Last fall, after listening to this fantastic TED talk, Tim and I sat down with our kids and brainstormed a list of our family values.  Who are we as a family?  What are we about?  What does it mean to be a Joss-Iudicello?  What things do we want to foster in ourselves, our family, and by extension, our world?  We threw a lot of words up onto a whiteboard and over the next few days, I took the words we had generated and tried to shape them into a few coherent statements.  We posted these statements on our wall for reference and reminder, to enjoin and encourage.

As with many worthwhile things in life, my relationship to these values is not straightforward.  I wish I could say that upon posting them, I magically transformed into their model practitioner.  Not so.  However, having them always before me has helped orient me to what I intend to be about and the ways I mean to live.

Of late, our first value has been much on my mind.  It reads:
As followers of God's Spirit, we are healthy - mindful of what we put in our body, heart, and head and how we use these things.

body
For the past two years our family has been eating things our species genetic code expects: real foods like healthy fats, grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, vegetables, some fruit.  We work at being omnivorous nutrient-seekers because, as homo sapiens, we are biological beings built this way.  As much as possible, we eat within our species blueprint, paying attention to what is fit and right for us as human animals.  

Because of this practice, we often find ourselves at variance with the standard American diet (you don't eat bread?) and a culture which seems to celebrate every event with feeding our children food-mimicking substances (Easter, Valentine's, Halloween, birthdays, snacks at the park and treats for everyday consumption are all opportunities for gluten, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils & dye).  Though our choices prompt discussions, awkward moments, and some tough choices for our kids, we persist because we feel passionate about being homo sapiens (which means, in part, being thoughtful hosts to the 100 trillion [that's trillion with a T!] microorganisms that live in our gut and thus regulate the health of our whole system).   

heart & head
While eating this way has had its difficulties, being mindful about what we put in our bodies has been the easy part of our value statement.  Food and beverage intake is obvious and concrete.  Far more challenging, is being mindful about what we put in our hearts and heads.  Like building strong physical selves, tender hearts and thoughtful minds need nourishment - they need to be filled with good, real material, the spiritual equivalent of nutrient-dense foods.  And just as our bodies become ill, distended, out of optimal health, from being fed outside our species blueprint, so too these less concrete parts of our makeup. 

In college, I had a philosophy professor who spoke about our species' drive for meaning.  As humans, we are verbivorous - that is, we consume words, we need them for life (the sapiens part of our species profile).  My philosophy professor was not alone in characterizing this human trait; long before him, the Torah proclaimed, "..one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."  We depend on good language (and art and music) for our spiritual fitness as much as the body depends on good food for physical fitness.  What we fill ourselves with is a matter of consequence.  You are what you eat, body and soul.

Being thoughtful about how we fill ourselves is hard work.  And it becomes harder every day!  The pace at which we receive information has ramped up immeasurably, while our attention spans are dwindling - thank you social media.  My discernment about what is valuable to put in my mind often lapses.  It is so much easier to take in the cheap and the processed and the quick (that facebook post, that youtube clip, that talking-head news report - mental equivalents of candy or pasta or soda) though they seldom provide much nourishment for my heart or mind, rarely giving me the building blocks to extend myself in compassion, love, wisdom, kindness, joy, peace, patience, self-control.

Health is rather a thin word.  To this verbivore, it doesn't nearly approximate all that I want from it.  But I do feel better about the extended definition from our family values, which encompasses the whole person: We are healthy - mindful of what we put in our body, heart, and head and how we use these things.  I do not live by bread alone.  Actually, I don't live by bread at all.  But nor do I live by broth alone (though it has been in the slow cooker for 24 hours and is full of bio-available calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, glycine, proline, collagen...).  My health is also dependent on words I ingest, things I see, what materials I give my heart and mind. This is nutrient-seeking for the verbivore.  The closing lines of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself remind me of this continuous process of feeding ourselves in this way, of feeling our way towards things that are truly good for us:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I should be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

It is not always obvious why watching that magpie dip through the air, or why reading Winnie the Pooh (Milne's not Disney's!) to Birtie, or why turning off every gadget to sit in silence does a body good (as the milk commercials used to claim, however dubiously).  But nevertheless these things are good health, filtering and fibre-ing our blood, as Whitman writes.  And the great news is, though we may fail to fetch them here and there (as I do - and often), the world is not scant on good things.  They are around, just waiting for our attention to turn their way.

Lastly, fellow verbivore, while I have you, here are some nutrient-dense words for you to chew on:
Wonder.
Imagine.
Think. 
Look.
Listen.
Watch.
Ask.
Search.
Explore.
Ponder.
Treasure.

   
   

There are lots of calendars I keep.  There's the one on my phone with its buzzing reminders that order and regulate my daily life: Corin to the gym, Seth to soccer, Birtie's friend here on Wednesday. There's the seasonal calendar I keep by watching the world outside: the meadowlarks are back, the vinca is greening by the door, the trees have not yet budded out.  The moon is its own calendar.  So too, the light in this season, creeping a little earlier into each morning, stretching a bit further into every evening.

And then there's the calendar of the liturgical year.  By the reckoning of this calendar it is Holy Week.

Holy Week.  The words alone, make me want to set aside everything - the appointment with Corin's teacher, the man coming to inspect our furnace, the grocery shopping that must be done if my children are to have lunch, the mountain of plastic eggs that need to be filled for the neighborhood egg hunt - and choose activities that center on the sacred.

In the liturgical year, Holy Week is the annual invitation to explore the most sacred, painful, hopeful, bruising, beautiful, texts in our cannon.  Over the course of these eight days (Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday), we recount the central story of our faith: Jesus' death and resurrection; darkness' inability to overcome light.

It's a eucatastrophic story - the eucatastrophic story - to use a word of Tolkien's coinage.  Eucatastrophe (eu from the Greek "good") is a story in which victory arrives unlooked for out of certain defeat.  The eucatastrophic is the point in the story when somehow, beyond all imagining, things come right.  It is a story where all has been given up for loss, where bitter defeat is certain, and yet, somehow a better, higher, more complete victory breaks forth like sunrise.  As Tolkien writes, the eucatastrophic is "the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears...a sudden glimpse of Truth."  In an essay, he further explains:
 ...it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Joy beyond the walls of the world.  Isn't this exactly where Easter takes us?  Not, of course, the Easter of eggs and candy and ham dinners, the Easter on my civic calendar.  The eucatastrophic is only in the Easter of Holy Week - the Easter that follows the week's recounting of betrayal, rejection, abandonment and death, the week where all the evidence is on the side of utter defeat.  If we don't journey through the dark drama of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, then we're unprepared for the radical surprise and dawning joy of being met Sunday morning at that darkest door with the question: why do you look for the living among the dead?

That's the joyous turn, the privileged glimpse into a world where nothing is lost, nothing is abandoned, where love has the last word - where love is the last word.  And this glimpse, beyond the walls of the world we usually inhabit, is Holy Week's invitation.  It's an invitation to the sacred center, to meeting the rising sun.   

I just checked out a book from my library: A Book of Luminous Things.  This great title grabbed me as I was passing it by on my way to the fourth installment of the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place for my boys.  The Incorrigible children for my boys.  Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Day for my daughter.  Lumionus things for me.  Aren't libraries the best?

A Book of Luminous Things, it turns out, is an anthology of poetry collected by Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz.  I have long had a Milosz quote written on the back of an index card:
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.
'Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.'

I dug out the card with this excerpt from the poem "A Magic Mountain" after I came home from the library with A Book of Luminous Things under my arm. There's a box in the back of my closet with things I have gathered over the years: slips of paper with quotes; a picture of my grandma on her wedding day, her nose scrunched in the smile we all inherited from her; a print of a VanGogh self portrait and one of a field in Arles; a sepia picture of Mount Jumbo in the 1930s; a card with a quote from Antoine Saint Exupery that reads: "you become responsible for what you have tamed"; a score of creek rocks.  And though I seldom peek into this box, if a fire were to ravage my house, it would be one of the first things I grab after my children were safely secured.

It's funny isn't it?  These odds and ends can have no significance for anyone, but remain treasures to me.  Magpie-like, I have lined my nest with glinting bits of this and that.  But here's the thing about this box: when I open it, I know who I am.  I am clear about what I value.  I see (as plainly as we ever get to in this world) my heart and mind.  Matthew's gospel records Jesus as issuing a general warning about what type of treasure we gather.  Do not gather up treasure on earth, he says, where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal.  But gather up treasure in heaven, where these forces of decay can pose no threat. This wisdom contains the oft-quoted: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I am thinking about this quote as I consider the box in the back of my closet.  Perhaps my heart is tucked in cardboard beneath the pile of clothing donations to the goodwill.  Perhaps.  But more likely, it is here and there in these bits of heaven that I have found - Milosz's murky island with its barking seals, VanGogh's self portrait, my grandmother's wedding day grin, rocks softened by Rattlesnake creek.

And these are luminous things indeed.

Milosz closes his anthology's formidable introduction (free-ranging from Cezanne to Schopenhauer to Goethe to Buddha), with this light and lovely statement:  "Yet, since I am obviously interested in the visible world, again and again unveiling itself and offering itself to the eye, I would have nothing against calling my anthology a book of enchantments."

And that is what I have in the back of my closet, I guess, a box of enchantments -- a record of things luminous that have unveiled themselves, even momentarily, and studded my life with their beauty.