levels of meaning. Sh'ma also means believe. It also means act on these words you hear. This makes Jewish belief an active belief: you hear, believe, and act. Ch...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . In case you hadn't figured it out yet, I am always interested in learning more about the God I believe in. My first image of God was like those described by many others: a distant bearded God in the clouds, although I often prayed to Him when I was scared of the dark. In recent years, thanks to EfM , I've learned more about developing theologies on how folks see God, although honestly some of it was a bit head-scratching and I would lament: "Why can't God just be God? Why do we have to describe what God is?" But we all do to some extent. And I would say that in my personal theology, the least developed part of my understanding of God is God the Father. (Or Mother if you will. Take that, patriarchial society!) The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that is both so faithful to His people and yet ... there's this whole vengeful, genocidal side which is just not pretty or unde...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . I didn't expect to find Judaism helping me out with my rule as an Associate of the Order of Holy Cross. But as the first Yom Kippur service of the morning began, I found myself taken by the sung prayer of confession. An alphabetical list of sins. In the prayer book "Gates of Repentance" that is used in Reformed congregations for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it is summarized in English as: "Who among us is righteous enough to say: 'I have not sinned'? We are arrogant, brutal, careless, destructive, egocentric, false, greedy, heartless, insolent, and joyless. Our sins are an alphabet of woe." Except I'm pretty sure we sang all the letters not just the first part, and with each word, tapped our heart with a fist, in a move that's reminiscent of mea culpa . It is a thousand ways more better (more better?) than the vague confession found in the Episcopal Sunday mornin...

You can find an index of all the 31 Days of Encountering Judaism  here . I actually got asked the other day, not seriously, I think, if I was considering converting to Judaism. I'm sure some of you are saying: Girl, you sure talk about it a lot. There's no denying I'm fascinated by it and love the liturgy but convert? Give up Jesus? So not there. Besides, if I also chose to keep kosher-style, if not totally kosher, then I'd have to give up bacon. And shrimp. So not happening. What I need to do though is stop announcing that I had a non-kosher lunch when somebody at work asks me where I went. "Um, that hot dog place. Are polish dogs kosher?" or "Italian. I had gnocchi with smoked mozzarella and um, er, um, speck." It seems to me like an odd little rebellion of mine. Kind of childish really. And it really isn't polite or kind, especially if my Jewish friend is really missing shrimp or similar. So I promise not to say that any mo...