Intellectuelle   Atlantic

I was really pleased to be invited to join the Intellectuelle team, but this introduction thingy has been giving me writer’s block. Maybe if I type quickly, I can get this over with.

I’m in my late thirties, married with no children (please pray for us!). I’m an American, but I’ve lived in London for several years, although I’ve always wanted to move to the country. In the meantime, I have a pleasant but boring office job and a vegetable garden, and I do a lot of homebrewing, baking, jam- and pickle-making and that sort of thing. My favourite authors include J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. I don’t get to read nearly as much as I’d like. I really like early music and baroque music, especially Bach, Palestrina and Gregorian chant, as well as some folk groups – generally the more traddy British ones.

Also, as some of you will no doubt have guessed by now, I’m a Catholic. I was raised in a more-than-nominal-but-not-exactly-devout Catholic family, and fell away while I was at college. Then I felt the “tug upon the thread” in my mid-twenties and that was pretty much that. Incidentally, while I’m happy occasionally to field questions and discussion about Catholic matters, I don’t want to turn my postings into just apologetics or Catholic-Protestant issues. There are plenty of other places for that on the internet.

Of course, my posts will tend to come from a Catholic perspective – for instance, it’s very difficult right now for me to think about much besides, “It’s Holy Week!”

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to this, as I've been a fan of the Intellectuelle blog since it started and I'm honoured to have been asked to join such a great team of Christian women.

I meant to post this just before Holy Thursday…better late than never. I hope everyone here is having a wonderful and prayful Easter season.

Holy Thursday is the special commemoration of the Last Supper, which was a Passover meal. My husband is a Jewish Christian and we are both very interested in the Jewish roots of Christianity, so in our household, we have a Passover seder of sorts on Holy Thursday. This usually is close to the first night of Passover according to the Jewish rabbinical calendar – this year the first night of Passover was the Wednesday of Holy Week.

Spring is finally here in England, so I went out wild food gathering last Saturday. I do a fair amount of wild food gathering, especially greens in the spring and berries in the autumn. I do this for lots of reasons: I’m on a fairly tight budget, so free food is very welcome. Wild foods diversify the diet, adding lots of vitamins, minerals and fiber and they don’t take up space in my tiny vegetable garden, either. If you’re into eating locally-produced organic foods, wild foods fit the bill nicely. I also just love going out with bags and baskets and picking stuff to eat! It’s satisfying on a basic level – feeling a physical connection with the earth and the seasons that God created, sort of like gardening, only a bit more visceral. A tiny taste of the Garden of Eden, maybe, before the sweat of the brow came into it.

The only surviving radio lecture from the series that became Mere Christianity has been put online here by the BBC – it’s the link labelled The New Men.

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

Today is the feast of the Ascension! The Office of Readings for today includes one from a sermon by St. Augustine.