Lift Up Your Hearts!

We Have a New Rector...Again

sursumcorda — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:50:12 -0400

This is not the first time God has decided that his plans are better than mine; nor shall it be the last.

After a long year of depending on supply priests to lead our Sunday services, and on non-ordained staff and congregational volunteers to provide for the needs of our people, our church has called a new rector. It will be good to get someone who will belong to us, who will be the "Father" a priest is supposed to be for his flock.

But there's a problem. After all those months of praying for "a man after your own heart, who will lead us in right thinking, right belief, right action, right worship, wisdom, and love," God's answer to that prayer was ... a woman.

I'm all for women, and for women using their gifts, skills, and talents in church. After many years in a denomination that limited church leadership to men only, I know how narrow and hard-hearted a church without feminine influence can become.

I'm also okay with women pastors and priests, at least on a theoretical level. As far as practical experience goes, however, I find their record less than stellar: some good ones, some okay, and a few truly awful. Of course that is true of male pastors as well, but on the whole I feel men do a better job, or at least are better prepared for it. I'd rather hear a man preach than a woman. Furthermore, I don't believe women should be bishops, or even rectors. I'm a big fan of mothers, but especially in a denomination that calls its priests "Father," I believe the church should be led by someone who could actually be a father. Whether a priest should have that title at all is another issue, which I'll not deal with now—but "Mother" just doesn't cut it. "Mother Church" is not an individual person, and anyone titled "Mother So-and-so" sounds like a superior sort of nun. If I must call our new rector "Mother Lo," I'll probably have to resort to "hey, you." (No disrespect meant, but it reminds me of how I interacted with my mother-in-law. She didn't want to be called "Mrs. Wightman," and I couldn't make myself call her "Alice." So we generally managed to get along without names.) A mother is not a father, and vice versa. A church, like a family, needs a father to lead it.

But hey—I've endured pastors who were out-and-out heretical, pastors whose sermons were always three times as long as they should have been, leaders who made me think they cut all the seminary classes where they were supposed to have learned people skills, and preachers whose sermons never got past the very beginnings of the Christian life. However, every one of them also had strong points, and some were fantastic. I long ago stopped hoping to find a church that would be everything I wanted, or needed.

Church life is a family dinner, not a restaurant meal.

Our choir director assures me that I will love Rev. Lo, and he's a pretty good judge of such things, so that's encouraging. I'm looking forward to seeing how God demonstrates that his disappointing answer to my prayer was the best outcome for our church—even if I only get the answer Job received to his questions: I know what I'm doing, and you do not.

Lovely Connecticut House

sursumcorda — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:17:48 -0400

Would you like to live in Connecticut? Check out this gorgeous home in Salem. No, we're not selling it, though we do know the owners. And we don't want to buy it. The bulk of our immigrant ancestors did call Connecticut home, but at this point our roots run deep in Florida's sand. But I can't deny that the Zillow listing is very attractive. Here's a front view, and my favorite of the inside photos

FlyDubai Information

sursumcorda — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:40:43 -0400

If you are interesting in learning more about the recent FlyDubai hijacking, may I again recommend MentourPilot for straightforward, knowledgeable commentary with minimal speculation. Here you can click on his latest short posts for a taste. He's still collecting authoritative data and working on a long form post, which should be fascinating when it comes.

You won't get the lastest news and gossip, but you will get what appears to be reasonable and accurate data.

Grace Update - Life Behind "No News Is Good News"

sursumcorda — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:54:45 -0400

It's been a long time since I've posted an update on Grace, which is of course very encouraging! But here's something Jon posted recently that demonstrate that "no news is good news" hides a life that is far from normal, even though you'd never guess it from a casual encounter. There's a lot they don't tell you when you begin a complex medical journey—or maybe they do, but it's just too overwhelming to be taken in. One cannot pour highly toxic substances into a growing body (or any body) and expect them to do no harm. And sometimes it's the (relatively) little things that have a surprisingly strong emotional impact; hearing that Grace is apparently condemned to flu and COVID shots for the rest of her life hit me very hard, though if pressed I will admit that if I could eliminate just one of the actual and potential side effects, that would be far down on my list.

Lest you think nothing has been going on, here was Grace's medical schedule since we last posted.

8 visits to primary care for vaccinations - she had to restart over as a baby, and get all of them over again - just one left, plus flu and COVID, which oncology told us yesterday they highly recommend for Grace since one of the chemos she received can cause long-term lung problems and she is more likely to have a harder time with respiratory illnesess.

3 visits to dermatology - this has gone really well, and it would have been good to meet with a dermatologist earlier, as the doctor changed out the skin meds she was on, and (perhaps in combination with figuring out thyroid dosages and lowering the Koselugo), her skin is 100% better, though as we enter into the drier winter season she'll need to use her lotions more often than she needed to over the summer.

1 visit to our dentist - nothing to report. Though oncology told us yesterday that one of the chemos she had causes long term teeth problems, and before pulling any teeth or major dental work, they need to check to make sure that the adult tooth exists and is in the right place, and is shaped properly, etc.

3 visits to endocrinology - mostly just to lay eyes on her; the doctor has been working on getting the dosage to get her thyroid levels within normal limits, and that has been a success. Oncology just said to keep an eye on it as she gains weight, as the dosages will need to change.

1 visit to opthamology - everything looking pretty good, though they have some concerns about "thickening" around one of her retinas, but is is good for now.

1 visit to neurology - we like to do combination visits with neurology and oncology to make sure we are covering the bases with NF1 and JMML.

2 visits to oncology - this is Dr. Santacruz at Dartmouth, who we love and who we basically consider her primary care provider, though after the conversation yesterday with Boston, we need to have some conversations with all of her providers, as it is depending a little too much on each individual to be thinking about the whole picture, and I'm not sure specialists are that good at thinking that way, and while I'm comfortable managing much of her care, it is easy for us to not connect the dots across everything.

1 visit to audiology - hearing is still good (even with the lower dose of the anti-tumor med, so that is good news!). There is always a question about one of the tests (air pressure/response), and from my view point, the test is greatly skewed by how the sensor is physically held into her ear, so I'm not entirely sure we are getting consistent tests to compare to each time, but the regular actual hearing tests are good, and the frequency responses are mostly normal.

1 visit to cardiology - this was just yesterday, so I haven't talked to anyone yet, but Heather said the report looked good. And the valves look good to my inexperienced eyes. I am going to ask someone to double check they aren't anything, as I don't remember those being there before. Gemini tells me bright spots can appear due to reflections of the ultrasound waves, so perhaps it isn't anything.

1 visit to pulmonology - also yesterday, and because she is considered too young for a spiromometer test, they just do a walking test while monitoring SpO2 levels, and she did fine on that. Prior to the appointment, I was wondering if they were going to have her do the spiromometer, so we practiced some in the car, and the oncologist was interested to try, partly just to get her to understand the test (everyone fails the first time they take it - I failed and the tech had to show me how to do it), but said typically they don't use that test until they are 6 or 7 years old.

2 visits to radiology: 1 "regular" MRI on her head/ears/eyes. Another one scheduled for November. She also got a bone density scan yesterday for the first time - the whole skeletal picture is pretty cool, so hopefully we'll get to see it in more detail than just me watching over the tech's shoulder. People with NF1 are susceptible to weak bones, etc. When Grace fractured her leg last year, they were concerned about whether it was due to NF1, but due to how it broke, decided it was due to being on steroids too long, so were less concerned about anything going forward, but she'll get a scan every year or two.

Countless blood draws, which fortunately she doesn't mind at all.

Whew!

Most doctors are starting to talk about longer time spans between the visits, so that will be nice to have those slow down a little. We did meet the "long term survivorship" medical team yesterday; when Grace heard about this, she said, "Oh good, more doctors!"

Nathaniel and Grace made brownies which we delivered to Boston Children's Hospital 6th West, where she stayed during the bone marrow treatment, and they were all happy to see her, both the nurses that we knew, who were especially happy, but even some other nurses thanked us for coming, that everyone likes to see success stories.

Boston oncology does want her to get a bone marrow aspirate, not entirely for chimerism, which they did via a blood test yesterday, but there are also some other things that are important to check that I didn't really understand.

And as I referenced above, there were a number of times yesterday that the oncology team said things like, "well, her <insert other specialist> will be keeping an eye on that, so we will defer to them..." Because of Grace's NF1, she gets seen more than the average JMML patient, and so the onocology team isn't as used to having so many other reports and so many other specialists watching over her. So, I just need to check to make sure that the other specialists are, in fact, actually thinking about the total picture and keeping an eye for something that might be pointing to a larger issue. Case in point, I hadn't realized that GVHD was still a concern at this point, and I think acute GVHD isn't likely, but chronic GVHD is more of a possibility, thought we've not seen anything so far that is particularly concerning. Her Boston oncology team was surprised to hear about her lack of hair growth and hair color changes, but now that she is through it, it appears it wasn't GVHD related, but I'm not sure anyone was actually thinking about that previously.

We also got some conflicting information yesterday compared to what we were told previously about the purpose of removing and freezing one of her ovaries, so we need to check into that. The nurse practitioner yesterday said that her ovary would definitely not be used for hormone therapy during puberty, but only for potential fertility later. I now know more about NF1 than I did, mostly due to being on Facebook groups with other patients and parents and watching them go through NF1 as an adult, or learning that they have NF1 after passing it onto their children, though I've attended some medical provider trainings on NF1 as well. My counsel to Grace would currently be to not have children, where previously I was thinking that would be okay, and we wanted her to be able to make that decision. The annual costs of freezing are going up, and we're now wondering if it is worth paying all that money each year if she won't eventually even use it. Apparently, hormone therapy/replacement for teenagers is reasonably well understood, so they have synthetic meds or whatever that can control and compensate for imbalances, so they are confident they wouldn't need/want her ovary for that. We need to ask some other providers about that, since if you recall, this journey started with bad information from a nurse practitioner who insisted she knew what was going on...

I know many of my readers still pray regularly and faithfully for Grace. Our gratitude is necessary but not sufficient. (If that last line is confusing to some of you, it's just me reverting to my math major roots. What I mean is, "Thank you so much!")

Times Change; Human Nature Remains

sursumcorda — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:48:39 -0400

Let a man do right, nor trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men.

— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

George MacDonald lived from 1824 to 1905, but he nailed one of the chief dangers of social media.

Welcome, Autumn

sursumcorda — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:46:03 -0400

Autumn came gently this year. Yes, we have notable seasons in Florida, just not the ones taught to preschool children.

(Well I remember, when our children were that age, looking through a kindergarten workbook from a well-known publisher, and recognizing in a lesson on the seasons the same old spring, summer, winter, and fall that I knew from my childhood—especially the mounds of snow in winter. Good for a child in more northern climes, I noted, but certainly confusing for those growing up in Florida. That would not have been so remarkable except that I looked at the beginning of the book and discovered that the publisher was based in Pensacola, Florida. I have viewed that publisher with suspicion ever since, though the city's record-obliterating 9-inch snowfall in January of 2025 might allow them to claim they were merely being prophetic.)

Autumn can be a scary time in our part of the world, as it arrives in the middle of peak hurricane season. But sometimes it is gentle, and makes itself known first in the early morning, when the soft breeze on my cheek is suddenly cool, and the very air announces that pleasant temperatures have not forgotten us. It is much like the early signs of spring in my youth, when drops of water formed on the icicles in the afternoon sunshine, and the sound of trickling streams of snow-melt promised that warmth was returning. (The music of snow-melt is still one of my favorite memories.)

There will still be days of blistering heat, just as there will be late snows in the spring. "One swallow does not a summer make." But Noah has been keeping track of the temperatures outside my office window (blue line), and you can see clearly that fall is creeping in on little cat feet.

Nature and Nurture

sursumcorda — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 05:40:12 -0400

Our two-year-old granddaughter is a sweet, tender little girl. With four older brothers.

Recently she was overheard crooning this little lullaby while rocking her doll:

Little baby Jesus,
I love you.
Sing with me.
Rock, baby,
Will FALL!

At the word "fall," she chucked the baby across the room.

Undoubtedly she figured the baby enjoyed the ride as much as she enjoys playing with the guys in her life, who swing her around until she's dizzy, toss her high into the air, and give her rough, bouncy "horsey rides."

Such play is just what her developing vestibular system needs. My own aging vestibular system has a different opinion.

Early Morning Sunshine

sursumcorda — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:11:14 -0400

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I cannot wait for the return of Standard Time!

The above lines by Robert Louis Stevenson return to me every morning these days. In point of fact, I have been "dressing by yellow candlelight" all summer, too. In Orlando, the earliest sunrise is about 6:30 EDT, which occurs in early June, and the latest sunset about 8:30 EDT, in late June. According to reality (sun time as opposed to clock time), these numbers are 5:30 for the earliest sunrise, and 7:30 for the latest sunset, which my own body clock finds much more reasonable.

Recently I came upon the advice that the first thing we should do when we awaken in the morning—specifically, within the first 10 minutes—is to expose our eyes to sunlight.

I'm a big fan of sunshine—I live in the Sunshine State after all—but my immediate reaction was the impossibility of following that advice for anyone who, like me, is up well before the sun peeks over the horizon. And what about Alaskans and Scandinavians?

I decided to ask Claude for the extremes of sunrise and sunset for Central Florida, and that led into the following conversation:

My prompt: These thoughts were inspired by reading someone's theory that it's important for our metabolic health that our eyes take in actual sunlight during the first 10 minutes or so after waking up. My reaction was that that sounds good, but it's not going to happen with any consistency, not only because of modern artificial light, but because the times of sunlight vary so much geographically. Have you ever heard of that theory? If so, what do you know about it?

Claude's response:

Yes — that's a real and pretty widely discussed idea, most associated these days with Andrew Huberman (Stanford neuroscientist with a popular podcast), though the underlying science predates him by decades in circadian biology research.

The core mechanism, briefly: Your eyes have specialized retinal cells (ipRGCs — intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells) that don't contribute to vision but feed directly into your suprachiasmatic nucleus, the brain's master circadian clock. Bright light exposure early in the day — especially the low-angle light around sunrise, which is rich in certain wavelengths — helps set that clock, which cascades into timing for cortisol release, melatonin onset later that night, and various metabolic processes (insulin sensitivity, body temperature rhythm, etc.).

What's solid: The general principle that morning light exposure helps anchor circadian rhythms is well-established in sleep and chronobiology research, going back to work in the 1980s-90s. Poor circadian alignment is genuinely linked to worse metabolic outcomes — shift workers, for instance, show elevated rates of metabolic syndrome. Light intensity matters a lot: outdoor light even on an overcast day is far brighter than typical indoor lighting (think 1,000-10,000+ lux outside vs. 100-300 lux in a typical room).

Where it gets oversold: The specific claims — that it has to be within the first 10 minutes, that it has to be actual sunrise, that you need a precise duration — go well beyond what the research actually nails down. Most of the underlying studies show benefits from "bright light exposure earlier in the day" generally, not a narrow 10-minute window. That kind of precision makes for a compelling podcast soundbite but isn't something the science actually demands.

Your instinct is right, too: the practical version of this advice — "get outside in the morning when you can" — is useful and low-cost. The rigid, must-be-within-minutes-of-waking version runs into exactly the problems you flagged: it's not achievable consistently for people with early alarms in winter, night-shift workers, or anyone at high latitudes where sunrise might be 9 AM in December. A "rule" that only works for early risers near the equator in summer isn't a robust health principle — it's a lifestyle-compatible one, dressed up as more universal than it is.

My next prompt: Thanks—although I would push back on the idea that it "works for early risers," since I am routinely up before the sun in Orlando (no alarm clock, just the way my body works), and natural light isn't available until much later. It's good to know that it's still helpful to get out in the sun once it shows up to the party.

Claude's response:

Fair pushback, and you're right — I stated that carelessly. "Early riser" doesn't line up with "sunlight available at wake time" at all; those are two different things that just happen to overlap for people whose wake time is late enough (or whose local sunrise is early enough) to coincide. You're up before the sun regardless of the clock, so the "within 10 minutes of waking" version of the rule was never going to apply to you no matter how you set your schedule.

The more accurate framing is probably: get bright light exposure reasonably early in your day, whenever the sun actually shows up relative to your own wake time — not tied to the moment you open your eyes. The circadian benefit comes from getting that light signal before too much of the day has passed, not from some magic window immediately post-wake. So for you, sun exposure shortly after sunrise (even if that's an hour or two after you're already up) should still be doing useful work — you're just not getting it in the first few minutes, and that's fine.

That is not only comforting but makes real sense. We humans could not have been designed (or evolved, if you prefer; for this point it makes no difference) to have our well-being depend on a very narrow window of time that has been unavailable for most of the population since long before the invention of electric lights.

It's also good to know that the anti-natural clock machinations of the government can't take away the benefits of early morning sunshine.

But I still can't wait for the return of Standard Time.

All Is Gift - George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis

sursumcorda — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:39:11 -0400

If you were reading Lift Up Your Hearts! regularly back in 2020, thank you. The following may consequently sound familiar, but it's worth reprising. C. S. Lewis is well-known, and classic. George MacDonald is much less so, though he has enjoyed somewhat of a revival thanks to renewed availability of his writings. What is worth bearing in mind is that he was Lewis's mentor, though they never met; it was his writings—and the character they revealed—that influenced Lewis so greatly. Lewis put it clearly and boldly:

I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.... I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.

C. S. Lewis showed me a God who made sense of the world; George MacDonald showed me a God I could wholeheartedly love.

As I neared the end of my C. S. Lewis retrospective—reading (mostly re-reading) all the books we own by or about the prolific author—I was challenged by my friend, The Occasional CEO, to relate a few of the most significant things I have learned from Lewis. I began with the idea of trying to distill a Top Five from his many areas of influence in my life.

It soon became clear that of everything I have learned from Lewis—from faith to literature to history to the changing meaning of words to the critical importance of one's model of the universe—two stood out, orders of magnitude greater than the rest.

All is gift. I am Oyarsa not by His gift alone but by our foster mother’s, not by hers alone but by yours, not by yours alone but my wife’s—nay, in some sort, by gift of the very beasts and birds. Through many hands, enriched with many different kinds of love and labor, the gift comes to me. It is the Law. The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own. [from Perelandra]

The first gift I received from C. S. Lewis was his Narnia stories. I was introduced to them in mid-elementary school: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a gift from my mother, who brought it to me in a stack of books from the library when I was sick in bed. The remainder of the series came about two years later, a gift from a neighbor, who owned all seven and shared them around our group of friends. I was delighted, enthralled. However, my attempt to find similar delight in his other fiction was at the time unsuccessful. I tried the first of his Space Trilogy, but I was a hard-core science fiction fan—Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke—and Out of the Silent Planet was not sufficiently science-based for me. One of Lewis's earliest books, it lacks the beauty and enchantment of the Narnia stories, and was intended for an adult audience. I have since come to enjoy it, but I wasn't ready then.

I rediscovered Narnia in college, thanks to the University of Rochester's Education Library, which was well-stocked with children's books. There I also first encountered Mere Christianity: the gift of my roommate, and my introduction to Lewis's nonfiction. To my shock, there I discovered that all the delight—the goodness, truth, and beauty—that I had encountered in Narnia was for Lewis an expression of reality, a reality far greater than he could depict, even in fantasy. I came later to respect the background in Christianity I had received in my childhood, but it was through Lewis and Narnia that the reality of God began to make sense to me.

This is the first and great gift, and the second is like unto it.

I went on to read more of Lewis's non-fiction, and to gain from it, but his next pivotal gift came many years later, through a friend—all is gift—who shared with me Lewis's George MacDonald: An Anthology.

If Narnia had shown me a God who made sense of the world, MacDonald showed me a God I could love.

George MacDonald is another author I had met before—as a child through his Curdie books and At the Back of the North Wind—but I'd never followed through to find what else he might have written. To be fair to myself, his other books weren't easy to find back then.

Of MacDonald, Lewis wrote,

In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank—perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels), sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man.

(Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Lewis's preface to George MacDonald, An Anthology.}

MacDonald's works can be divided roughly into three parts, though they overlap: the fantasy that so impressed Lewis; books of sermons; and his many adult novels—the craft of which left Lewis so unimpressed—which served both to feed his family of thirteen and as vehicles for reaching a wider audience with his preaching. The last sounds dreary, but in reality the preaching is what makes his novels shine. (Those who know my lack of appreciation for most sermons will recognize the peculiarity of such a statement coming from me.)

Having been reawakened to MacDonald by Lewis's Anthology, I looked around for more, and the best I could find were modern re-workings of his novels, some by Michael R. Phillips and some by Dan Hamilton. I give credit to both authors for their obvious respect for MacDonald, and their faithfulness to his ideas, even though in their efforts they exaggerated the parts I like least from the originals (the Romantic elements) and reduced the best (the preaching). The library had most of them, and I wolfed them down.

Most of my extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another.

The next contributor to my journey was a church secretary who had obtained photocopies of all three Unspoken Sermons books, which she graciously shared. I wonder if the generations who grew up with easy access to a universe of electronic resources can even imagine how valuable bound photocopies could be. Or what an incredible gift it was to the world when, in the 1990's, Johannesen began republishing all of MacDonald's works, in beautifully-crafted sets. All of these treasures were given to me, over several years of birthdays and Christmases, by my father. He himself had no particular appreciation of MacDonald—I doubt he read any of the books—but a great deal of love for his children and grandchildren, for whom I consider the collection a legacy. Now, Kindle versions of almost all of MacDonald's works are available at no or very little cost.

I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.

Lewis is not exaggerating the frequency of MacDonald's influence on his own works. Having tackled my MacDonald retrospective first, I easily recognized his ideas and often his words when I encountered them in Lewis.

I know nothing that gives me such a feeling of spiritual healing, of being washed, as to read George MacDonald. (from a letter of Lewis to Arthur Greeves)

I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.

What greater endorsement could there be?

Lewis was puzzled as to how people could idolize him and ignore MacDonald. I have some ideas. MacDonald's books were old, even then—he had died before Lewis turned seven—and our society's "chronological snobbery" was well established. Although full of gold, many of his books are difficult to read, even those not laden with Scottish dialect. I can now say that it's well worth the effort, and the reading and understanding get much easier with practice. But I can't forget that I had actually encountered MacDonald's novels years before, deep in the stacks of our main college library. But apparently this, too, had to wait to be a gift rather than my own choice: to my everlasting embarrassment, I turned aside from those unattractive, ancient, brown, and dusty tomes. Perhaps it was the library's revenge that I later became a genealogist, whose blood now quickens at the mere scent of such books.

Then, too, from the beginning MacDonald was plagued by charges of heresy and branded "Universalist" for his belief that, in the end, God's love would triumph. Lewis did not see him that way, but it led (and still leads) some to dismiss MacDonald out of hand.

Reaction against early [strict Scottish Calvinist] teachings might ... have very easily driven him into a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent.

Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.

Inexorability—but never the inexorability of anything less than love—runs through [MacDonald's thought] like a refrain; "escape is hopeless"—"agree quickly with your adversary"—"compulsion waits behind"—"the uttermost farthing will be exacted." Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so. MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy."

The effect of C. S. Lewis's writings on my thinking is incalculable, and not just from his most popular books. Who would have guessed, for example, that I would give a five-star rating to Studies in Words—a book on philology, addressed to scholars, of which I understood less than half? But I was fascinated, and my eyes were opened to the pernicious habit (especially common among both literary critics and high school English teachers) of simply seeking meaning in what we read, instead of seeking what the author meant by his words and what his contemporary audience understood him to be saying.

There's no doubt that Lewis was quirky, humble, and absolutely brilliant—all the more brilliant that so many of his writings were written to be accessible to the ordinary British public, yet there's no hint of condescension. I could start my Lewis retrospective over again from the beginning and learn a lot more.

But for all that, Lewis's greatest influence on my life came less through my mind than through my spirit. Lewis said that reading MacDonald's Phantastes "baptized his imagination." The Narnia books first, and then George MacDonald directly, did the same for me.

This surprising realization came nearly sixty years after my first encounter with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and was itself a gift—thanks to my friend's challenge.

Apple Hunting

sursumcorda — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 06:51:02 -0400

I must share a wonderful article from Yankee Magazine. Many years ago, when we were first married, my in-laws gave us a subscription. It was interesting, but not so much so that I've missed it in the many years since we let our subscription lapse. But recently I came upon "The Heirloom Apple Hunters," and was overwhelmed by a wave of homesickness for the Northeast. I've come to love Florida; what's more, New York and New England have changed far too much for me to want to move back there. But oh how I miss the scents of autumn, the nip of cool air after summer, the play of light on multi-colored leaves—and I especially miss the apples.

"The Heirloom Apple Hunters" is what I was looking for, and didn't find, when I read Endangered Eating. I am so happy that there are still those who remember what apples, and apple cider, once tasted like. When apples sparkled with variety, and a broad spectrum of taste. It's good to know that a few ("the happy few") are putting action to their longing, and labor to rescue the perishing, even among the vegetable kingdom.

Here are a few personal keywords that leapt out at me, and which might pique the interest of some of my readers: Maine, Colby College, Black Oxford, Blue Pearmain.

And the usual short quotes:

Welcome to the Maine apple hunt: an ad hoc effort to save heritage apples, the rare survivors of a vast and nearly vanished orchard landscape once filled with thousands of varieties. According to a 1905 catalog by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, some 14,000 kinds of apples were grown between 1804 and 1904, mostly in small orchards on land too marginal for other crops. There were apples as small and red as cherries, fruits that were ghostly white and others so dark they looked black, and monstrously pimpled russets. There were others so tart and juicy they tasted effervescent, or left the flavor of banana, coconut, or clove lingering on the tongue. New England in particular had the most diverse and longest history of apple propagation in the country, because colonists here were first to bring trees from abroad, and Maine alone grew more than 600 varieties during this time.

Todd Little-Siebold spends his days off investigating strange apple trees. One October morning, the tree that piqued his interest belonged to a young couple in Penobscot, an 18th-century village along a rocky shoreline of Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula. The couple had connected with Little-Siebold after hearing about the Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a rare French apple thought lost to history that Little-Siebold and fellow apple hunters found four years ago in a neighboring town. This couple wondered whether their own tree might be another Drap d’Or, or some other missing and special Malus domestica.

Little-Siebold was all for it. “My problem is I have AADHD—Apple Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I’m like, ‘Apple! There’s an apple! Let’s go get the apple!’” he says. “It’s addictive. It’s like a treasure hunt every day.”

“These apples weren’t being trademarked; they weren’t even being written about,” says John Bunker, a Maine apple historian who mentors Little-Siebold. ... [B]y the early 20th century, as the agricultural market globalized, apples were being bred more for shelf appeal, durability, and transport than for flavor. Federal agricultural agents encouraged farmers to rip out their unique varieties for lucrative mass-market alternatives like Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and McIntosh. This development, combined with the Great Depression and a pair of catastrophic winters, decimated hundreds of thousands of Maine’s apple trees. The few that survived are now reaching the end of their natural lifespan, just as old farms and undeveloped land are disappearing from Maine’s landscape. “If we’re going to save them,” says Bunker, “we have to do it now.”

Each year, Little-Siebold, Bunker, and the dozen or so other volunteer apple hunters in Maine send samples from up to 40 promising trees to the Washington State DNA lab. The ones confirmed as rare are then grafted onto rootstock at the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity, which Bunker founded as a living archive in 2012. So far, there are about 300 local heritage varieties in the orchard, and over the past six years DNA testing has helped correct about a dozen misidentified varieties.

Maybe someday our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, will again be able to taste the wonders my generation once took for granted and let slip out of our lives. May the Black Oxford tree our grandson planted in his front yard live long and prosper!