P&S Mar 2022 GIFT

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guest Christie Purifoy

Welcome to the March issue of Paper&String!

I

t is a joy to extend a double welcome to you this month because welcome is also the theme of this issue.

I have slipped into the editor’s chair so that our editor, Elrena Evans, can slip over into the Read category of our care package this month.

In Read, you’ll find an interview with Elrena

by Heidi Lee celebrating Elrena’s book Special Grace: Prayers and Reflections for Families With Special Needs. This one-of-a-kind book is available to pre-order and will be released April 12.

I knew from the moment Elrena first shared the idea for this project with me that her book of written prayers and personal stories would be an enormous gift to families of those with special needs, but what I did not realize at the time is what a gift it would be to me and to many I know who do not encounter children with special needs on a daily basis. Through prayer and storytelling, this book has vividly and beautifully welcomed me deeper into the fullness of what it means to be human in this world.

Order this book, friends.

Give it to families you know who have direct experience of these things and give it to yourself. It is a gently hospitable book, welcoming us into struggles we may or may not have experienced ourselves and in this way equipping us to offer a larger, deeper welcome to more of our neighbors in the world.

This March, welcome takes many forms, and I am so grateful for all the nuanced ways our contributors explore the idea. Welcome looks like a thought-provoking podcast exploring cross-racial friendships, it looks like tortellini soup and a slightly over-eager church greeter, and it looks like inviting your musicloving daughter to help you host a dance party. Most of all, to use Troy Cady’s poetic words, it looks like an “acrobat / schooled in the art / of graceful stumbling.”

Perfect hospitality and perfect welcome may be our goal, but we are human. We are graceful and awkward, but even our stumbling can be a work of art if we do it with love and a willingness to share vulnerably with one another. Since its founding two years ago, we have always described Paper&String as a “care package from the Black Barn.” Years ago,

we would gather in the barn and share our sometimes stumbling, sometimes graceful creative offerings with one another. We felt cared for by the place and the conversation and the deepening community. When you unwrap the package that is Paper&String, this month and every month, I hope you feel welcomed into that place, that conversation, and that community. And I hope you feel inspired to offer your own beautiful, imperfect welcome to others in the world, thus building creative, resilient relationships that are the best kind of art.

With love from Maplehurst,

To download this printable page, click here!

Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the One who sent me.

- Mark 9:37

Words When We Have None: A conversation

with Elrena Evans about her new book, Special Grace

by Heidi Oberholtzer Lee

E

arly last December, I made arrangements with Paper&String’s executive editor and my good friend, Elrena Evans, to meet up and talk about her forthcoming book, Special Grace, slated for release by InterVarsity Press in April.

Elrena and I envisioned having our book chat while cupping our hands around warm mugs of tea and sitting beside a fire in our favorite local café. We thought we would be relaxed and enjoy our conversation more fully if we held our meeting after having packed away the Christmas decorations and toasted in the New Year.

However, the surge in Omicron cases in our area sent us begrudgingly back to our Zoom screens, instead of to the café fireside. I say “begrudgingly” as a quick word of protest against the extent to which my life has become

digitized and contained within small, pixilated rectangles, but actually any meeting with Elrena includes a lot of laughter and joy. She arrived for our interview on my computer screen with her typical energy and vividness—red hair bright against one of her favorite burgundy dresses, and handcrafted jewelry highlighting seashell and stone mementos from a particularly special beach trip. Eager to talk as much as possible in the short amount of time allotted by our children’s purposeful assignment to other activities, I quickly began questioning Elrena with what would have sounded like aggressive

interrogation to anyone not familiar with how precious conversation can be to two hurried moms managing to steal away some time to talk about their lives with each other.

I wanted first simply to hear Elrena talk to me about her book—its themes and what her readers can expect to find between its pages. The book is designed, she explained, for families of children with special needs, as well as for pastors, teachers, therapists, and, really, all of us who encounter children with special needs somewhere in our lives— whether at the grocery store, in the library, or at church—and want to extend welcome and love to those whom are all too often made to feel invisible. It’s a book of prayers, she elaborated, interspersed with personal essays about her family’s life. The prayers are intended to “provide readers with words when they have none, and words that can hopefully be an inspiration for them to find or create their own words to bring before God,” Elrena

said. The essays give readers a glimpse into the lived reality of a home and family challenged by their children with special needs, but understanding those needs through a lens of love and prayer.

In response to my question as to what inspired her to write this prayer book in the first place, Elrena answered after some careful thought, “I think I was motivated, in part, to write the book because I’m an Episcopalian, nearly all my life, so written prayers are part of my faith tradition.” Citing her influences, she noted “the Book of Common prayer, obviously,” and she also recommended Every Moment Holy, by Douglas Kaine McKelvey and Ned Bustard.

For those passionate about social justice, she pointed to Britney Winn Lee’s Rally: Communal Prayers for Lovers of Jesus and Justice, to which Elrena had contributed a prayer, too. “One book on prayer in particular that I like, called Changes, which is put out by the Episcopal church, has a chapter that’s prayers for children

who are growing up: so prayers for moving to a new bed, or prayers for riding a bike.” Elrena recalled, “At points in my life, I remember looking at that book and thinking, ‘Where are the prayers for an IEP meeting, or for when my kid bit a teacher, or for when my child Where are the was violent? That was prayers for an IEP part of the impetus for writing Special meeting, or for Grace. So those are when my kid bit the prayers you’ll find a teacher, or for in the book—prayers when my child was for a new mobility violent? That was device, for starting part of the impetus medication, for for writing Special therapists and special Grace. education teachers, three separate prayers for IEP meetings, prayers for your insurance company, and prayers for every aspect of life for children with special needs.” She needed prayers for herself and her family, and prayers

to offer to her friends with children with special needs, so she wrote those prayers, she explained matter-of-factly.

Elrena speaks from a position of personal experience and authority when it comes to navigating family life and special needs. She has “five children, with some special needs in the mix…and none of them are ‘typical,’” as she puts it. How then, I had to ask, did you manage to write a book when you regularly describe your life as “already overfull?” Elrena responded with frank honesty and her own remembered doubts that she could complete a book, especially once the pandemic hit. But, she explained, she worked on it “in bits and pieces, in dribs and drabs, and in the little cracks in moments of the day,” a description of purposeful multi-tasking with which most of us can readily identify. She also wrote some of the prayers and portions of the essays as emailed encouragement to several of her close friends who have children with special needs,

and later retrieved (from among thousands of emails to her friends) some of the prayers and narratives that became portions of her eventual book.

Elrena is quick to mention the support she found in her friends, her husband, her agent, and her editor as she was writing Special Grace. “The book literally owes its existence to relationships. It is completely rooted in relationships,” she says. True, as an “early riser” who likes to awaken before the rest of her household, Elrena wrote some of her prayers very early in the morning. However, she remarks, it was the friends in her writing group who loaned her much-needed quiet weekend space who facilitated the writing of many of her prayers. They gave her weekends in their pandemic-emptied apartment, their home vacated for a work trip, or even time at the Black Barn itself so that she could write in solitude. Her husband, for his part, sent her off on these writing weekends with containers

of packed food—most notably quiche—so that she could focus on writing without the distraction of cooking. All of those involved, it seems, were inspired by Elrena’s passion to see this book to fruition as a culmination of this part of God’s calling on her life. “This is what I am to do, with at least this part of my life,” she says.

A sense of calling, even of fulfilled calling, does not, as we know, ensure a profession free of distress or characterized by ease. Elrena candidly shared, “Every single time I have worked on this book, I have cried. Every single time.” When I express some curiosity as to what prompted these particular tears, she explains a bit more. “I have an active imagination.

When I’m writing a prayer, I picture the kids, I imagine the family, and I feel the overwhelm, the confusion, and the pain. It’s so real to me that I cry, every single time.” I comment that her strong sense of empathy makes this work difficult. She agrees and adds, “I’m such

a private person, and every single piece that I write about my family is in some ways an agony because I am so private. And every single time I go through this torture about what to say or not, what is too much, how will my children feel, am I co-opting their story. It is a constant struggle.” She takes solace, she says, in the words of her friend and Paper&String colleague Amy Knorr. Amy once told Elrena that everything she writes reflects the love that she has for her kids, and that this is really writing more about a mother’s own reactions and perspectives than it is about her children’s lives.

However, the best assurance for Elrena that she is helping to fill a need is the feedback that she receives from readers. One mother whose son with special needs was being expelled from kindergarten wrote to Elrena that she was reading an essay of Elrena’s every single day and holding the piece close to her heart.

“If I can be that encouragement for someone

else,” Elrena says, “if I can make them feel like somebody gets it, that they’re seen and not in this all by themselves,” that makes the challenges of this kind of writing worth it.

Not one to focus on difficulties, though, Elrena shifts the conversation to the joys of writing and the beauty that she seeks to make a regular part of her life. Her book focuses on the prayers needed in lives filled with an abundance of challenges, yet the tone of the book is not sad, depressing, or even poignant. The most used words in the book (which Elrena tells me she knows because she counted) are “comfort,” “hope,” “love,” and “light,” and some of the prayers are downright funny. “One of my favorite prayers in the book,” she recounts with a grin, is “the one that probably made me laugh the most when I was writing it, the ‘Prayer for a Substitute Teacher.’ It starts out, ‘Dear God, well, you know what’s coming and I know what’s coming, but this dear teacher has no idea.’”

Elrena looks for laughter, and even more so, beauty, in the places in her life where it might seem there is very little. She tells a bus stop story about her son drawing her attention to the beauty of the neighbor’s spotted driveway, where the rain had dried and left an alternating pattern of light and dark. Her son helped her to see these patterns as beautiful. “One of the best parts of parenting a child with special needs is seeing beauty in unexpected places,” she muses.

“I think of beauty as something that we have to learn, something that we have to look for. One of my favorite kinds of beauty is beauty that is unexpected,” Elrena remarks.

“That kind of beauty feels like a treasure, a delight. I find a lot of beauty in the created world. I like to think about God tucking beauty into the world and waiting for us to find it. One

of my favorite examples of this is lanternfish, and the plankton that bioluminesce.

Lanternfish have been at the bottom of the ocean and have probably been glowing for millennia, and God created them, knowing that we wouldn’t find them for eons, but he tucked them down there for his own delight—knowing that someday we would find them, we would see them.” Elrena then effusively rattles off a list of other elements in nature that she finds beautiful—the “ratios in the whorls of the galaxy, the same as in seashells, and in the Fibonacci sequence.” “I love that there are 127 prayers in Special Grace because 127 is a prime number,” and prime numbers are beautiful, she gleefully exclaims.

While I have to admit that I can’t easily see the beauty of the Fibonacci sequence or of prime numbers, Elrena’s larger point, that we

should look for beauty in unexpected places, sounds wise and beautiful in its own right. “I would encourage people to look for beauty, to find the things in their lives that are beautiful, even if they’re unexpected or if someone else doesn’t think they’re beautiful. And then, think about ways this beauty communicates God’s love. Because it really does feel like a gift. I think beauty is a gift from God.” Elrena then makes a quip about her ten-year-old daughter’s love of “the beauty of false nails and hair extensions,” and wonders if even they can “communicate God’s love,” before she redirects me to Aundi Kolber’s book, Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode—and into a Life of Connection and Joy. “I love her book,” Elrena notes. “She talks about beauty hunting.” I think of Elrena’s prayers, which are “more like poetry than prose,” and I see beauty there as well.

Our reflection on beauty occasions my next question about the relationship between Elrena’s passion for not just writing, but also for dancing. Is there a connection between the two? Has her dancing—extensive training in ballet, modern, and folk, and her continued participation in her church’s Dance Ministry performances—taught her anything about beauty? She responds thoughtfully, “At its essence, special education is portraying something in a different way, coming at the material in a different way, so that someone can understand something that they couldn’t understand before. I feel like writing and dancing are two things that, for me, are two different ways of accessing the same material but understanding it in different ways.”

“I understand things when I dance that I will never understand in words,” she explains, “and I think that the different ways I create inform each other because they contribute to different ways of understanding.” Elrena then tells me

of an “image” that she had in her mind, after writing an essay about her son, of a crowd of children with disabilities who were bringing to the baby Jesus their most beloved possessions.

She could not find the words, however, to describe this image. So, she choreographed a dance about it and found the “feeling” that she wanted to communicate. That image and its accompanying feeling went on to inspire several of the prayers in Special Grace. Her dancing had made her writing a possibility.

As she later explained it, “When I expressed it with my body, then I could find the words.”

While I don’t see myself using dance as my muse anytime soon, I wonder whether there might be something instructive even for me in Elrena’s idea that the body can help the mind to process a painful or complicated idea. Maybe even a good nap or a walk outside could help my own uncoordinated body to cope more fully with the ideas with which my brain is struggling.

As Elrena and I chatted about “possibilities” or concepts that seemed impossible to grasp, I began to wonder if Elrena ever thought that not just writing a book, but particularly writing a book of prayers, might be at least daunting, if not impossible for her. “It was so intimidating to write about prayer,” she admitted, “because it feels so pretentious. It feels like if you’re going to write about prayer, you need to be a super spiritual person, and have your s*&# figured out. I do not see myself that way at all, so that was hard.” Alarmed at seeing me recording that quote, Elrena hurriedly told me, “Don’t put that in your piece!” But I insisted on writing it down anyway because, yes, I think many of us sometimes feel like we cannot pray or cannot make the time to pray and certainly cannot help others with prayer because we do not, in fact, have it all together. We’re wrong, of course, but I identify strongly with the sentiment.

Elrena then adds, “Also, the older I get, the more I think my truest prayers are not prayers with words. I pray when I dance. I pray with my body. When I have things that are heavy on me and have things that I feel like I need to communicate to God, I dance. And I think in the end… I’m not writing lofty prayers. I’m not writing something that sounds fancy. I think there’s beauty in some of my prayers, but a lot of them are from the gut, at a visceral level.” It is that honesty in these prayers, the heartfelt sense of need and the crying out to God, that will truly serve many of her readers.

“I am looking forward to readers discovering what in the book delights them, or touches them, or reaches their life,” Elrena recounts.

“I think people are going to find things that possibly I never intended. I had beta readers in the Black Barn read the book, and one woman wrote back to me and said her family prayed one of the prayers as their city went into lockdown. The prayer was not written

for lockdown, but she applied that prayer to her own context, and I think that’s what I’m looking forward to—that the prayers touch readers in different ways. I’m excited for readers to find the places in the book that touch them.”

If you, too, are eager to hear more, whether “A Prayer for a Loved One Who Is Out of Control,” “A Prayer for a Meltdown,” or “A Thanksgiving Click here to watch for Legos,” you the video trailer for Special Grace! can find Elrena’s book on Amazon, InterVarsity Press, or just about anywhere books are sold. You can also sign up to be a part of her launch team, which will provide you with free downloadables and other exclusives.

Elrena’s next book project is When I Go to Church, a children’s picture book that speaks to young audiences about disability, inclusion, and welcome in the body of Christ by telling the story of being at church from the perspective of different children who have special needs.

Heidi Oberholtzer Lee lives in Phoenixville, PA, with her husband, two daughters, and their guinea pig, hamster, and immortal hermit crab.

She teaches writing at Claritas Classical Academy and Eastern University.

Would you like to join the book launch team for Special Grace? You’ll receive early access to the book, as well as free downloadables and an invitation to a virtual launch party as our thank-you to you!

Click here for more information.

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I’ve spent years raving to friends about the books, shows, and films I love and why. They don’t have to be recent to catch my eye.

They only have to be a new way to see the old, old story of light vs. dark.

This never fails to move me.

While not every review will be for every person, my hope is that these move you too.

Astrid Available: On PBS Masterpiece via Amazon (or other BBC service provider) Rating: TV-MA Language: French with English subtitles What You Need To Know: My husband and I are both hooked on this French investigative crime-solving duo, both women, one a police district commander, mom, and rule breaker, the other the titular character who is a young researcher in the library of the judicial police and has Asperger’s syndrome. The maturity rating must come from the use of bad language and some of the scenes in the mortuary, but there is no graphic violence, sex, or gore, and my husband and I

thought the show reads more along the lines of PG-13. The focus of the show isn’t the crimes as much as the tender education on the lived experiences of neurotypicals vs neuroatypicals, through the friendship that develops between these richly drawn female characters.

Diving In: At their best, stories help us step into the lives and eyes of our neighbors. People we pass in grocery store parking lots or church pews. Loving them is deeply connected to knowing them. And since the days when my mom used to take me out of school to see important movies, I’ve believed that film helps shortcut this perspective-shifting process.

In Astrid, the writers seem so invested in bringing us into Astrid’s world that sometimes the show shortchanges the resolution of the crime in its insistence on giving large portions of real estate to unpacking Astrid’s experience of the world and the people around her. And I think the show is richer for it.

The cases, or “puzzles” as Astrid describes them, allow us a window into her world and one such delightful component is the adult autistic support group she’s part of. Listening “We know that we in on how we cannot achieve “neurotypicals” are experienced unanimity on a

by Astrid’s subject such as the community made question of autism, me pause and but we are very reexamine my own vigilant about what communication we say around this style, and my about the character assumptions of Astrid, nourished about how it is by our meetings with interpreted by autistic people.” others.

- Alexandre de Seguins, screenwriter and co-creator of the series.

I haven’t had the lived experience of life within the autism community, and so I can’t speak for how their experiences have been interpreted by this show. But I can say that it did what I hope a story that strives to tell the truth will do: it has shown me something about both myself and the perspective of others that I had been blind to before.

Set in Paris, this series is tender, curious, and full of puzzles, both criminal and literal. The creators clearly care about their characters, and have given two fully-formed female leads strong material and have not reduced them to caricatures. Their friendship and their intelligence take center stage. After the first season, the second came out in the summer of 2021, and a third has just been announced for this year. I’m delighted it’s found such a fan following, and look forward to learning more about Astrid, and what she teaches me about myself, next season.

with ANNA GRIST

Wrangling the Words

T

he pandemic stole all my words early on.

Two years in and it’s given me too many.

I’ve found when I lack words, or when I have too many, that walking still releases them.

Organizes them. Helps me dismiss some and develop others. Sometimes the words start out just as anger, fear, frustration, joy, and I have to bend down and listen closely to what they are saying.

When my brain walks in circles, I now know to go out and walk my feet in straight lines.

When it’s -30C out, I walk on my treadmill.

This does not come naturally, especially on the days when it’s dark and cold. Even after making it a practice for two years, my brain still wants to schlump on the couch and play inane games for hours on end (which has its place, but not when my mind is spinning and needs voice).

Always, the walking amplifies, clarifies.

What is it for you, dear heart, that does this?

Do you know yet where and how your body and brain and soul meet? Where is that “thin place” where Heaven is closer, where things are quieter? Is it hands deep in soil, in dough, in paint, in clay? Is it feet first in water, on trails?

Is it a place or a person? Or something else?

May I encourage you this season to find it, or if you already know where, when, how it is, to lean into it more, to seek it out as an essential practice and not just a hobby to take last place.

Let the Spirit do its vital work, let it get louder, find the ways and places it thrives in, because in those places and moments, your mind, soul and body can meet, can commune, can heal.

Find what your hiking on holy ground is and let it do its gentle, necessary work.

Poetry: Sometimes Welcome

by Troy Cady

Sometimes Welcome comes not as a home but as a frontier, wild and playful, accompanied by friends foolish enough to follow Sister sun, Brother moon and an extended family of stars.

Sometimes Welcome is goodbye.

Sometimes Home is not a place of staying but a way of leaving, when the familiar puts on shoes and goes exploring.

Sometimes Home is a nomad’s circus tent looking for places to open up and recruit curiosities— the strong man who’s weak, the clown of conviction, and the acrobat schooled in the art of graceful stumbling.

- from Featherdusting the Moon: 100 Poems by Troy Cady

Click on the video image OR here to enjoy a reading of Troy’s poem!

DPP! (Dance Party Playlist)

By Marielle Evans

M

ommy had an event for her new book, Special Grace. It was a respite night for families with kids with special needs, and I got to help out. The event had things such as games (many games), fun craft activities, and more. My favorite part, though, was the dance party! (And crafts in a close second.)

“Marielle, help me with the playlist for the dance party!” Mommy says.

I walk downstairs to see Mommy sitting on the couch with a big grin on her face and her warm purple pillow on her lap. I take a seat next to her on the couch and we start looking over what we already have on the playlist. There were things like “Everything Is Awesome” and “Better When I’m Dancing,” yaknow, songs that the six-year-olds at the event would like. (And that one five-year-old, OH don’t forget it’s five and THREE QUARTERS, and the really young three-year-old….)

Anyway I picked songs that I think they would like! But this was literally over a week and a half ago (I know sooo long) so I don’t remember what I said. After about ten minutes we got everything together, and we had the dance party, and it was super, super fun.

Marielle Evans is 10 years old and in 5th grade. She loves glitter, makeup, gel nails, singing, dancing, musical theater, and jumping on the trampoline.

Click here to listen to the Spotify playlist!

In Our Earbuds:

Death, Sex, & Money and Code Switch

by Jon Carlson

W

ho finds welcome in your innermost circles? When you think about your closest friends, do you find that most of them look just like you?

If they do, you’re not alone: One survey found that 75% of white Americans have entirely white social networks.

Black Americans are 8 times more likely to have a diverse group of friends, but their social networks can end up being pretty homogenous.

As Chris Rock quipped, “All my black friends have a bunch of white friends and all my white friends have one black friend.”

In a recent collaboration between the WNYC podcast Death, Sex, & Money and the NPR podcast Code Switch, two episodes explored the emotional and sociological dynamics of crossracial friendships and what can happen when we welcome friends across racial lines. What role do segregated schools play? Who gets left off the bachelorette party guest list?

You can find the first episode by clicking here and the second by clicking here. Both are worth a listen.

Rhythms of Hospitality from Tonya Salomons

I

’ve been curious lately about the relationship between guest and host when it comes to hospitality. When we open the doors of our homes we give hospitality, and when we step into the homes or spaces of others we receive it. There seems to be a synergy between these two roles that goes beyond an oversimplified, transactional relationship where one person gives and the other receives.

I love opening our home to guests. Making sure that each person who walks through our door is made to feel loved and wanted is very important to me. Feeding people, and feeding them well is also very important to me. I’ll be the first to admit that there is this small zing of excitement that runs through me when I watch a guest take the first bite of something that has been made just for them. I watch as they close

their eyes and can hear the small sound they make when they take that first bite. As a home chef, knowing the dish has hit the mark is a very nice feeling of accomplishment. But is this accomplishment hospitality?

Lately, I’ve felt this pull to make my home about more than a place where I create a welcome. I want it to be a place where the soul feels nurtured and unburdened. I want my home to be a respite from the strife of this world and through comfort, conversations, and memories, I want it to be a place where one feels renewed. While these things are what I hope each of our guests experiences, I’m beginning to see how my own soul needs to find these things in our home as well.

When I engage in personal rhythms and practices that nourish and feed my own soul, I am simultaneously creating an environment and space for others to benefit from those

rhythms as well. While I work hard at creating a physical environment of warmth, I am beginning to understand that welcome comes from a much deeper place than how clean your home is or how beautifully it is decorated.

Henri Nouwen wrote in his book Turn My Mourning Into Dancing: “Community, then, cannot grow out of loneliness, but comes when the person who begins to recognize his or her belovedness greets the belovedness of the other.

The God alive in me greets the God resident in you.”

Recognizing myself as beloved is a daily practice, and creating space in my home where my own soul can breathe helps me see myself as God sees me. And that, in turn, helps me see the Imago Dei in those who come as guests into my home. In the art of hospitality there is no distinguishing between guest and host, it is about holding space for each other as we learn to recognize that we are well and truly loved by God.

The following recipe is what I consider to be the perfect comfort food. Simple ingredients, easy to assemble and lick-your-plate-clean delicious. Cook it for yourself and your family if you need to be reminded of how much your space and your home welcomes you, or cook it for the guests as a symbol of comfort and warmth. This recipe is easily halved if you want to prepare less.

Download the recipe as a letter-size page or a recipe card, just click on the images below!

Tortellini Soup

By Amy Knorr

O

ver two decades ago, my husband and I found ourselves in a new church. We were just trying it out, seeing if it was a fit… we walked through the doors and looked around. In seconds, I was aware of two things: One, the number of older congregants, and two, a young woman hurtling toward us at top speed.

“You have to stay! You have to stay! You have to stay!” she flung breathlessly at us as she got close enough for us to hear.

I have never been welcomed into a church with that much enthusiasm before or since, and I must say I began to look for the exits. But God’s desire to offer us community and belonging was much deeper than anything I could have imagined. That

young woman and her husband went on to become our best friends, laughing and growing alongside us, walking with us through the worst time, offering hope without pollyannaism and love without reservation. Five years later, we moved within a month of each other, landing 2500 miles away from our Texas homes and separated only by two hours and a border. There, we welcomed each other into our respective homes once a month or more for a weekend at least. That time houses some of my most cherished of memories, and I have only to add tomatoes to carmelizing onions in a big soup pot to go right back to that time and place, a time where my heart knew the love of a spacious friendship that met me and taught me, nourished me and challenged me.

This simple soup was simmering in a pot on the stove nearly every time we enjoyed our weekends together. Nourishing and uncomplicated, it was a staple. To this day, it is a family favorite in our home and can be found on the menu every month during the cold season.

It is also the go-to for unexpected company!

As you make this soup, may you remember times of friendship and welcome, and may your heart be full.

Download the recipe as a letter-size page or a recipe card, just click on the images below!

Rustic Blue Bread

From the Evans Family Kitchen

I

n Special Grace, I tell the story of my middle son, then nine, and his attempt to make blue bread from a recipe of his own creating. It did not go well.

He’s twelve now, and has learned that sometimes, it’s okay to follow a recipe.

Sometimes, it’s okay to ask someone (like Dad!) for help. And, sometimes, it’s okay to give it your very own twist.

Download the recipe as a letter-size page or a recipe card, just click on the recipe images!

The Welcome Prayer

By Jennifer Goodyer

“To welcome and to let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an open-hearted embrace of all that is in ourselves and in the world.”

- Mary Mrozowski

T

he welcoming prayer was formulated in the 1980s by Mary Mrozowski, one of the founders of Contemplative Outreach. She based it on the 17th century French spiritual classic Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade. It is a practice of inner hospitality that offers a pathway to remaining anchored in and open to God’s presence whatever the situation or experience.

There are three steps, or movements, to the welcoming prayer: Focus and Sink In, Welcome, and Let Go. Focus and Sink In • Check in with your body. Where are there sensations? Is there stress or tension? Is there pain?

• Allow thoughts and emotions free reign.

Where is the energy? Give it all of your attention. Move with it freely.

• Sink into whatever your mind or body presents as though sinking into a Jacuzzi or warm bath. Most importantly, “Don’t try to change anything. Just stay present”.1 Welcome • Wherever you are drawn in your mind or body, create an atmosphere of “inner hospitality” by saying, “Welcome, welcome”.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Lanham: Cowley Publications, 2004, p143.

1

If you notice anger, say “Welcome, anger”. If you notice pain, say “Welcome, pain”. This expresses your willingness to feel whatever is presented and not to run away from it or try to repress or avoid it. This enacts your consent to be unconditionally present and to be with God now, whatever may be happening. This doesn’t mean you are acquiescing with all situations, but rather, that you are remaining aligned with your “magnetic center, the seat of your inner observer, through which Divine Being can flow to you”.2 • Stay with your feelings, welcoming them as they present themselves.

• Before moving to the final step, allow yourself plenty of time to go back and forth between focusing and welcoming. This is the “real work” of the Welcoming Prayer that allows the “knot” of feeling to “dissolve of its own accord”.3 2 3

Ibid., p146.

Ibid., p146.

Let Go There are two ways to do this.

• One way is to offer a statement of intent as a way of “inwardly [waving] farewell to the emotion as it starts to recede.” For example, you could say, “I let go of anger/pain/fear/envy/ etc.” or “I give my anger/pain/fear/envy/etc. to God.” • The other way is less about bidding farewell to the emotion or sensation and more about bidding farewell to the desire to impulsively respond to it. You may like to use the following statements of intent, based on a formula favoured by Mary Mrozowski: “I let go of my desire for security and survival.”

“I let go of my desire for affection and esteem.”

“I let go of my desire for power and control.”

“I let go of my desire to change the situation/ feeling/emotion/sensation/thought.”

“I embrace the moment as it is.”

These statements affirm a willingness to release the fear-driven false self programs to protect or insulate self by accruing power, possessions and approval. By releasing these programs you “send a strong message to the unconscious” and choose to remain fully present to God in what is actually happening, right now, for as long as it lasts.

Click here or on image above to watch Jen’s video

Tell me a story about welcome...

I

was discussing feelings with my sister-in-law the other day, and it made me realize that in the church tradition I grew up in, feelings like anger, sadness, and disappointment were dismissed as soon as they arose, without the space for letting them speak and be heard and just exist. The

interpretation was that those feelings were not to be encouraged, but suppressed, instead of the more healthy approach of letting them be expressed and sat in for a moment, in order to figure out what they were trying to tell us, and then decide on a godly approach. The emphasis was to skip the welcoming of my mind and soul having an emotion, instead gatekeeping and not letting the emotions do their work.

This year I’m working on welcoming all the emotions, even those I was raised to believe were inherently bad, and letting them speak, then deciding how to act and how to move past them into healthy mindsets and feelings.

Welcome the voices in me that are a part of who I am, who the Spirit of God is in me,

welcome even the human, broken parts that speak up. The filter now happens after letting the feelings be there, be communicated, be understood, not before. I only hold onto anger and fear if I ignore it. Facing it, letting my emotions speak, means I can wrestle with them and process them properly.

Editor’s Note: This story made us think of the Rumi poem, The Guest House. Click here to read it.

A

s a gardener I know that welcome has a spatial component. It’s something we feel with our bodies, and as I plan for spring planting I’ve been thinking a lot about what visitors feel in the space around my home, Maplehurst.

Because this is an old house, the front door is a little hard for visitors to find. Maplehurst was built for visitors who would have arrived by carriage and “parked” their horses in the barn, and so the front door doesn’t face the street but rather the old path toward the barn.

I don’t want my guests to feel confusion when they approach my home; I want them to feel peace and a sense of invitation. I want them to know they are welcome. Last spring, I tried to plant a welcome message. There are brick

steps that do lead to my front door, but without the right message it wasn’t clear to guests that these brick steps were the right ones to take.

Sometimes, visitors veered off to the left and knocked at the back door. Sometimes, visitors veered off to the right and wandered back around to the kitchen door.

Formal symmetry in the garden can make a space feel public, rather than private and intimate. Think of how we often flank a front door with two big containers. So I planted two

green pyramids of Japanese holly–one on each side of the steps, and they seem to say, “This is a public entrance. This is the path for you.”

I like to think–I hope–they also say, “You are welcome in this place.”

O

ver the Christmas holiday, my brother and his family came for a week. It was glorious. Late in the week, over a late dinner, my sister-in-law sat down and picked up her fork again. She had been

conferencing with my nephew in the kitchen.

Looking up, she said, “Jack just gave y’all the biggest compliment.”

Intrigued, I looked at Jack, who was looking down a bit embarrassed, and then back at his mother.

She smiled. “He said, ‘I like coming to Auntie Amy’s house. I have gone to bed full every night this week.’”

Oh, my heart! I love to have my house filled to the absolute brim. A full table, every sleeping space occupied, laughter and voices layered into a chorus of aliveness and joy. And I want people to leave our home feeling filled, whether they have been in our space for a few minutes or a few days. That speaks of welcome to me.

The lovely thing is that my nephew’s innocent comment filled me, welcoming me into my own space, into my own desires, and offering me the moment to look around the table again with renewed appreciation and love for the welcome that was passing from hand to hand in the form of bread basket and fruit plate, smiles, and words and love shaken gently around the table.

The Team!

Christie & Jonathan Purifoy

live at the old farmhouse in Pennsylvania called Maplehurst and built the Black Barn. Christie earned a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago before trading the classroom for a picket-fenced garden and an old writing desk. Now she writes books and raises kids and chickens and tends the trees that gave Maplehurst its name.

Lisa-Jo Baker is a

third culture kid, former attorney, reader, writer, and storyteller. Every Wednesday on the Out of the Ordinary Podcast she and Christie explore the surprising ways that cultivating ordinary life leads to extraordinary stories. She is endlessly fascinated by people and how loud her children are.

Elrena Evans first had the dream of

sending you a care package from the Black Barn. She’s a writer, editor, and dancer, a mother of five, an ally and an advocate. A new Paper&String care package every month is her gift from us to you.

Allison Sheeler Duncan studied English

and theology at Eastern University and is now a writer and editor at a university in southeastern Pennsylvania. She enjoys growing flowers and heirloom tomatoes, watching superhero movies, and trying new recipes.

Anna Grist is the western Canadian in our

midst, working on Paper&String from the Rockies near Calgary. She creates all the design and layout and contributes a few illustrations and snippets of writing as well as laughter and well-timed GIFs. She’s a wife and mother to two human children, as well as twins Quill & Ink (pictured).

Amy Knorr is an educator, speaker and

writer who loves to create contemplative spaces in real life and online. She is in a Nonprofit and Spiritual Formation graduate program with a spiritual direction certification.

Amy has shared a nomadic married life with her husband, Dan, for 21 years. She is mom to two girls growing tall and a son she will hold again someday. She enjoys a good laugh, a quiet moment, a furry doggy face, a challenging trail and a cup of hot tea.

Anna Kocher is an artist living and working

in the greater Philadelphia area. She’s an art teacher, a painter, and mother of three. When she’s not teaching, painting, or parenting she can be found reading, tea in hand and Ella Fitzgerald on the record player. She lives in a creaky old house with her husband, her kids, her dog, Mystic, and Edmund the cat.

Tonya Salomons

lives with her husband in Canada’s largest city.

During the day, she works as a registered social worker, but at night and on the weekends the kitchen is where she finds the space to recharge and finds her joy, feeding not only the body but the soul. She admits to reading cookbooks like they are novels while sipping copious cups of coffee and eating chocolate chip cookies.

by Elrena Evans

Heavenly Father, Before the foundation of the world you chose our child to be a dearly beloved child of yours.

We are honored by the privilege of being your hands and feet here on the earth.

Thank you for the joys, and for the sorrows. Thank you for the triumphs and the setbacks.

Thank you for everything that makes this child a beautiful, priceless creation in your sight.

Thank you for the ways you have stretched us and grown us, opening our eyes to see you ever more clearly.

Thank you for all the ways you have given us special grace.

Amen.

- Taken from Special Grace: Prayers and Reflections for Families with Special Needs Click here to download a printable version of this prayer from InterVarsity Press

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